By Dr. Michal Tsur, a serial tech entrepreneur, and 

We live in a world where young, ambitious women will now contend with a new, and sadly pressured life question – are you “leaning in”?

While Sheryl Sandberg, the second in command at Facebook and author of recent bestseller Lean In, and her ambitious following of female professionals have a nuanced understanding of the concept, in common speak, the words “lean in” convey something too simple, intense, and aggressive.

“We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,” writes Sandberg in the book.

Sandberg, who is trying to launch a social movement to empower women, is admirable and certainly has wisdom to offer. However, the intensity and pressure conjured by her phrase is not the right message we should be sending to female youth. In fact, remember old high school basketball coaches barking at us to lean in? Sandberg’s message is reminiscent. “Lean in ladies! Be aggressive. Run faster. The quarter is almost over. No taking a rest now!”

The words themselves were designed to motivate us to work harder and faster; to win.

Yet, unlike basketball games, careers are not broken into quarters. They are more of an evolving marathon filled with twists and turns. The opposite of a sprint. And while muscling forward may help one win a basketball game, it’s not clear that more energy, effort, and aggressiveness is what will get women into the boardroom.

What we’ve realized in debating the message of “lean in” while looking at the careers of people like Sandberg and Mayer, is that something big is lost in the colloquial phrase that Sandberg is championing. We must redefine the phrase to convey a vision that is as big in spirit and excitement as it is in raw ambition.

As Sandberg herself states, success depends on a fair bit of luck. Both Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Sandberg had the good fortune to jump on the Google train in the early days. And Sandberg’s COO role at Facebook has catapulted her into tech godliness that was largely unpredictable.

Yes, smart negotiation, ambition, and sponsors were important. But, what distinguishes Sandberg, and what we’ve learned from our own careers is that success is also about creating, recognizing, and seizing opportunities.  It’s about putting oneself in a position that maximizes luck.

Let’s look at Sandberg. She had the confidence to jump between jobs with the government, the World Bank, and tech companies, following a varied and non-linear path. Mayer grabbed the CEO opportunity at Yahoo despite being pregnant, and knowing that she’d be following a long series of executive failures.

In our own careers, it’s been the opportunities that came from new connections made in school or at a conference, or from invitations to write, speak, or create, that pushed us forward.

And at Kaltura, we look at examples like Becky, one of our key project managers, who, after being told that she didn’t have enough technical experience or background, decided to take a leap, jump into a technical job and learn engineering basics on the side in order to make a career transition.

Or Charly, who, with no degree or any technical background whatsoever, led customer support at one of our competitors and later joined Kaltura as a key account manager.  Yes, these women fought hard to get ahead, but what really sets them apart is that they identified a passion, took risks, and seized new opportunities.

What we see in these examples are ambitious women that “leaned in” to advance their careers and families simultaneously. The message of “lean in” should not be to push harder, as Sandberg argues, “put your foot on the gas pedal and keep it there.”

The key, rather, is to be mindful, intentional and clear-eyed about possibilities that emerge in life and work. It is about not being guided by fear, but rather knowing your passions, being bold, and taking risks. And for women who are nearer to the top, leaning in is about being conscious of setting precedent and shaping institutions in ways that will also create paths for younger women.

So, to women (or men) who feel compelled and inspired by Sandberg but also scared about the implied added pressure to constantly push higher and farther – take a breath.  There is a way to lean in and achieve success with levity and spirit. Lean in to life. Opportunities will emerge.

The key is to be confident and aware enough to see them.

Dr. Michal Tsur is a serial tech entrepreneur, having co-founded online security firm Cyota and open-source video platform Kaltura, where she is currently president. Leah Belsky is a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, where she contributes on online collaboration and technology policy, and is currently SVP Operations at Kaltura.

photo credit: Victor1558 via photopin cc

A stealth startup called Tomfoolery closed a $1.7 million seed round to make work “awesome.” It does this by developing user-friendly mobile enterprise applications that are as easy and enjoyable to use as many consumer-facing applications.

“In your personal life, social mobile applications are beautiful, their functionality is meaningful, and they let you to make real, human connections,” said CEO Kakul Srivastava in a statement.  “At work, today’s enterprise software makes us feel about as close to our coworkers as strapping spreadsheets to carrier pigeons.”

Startup land is all about fostering company culture, and multiple studies have found that a positive atmosphere in the workplace encourages productivity. Furthermore, the growth of Bring-Your-Own-Device and the distributed workforce has created a growing need for mobile applications that let employees work on the go. Tomfoolery designs its application with these principles in mind.

The founders have impressive backgrounds in management and consumer technology. CEO Kakul Srivastava is a former VP at Yahoo and worked as the General Manager at Flickr. Her cofounder, Sol Lipman, is a former VP of mobile at AOL and previously founded startups Rally Up, 12seconds.tv, and Sticky Inc. With Tomfoolery, they combined forces and applied their expertise to the enterprise world.

“Anyone with a smartphone and a job should care about the quality of apps they use in the workplace,” said Srivastava in a Q&A. “Tomfoolery is focused on enabling the spirit of fun and play that’s the hallmark of great team culture. Work doesn’t have to feel tough, or hard, or serious. In the best teams, work is awesome, it’s something fun and creative — and you can’t wait to get started when you wake up in the morning.”

There are many competitors in the social enterprise space, most notably Asana, Endesk, Jive, Yammer, Workday, Podio, and Chatter. Tomfoolery is distinguished by its mobile-first focus.

Investors include big names like Ash Patel of Morado Venture Partners, Sam Pullara from Sutter Hill Ventures, Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang through AME Cloud Ventures, Andresseen Horowitz, YouSendIt CEO Brad Garlinghouse, and Tech Stars NY cofounder David Tisch.

Tomfoolery is still in stealth mode. The team of six is based in San Francisco.

Robots are on their way into your workplace, but you may not be there to complain about it.

“Many of us will live to see the day where we have physical, non-human colleagues,” says Matt Beane, a researcher at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Beane’s research addresses what he calls “The Avatar Economy”, where remote workers operate robots. Such robots are already used for tasks which require highly skilled labour and physical presence but where it’s either too dangerous or extremely expensive to use human beings. Aerial and ground-based robots were used in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, for example, to help assess system and structural integrity and evaluate demolition plans. 

According to Beane, the next wave of robotic workers will be in retail, security and remote supervision of manufacturing operations. Telepresence robots like those made by DoubleRobotics (and their human operators) will help you to find the right TV in a retail store or allow an operations supervisor in Chicago to do quality control on an assembly line in Shanghai. 

But robots are just one small slice of our automated future. Google’s driverless car depends on the company’s massive sensing, mapping and data sorting network. Technologies like Big Data, the Internet of Things, Speech Recognition and Machine Learning will make robots smarter but that’s the least of their applications. “Robots will not be a discrete element of the change in the economy, but rather the physically extensible part of this ever-expanding bubble of underlying technology.”

“The next frontier for automation is non-routine work,” explains Beane. “Some of the biggest changes in work could be at the high end. These jobs can be automated without a physical avatar.” So while taxi drivers and farm workers can be replaced by robots operated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) or a human operator, it’s still expensive to manufacture that hardware. “Most automation will be intangible. It’s progressing very rapidly and is much less expensive than physical production. Once you have got good AI, it’s replicable at almost zero cost.” That, gentle reader, means you. Replacing lawyers or software developers or technology journalists with AI could result in the ultimate scalable business. 

These developments raise some rather uncomfortable questions for non-extensible human beings. “Who am I if this robot can do my job?” says Beane. He points to surgeons as an example of highly skilled workers who already work with robots and will face this dilemma. “This is one of the most narcissistic, ego-driven working cultures you can imagine and many of us owe our lives to that culture. Being decisive in the face of imminent death or disability takes an almost inhuman amount of confidence and skill,” he elaborates.

A surgeon’s whole identity is based on incredibly high status, skill and autonomy relative to other professions. “Yet when they use a Da Vinci surgical robot, if they stray outside the surgical field, the robot can be programmed to resist. They get force feedback on the manipulators. Even the best surgeon in the world can be told by the robot, multiple times during an operation ‘You shouldn’t be doing that.’”

So is all automation bad for humans? Beane has studied hospitals using Aethon’s Tug robots, which move supplies around the building. No jobs were lost. In hospital pharmacies Tugs were used to deliver drugs. “Pharmacy technicians spend two to four years in schooling and certification but they were spending eighty percent of their time ferrying drugs around. Now the technicians are doing the things they were trained to do and have much higher job satisfaction.”

In general though, if automation significantly reduces the amount of work there is to go around, this could lead to fundamental structural problems in the economy such as higher concentration of wealth, greater inequality, fewer high-paying jobs and lower consumer spending. “We may automate ourselves into a recession,” concludes Beane. 

If you’re Sococo — short for social communication company — you create a virtual world, with virtual offices, desks, meeting rooms, and even buildings. But don’t think Second Life: You won’t find any sexy avatars, flying, pets, or islands. You will, however, see a lot of work getting done.

“We bring distributed workers together to interact in real-time,” Sococo’s chief marketing officer Mark Fisher told me. “Coworkers talk, share, chat … and interact all day long.”

The service is built on a premise of connecting people in a more natural way. Spatial shifting is a key part of that — in a real office, you need to get out of your cube and walk to see someone else — but so is context and situational awareness.

“Today, if I phone you, I have no idea if you’re busy or not. And if I get your voicemail, I have no idea why … if you’re busy, or just don’t want to talk with me,” says Fisher. “Also, in all communication — instant messaging or similar — after it’s over, the session evaporates and there’s nothing to go back to.”

So Sococo not only provides a virtual space for interaction, it tells you if people are occupied and what they’re doing. For instance, when I jumped into the application, I could see Sococo’s CEO was in a conversation with someone in a room. The company calls it “social awareness,” and it helps you make decisions about who to talk to, who’s available, and when to connect.

In addition to the ability to share desktops, chat via voice or keyboard, add remote participants via a virtual phone, share applications for collaborative editing, and show presentations, and more, the company is adding multiple spaces today — separate office “buildings,” if you will. Companies can build multiple spaces to ensure that not only do teams have their own space, but they can connect to other teams, both inside and outside.

“There’s an important break point at 40 to 50 people,” Fisher told me. “We don’t want to just provide a long directory of everyone.”

The upshot of a virtual connected space?

“A person who works exclusively at their house feels connected to their team,” Fisher said. “That increases employee morale.”

Image credits: Sococo

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Looks like more than just consumers are excited about the new Apple iPad unveiled last week. A new survey from ChangeWave Research indicates that more than a fifth of businesses will soon buy a tablet, with the iPad as the most preferred device.

We’ve known for a while that businesses are strongly interested deploying iPads into their work flows. And hours after last week’s event, we analyzed how business demand for the iPad would intensify thanks to new features like 4G wireless networking and better graphics capabilities. But this new survey only further validates that business demand will continue to grow as the iPad gets more powerful.

The survey indicates that 84 percent of companies that plan to buy tablets in the second quarter will pick up an iPad –  leaving all other tablet manufacturers to fight for the remaining 16 percent. Samsung, Amazon, and HP represent the three top non-Apple tablet makers companies expressed interest in, but they are minuscule compared to Apple.

The 84 percent figure is a 7 percent jump from the last time the survey was conducted in Nov. 2011. As you can see on the chart above, companies have mostly been preferential to Apple tablets all along.

Will your company be deploying iPads in the next quarter or perhaps during this year?

iPad guy staring photo: Robert Nelson/Flickr

VentureBeat is holding its second annual MobileSummit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of themobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Answer an email from your employer after your work day is over and you’re eligible for overtime pay — but only if you’re a Brazilian citizen, that is.

The worker-friendly amendment was added to the country’s labor code and approved by Brazil President Dilma Rousseff in December.

“[The legislation] says that company emails to workers are equivalent to orders given directly to the employee,” the Associated Press reported. “Labor attorneys told the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper this makes it possible for workers answering emails after hours to ask for overtime pay.”

The law is the latest measure designed to address the serious implications of an increasingly 24/7 mobile workforce — it’s also bound to make workers the world round more than a little covetous of their Brazilian peers.

German carmaker Volkswagon recently made headlines for its decision to shut off email to some employees 30 minutes after their shifts end.

[Image via Ian Lamont]

Years of studying neuroscience and psychology has led me to believe those are truly insightful mottos that should be instilled not just in high school students but company employees as well.

In 1998 I was sitting in my partner’s home office, brainstorming names for our brand new educational video game company. It was one of the happiest moments of my life, perhaps reflected in the fun name we came up with: Mudpuppy Studios.

That happiness later deteriorated into pessimism and politics that undermined our company’s productivity and strategy. Three years later I was sitting with my partners telling half of our employees “I’m so sorry everyone, but we have to lay you off. We just don’t have the business to keep you on payroll.” Within months we were shutting down the company entirely, one of the lowest moments of my life.

If I knew then what I know now about optimal brain function, I might have been able to sustain the happiness and productivity we had at the beginning.

According to S. G. Post’s 2005 paper Altruism, Happiness, and Health: It’s Good to Be Good (published in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine) scientific data suggests doing things for others boosts happiness and health.

Various studies have shown that happiness increases productivity. A 2009 study by A. J. Oswald, E. Proto, and D. Sgori for example found a 12% boost in productivity due to increased happiness. Those who work “not for one’s self” in your office will be significantly more productive than those who are more self-focused.

If my partners and I had instilled Non Sibi in our company culture, we would have been a more productive company.

Similarly, Finis Origine Pendet, or “the end is determined by the beginning,” has wisdom to offer startups. How a meeting, day, or company starts will largely determine the end.

Starting a meeting positively, with recognitions and other expressions of gratitude, puts brains in a positive state. (See the 2003 study by P.C. Watkins, K. Woodward, T. Stone, and R. L. Kolts for more on how gratitude boosts happiness.)

Numerous studies suggest that positive brain states lead to better creativity, insights and success (see for example The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success? by S. Lyubomirsky, L. King, and E. Diener.)

By starting positively, success follows. Finis Origine Pendet.

Negativity and fear, on the other hand, are the enemies of optimal brain function. When negativity and fear are intense, your brain goes into “fight or flight” mode. You decide between fight, flight, or freeze.

You hear less about this third option because it doesn’t rhyme, but in fact this is the brain’s first option when faced with immediate threat. If you see a tiger, if you shut up and hold still, maybe the tiger won’t see or hear you, and you’ll survive. If it becomes clear that won’t work — the tiger sees you and is approaching — then you choose between fighting it off (good luck) or running away (maybe you’re with someone slower than you are).

What you won’t do under fear is think creatively. In fact, you won’t use much of your brain’s prefrontal cortex at all.

Your prefrontal cortex is the layer of your brain immediately under your forehead; it’s one part of your brain that distinguishes you from all other mammals.

Our limbic systems, on the other hand, are quite similar to those of all other mammals. Our limbic systems are so good at keeping us alive under immediate threat, that they take over when we are excessively stressed or afraid.

It’s as if your limbic system (amygdala and other parts of your mid-brain) says to the rest of the brain, “We’re under threat here, and I’m in charge. I know we have only three good options for staying alive, so I’m going to decide between fight, flight, or freeze. I’ll take most of the oxygen and glucose coming to the brain now.”

Innovative, insightful thinking (“Hey, that tiger’s stripes would be a cool design for our new product logo”) doesn’t keep you alive, so the creative parts of your brain are relegated to the brain’s background.

It’s hard to be creative and successful when you are feeling negative or afraid. Start positive and stay happy to have productive brains and successful finish.

Will your company have a positive, bright future? Or will fear and negativity undermine your success to the point of failure? How you start will have a significant effect on the outcome.

Science suggests that my high school had some very good advice: work not for yourself to boost your happiness, and remember the ending is determined by the beginning. Non Sibi. Finis Origine Pendet.

Scott Crabtree helps organizations attract, engage, develop, and retain top talent by applying neuroscience and psychology with workshops, coaching and consulting. Contact him through www.HappyBrainScience.com, or follow him on Twitter: @ScottCrab.

Top image courtesy of Nora.

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Yahoo employees are celebrating the fact that their chief executive, Carol Bartz, has been fired.

Former Yahoo vice president Brad Garlinghouse greeted the news with a gleefully nasty tweet: “Ding dong the witch is dead.”

He’s not alone. According to a survey by Glassdoor, Bartz’s approval rating among Yahoo employees has nosedived quarter after quarter to a dismal 24% in the second quarter of 2011, before bouncing slightly to 33% in the third quarter. That means two-thirds of Yahoos have no confidence in Bartz.

For a CEO who had a 90% approval rating shortly after she took the reins in the second quarter of 2009, that’s got to be a disheartening change.

The chart above, provided by Glassdoor, shows how employees’ opinions of Bartz have declined over the past two and a half years. The numbers are based on more than 700 surveys filled out by Yahoo employees who visited Glassdoor.com. They included 275 comments on Bartz specifically.

As a point of comparison, Steve Jobs had a 97% approval rating among Apple employees before he announced he was stepping out of the CEO role in August. AOL’s Tim Armstrong has a 66% approval rating, and Google CEO Larry Page has 97% approval, but on a smaller sampling of reviews (31). Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer has a 45% approval rating; Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has 91% approval.

Further comments about Yahoo management from Glassdoor’s recent surveys:

“No strong leadership with vision & execution. Especially lacks execution.” – Yahoo principal engineer

“Be straightforward with the real problems Yahoo is facing and focus on the core business rather than spread the money over many irrelevant projects that are destined to die from the day they start.” – Yahoo employee

“Very low employee morale is taking a toll on those who still want to work here, Upper management gives the same raa-raa speeches will little to back up the talk.” – Yahoo employee

“Lack of numbers driven decision making, lack of customer focus. Top leadership denies the world changed so we are still pursuing the portal business when the world rapidly changes to mobile, apps, social networks and location based personal solutions.” – Yahoo product manager

“Keep fighting the good fight; keep employees motivated, and reward them for doing well! Do better at identifying top talent and nurturing, stimulating, and retaining that talent.” – Yahoo technical employee

“please stop making senseless speeches about your vision and strategic plans. Instead, focus more on quality engineering and addressing the platform problems. Please don’t attempt to save a few bucks by outsourcing.” – Yahoo technical employee

“go away already!” – Yahoo web analytics manager

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