<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/benimoto/2732919905/in/photolist-5auVSH-6Jh5Ut-9U3ebW-6NekNt-6NiwYQ-6GgSkJ-4N3gGL-fcu1hH-7yF1jZ-6JmavG-6Jh9aH-6GfV6n-zDDy1-zDDxC-zDDxh-zDDwL-2YhSKj-9tc445-bpJiXC-bCDes6-6DGPyR-9U3dTj-9U3dFC-9U3dAQ-5hpUs3-9ryHb-6NgAwV-8Jwh93-6MGtQR-6DGPNa-6cezDr-6Nekbe-6LJz1W-2Zw2TM-6LEpCT-6BNBfZ-kvSMQ-6JmcyJ-6ciKts-7t84aC-5xkc4E-9tc48s-6GjXPJ-2Zw2pP-2ZAxG5-2ZAxhq-6Jh7X6-6Jh9Gn-9t94zX-6GgSSd">Benny Mazur/Flickr</a></span></p><p class="caption">The magic of ChaCha: Texting a question to get a text back with the information. In this case, rabbits are crepuscular.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>Five years ago, I became an anonymous guru, answering the world's questions sent in via text.</p><p>My specialty was looking up Google Maps directions. Sitting in my pajamas with a laptop in my lap, I would quickly type in two locations and respond right away with a time estimate. In each message, I tacked on a friendly "ChaCha On!"</p><p>On the other end, an equally anonymous person with a cell phone would get my text message and know just how far away the movie theater was from their restaurant. (Hopefully they wouldn't immediately respond asking if there was a later showing of Avatar.)</p><p>In 2015, this sounds absurd. Today, Google Now will have already told them they're running too late. Tomorrow, Facebook's M would have re-booked the tickets for a later showing. </p><p>But in 2008, months after the iPhone launched, the easiest way to get information to your phone was to ask ChaCha. </p><h2>The world's information at your (texting) finger tips</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/rjacklin/366614694/in/photolist-yoZM1-9U3dsG-9TZpnp-9U3ewb-9TZpJR-9U3e6h-NsMu2-zoKDQ-9ixRnr-6ix5xC-5VWUUC-8JwgXU-9U12LD-9U3RhL-9U135H-9U12Bk-9U12mM-6JhacZ-8dc68N-5auVSH-6Jh5Ut-9U3ebW-6NekNt-6NiwYQ-6GgSkJ-4N3gGL-fcu1hH-7yF1jZ-6JmavG-6Jh9aH-6GfV6n-zDDy1-zDDxC-zDDxh-zDDwL-2YhSKj-9tc445-bpJiXC-bCDes6-6DGPyR-9U3dTj-9U3dFC-9U3dAQ-5hpUs3-9ryHb-6NgAwV-8Jwh93-6MGtQR-6DGPNa-6cezDr">Rjacklin1975/Flickr</a></span></p><p class="caption">ChaCha's early chat version before it jumped to mobile texting.</p></div><p></p></div></div>When ChaCha first launched in 2006, it was a different way to search the internet. Instead of typing into Google, you could just have a normal chat conversation in a box that looked a lot like AIM.</p><p>The startup raised $10 million because it was "a game-changing disruptive equation, even in the context of giants like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft," its <a href="Answering the questions, or so I thought, were humans. ">investor, Morton Meyerson, was quoted</a>. Investors like Jeff Bezos latched onto it, pouring more money into the Indiana-based company. </p><p>By 2008, the service launched a mobile version, which is when it went viral with my friends. As a high school student, I played around with it after school, trying to come up with the craziest questions I could ask. Unless you had a smartphone with a fast hook-up to Wikipedia and parents who didn't care about data, texting ChaCha was your info line and your entertainment.</p><p>However, ChaCha's popularity amongst teens like me was a big problem for the site.</p><p>"The whole goal was to break the system. You have guides who come in and try to do foul play, and then you have users who come back in over and over again," said ChaCha's CEO Scott A. Jones in an interview with Business Insider.</p><p>Half of the company was devoted to managing unruly guides - contractors like me who would answer questions - and the unruly users - teens like me who just wanted to ask it crazy questions to see if ChaCha could answer.</p><p>"It was only 1-2% of the users or the guides, but they could do damage quickly because they were intent on it. They would spend hours a day just pummeling the system or answering the system with bad answers," Jones said.</p><h2>Using humans to fall back on</h2><p>One way around the abuse is to rely only on algorithms and computers. </p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ChaCha_Staff_Picture_-_October_2010.jpg">Sara Camden/Wikimedia Commons</a></span></p><p class="caption">ChaCha staff in October 2010. Not pictured: the thousands of guides performing the searches from home.</p></div><p></p></div></div>When you search Google, there isn't a human behind it frantically searching. When you ask Siri a question on your iPhone, she speaks back, but in a jilted computer voice. It's more amazing when she can find things for you, and less frustrating when she can't. She's clearly not human, after all.</p><p>Early on, ChaCha started cataloging questions and the answers written by guides. Nine months after launch, ChaCha added "Expediters" who could select an answer from the catalog to send in response. Basic questions like "How many planets are there?" or "Who is on the dime?" didn't require someone to search it every time.</p><p>As a user, I didn't notice whether it was a human or the AI answering me. Since the answers had been written by humans before, each one generally read like someone had personally written it out, down to the same "ChaCha Again!" or "ChaCha On!" sign-offs.</p><p>Jones estimates that about 70 percent of the questions were answered first by AI, another 20 percent had an answer selected by the database, and the remaining went to guides who would answer by hand.</p><p>"We were 10 million questions and answers," Jones said. "But it didn't really matter because we had this army of Guides and they could always answer a question that way."</p><h2><strong>Becoming a guide</strong></h2><p>By the time I was a college student with time and an internet connection to waste, I decided to try my hand at becoming a "Guide" in December 2009. </p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Biz Carson/Business Insider</span></p></div><p></p></div>At that point, the questions that ChaCha did toss to guides like me were either geographical or time-based. Answering "What was the score of the game last night?" required knowing the day and what the big game was. </p><p>But about a month into my tenure as a guide, I received an email. My user rating was too low at 84 percent. ChaCha told me I should make sure I'm still signing my messages with "ChaCha!" or my most-used "ChaCha on!" Otherwise it was a list of helpful hints and tips.</p><p>This is what it must feel like to be an Uber driver today, and maybe an M employee tomorrow. </p><p>As a contractor, I don't remember the day I stopped. I think I just stopped logging in once school got back in swing, and my dead time evaporated with a new semester.</p><p>My month as a human Siri faded to the back of my mind (to this day, I don't think I ever earned the $100 minimum). ChaCha, too, began to fade just as quickly.</p><h2>Lesson for Facebook: People are messier than computers</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table center"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Biz Carson/Business Insider</span></p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>ChaCha now is more of a "low boil" than the roaring viral sensation it once was, Jones says.</p><p>The company was never able to monetize its service. The site followed the trends in mobile, moving away from costly texts to building out an app. The 12 employees who are still with ChaCha work remotely, while Jones has decamped to Hawaii, away from his Indiana headquarters. It makes its money as texting service for Veterans Affairs and licensing out its data.</p><p>But now Facebook is following in ChaCha's footsteps with its own hybrid human-computer assistant: Facebook M. </p><p>M is supposed to be more transactional - it's more about helping somebody book restaurant reservations or buy flowers - but it's using a lot of the same tricks as ChaCha.</p><p>For instance, ChaCha gave guides a full chat history so they could see when a pronoun like "it" referred to a movie theater's location versus a movie itself. Many of the apps, like Siri, can't even follow a chain of conversation.</p><p>For Facebook's vision of M, humans monitor "every" communication from "start to finish" to help the computer. Hopefully, that will cut down on bad answers on behalf of the computers, but it could open it up to bad actors on behalf of the humans.</p><p>Facebook claims it has a few dozen employees now, but its chief Messenger boss envisions a network of "thousands" of M Trainers over time. Whether they will behave better (or perform at a better satisfaction than 84%) is hard to know. </p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Biz Carson/Business Insider</span></p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>But Jones cautioned that people react differently to computers and humans, as <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/my-life-with-facebooks-m#.xwjMkDDyo">we've already seen in the early M reviews</a>.</p><p>Those reviews tried to push the limits of what the "M" computer was supposed to be able to. Computers normally can't hand-draw photos, so the little human puppeteer of M in the background peeked its head out to do it for you. With ChaCha, part of the magic was knowing that a human was on the other side, looking up things for you - or answering the most insane question you can think of.</p><p>Either idea, once it reaches millions of users (or Facebook's billions) starts to face problems. More humans trying to challenge the computer, more humans introducing error into the computer's work.</p><p>Given Jones' experience with the unruly guides, he's skeptical about the privacy, especially since a lot of what M is doing is facilitating transactions, like booking plane tickets or lowering a Comcast bill. It's an area he intentionally avoided.</p><p>"We didn't do things like make a restaurant reservation on your behalf," Jones said.</p><p>Facebook may have the advantage of having linked accounts (and an extra decade of technological advancement), but ChaCha's troll trouble is a warning shot.</p><p>"I'll be interested to see how they pull it off because it's rife with places where people's privacy could become a risk," Jones said.</p><p>ChaCha on! </p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/kids-dont-use-facebook-2015-10">We asked a bunch of kids what they think about Facebook</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="ttaTNzcTrV3D2fg3UQRLRE5tNi_izNGO" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

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54. Will The Real Mr. Oreo Please Stand Up?

<p><div class="image-container float_right" style="width:480px"><div class="image"><p class="source"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/merchau/8548057127/">Flickr/mer chau</a></p></div></div>THERE is a never-ending supply of <keyword id="6355515" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="Business">business</keyword> gurus telling us how we can, and must, do more. Sheryl Sandberg urges women to “Lean In” if they want to get ahead. John Bernard offers breathless advice on conducting “Business at the Speed of Now”. Michael Port tells salesmen how to “Book Yourself Solid”. And in case you thought you might be able to grab a few moments to yourself, Keith Ferrazzi warns that you must “Never Eat Alone”.</p>
<p>Yet the biggest problem in the business world is not too little but too much—too many distractions and interruptions, too many things done for the sake of form, and altogether too much busy-ness. The Dutch seem to believe that an excess of meetings is the biggest devourer of time: they talk of vergaderziekte, “meeting sickness”. However, a study last year by the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that it is e-mails: it found that highly skilled office workers spend more than a quarter of each working day writing and responding to them.</p>
<p>Which of these banes of modern business life is worse remains open to debate. But what is clear is that office workers are on a treadmill of pointless activity. Managers allow meetings to drag on for hours. Workers generate e-mails because it requires little effort and no thought. An entire management industry exists to spin the treadmill ever faster.</p>
<p>All this “leaning in” is producing an epidemic of over<keyword id="6355058" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="Work">work</keyword>, particularly in the United States. Americans now toil for eight-and-a-half hours a week more than they did in 1979. A survey last year by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that almost a third of working adults get six hours or less of sleep a night. Another survey last year by Good Technology, a provider of secure mobile systems for businesses, found that more than 80% of respondents continue to work after leaving the office, 69% cannot go to bed without checking their inbox and 38% routinely check their work e-mails at the dinner table.</p>
<p>This activity is making it harder to focus on real work as opposed to make-work. Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School, who has been conducting a huge study of work and creativity, reports that workers are generally more creative on low-pressure days than on high-pressure days when they are confronted with a flurry of unpredictable demands. In 2012 Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, and two colleagues deprived 13 people in the IT business of e-mail for five days and studied them intensively. They found that people without it concentrated on tasks for longer and experienced less stress.</p>
<p>It is high time that we tried a different strategy—not “leaning in” but “leaning back”. There is a distinguished history of leadership thinking in the lean-back tradition. Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s favourite prime minister, extolled the virtues of “masterful inactivity”. Herbert Asquith embraced a policy of “wait and see” when he had the job. Ronald Reagan also believed in not overdoing things: “It’s true hard work never killed anybody,” he said, “but I figure, why take the chance?”. This tradition has been buried in a morass of meetings and messages. We need to revive it before we schedule ourselves to death.</p>
<p>The most obvious beneficiaries of leaning back would be creative workers—the very people who are supposed to be at the heart of the modern economy. In the early 1990s Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist, asked 275 creative types if he could interview them for a book he was writing. A third did not bother to reply at all and another third refused to take part. Peter Drucker, a management guru, summed up the mood of the refuseniks: “One of the secrets of productivity is to have a very big waste-paper basket to take care of all invitations such as yours.” Creative people’s most important resource is their time—particularly big chunks of uninterrupted time—and their biggest enemies are those who try to nibble away at it with e-mails or meetings. Indeed, creative people may be at their most productive when, to the manager’s untutored eye, they appear to be doing nothing.</p>
<p>Managers themselves could benefit. Those at the top are best employed thinking about strategy rather than operations—about whether the company is doing the right thing rather than whether it is sticking to its plans. When he was boss of General Electric, Jack Welch used to spend an hour a day in what he called “looking out of the window time”. When he was in charge of Microsoft Bill Gates used to take two “think weeks” a year when he would lock himself in an isolated cottage. Jim Collins, of “Good to Great” fame, advises all bosses to keep a “stop doing list”. Is there a meeting you can cancel? Or a dinner you can avoid?</p>
<p>Less is more—more or less</p>
<p>Junior managers would do well to follow the same advice. In “Do Nothing”, one of the few business books to grapple with the problem of over-management, Keith Murnighan of the Kellogg School of Management argues that the best managers focus their attention on establishing the right rules—recruiting the right people and establishing the right incentives—and then get out of the way. He quotes a story about Eastman Kodak in its glory days. A corporate reorganisation left a small division out in the cold—without a leader or a reporting line to headquarters. The head office only rediscovered the division when it received a note from a customer congratulating the unit on its work.</p>
<p>Doing nothing may be going too far. Managers play an important role in co-ordinating complicated activities and disciplining slackers. And some creative people would never finish anything if they were left to their own devices. But there is certainly a case for doing a lot less—for rationing e-mail, cutting back on meetings and getting rid of a few overzealous bosses. Leaning in has been producing negative returns for some time now. It is time to try the far more radical strategy of leaning back.</p>

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