The Best of the June Issue

 

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April 10, 2014 By Best of the Issue Managing Yourself 15 Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer Deepak Malhotra A Harvard Business School professor of negotiation shares the advice he's been giving his students on navigating the tricky terrain of job offers. People only go to bat for candidates they find likable, he begins, and those whose value to the organization is clear -- and whom they stand a reasonable chance of landing. So be charming and don't play hard to get. Display your talents without seeming arrogant, show enthusiasm for the work, ignore graceless questions, and deflect attempts to try to pin you down. Consider the whole offer, not just salary. And don't negotiate just for the sake of it. Ultimately, he reminds them, getting the right job is more important than getting the perfect terms. If things work out, you can always renegotiate down the road. Feature The Limits of Scale Hanna Halaburda and Felix Oberholzer-Gee The more people who use the dating site Match.com, the more valuable it is, certainly. Move first and get big fast, strategists commonly advise businesses subject to such network effects. Grow by keeping prices aggressively low and acquiring smaller players. But do these rules really work? Not when the networks are actually made up of a series of smaller communities, found an economist from the Bank of Canada and a professor. Thus eHarmony can successfully compete against the far larger incumbent Match.com by siphoning off its most valuable members -- individuals looking for committed long-term relationships -- from the sea of casual daters. Distinguishing among the different communities in their networks can help incumbents as well, enabling them to escape maturing markets by identifying and establishing lucrative adjacent networks, as TripAdvisor did when it added crowd-sourced appraisals of restaurants and airlines to its maturing accommodation review business. Big Idea Making Business Personal Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey, Andy Fleming, and Matthew Miller To an alarming extent, people are devoting their energies to a second job no one's paying them to do: preserving their reputations, putting their best selves forward, and hiding their inadequacies. But what if they didn't? What would it be like to work in a company in which failure was an option -- or rather, a firm in which you are expected to fail so you can learn from your mistakes? After searching for three years, these professors found such two companies -- an East Coast hedge fund and a West Coast movie theater operator -- that are gaining a unique competitive edge by gently, systematically, and relentlessly pushing every person, from the CEO on down, beyond their comfort zones. In these uniquely safe environments, people become more capable and resilient as they become experts in adapting to new challenges. Listen to an interview with Robert Kegan about these two remarkable companies, and why this approach isn't for everyone. Synthesis Behave Yourself! Amy Bernstein The principles of good manners -- showing respect for others, maintaining a pleasant demeanor without invading others' privacy, balancing competitiveness with cooperation, combining honesty with tact -- don't change. But etiquette -- the rules that apply in a particular situation -- are clearly evolving in a world where electronic devices proliferate and cubicles press us uncomfortably close together. Thus the need for a new generation of business etiquette books. Consider this example: Should a female manager stand to shake hands with a younger male associate? Miss Manners says the core rules remain the same as ever: Women don't stand for men. Older people don't rise for younger ones. Higher-ranking people don't rise for those of lower rank. But a higher ranking woman should stand to meet anyone entering her office, on the grounds that she's acting as hostess. Got that?

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