^∞Fouroboros

From today's Knowledge@wharton update

Leading from Within Means Learning to Manage Your Ego and Emotions

“It is not essential to have a big ego to be a successful CEO,” says Deepak Chopra, a physician who has helped make alternative healing respectable in the U.S. He laments that American society has been trained to measure business success solely by the calculation of shareholder value. That, in turn, has bred a generation of top executives who have “bought into the idea of ego, power, extravagance, arrogance and total disregard for other people’s feelings,” says Chopra, who will be speaking at an April 9 Wharton Leadership Ventures conference in Philadelphia titled Leading from Within.  
 
Long-lasting businesses aim to serve needs, not just sell products, he says. “If you start with the premise of increased income for me and my shareholders, you get the big scandals you have had recently.” For the individual business leader, success should be much more, he suggests – “having meaning in your life, having love and compassion, self-esteem and a sense of connection with your own creativity.” Absent that, “egocentric leaders become most insecure, anchoring their self esteem in external things such as money and power.”

...According to Chopra, the ultimate test of business leadership is what happens to a company after the CEO leaves. By that criterion, even the hallowed Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, does not make his first team, Chopra says, suggesting that GE hasn’t done as well in the immediate aftermath of Welch’s departure. Indeed, Chopra asserts that a roster of top performing corporations would put Wells Fargo and Philip Morris ahead of GE, yet “you don’t know their CEOs’ names.” He asks why, and answers his own question: “Because these people were not into themselves; their goal was not adulation or power for themselves but to create a great company.”
 
After five and a half years of running her family business – a company founded nearly 80 years ago by her grandfather and run for 50 years by her father – Lynda Barness, president of The Barness Organization, home builders based in Bucks County, Pa., has distilled similar insights about the essence of leadership. “I have learned that it is necessary to navigate rather than rule,” she says....

I like Lynda already.

There's more on Chopra, Lynda and others, plus these:

When the CEO is the Brand, But Falls from Grace, What's Next?

Shell Games at Royal Dutch/Shell: Will They Affect Corporate Governance in Europe?

Why Some Start-ups Choose Cooperation over Competition

IKEA: Furnishing Good Employee Benefits Along with Dining Room Sets

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Life in a Mall

Hmmm, here's something apropos to the previous post. I like harmonics.

From Spring 2004 Strategy & Business (You need to register but it's free.)

The Post-9/11 Resilience of American Brands

American foreign policy initiatives have generated rising anti-U.S. sentiment in many corners of the globe. American multinational corporations (MNCs) have grown increasingly concerned that such perceptions might influence how foreign customers value their brands. They are particularly worried about their businesses in Islamic countries, where anti-American feelings are fierce.

Our research suggests, however, that American MNCs should not overreact. Strong public opposition to American foreign policy doesn’t necessarily affect consumer choice. American companies should carefully weigh the costs and benefits of abdicating the “American-ness” of their brands. They should be honest and open about their heritage, and they should not overdo introductions of locally adapted products. That tactic could appear more patronizing than culturally sensitive....

In addition, we looked generally at whether antiglobalization sentiments affected global brand preferences. Does an antiglobalization segment exist, and is it particularly strong in Islamic countries? We did find a significant antiglobal segment, about 13 percent of our sample. But, remarkably, this segment was not the largest in the three Islamic countries; in fact, the strongest responses came from China and the United Kingdom.

These findings suggest that American multinationals have exaggerated beliefs about how anti-American sentiment is affecting consumer choice, and, therefore, that the current retrenchment is unwise.

An American global brand — whether it is Coke, Pepsi, Nike, Motorola, Ford, or Kraft — is understood foremost as global, not American. Even brands that use American values as part of their symbolism don’t seem to positively or negatively sway consumers’ opinions of the brand.

We also found that Islamic consumers were even more favorably disposed toward the positive characteristics of global brands — their reputation for quality and status value in particular — than were consumers in non-Islamic countries.

Given our findings, we were not surprised to learn that Coke and Pepsi turned in their most successful year ever in the Arab countries in 2003. American multinationals should wear their global success proudly, rather than try to hide it....

This is the right approach. American companies should have the confidence to treat Islamic countries as they do all the foreign markets in which they operate. Indeed, they would do well to follow the same “glocal” strategies (global reach, local implementation) that have served them well in other parts of the world.

To pursue these courses of action in the Islamic world, however, MNCs must develop more senior executives who understand the cultures and know how to do business there. Similarly, the drive for diversity in the multinational company boardroom should be global, not just national, in its perspective. Today, how many Fortune 500 companies’ boards of directors include a Muslim? How many of their top executives are Muslim? All too few.

There is so much latent power in the American Dream that even our sometimes bull-in-a-chinashop nature can't dull it. It seems hackneyed to say you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but it's true. Also true: honey's got higher margins.

I'm voting for this guy. Now, where the hell is he or she?

On the stump, somewhere in America, October 20, 2004:

Do you share in the pride we all feel to belong to this thing called the USA? Wonderful: You're in, welcome to the club. But first, as citizens, let's do a little inventory: We may look and speak and live differently, but we remain Americans. We're great buiders and great thinkers. We're great sharers. We're great doers. It is who we are. Yet somewhere along the way, someone has sold us a bill of goods. Somehow the idea was introduced that better profits trump the betterment of you and me. Either-or, not both-and. That somehow, national security comes not from cooperation and coordination, but by some imagined lonesome cowboy ethic that never really was. Imagine a movie that expects you to believe this plot--that a sheriff succesfully protects his town by alienating and insulting the ever-friendly marshalls in the surrounding counties. This is the premise and the plan, tragic and costly, we're expected believe today. You're either with us, or you're against us. Our way is the only way.

This is wrong. This is not us. We have more confidence and ability than strained belligerent bluster like that betrays. The only franchise on infallibility comes from God, everyone's God. Our Declaration of Independence is quite clear on this. America is not about being perfect. It is about pusuit of the ideal of perfection. Why? Because the minute we say "perfect," we're done. Our national reason for being is gone. Besides being impossible, "Perfect" is a destination. Terminal. Where to from there? If the world keeps turning, nowhere but irrelevance. But seeking perfection, not accepting good enough, now there's a journey. And a plan. And journeys need supplies, new help, new ideas and new things to discover. And the right journeys are glasses half-full. They are self-sustaining and self-starting. They are energy itself.

Franklin Roosevelt told us fear is no way to face the future. We know he was right. It's not who we are, and it will never be allowed to define us. America's real security, not imagined, must be tended to and our power to protect, ourselves and others, must be unquestioned. And so it shall be, unquestionably. That is what this election is about. And, with your trust and faith, it is why I stand before you today.

But it seems I stand before you for another reason also. Like Dr. King, I have a dream. A dream you share. A dream that the prosperity and security of America for the next century is assured. That dream becomes reality only when we tend to the unfinished business of this great and maturing nation. And that business is the uplift of those who are struggling with task of joining prosperous nations like ours. That is our Mission to the Moon, but on this here Earth. This is altruism, yes, but it is enlightened self-interest also. We are builders. We are inventors. We are managers. We are creators. These endeavours require opportunities for release and action. They require customers. And they mean jobs.

My friends, do you remember the words of Lady Liberty--bring me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses? Well, they don't have to come to us. We, will go to them. And with discipline, fairness, ideas and opportunity, America will not only do well in the 21st century, we will have done Good.

[update] What is the above gibberish? The result of an interesting lunch where the conversation revolved around politics and the false, inert and simplistic choices voters will end up with this fall. We all agreed, no matter what our party preference that tired, unimaginative rhetoric makes us want to puke. We even agreed that if John Kerry's gonna keep using the lame "bring it on", he needs to let his audiences finish the the actual line because it sounds so hollow and shallow coming from him. That led many of us to ask, what would an ideal candidate say--how would he or she bridge the predicament we are in globally and domestically with a message of action and hope? Does the above fit the bill? Who knows, but I had to get it out of my system.

The Brand Called Omarosa

Brand Autopsy has a nice post on, well, see the above headline.

Yes, Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, our ex-White House "political consultant" (tee-hee) and now ex-almost-Apprentice is thinking of Marthanizing herself. (Hey, that may just be another one for the Fouro Executive Lexicon™!)

The primary lesson that I learned was the importance of branding. Inspired by Trump's branding brilliance, I am building my own brand by launching a line of business suits and accessories, exploring book and TV deals and a nationwide speaking tour. I made the mistake of not focusing solely on the task at hand and not focusing on relationships. It would have been more strategic to develop alliances in order to survive in such a high-stakes game.

That is the funniest damn thing I've read in weeks.

While the line extension possibilities boggle the mind, let's have a contest to name that clothing line, first. A few humble starters...

1. Professional Suicide
2. Solipsis
3. Omihead, Omigod, Omarosa!

Next?

Okay, okay. It's not the Real Thing^® and yes, it does contain carcinogens. But, other than that...

New Zealand Herald:

The fiasco meant complete collapse of Coke's ambitious attempt, with a £7 million high-profile publicity campaign, to break into Britain's burgeoning bottled water market, which is worth more than £1 billion a year and now growing by 20 per cent annually.

Executives at the Coca-Cola (Great Britain) headquarters in Hammersmith, West London, were horrified by a PR catastrophe on a scale with the jeweller Gerald Ratner's famous comparison of his products to prawn sandwiches, or Shell's attempt to sink the giant oil storage buoy Brent Spar in the Atlantic. "Obviously, we are very upset about it," said one.

Executives... were horrified by a PR catastrophe

I realize this is the journalist's characterization, but it does pretty much sum up the gaping maw of where real people are and what corporations view as a "perception challenge": The Truth. And it's relative importance. Read on...

Dasani was said to undergo a complex purification process and then have carefully selected minerals added to it.

But the brand hit trouble straightaway when it emerged that the source for Disani was actually the Thames Water mains supply to Coke's Sidcup plant - which has passed more than 99.9 per cent of quality checks, making it already one of the purest drinking waters in the world.

While half a litre of Thames tap water costs 0.03p, half a litre of it bottled as Dasani was costing 95p, a mark-up of more than 3,000 times, or a profit of more than 300,000 per cent.

As a person charged with working in this stylized Kabuki called "marketing" I know the hits people's integrity takes having to justify things in their professional lives they would flat out reject in their personal dealings. In this way, we find ourselves stuck, checking our principles at the door for a paycheck. Our values haven't changed. We're just asked to visit them on weekends. Like the children of divorce.

This is systemic entropy in action. It is unsustainable in human terms. And this should be deeply troubling to business leaders. Instead, we hear crickets and the occasional dog barking in the distance.

They say millennial milestones bring profound change. I'm not worried. Ours is just late, not DOA.

Link from PR Fuel via Corporate Engagement

Don't curse the fates, curse your opponents. Or: Ideology means never having to say "Ooops."

From James Lileks via Jay Solo comes this zesty jab at those ungrateful peaceniks protesting one year in Iraq:

Imagine if you woke from an operation and discovered that your tumor was gone. You’d think: I suppose that’s a good thing. But. You learned that the hospital might profit from the operation. You learned that the doctor who made the diagnosis had decided to ignore all the other doctors who believed the tumor could be discouraged if everyone protested the tumor in the strongest possible terms, and urged the tumor to relent. How would you feel? You’d be mad. You’d look up at the ceiling of your room and nurse your fury until you came to truly hate that butcher. And when he came by to see how you were doing, you’d have only one logical, sensible thing to say: YOU TOOK IT OUT FOR THE WRONG REASONS. PUT IT BACK!

Okay then. I like this approach. Maybe I'll try it:

Suppose I get a client by offering to help boost his market share. To do this, I recommend repositioning his chewing gum product as a cure for cancer. Some believe at first and buy by the case. But the medical community has a cow and lets its disgust be known. Hope has turned to skepticism, then to anger. This alienates half my client's employees and half his consumers, plunges his balance sheet further into the red and garners him reams of bad press. The alienated employees and consumers find common cause in their grievances, form an angry mob and set out to picket my client's place of business. Things get out of hand. Security is called in. Violence ensues, torches get lit and a building gets burned down. Only problem is, in their zeal, the protesters got the address wrong and it turns out they've mistakenly burned down my client's chief competitor instead. The next day, Wall Street reacts to the news and my client's share price doubles. Customers who previously had two choices now have one. My client's market share doubles. Logically, I have done what I said I would do. Mission Accomplished. Now, given my proven effectiveness, can I help you with YOUR marketing?

I think we have a new business strategy for the ages here. Thanks, James.

Why does doing it right take less time than doing it over?

From Pattern Language dot com, a conceptual framework midwifed by Christopher Alexander:

...Then what happened is we tried building buildings not just writing down known solutions. What something looks like actually depends on how it is made. If you watch raindrops fall off the tree, you can see that the tear drop shape is formed over time and couldn't get that shape any other way.

If you look at corn kernels on the cob, you can see that the kernels are not quite straight or even but have grown to fit just so on the cob. It's why we enjoy things that are hand made and find mass produced widgets so boring and would like a house that fits just so in the landscape, and like a jewel, brings forth the charm of the landscape itself.

So all our attention was on understanding process, how things unfolded and got made so that each part was unique and had a just so rightness in the way it fit.

But what we're working most hard at is writing sequences. Now a sequence is something that looks very very simple and is actually very very difficult. It's more than a pattern; it's an algorithm about process. But what is possible is to write sequences so that they are easy. You follow the steps in a sequence like you follow the steps in a cooking recipe....

A sequence is like a bit of genetic code. It helps things to unfold in the right way. An human embryo follows steps as it grows, and if it misses a step then there is a malformation. But ten embryos following the same sequence will lead to ten very different people, each one unique.

A sequence means a different process.

Normally what happens when you build a house, for example, is that an architect, tries more or less or understand what you want and makes a blueprint. But a blueprint and CAD designs are mostly guess work about what is going to be just right for the dimension of a room or the placement of a window. It's like tossing thirty coins all at once and hoping they all land on heads. Never works. A sequence is figuring out which decision has to come first and getting it right and then moving to a second decision. Like tossing one coin at a time, which is actually a much better, faster, and less expensive way to get to thirty coins all on heads. But if you work from a blueprint you are stuck with your guesses and the builders, who aren't the architect, just have to follow the blueprint, even when they know a much better solution. It's a silly way to do things.

Insulated Decider, meet Isolated Deliverer.

There's a Black-Market of Self Esteem in companies many bosses probably don't have a clue about.

Dig deep enough into any organization and you will find an invisible ghetto. It's non-sanctioned, off the org chart, and carries great potential. For good, when re-engaged. Or harm, when ignored. Unlike most ghettoes, this one has power. As a rule, that power is exercised against corporate "values" or directives. At the least, it's usually ambivalent to them, which is almost as bad.

Just as nature is "self-organizing", groups of people coalesce into social systems automatically. In companies, Isolated Deliverers do this all the time. As an isolated deliverer, you may feel you have no access to the sanctioned perks or opportunites of those above or around you, that the structure doesn't match your ideals, or the PR doesn't match the reality. If you read the papers or just the company memoranda, you simply know this to be true. What do you do? Well, if you feel shut out and unable to play the game, you make up your own game.

Naturally, you're disappointed to be "out", but you adjust your standards according to your circumstance: Standards of Intrinsic Reward, and Standards of Group Excellence. You create a virtual environment where you can feel good about yourself. An affinity group of the disaffected maybe. Look close enough and you'll find that groups like these have a mayor, heroes, jesters, wanderers and more, especially in larger companies. The archetypes abound in these groups just like any other. And, as non-sanctioned as it may be, it is a cohort. It has a social structure:

1. Pecking order
2. Rules of the game
3. An admission requirement

Sound vaguely familiar? How does this manifest in your organization? If you have any stories or examples, I'd like to include them in future posts on the topic.

(What's an Insulated Decider? You have to ask?)

[update: forgot to include the request for stories]

Six Degrees of Separation. Or Citation. Or G5. Or Lear. Or Falcon 2000. Or...

Slate's Daniel Gross (the Moneybox guy) reckons corporate scandals can be partly blamed on the fierce desire of execs to keep their sky-limos and the rarified life of exclusive privelege they convey.

Hey, if you're worth a billion or so and you stoop to goofyness to avoid a 50 grand stock loss, who's to say what's plausible or not?

[reposted for Carnival of the Capitalists visitors due to bloggered permalink]

Brain, Metaphor, Archetype, Brand.



Part I
Part II
Part III - TBA [*see below]

This series explores the relationship of personal motives to corporate brand identity. A core premise is that brand is as much a leadership and operational tool as it is a means to sell product. In fact, by relegating Brand to afterthought status you create real problems for yourself and your people. The examples and ideas in the series move from historic to current, business to metaphysics, psychological to geometric. Deeply resonant brands have often become that way often not by design, but by intuitive accident, by tapping into universal but little discussed standards of human decision-making. The central fact of brand from this perspective is that it is dimensional and real and packed full with primal meaning and opportunity. It is far more powerful than we suspect.

Brands, as well as people, function more effectively when they're connected to something other than themselves. It's called "context". Carefully considered, contextually resonant companies do several things well, and often automatically: They generate a sense of ownership and pride which reinforces a self-regulating culture of merit. The more this approach is imbued in an organization, the less complex the challenge of management becomes. Likewise, the more connected that consumers, employees and stakeholders are in their purpose, the clearer and more fundamental each relationship becomes.

But this only happens when brands are allowed to reach formulations where certain relationships are accorded equal weight and value. Only then do we approach what equates to a sustainable, meaningful brand model in terms that people care about: Dimensionality. 3-D. That's the real world, messy and emotion-laden as it is.

Again, self-identification and brand identity are intricately joined. We're all looking for some thing, some need to be filled, some group to identify with, some reason for sharing our energy and effort and money. Companies, through their brand identity, have powerful opportunities to be part, if not necessarily all, of the answer to that search. The benefits of a company placed in this indispensable position should be obvious. The requirements are geometrically simple. And they include four elements any sensible business person should insist on when judging the utility of a message, idea, project or plan:

1. Coherence
2. Relevance
3. Resonance
4. Internalization.

It must make sense. It must apply to what we do. If must be meaningful enough that we don't forget. It must be powerful enough that it points out and crystalizes what we already think, but couldn't enunciate before. It makes us damn proud. It feels right, because it's already "us". Lastly, it moves people because they handle the moving.

* The third and final post will cover the idea that meaningful Brand is ubiquitous and it's job is to mobilize affinity amongst employees and consumers. This happens when its language and implementation is allowed to influence and power the mix of all functional activities that affect the customer. Brand can be a liberating and powerful, strategic and tactical story. And all the elements of an organization can play a part and benefit from the telling.

I hope you enjoy the series. Any comments are welcome.

Is this the good part of the Internet or the not good part?

Which political candidate do your neighbors and associates like enough to give money to? All you need is a zip or an address or a name for this FEC database. (Current to 12/31/03--next update 3/31/04.) You can even generate color-coded maps of political giving in any area nationwide.

Fundrace.org

Yes, I'm creeped out by it.

Apologies for the drop in posting Friday/Saturday. Had an out of towner on short notice and barely time to pack a toothbrush. As always, chatting for hours with your coworkers enroute to a meeting stirs the juices a bit.

After some quality youngster time at a local arts fair this afternoon I'll be hammering the keyboard later.