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Different paths can lead you to new careers, and there are ways to explore these paths with little to no risk.  You can build different skills on top of the strengths you already have. There are brainstorming exercises to imagine new possibilities. You can research different fields of work, talk to friends, and attend company presentations. But what if you're still puzzled? You may not know what works until you've tried it. INSEAD professor Herminia Ibarra has written that "it's nearly impossible to think out how to reinvent ourselves." Instead, you may need to experiment directly in a new field. Nina (name has been changed) is a great example. As a new corporate officer, she was unhappy with her political office environment. She also feared she'd missed her true purpose: being an artist. Nina had considered art when finishing college, but she needed a job and transitioned to corporate life. But art remained on her mind — and it was som...

Single-question customer metrics have become very popular. Companies all have their favorites. Some go for the traditional Customer Satisfaction measure, others the now famous Net Promoter Score. The most recent addition to this panoply is the increasingly popular Customer Effort Score , which tracks the amount of time and effort that customers have to put into solving after-sales problems. Each claims to be the one metric that managers need to measure, monitor, and act on, because it promises a better correlation with business performance than any other existing measure. So which of these is actually the best? A lot depends on what you measure performance with. In making the case for their Customer Effort Score, Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman, and Nicholas Toman correlated the three measures with levels of customer repurchase and overall levels of spending. The results are shown on the graphic in figure (1) below. But the picture is rather different if you correlate t...

Speed is killing our decisions. The crush of technology forces us to snap react. We blink, when we should think. E-mail, social media, and 24-hour news are relentless. Our time cycle gets faster every day. Yet as our decision-making accelerates, long-term strategy becomes even more crucial. Those of us who find time to step back and think about the big picture, even for a few minutes, have a major advantage. If every one else moves too quickly, we can win by going slow. No one understood the challenge of time-pressured decision-making better than military strategist John Boyd , arguably the greatest fighter pilot in American history. Boyd developed a decision-making framework that our best leaders use today, in military and in business. It is known by the acronym OODA, for observe, orient, decide, and act. As a pilot, Boyd advocated lightweight, maneuverable aircraft. He helped design the F-16 Fighting Falcon, which could be used like a switchblade in a knife fight. A...