Corner Office: Paulett Eberhart: Paulett Eberhart of CDI, on Gaining the Boss’s Attention

Q. Were you in leadership roles early on?

A. After I graduated from college, I was hired as a billing office supervisor of about 30 people.

Q. That’s a big step for a first management role.

A. It’s one of those moments where you show up at the right time and they needed someone, and I think my college education was important to them. I had the good fortune of working for a woman who taught me a lot. Most of the people who worked there were older than me and they certainly had a lot more experience.

So how do you deal with that? You have to learn to become very humble, and you have to recognize that they know a lot more than you do. I spent a lot of time walking around getting to know them, spending time sitting with them, learning what they were doing, how they were doing it. I think they appreciated that.

Q. You said your boss at the time was a good mentor. How so?

A. She knew that I really wanted to learn, I was dedicated, and I was working really hard. I have found that if people think you’re working really hard and trying, then they’ll spend extra time with you. I learned very early that you’ve got to ask for help, you’ve got to go in and say: “Look, I’ve got this situation and I’m not sure what to do. I want to run it by you.” If people think you’re really trying, they’ll go the extra mile to help you.

Q. Tell me about some aspects of your leadership style today.

A. I tell my team that I expect them to be very honest, brutally honest with me, but in a respectful way. I like to have strong people around me, and they have to be very open and very honest and very candid. So you can’t just tell me once and assume that I grasp it.

If it’s critical and important, you’ve got to come back, you’ve got to tell me, you’ve got to come into my office and shut the door. I don’t care if you have to pound your fists on the table and say, “Paulett, I don’t think you’re comprehending it, I want your full attention, listen to me, this is what I am telling you.” We, at a minimum, need to discuss it or whatever the situation is.

And so I encourage them to be very aggressive with me because I work and I run at a fast pace, and sometimes you have to stop and take five minutes. You’ve got to invite them in and sit down and say: “O.K., what are the issues? You’ve got my full attention. Let’s talk about it.”

Q. You were brought into your current company to turn it around.

A. The board decided it needed someone from the outside who could bring more of a growth culture, which is a lot of what I like to do. I like transforming businesses and then figuring out how do we get a new strategy and start really growing. A lot of that goes back to my early days at E.D.S. because we grew so quickly there.

Q. What have you done to change the culture?

A. I was surprised to learn how many people in the company really didn’t know the company’s history. So I had some people re-create the history and we put together a video, because I think it’s good to know the past that leads you into the future.

I also saw a company that had really talented people, but they didn’t really talk to each other a lot. They were in different silos, and there were actually a lot of silos, given the size of the company. One of the things I heard from talking to our clients is that people from CDI don’t even know who each other are. That told me we weren’t maximizing our opportunities with the client.

So we tore down a lot of the barriers and really got people to think that if it’s good for the client, and good for CDI, then we’ve got to figure out a way to make it happen.

The other thing that I really focused on was accountability. You have to be accountable for your actions. And if you sign up to hit an objective, whatever that objective may be, then the rest of the organization and your client, or whoever else it may be, are counting on you to hit that goal. I felt we needed to push that more. Culture is a hard thing to change. It takes a long time, but you’ve just got to keep repeating things and practicing what you preach.

Q.  I’ve heard a lot of leaders talk about the importance of repetition.

A. People don’t spend enough time communicating. People love to know what’s going on, and you’ve got to keep communicating day in and day out. Sometimes I’ll think, I’ve said this so many times — surely people would get it. But then you’ll go into a meeting and you’ll think, wow, O.K., they don’t get it yet, so we’ve got to continue reinforcing it.

Q. How do you hire?

A. I try to get them to talk about what’s not on their résumé. Part of it is just getting a sense of the person. I’ll say that we’ve all had a lot of successes in our life, but we’ve had some things that we’ve learned from as well, so what are some of those?

And I’ll ask them, “If I were to talk to a group of people who’ve worked for you in different roles, what would they say that’s good about you, and then, what are the two things they would change about you?” And so it’s not so much about the answer — it’s just how thoughtful were they about it and were they really honest?

Q. What career advice do you give people?

A. I think accountability is important. People have to be able to count on you to deliver on what you committed to deliver, whatever that is.

I also talk to people about what I have learned in my career, and what I would do differently in some areas. One of the things I should have done earlier in my career is network more. I thought, just keep your head down and keep working and everything will work out. And I’ve done well, so I have no complaints.

But the advice I give people is to really keep those networks alive and truly stay in touch with people.

Online-Only TV Shows Join Fight for Attention

When Amazon sizes up the television marketplace, it sees opportunity. Internet-delivered TV, which until recently was unready for prime time, is the new front in the war for Americans’ attention spans. Netflix is following up on the $100 million drama “House of Cards” with four more series this year. Microsoft is producing programming for the Xbox video game console with the help of a former CBS president. Other companies, from AOL to Sony to Twitter, are likely to follow.

The companies are, in effect, creating new networks for television through broadband pipes and also giving rise to new rivalries — among one another, as between Amazon and Netflix, and with the big but vulnerable broadcast networks as well.

“These are the very first lab tests in a very grand experiment,” said Jeff Berman, the president of BermanBraun, a media company that makes programming for NBC, HGTV, AOL and YouTube, among others.

As he suggested, the competition has only just begun. Amazon is making pilot episodes for at least six comedies and five children’s shows, with more to be announced soon. Sometime this spring it will put the episodes on its Amazon Prime Instant Video service and ask its customers which ones they like, then order full seasons of some of them.

Netflix has been ordering entire seasons of its shows without seeing pilots first. Reed Hastings, Netflix’s chief executive, said last week that “House of Cards,” the political thriller starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, had been a “great success” for the company. Its next program, a horror series called “Hemlock Grove” from the film director Eli Roth, premieres in April.

Microsoft has said comparatively little about its plans. But all three companies are commissioning TV shows because they have millions of subscribers on monthly or yearly subscription plans. Though the shows may be loss leaders, executives say that having exclusive content — something that cannot be seen anywhere else — increases the likelihood that existing subscribers will keep paying and that new ones will sign up.

The proliferation of shows is generally seen as a good thing for viewers, who have more choices about what to watch and when, and for producers and actors, who have more places to be seen and heard. But the trend may inflame cable companies’ concerns about cord-cutting by subscribers who decide there’s enough to watch online. At the same time, the rise of Internet-only shows may make viewers more dependent on the broadband cord. In many cases, though, both cable and broadband are supplied by the same company.

Unlike the early stabs at Internet television, these shows look and feel like traditional TV. That is partly because more viewers are watching Internet content on big-screen TV sets, but it is mostly because the companies involved are throwing money at the screens: each of the Amazon comedy pilots cost the company upward of $1 million, according to people involved in their production, which is less than the $2 million invested in a broadcast comedy pilot, but more than is typically invested in cable pilots.

Not only are the budgets comparable, so are the perks for actors and creators — like trailers and car-service pickups. The writers are guild members. The actors have what the people involved say are standard television contracts, with options for several seasons if shows succeed.

“There’s absolutely no difference” between TV and these new productions, said Jeffrey Tambor, who starred in HBO’s “Larry Sanders Show,” then Fox’s “Arrested Development.” Now, at 68, he is an online pioneer: earlier this year he reprised his character for Netflix’s new season of “Arrested,” which will make its premiere in May. While taping that show, he read the script for “The Onion Presents: The News,” an Amazon pilot. He signed up, and played the older rival to Cheyenne Jackson.

The “Onion” producers took over half of the newsroom of NY1, a New York news channel, in mid-February and reimagined it as the headquarters of an unscrupulous news corporation. (In the pilot episode, a reporter kidnaps a child to increase ratings.) NY1 had rented out its space to the producers of “Gossip Girl,” “Damages” and “The Good Wife” before — but never to a show being made for the Web. For most of the actors there, like Mr. Jackson, a Broadway star whose TV credits include “30 Rock” and “Glee,” the taping was their one pilot of the season — and thus represented a bet on Amazon over the broadcasters.

Mr. Jackson recalled that his manager called about “The Onion” with a note of apprehension in her voice. “It’s online,” she said. “We have to talk about this.” But when he read the script, he said, he felt confident — the tone of it reminded him of “30 Rock.”

“This is kind of a leap of faith,” he said between tapings. “We’re all taking a leap together.”

Analysts say they expect more TV investment to come, including from companies that do not have monthly subscribers to please. YouTube, for instance, the biggest video Web site of all, makes its money from ads, not from subscriptions. But it has paid dozens of outside producers to start channels so that it has original, professional content. And its owner, Google, can afford to pay many more.

Similar logic is spurring cable channels, which each receive a small piece of cable subscribers’ monthly payments, to come up with more dramas and sitcoms that they can call their own. This brings up a conundrum, of course: too much great TV to watch, and not enough time.

“Viewers find organizing and managing all of their beloved TV options to be a bit stressful,” said Christy Tanner, the chief executive of TVGuide.com, which conducted research that found respondents who said “it feels like work” and “I’m afraid of missing something.”

Nonetheless, the number of companies trying to elbow into the TV space is only going up — further proving the nearly 20-year-old adage that “content is king.” Witness DirecTV, the biggest satellite distributor in the country, which is planning to introduce its first homegrown show, a thriller called “Rogue,” next month. Christopher Long, who runs DirecTV’s original programming, said he wanted to buy several more shows: “Our opinion is, if we build good enough television, people will find it.”

Montevideo Journal: Uruguay’s Video Game Start-Ups Garner Attention

But the company, a success in the fiercely competitive field of video game development, stands out from other high-tech ventures in one respect: its unconventional location, which frequently confuses people abroad. “They politely ask, ‘Where is Uruguay?’ ” said Álvaro Azofra, one of the three founders of Ironhide, the company behind Kingdom Rush, a lucratively popular game in the United States that involves a cartoonish kingdom under attack by marauding yetis and ogres.

Squeezed between Brazil and Argentina and long dependent on commodities exports, Uruguay may be better known for its flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. But attention is now shifting to the country’s growing constellation of start-ups that are engineering video games for computers and hand-held devices.

Developers point to a variety of reasons that Uruguay has been able to compete with South America’s larger economies, whether the creativity of its engineers and commercial artists or its relatively relaxed immigration rules and extensive use of computers in schools.

“It’s ironic, because historically, this is a country that hates entrepreneurship, but not the culture of entrepreneurship,” said Gonzalo Frasca, a video game theorist whose company, Powerful Robot, has developed numerous games for clients in the United States, including Legends of Ooo, based on the Cartoon Network animated television series “Adventure Time.”

Mr. Frasca, 40, contrasted the skepticism that persists in relation to private enterprise in Uruguay’s cradle-to-grave welfare state, in which companies in sectors like telecommunications, casinos and even whiskey production remain under state control, with the country’s robust tradition of creativity in the arts and sciences.

“We still have strong schools for computer science,” said Mr. Frasca, who has a doctorate in video game studies from IT University of Copenhagen and is a pioneer in Uruguay’s game industry. “When people graduate, they realize they’re in a small country where they have no choice but to engage with the rest of the world.”

While ORT, Uruguay’s largest private university, offers one of the region’s first degrees in video game design, the relaxed atmosphere of seaside Montevideo — the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once remarked that his countrymen resembled “Argentines on Valium” — can still make it seem as if it would be an unlikely place for technology start-ups to thrive.

Other parts of Latin America are nurturing their own video game development scenes. Chile, for instance, recently drew attention when Atakama Labs, a game developer based in Santiago, was acquired by the Japanese gaming company DeNA.

Gaming studios have also emerged in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s two largest cities, but developers there complain of byzantine tax regulations and labor rules that make hiring employees costlier than in some rich industrialized countries. In Argentina, dozens of game-developing start-ups have been founded in Buenos Aires.

But while Argentina has traditionally had more companies in the industry, some of the momentum is seen shifting across the border to Uruguay as Argentine ventures struggle with abrupt changes in economic policy, including the tightening of currency controls that have complicated operations for exporters.

In Latin America and beyond, developers are seeking to mimic the success of Kingdom Rush, ranked in 2012 among the top-selling paid applications for the iPhone in the United States. In addition to Ironhide and Powerful Robot, an array of other game developers operates quietly.

Some, like Trojan Chicken, a developer of educational games in Spanish for schoolchildren, benefit from the heavy presence of the state across Uruguay’s economy, which avoided the privatization wave of neighboring Latin American countries in the 1990s.

Ingenio, a state-controlled incubator for start-ups, helped finance Trojan Chicken, which has created educational games including 1811, an adventure game set in colonial Uruguay, and D.E.D., a detective game in which players solve thefts of national heritage. The games are designed to be played on the inexpensive laptops distributed to schoolchildren across Uruguay.

Nearly all of the 300,000 children in Uruguay’s public schools now have their own computers, after the authorities here began embracing One Laptop per Child, the ambitious project aimed at bringing computing to children in the developing world, in 2006. Called the Plan Ceibal here, it is financed by public money.

Miguel Brechner, the director of the Plan Ceibal, said the initiative was already serving as a catalyst for Uruguayan content developers, notably gaming and animation studios. Describing Ceibal as a “digital equality plan,” he said that “reality has shown that kids get excited about games.”

Encompassing the video game companies, software development in Uruguay has evolved into a $600 million industry, making the country Latin America’s leader in per-capita software exports. But some here say that the industry may also be falling victim to its success, as salaries for developers rapidly climb and make it more expensive for start-ups to compete internationally.

Still, Uruguay’s immigration laws offer certain advantages in the competition for talented employees. Building on a history of attracting immigrants from Europe, engineers, animators and other foreign hires at start-ups can legally reside and work in Uruguay while their applications for work visas are being processed.

“Uruguay is a remarkably open place when it comes to attracting talent,” said Evan Henshaw-Plath, an American among the founders of the company that became Twitter. After moving to Uruguay in 2007, Mr. Henshaw-Plath founded a software development company that now has employees from countries like Poland and Ecuador.

Drawing a contrast between Uruguay and Brazil, he delights in telling a story about an American technology investor based in Japan who was about to embark on a business trip to South America aimed at finding start-ups in which to invest or to acquire outright.

Upon discovering that Brazil required Americans to go through a bureaucratic ordeal to obtain a visa, the investor canceled his trip there. Instead, he visited Uruguay, which has no such visa requirements, and eventually acquired Mr. Henshaw-Plath’s 20-person company, Cubox.

Mauricio Rabuffetti contributed reporting.

Israeli Success in Downing Hamas Rockets Has World’s Attention

But even ardent supporters of a continent-size missile shield to guard the United States and other NATO members acknowledge the limitations of Iron Dome, which is a tactical system designed to shoot down unsophisticated rockets — basically flying pipe bombs — with a range of less than 50 miles.

Some American technical experts also say they want hard evidence before judging whether Iron Dome knocked out as many rockets as Israel has claimed. Iron Dome’s most salient feature, according to American experts now examining after-action reports from Gaza, may well be its software: The system rapidly discriminates between incoming rockets that are hurtling toward a populated area and others not worth expending a far costlier Iron Dome interceptor to knock down.

The conflict between Israel and Hamas focused global attention on missile defenses, and came as the United States and its Arab allies have undertaken a costly effort to knit together a regional shield in the Persian Gulf to protect cities, oil refineries, pipelines and military bases from a potential Iranian attack.

“This will ratify the common-sense notion that these systems can play a role in defending you,” said Eric S. Edelman, a former under secretary of defense for policy in the George W. Bush administration. “It will be especially relevant as we move into an era in which there will be more countries with small inventories of rockets and missiles — and more countries that will want to defend against them in a reasonable way.”

The effort in the gulf is envisioned to include advanced radar as well as sets of two antimissile systems with accompanying radar: Patriot Advanced Capability interceptors and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense. Those weapons would be linked with the radars and missiles carried aboard American Aegis warships in nearby waters.

There is a similar effort in the Pacific centered on radars in Japan, Aegis warships at sea and land-based interceptors in Alaska and California.

The Obama administration’s more recent focus has been the system to protect NATO allies in Europe with advanced radars based in Turkey and long-range interceptors to be based first in Romania and subsequently in Poland. American officials have emphasized that the limited number of interceptors in Europe are all about Iran, and would be inadequate to blunt Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal; but the system remains an irritant in relations with Moscow.

During the conflict with Hamas, Israeli officials report that Iron Dome knocked down more than 400 rockets on flight paths to populated areas, with a kill rate of 85 percent. Hamas is said to have fired off more than 1,400 rockets in all, but Israel was able to limit Hamas’s ability to launch more of its arsenal of 12,000 rockets with pre-emptive attacks on the storehouses where they were kept.

But some antimissile experts have expressed doubt about Israeli claims for Iron Dome, which is built by Israeli defense firms but has received about $275 million in financial support from the United States. Bright flashes can create a visual impression of overwhelming interceptor success, when in fact they may represent nothing more than the interceptor warhead blowing up, these skeptics warn.

“I’ve met the guys in Israel, and they’re smart,” said Richard M. Lloyd, an antimissile expert with more than a dozen patents and two major textbooks on warhead design to his credit. “But I’m not seeing the things I want to see” to prove that Iron Dome actually succeeded to the extent described by Israel.

Mr. Lloyd, who works for Tesla Laboratories Inc., a defense contractor in Arlington, Va., said he had studied dozens of publicly available photographs of spent rockets that landed on Israel. Few of them, he said, showed signs of damage from Iron Dome’s exploding warhead and the specific mechanism by which the interceptor is designed to make its kill — a dense spray of speeding metal fragments.

Single Aunts Gets Lots of Attention — From Advertisers

Dr. Joyce Lee, 34, is having none of that. Considering what to get her 4-year-old niece this Christmas, Dr. Lee is deciding between a few designs in the LEGO Architecture series (including a 561-piece replica of the White House), and she may add some books to the pile. But there won’t be a corduroy jumper in sight.

“That’s the luxury of being an aunt,” said Dr. Lee, a pulmonologist who lives in Los Angeles. “I don’t have to buy things she needs. I can buy the things that I want.”

Dr. Lee, who is single, is part of a demographic that advertisers are increasingly trying to reach, especially during the holiday shopping frenzy: the PANK, or Professional Aunt, No Kids.

Melanie Notkin of Manhattan, who coined the acronym in 2008, is a former marketing executive and the founder of the Web site SavvyAuntie, a resource for women who do not have their own children but, like Ms. Notkin, have nieces, nephews, godchildren or friends’ children to spend time and money on.

“People imagine us eating corn out a can and watching television,” she said. Like many PANKs in their 30s and 40s, despite having a desire to have children of their own, Ms. Notkin, 43, just hasn’t met the right guy.

“Some of the most amazing women don’t have children by choice, or like me, by circumstance,” she said.

When Ms. Notkin first became an aunt in 2001, she struggled to find the right gifts for her nieces and nephews.

“There were no resources for the modern cosmopolitan aunt,” she said. “Because I’m not at the park with them, I’m not picking them up at school, I’m not necessarily sure what kids are into these days.”

Nicole Weymouth, 37, a single environmental consultant in Manhattan, faced the same problem a few years ago when she gave a copy of the 1986 movie “SpaceCamp” to her nephew, thinking he would find it funny. Instead he scrunched his nose.

Now she has six nieces and nephews, ranging from 1 to 11 years old, and she often asks her sisters for advice on what to get the children. She said she typically spends about $300 a year on each child, which includes birthdays, Christmas and the occasional outing.

This year’s list includes a mix of toys and clothing, including Nintendo DS games, LEGOs, Barbies, toy trains, books and a “Star Wars” origami book that will serve as a group activity during the holiday visit.

“We’re a bit of a list family,” Ms. Weymouth said. “I don’t want to repeat things, I don’t want to get them something they don’t need. I want to get them something useful, something they will enjoy.”

Whether they are literally aunts, godparents or friends of the family, PANKs argue that they serve a vital role in the family, and holiday gifts are just one part of the equation. These women often provide help with educational expenses, baby-sitting and household chores, Ms. Notkin said. But they can also be that “cool aunt” who exposes a child to cultural experiences for which the parents may not have the time or money. Often they are the trusted adult whom children can talk to about sensitive topics they wouldn’t dare discuss with their parents.

(So far, marketers seem less interested in Professional Uncle, No Kids, or, um, PUNKs — or, as one marketing executive called them, “punkles.”)

Linda Mora, 36, is a single child psychologist in San Mateo County, Calif., who has a niece, five godchildren, friends’ children and “a lot of little cousins.” She said that women like her can have a positive impact on children, “giving them exposure to certain things, going to museums, helping with education.”

She spends $200 to $300 each on her niece and godchildren every year.

“I get a sense of what they like, but I also kind of go with what I would like for them,” she said.