Usted es me todos: Best of the Issue: The Secrets of Dual-Career Couples, Metrics Aren’t Strategy, and the Perils of Categorical Thinking

August 20, 2019

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The Secrets of Dual-Career Couples, Metrics Aren't Strategy, and the Perils of Categorical Thinking

From Amy Bernstein
Editor, Harvard Business Review

If you and your significant other are both a little career-obsessed, you won't want to miss "How Dual-Career Couples Make It Work." Jennifer Petriglieri studied more than 100 dual-career couples to learn how they approach common dilemmas, such as figuring out whose job to relocate for, when it's OK for one partner to make a risky career change, and who will leave work early to pick up a sick child from school. Petriglieri offers guidance on navigating these tough situations together — without sacrificing your relationship.

When Wells Fargo decided to prioritize long-term customer relationships, it implemented ambitious "cross-selling" goals as part of its strategy. Of course, most organizations use metrics to give strategy form and make it easier for people to grasp. The problem is that Wells Fargo employees opened 3.5 million accounts without customers' consent in order to hit their targets, utterly sabotaging the company's customer relationship aspirations. Metrics, in other words, ate strategy alive. How can you prevent a similar thing from happening at your company? Michael Harris and Bill Tayler argue that the first step is to understand our compulsion to translate the abstractions of strategy into concrete measures. In "Don't Let Metrics Undermine Your Business," they explain how to keep a focus on numbers from going too far.

Finally, I want to point you to a wonderful piece of insight from Bart de Langhe and Philip Fernbach. Human beings are hardwired to put things in categories. We take in vast amounts of information, and then simplify and structure it in order to make sense of our world. But sometimes, the authors argue in "The Dangers of Categorical Thinking," this instinct trips us up. The Myers-Briggs personality test is a case in point: It places people in one of 16 categories based on their answers to 93 questions — answers that are oversimplified and that can easily change if the individual takes the test again. The test then "fossilizes" the results by treating the categories as static rather than as fluid. It's a demonstration, the authors write, that "categorical thinking perpetuates powerful illusions" about how the world works.

Thanks for reading,
Amy Bernstein

In the Issue:

How Dual-Career Couples Make It Work

by Jennifer Petriglieri

In her study of more than 100 couples around the globe, the author found that dual-career couples tend to go through three transitions when they are particularly vulnerable: when they first learn to work together as a couple; when they go through a midcareer or a midlife reinvention; and as they reach the final stages of their careers. Those who communicate at each transition about deeper work and personal issues such as values, boundaries, and fears have a better chance of emerging stronger from each one, fulfilled both in their relationships and in their careers.

Don't Let Metrics Undermine Your Business

by Michael Harris, Bill Tayler

Every day, at almost every company, strategy is being hijacked by numbers. This tendency is called surrogation, and it destroys a lot of value. Though it's easy to fall into the surrogation snare, firms can take steps to avoid it. For instance, they can involve the people who'll implement a strategy in its formulation, so they'll be more likely to grasp it and less likely to replace it with a metric. Tying financial incentives to a metric is usually a mistake: It only increases the focus on the numbers. Using multiple yardsticks is very helpful, however; that highlights the fact that no single metric captures the strategy and makes people less apt to surrogate.

The Dangers of Categorical Thinking

by Bart de Langhe, Philip Fernbach

Human beings are categorization machines, taking in messy data and then simplifying and structuring it. That's how we make sense of the world and communicate our ideas. But according to the authors, categorization comes so naturally to us that we often see categories where none exist. Categorical thinking, the authors argue, creates four dangerous consequences. In the years ahead, companies will have to focus attention on how best to mitigate those consequences.