How STEM Education Is Failing Students and How to Fix It

Yes, I know. "Science, Technology, Engineering and Math" as the latest hot educational trend is completely sacrosanct. Women are being pushed to consider it, companies are investing in it, and everyone is talking about it. Let me be very clear: I am not here trying to steer anyone away from STEM. I actually think that it can be a phenomenal background for the right person with the right career goals. My Electrical and Computer Engineering major taught me critical thinking and analysis, offered tremendous job security in decent-paying jobs, and gave me broad appeal to a variety of industries and roles. If you don’t believe me that STEM can lead to an incredibly successful career, consider this story: I was at a UI design conference a few years ago and was speaking with several engineers. After talking for several minutes, I asked one guy if we could connect on LinkedIn, and he responded “I’m not on LinkedIn anymore.” I thought this was odd (to an MBA, not being on LinkedIn is like saying you don’t have running water in your house) so I asked why and he said “Well I signed up for a few weeks, but I honestly was just getting too many job offers and I wasn’t really searching at the time, so it just became more of a hassle than anything else.”

Despite all the benefits, there are many ways that I’ve found in which a STEM background fails people who move into more general roles in business, which seems to be the majority of STEM grads. It's taken me over a decade to realize this and unlearn several of the things that I took for granted in school. STEM teaches a very specific way of thinking and approaching problems that can be antithetical to the way business is done. What I’ve done is lay out what I believe are the biggest problems with how we are preparing STEM grads along with my solutions for how STEM can become a more broadly applicable background, more fun to learn, and prepare students for jobs in the 21st century.

STEM teaches you to find the correct answer, not the best answer
If there is one thing that I learned in my engineering studies it was how to ingest an enormous volume of complicated information and synthesize it into a learning that could be broadly applied in quantitative practice. Great, right? I can't tell you how many hours were spent in libraries pouring over textbooks trying to make concepts stick. I was rewarded when the concept finally did stick and I was able to get the correct answer on a test. In fact, one of the aspects of STEM that I actually enjoyed was that there was no subjectivity to the answer: it was either right or it was not. I didn't have to like the answer; my professor's feelings about me didn't matter. The answer was what it was.

As most of you probably know, this is the opposite of how things work in business. There is almost never a "correct" answer, and even if there is, you may be wrong for selecting it. What does that mean? Let's use an example:

You're leading selection of vendors for an RFP that has been submitted. You have done all of the research and believe there is a clear winner: on price, quality, and every other aspect, one company has outshone the rest. However, another vendor that did not put together the best offer has a long-standing relationship with your company. Moreover, the sales team is personally close with your boss. You know that you have all the data needed to backup your selection of one company, but if you do, you will probably face your boss's wrath for disagreeing with him or her. Moreover, it won’t make a difference, because the company with connections will be selected anyway, and your career could suffer as a result. What do you do?

STEM teaches you to give the correct answer given the available quantitative data. In the real world, not paying attention to the nuances of historical actions and the personalities and relationships involved can lead to negative consequences for you and the business. I’m not saying that business people should take the politically expedient solution in all cases, but ignoring politics, personalities and nuance is certainly not a strategy for a successful career.

How do we teach STEM students to find the best answer?
The solution here is crystal clear: tie more projects to real-world examples with the professors as “clients.” Directly question the reasoning behind very fundamental assumptions about science and technology; if the students can’t defend the concepts, declare them void. Learning to bring a group of stakeholders to a consensus around the right answer for a group is an invaluable skill for anyone and the sooner that STEM students can learn it, the better it will be for their careers.

STEM does not teach you to be resourceful
If there is one skill that schools most often fail to teach students, it is resourcefulness. Technical disciplines are probably the worst offenders. Certainly there is the occasional group project that requires some interpersonal interaction, but the majority of grades come from exams derived from the official textbook. That textbook may be long, complicated, incredibly dense, etc. But examine it carefully enough and practice enough and you really don’t have to speak to anyone or even attend class in some cases. The concept of having to consolidate and synthesize information from a variety of sources and even leverage contacts to discover new possibilities is completely lost.

In business, there is no book. In fact, depending on where you work, there may be virtually no official path for knowledge sharing whatsoever. Part of this is intentional: when there is less knowledge sharing, existing jobs are more secure. Regardless of the reason, the fact is that when starting at a new company or on a new team, in order to come up to speed will require a lot of networking, coffees, lunches, etc. I have seen many people without this skill in my career, and they often remain in unfulfilling jobs for a very long time for the simple reason that they find the concept of coming up to speed on new responsibilities and skills to be too daunting. This really is a shame and, in a rapidly evolving economy, puts these employees at serious risk of being out of a job and without any fallback options. By being resourceful, people learn how to extract information from people in a way that is mutually beneficial. They develop strong networks of contacts that can be leveraged when needed. Most importantly, they develop a skill that can ensure success in virtually any environment.

How do we teach STEM students to be more resourceful?
What’s the best way to make a subject really stick in your head? Become a teacher. Similarly, the best way to enforce resourcefulness as a positive attribute could be to become a resource. I think that students need to be put in role-playing situations far more often to simulate real world experience. Since there is no book in the real world, give an assignment to half of the class and give the information required to the other half. Does this bias towards the more social and popular kids? Absolutely. Does the business world do the same thing? You bet. Let students get out of their comfort zone trying to figure out how to extract information required from their classmates and learn how information is collected in the real world.

STEM does not teach you to deal with ambiguity
How many job descriptions have you read that say the company is looking for a candidate who can thrive in an ambiguous environment? I’ve found that this can be code for “We don’t have well thought-out long term strategies and shift course often and erratically,” but the fact is that handling ambiguity is an extremely important skill for anyone in a business career. The world is not as neat and tidy as it is in a test case. Even in a technical discipline, such as computer science, requirements are going to evolve rapidly. It is well known that numerous successful entrepreneurs started their companies almost by accident as they had massive shifts from their original idea for a company. One of the most famous Atlanta start-up success stories, MailChimp, began as a web-design company that had actually given up on an email greeting card side-project until other companies started increasingly requesting it.

The point is that the end goal is not always crystal clear in the business world. Priorities and strategies change very quickly. In STEM, this is not the case. All of the tools and data are laid out in front of you and your task is to manipulate the data using the tools you have to come to new proven truths. Let me put it this way: in physics, you might be asked to figure out how long it takes a 2 kg ball to fall 40 meters under the influence of gravity. In business, you are asked to figure out how long it takes a 2 kg ball to fall a certain distance, but you’re not sure how long of a distance. Moreover, after a few days of working on it, you discover that it’s not actually a ball, but more of a disc. Then there’s a curveball that gravity now pulls objects away from the Earth instead of towards it and you’re suddenly required to give a defensible answer. (BTW, I know you are a STEM major if you cringed when I implied that the shape of the object changed the rate of descent in absence of wind-resistance. Calm down.)

How do we teach STEM students to deal with ambiguity?
In some disciplines, this will be easier than others. In general though, professors need to lay out less and less of the actual problem and push students to drive towards holistic solutions. Much like many top business schools rely almost entirely on cases, more and more of STEM education needs to be geared towards scenarios with a variety of possible correct answers. It will push students to think analytically and creatively at the same time and to work better in teams.

So what did I miss? What other ways is STEM education failing students when they get out in the workforce? What else can we do to fix it? Interested to hear your thoughts!

How the CrossFit Games Has Revolutionized Native Advertising in Sports

In one week, the 2017 CrossFit Games will begin at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison, Wisconsin.  This will be the 11th annual event and the first one to utilize partnerships with Facebook and CBS to stream the entire event live worldwide.  As a fan, I am excited to see the "Fittest on Earth."  As a business person, I am in awe of how CrossFit has seized the unique opportunity to monetize its annual competition in a way that no other sport can by turning the CrossFit Games into what essentially amounts to an extended infomercial.  In this article, I want to shed light on how CrossFit has targeted marketing more accurately than any other sport, how it has been able to turn all adherents into unwitting and unpaid spokesmen, and how it could potentially put the entire business model at risk.

First though, what exactly is CrossFit?  I don’t want to belabor the point too much, but it is officially defined as constantly varied functional movements performed at high intensity.  What makes CrossFit so unpredictable is that this description leaves a lot of room for interpretation.  Almost any workout can be considered “CrossFit”, provided it abides by these very basic rules.  Of course, the eventual goal of any competitive CrossFitter is to make it to the CrossFit Games, which is the annual international competition crowning one man and one woman as the “Fittest on Earth.”  What started as a few dedicated athletes doing workouts on an uneven patch of dirt before tapping a keg of beer has morphed into an ESPN-broadcast juggernaut, awarding $2.2M in prize money to athletes in 2016.  The path to the CrossFit Games is to first compete in the CrossFit Open, which is open to all athletes and had over 380,000 competitors in 2017.  In fact, the CrossFit Open has become de rigeur for CrossFitters, as it is the only standardized way to measure yourself against your fellow athletes.  More on that later...

So what does this have to do with marketing?  In recent years, traditional advertising (television commercials, magazine ads, etc.) has increasingly been supplanted with native advertising, or advertising that gives the appearance of real editorial content or entertainment, but is in reality a subtle ploy to get you to make a purchase.  This transition away from traditional advertising was a response to customers becoming immune to advertising or finding ways to avoid it altogether.  Remember when TiVo was first released in 1999 and it was finally possible to easily skip commercials during your favorite shows?  The initial response from advertisers was product placement, or embedded marketing, within shows.  If you have time and want to laugh, Google “soap opera product placement” and you’ll find numerous examples of gorgeous actors of mediocre faculties extolling the health benefits of Cheerios or Chex Mix in between searches for the ghosts of their ex-lovers’ estranged children or something (full disclosure: I’ve never actually seen a soap opera).

Though product placement never fully went away, in the online space it largely gave way to native advertising.  A great example of this is BuzzFeed, which does not use any display advertising but instead relies on “Sponsored Content” in order to generate revenue.  More and more websites have begun to utilize this tactic, finding that it increases advertising revenue.

Now, this starts to get interesting.  Think about how marketing occurs in most sports.  In reality, all sports are a delicate balance of integrating advertising, both traditional and native, into the broadcast as seamlessly as possible without alienating fans, knowing that this will achieve the highest conversion rate.  This is why baseball stadiums put banner ads behind home plate.  It’s also why NFL coaches are required to use Microsoft Surface tablets during the game.  It’s why stadiums have corporate names and replays are sponsored.  Soccer actually provides a very interesting example, as it is one of the few sports with no breaks for television commercials during play.  This has enabled owners to push the limits of what customers will endure and place large corporate sponsorships on the front of jerseys.  CrossFit is no different in that it wants to maximize advertising revenue, but the structure of the Games and the composition of the fan base makes the opportunity very unique.

First, the fan base.  Look in the stands at the CrossFit Games and try to find a single person that doesn’t look like they’re in peak physical shape.  This is because virtually every single fan of CrossFit as a sport is, at some level, a competitor themselves.  You certainly don’t go to an NFL game expecting every fan to have the same physique as Cam Newton (or, if you do, you certainly don’t do it twice).  But probably half of the fan base in the stadium at the CrossFit Games looks almost indistinguishable from the athletes on the field.

Second, by its very nature, CrossFit is very functional and less about style: for most exercises, the weight needs to get to a certain place, usually in a very prescribed way.  The excitement is more seeing the athletes strain and dig deep to complete exercises rather than the actual exercises themselves.  If you’ve seen one Clean and Jerk, you’ve really seen them all.  Imagine if this were the case in other sports.  What if the NBA didn’t count a layup because the player used his left hand from the right side of the basket?  That unpredictability is what makes basketball interesting for fans.  From that perspective, the CrossFit Games is unbelievably boring to watch.  Really, what makes it intriguing is seeing how far people can push themselves.  The type of person drawn to this is typically someone who wants to know how they personally stack up against these athletes.

Third, the structure of the CrossFit Games is unlike most other sports.  Whereas a single CrossFit workout is a short burst of high-intensity, the Games are a long slog that takes place over four full days with copious rest breaks for athletes.  That’s a lot of time for viewers to change the channel, or for fans at the stadium to go grab a drink and socialize.  Everything culminates in the final workouts, often times with placement in the last workout determining the champion.

So quick recap of the CrossFit Games:

1. There is a fan base that almost all compete in CrossFit.
2. These fans are dying to see how they compare to the top athletes in the world in a way that is objective and measurable.
3. The gaps in action are so great that traditional ads, at least on television, would receive very little exposure.
4. The duration of the competition is such that very few will watch the entire CrossFit Games, but almost everyone watches the final workout.

It hasn’t taken CrossFit long to figure out how to monetize the Games: make sure that new, incredibly expensive equipment is integral to the competition (in particular, the final workout).  Remember the CrossFit motto of “constantly varied functional movements performed at high intensity?”  Well, by introducing new equipment, CrossFit can claim this is a logical extension of the creed of remaining “constantly varied” and continue to add new equipment and movements every year.  Lather, rinse, repeat, monetize.

How does this work in practice?  New equipment is introduced at the CrossFit Games.  CrossFit then indicates to the participants and gym-owners that this equipment will begin to be programmed as part of what is officially considered “CrossFit.”  Often times, this new equipment will be made a part of the CrossFit Open, the preliminary round of the CrossFit Games open to all athletes.  Athletes know that the CrossFit Open is the one standardized, judged event in which most CrossFitters will compete; in other words, if you have a friend in another state that says he or she does CrossFit, this may be the only way to know who is the better athlete.  This turns every adherent into an unwitting Mary Kay salesman, as they push you into spending more money under the guise of being friendly.  The pressure then builds on gyms to stock this new equipment, since any gym that does not facilitate its customers participating in the CrossFit Open is not viewed as a “real” CrossFit gym.  The gyms eventually comply, and the increased investment is partially absorbed by the gym’s owners and partially passed on to customers in the form of increased fees.

Think about it: CrossFit has taken an opportunity that no other sport in the world has available.  The NBA can make the players wear special jerseys for a single game and then sell those jerseys, but very few people would consider it an iron-clad prerequisite to being a fan of the NBA that you buy every single jersey ever seen on the floor.  With CrossFit, in order to continue to be a CrossFitter, you MUST use the equipment that is promoted at the Games.  It’s all or nothing: purchase these products or find another workout regimen.  The concept is more akin to the NBA changing the size of the ball every year and claiming that anything without the officially-sized ball is no longer considered basketball.  You laugh (or maybe you didn’t), but it’s true.  The CrossFit Games doesn’t need ads because it is an ad.

And not only is it an ad, it is one that performs extremely well.  The most effective advertisement is one that has a very high conversion rate per a given number of impressions.  This means that you want to only show your advertisement to people who have at least some propensity to make a purchase, but you want that propensity to be very high for people who do see it.  By integrating native advertising into the CrossFit Games, CrossFit has been able to almost exclusively target individuals that are part of the market for CrossFit equipment.  Furthermore, it has ensured that each of these individuals, either directly or indirectly, is virtually obligated to make a purchase in order to continue their current fitness program.  With a program that relies so much on a sense of camaraderie and community, there are extremely high switching costs.  This means conversion rates are extraordinarily high.

RogueFitness.com, showing 50 lb dumbbells
sold out soon after the announcement of use in
the CrossFit Open

I’ve seen first-hand how this has affected the equipment in CrossFit gyms in recent years.  After the 2015 CrossFit Games, every gym started to buy an Assault AirBike, a then-$1000 stationary bicycle that had featured prominently in the final event.  After the 2016 Games, the equipment purchases du jour were a SkiErg (currently $950 with a stand) and a pegboard (up to $350) after these were in the final two events.  In the 2017 Open, one workout employed 50-pound dumbbells for the first time, which instantly sold out everywhere.  All this from a regimen designed by a founder who once said “If you only had a bar and a place to do pull-ups you could do an acceptable variant of the CrossFit Program.”  None of this would be possible it not for the marketing arm of CrossFit, the CrossFit Games.

The CrossFit Games has essentially become the September issue of Vogue: people eagerly awaiting the opportunity to pay for something that is almost entirely advertisements.  This opportunity is not available to every business.  CrossFit had to spend over a decade building up credibility before having this kind of market power.  It is similar to how Facebook began to monetize its customer base with targeted advertising in the news feed only after nearly a decade in existence.  By waiting that long, Facebook was able to build up a formidable network effect that made substitutes very difficult to find.  With CrossFit, the brand and network are unbelievably important because everything else is very easily imitable.  In fact, there is nothing stopping someone from opening up a gym that is 99% identical to CrossFit, but without the name (in fact, many have done this already).  What stops these from expanding is the brand, the widespread international community, and the fact that everyone wants to say that they do “CrossFit” and not some obvious imitation workout.  But this is not without risk.  If CrossFit continues to forcefully push this advertising on its customers, there could be a tipping point where adherents will leave in droves.

What do you think?  Is CrossFit risking its long-term viability by so tightly integrating native advertising into its premiere competition?  Are other sports missing out on similar opportunities?  The 2017 CrossFit Games are coming up soon.  If you’re like me, you’re excited to see if Matt Fraser can continue the dominant run started last year, intrigued by the potential comeback after a disappointing 2016 by former champion Camille LeBlanc-Bazinet, and keeping your credit card handy to be the first to purchase whatever new equipment is in the spotlight for the final event.

Artificial Scarcity and My Failed Quest for an NES Classic

Confession time: on November 11, I went to a Target store before it opened and waited outside for the launch of Nintendo’s NES Classic Edition.  I went home empty handed.  Just this morning (December 20), I went to a Best Buy store in 40 degree weather about an hour before it opened only to find out all the tickets for NES Classics had already been handed out to people who had camped outside the store overnight.  I’ve made probably two dozen calls over the past month, stopped by numerous stores, and even attempted to bribe employees for more information about shipments.  I’ve had absolutely no luck.  The simple fact is the NES Classic is by far the most difficult to procure item of this holiday season.

But the whole experience has me thinking: why would a company refuse to meet demand for one of its products, if even temporarily?  Nintendo is a $4.4B company and has been releasing globally-successful video game hardware for 36 years; I can’t believe that the company is this bad at predicting demand that the shortage is an accident.  So is a temporary shortage a strategy and, if so, how could it be beneficial to the company?

Before diving into the strategy for the shortage, let’s talk about the three possible reasons a shortage could occur:

1. The company cannot produce enough to meet demand.  There are very legitimate instances in which this could occur, often due to limitations in natural resources.  A great example of this is the most hard-to-find beer in Atlanta, Tropicália.  Atlanta beer drinkers have grown accustom to the empty grocery store shelf with a Tropicália label under it.  But the beer uses very specific ingredients, like Galaxy hops from Australia, and, as the CEO himself has said, “the brand can only grow as fast as the raw materials will let it.”¹
2. The company will not produce enough to meet demand.  In this instance, the company is fully aware that there is a shortage of its product and still refuses to produce more for a given time.  As a father of a young child, I am intimately familiar with the “Disney Vault,” which is Disney’s term for its storage of a movie that it simply refuses to currently sell (if you don’t believe me, try and buy a copy of The Lion King anywhere right now).  In Disney’s case, the strategy is due to the fact that the movies tend to target young children, which is a demographic that is constantly in flux.  By putting a movie in the “Disney Vault” and then re-releasing it every seven years or so, it can build excitement for a new generation of children that has never been exposed to the movie.
3. The company underestimated demand and has not yet caught up.  As a telecommunications employee, I still remember the original iPhone launch in 2007 and the massive overhaul to mobile networks that occurred as data usage exploded.  Not even Apple had foreseen the complete shift to users primarily accessing the internet through their mobile device, and the mobile networks were congested as the service providers made improvements to meet the additional demand.

Now which one of these applies in the case of Nintendo’s NES Classic?  The President of Nintendo America is on the record as saying “The overall level of demand is certainly greater than we anticipated, that’s why we’re suffering through the shortages out there in the marketplace.”²  Poppycock!  Limiting supply is a classic strategy that Nintendo has been using for decades with its newest products.  So why would Nintendo deliberately produce so few units?  As it turns out, there are many reasons.

The most obvious is the ensuing buzz that is built for the item.  Why buy advertisements for your product when you can make a newsworthy story about the product and thus promote it for free?  When I went to the Best Buy this morning, I spoke with someone else there about the status of the NES Classics, simply assuming he was another consumer.  At the end of our conversation, he said he was with a local news station and was reporting on the story of people camping out to buy the system.  It’s hard to fault Nintendo in this respect, as there is no question that this has been one of the most talked about items of this holiday season.  At least some of that is due to the scarcity.

But there’s more at play here.  After the launch date when it became clear that these units would be difficult to acquire, a secondary market immediately sprang up.  According to eBay, the average sales price was $230 for an item that was selling in stores for $60.³  This raises the obvious question: if consumers were willing to pay $230 for it, why did Nintendo not increase the retail price and enjoy the higher margin?

That answer is somewhat complicated.  Keep in mind that this is in absolutely no way revolutionary technology; in fact, it can be viewed as an item that has already been in existence for 30 years.  Users are willing to pay a relatively low price for the convenience it affords, but might scoff (or even protest) at such a high price for what amounts to a piece of nostalgia.  And remember how Nintendo wants to drive organic marketing for their product through the media?  That message is muddled when everyone is complaining about the price of the product.  Not to mention, it can be seen as price gouging children with a device that is in no way educational.  Nintendo very deftly side-stepped this situation and sacrificed the additional marginal profit to scalpers in order to continue to be seen as a “good” company.

But the fact is that essentially the only units available in the market are at these inflated prices.  This turns the unit into an extremely prestigious, almost luxury item.  Being able to acquire one is either a sign of wealth or a herculean effort.  Either way, owning one is a status symbol and creates a halo effect around all of Nintendo’s products.  Essentially, Nintendo gets all the credit for high prices with none of the downside.  The buzz ensures that Nintendo is on the mind of anyone with a passing interest in video games.

Well, what does Nintendo do with all this mindshare?  Releases “Super Mario Run” on iOS, of course!  Though the success of the game is debatable at this time, it is clear that there was more buzz around the game than otherwise would have been since so many people were already salivating over playing Super Mario games on the NES Classic that they had tried (and, most likely, failed) to acquire.

Nintendo also has to keep in mind its other stakeholder: retail stores.  Nintendo does a small fraction of its sales directly to consumers and instead relies on stores such as GameStop and Best Buy to sell its products.  By releasing units so slowly and in such an inscrutable and seemingly-haphazard manner, Nintendo has driven a ton of foot traffic to these stores.  Consumers are calling and stopping by much more frequently to try and get an inside track on when the next shipment is coming in.  While they are asking, they might make an impulse purchase or two.  I personally called a Toy”R”Us at one point to ask about shipments and received a pre-recorded message saying that they did not know when more shipments were arriving, so I should come in the store frequently to ask for the latest information.  The message was clear: we love you asking about this product, but make sure to do it from within the store where we can cross-sell you for our trouble.

So it’s clear that there are a lot of benefits to an artificial shortage, such as the one Nintendo has created.  But certainly there are negative effects as well, right?  In fact, there are many.

First, there is a definite risk that the brand will suffer more than it benefits.  While this does make Nintendo appear to be a prestigious, luxury company, it also makes Nintendo look like a company that is too incompetent to manufacture a video game system, which is its main business.  There has actually been a lot of vitriol directed at the company on Twitter stemming from the continued refusal to meet demand (only a small fraction of this hatred has come from me).

One must also remember the time-sensitive nature of the holiday season.  This would make a perfect Christmas present, but only if you can get it by Christmas.  At this point, it looks like most people will not be able to.  Nintendo obviously released to coincide with the holiday season, so failing to capitalize on that demand is puzzling.  The most committed consumers will buy this unit whenever they can, but some will not buy it after December 25.  In fact, many people might play the system at a friend’s house and realize that they don’t need a unit for themselves.

And don’t forget about the retail stores.  While they enjoy the increased traffic, there is certainly a lot of employee time being spent on repeating the same message over and over to customers.  When this takes place over the phone (as it often would), there is very little benefit to the store.  If the stores start to feel like this is an unfair expense, Nintendo’s shelf placement at these stores could easily suffer.  Nintendo has already announced its next-generation console, the Nintendo Switch.  If stores are still reeling from this experience, that unit could be buried behind a stack of PlayStations and XBoxes when it is released.

Finally, remember that Nintendo is a publicly traded company.  As the end of the quarter nears, Nintendo risks pushing sales into a future quarter, at best.  By recognizing these sales earlier, Nintendo could invest the revenue from these items and receive a return in the time between when the sale would have occurred and when it actually occurs.  Now everyone knows that the rate of return on short-term savings or treasuries is extremely low, but there still is a time value of money that Nintendo is sacrificing here.

In the end, I personally feel like Nintendo has botched this release and I think that the NES Classic will be a successful failure.  There is no question that the system itself is a success as it has already sold over 200,000 units⁴, but I believe that Nintendo has left revenue on the table with its artificial scarcity strategy.  The strategy only works if a company quickly builds buzz for an item and then meets the demand in a timely fashion.  At this point, the buzz has been built for some time and consumers are just feeling spurned and frustrated at their continued inability to acquire the system.  Perhaps there truly was a miscalculation in demand projections, but I don’t think it fully explains the continued shortage.  I think that it will be interesting to see how the system continues to roll out after the holidays and how this launch affects future launches by Nintendo.

So what do you think?  Is Nintendo outsmarting us all?  Will the company flood the market at some point soon?  Let me know in the comments.  And if you like this article, PLEASE send me a donation so that I can buy an NES Classic from a scalper on eBay.  I’m dying here.

"Your Interview Just Started" and Other Mistakes I've Seen (and Made) In Recruiting

I should start by saying that I actually really love recruiting.  I’ve helped a lot of people get roles on my current team and I think that it’s very fulfilling to match a talented person with a role that can further their career.  I’m the person who honestly gets excited when a person that I believe in asks me if I know of any available opportunities.

Having worked at several different companies, I’ve been involved in a lot of very different recruiting processes, both as the candidate and as the recruiter.  I thought that it might be interesting and informative to share some of the mistakes that I have seen (including one that I personally made) throughout these processes.  Let me say that this is obviously not intended to poke fun at those that are being described, and I’ve gone to great lengths to not give away the names or any unnecessary info about the people described.  But each one of these stories did really happen and illustrates a somewhat deeper lesson when it comes to recruiting.  Read carefully and avoid these mistakes when looking for your next role!

Your Interview Just Started

This happened many years ago when I was tasked as a greeter for on-campus recruiting.  My job was simple: my company was bringing in a high volume of candidates to interview, and I would stand outside the interview rooms and shake hands, answer basic questions, tell people where to get coffee or use the bathroom, and generally keep the machine running smoothly.  I actually found this role very satisfying, because most people are very friendly and complimentary when they're encountering someone who works for the company with which they are interviewing.

Unfortunately, not all people are this way.  Despite so much time passing, I still remember one candidate that came in a few minutes early for his interview.  He seemed frazzled and nervous and he had a stack of paper with him.  I introduced myself and told him that they were still finishing up with the previous interview.  I then asked if he needed anything.  I don't remember his exact response, but it was something to the effect of:

"No, I don't need anything.  Actually, if you could just leave me alone for a minute so I can prepare for my interview, that’d be great."

Bad news: your interview just started and you've already messed up.

Now this candidate was young and I'm sure had no idea how the decision process for offers would go.  In reality, everyone (including interviewers and greeters) came together in a room at the end and all shared notes.  When I was asked my opinion on this candidate, I had to relay that story.  Now, I don't believe that it was the deciding factor in his candidacy, but it certainly didn't help his case.  This raises a rule that I've always tried to adhere to: the second you finish dressing for the interview, you are in the middle of the interview.  Every interaction needs to be professional and friendly, because you never know what will factor into the company's decision on whether to hire you.

The Long Pause

Of all the faux pas that I've seen during interviews, I will say that this one was fairly mild.  That said, since it wasn't as obvious as some of the others, it bears repeating because a reasonable person could be convinced that this wasn't a mistake.

I was part of a group conducting an interview one time and the candidate was asked a question.  Now, I don't remember the exact question, but I do know that it wasn't completely out of left field.  Maybe something that the candidate hadn't prepared for specifically, but reasonable enough to expect that it will be asked.  The candidate's response was to ask "May I have a few moments to gather my thoughts?"  Reasonable enough, we all thought.  So we sat there in silence.

What I thought would be five seconds must have stretched into 45 or even a full minute.  I can't describe how uncomfortable it felt to sit in a room with five people, everyone looking at the table or aimlessly at the wall, in complete and utter silence for that long.

Then, he started to speak.  I don't remember his exact response either, but I feel like it was probably pretty good (one would hope after having that much time to get mentally prepared).  Unfortunately, all these years later, I don't remember the question or answer, but I'll never forget the awkward feeling during that long pause.

The fact is that you should always thoroughly prepare for an interview, but you need to be able to improvise as well.  In the workplace, you won't always be completely prepared for every question you get.  Every job involves a certain amount of sales skills and if you can't think on your feet, your career will suffer for it.  Most people conducting interviews will realize this and be unimpressed if you are unable to come up with an impromptu answer.  Sometimes spending the requisite amount of time coming up with the absolutely perfect answer to every question can be fatal.

The Great Leader

I can't impress upon you how serious I am: this example is not a joke and it actually happened.

Someone I have worked with at one point once told me a story about an on-campus interview that he or she had during school.  Near the end of the interview, the recruiter asked this person for an example of a great leader.  Honestly, this should be a slam dunk: there are hundreds of great leaders out there, and the question is asking your opinions, so there really is no wrong answer.  An obvious answer would have been Warren Buffett, which nobody would question.  Steve Jobs, John Mackey, Larry Ellison, Jack Welch.  All of these would have been defensible answers.  You could even go outside business and mention Gregg Popovich, Mike Krzyzewski, or Bill Belichick.  It's a little riskier due to individual sensitivities, but mentioning a well-known politician would probably be acceptable.

No.  This person's response when asked for a great leader?  Adolph Hitler.

To hear the story, this person tried to hedge by saying that Hitler was obviously a horrible person, but that the way he unified Germany showed that he had the confidence and rhetorical skills that are essential for leadership.  I suppose you could consider that a fair point, but I can almost guarantee that the interviewer stopped listening as soon as the words "Adolph Hitler" were mentioned and started mentally planning on how best to relay this story to friends later.  Needless to say, an offer was not extended.

Now this person has gone on to have a very enviable career.  So the good news: a mistake like this can be overcome.  But it proves what should be a very obvious point: make sure any answer you give in an interview passes a quick sanity check.  Not every answer needs to be perfect, but you need to avoid huge, memorable mistakes.

My Biases on Display

To show that I am not above some of these blunders, I will include an example of a mistake that I personally made during a recruiting process a while ago.

I was conducting interviews for a variety of roles and had seen candidates all day.  Honestly, it's very difficult to remember details after such a whirlwind of a day, so I relied on some key notes that I had made.  I had a read a book that said to not ignore your biases and personal experiences in recruiting, the idea being that if you have something in common with the candidate that you know has helped at the company, don’t discount that under the guise of trying to be as impartial as possible.  Personally, I had an extremely difficult major in undergrad (electrical engineering) that required a herculean effort on my part to graduate with a fairly average overall GPA.  I wear it as a bit of a badge of honor these days, and I am predisposed to be more impressed by others who have undertaken majors that were outside of their comfort zone.

When all of the interviewers convened to talk about the candidates, I clearly had my favorites.  There was a lot of widespread agreement on many of the candidates, while others inspired vigorous debate.  One candidate in particular seemed to have almost unanimous agreement from the group as one of the best.  This candidate had a 3.9 GPA and graduated with the highest honors with a degree in psychology.  Nearly everyone in the room was in awe of the GPA and seemed ready to move on to discussing the next candidate.  Then, I decided to open my mouth:

"Well, sure she has a high GPA, but it was in a psychology major.  I would be more impressed if she had actually challenged herself."

The room went silent.

What I had forgotten is that while I am biased towards students that have studied subjects that are traditionally seen as more difficult, not everyone else has that bias.  In fact, anyone who has read Malcolm Gladwell knows that there is evidence that “the best students from mediocre schools [are] almost always a better bet than good students from the very best schools.”¹  In other words, students with proven success might even be better hires than those who pushed outside their comfort zone and weren’t as successful.  Not to mention, I found out later that there was a psychology major or two in the room.

In the end, this candidate got an offer and I had my foot stuck in my mouth.  I didn't impress any of the other leaders in the room with my comment and I ruined what could have been a great networking opportunity for myself.

I think the best lesson from this is not to ignore all of your personal experiences during the recruiting process, but to use those to make decisions in a way that is respectful of your peers and with an understanding that group consensus often should outweigh your individual predilections.

So that’s it.  What interesting stories do you have from recruiting and what have you learned from them?

1 - Gladwell, Malcolm. David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (p. 87). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

A Federal Reserve Primer for Mark Wahlberg

“And the Federal Reserve is a...prison?” - Detective Terry Hoitz, The Other Guys

If you haven’t seen it already, go rent The Other Guys.  You will not be disappointed.  It has one scene in which Mark Wahlberg’s character, Detective Terry Hoitz, and Will Ferrell’s character, Detective Allen Gamble, listen to an SEC employee attempting to explain the function of the Federal Reserve.  Mark Wahlberg refuses to be educated and continues to believe that the Federal Reserve is a jail where he can lock up criminals.  Will Ferrell’s character remarks in frustration, “He still doesn’t understand the concept.”

Well, I really hope Mark Wahlberg is reading this post (I can only assume he spends his downtime perusing my blog).  Central Banking, of which the Federal Reserve is just one example, is one of the most commonly misunderstood concepts in the world.  I had no idea what the Federal Reserve was until I was probably 24; even then, it took me 8 years and an MBA to gain a really deep understanding.  I’ve spent a lot of time studying the Federal Reserve (or “The Fed” in common parlance).  In fact, I took a vacation day in 2013 to tour the Federal Reserve building in Atlanta, something my wife views as nerdier than driving a DeLorean to a Star Trek convention dressed as Gandalf.

Though the average person might not grasp all of the functions of the Fed, I think most people have a vague understanding that the Fed sets interest rates.  But what does this really mean?  Is the Fed actually telling banks what rates they can charge on loans?  I don’t want to focus on the goals or historical results of the Fed at this time; the subject is far too complicated for one short post and I don’t feel fully-qualified to write it.  What I want to do is to attempt to describe what interest rates really are and how the actions of the Fed affect these rates.  I hope that this will done at a level that will bore an economics major, be fairly insightful to an MBA, and be a thunderbolt of information to someone without a business education (Mark Wahlberg, I’m sorry, but I’m assuming you’re in the last category).  Alright, here we go!

I think that most people realize that when you deposit money in the bank, the bank doesn’t actually take all of your money and store it in a vault.  Some of it is placed in a vault and the rest is loaned out to other individuals or institutions in need of capital.  The idea is that, if you want your money at some point, you will be just as happy if the bank pays you back with someone else’s money as your own.  The concept is referred to as fractional reserve banking and it is the foundation of our financial system.

But wait.  What if everyone wants their money at the same time?  The bank can’t pay everyone with someone else’s money.  This causes a run on the banks, where everyone tries to rush to get their money out before it’s all gone.  In order to ensure this doesn’t happen, the Fed has instituted a reserve requirement of 10%.  This means that the bank can only loan out 90 cents for every dollar that you deposit, and it is supposed to instill stability in the system.

So what happens at the end of the day when a bank only has 9% or 8% of its total deposits in reserve?  In order to not run afoul of the law, the bank does what anyone else does when they need money: get a loan!  And who would want to make an overnight loan to a bank?  Usually, it’s another bank that has reserves in excess of the reserve requirement.  Since the extra money will not earn anything sitting in the vault, banks are happy to make an overnight loan to other banks in need.  The rate at which banks will loan each other money is referred to as the Federal Funds rate, despite the money not coming from federal funds.  Though the Federal Funds rate is referred to as if it is one discrete number, it is actually a target range of interest rates that banks charge each other.

How does the Fed come into play?  Banks also have the option of borrowing from the Fed at a set rate, referred to as the discount rate.  The discount rate is higher than the Federal Funds rate, causing banks to prefer to borrow from other banks.  But due to the simplicity of the transaction, banks still chose to borrow from the Fed sometimes.  While the Fed does not directly dictate the rate that the banks can borrow from each other, the simple fact is that the discount rate sets the ceiling for the Federal Funds rate.  If a bank is offering a rate on overnight loans at or higher than the discount rate, banks would simply prefer to borrow from the Fed at the discount rate.  After all, the Fed has unlimited funds that it is always willing to loan at a predetermined rate, making the search for funds very simple.

But who cares about the rate on overnight loans between banks?  Well, if a bank can borrow money very cheaply to make up a shortfall with regards to the reserve requirement, that bank is much more likely to aggressively lend out money to individuals and corporations during the day.  Conversely, if it is expensive to borrow to make up a shortfall, banks are going to be very careful about lending during the day to make sure their reserves are over 10%.  This applies significant pressure on the rates for loans that the bank offers; if the Federal Funds rate goes down, all else being equal, the interest rate on loans from banks will also go down.

These actions have a tremendous effect on the interest rates on car loans and mortgages.  But looking at recent history, the Fed did not raise its target for the Federal Funds rate from essentially zero from 2008 until 2015.  Does this mean that loans were interest-free during that time?

If only we were so lucky!  Though the discount rate puts significant pressure on the interest rates for personal loans, it is not the only factor.  In fact, when a bank is making a loan, it is essentially making an investment in debt.  As such, your debt needs to be competitive with other debt instruments available on the free market.  And who is the most ubiquitous debtor in the world?  The U.S. Government, of course!

Your mortgage is actually competing on the open market most closely with U.S. Treasury bonds that mature in 10 years.  As the yield on these bonds rises and falls, so will the rate that you are offered for a mortgage.  Certainly, the rates on Treasuries is affected by the Fed (particularly during the Treasury-purchase program known as Quantitative Easing that was just recently ended), but many other factors come into play as well.  An increase in demand for bonds, for instance from a tanking stock market, would increase the prices of these bonds, causing the yields to go down.  As these rates rise and fall, so will the rate on personal loans.

So why is the Fed involved in loaning money to banks at all?  What are its aims and how successful has it been in the past at achieving its goals?  I could discuss this or a thousand other relevant issues, but digging deeper into the Fed can often result in more confusion.  Since Mark Wahlberg is a busy man, I want to respect his time and keep this post short and readable.

The Fed is complicated and very frequently misunderstood, but its influence on the business cycle and global economy cannot be understated.  Though it may require an economics PhD to fully understand it, knowing its functions at a basic level is relevant to every person working in business today...even Hollywood actors.

Lessons in Building Consensus from the New Zealand Flag Debacle

Before having kids, my wife and I decided that we couldn't possibly settle down to a life of changing diapers without having been to Australia.  One last amazing trip and then we would become real grown-ups.  Of course, after watching an intriguing episode of The Bachelor in which women threw themselves at the eponymous man on a picturesque Kiwi farm, we swapped Australia for New Zealand.  That spring, we spent almost two weeks in New Zealand drinking some of the best Sauvignon Blanc in the world, seeing the Hobbiton set from Lord of the Rings, attending cultural demonstrations by the local Māori, and generally having a great time.  Oh, and about twelve months after we flew home, she gave birth to a wonderful baby boy and we couldn't be happier.

All that is to say I have a tiny bit of personal experience with New Zealand (also I have no idea how to start blog posts in an engaging way).  During my time there, I saw the above fern logo in every single store in the entire country.  It was on hats, shirts, underwear, pins, and posters.  It was even the livery on one of the Air New Zealand planes that we took.  Turns out that it is the logo of the All Blacks, which is the national rugby team of New Zealand.  I was shocked when I found out that it wasn't the official country flag, given the ubiquity.

It turns out that I'm not the only one thinking the actual New Zealand flag needs changing, as the country is currently going through the process of selecting a new official flag.  I think this is generally a good idea; the current flag doesn't seem to represent the New Zealand as much as it represents the United Kingdom.  It is also virtually indistinguishable from the Australian flag, and anyone who has seen Flight of the Conchords knows that Kiwis are a little touchy about being confused with Aussies.  Unfortunately, New Zealand has gone about changing the flag in the worst way possible.  Fortunately, there are a lot of lessons to be learned that are applicable in any situation where consensus is required.

The first step of the process of changing the flag was issuing an open call for designs.  Over 10,000 entries were submitted.  Some were good, and others had kiwi birds with lasers coming out of their eyes.  From this, a government-appointed panel of 12 selected the "long list" of 40 flags that were to be considered.  Already, many people were upset that their favorite design (or the design they submitted) was not in consideration.  However, many presumably were able to find an agreeable design among the 40 selected, and became attached to one of the long list flags.  Three weeks later, without any official consultation with the public, the panel reduced the list of 40 down to 4.  Already there are Kiwis petitioning to add their favorite designs back to the list of 4.  Essentially, the government has assured that everyone has now been spurned at least once, and many have been twice.  This brings us to the first lesson: engagement decreases each time stakeholders feel their opinions are not taken into consideration, so minimize the number of times that this occurs.  All this does is create animosity and a feeling of betrayal.  These individuals then remove themselves from the process completely or, even worse, protest.  The New Zealand flag process feels like it was designed to give the impression of popular vote without the messiness of actually needing to abide by popular opinion.  By conducting the search under the guise of popular opinion, but reducing the choices to the ones the government deems acceptable, all they have done is get the hopes up of everyone in the country multiple times, only to have them dashed.

Unsurprisingly, a very high percentage of the proposed flags featured the silver fern design.  However, the official silver fern logo is a registered trademark of the NZ Rugby Union.  All those shirts and hats that I saw containing the design?  All licensed (for a fee) from this group.  If this design was selected as the national flag, the NZ Rugby Union would have to sign over all rights to the design, without charge, to the government of New Zealand.  Needless to say, the union is not eager to do this.  As an intellectual property lawyer from New Zealand commented: "It's almost like handing over the crown jewels, so to speak, of their business to someone for no commercial gain."  So any design with the silver fern had to be removed from contention.  The government should have known: never present a group with a popular option unless you know it is viable.  The fact that nobody in the government checked about the feasibility of this logo prior to the initial design submission is honestly shocking.  Everyone in the entire country knew this would be the design to beat.  Giving the citizens false hope that the logo could be the selected design ensured a lack of commitment to the process.

Though the official fern from the All Blacks has been disqualified, other fern logos are still allowed.  In fact, all four of the final designs feature a fern in some way.  Two of these designs are literally identical except for the coloring, and both look somewhat like they were designed by committee by incorporating the four stars from the current flag.  The fourth flag is a Māori design, which technically represents a fern as well.  Now there is no doubt in my mind that the committee wanted to make sure that one Māori design made the final four, as about 15% of the population identifies as Māori and the group tends to be very protective of their culture and traditions.  However, with the incredible variety of original submissions, how did the final four all end up with variations of a fern?  New Zealand officials should have known that if you're presenting a group with a choice between multiple options, make sure there is a real choice.  Allowing the country to choose between option 1 or option 1a doesn't truly provide much of a selection for the citizens, especially when it isn't representative of the breadth of options that truly existed.  The way the final four has played out gives the appearance that the government wanted to ensure that there would be a fern on the flag and wasn't going to take any chances at letting the public screw that up.

Now that the final four designs have been selected, the citizens (through postal referendum) will vote for their favorite of those four.  The winning design will then go against the current flag in a second referendum in March 2016, with the winner of that becoming (or remaining) the official flag of New Zealand.

In the end, I think this process will end right where it started: with New Zealand's flag having a small Union Jack next to some stars.  The government has done such a poor job of building consensus that I think the majority of Kiwis will vote to retain the current flag either out of spite or in the hope that there will be another chance to change the flag soon.  It is a shame, because the current flag of New Zealand truly should be changed, and New Zealand's half-hearted reliance on popular democracy has hindered progress.  If the government had merely picked a design without any input from the citizens, at least those citizens would not have felt as deceived as they currently do.  By providing multiple instances for the citizens to provide input, then disregarding that input, the government has created a public relations nightmare that has overshadowed the entire process.

Think about these lessons next time you try to build consensus in a group.  If you ask for input, make sure you genuinely take that input into consideration.  Don't let the group get carried away with options that have no chance of being implemented.  And give the group real choice, or none at all.  If there truly is only one possible right decision, realize that you may be better off just making the decision yourself.  In the long run, your co-workers may be happier and more engaged if you do.

How All Global Business Is Driven by One Meeting at a New Hampshire Ski Resort

If I told you that every decision your business makes is affected by agreements made between an American Treasury official who was probably a Soviet spy and a homosexual British celebrity in a luxurious ski hotel in New Hampshire during WWII, would you believe me?

I recently finished reading The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil.  This was a very detailed history of the conference between delegates from 44 nations in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire near the end of WWII to determine the financial order of the post-war world.  The first thing I learned from this book is that dense, wonky, academic books are very difficult for me to read.  I suppose there's a reason I got an MBA and not a PhD.  But, as someone not familiar with the entire history of global finance, some of the implications of the conference were fascinating.

As WWII was drawing to a close, it became obvious that the financial order of the post-war world would need to be decided in advance of the final shot fired.  The British, probably aware of their waning power in the world, were very reluctant to cede the position of leader to the Americans.  However, the British were also up to their ears in war debt from fighting Germany--a debt that was not fully repaid until 2006!  Enter British celebrity economist John Maynard Keynes.  If you've heard of one economist (and it's not Milton Friedman), you've probably heard of Keynes.  He's so well-known that his theory of economics, appropriately referred to as Keynesian economics, persists to this day.

Facing off with Keynes was American Harry Dexter White.  While it is clear that the Americans were sometimes overly charmed with Keynes, White was determined to push an American agenda at the conference.  First and foremost, this meant establishing the US Dollar as the world's reserve currency in the post-war world.  The other countries represented at the conference would peg their currencies to the US Dollar, essentially adopting US monetary policy as their own.

So what is a reserve currency and why is it important?  With so much business occurring between two nations with different currencies, it is important to have one standard for exchange.  Theoretically, this is the most commonly-accepted, credible, and sound currency available.  By maintaining a store of this currency, transactions can occur without constant need for foreign exchange.  As you can imagine, there are tremendous network benefits: in other words, there is a great incentive for an entity's reserve currency to be whichever reserve currency is most popular for other entities.  This might even outweigh concerns about the currency's viability.  Think Facebook: as much as you may hate it, you won't delete your account as long as everyone else is on it.

There are major advantages to the country that has its currency as the predominant reserve currency.  For one, there will always be demand for that currency, contributing to its strength (though this can also hurt exports).  This also decreases costs for businesses in that country, as they will deal exclusively in that currency, and enables those businesses to borrow at lower rates.  This can provide downward pressure on prices of goods from that country.  The reserve currency is also the currency in which major commodities are priced, such as oil and gold, so the strength of the currency can have a major affect on commodity prices.  Finally, and somewhat ominously, the country issuing this currency has great power over other countries, and is thus in a position of additional military power.  After all, it is Mayer Amschel Rothschild who is quoted as saying "Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws."

Knowing full well this meant that the country with the world's reserve currency would be the preeminent super power in the post-war world, White somewhat deviously maneuvered to make sure that this currency was the US Dollar, which he claimed was as good as gold.  As Steil explains in the book, this was done in a way that it was part of the agreement without Keynes becoming aware until after the conference had ended.  The US government then promised to allow any country to redeem their dollars for the value in gold at any point.  Eventually, this system became unsustainable as the US could not maintain required gold reserves and Nixon severed the tie between the US dollar and gold in 1971.  As Steil points out, somewhat cheekily, "Dollars were not synonymous with gold, as White had contended; only gold was gold."

There were numerous other agreements made at the Bretton Woods conference, such as establishment of the International Monetary Fund.  But if the core agreement of a US Dollar global reserve currency, redeemable in gold, is no longer valid today, why is the conference still important?

Just because the dollar lacked gold convertibility did not mean it lost its designation as the most widely used "safe" currency.  According to Wikipedia (I'm not writing this for a class, so Wikipedia is a legitimate source), to this day around 63% of the world's reserves are held in dollars.  Looking at the history of reserves, it is clear that increased confidence in the Euro has been one major detractor to the usage of US Dollars.  What does this mean if the Greeks exit the Eurozone and the Euro eventually collapses?  Will the increased demand for dollars increase imports to the United States?  Even if the Euro remains a legitimate reserve currency, where would American business be today without the borrowing advantage that it is continually afforded?  What would have happened in the Cold War if another currency had been selected as the world's reserve, such as the Soviet ruble?  What will happen if the Chinese Yuan is elevated to be the dominant global reserve currency?

The book quoted a government report around the time of the conference: "There is virtually no public opinion about the Bretton Woods conference...there is no interest because there is no comprehension of the issues involved and the plans proposed, or their importance."  Even Keynes and White didn't have much time to care about the results of the conference; Keynes suffered health problems almost immediately after the conference that would eventually kill him while White was accused by Joseph McCarthy (with fairly convincing evidence, actually) of being a Soviet spy.  Both were dead from heart attacks within three years of the war ending.  Personally, I have sympathy for an apathetic public, as I can't say that I understood the implications of every action at the conference even after spending so much time learning about it.  But the results of Bretton Woods undoubtedly have had a tremendous affect on the landscape of business and finance, even 70 years later.