Brand is who we are. Bond is why we are.

[Some vague recollections of a talk to a business group today...]

Answering "Who?" shows your trendiness. Answering "Why?" reveals your soul.

High margin is spelled: S-O-U-L.

ATOMS : MOLECULES : MATTER
LOVE : MARRIAGE : KIDS
BRICKS : HOUSE : HOME
FAITH : RELIGION : SERENITY
IDEALS : BONDS : COMMUNITY
BONDS : BRANDS : MOMENTUM
PEOPLE: PURPOSE: PROFIT
SALES : PROFIT : OPPORTUNITIES

Brand is not a marketing concept, it's a leadership tool.

Brand is shorthand, often misunderstood, for a progression of thought and a collection of bonds that form and hold organizations and communities together.

• IDEALS, properly identified & promoted allow you to generate bonds between people, products and organizations.
• BONDS, firmly held and affirmed tend towards self-perpetuation and self-regulation..
• Bonds, or the search for them, coalesce into community.
• Another word for community, used carefully, is BRAND.

BRAND, as community, applies to employees as much as consumers. Perhaps more so. Even if your employees did not participate in the genesis of your identity, they are the torch-bearers of its values and spirit 24 hours a day. They can support it, save it, or stand by and watch it drown, on a daily basis. Sometimes, if things are terribly wrong organizationally, they will even hold its head underwater.

Healthy brands and their communities forgive a multitude of sins but only in exchange for commitment and a voice in the choir. Effective brand-leaders (and plain-old ordinary leaders) know that the idea of “ownership” does not belong to owners alone. The more that brands are viewed as shared property, community property, therefore, the more parents and “owners” it has with a vested interest in seeing it succeed or recover from failures. That means consumers too (If you think smart management alone saved Tylenol or Harley Davidson from the bone-yard, you need to get out more.) In the operational sense, employees as “owners” weather sacrifice and challenge more willingly and productively than “employees”. Brand, and the recognition of its importance to the culture and operation of an "owner" organization is a force multiplier. Managers can use the latent ambition and inertia in employees to achieve surprising return and energy without the always-popular prodding, politics or punitive measures. Judo-style, a person’s own ideals are pressed into service--often with shouts of “at last!” Customer service becomes an urge, not a job description. Products become prizes to be shared, not SKUs.

Sounds utopian doesn’t it? Sounds too easy, too pat.

How can any organization bigger than two people find agreement on the job like that? We can’t even get people to agree on barbeque or chicken for the company picnic.

I can’t worry about making everybody happy, I have a business to run!

No, you can’t make everybody happy. To mangle an old song and Coke® commercial, I’d like to teach the world to sing, but I don’t have the time or the patience. The point is not to match every person’s wish list, but to elevate the standard of what those wishes must achieve. A-la-carte requests from left and right field arise—my parking space is too far away, my desk is too small, our copier sucks, nobody listens to me, leadership is AWOL—these all arise because that’s the best we can manage when the discussion is limited to the finite and the measurable, to the comfortable and the depersonalized.

But, people don’t get “happy” and energized for spreadsheet-able reasons. And definitions of corporate happiness can and do change when communities and their members understand the question is being asked in larger terms than usual. This is the alchemy that organizations ought to recognize and encourage. The intersection of people, purpose and profit is that crossroads of ideals that generates bonds which become communities of meaning and brands of substance. This discovery and implementation turns employees into stakeholders, and critics into supporters, and leaders into geniuses.

How?

ideals : bonds : brands

Ideals can include the seven cardinal virtues: Truth, Justice, Beauty, Faith, Hope, Charity and Virtue. Ideals can, an often do, include an active and vocal, or, subtle and subliminal distaste for the seven deadly sins: vanity, covetousness, envy, sloth, lust, anger, greed.

These are not things to be hated or denied, exalted or elevated. They just are. They just exist, by some divine or biological plan. And they have huge impact on our efforts. In many cases, the impact they have is unsanctioned or unacknowledged and, therefore, we find ourselves on the floor, ears ringing and cartoon canaries circling our heads: “What happened?”

People happened. Or, rather, the ever-present yet unaccounted for people-response happened. The result is we’re now on the floor, on our ass, bewildered.

Why? Because we have denied—not examined—our ideals, the why of who we and our organization is. And who cares. And who shares our "brand" of care.

We assume because a company exists it deserves to exist—to live a long and sainted life. Not so. Companies live because people—consumer, employee, management and shareholder—will them to live. And they will them to thrive, because the organization is a tool to realize and make certain and tangible that which makes they as people feel real and of import: Ideals, made real, made in their image, made lasting. Made meaningful.

Companies are levers to ambition. Shared ambitions generate bonds.

We do not give people to companies. Companies are tools we give to people.

People with tools can build things. Tools alone cannot.

People. Pure and simple. And unpredictable.

But not incomprehensible.

If you care to wonder.