When being the best isn’t always possible

How comparatives dismantle business hype in the contemporary 21st-century marketplace

If you’re not familiar with the hot topic issue of using H-1B visas to fill positions employers can’t source locally, you should be if you’re part of the new economy of technology and design. A defining threshold of the inseparability between the two maybe the adoption of three-dimensional printing especially if you’re upper-middle-class, well-educated, and scientifically literate. Because of the growing entanglement between thinking and facilitating, the hybrid job — the ‘Prius candidate’—is, or at least should be, on the rise according to talent expert Jacque Villet.

What does ‘best’ really mean?

We should, as so called ‘scientifically minded’ individuals, consider how we define ourselves, our companies and our jobs in relation to one another honestly. As a former business analyst, my job was to find the meaning of data through comparison— for any one point on a line, there must be another to create that line. As a job seeker in the new economy with an analyst mindset, the way many companies present themselves is suspect. They all seem to be points without lines.

“We’re a growing and evolving agency in search of the brightest and most passionate individuals to join our ranks,” says one recent ad. “… office is home to more than 500 of the world’s best visual and interactive designers, creatives, technologists, researchers, strategists and digital program managers,” claims another. “This cross-functional collaboration between designers, developers and product managers brings out the best features, design and product,” another adds to their long list of claims.

What none of these companies has addressed directly is why they need new employees and, specifically, what do they need new employees for— primarily the basis of any goal setting theory is “who” and “why.” Locke and Lanthem’s “New Directions in Goal-Setting Theory” in Current Directions in Psychological Science theorizes goals should be conceivable, believable and achievable.

Even more troubling in the labyrinth of perfectionist compulsion is when companies, themselves, are seeking people who don’t actually exist; “at least ten years of experience developing mobile platforms,” “five to ten years of experience in social media,” “five to seven years experience working with social media analytics,” “three to five years developing flat UIs,” and “seven to nine years of experience working with developing content for social networks like Facebook and Twitter.” The requirement for these jobs is fundamentally not possible; this is unbelievable and unachievable goal setting. There were no ‘digital content agencies’ five years ago, no third-party mobile applications ten years ago nor did Twitter exist nine years ago.

Part of realistic goal creation is learning from failure and the less-than-best companies may provide the best opportunities if they’re honest. Amy Edmondson writing on strategy from failure for the Harvard Business Review:

First, failure is not always bad. In organizational life it is sometimes bad, sometimes inevitable, and sometimes even good. Second, learning from organizational failures is anything but straightforward. The attitudes and activities required to effectively detect and analyze failures are in short supply in most companies, and the need for context-specific learning strategies is underappreciated. Organizations need new and better ways to go beyond lessons that are superficial—procedures weren’t followed— or self-serving — the market just wasn’t ready for our great new product.

Being the best is neither conceivable or believable when honesty is absent from the discussion.

Let’s look at some failure of the new economy. As mentioned previously in User experience and user interface is simply ancient, sixty percent of applications in Apple’s App Store are grossly underperforming. And it’s not just the mobile applications and social media market taking hits either; Nokia or Blackberry have never really recovered from the failure to adapt. Large behemoths like Google have tripped up, too. The Young Entrepreneur Council writing in Forbes points out, “Google defunct Wave product is a prime example of bloat sinking the ship. They built a groundbreaking product but because it was so heavy with features, making changes became a slow and agonizing process. As a result, it was plagued with speed issues and bugs. Even a software giant like Google was unable to recover. Had Wave launched as a smaller, leaner offering, I believe the results would have been very different.” And to top it off, Ad Age’s Michael Sebastian writes that fraudulent internet traffic is costing advertisers close to $180 million annually and points out that according to Timur Yarnall, the CEO and other co-founder of MdotLabs, upwards of 50 percent of all internet traffic might be nonhuman in origin.

“Comparison is the death of joy.” ―Mark Twain

While Twitter is populated with an army of fake followers so ingrained in the service someone had to invent a tool to validate it, some internet traffic is the result of clicking farming. A practice, the Guardian writes, where low-wage workers overseas are paid to give the illusion of internet popularity with authentic human-based traffic.

With technology firms and digital agencies reporting such great successes, is the work that they are doing actually great? Can this question even be answered when so much of the data we use might be entirely phony? Does this mean that all of the consideration and research we put into designing might be a moot point? Design ROI has a better answer than I do.

Statistically, only a small fraction of firms, employees, clients, advertisers and projects are actually the best.

Accepting being neither best nor worst maybe a sound and cost-effective strategy. If we recall the ridiculously errant job qualifications, consider the average salary of a recruiter in New York City. A bad hire whose annual salary is $50,000, according to the Department of Labor, can cost a company $15,000 over a year. However, the recruitment cost of a professional employee on average is roughly $5,500. For firms looking for the best employees — especially when that goal is unrealistic—they stand to lose substantially more.

Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi in the Harvard Business Review report on the follies of over-prioritizing, “there are an infinite number of ways that a company can try to grow, and simply brainstorming them will immediately lead to a long list of initiatives. That will soon become an endless litany of priorities, and a large number of conflicting claims on your attention.” Other results from Booz & Company’s Coherence Profiler study featured in the story:

• Most executives, sixty-four percent, report they have too many conflicting priorities.
• The majority of executives, fifty-six percent, say that allocating resources in a way that really supports the strategy is a significant challenge, especially as companies chase a wide set of growth initiatives.
• Eighty-one perent admit that their growth initiatives lead to waste, at least some of the time.
• Nearly half forty-seven percent say their company’s way of creating value is not well understood by employees or customers.

The takeaway? Avoid being the best. The logistics of best aren’t really worth it especially if you don’t a mind little failure, a better bottom line and more engaged employees.