What do caring moms, extreme skydivers and the Three Little Pigs have in common? They’re all the subjects of 2012’s most unforgettable advertising campaigns. Beyond that, though, they epitomize the new era of advertising: authentic, transcendent, storytelling works of art that get people talking and become part of culture.
“The holy grail for advertising today is the same as it’s always been: to rise above the fray of soulless sales pitches and become part of culture. Not just being recalled or remembered but hitting a nerve and becoming both share-worthy and meaningful,” says William Gelner, executive creative director at 180 LA. “The best brands get that. They aim higher.”
Heath Rudduck, chief creative officer at Campbell Mithun, says an ad that tells a story in an authentic and compelling way is more likely to grab your attention and stay with you for a long time. “I don’t think a brand can exist today without some degree of empathy. Timing is one thing, but unless you strike a chord emotionally with the audience, it falls on deaf ears and cold hearts.”
The Most Unforgettable Ad Campaigns Of 2012
Procter & Gamble's "Best Job"
Watch “Best Job."
Take Procter & Gamble’s “Best Job.” The two-minute spot—produced and created by Wieden & Kennedy, a Portland, Ore.-based agency, and director Alejandro González Iñárritu—was the cornerstone of the “Thank You, Mom” campaign. The ad promoted P&G’s Olympic sponsorship by celebrating the dedicated mothers who raise the athletes. It ran online, on TV, and in print, and recently won the Emmy for the best primetime commercial.
“This was a beautiful piece of work that really gave me a visceral reaction,” Rudduck says. “This spot was born of a truth and it was delivered in a wonderful way.”
Gelner agrees. He says he’s been a fan of this campaign since it started because it beautifully acknowledges the world’s most thankless job: being a mom of an Olympic athlete.
“Long after the floor exercise is over, the applause dies down and everyone has gone home, moms are the ones there left to pick up the pieces and provide console and comfort,” Gelner adds. “While authentic and noble, in the wrong hands this could have been schmaltzy. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu handled it masterfully. The moments felt authentic and real, versus overly sentimental or ham fisted.”
Jez Frampton, Interbrand’s Global Chief Executive Officer, says P&G struck a deeply emotional chord with this campaign. “It not only successfully appealed to the mom demographic, but by depicting the small, intimate moments of raising a child striving for Olympic success, P&G also tapped the hearts of moms and many other consumers worldwide.”
For an event that, at its core, is about competition, this campaign evoked a sense of global unity and, as such, resonated with consumers all over the world, Frampton says.
“The campaign helped to humanize a seemingly larger-than-life and commercial event. As P&G has long stood for providing comfort, wellness, and the means necessary to thrive and succeed, the campaign was credibly tied into P&G’s distinct brand DNA.”
In Pictures: The Most Unforgettable Ads Campaigns of 2012
Susan Credle, chief creative officer at ad agency Leo Burnett, says the most memorable spots don’t just make us laugh or cry; they change a conversation.
A perfect example of this is The Guardian’s “Three Little Pigs.”
In February, the British newspaper launched this creative and compelling spot that showcases their multimedia credentials and “open journalism” philosophy. The 120-second ad follows the developing story of the Three Little Pigs, and visualizes how the paper would cover the story online and in print.
“Much has been said about the death of the newspaper,” Gelner says. “This epic film challenges that notion by putting world-class journalism and objective reporting at the center of the conversation. Regardless of where that conversation is taking place: on a tablet, in social media or printed in a good old-fashioned newspaper. It’s classic storytelling at its best.”
The TV commercial, which was developed by ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) and directed by Ringan Ledwidge, did a tremendous job of making newspapers feel contemporary and relevant, Rudduck says. “Will The Guardian end up in purely digital form one day? Yes, but they still have to shift paper today and this is a spot that makes me want to get ink on my fingers.”
Sunday, December 23, 2012
The Most Unforgettable Ad Campaigns Of 2012 - Forbes
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
INSIGHT-The booming Philippines' missing link - foreigner investors | Reuters
INSIGHT-The booming Philippines' missing link - foreigner investors
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By Rosemarie Francisco and Stuart Grudgings
MANILA | Tue Dec 18, 2012 4:00pm EST
Dec 19 (Reuters) - The gathering had the air of a post-mortem. About 100 executives and government officials listened quietly as Guillermo Luz poked holes in the Philippines' fairytale economic revival.MANILA
Luz, head of the Philippines' National Competitiveness Council, projected a deck of slides onto two pull-down screens that showed the fast-growing Philippine economy slipping in the World's Bank's "Ease of Doing Business" index to 138 out of 185 countries, near Tajikistan and Sudan.
"It's a lousy neighbourhood," he said of the two-notch fall this year. "I do not want to live with that ranking."
As the Philippines gallops ahead with the strongest economic growth in Southeast Asia and one of the world's best-performing stock markets, its shortcomings are being laid bare, including stubborn problems that have already started to undermine its economic renaissance.
While foreign funds have poured into Philippine assets this year, driving the main stock index up around 30 percent to a succession of record highs and lifting the peso currency about 7 percent, foreign direct investment (FDI) remains embarrassingly low.
Total FDI is on course to hit around $1.5 billion this year -- about half its level in 2007 and less than the average $1.7 billion received every month in remittances from Filipinos overseas.
That is only about 3 percent of the total that flowed last year to a group of five peer economies including the Philippines in the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
In his presentation in Manila's Makati business district, Luz highlighted the Philippines' lowly ranking in a range of categories, from "paying taxes" (143rd), to "starting a business" (161st) and "resolving insolvency" (165th).
Since coming to power in 2010, President Benigno Aquino has made headway against long-standing problems of corruption, shaky public finances and low infrastructure investment that earned the country the unwanted sobriquet of the "sick man" of Asia.
But he has yet to show his government can translate the torrent of hot money and improved market confidence that is also fuelling a property boom into real gains such as an expansion of higher-paying jobs and better transport links.
Calls by congressional leaders to loosen constitutional restrictions on foreign ownership have met with a lukewarm response from Aquino, a scion of an elite family whose mother, democracy icon Corazon Aquino, passed the 1987 constitution as president.
"I do not believe that foreigners would be that foolish to come here and put their money in business," Juan Ponce Enrile, the Senate president who is calling for the constitution to be revised, told Reuters. "They are at the mercy of local people who are not quite familiar to them. That is to me the reason why we lag in investment attractiveness in Asia."
"SALESMAN IN CHIEF"
The absence of FDI is a missing link that raises doubts over how much has really changed in the nation of 96 million people, where many an investor has been stung by copious red tape, unpredictable policymaking and graft.
Aquino has vowed to change the country's tarnished reputation among foreign investors, billing himself as the country's "salesman in chief". But to do so he needs to tackle vested business interests who benefit from a protected domestic market. So far, there are few signs he is doing so.
The constitution and current rules allow foreign investors to own no more than 40 percent in most industries and bars foreigners entirely in areas such as media and the practice of licensed professions such as engineering, law and medicine.
From 2000 to 2011, net FDI to the Philippines totalled $18.9 billion, according to United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, less than a third of what Singapore attracted in 2011 alone. As a proportion of the economy, the Philippines' net FDI stood at 0.6 percent last year, compared with 2.2 percent in Indonesia and 6.2 percent in Vietnam.
Strong foreign investment has been a vital ingredient in the rise of better-off Asian neighbours like Malaysia and Thailand, boosting job creation and deepening technological capabilities.
Foreign executives here are quick to complain there has been little concrete improvement on the ground, despite a surge of money into financial markets and credit rating upgrades on the back of improving fiscal health and lower borrowing costs.
"For me it's extremely frustrating," said Hubert D'Aboville, former head of the European Chamber of Commerce.
"We should welcome foreign investment, giving them the majority of 51 percent or 100 percent. What is important is to create jobs. We are not creating jobs."
EXODUS OF WORKERS
The Philippines has among the highest jobless rates in Southeast Asia at around 7 percent, helping to fuel an exodus of about 10 million Filipino workers in total that has yet to reverse course or even slow significantly.
Officials close to Aquino say he recognises the need to attract more foreign investment, but is wary of broaching a reform of the constitution that could open up a complex, messy and energy-sapping political process.
"I don't think it's going to be touched for now," Budget Secretary Florencio Abad, who is also vice president of Aquino's party and one of his close advisers, told Reuters.
"You create another uncertainty. Investments are coming in anyway, predominantly by local guys."
Combined investment by the public and private sector grew an annual 7.9 percent in the first nine months against just 1.1 percent a year earlier, with more than half made up of investments in machinery and equipment.
While policy transparency is widely seen as improving under Aquino, the Philippines' volatile political and legal systems regularly throw up unpleasant surprises for foreigners.
Aquino's government has halted new mining projects, stalling development of an estimated $850 billion in mineral reserves, until Congress approves a mining tax reform -- a vote that is unlikely to take place before May 2013 mid-term elections.
In October, Manila added to restrictions on ownership of real estate, lending firms and professions.
Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking at expanding the 40 percent foreign ownership limit to apply to all classes of shares in a company, rather than just common or voting shares, following a Supreme Court ruling last year that telecoms firm PLDT had breached the cap.
"The Philippines will be shooting itself in the foot because it will severely restrict the available shares for foreigners," said Francis Ed Lim, managing partner of the Accra law firm and a former head of the stock exchange.
TWO PHILIPPINES
While service sectors such as call centres, retail and tourism are growing strongly, the manufacturing sector - an engine of development in countries like Vietnam and Thailand - struggles to compete with neighbours and attract investment.
Ford Motor Co announced in June it was closing its Philippine production factory, citing an inadequate supply network and a lack of economies of scale.
Foreign executives here tell a tale of two Philippines. One is the country's special export zones, where companies can set up wholly owned units easily and receive incentives and efficient services as long as they ship their output abroad.
Total investments by local and foreign firms in economic zones totalled nearly 660 billion pesos ($16 billion) by the end of 2011, more than doubling since Aquino took office in 2010.
The other Philippines is encountered when companies try to tap the domestic market, running a gauntlet of heavy bureaucracy, local government corruption and sometimes troublesome partnerships with Filipino firms.
Companies have to go through 16 separate procedures to start a business in the Philippines, compared with three in Singapore and nine in Indonesia, according to the World Bank report.
Japanese firms have rekindled their long-dormant interest in the Philippines this year, prompted by rising wages in China and Beijing's territorial dispute with Japan. Still, a potential flood of money has been slowed by ownership limits and other restrictions, said Takashi Ishigami, president of Japanese trading house Marubeni Corp in the Philippines.
Marubeni is teaming up with a local firm to bid for a $1 billion railway project, among at least eight major Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) that make up Aquino's flagship plan to improve infrastructure.
But Ishigami said Marubeni was only supplying equipment as part of the bid, and had been deterred from taking an operational role by the government's refusal to guarantee rail fares. That shortcoming would likely deter Japanese firms from bidding for other PPPs, he said.
"The Filipino PPP is far away from our standard."
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Palace OKs proposed gov’t takeover of MRT-3 | Inquirer Business
Palace OKs proposed gov’t takeover of MRT-3
By Niña P. Calleja
Philippine Daily Inquirer1:38 am | Wednesday, December 19th, 2012 Posted by clopez-->President Aquino has approved the Department of Transportation and Communications’ plan to take over the Metro Rail Transit Line 3, which was estimated to cost the government roughly $1 billion.
“It was approved yesterday (Monday) by the President and consented by the concerned Cabinet secretaries present in the meeting,” Transportation Secretary Jose Emilio Abaya said in a briefing on Tuesday.
Abaya said the President and the members of his Cabinet discussed and approved in principle the DOTC’s plan to buy out the private sector’s stakes in the commuter train system. Abaya said the “de-privatization” plan would cost the government about $1 billion.
The DOTC said the state takeover of the facility would spare the government from covering the 15-percent return on investment guaranteed to the MRT concessionaire.
MRT concessionaire Metro Rail Transit Corp. (MRTC), the consortium that built MRT-3, is controlled by Metro Pacific Investments Corp., the listed holding company in the Philippines of Hong Kong-based First Pacific group.
Although the government owns 80 percent economic interest in MRTC, through Land Bank of the Philippines and Development Bank of the Philippines, its voting rights are less than those held by the private concessionaire.
The consortium operating MRT-3, through special purpose vehicle MRT II Funding Corp., earlier raised funds via the issuance of MRT bonds. The bonds were bought by private corporations but were later bought back by DBP and LBP.
“We will be buying the bonds from DBP and LBP. It’s like retiring the bonds,” Abaya said. He added that the $1 billion estimated cost included the cost of buying back the bonds.
The buyout will take place next year, he said.
In the meantime, Businessman Manuel V. Pangilinan said his group would not stand in the way of the government’s planned buyout of the MRT line.
In an interview, Pangilinan said he would respect the government’s decision and would continue to support the administration’s infrastructure program.
The Pangilinan group, through Metro Pacific Investments Corp. (MPIC), owns the majority of the voting shares in MRT Corp., the private sector consortium that holds the train line’s concession contract. Despite controlling MRTC’s board, MPIC only holds a fraction of the MRT line’s economic benefits.—With a report from Paolo Montecillo
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Monday, December 17, 2012
Myers-Briggs: Does it pay to know your type? - The Washington Post
Does it pay to know your type?
By Lillian Cunningham, Published: December 14
Some grandmothers pass down cameo necklaces. Katharine Cook Briggs passed down the world’s most widely used personality test.
Chances are you’ve taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or will. Roughly 2 million people a year do. It has become the gold standard of psychological assessments, used in businesses, government agencies and educational institutions. Along the way, it has spawned a multimillion-dollar business around its simple concept that everyone fits one of 16 personality types.
Now, 50 years after the first time anyone paid money for the test, the Myers-Briggs legacy is reaching the end of the family line. The youngest heirs don’t want it. And it’s not clear whether organizations should, either.
That’s not to say it hasn’t had a major influence.
More than 10,000 companies, 2,500 colleges and universities and 200 government agencies in the United States use the test. From the State Department to McKinsey & Co., it’s a rite of passage. It’s estimated that 50 million people have taken the Myers-Briggs personality test since the Educational Testing Service first added the research to its portfolio in 1962.
The test, whose first research guinea pigs were George Washington University students, has seen financial success commensurate to this cultlike devotion among its practitioners. CPP, the private company that publishes Myers-Briggs, brings in roughly $20 million a year from it and the 800 other products, such as coaching guides, that it has spawned.
Yet despite its widespread use and vast financial success, and although it was derived from the work of Carl Jung, one of the most famous psychologists of the 20th century, the test is highly questioned by the scientific community.
To begin even before its arrival in Washington: Myers-Briggs traces its history to 1921, when Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, published his theory of personality types in the book “Psychologische Typen.” Jung had become well known for his pioneering work in psychoanalysis and close collaboration with Sigmund Freud, though by the 1920s the two had severed ties.
Psychoanalysis was a young field and one many regarded skeptically. Still, it had made its way across the Atlantic not only to the university offices of scientists but also to the home of a mother in Washington.
Katharine Cook Briggs was a voracious reader of the new psychology books coming out in Europe, and she shared her fascination with Jung’s latest work — in which he developed the concepts of introversion and extroversion — with her daughter, Isabel Myers. They would later use Jung’s work as a basis for their own theory, which would become the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. MBTI is their framework for classifying personality types along four distinct axes: introversion vs. extroversion, sensing vs. intuition, thinking vs. feeling and judging vs. perceiving. A person, according to their hypothesis, has one dominant preference in each of the four pairs. For example, he might be introverted, a sensor, a thinker and a perceiver. Or, in Myers-Briggs shorthand, an “ISTP.”
Everyone, they posited, fits one of the 16 possible combinations.
Today, organizations administer the personality test to employees, then use the results as a basis for training programs. The basic idea is that knowing your personality type, and those of others, will help you interact more effectively with colleagues and better identify your own strengths. In educational institutions, the test is often used to help identify potential career fields.
The testing process seems simple enough: a multiple-choice questionnaire, with a discussion afterward about what your personality type says about you. And yet behind it lies the elaborate business model and enormous marketing push that have enthroned MBTI in the pantheon of human resources programs.
Corporate America has its own religions, and one of them is Myers-Briggs.
How the work began
It was World War II, and Isabel Myers was thinking about peace.
War and peace, in fact, are what the family would come to describe as the true cause and effect of developing the Myers-Briggs indicator. World War II created a need for women to fill professional jobs on the home front. Having read Jung’s theories on type, Isabel Myers saw an opportunity to use personality testing as a way to identify women’s job proclivities on the basis of innate character traits rather than prior professional experience, which many women did not have at the time.
“What Isabel decided was, if she could give people access to knowing their psychological type, it would be a contribution to world peace,” says Katharine Myers, the daughter-in-law of Isabel Myers.
So Isabel had her mission. Soon her home filled with index cards mapping out her theory. Lots of index cards.
Isabel by that time was married, a mother herself and tending a home in Swarthmore, Pa. She found a helper for her project in Katharine Downing, now Myers, whom she paid to help her hand-copy personality types onto 5-by-8-inch cards. The young girl went to school with Isabel’s son Peter, an Eagle Scout.
“In eighth grade, I got a valentine in Morse code,” Katharine recalls. It’s one of her earliest memories of Peter, and the Myers family she would one day marry into. “And that was really the beginning of the rest of our lives.”
Then came the money
At 86 years old, Katharine and Peter are the last living copyright holders of his mother’s and grandmother’s legacy. CPP, however, is the exclusive publisher of the test.
“The folklore is that when it started it made about a thousand dollars,” says Jeffrey Hayes, chief executive of CPP. He won’t say precisely how much it makes today. Just “millions,” as he put it.
The number is more like $20 million in revenue a year.
The framework itself has barely changed since Katharine Cook Myers and Isabel Briggs created it decades ago, but in the meantime CPP has developed nearly 800 products related to the assessment — guides to interpreting your results, guides for coaching others on interpreting their results, guides for enhancing team-building based on everyone’s results — and translations of the material into 24 languages.
In addition to its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, CPP has offices in Singapore and Australia and distribution arrangements around the globe. “I like to refer to it as the CPP federation,” Hayes says.
Myers-Briggs, one of five major assessments that CPP publishes, is the company’s “flagship product — and should be,” according to Hayes.
Hayes began at CPP in 1987 as an assistant manager for customer service and worked his way up to co-president in 2004 and president and CEO in 2007. Even on the phone, you can tell he’s extroverted—the E in his ENTP type. “I attribute much of my success to my better understanding of myself through my Myers-Briggs,” he says.
MBTI is the most widely used personality assessment on the planet, but as Hayes says, “There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes to make that happen.”
In the past 20 years, CPP has created a cadre of regional sales teams to pitch organizations on how they could use Myers-Briggs. The company also, according to Katharine Downing Myers, “has a lawyer in practically every country in the world looking for plagiarism — and there’s lots of it.”
Here’s how the business model works: It costs $15 to $40 for an individual to take a Myers-Briggs assessment, depending on the depth of the test and how fast a customer wants the results interpreted. Supplemental guides and tool kits quickly make the cost grow. Moreover, the only way to take the test is through a certified administrator. And the only way to become a certified administrator is to pay $1,700 for a four-day training class.
In short, CPP makes money off the test taker and the test giver.
Organizations administer the MBTI assessment to employees in one of two ways. They either pay for someone in their human-resources department to become certified, then pay the materials costs each time employees take the test. Or, they contract with certified, independent training consultants or leadership coaches.
Last year 2,500 Americans became certified to administer the Myers-Briggs.
They are part of a corporate-training industry that nets more than $50 billion annually. And for independent consultants in this field, paying to get your MBTI certification has become almost a base-line cost, a badge that companies all but require before contracting with you — even for work outside of Myers-Briggs testing. Tens of thousands of coaches and consultants hold that badge.
“They just want to see that you have it,” says Rebecca Dallek, a District resident who attended a spring MBTI certification course at the American Management Association’s offices in Arlington. After having two kids, Dallek made a career change from the educational technology industry to her own career coaching practice. She works with professionals, from federal employees to nonprofit workers to lobbyists. The $2,500 fee to CPP, she says, was quickly recouped.
To help new recruits, CPP provides a suite of informational guides and Power Point slides on its Web site that show how to pitch your services as a certified Myers-Briggs administrator. Coaches can increase the charge for the products at their discretion, but many provide them at face value and then turn a profit from fees for time spent working with the test takers and walking them through the results. There is no real industry standard for coaching rates, and hourly fees can run from $75 to $1,000.
As a result, CPP has combined the power of its own marketing efforts and its roughly 200 employees with the sales efforts of the thousands of professional-development coaches who pay CPP for certification and then essentially sell the test on the publishing company’s behalf.
“We get a percentage of the sales,” Katharine Downing Myers says of the copyright. “I have more money than I expected to have in life.”
A boost from CPP
Isabel Myers would turn out, by her own rubric, to be an INFP — an introvert, an intuitor, a feeler and a perceiver. She would also turn out to be highly possessive and obsessive about the indicator.
It would take roughly two decades for her work to make it from the stacks of index cards to the research holdings of the Educational Testing Service in the early 1960s. In the interim, she had looked for more and more opportunities to legitimize her homegrown project. “That was her mission in life,” Katharine Downing Myers recalls, “and she worked on it early in the morning until she went to bed at night.”
Peter remembers the sound of her typewriter downstairs as he would lie in bed as a child. He also recalls taking cards to school in his back pocket so he could help his mother by asking personality questions of classmates and recording their responses.
Isabel was born in Washington just before the turn of the century and was home-schooled by her mother. Her father, Lyman Briggs, was a career federal worker who served for more than a decade as the director of the U.S. Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He also led President Franklin Roosevelt’s Uranium Committee, which explored the feasibility of an atomic bomb.
War, and peace.
In addition to chiming in with his scientific acumen, father Briggs did another favor to help his wife’s and daughter’s project grow in its early days: He used his clout in the capital to persuade the George Washington University Medical School to let its students serve as guinea pigs for the new psychological assessment. That was 1945, and it marked the first major study conducted with the MBTI. Over several years, Isabel administered tests to more than 5,000 students, charted their personalities and then looked for correlations between their psychological type and the medical specializations they chose.
She would go on to conduct more of her own studies, mostly in medical and educational settings, through the time the Educational Testing Service acquired Myers-Briggs for research use. “Our vacations were often trips collecting data, or collecting agreements to provide data,” Peter recalls. They must have visited 50 or 60 colleges.
Yet ETS did not want to promote the indicator or administer it as part of its testing portfolio, so by 1975 Isabel struck a deal with Stanford professor John Black allowing his young publishing company, Consulting Psychologists Press (now CPP), to take over the exclusive publishing rights.
Says Katharine Myers: “Isabel was very protective — fiercely protective — of the indicator, and she didn’t want anyone messing it up.”
Says Hayes: “Isabel didn’t feel like ETS was doing enough to bring MBTI to the commercial world.”
Sure enough, shortly after transferring the rights to CPP, Isabel saw the test gain momentum in the marketplace. Its use in organizations benefited from CPP’s aggressive marketing push. And yet, its living-room origins would cast a shadow over its scientific validity that remains today.
Doubts among psychologists
“What concerns me is the cultlike devotion of many consultants and practitioners to it without the examination of the evidence,” says Adam Grant, a professor of industrial psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Despite the far-reaching use of the assessment in organizations, the academic psychological community has been slow to embrace it. No major journal has published research on the MBTI, which academics consider a strong repudiation of the test’s authority. What makes this even more striking is that CPP has three prominent psychologists on its corporate board — Carl Thoresen, Wayne Cascio and Christina Maslach — who presumably could have used their stature in the field to help.
Thoresen, the CPP board’s chairman, is a long-time and highly regarded professor of psychology at Stanford. His role at the helm of CPP gives the image of strong institutional support for the test. And yet of the roughly 150 papers he has published in his career, there isn’t one mention of Myers-Briggs.
“I used it practically, but I didn’t use it in any of my research,” Thoresen says. “In part because it would be questioned by my academic colleagues. That was always a barrier.”
It is a classic chicken-and-egg problem: No major journal has published on it, therefore no elite academic will support it, therefore no major journal will publish on it.
But there are concrete reasons it was not welcomed in the first place.
“Carl Jung was a pioneer in terms of really creative and novel theory and ideas, but a lot of his work was done before psychology was an empirical science,” says Grant, the Wharton psychology professor. And the 16 Myers-Briggs personality types, remember, are even a step removed from that — they are an interpretation and recasting of Jung’s theory. Even more compromising, according to Grant, is the fact that Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Myers created the framework in their living room before doing any robust scientific research, rather than the other way around.
The research that most psychologists today hold up as the best attempt to derive personality types from empirical data is called the Five Factor theory, which emerged from several large-scale independent projects that, conducted over decades, pointed to the same broad set of conclusions. The studies found five core axes that underpin personality, versus the MBTI’s four. They are represented by the acronym OCEAN: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Of the five, only extroversion closely maps with Myers-Briggs.
Yet the Five Factor theory has a small commercial problem.
“There’s no individual or group who owns it,” Grant says. “It’s something that’s collectively owned by the academic community.” That means it’s harder to copyright and package.
There’s another problem: Not all the personality traits delineated by the Five Factor theory are positive. One of the traits in this framework is neuroticism, for example, which has undeniably negative associations.
One of the major selling points of Myers-Briggs is that it is unequivocally positive. No personality type in its framework is better or worse than any other; each is billed as having unique and constructive strengths.
This rubric has massive marketing appeal for organizations, especially given that much of the literature and language around talent development in the past few decades has taken a decidedly soft approach. Words like passion, motivation and collaboration have rooted themselves in the corporate lexicon, and they have been part of a larger wave of management theory that has turned its focus to motivating and eliciting best behavior.
“There’s been a huge wave in positive psychology. It’s been remarkably refreshing,” Thoresen says. “But it’s controversial, and it makes many psychologists nervous because it’s not in their bailiwick.”
Use of psychological assessments in organizations really picked up in the late 20th century, alongside a growing trend in seeing talent management as a core component of a company’s competitive advantage. Myers-Briggs became one of its first and shiniest symbols. An organization that used the test showed that it recognized people, and their diversity of background and thought, as one of its biggest assets.
“To raise questions about [Myers-Briggs’s] reliability and validity is like commenting on the tastiness of communion wine. Or how good a yarmulke is at protecting your head,” says Brian Little, a former psychology professor at Harvard University who is now at the University of Cambridge. “It’s simply the wrong question, from their perspective.”
That is, from the perspective of MBTI adherents who find the test both enlightening and empowering.
Brian Twillman of the Environmental Protection Agency is one of them.
MBTI’s pervasiveness
The EPA estimates that it has given the MBTI to at least a quarter of its 17,000 federal employees, from senior political leaders to frontline staff.
Twillman, a training coordinator at the agency, has been there since 1989. “There hasn’t been a year that resources haven’t gone to MBTI,” he says. “If we had not had the MBTI introduced into the agency as it’s been, there would be a lot of blind spots within the agency with managers.”
Twillman is an INFP in an INTJ organization. Which, he says, can be hard.
He first found out about Myers-Briggs as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University in 1977. Since then, he’s been, as he describes it, “an active player in psychological type.” He has served on the Association of Psychological Type board and has helped make the EPA one of the most active agencies in promoting the Myers-Briggs.
“I gave the test to someone I met on the first date,” Twillman says. “Now we have two children and are happily married.”
Like many other enthusiasts, he describes himself as a “type watcher” — someone who takes pleasure in guessing strangers’ MBTI personality types. A common line from supporters is that the test starts an important dialogue around who we are and how we interact with others.
“Insight from the Myers-Briggs can start that conversation, but unfortunately it often ends the conversation. You’ve got your type stamped on your forehead,” says Little, the professor. “It really is scripting down the complexity and the delight of human interaction.”
Still, it’s a mainstay in professional-development portfolios. Brian McCann, a sales consultant for CPP in the D.C. area, says about 200 federal agencies pay for Myers-Briggs as part of their training programs. The military, he adds, has been one of the test’s longest and most avid users. “There’s a story that goes around that says if you’ve risen to the rank of major in the Army, you’ve taken the MBTI at least once,” he says.
It’s widely used within the State Department, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the CIA and nearly every federal department you could name.
Yet of all those who use the test, only a few have set out to quantify the gains from such an investment.
Take St. Luke’s Hospital and Health Network in Pennsylvania, where more than half of the 8,200-person staff has taken the test and 15 percent of training funds go to
Myers-Briggs.“Back in 2002, there was no measure of the effectiveness of using MBTI in an organization,” says Robert Weigland, director of management training. “We embarked on creating the model.”
Weigland has since co-authored a report, published by CPP, showing how organizations can determine the return on their investment. It involves estimating how behavioral improvements in employees translate into higher revenue. It’s an inexact science, but it’s an attempt to address a problem that plagues HR professionals across the public and private sectors: How do you assess whether a program is effective and worth the price?
Because of the complexity of measuring such an investment, many organizations hardly bother trying to do the math. “There is almost a ‘rite de passage’ to taking the Myers-Briggs, and it’s becoming a very symbolic thing,” Little says.
Or as Barry Edwards, a self-described “big fan” of MBTI and a training senior manager at the large government contractor CACI, put it: “It’s like religion. Believe what you want. Get out of it what you want.”
Should companies use this?
Academics would contend that is precisely Myers-Briggs biggest flaw: It’s about belief much more than scientific evidence. And it’s administered by leadership coaches who, by and large, have no formal education in the science of psychology.
“People like it because it reveals something they didn’t know about themselves or others,” says Wharton’s Grant. “That could be true of a horoscope, too.”
Even Katharine Downing Myers concedes that “psychologists had no use for the indicator; they felt that Jung was a crazy mystic.”
And yet the psychological community has been reticent to speak up too vocally against it. The fact is, many psychology professors do lucrative side work as organizational consultants. And as taboo as it is to praise Myers-Briggs in U.S. academia, it’s equally taboo to disparage it in corporate America.
“Some psychologists see it as a necessary evil,” Grant says. They think: “I want to have influence with practitioners, so I can’t poke a hole in their sacred cow.”
It is sacred because CPP has done such a thorough job of ingraining it in organizational culture, because company norms are hard to break, because institutions are attracted to the safety of its all-personalities-are-created-equal message, and because — despite what Myers-Briggs advocates would call the complexity and depth of the tool — it is, in the end, elegantly simple.
Add all those together, and you have an organizational Goliath. “You begin to figure out,” Grant says, “is this a battle that you want to fight?”
The marketplace
While not many individual academics are fighting the fight, plenty of publishing companies are. The Hogan Personality Inventory and DISC are two personality assessments that map more closely to the Five Factor research espoused by the majority of academics in psychology. DISC is the Myers-Briggs indicator’s biggest competitor, and it is owned by Inscape Publishing, which was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February for $85 million.
“It is a crowded market,” CPP’s Hayes says.
In addition to more competition, CPP is facing another trend: belt-tightening in the budgets for leadership training programs. “We had several organizations where the departments we were working with were reduced from 15 to two,” Hayes says. He adds that “some of the big organizations that went under [in the recession] were customers of ours.”
These factors, while not leaving CPP anything less than ultra profitable, are making it seem increasingly important that Myers-Briggs finds a way to get the blessing of the academic community before other tests emerge that have both mass-market appeal and a scientific seal of approval.
“Being an academic myself, I’ve always been pushing CPP to get some publications in major psychological journals,” Thoresen says. “Particularly in the business field, in large corporations especially, they like to know that there is some evidence that this is a valid test.”
To that end, CPP has plans to make a large research push over the next three or four years, which would amass millions of its cases and pull them into research that Thoresen thinks should be publishable by the top-tier psychological journals.
There would still be a problem, though, according to Little: “It’s a little bit like taking a Dodge Caravan and trying to turn it into a Rolls Royce.” Theoretically, Little says, it could be possible to do substantive research that would improve MBTI’s validity, but CPP — and the Myers-Briggs family — would have to raze any parts of its theory that prove unsound. And that is highly unlikely.
“It became a case of copyright over designing an assessment technique that could be adaptive,” Little says. “From a business perspective, [adaptation] is a pain in the neck. From a scientific perspective, it’s the only way to go.”
The end of the line
When the copyright passed to Katharine and Peter in 1980, after Isabel’s death, the pair became the vision keepers of her legacy. “We have been partners in really carrying out her dream,” Katharine says. “I think of it as protecting both the instrument and the theory on which it is based.”
For decades the couple, who are divorced but still close, attended meetings three times a year with CPP to discuss the indicator and to make sure its use was not wandering too far from Isabel’s intentions. “She’d be astounded,” Peter says. “Even in her wildest dreams, I’m sure she never imagined the breadth of it, the reach, the number of languages it’s been translated into.”
Katharine recently retired from the meetings but still gets the notes.
She lives by herself in a two-bedroom cottage in a Quaker retirement community just outside Kennett Square, Pa. It is 25 miles from where she was born 86 years ago, and 25 miles from where she met Peter.
When they die, the copyright will go to the Myers-Briggs Foundation, which funds research and helps maintain the nonprofit Center for Applications of Psychological Type. They both have children from separate marriages, but “they won’t be putting into it what Peter and I do,” Katharine says. “For Peter and me, it became our life’s work.”
When asked if he is sad his children won’t carry on the family legacy, Peter replies, “Yes, but that’s the luck of the draw.”
And so the old pair made the decision to end the line here.
Among the Quaker cottages, where Katharine intends to live out the last of her years, she still feels the presence of Myers-Briggs. She has started a small group of retirees who meet to talk about Carl Jung’s theory and the indicator that has been such a force in her life.
“It was a family that didn’t think you had to go to a class to learn something,” Katharine recalls of her mother and grandmother-in-law. “You could just learn it on your own.”
The 2,500 people who got their Myers-Briggs certification last year likely agree.
By Lillian Cunningham (@lily_cunningham)
Sunday, December 09, 2012
Worked in this space for a while, and am truly excited about developments upon us now. | The Future of Money
When it comes to money, there’s a lot of change going on.
Money is one of society’s most embedded, ancient institutions; it doesn’t change quickly. Technology, on the other hand, changes at a rapid pace, and it has a habit of bringing about change at an unforeseen pace in all areas of life and society.
The changes being wrought will become mainstream at a much slower pace than, say, the latest smartphone technology – but it will be fast by the standards of the almighty dollar and plodding banks that are hundreds of years old.
There are many players. Square has been hard at work revolutionizing the payment process. Instead of fumbling about with cumbersome cash or swiping your year-old bank card every which way until it finally works, you simply have to be present at the counter to pay the new way. There are others in this space, but none have an approach where technology goes so unseen that it is futuristic.
Focusing on another area, there’s Simple, which is a replacement for the traditional way of doing banking. Simple doesn’t have branches – everything is done online. There are no fees, either, and the company has partnered with the Allpoint ATM network, which is also fee-free. This is not just a matter of strategy, but part of Simple’s reason for existing. The service includes tools for keeping tabs on and understanding your money, too.
There’s another kind of player in this new game, too. It’s one that has been greeted with the most skepticism and yet has the most potential for complete and utter disruption – cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin.
All of these companies and organizations are bringing fascinating possibilities to the table, but what’s more interesting than each of them individually is the sum of these parts. What will money look like in the future, in a few years or several decades when such things breach the hardened walls of the banking and government institutions running our economies?
Square simplifying the checkout process
Square’s philosophy centers on using technology to make technology invisible – whether that’s the digital payment processing system in use at the local store, or the old technology of printing notes and pressing coins.
“The best technology disappears completely,” said a Square spokesperson in reference to its Pay With Square technology, which reduces the financial transaction involved in buying something to simply saying your name.
“Instead of attending to the mechanics of a transaction, the entirety of your payment experience is your interaction with the person behind the counter. Technology made that possible, although you never see it.”
In order to use Pay With Square, you need your mobile phone on you, but you don’t have to take it out. A big part of the trend here is the consolidation of everything you carry on you. With developments like Apple’s Passbook, we’re moving toward a world where you don’t have to use paper boarding passes and tickets, and a bit further out from that, it’s likely we’ll see identification move to the phone as well.
Presuming that society doesn’t suddenly start heading backwards, solutions like Square will eventually replace debit and credit cards much the same way cards replaced cash – though it is still used, I don’t know many people who use it as their primary means of making purchases. The day we stop using wallets and add another role to our smartphones is steadily approaching, and there are plenty of other players in that arena. Google and its NFC-driven Wallet, and PayPal are just two other large technology companies getting involved.
Simple’s new banking paradigm
While Simple won’t help you ditch the wallet at this stage – its customers use the Simple Visa Card – it is part of the movement to a less physically mired finance world. Those who use Simple for their banking need go online instead of to a local branch. All banks have Internet banking these days, but at Simple it’s the core product (a much better one at that) and you won’t need to go anywhere in person to handle mundane tasks.
One of the key features of Simple is that there are no fees. The company’s stated goal is to help people worry less about money, and it sees banking fees as a real obstacle to that goal.
“Right now, the banking system fundamentally makes money by keeping customers confused. They make the lion’s share of their profits from fees and charges, not from banking,” says Joshua Reich, the CEO of Simple. “We focus on basic banking and strip away the surprise fees.
“More importantly, we focus on making it really easy for our customers to understand their financial lives. That’s why we work hard to get transactions to appear on people’s phones within seconds,” says Reich. Simple includes a Goals feature that helps you set up targets – a new iPad, a kitchen remodel or a vacation, for example – and save for them automatically.
Speaking of the future of money, Reich says “I think the biggest ramification will be the increased awareness of our impact on our personal flow of money.”
This philosophy is also behind the “Safe-to-Spend” balance – a figure that tells you what’s available in your bank account to use right now, excluding both pending transactions and upcoming scheduled payments. I know I’ve been bitten by fees when I’ve spent money I didn’t really have, all because the bank hadn’t made it clear a payment that should’ve processed was pending.
This is at the core of what Simple wants to do. Reich calls the relationship between consumers and banks “adversarial”; the banks have created their business model around the consumer screwing things up so they have to pay fees. Instead, Simple tries to keep as much money as possible in the hands of consumers while it makes its profits the way banks are traditionally meant to – through responsible investing.
Better planning with Planwise
Vincent Turner, the founder of Planwise, is similarly invested in the idea of giving consumers control and clarity over their finances. Planwise offers a free tool where the average individual can create plans for various financial goals, tweaking the numbers as they go and evaluating a range of information about their situation and their opportunities in an easy-to-understand way.
“Personal finance is software that the mainstream needs, but doesn’t love. No one enjoys logging into their bank account but most accept that they need to know how much money they have as a binary indicator of whether they can do whatever it is they want to do next,” said Turner in a recent piece for The Next Web’s founders column.
“Personal finance tools that are yet to evolve will take this binary indicator far further and, by pulling in real-time data — such as historical transactions, online payments, offline payments and banking — will provide meaningful input to help people take control of their personal finances.”
Bitcoin’s model for a new currency
Moving away from the startup world is the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, developed by Satoshi Nakamoto. Nakamoto is a pseudonym, and nobody knows who he really is. He stepped down from the project in 2010, before it ever got any serious attention.
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer currency with no centralized authority. It is pseudonymous, in that all your transactions can be linked with one another but there is no personally identifying information involved. Bitcoin is regulated by code, which determines how quickly new Bitcoins are generated without the intervention of humans.
Bitcoins are stored in a wallet that resides on your computer – or a hosted wallet service off in the cloud, if that’s your preference – and transactions are nearly instantaneous. Where Simple endeavors to reflect the impact of transactions on your balance as quickly as they can – despite the time it takes money to actually move around — Bitcoins move from one wallet to another right away.
With a peer-to-peer infrastructure, the load of maintaining the network is spread around to everyone using a client. This is important to ensuring Bitcoin can stay decentralized so the power stays with the masses in the most democratic of ways, but it is also important to the security of the network. The more people using Bitcoin, the stronger it gets as data spreads, validating the state of Bitcoin distribution as it goes. It’s a very difficult protocol to try to fool or scam.
Bitcoin improves on the old model for currency in many ways. Maybe it’s the prototype for whatever improved implementation overtakes traditional currency in the future, or maybe Bitcoin will take that throne, but it seems likely that our current model will be replaced, whether today’s governments come to allow it, or we have to wait for them to fade out – or be thrown out – of existence.
Where the future may take us
A common thread that nearly everyone working in this area comes back to again and again is speed. Square wants you to get what you want out of a store with minimal hassle. Simple wants you to have an up-to-the-minute picture of your finances. With Bitcoin, transactions are instantaneous and are reflected in your wallet as such.
“What these technologies will unleash will be profound. Money can move instantly, anywhere and without restriction. A digital payment can move between two people as they pass each other on the street, or between two people on opposite sides of the Earth – with no difference between the character of the two payments,” says Erik Voorhees, who is a Bitcoin entrepreneur who works at BitInstant.
“Money will move in this direction – toward these enabling technologies – because it tends to follow the path of least resistance. New rails have been built, and it’s just a matter of building the infrastructure around them and the trains will start switching, unavoidably.”
Speed – or a lack thereof – is also a big obstacle. Everyone I spoke to mentioned the glacial pace of the regulatory agencies and banks. “We’re used to working on two-week development cycles, but the banking ecosystem isn’t,” says Joshua Reich. Any company looking to disrupt money has to come to the long game with plenty of patience.
Another obstacle – though intricately linked to this issue of slow movers – is the lack of a government position on cryptocurrencies. “The question of ‘what’s next?’, depending on how it’s answered by governments, might be very exciting or very frightening,” says Voorhees. “How will they respond to a world where individuals can completely control their own money? How much freedom will they allow, when freedom is so attainable?”
“How will they treat banks when, with merely a download, anyone can be their own bank? What will they have to say about currencies which compete with their own?”
Voorhees points out that with a word from the government, the future of money could flourish or be toppled. It’s a world where Bitcoin would lose the ground it has gained so much of and live out its days in its typecast role of funding Silk Road drug purchases, and we’d be stuck with the controlled currencies of our governments, made by design ever more traceable.
“The technologies recently built enable significant new powers – but we don’t know whether these new powers will be seized by individuals or by their governments,” says Voorhees.
His final word is cautious for an area with so much untapped potential. “More important than asking “what’s next” is asking, “who gets to give the answer?”
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