The Dual-Career Mojo that Makes Couples Thrive

"The most important career choice you'll make is who you marry." This career advice from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg makes good sense based on research. Among couples, career outcomes are indeed linked to the dynamics of support and career priority within couples.

Yet many people end up in less egalitarian marriages than they expected to have, often facing a "choice" to either stay in jobs that threaten to overwhelm them and their families or to withdraw from the workforce entirely. Just as lack of consensus around finances can doom a marriage, lack of support from one's spouse can effectively sink a career. To make dual careers work, a couple needs to be on the same page regarding their career and life goals and how they will support each other in achieving them. Here are four strategies for developing and maintaining an effective dual-career partnership.

Shared vision and values. First of all, talk early and often about what matters most to both of you. What gives you a sense of value, meaning, identity, joy? Which of these things do you share? What would you not give up under any circumstances, even if it meant sacrificing in other important areas? Even though you may hope to "have it all," placing things that are important to both of you (such as career advancement, living in a certain geographic area, starting a business, both being actively involved in your children's lives, maintaining excellent health) in order of priority improves your ability to make optimal decisions. The purpose of regularly revisiting what you hope to create together is to ensure that — to borrow from the title of a now-classic Harvard Business Review article — your commitments match your convictions. In other words, you want to avoid realizing too late (e.g., when you've already called a divorce lawyer) that there is a big gap between what you say you care about most and how you actually invest your time and energy.

Mutual interest, appreciation and investment. Remember that you fell in love with this person because you found him or her interesting. Being interested in and learning about your partner's work life and sharing about your own are important ways of maintaining that mutual interest and of promoting the limitless possibilities of mutuality. In less successful couples, partners come to inhabit separate, non-overlapping worlds, with the result that they know each other less well and have fewer opportunities for mutual enrichment over time. A good guiding principle to follow is to look for solutions that reduce career-related conflicts and maximize opportunities for career enrichment between the members of the couple. In a recent HBR blog post, Stew Friedman described a relevant example of an executive who improved both his job performance and the quality of his relationship with his spouse by sharing upcoming work challenges and inviting her input. My husband and I routinely help each other decide how to approach issues we encounter in our careers by listening, asking questions and offering a broader perspective.

A team orientation. If you've been working on the first two strategies, it should be fairly natural to help each other out and to work together to find solutions that help you to achieve your shared goals.This often means taking turns, as my husband and I did when we put each other through school. Many dual-career couples confer with each other before accepting travel commitments to ensure that both parents are never away at the same time. The most successful dual-career couples avoid consistently sacrificing one partner's career in favor of the other's. This might mean saying to one's boss, "I'd like to work from home until mid-morning the last week of next month because my spouse will be away at a conference." In less successful dual-career partnerships, each partner's interest in the other's career is often more self-referential — i.e., "How will my partner's work demands or rewards affect me?" as opposed to "How do we meet the demands and enjoy the rewards together?"

Flexibility and adaptability. Both partners need to be open to change and adaptable. Plotting an inflexible dual-career roadmap at the outset and expecting that you will be able to stick to it forever is a recipe for disappointment and missed opportunities. Modern careers don't typically follow a predictable path; rather, the road is ever-changing. Few people make it all the way through a career without experiencing an unexpected company event that affects their career prospects, a significant failure, an apparent success that turns out to be unsatisfactory, or a desire to make a significant change. Fortunately, having two careers takes the pressure off of either person to be responsible for all of the material support of the family unit. Furthermore, shared goals, mutual understanding, and a commitment to helping each other out are powerful resources that help dual-career couples work through career and life challenges and changes. If you fundamentally respect each other, value and appreciate each others' careers, want to help each other succeed, and keep the lines of communication open, you'll be able to handle and quite possibly even embrace the twists and turns you encounter along the way.

via HBR.org http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/the_dual-career_mojo_that_make.html

Fixing the World's Infrastructure Problems

We all have a stake in the infrastructure surrounding us — the roads, buildings, power lines, and telephone networks that we rely on daily. How well they're built and operated is crucial to economic growth and is a key arbiter of an economy's competitiveness — and yet, virtually every economy faces an array of infrastructure challenges.

Just a few examples illustrate some of the pressing issues: South Africa's power distribution network has an estimated maintenance backlog of $4 billion — equivalent to half of the country's total investment in electric power generation and distribution in 2011. The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that 15% of the country's roads are in an unacceptable condition and says that road congestion costs the U.S. an estimated $100 billion per year. In Jakarta, from 2005-2009, the number of cars rose by 22% annually, while the distance of usable roads actually declined (PDF). The UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean estimates that investment equivalent to 7.9% of GDP (PDF) is necessary to raise infrastructure in the region to the standard of developed East Asian countries.

Just to keep pace with anticipated global GDP growth, the world needs to spend $57 trillion, or on average $3.2 trillion a year, on infrastructure over the next 18 years. That's more than the entire worldwide stock of infrastructure on the ground today — and nearly 60% more than the world has invested over the past 18 years. Tackling maintenance backlogs, future-proofing infrastructure to cope with climate change, and meeting development goals such as access to clean water and all-weather roads to transport goods to markets would cost a great deal more.

The bill for all of that looks prohibitive at a time when many governments are highly indebted and capital is tight. A focus on the huge need for additional investment and potential difficulties in financing it dominate the debate. Pessimism rules, but it needn't be that way. There are ways of cutting the bill down to size and meeting the challenge. The answer lies in improving the way we plan, build, and operate infrastructure — in other words, we need to boost its productivity.

We have analyzed 400 case studies that show that there's plenty of opportunity to boost infrastructure productivity, and in turn save 40% on the global infrastructure bill (or $1 trillion a year) and boost global GDP by about 3% by 2030 if reinvesting the savings. There are three routes to getting there:

1. We need to make better choices about the projects we're investing in. Projects need to be clearly linked to broader economic and social development, rather than being vanity exercises. Governments need to evaluate costs and benefits rigorously and prioritize accordingly. South Korea's Public and Private Infrastructure Investment Management Center has saved 35% on its infrastructure budget by rejecting 46% of the projects it reviews, compared with only 3% previously. Making more strategic choices has the potential to save $200 billion a year worldwide.

2. We need to streamline delivery. There is huge potential to speed up permits and land acquisition particularly for new transport infrastructure, to structure contracts to encourage innovation and cost savings, and to strengthen collaboration with contractors. This could save up to $400 billion a year and accelerate the timeline for the completion of projects. For example, in Australia, the state of New South Wales cut approval times by 11% in just one year.

3. Instead of rushing to build new capacity, we need to do more with what's already on the ground. This, too, has the potential save $400 billion a year. The United Kingdom, for instance, achieved reductions of 25% in journey times, and 50% in accidents on the M42 motorway by implementing an intelligent transportation system solution that directs and controls traffic flow. Smart grids could help the United States avoid $2-$6 billion a year in power infrastructure costs.

None of this is rocket science, but bringing these opportunities to fruition will require a much less fragmented way of running infrastructure policy. The many agencies involved in various kinds of infrastructure (roads, power, water, etc.) at different levels (city, state, country) need much better coordination. And the public and private sectors need to forge far deeper and broader partnerships. Most collaboration between the two is around financing and construction, but the private sector could certainly do much more with planning and delivery. This isn't an overly radical thought — Chile, the Philippines, South Africa, South Korea, and Taiwan are all developing frameworks for giving private players greater roles in project and portfolio planning.

Saving money with higher infrastructure productivity is a win-win that would be particularly useful at a time of capital constraints and anemic growth in many parts of the world. There is every incentive to be smarter about tackling our infrastructure problems.

via HBR.org http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/fixing_the_worlds_infrastructu.html

Comic for April 11, 2013

via Dilbert Daily Strip http://feed.dilbert.com/~r/dilbert/daily_strip/~3/xDc8qmtD5A0/

Pre-Tax Profits Rise At Private Banking Arm Of HSBC

Pre-tax profits at the global private bank of UK/Hong Kong-listed HSBC rose by 7 per cent year-on-year to $1.01 billion, while this unit logged net operating income, before impairments, of $3.172 billion, down from $3.292 billion a year ago.



On a constant currency basis, HSBC later told this publication, pre-tax profits rose by 8 per cent from 2011.



The parent bank, meanwhile, today reiterated its apology for the breaches of anti-money laundering rules in the US and Mexico. In December last year, HSBC was fined $1.9 billion by UK and US authorities for infractions and has enacted measures as a result.



“For well-documented reasons, the last two years have been extremely damaging to HSBC’s reputation and to our perception of ourselves. We faced serious failings both in the application of our standards and in our ability to identify, and so prevent, misuse and abuse of the financial system through our networks,” Douglas Flint, chairman, said in a statement today.



“Our strategy is entirely configured to eliminate the possibility of this happening again. We have apologised unreservedly to all our stakeholders and have paid huge penalties both in monetary cost and reputational damage. More important than apologies, however, are the steps being taken to prevent recurrence,” he said.



Flint noted that HSBC in January created a new board committee, the Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee, which provides governance, oversight and policy guidance over the framework of controls and procedures designed to spot areas where HSBC may become exposed and, through that exposure, expose the financial system more broadly to financial crime or system abuse.



Parent results

The parent bank logged a pre-tax profit of $20.6 billion, down by 6 per cent on 2011. That figure included the impact of $5.2 billion of adverse fair value movements on HSBC’s own debt. Underlying profit before tax, which takes account of the US and UK legal actions and fines, was $16.4 billion, a rise of 18 per cent on a year before. (A Reuters’ poll of analysts gave a pre-tax profit forecast of $22.7 billion.)



The bank had a core tier 1 capital ratio, under the international Basel rules, of 12.3 per cent, up from 10.1 per cent at the end of 2011.



HSBC declared dividends per share for 2012 of $0.45 per ordinary share, up 10 per cent on 2011, with a fourth interim dividend for 2012 of $0.18 per ordinary share. Total dividends paid amounted to $8.3 billion.



The bank, which has been shedding some businesses and exiting operations to contain costs and boost profitability, noted that in 2012, it announced the disposal or closure of 26 businesses and non-core investments, and four in 2013, bringing the total of such moves to 47 since the start of 2011.



The bank said it generated further cost savings of $2.0 billion, giving an annualised total saving of $3.6 billion. This figure surpasses HSBC’s cumulative target of $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion of sustainable savings since 2011.



On a geographic breakdown of the results, Europe posted a pre-tax loss of $3.414 billion, while Hong Kong accounted for $7.582 billion, other Asia-Pacific at $10.448 billion; Middle East and North Africa at $1.35 billion; North America at $2.299 billion, and Latin America at $2.384 billion.



“The majority of our core businesses in Asia, particularly in Hong Kong, continued to perform well, achieving good underlying revenue growth in the year,” Flint said in the statement.



Board change

One new board change announced today was the appointment of Jim Comey, to serve on the newly-created Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee. He acted as general counsel to several international businesses. Between 2003 to 2005 he was US Deputy Attorney General.





































Source: wealthbriefing



via Global Banking & Wealth Management Blog. http://www.kalikajaros.com/Site/Global_Banking_%26_Wealth_Management_Blog/Entries/2013/4/11_Pre-Tax_Profits_Rise_At_Private_Banking_Arm_Of_HSBC.html

Tell Better Data Stories with Motion and Interactivity

When it comes to making sense of vast amounts of complicated data, time really is on your side. It's a simple concept, one that everyone understands: an action starts, then eventually stops. The distance between those two points conveys information — information about then, about now, and about the differences between the two.

If you apply that simple yet elegant measuring stick to an overwhelming glut of information, you have the beginnings of a powerful data visualization that can simplify the complex, identify trends, and shape your audience's comprehension of the story you want to tell.

However, when time is the canvas for your data, you'll need one, or both, of these techniques: motion and interactivity.

Hans Rosling, who gained popular fame in his 2006 TED Talk on "stats that reshape your worldview" uses the power of motion in the software that runs his Gapminder trend-finding operation.

As he told Discover , "when you show time as graphic movement, as animation, people suddenly understand." BBC's "The Joy of Stats" series added a bit of special effects to a condensed version of the lecture in 2010: "Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes."

These videos exemplify the effectiveness of movement in explaining the complexity in health, poverty, and economics trends. And by pacing through the years, the audience is able to consume the data as a visual narrative, one frame at a time.

There are also boundless opportunities to illustrate data from a series of events over time in tandem with geographic overlays. Take "1945-1998" by Isao Hashimoto, which traces the growing number of nuclear explosions around the world by marking each blast with a visual and audio blip. In Hashimoto's visualization, 1962 was a dramatic year, with over 175 nuclear explosions. In contrast, the video's activity during the previous year carries implied meaning — fewer blips, fewer nuclear blasts.

Visualizations that span seconds instead of decades can also sift through an avalanche of information. One of my favorite interactives from The New York Times is "Fractions of a Second: An Olympic Musical" by Amanda Cox, who was interviewed for this series. As with the previous example, silence is golden. Listening to the margins between skiers' finish times provides extremely effective insights.

Blending time and motion can also help the audience feel emotionally closer to the story. Take the admittedly low-info — yet amusing and thirst-inducing — graphic "The American Beer Revival" by Nate Whitson. Nate used some simple (read approachable) visual techniques to tell the story of U.S. breweries in the 100 years before Prohibition.

The examples mentioned so far have mainly been published in linear form with the ability to hit play and/or pause to step through the information. Adding a layer of interactivity allows your audience to filter through volumes of data and creates a second axis to compare information across time. Hans Rosling's Trendalyzer software, which he uses in Gapminder's analysis of "Wealth & Health of Nations," empowers the user to highlight geographic regions and even isolate specific countries.

Interactive graphics encourages people to lean forward and participate in the storytelling. By adding layers of information and the mechanics to view the data in varying perspectives, you're essentially allowing your audience to fill in and add their own narrative — their second story, if you will.

This purposeful interaction reminds me of a story Internet artist Jonathan Harris tells about his fourth-grade teacher, Baz. In the story, he describes the difference between the "wow" when you lean back stunned and the "wow" when you lean in to participate. The latter moments linger in your memory. Similarly, interactive graphics are an invitation to participate and an opportunity to have the information stick with you.

Tread lightly, however, when adding interactivity to your chart. You may very well be adding design and interface hurdles that you'll need to compensate for, increasing the complexity of comprehending your data.

This leads me to my three takeaway points when presenting data visualization using motion and time:

Pace through the data. By layering information over time, you isolate specific data sets to minimize overwhelming your audience. Comparing numbers over time can also help to identify patterns and highlight trends. Animating these patterns helps bridge the comprehension gap between two sets of data.

Minimize the number of canvases. By keeping to one canvas throughout the video, your viewer will be able to understand the full frame of reference. You can zoom in and pan across the overall chart to highlight or tease out nuggets of information. For example, The New York Times classic "One Race, Every Medalist Ever" relies solely on camera moves throughout the entire video. The objects and data remain static. With intentional angles and views, this single canvas afforded multiple perspectives to visualize the data and tell the historical story of the event.

Add motion purposefully. Do not add animation for animation's sake; make sure that you're using it to convey meaning. Avoid using motion as a type and motion study, as in many college animation assignments. Use motion to show growth, demonstrate a shift over time, or to emphasize a piece of data.

These points will give your visualized data more impact only if they work in concert with the main goals: simplify the complex and ensure that the data provide insight.

Visualizing Data

An HBR Insight Center

• When Creating Visualizations, Question Everything


• Telling Stories with Visual Data: A Glimpse into the Future of Narrative


• How P&G Presents Data to Decision-Makers


• Visualization as Process, Not Output

via HBR.org http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/tell_better_data_stories_with.html

Asia's Key New Segment: Powerful, Professional Women

If money talks, then some young women are making a powerful statement with their pocketbooks. This is particularly true of a new segment of professional women in Asia called the "Gold Misses."

Gold Misses is a play on the word "old misses," which means unmarried women, but differentiates itself to highlight the group's massive consumption power. Gold Misses have emerged in Asia as more and more women become better educated, enter higher paying jobs, and then delay marriage (PDF). Even after marriage, many working women have few or no children. The overall result is that professional women have more disposable income to purchase a wider range of products, such as houses, financial services, durables, and especially luxury goods.

Despite the global recession that has dampened demand in many industries, the luxury market is still holding strong. Such continued growth in this sector is being led by new drivers of sales — latecomer countries to luxury, such as China, and fresh lead users like the Gold Misses.

In South Korea, the Gold Misses have become consumer icons, as they influence the demand of not only their peers but also scores of wannabes who aspire to their glitzy lifestyle. In fact, the latter's more ostentatious consumption pattern was the inspiration for Psy's satirical "Gangnam Style" music video.



In China, the Gold Misses are called the shengnu, and its contrasting double meaning of "leftover women" and "holy (as in hard to approach) goddesses" reveals their evolving status in Chinese society. The number of never-married women in urban China is estimated to be about 7 million. But since this demographic trend is influenced by economic growth, that size will easily increase as China — and specifically its women — continue to advance.

In India as well, career-oriented women are flexing their spending muscle with income in urban centers doubling over the last decade, enabling them to independently purchase items like apartments, cars, and insurance plans as never before. Looking at China and India alone, BCG estimates that by 2020 their female economies combined will account for $5 trillion annually with professional women fueling some of the next wave of growth.



For companies wanting to better position themselves in this region and to this expanding segment, the following strategies can be some effective first steps:

1. Help them to stand out. These young women see themselves as cultural pioneers, whether as professionals or as consumers. Their purchasing behavior also reflects their desire to not just follow the herd mentality but instead to be trendsetters. The level of marketing individualization to them thus needs to be greater as compared to the communal style of marketing that is sometimes required in Asia. Such a strategy may have worked for Starbucks in China where, as in other places, its customized drinks and personalized service appeal to people who want to embrace their individuality.

2. Create ripple effects to their followers. The product and brand preferences of the Gold Misses can become the catalyst for mass demand among their followers who want to emulate, even at a basic level, their role models. For luxury brands, this kind of social hierarchy has led to greater sales of less expensive "logo" lines. Sometimes this dynamic occurs cross-nationally, such as between South Korea and Southeast Asia, where the former's portrayal of successful women in soap operas impacts trends abroad, such as in clothing and hairstyle.

3. Establish a digital and social commerce presence. The Gold Misses enjoy and can afford to indulge themselves, but they do not have the time to shop. The solution here can be digital commerce. Asian women are prone to shop online two times more than their Western counterparts, and 81% of these purchases are made for herself only. Niche social networks like Pinterest and Instagram have experienced explosive popularity in places like Hong Kong and Singapore, and generate traffic to global and local downstream sites. For foreign firms, setting up such digital beachheads to an influential segment can ease their brick-and-mortar entries that come later on.

As Asia becomes a new hub of global economic activity, companies may capture new opportunities by tapping into one of that region's future movers and shakers — its rising professional women.

via HBR.org http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/asias_key_new_segment_powerful.html

Enabling the Natural Act of Entrepreneurship

I met Slovenian entrepreneur, Sandi Cesko, in 2007 when his Ljubljana-based multi-channel retail operation, Studio Moderna, had about $70 million in sales. Not bad. I met him again two months ago: six years later he had scaled up by a factor of ten — all the result of organic growth — and employs over 6000 people. Even better.

Scale-up means growth, and growth means jobs, wealth, and tax revenues. In a recent post on HBR.org, I called attention to the fact that we entrepreneurship promoters are too focused on start-up, and need to re-balance the dialog to support scale-up as well. That dialog includes all stakeholders, from the entrepreneurs themselves to investors to government policymakers. For you entrepreneurs, the challenges of scale-up are first and foremost the responsibility of managements and boards. Don't go looking to public officials for help in growing your venture ten times bigger. But you policymakers can still play a key role in fostering an entrepreneurship ecosystem that supports scale-up entrepreneurs. So here are some suggestions, most of which by the way, happen to be essentially cost-free:

Removing barriers to growth should be your number one priority. Entrepreneurship is a natural act, a normal aspect of the human condition that spans geography, culture, and history. Three thousand years ago the Phoenicians in Tyre were as globally entrepreneurial as the startupists are today in nearby Tel-Aviv. This natural drive to grow something big and new needs to be unleashed, not pushed or incentivized. The Brazilian government recently decided to make life easier for very small businesses so they passed special laws and tax breaks for micro-enterprises, called "simples." A great idea, and the Simples Nacional taxation system has indeed turbocharged formalization of Brazil's informal economy.

But without solving the fundamental problem of an incredibly opaque and complex bureaucracy, the Brazilian government has, despite the best intentions, kicked the can down the road and it is precisely the scale-up entrepreneurs who suffer: there is now paradoxically an incentive for entrepreneurs to stay small because when they grow, they are suddenly hit with a harsh administrative reality. As one Rio-based entrepreneur told me, "I got to nine people, took one look at the huge regulatory stair that I would have to climb to get to ten, and went back to opening up additional small companies instead of growing one big one. It is hell to manage."

The commonality of perverse behavioral outcomes from good policy intentions leads to a second prescription:

Do not discriminate in favor of entrepreneurs. "Not" is not a typo. If you remove the barriers, then you don't need to incentivize entrepreneurs to commit their natural act. Because it is extremely difficult to define a priori what an entrepreneur is and is not, pro-entrepreneur incentives will inevitably create a direct or indirect cost for those entrepreneurs who don't happen to fall into government's typically limiting definition. How many programs divert scarce public funds to discriminate in favor of certain entrepreneurial ventures, often under the rubric of "small business"? For example, in France it is twice as likely to find a 49-person company as a 50-person company. Huh? Here, policy has created a distorted system, in which it is rational to want to stay small and suppress the drive for growth. Piecemeal policies, like angel tax credits, loan guarantees, reduced payroll taxes, direct investments, government venture funds, etc., have spread like wildfire. Their effectiveness is almost impossible to measure, yet compared to removing the obstacles to the "natural act," they are quick fixes, and also use up scarce public resources.

Real entrepreneurs don't mind paying taxes, so develop a clear, right-sized and strictly enforced tax system. Taxes per se do not hinder entrepreneurship. I have talked to many entrepreneurs and policymakers in Denmark, one of the highest tax regimes in the world. Of course, no one likes to pay taxes, but the Danes don't complain as much as you might expect in part because they receive a high quantity and quality of public services for their taxes. And no less important, company tax administration is relatively fast, simple, predictable, and logical.

Anyone from Mexico or Ukraine knows that many tax regimes are hostile to business in general, but some of them seem to diabolically target the entrepreneurs who otherwise would be creating the next wave of jobs. Taxes on revenues (not to be confused with VAT), taxes on assets, taxes that are paid in advance of profits or receipts, tax refunds that take months to be repaid — these are a huge burden to a rapidly scaling company in which cash flow management is a matter of survival. If we want the jobs these companies create, then we have to design (and strictly enforce) a better tax system, rather than manipulate taxes as incentives. We don't need to incentivize people to act naturally.

Want to solve the capital problem? Start by paying suppliers on time. Here is a paradox: In Puerto Rico every government supplier knows that it will take them at least a year to be paid, despite the fact that the law stipulates payment within 40 days. So Puerto Rican entrepreneurs hire consultants to badger government procurement to pay up, and in parallel they jack up their prices to finance the long receivables cycle. There is a law making it a crime for the government to pay late, but it is widely believed that if you try to enforce the law, it will be a long time before you see your next contract.

I once guestimated that about a billion dollars of cash are used by suppliers to finance the Puerto Rican government's late payments, not to mention the extra cost to the public of the price increases that suppliers charge. Oh, and by the way: Puerto Rican growth ventures are starved for capital, and government agencies have invested public funds to try, unsuccessfully, to kick start a venture capital sector.

Unjam the exit if you really want to improve entrance and scale-up. Not having a reliable exit channel for businesses creates a traffic jam at the start-up on-ramp. For example, it is nearly impossible for scaling ventures in many countries, including Brazil and Denmark, to count on an IPO for a successful exit. This blockage slows down the entire flow of ventures and venture capital, with lack of risk capital and lack of highly scalable ventures each keeping the other below their potential.

The blockage of capital flows also has follow on effects: Why would any rational person leave a secure, soft, high-status job at state-owned Petrobras or Vale without a really compelling prospect of making it rich? Having startup policies without taking care of access to IPO markets is like having a fast new ramp onto a pot-holed dirt road.

Stay off of ventures' balance sheets — and get onto their income statements. Policymakers seem more and more to be looking to play venture capitalist or banker. We see the results of this confusion in the (again, well-intentioned) US Department of Energy loans and loan guarantees for cleantech companies. Being a company shareholder or debt holder can and should misalign your interests in broader public goods with those narrower interests of rapidly building a growing and competitive venture. Governments and shareholders should have different motivations. The only occasionally valid excuse for being on a venture's balance sheet (and then for only a very short period) is to create a "demonstration effect" that shows unaware investors that there are profitable opportunities to invest in.

That does not mean government offices are irrelevant to entrepreneurs' profit and loss statements. At an entrepreneurship ecosystems workshop I ran in St. Petersburg, Russia, last November, a confident entrepreneur publicly challenged a famous priest: "With such a large purchasing budget, what is the church doing to buy from entrepreneurs?" The same can be asked of governments: you can stimulate a lot of entrepreneurship by clearly defining and allocating resources to social problems that need solving. The "space race," "cold war," "war on poverty," and many other initiatives created powerful and natural new markets for entrepreneurs (and big companies as well) to compete in. Obamacare is creating more opportunities for entrepreneurs by boosting a new market to address a brand new social priority.

Convene, celebrate, catalyze. Mayor Thomas Menino launched the Boston Innovation District in 2010 with his fifth inaugural address. He and his staff had created a simple compelling vision around work-play-live, a set of operating principles and a digital community, and then worked to bring different actors together: real estate developers, startup competition organizers, entrepreneurs, advertising agencies, investors, established high-tech companies, private incubators, a college (Babson), community organizations and artist associations. 4000 new jobs later, the mayor's office has spent virtually no money, fielded only a virtual team, and, with one exception, offered no monetary incentives to locate there. The private sector has footed the entire bill of accommodating over two hundred new scale-driven companies, primarily because they saw it as a good investment.

Of course, as we all know, the devil in policy effectiveness is almost always in the details, and I have simplified the argument. But this does not weaken the larger truth that when it comes to encouraging scale-up entrepreneurship, the first and best thing policymakers can do is to get the artificial barriers to this natural act out of the way.

via HBR.org http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/enabling_the_natural_act_of_en.html