The @Work State of
Mind Project
Engaging the Most Engaged
A collaborative marketing research and development project
led by gyro, the global ideas shop
Contents
Methodology............................................................................................................. 2
Acknowledgments.................................................................................................. 2
Foreword..................................................................................................................... 3
Introduction................................................................................................................ 4
Prologue...................................................................................................................... 6
Key Findings.............................................................................................................. 7
Executive Summary................................................................................................ 8
Work Is No Longer a Place: It’s a State of Mind........................................... 9
Returning to a New World of Ever-Present Work.......................................11
Readiness With a Human Face..........................................................................13
A Thoughtful and Disciplined Social Media Approach.............................14
The @Work Reality................................................................................................15
Always Prioritize......................................................................................................19
A Blurring of Work-Life Boundaries...............................................................20
Conclusion:
How to Put the @Work State of Mind to Work for Your Brand...........23
Methodology
This report is based on a survey of 543 executives and dozens of one-on-one interviews
conducted by Forbes Insights. The survey respondents described themselves as decision
makers, with most focused on business operations (62%) and strategy (60%).
Ten percent were business owners, 24% held C-level positions, and 41% were EVP/SVP/VP/director. The remaining 23%
were unit or department heads or managers. (Three percent were board members.)
Roughly one in three respondents (31%) worked for companies with revenues under $100 million, 22% worked for
companies with revenues of between $100 million and $1 billion, and the remaining 47% worked for companies with
revenues of more than $1 billion, including the single largest grouping (19%), who worked for firms with revenues of
more than $10 billion.
The largest concentration of respondents came from banking/financial services/insurance (19%). The groups working
in manufacturing (12%) and professional services (10%) were the two next largest.
The geographic breakdown included 316 respondents in the U.S., 105 in the U.K. and 122 in Continental Europe.
Some charts may not add to 100% due to rounding.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Gyro and Forbes Insights would like to thank the following for their assistance, counsel and contributions to this report:
Honorable Elaine Chao, U.S. Secretary of Labor (2001-2009); Dalton Conley, Ph.D., Dean of Social Sciences, New
York University; Maggie Jackson, journalist and author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark
Age; Ralph Oliva, Ph.D., Institute for the Study of Business Markets, Smeal College of Business, Penn State University; Fred W. Roedl, Clinical Associate Professor of Marketing, Director-Business Marketing Academy, Kelley School
of Business, Indiana University; the Business Marketing Association; Kenneth Hein, Marketing Director NA, gyro,
and Patrick Danaher, Marketing Director EMEA, gyro.
2 | The @Work State of Mind Project
Foreword
BY CHRISTOPH BECKER
CEO and Chief Creative Officer, gyro
“Nine-to-five thinking is a thing of the past, and this must be reflected in how brands
advertise with their customers and clients.”
Work is no longer a place, but a state of mind.
There are no boundaries between work and leisure.
It’s now just life.
The customers who matter most to your success—the
decision makers—now have an @Work State of Mind.
This means that communications must evolve to reach
them. It means that messages must be more inspirational,
more humanly relevant.
Gyro partnered with Forbes Insights to create a clear
picture of how executives consume information and in
what way it influences their business decisions. We also
asked, most importantly, how they feel about the @Work
State of Mind.
We surveyed more than 500 marketers and interviewed CMOs at Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard
and many of the world’s other top companies.
Our pursuit is to understand this @Work State of
Mind better than anyone else in the world so that we can
best ignite emotions.
What you are about to read presents a clear picture of
how today’s independently minded and highly connected
executive looks, thinks and feels.
We hope this deeper understanding of the @Work
State of Mind will inspire you.
What a time to be alive!
Our mission is to create ideas that are
humanly relevant. gyro is an Advertising
Age Top 50 global ideas shop with 600
creative minds in 17 offices in nine countries. Globally gyro works with Abbott,
Audi, FedEx, HP, John Deere, L’Oreal,
USG and Virgin Atlantic. www.gyro.com
CHRISTOPH BECKER
CEO and chief creative officer of gyro, the global ideas shop.
Contact him at christoph.becker@gyro.com.
Copyright © 2012 Forbes Insights | 3
Introduction
In the summer of 2010, gyro assembled a group at Hyper Island, the world-famous digital
training center in Karlskrone, Sweden, for what we call the gyro Academy, an intense professional development program for our up-and-comer colleagues. We exposed these students
to our techniques and tools for ideation and collaboration. The group was asked to select a
challenge against which they could practice these tools. They chose “work-life balance.”
Being at work is a state of mind; no longer a place or
Alas, I am not among our youngest colleagues. So, when
even a fixed period of the day.
I came to the session as a mentor, I was gruff and dismisThe Internet, mobile telecom, social networksive. “Quit whining! People have been complaining to
ing and a 24/7 global economy have eliminated the
me for 30 years about the long and daunting hours of the
boundaries of time and space that once def ined the
ad agency business. Do you want a job, or do you want
workplace. Technology has
a career? This is no business
caused work to expand to
for clock-watchers. It’s a fact
longer hours of the day and
of life in the agency busihas attached work to people
ness. There’s nothing new
wherever they are.
about this work-life balance
Product iv it y-en hancing
issue,” I said.
technology has not served to
Then one of them said,
increase the amount of leisure
“Oh, yes, there is,” and she
time we enjoy—quite the conreached in her jeans pocket
trary. It’s caused work to spill
and set her iPhone on the
over its banks, flooding more
table. “This has changed. It’s
hours of the day and more days
attached to me. I cannot disof the week—curiously, as a
connect from it.”
matter of people’s own behavIt was for us a moment
ior and choices.
of epiphany; of sudden reveWork goes home. Home
lation and insight. It was not
–RICK SEGAL
goes
to work. People are conas if we had been oblivious
President Worldwide and
stantly toggling between
to the spread of networked
Chief Practice Officer, gyro
working and “home-ing,”
communications and handmaking decisions, personal and
held devices, or even how
professional, at all hours of the
important it was to deliver
day. They master time, rather
new forms of communicathan the other way around.
tion to reach people with
People in an @Work State of Mind today are exposed
these media. But as people engaged in perfecting marto a constant, multi-point flow of communications from
keting communications, it struck us like a lightning bolt.
not just customers, suppliers and co-workers, but also
Work has changed—and people at work have changed
from family, friends, would-be friends and network
profoundly.
members. They are not only engaged in considering
Oh, we had understood for many years that it was
brand messages while at work, but also championing
technically easier than ever to identify targets, locate them,
them to their social networks.
reach them, engage them and transact with them; even to
People in the @Work State of Mind represent a powspur them to exchange messages among themselves. We
erful theater for brand communications; perhaps the most
understood clearly how technology had changed, but we
powerful. They exert double purchasing power on both
confess we neglected just how much it had changed them:
their own needs and those of their companies.
the people to whom we were marketing.
“Technology has caused
work to expand to longer
hours of the day and has
attached work to people
wherever they are.”
4 | The @Work State of Mind Project
Their eyes are on screens: small, medium and large.
They are already in engagement mode.
They are considering solutions carefully.
They are making decisions.
And this @Work State of Mind is a shared state
of mind. People today are connected to and communicating with others in the same state of mind. This
makes them a switching station of enthusiasm and
endorsement channeled toward decision-makers and
inf luencers, immediately.
Mining opportunity from the rich vein of the
@Work State of Mind requires new methods and models.
The model must be much more real-time, agile and even
uncontrolled.
It is an approach that must be anchored in anthropology and behavioral science, relying more heavily than ever
on understanding human-scale motives and at striking
responsive chords of emotion—particularly if people are
to be compelled to act and advocate spontaneously on a
brand’s behalf.
Mastering the @Work State of Mind promises breakthrough success for marketers, exchanging the mediocre
performance of conventional methods for the high performance of programs radically reset to the way people really
live, work, dream and prosper.
Gyro is delighted to have at its disposal the amazing
resources of Forbes Insights in the ongoing investigation
of this profoundly important area of inquiry. This report
is but the first of several products to emanate from “The
@Work State of Mind Project,” a collaborative marketing R&D project led by gyro that includes participants
from business, government, the arts, healthcare, NGOs,
academia and entertainment. If you have an interest in
sharing in this discovery, we hope you will join us.
Rick Segal
President worldwide and chief practice
officer of gyro, the global ideas shop.
Contact him at rick.segal@gyro.com.
Copyright © 2012 Forbes Insights | 5
prologue
By Rich Karlgaard
Publisher, Forbes
“If nothing else, after reading ‘The @Work State of Mind,’ you will lose the guilt over
declaring your own independence. Enjoy that freedom, and bestow it generously
on your colleagues.”
Three years ago I took up bicycling to stay in shape. I try
to get in four rides a week—Saturday, Sunday and two
more rides in the middle of the week.
The thing you try to avoid as a bike rider is a bad
encounter with a car or truck. Simple physics tells you
who will win that battle. Thus, for weekday bike riders, the safest hours to share the road with cars and trucks
are those between late morning and early afternoon—10
a.m. to 2 p.m. The commuters are all at work. The high
school drivers are still in school. The roads are as free as
they’ll get.
At this point you may ask, what kind of serious working professional can take time to ride a bike—or chase
fun of any kind—in the middle of the workday, in the
middle of the week? Answer: Tens of millions of us.
Smartphones and Wi-Fi have set us free.
The flipside of the freedom to play hooky in the
middle of the week is obvious. You can’t get away from
work. Not really. Not for more than a few hours at a
time. Flying from San Francisco to New York, even in
coach class, used to be a mini vacation. It meant six hours
alone with the latest John Grisham. “Nobody can screw
6 | The @Work State of Mind Project
with me while I’m 35,000 feet over Nebraska,” I would
happily think as I boarded the plane. Kiss those days
goodbye. Try telling your boss that, sorry, I was out of
email reach during my long flight. Doesn’t fly anymore,
that excuse.
The @Work State of Mind is both a deeply researched
and very personal look at how the always-on workstyle
has changed our lives, for better and worse (but mostly
for better). I couldn’t stop reading this report. Each page
gave me a fresh insight into the biggest trend affecting
the workplace and the minds of the new 24/7 professionals, who are figuring out their own seamless blend of
work and non-work.
If nothing else, after reading “The @Work State of
Mind,” you will lose the guilt over declaring your own
independence. You will happily steal an hour to ride a
bicycle or visit a friend in the middle of the weekday.
Enjoy that freedom, and bestow it generously on your
colleagues. The best and brightest will demand these
new choices.
Just stay in touch, and remember to keep your smartphone battery charged.
Key Findings
The @Work State of Mind has taken hold. The barriers between personal and work time have crumbled. Executives have to be
prepared to make decisions anywhere and at any time. Just 3% of the survey respondents said that they didn’t send or receive
emails while on vacation. Only 2% said that they never worked weekends or nights. More than half the respondents (52%) said
they receive information related to business decisions round-the-clock, including weekends.
The @Work State of Mind reflects a new blending of work and personal time. Downtime no longer means total disengagement
from work for an extended period. Those most at ease with the @Work State of Mind are those who feel most in control. They are
good at separating work from personal time: Only 15% of them said they are rarely or never able to do so, versus 24% of those
who feel a lack of control. Since both groups spend similar amounts of time working on weekends, evenings, etc., this seems
to be a matter of successful mental compartmentalization. “Just as the boundaries of the physical world and digital worlds are
blurring with the rapidly increasing penetration of smartphones, tablets, Facebook and location-based apps like Shopkick and
Foursquare, so are the boundaries blurring between work and home,” says Nathan Estruth, VP, Procter & Gamble FutureWorks
NDB. “Increasingly, work is no longer constrained by space or even by time of day, but rather by an individual’s personal preferences and state of mind at any given moment.”
Work—or personal space—is where you make it. Almost three in five respondents (59%) said that they made business decisions at
home, while almost two in three (64%) said that they made decisions while traveling on business and an additional one in three
(30%) said that they made business decisions while traveling with family. At the same time, 98% of respondents said that they
dealt with personal matters in the office, with 41% saying that they spend more than 10% of their time doing so. “With the growth
of the Web and the introduction of high-speed data connections at home, it’s now possible to do most jobs from any location,
including home,” says Rick Saletta, VP of marketing for Vitria Technology. “Problem is, that means we are always on and usually
multi-tasking.”
Technological innovation has largely enabled the @Work State of Mind, but this new era has expanded rapidly because it is linked
to professional advancement. More than two in five respondents (43%) said that technology had fueled the dismantling of
barriers between work and personal time. About three in 10 respondents (28%) said that personal ambition was the reason,
15% said it was about creating efficiency, and 9% cited a desire to move ahead.
Many decision makers feel empowered by the @Work State of Mind. Asked how they feel when making a business decision,
considering the stream and volume of information, 40% of respondents said they feel empowered and 44% feel well-prepared.
But attitudes differ between U.S. and European executives toward the @Work State. European decision makers viewed the @Work
condition more negatively than their American counterparts. Three in 10 European respondents (30%) said that they felt irritated
by the blending of work and personal time, compared with 19% of Americans. U.K. respondents trended closer to U.S. than to
other European decision makers.
Social networks are important for conducting business. About two in three respondents (67%) said that such work-related
networks play a significant role in business, and 56% said that personal social networks influence their determinations. But businessrelated networks are clearly more important than ones more focused on personal life. “Highly focused tablet/smartphone apps with
closed social media built in will replace email,” says Warren N. Bimblick, senior vice president of strategy and business development
for Penton Media.
Copyright © 2012 Forbes Insights | 7
executive Summary
The @Work State of Mind means that most global business
decision makers are on, irrespective of time or location.
Reaching them successfully requires an understanding of more
than how they blur the lines between work and personal time
in terms of their usage of technological devices, time slots or
2%
Never work weekends
or nights
locations. To communicate with @Work State of Mind decision
makers, it’s imperative to understand their motivations, emotional attitudes and levels of satisfaction with round-the-clock,
all-device messaging.
Gyro, the global ideas shop, in association with Forbes Insights, the thought leadership practice of Forbes Media, surveyed more than 500 global executives about the
@Work State of Mind, and conducted in-depth interviews with marketing leaders and experts.
The survey found that in the @Work State of Mind world, executives resemble
24/7 news networks—constantly receiving, processing and sending information.
The aim of this report is to start a discussion about what might characterize the
most effective messaging—the type that cuts through the static of other messages
to reach…emotion.
14%
Rarely work weekends
or nights
27%
Work most weekends
or nights
17%
Work weekends and
nights every week
52%
Receive business
information round the
clock, including
weekends
8 | The @Work State of Mind Project
Work Is No Longer a Place:
It’s a State of Mind
nearly any location. Social media sites have simultaneously
In today’s working world, most executives are always
sprouted and mushroomed to encompass huge swatches
on. Not necessarily actively engaged in work or thinkof the world’s population. Facebook now reports more
ing of work, but available, reachable, aware that they may
than 850 million users, roughly one-tenth of the world’s
have to respond in a heartbeat. No place is sacrosanct.
7 billion people. Twitter and LinkedIn subscribers both
Not lunchtime, family dinners, weekends or vacations.
number over 100 million and are growing rapidly. There
Even the once relative calm of an air voyage—the busiare an estimated 5 billion subscriptions to cell phones.
ness trip where fierce road warriors could unwind—was
“Technology has created devices that present us with
shattered years ago. Now desperate travelers hang on with
an ever-increasing number of choices,” says Laura Gross,
their fingernails to connectivity as their planes taxi down
marketing SVP for Muriel
the runway. A few minutes
Siebert, “compressing an
into flight, they’re on Wi-Fi,
ever-decreasing amount of
exchanging emails and moniwhat used to be known as
toring events in real time.
free time.” Gross thinks all
Executives are 365-day,
these choices have made the
24-hour networks, ready to
task of the marketer more
parachute into any pressing
difficult. “What should we
issue. Technology has enabled
do on our commute, for
the rapid response and made it
example?” she asks. “Read
the norm. Executives who do
and respond to work email?
not engage with the informaDecompress from the day
tion flow risk falling behind,
with Angry Birds or Sudoku?
or worse, worry about what
Catch up on The Wall Street
they might have missed.
Journal or the Economist? Listen
“There’s no more off switch,”
to our iPods? Turn on the
says Tom Nightingale, pres–Adam Swann
radio? Will we choose busiident, sales and marketing,
Head of Strategy, gyro New York
ness news, jazz, rock, or play
for Waltham, Mass.-based
a CD or an audio book? Surf
ModusLink Global Solutions,
the Internet for hotels for
a multifaceted technology
next year’s vacation? Can we
services provider. “There are
even hear old-fashioned ads
very few people who are not
anymore or have we become numb to them, regardless
checking emails or receiving social media while at work,
of venue?”
school, commuting, or at the sidelines of their kids’ sportAdam Swann, head of strategy, gyro New York, says
ing events.”
this state of perpetual contact has sprouted from a growing
Indeed, for Lauren Flaherty, executive vice presisense of community—people responding simultaneously
dent and CMO for San Diego-based technology provider
to the same trend and adding to its momentum. “It’s
Juniper Networks, “connections” are “ubiquitous.” “We
human instinct to want to be involved, to know what’s
are all much more real-time in our work habits,” she says.
going on, to feel part of a community, a tribe, to feel like
The @Work world is the result of a historic period of
you have significance,” he says.
technological advancement. In less than 25 years, man has
But Swann adds that the @Work State has grown
overhauled communication systems several times over.
because it has already proven a more effective way of
The past decade alone has seen the rise of increasingly
doing business by lessening stress later on. “Sometimes
powerful, more-multifaceted mobile devices that allow
when you jump on an issue, it might be in the evening
people to touch base and be touched any time and from
“It’s human instinct to
want to be involved,
to know what’s going
on, to feel part of a
community, a tribe...”
Copyright © 2012 Forbes Insights | 9
and you might be at home,
you can deal with something
quickly, and the issue is
“The information is
resolved. It doesn’t explode
right there as soon as
into something more.”
you ask a question.”
An often cited IDC
study sponsored by EMC
—JENNIFER NEALSON
Corporation found that
CMO,Denver Center for
the amount of information
the Performing Arts
on the Internet will double every 18 months. Many
executives consider the constant access to increasing
quantities of information a business advantage. They no
longer have to spend as much time searching for what
they need, and that has made their jobs easier. “The
information is right there as soon as you ask a question,”
says Jennifer Nealson, the CMO for the Denver Center
for the Performing Arts.
Such easy accessibility has decreased the need for conventional marketing and pointed toward approaches that
are more nuanced and profound. The days of passive consumption of messaging are gone. Relationships in the
@Work era are more interactive and changeable. The
new marketer has become a listener who is adaptable to an
audience’s hot spots more than simply the disseminator of
information. “The boundaries between our public (work)
and private (home) are collapsing,” says Joan D. Khoury,
managing director and CMO at LPL Financial. “But
almost from the moment of birth, people want to learn.
We must change our marketing approach to less reflect old
boundaries and to more reflect the desire to know.”
This new age has also necessitated an ability to pinpoint the right audience segments—influencers—and
take advantage of their increased power in ongoing
debates about products, services and organizations. “The
advent of the web and real-time communications has
upended engagement paradigms,” says Andres Jordan,
Deutsche Telekom North America’s VP, innovation and
business development, international business. “That,
paired with people’s innate desire to belong, requires that
the new engagement models be dynamic, genuine, and
How often do you step away from dinner and other family gatherings to deal with business calls and other work issues?
n 3% Multiple times at each event
n 9% Do so at least once per event
n 41% Do so occasionally
n 31% Rarely
n 17% Almost never
10 | The @Work State of Mind Project
Returning to a New World of
Ever-Present Work
By Maggie Jackson
Award-winning columnist and author of Distracted
In 1926, Henry Ford instituted a controversial shift change
at his growing automotive empire: the weekend. To the ire
of many other manufacturers, Ford closed shop on Saturdays, giving his workers the new-fangled ritual of two days
off a week. His move was the high point of a short-lived
historic experiment. Remember the weekend, when men
and women valiantly tried to keep work and home separate,
equal and unadulterated?
Now, of course, we work anywhere, and most of the time.
Work is in our pocket, spilling into homes, weekends, vacations and bedrooms. Nearly 40 percent of mobile workers
with PDAs now wake up at night at times to check them, at
least occasionally, according to a quarterly survey of mobile
enterprise workers by iPass.
Does this blurring of boundaries signify an easy return to a
pre-industrial past, when we lived over the store or on the
farm? Are we sliding seamlessly back into integrated lives?
No. For most of human history, work and home were blended
due to the restriction of experience. Geographic distance and
the rhythms of sun and season limited the circumference of
our work and home lives. Trade, like war, ceased at sunset.
Entire lives centered on the same corner of earth.
Today we multitask in nanoseconds on a global scale, moving restlessly in thought and body across the planet. Forty
percent of offices lie vacant on any given day, according to
Deloitte. Bankers shift their hours to the midnight darkness
of each monetary mess. We rarely speak of anything being
“too far away” anymore. “Long weeks within a single community are unusual; a full day within a single neighborhood
is becoming rare,” writes sociologist Kenneth Gergen in The
Saturated Self. The @Work State of Mind arises from an expansion of experience.
What is the impact of these extraordinary changes? Surely,
we are light-footed and nimble-minded. And yet always-on
work forces us to constantly negotiate what we are doing,
individually and collectively. Who changes the diaper when
both spouses return from work exhausted? How do you sync
a team spread across six time zones and three alternative
work arrangements? Throughout the day, the average worker
switches tasks on average every three minutes; half the time,
they are interrupting themselves, according to studies by Gloria Mark, a professor of Informatics at the University of California Irvine. Perhaps this is why the @Work study reveals that
among today’s decision-makers, a sense of accomplishment
correlates with an ability to separate work and personal life.
Without at least a few borderlines, we cannot find terra firma
in an unshackled world.
A constant negotiation of attention is our foremost challenge.
At heart, paying attention well is a matter of judicious boundary-making. Focus, or “orienting” in science parlance, is akin
to a spotlight of the mind, allowing us to filter what’s secondary and go deep into thought. Awareness opens our sensory
floodgates, making us sensitive to our wider surroundings.
Finally, executive attention fuels our abilities to plan, prioritize
and weigh conflicting data. Attention isn’t singular, scientists
are now discovering. It’s a multifaceted skill set that is a secret
to thriving in an always-on era. How we attend shapes how we
rest, play, create, manage, communicate and love.
Hopping from task to task, juggling interruptions, layering
time is our default workstyle, although research conclusively shows that we cannot multitask very well. Beyond simple
tasks such as folding laundry and watching television, we are
often slow, prone to error and intellectually half-asleep when
we multitask. And those who do it the most tend to do it most
poorly, according to a 2009 study by Stanford University scientist Clifford Nass. The habit trains them to be “suckers for
irrelevancy,” says Nass. Skimming, surfing, task-switching are
crucial “literacies” of this new age. But they must be balanced
by time for deep focus, analysis, reflection and—dare I say
it?—calm. @Work needn’t be a monotone state of mind.
Remember the weekend? It varied the pace of life, placing a
boundary around something worthwhile. Put in place to protect people from the burden of never-ending work, over time
the weekend, nevertheless, came to exemplify the rigidity of
the boundary-centric Industrial Age. Now liberated from the
confines of space and time, will we be remembered by future
generations as the people who forgot the art of the limit?
Copyright © 2012 Forbes Insights | 11
dare I say, soulful. It presents a glorious opportunity for
brands to build genuine two-way communications/feedback loops with advocate communities that can be part of
the brand’s evolution.”
Jordan says that “the new instant feedback economy
has empowered everyone to be a recommendation engine
and critic. Therefore, customer touch points are now
becoming critical shapers of customer experience driven
by a new awareness and digital behaviors that feed into
our propensity to buy,” he
says. “Feeling empowered to
“Brands, even B2Bs,
provide instant feedback on
have to celebrate the
that bad experience you had
returning that car in the airuniqueness of each
port is literally 30 seconds
channel and relate
away with your mobile app.”
to the customer
The importance of this
development
has only been
as an individual.”
heightened by the economic
— JIM DAVIS
downturn and the resulting
Senior Vice President and
intense competition for cusCMO, SAS
tomers. Customer reviews,
whether positive or negative,
can be a life-or-death issue
for many companies.
Many marketers and observers of this industry
believe that the stakes have never been higher because
companies’ competitive advantage will rest increasingly on barrages of information that appear from an
increasing range of sources. These channels will be
increasingly unplanned and unsolicited, part of a constant and constantly shape-changing conversation. The
relevance of information received one day may diminish starkly within months or weeks. This speed of
change stems from the lightning rapidity of product
change and increased transparency, since it is more diff icult than ever for companies to keep secrets about
what they are doing.
“Customers don’t need marketing so much to actually
tell them what’s out there,” says Kevin Allen, gyro’s international planning director. “The sensible marketer will be
looking to change [customers’] behavior, not necessarily
overnight, but they should have a plan for it.”
Yet some marketers understandably see a danger in
the amount of information available. They believe that
people may be so overloaded that they freeze or cannot
make the right decision. Manny Kostas, SVP marketing
and strategy, Imaging and Printing Group at HewlettPackard, sees his role akin to a guide: “If we understand
how the overload diverts us, we can better figure out
how to help the customer sort amongst all that data, and
12 | The @Work State of Mind Project
turn that overload into helping us make a real meaningful impact.”
What should messages look like, and how often
should they be sent? These are age-old questions that
have assumed an even larger significance in the @Work
world. Some marketers worry that they will irritate their
audience by sending too many communications or timing them poorly. “With work taking over, that creates
an environment where there is less tolerance for other
interruptions—and like it or not, marketing and communications typically fall into the other interruptions
category,” says Andrew Bosman, CMO of consultancy
Navigant. “As marketing and communication professionals, we must be cognizant of this resentment, and
not only pay attention to the timing of our messages but
also ensure that our targets feel they are better off for
receiving our information.”
There’s a fine balance that marketers have to strike
of frequent but not too frequent messages framed in just
the right tone. This has underscored the importance of
more personalized methods in engaging audiences—
at times, customizing methods by individuals or small
groups. “Many still approach marketing communications as trumpeting one message across all channels,
typically from a business perspective,” says Jim Davis,
senior vice president and CMO for SAS. “Those that
continue to broadcast will lose in the social environment. Brands, even B2Bs, have to celebrate the
uniqueness of each channel and relate to the customer
as an individual.”
Readiness with a human Face
Randy Brandoff
SVP and CMO, NetJets
“There’s so much activity from conversations, meetings, conference calls, travel in the
day-to-day job that, at this point, fewer decisions are being made in the office.”
The transition to a world where individuals increasingly
conduct business outside the office has been so seamless
that it’s difficult for many managers to pinpoint where employees are making most of their decisions. They see the advantages for their organizations when workers can engage
at all hours. As long as they are making good decisions, it
doesn’t generally concern them how and where they are
rendered. “More of your waking hours are devoted to thinking through some office elements,” says Randy Brandoff,
SVP and CMO of NetJets, a Columbus, Ohio-based provider
of shared aircraft ownership. “There’s so much activity from
conversations, meetings, conference calls, travel in the
day-to-day job that, at this point, fewer decisions are being
made in the office.”
Brandoff says that he rarely if ever disconnects for more than
a day from his professional life. “That’s a lot, including vacations,” he deadpans. Rather, Brandoff escapes in small snippets, a half-hour in the morning to spend time with his baby,
an hour or two in the evenings to spend time with his wife and
child. On weekends, he usually responds to emails in half-hour
to two-hour blocks.
20 hours’ worth of catching up where, by the way, I’d be getting 200 to 300 more emails.”
Yet Brandoff does not expect his charges to respond right
away. He says that part of effective management in an always-on business climate is enabling employees to maintain
a sound balance between career and home life. For example,
he requires only that his subordinates respond to emails in
“an appropriate amount of time,” unless marked urgent. And
he tries not to impose on individuals’ free time. “If you get
an email at a moment when you’re able to respond, people
respond, but they’re not in any way, shape or form required
to,” Brandoff says. “I’ll sometimes be cleaning up emails while
someone I know is on vacation, and I’ll say before they go
away: ‘Following up on a handful of things. Please wait until
your return to deal with this.’”
This high level of readiness is perhaps more important at NetJets, which has jets in the air at any time, than at some other
companies. Last year the company faced the added burden
of assimilating Marquis Jet, which the company had acquired
the previous year. Brandoff and his team had to work particularly hard creating new marketing materials to address the
firms’ combined resources. “Starting in the first quarter, we
wanted to hit the ground running on integrating the brands
and the companies and the team, and not skip a beat from
a marketing and business sales standpoint,” he says. “There
was a great deal of work to do and time pressure.”
Brandoff says that even skipping a day of email can lead to
lengthy backlogs requiring hours of catch-up. “If I were to
take a week and not look or respond to emails, I could literally
have 2,000 to 3,000 emails that I would come back to, 15 to
Copyright © 2012 Forbes Insights | 13
A thoughtful and disciplined
social media approach
Manny Kostas
VP of strategy and marketing, Hewlett-Packard Imaging & Printing Group
While two in three respondents (67%) said that input from
work-related social networks plays an important role in business, social networks still remain a less compelling resource
than other online and traditional outlets, including industry
and business websites.
Some marketers expect that to change as social media sites
now separately targeting business or personal life blend. “We
have started to think about Facebook and LinkedIn as reality
TV channels with everyone curating their own shows,” says
Kirk Chartier, a vice president at financial services firm Charles
Schwab & Co.
A number of companies in the @Work world have recognized
that social media’s effectiveness as a marketing tool depends
on a thoughtful, disciplined strategy that focuses on reaching
the right individuals at the right time.
Consider Hewlett-Packard’s Imaging & Printing division. It recently introduced a new commercial digital printer that it sells
largely to small and midsize printing firms for about $1 million.
Some of these companies may not generate revenues much
over $10 million, so the expense of replacing a printer is carefully considered.
Manny Kostas, the HP Imaging & Printing Group’s VP of
strategy and marketing, says that his unit decided to launch
the newest product at a customer’s plant before a select
audience of journalists and other individuals whom the
company identified as influencers. In the past, HP might
have staged the event at its own site, but the company felt
that a neutral environment gave it more credibility. HP provided video and other materials that could be used swiftly
online to help spread interest. “The information went out
via tweets and re-tweets from about 1,300 people who
were attending,” Kostas says. “They were helping other
print-service providers qualify this big capital investment
they were about to make, or they were print-service providers themselves who actively have a community discussing
among themselves what the best new digital printing technology is. That just fostered an official HP communications
path. What’s most critical is we’re choosing a medium that
the customer has chosen.”
14 | The @Work State of Mind Project
Kostas says that once the event took place, his group entrusted the content and distribution of messaging to the circles of
influencers and other interested parties. But he believes that
the benefits of relinquishing some control—open discussion
and a more engaged audience—outweighed the main downside of potential criticism in a public forum. “The customers
know better what’s most important to them, not necessarily
the manufacturer or even the salesperson,” Kostas says. “So
when you rely upon the industry analysts and members of the
press that focus on this very small, distinct market as well as
the customers themselves, they trust each other more than
they trust the manufacturer to help sort the most relevant and
compelling data out of this information overload that’s coming to them. As long as you get the content in the form, in the
vehicle that’s relevant to them, but then they self-select and
talk amongst themselves, then you deliver the message far
more effectively.”
Kostas says that the same principles apply in marketing to individuals and businesses. “We don’t separate the pure B2B from
the individual because the owner-manager or the professional
is inundated on the personal as well as the professional front.
The explosion of content, whether it’s email coming to them,
tweets, searching queries or blog posts, all that information is
coming at them whether they’re on their way home, on a cell
phone, on a tablet or in the workplace. We have to manage that
in its entirety.”
Kostas adds: “The key is to embrace it and to understand the
right time, the right form, and glean amongst all that information what’s most compelling.”
The @Work Reality
Email, seemingly less intrusive than a phone call, has turned into an always open channel of
communication. Just 3% of executives said that they never send work-related emails while on
vacation. Another 12% said they rarely send or receive such emails. Contrast these numbers
with the nearly two in three respondents (63%) who send or receive such emails on every, or on
most, vacations.
10
12
Never
11
Rarely
Occasionally
25
Sometimes
38
Most vacations
How often do you send and receive work-related emails
and have business discussions during vacations?
Every vacation
To be sure, this doesn’t necessarily mean a significant
commitment for decision makers. Michael Fertman,
CMO at Guidepoint, checks his email about once per day
during vacations. “I’m just looking for [emails] where I
know somebody really needs something, and there’s no
one else who’s going to be able to help them,” he says.
“It’s around literally how to find something or helping
craft a tiny little message, but not things that will be a
half-day kind of thing.”
Still, the perceived need to monitor the flow often
leads to compulsive behavior. Twelve percent of respondents said they check email on a smartphone during
non-work hours at least five times per hour. And 63% said
they check at least every one to two hours.
Even Europe, with its traditionally greater emphasis
on vacations than North America, now accepts downtime
interruptions as common practice. Indeed, almost seven in
10 respondents (69%) from Continental Europe said that
they sent or received emails during all or most vacations
(this may bear some relationship to the length of many
European vacations). That’s eight percentage points higher
than among U.S. professionals.
Gyro’s Allen says this may reflect the continued influx
and influence of international companies in Europe, which
have imported their work schedules rather than adopting
national practices. “In European companies that are part
of international networks, you often don’t have a choice.
If you were working for a German engineering company
that did most of its business in Germany, I’d be interested
to see if it was different.”
It might be. Car manufacturer Volkswagen recently
prevented some 1,100 non-management employees from
sending or receiving emails between 6:30 p.m. and 7:30
a.m. on their company-issued BlackBerrys and other
smartphones. The move responded to employee complaints about workdays extended by having to respond
to messages at any time.
3
Percentage %
Copyright © 2012 Forbes Insights | 15
But Volkswagen limited this ruling—effectively reinstituting evenings off—to non-management employees
only, and only to its German workers. Management types
don’t fall under this rule, as it was negotiated by a trade
union. That non-management employees were upset about
having to monitor email after work hours should not come
as a surprise, as attitudes about email depend on a given
employee’s rank.
The Forbes Insights survey confirms this thesis.
Analyzing the responses of two groups—those who
feel in control, who are driven to participate in the
@Work State of Mind by their own ambition; and the
Not-In-Control group, who are driven by company
expectations, such as the Volkswagen employees who
won email free time—differences in attitudes become
clear. For example, even though 35% of respondents
reported feeling productive, only 22% of the not-incontrol set felt productive.
The composition of the groups varies by title, responsibilities and company size. The higher up the ladder they
are, the happier the @Work State of Mind makes executives. While 37% of the executives surveyed were C-level,
just 24% felt a lack of control. This ratio is reversed for
executives with titles below C-level. While 64% of executives surveyed had titles below C-level, 77% of below
C-level executives felt a lack of control.
In fact, while those who feel in control are distributed
pretty evenly across the range of company sizes, the percentage of those who feel a lack of control over their work
flow increases fairly steadily with company size.
John Cripps, founding partner and president of
Marketing Decision Science Inc., adds that attitudes
toward the glut of information depend on whether people
are more often on the receiving or sending end of communications. The receivers are more likely to feel negative
about it because they are more frequently responding to
commands. “If you’re a net receiver of communications,
you’re angry because you’re not in control,” Cripps says.
“A good day for me is if I send 50 emails but receive 10 and
have no calls.”
How often do you send and receive work-related emails and have business discussions during vacations?
39
39
35
34
22
23
12
11
12
8
10
12
14
9
7
7
3
Every vacation
Most vacations
Percentage %
n The U.S. n The U.K. n Other Europe
16 | The @Work State of Mind Project
Sometimes
Occasionally
Rarely
3
Never
productive
Energized
Enabled
Negative Feelings
resigned
-
irritated
+
shackled
Positive Feelings
TOTAL
35%
TOTAL
21%
TOTAL
10%
TOTAL
33%
TOTAL
22%
TOTAL
11%
in control
44%
in control
26%
in control
13%
in control
32%
in control
15%
in control
7%
Not
in Control
22%
Not
in Control
11%
Not
in Control
3%
Not
in Control
44%
Not
in Control
36%
Not
in Control
21%
Note: Executives could select multiple responses.
Copyright © 2012 Forbes Insights | 17
What was your company’s approximate revenue during
the most recent fiscal year?
Less than $5 million
5
13
$5 million - $24.9 million
6
13
$25 million - $99.9 million
9
10
14
$100 million -$499 million
11
13
$500 million - $999 million
11
18
$1 billion - $4.9 billion
16
14
$5 billion - $9.9 billion
10
21
Greater than $10 billion
16
Percentage %
n Lack of control n Control
18 | The @Work State of Mind Project
Email often works in favor of C-level executives and
owners, notes gyro’s Swann, because it gives them more
control. They’re copied on many emails, which means
they don’t feel obliged to respond but still get a constant
flow of information, which helps with decision-making.
It also helps with monitoring activity and conversation,
and now keeps very senior people, who once upon a time
would have been very detached, quite involved in what’s
going on.
Apart from control, email also affords them comfort. “I
check email during vacations, every morning and some late
afternoons,” says Juniper Networks’ Flaherty, “That doesn’t
mean I speak to anybody, but it means that I monitor the
flow. It makes me more relaxed that everything is well at the
home office.”
But even C-level executives can sometimes feel deluged
by email requests. For marketers, this means that they cannot know the current state of mind of any receiver. The
challenge is knowing when to contact someone, and how
to shape a message. Cripps differentiates between text messages and emails. He would send a text to a customer he
knows well, but would resort to the more official format
of an email when bidding on a contract. “You have to play
carefully,” he says.
In view of this nuanced reality, Michael Goldberg, senior
partner and CMO at public relations firm Porter Novelli,
says that although ever-improving software can help pinpoint how and when to communicate, a marketer’s success
rests on intuition, personal judgment—what he refers to as
the “human touch.”
An email one day after a meeting may appear pushy if it
seems robotic, without substance. But contact that addresses
a particular issue, framed gracefully, can show sincere interest
and weigh positively on a potential customer. “I don’t think
it’s the time; it’s the relevance and the intent of the message,”
Goldberg says. “Whether it’s B2B or B2C, it’s still a human
dealing with a human.”
Always
Prioritize
Which of the following best describes your title?
Business
owner
Board
member
Chief executive
officer/president/
managing director
Chief financial
officer
10
Lauren Flaherty
E
VP and CMO,
4
13
Juniper Networks
3
“With all these devices that liberate
us, the freedom and mobility are
exceptional.”
2
3
10
4
Lauren Flaherty sees the ready access to information and
dismantling of the borders between personal and professional life as beneficial to her job. “It was harder when
you were doing this with workstations and faxes,” says
Flaherty, EVP and CMO for Juniper Networks. “You had
to do it from your house, so you had to be tethered to a
wire. With the new devices, you are able to be more productive. You are able to be more responsible.” She adds:
“With all these devices that liberate us, the freedom and
mobility are exceptional.”
10
4
4
4
Chief operating
officer
3
3
3
Chief information
officer/chief
technology officer
Other C-level
executive
Flaherty says that it’s important to develop time management skills, and that these may be best learned partly
by observing “high performance” colleagues. “It’s a combination of experience and picking up best practices,”
she says.
3
3
2
4
As the flow of information and communications has increased, she has also improved her ability to prioritize. “Pick
a period of time when there hasn’t been a requirement for
people in business to filter through a lot of information, distill what’s important, get to the core issues, focus on what
matters,” Flaherty says. “Maybe the tools and technology
have changed the volume, but the fundamentals are the
same. You’ve got to hone those prioritization skills.”
4
3
6
EVP/SVP
6
6
35
VP/Director
42
34
15
Manager
21
12
Head of business
unit/development
8
8
9
Percentage %
n Total n Lack of control n Control
Copyright © 2012 Forbes Insights | 19
A Blurring of Work-Life Boundaries
The place of doing business—once, the traditional office—
is no longer a physical or stationary location, but a state of
mind. People address work issues whenever and wherever
they arise. “The collapse or collision of work and home
life is a new world phenomenon that must be understood
by today’s marketers in order to shape their communications, messaging and delivery methods,” says Michael A.
Disser, president of MAD Marketing.
Asked if she was making more business decisions
outside the office than in the office, Juniper Networks’
Flaherty said: “I don’t even know if I make that distinction. You make them where and when you need to
make them.”
The survey detected some regional variation here:
Those in the U.K. spend less time on work decisions at
home, as well as less time on personal matters in the office,
and so are more likely to keep the two realms separate.
Executives interviewed for this report point to the
advantages of the blurring of the lines between work and
personal time. Gyro’s Allen notes that where and when
someone decides is fluid, and that the locations where
business decisions are made are not always correlated
with when or where they are conceived or evaluated.
Executives may be pondering business-related information during personal time, or they may test a potential
solution they’ve reached outside the office at work.
“Outside of work is often one of the few places where I
have a chance to actually think about something, gather
up the evidence, weigh the facts and come to a conclusion,” says Allen.
Porter Novelli’s Goldberg says that it’s an advantage
to be able to respond to the flash of inspiration anytime.
“The light of it to me is that I have a right to participate
in anything that my head and heart are interested in at the
moment,” he says. “There is no ‘open’ or ‘closed’ sign.”
Where are we when making business decisions?
95%
52%
59%
55%
9%
21%
Making business
decisions
at the office
Making at least 20% of
their work decisions
at home
20 | The @Work State of Mind Project
Making business
decisions en route
to work
Making at least 50% of
their work decisions
at home
Making business
decisions at home
Making less than 10%
of work decisions
at home
Goldberg expounds on the freedom afforded by the
@Work State of Mind: “I can accomplish all the matters
of heart and mind, and get them all done—ultimately with
much more control than I ever had before. It wasn’t that
long ago, but at the same time it was a world ago, I had to
focus on things that were professional during the day, and
I couldn’t get to [other things]. So, I had chores when I
got to work and I had chores when I got home, a to-do list
in two places. Now I can be in a coffee line and reserving
tickets to a vacation, and at the same time, studying something in social media that I think is relevant to a client. It’s
this mass blending.”
The blurring of work and personal life has influenced
not only where and when, but also—perhaps most important—how people are making decisions. More than three in
four respondents said that personal values were important or
critically important in making business decisions, more than
said that return on investment or other financial benchmarks
were important or critically important.
Meanwhile, at the office...
98%
Spend time at the office
on personal matters
4%
Spend more than 50%
of their office time on
personal matters
What percentage of time do you spend on work decisions at home?
27
29
27
24
20
18
16
19
21
22
19
12
11
6
>50
5
6
8
6
>40
2
>30
>20
>10
<10
1
2
Don’t know
n The U.S. n The U.K. n Other Europe
Copyright © 2012 Forbes Insights | 21
Since decision makers often involve their personal
values in their business decision-making, a marketing
message has to reverberate with or inform the value system. “Effective leaders have a strong set of values, and as the
@Work State of Mind evolves to more decisions being
taken from home or holiday, then personal values will
become more important factors in making decisions,”
says Chris Combemale, executive director of the Direct
Marketing Association, a U.K.-based trade group. “Sales
and marketing messages need to move beyond transactional, rational decision making and focus more on
brand values, tone of voice and subjective benefits.”
Combemale adds: “In the technology space, brands
that are sexy or cool will win out versus brands that
are purely functional, and psychographic factors will
become more important.”
While reaching out to their audience, marketers need to take into consideration all the layers of the
@Work State of Mind, starting with the setting where
this message is received. “The majority of marketers
might think, ‘We’re going to talk to someone in an office
setting, they’ll be at work and they’ll be in their office,’”
says gyro’s Swann. “We’ll send them something, and it’s
all pretty traditional.”
But that can be a mistake. The executive that you may
be trying to reach could be in a taxi on his way to the airport, he could be at home, or on vacation.
The reception of the marketing message will vary
depending on the place and time, so “you’re going to get
a little bit of tension,” says Swann, “and whatever you do
with that tension, you have to make an impact.”
Every day in America, 3.5 billion brand-related conversations take place, according to a report by Keller Fay
Group. Getting a message noticed and having it reverberate in that environment is a sophisticated process,
requiring understanding of the @Work State of Mind.
“The perception for marketers is that brands aren’t
being spoken about,” says Swann, “so what we have to do
is shout our message at this audience. The reality is that
people are speaking about brands over time. They’re talking about them particularly in the course of work but also
in the course of their private life. Therefore, it’s less about
yelling and shouting and it’s much more about offering
something new to say about that brand. Give people some
clear value, and they will talk about you.”
22 | The @Work State of Mind Project
Factors affecting business decision making
77%
Personal values important
or critically important
Conclusion
How to put the @Work State of Mind
to work for your brand
From the thought leaders at gyro
The emergence of the @Work State of Mind necessitates some wholesale reconsideration of how marketing communications programs are planned and executed. New best practices must emerge to accommodate such radical
reconfiguration of the business decision maker’s time and space. These new practices seem obvious, based on the
findings of this research.
A new practice for driving actionable results
At gyro we are working to develop new processes and tools to define and visualize the decision makers’ @Work State
of Mind. Through this visualization we seek to understand where our client’s marketing efforts intersect with decision
makers and their influencers, but more importantly we hope to identify new opportunities for the client to engage and
support the individual’s decision-making process. The outcome is an action plan for adjusting current marketing efforts,
altering existing message platforms and creating altogether new marketing strategies and programs.
@Work State of Mind Action Planning
1. Mapping the @Work State of Mind
A. Modeling the Purchase Consideration Perspective
The gyro process starts by building a model of the purchase consideration process based on input from the client’s
sales and marketing team. This consideration model is used as a guide for conducting qualitative research with
targeted decision makers and influencers.
B. Building a Project List Persona
Our qualitative research asks participants to describe their mental “to do” list comprised of work and personal tasks.
From this study we discover how decision makers accomplish the task of decision making throughout their daily
routine. We identify critical interactions, defining where those interactions will likely take place (work, home,
other), how interactions are accomplished and what are the likely outcomes from those interactions. Far more than
just a replay of the day, this investigation unlocks the pace and emotion that is at play during these often rapid-fire
exchanges. The results can be surprising when compared to the client’s rational and linear view of the process. This
new view is captured in a “Project List Persona” that paints a rich picture of the individual, their emotions, dependence on others, use of technology and their frame of mind throughout the consideration process.
C. Diagramming the Active Decision Flow
Accompanying the Project List Persona is the Active Decision Flow, which maps the activities of an individual based on
goals such as seeking solutions, validating sources and building consensus. This Active Decision Flow is often circular
and includes many interactions typically not captured in the linear purchase consideration model.
Copyright © 2012 Forbes Insights | 23
2. Validating and Enriching the Data
A. Capturing and validating Consumer-Initiated Connections
Drawing from the persona research, we are able to identify keywords and topics that can be used to feed social media
monitoring and search tools that validate the qualitative research and determine the scale and depth of the conversation in the marketplace. These tools also identify the overall tone of the conversation and relevant authorities.
Additional online tools are used to identify destinations most visited by decision makers, thereby giving us a more
complete picture of their activities.
B. Sizing up the opportunity with a Relevance Register
Combining results from the qualitative tools with quantitative data allows us to identify and prioritize destinations
and conversations where the decision maker is most engaged and will find the client’s information most relevant to his
or her goals. This prioritized list of opportunities is referred to as a Relevance Register and serves to guide our final
recommendations.
3. Shaping actionable recommendations in the @Work State of Mind Report
The combined output from the process is summarized in a report that offers recommendations in three areas.
A. Adapting current marketing efforts
Recommendations on how to adjust current marketing programs to better support the decision maker’s tasks, motivations and destinations.
B. Altering content strategies
Recommendations on how to create consumable content and shape relevant message platforms.
C. Identifying new opportunities
Recommendations on new engagement strategies based on a better understanding of the @Work State of Mind.
A fresh perspective for a new consciousness
The @Work State of Mind Project remains a collaborative effort: it is only facilitated by gyro. The practice is new and
rapidly evolving and we are looking for clients who are interested in learning with us. We invite you to contact us to
participate in the global ideation process underway to shape a new strategic and tactical approach.
24 | The @Work State of Mind Project
Addressing the whole @Work State of Mind?
EMOTIONAL
DRIVERS
This framework depicts the individual in the middle of the whole @Work State of Mind. The highlighted area in lower
left is where most business marketing activities have been focused historically.
POINT OF V
IEW
SONAL
PER
AREA OF CONCERN:
INTERCONNECTEDNESS
EM
PO
E
SOCIAL MEDIA
US
CA
WE
RM
E
NT
AREA OF CONCERN:
REPUTATION
MOTIVATION
AFFINITY
PERSONAL NETWORK
WEB/CONNECTIVITY
FEEDBACK
IL
I
The
@Work
State
of Mind
CAPABILITY
RE
SP
MISSION
VISION
MA
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
BUSINESS COMMUNICATION
N
IO
AT
OR
AB
PERFORMANCE
METRICS
S
IC
YT
AL
DE
CI
AN
SI
D
ON
AR
BO
LL
DIGITAL
DRIVERS
SH
LEADERSHIP
MANAGEMENT
TEAMWORK
CO
INTEGRATED EFFECTIVENESS
DA
KI
NG
VALUES
EXPERTISE
RMATION TECHNOLOGY
INFO
T
EN
NM
BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
ON
SI
B
IG
AL
SOCIAL
DRIVERS
ATIONAL PSYCHOL
OGY
ANIZ
ORG
TY
GOALS
SI
TU
A
TI
ON
A
L
AW
AR
EN
ES
S
AREA OF CONCERN:
TRANSPARENCY
ECONOMIC
DRIVERS
NESS POINT OF VIEW
BUSI
AREA OF CONCERN:
PARTNERSHIPS AND ALLIANCES
Copyright © 2012 Forbes Insights | 25
About
Forbes Insights
Forbes Insights is the strategic
research practice of Forbes Media,
publisher of Forbes magazine
and Forbes.com. Taking advantage
of a proprietary database of
senior-level executives in the
Forbes community, Forbes Insights’
research covers a wide range of
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and regulation; small/midsize
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Bruce Rogers
Chief Insights Officer
Brenna Sniderman
Senior Director
Christiaan Rizy
Director
Kasia Moreno
Editorial Director
James P. Rubin
Report Author
Taryn Sefecka
designer
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