If marketing has had to adapt to a new digitally enhanced environment and adopt new tools and terminologies, I think some of the same ingredients to building a great brand can cross over with the creation of a legitimate and powerful learning organization.  Here’s why!

Marketing of the 5E’s

In 2010, I wrote about the marketing of the 5E’s as being the key new drivers of brand marketing.  These 5E’s come in complement to the classic 4P’s, not as a replacement.  A brand must properly execute the basics.  For two of the P’s – place and publicity – we have seen a substantial evolution via the new digital options.  Place and publicity now must include the digital options.  But, where brands can make a difference in today’s context is by layering in the 5E’s: engagement, exchange, emotion, experience and essence.  {Click to tweet if you like!}

Why these 5E’s make sense

The more upscale the brand is, I argue, the more essential it is to explore all 5 levers.  By layering them into the relationship with the customer, a brand will raise the perceived value.  All of the levers speak to a more human component of the brand.  Where the 4P’s tap into a more rational angle and help drive the transaction, the 5E’s are providing personality and attachment to create a more vibrant brand experience.  In short, the 5E’s are about the relationship.  It should be noted that this type of marketing is much less pertinent for low value commodities.  Surely, no one is looking to have an emotional experience when buying a screwdriver or wants to have a belabored conversation with a shampoo manufacturer.

Where relationship fits into learning

When one thinks back to the best course one ever took, inevitably the first point of call will be the teacher.  If one considers the qualities of that teacher, more than likely, he/she was using one or more of the same 5E levers.  I wrote previously (“Great Teachers”) about some of my favorite teachers at school and, to each one, I could list how they were innately fantastic at integrating the 5E’s into their courses.

5E’s in a Learning Organization

For companies keen to foster learning within their organization, the question for the HR/Learning for Development department becomes: How are you integrating the 5E’s into the learning environment?  A Learning Organization enables constant learning, not just in a classroom, but throughout the daily routine of business.

Below is a table juxtaposing how the 5E’s can fit into marketing and learning.

The 5E’s leading to meaning

As Seth Godin said in his typically pithy way: “Great marketers don’t make stuff.  They make meaning.”  And, in a similarly strategic sense, in the case of learning, a great learning organization provides an enriching educational experience for its employees, aligned with the business objectives and that resonates with the employees at a personal level.  {Click to Tweet}

Please do give me your reactions!

The post What’s the link between creating a learning organization and building a great brand? appeared first on Branding and digital marketing strategy | The Myndset by Minter Dial.

This interview with Jennifer Preston, Social Media Editor at the New York Times, was conducted by my good friend, Olivier Cimelière, who translated and posted it on his fabulous blog Le Blog du Communicant 2.0.  You can find the French version article here: “Journalistes osez les reseaux sociaux.”  I benefited from the V.O. version and a visit with Jennifer at SXSW, to allow this publication here.  Enjoy.

A Rapid Biography of Jennifer Preston

Jennifer Preston,
“Social Media Editor” at The New York Times

Jennifer Preston has worked as a reporter, editor and newsroom executive at The New York Times for nearly 20 years.  I had the chance to do a fireside chat with Jennifer at the Netexplo Forum at UNESCO (Feb 14 2013).

In 2009, she was named the first Social Media Editor at The New York Times, charged with the task of defining the value of social media for Times journalism and working as an evangelist for using social media tools within the newsroom.

She now writes for The Times about the intersection of social media and politics, but she has focused her efforts in the last year working on a new form of social journalism. It is digital storytelling that combines original reporting, user generated content from social platforms and “old-fashioned” blogging for the home page of nytimes.com.

Jennifer is an author and has won several awards for investigative reporting, including the New York Press Club’s Gold Typewriter Award for outstanding public service for a series about the use of deadly force by off-duty police officers – a timely subject if we think about the recent Dorner case in California.

Jennifer Preston is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.  Aside from her wonderful personality and generosity, you will enjoy following her on Twitter @JenniferPreston, where you will observe that she has quite a following.

1/ In your eyes, how can crowdsourcing be instrumental for media companies? In other words, what are the opportunities?

Citizens are increasingly providing useful content for journalists.

Jennifer Preston:  One of the most important lessons I learned from Martin Nisenholtz, former digital chief at The New York Times, is the value and importance of journalists taking on the role of curator. We are responsible for delivering the best original reporting and ideas for our readers and users. At the same time, we are also responsible for curating — for finding and pointing to – excellent content that is being produced by others, including content produced by our long-time competitors and ordinary people, long-called “citizen journalists.”  (Jay Rosen and Clay Shirkey, both professors at New York University, have been articulating the role of the crowd and citizen journalists for a longtime. To me, they are the two best thinkers in this space.)

Social media tools offer tremendous opportunities for media organizations to distribute content and engage with readers all over the world. For reporters and media companies, these tools offer ways to find sources at the scene of breaking news events. With cellphones, ordinary people are creating compelling content, photos and videos, that we can be easily found and integrated into our news reports. To ignore the witnesses on the ground and to dismiss the content they are creating

is a big mistake. Is the quality the same as that a professional photographer?  Of course not.  We continue to rely on the keen eye of professional photographers around the world; but, they are not always available. And everyone with a smartphone can be a photographer today and publicly share their work on social platforms. It is our job, as journalists, to find those photographs, sort through them to find the best, and to make sense of them, and publish, if appropriate, with the right context.  We pay for photographs from amateur photographers in our paper.

An Indonesian woman using her mobile phone to film.

Beyond breaking news, journalists can find excellent videos, images and information shared on social media platforms that can also help them report, tell and present multi-media visual narrative storytelling, without Final Cut Pro (the program that many people use to edit videos.) One of the most important lessons that every writer learns is the value of “showing” your reader as well as telling him or her. By embedding YouTube videos, images and posts from Twitter, writers and editors can help illustrate and add value to their storytelling.

That said, I am not in favor of blog posts that are made up of embedded posts on Twitter, let’s say, showing reaction to a certain event. On the New York Times LEDE blog, we strive to combine original reporting, with user-generated content, along with what I like to call old-fashioned blogging — linking to terrific ideas from other sources, including professional sources.

2/ What is the New York Times’ vision about User Generated Content (UGC) for breaking news and narrative storytelling?

Interactive word cloud created by the NYT where readers can drop in their messages on the different themes.

Jennifer Preston:  I am not the right person to discuss company strategy. But I can tell you that The New York Times has engaged its readers for more than a hundred years. In our Opinion pages, we were the first newspaper in New York to invite Letters to the Editor from people who disagreed with the Editorial page’s position on issues. Beyond reader comments and sharing reader photos and videos in stories, we have been involving our readers in the creative process in all sorts of interesting ways.

We have asked readers to contribute in the context of a Moment in Times, where we have asked them to help create an interactive graphic, for example, with their ideas for Hope (2010); on health care policy reform; or to fix the budget.

We regularly ask our readers to send their photos and/or videos for various stories that we are working on and we incorporate them into beautiful presentations, as well as interactive graphics and articles. Andrew DeVigal led our multi-media efforts for years. He is a master. I learned, as all of us did, so much from him.

Storyful, a powerful tool to create sources of information through the social networks.

With social media tools, we have been able to find content created by people all over the world and integrate their images and videos into our storytelling. I hope that you will see more of this storytelling on other news organizations. I think that you will, with organizations, like Storyful.com, in the business of creating a social media news wire for media companies and Storify.com, helping give journalists tools to present.

All that said, the Times is committed to continuing to create the most original, stunning multi-media presentations, videos and interactive graphics — with our own amazing and talented staff of photographers, producers, videographers and editors.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, look at Snowfall. It is a whole new way of storytelling — not with UGC but with videos and a multimedia presentation that was created in-house.  {MD: Snowfall is an absolutely a stunning story, magnificently presented… Talk about an Omigosh factor!  Please do tweet this out!}

3/  How are you proceeding to foster buy-in and a mindset change among NYT journalists who might be reluctant or/and suspicious?

The NYT editors quickly converted to the social media networks.

Jennifer Preston: As the newsroom’s first Social Media Editor, named to that position in 2009, I did not run into much resistance from my fellow journalists. In part, that is because I placed a heavy emphasis on the value of these tools for our journalism. I did not tell reporters that they all had to open a Twitter account and start tweeting. Instead, I showed how social media gave them powerful tools to do their job in a smarter way. I showed how social media tools can be used for reporting, for creating a personal wire service, using Twitter, for each beat and for helping journalists find sources, track trends and keep up with vital information in a time efficient way. For editors, I showed the value of these tools for real-time publishing and presentation. For example, in a big breaking story, we can share with our readers curated posts on Twitter from people at the scene as we are trying to move reporters and photographers to the location. This proved to be very useful during the earthquake in Haiti and the shooting in Fort Hood.

But, the first lesson for everyone in the newsroom about the importance of Twitter for learning about breaking news came when a gigantic airplane landed in the Hudson River, just a few blocks from our office. How did we know about it? Patrick LaForge, an editor on the Metro Desk and early adopter of Twitter, saw a photo taken of the plane, floating with passengers standing on its wings, posted on Twitter.

The episode of the plane landing in the Hudson River revealed to the NYT the importance of Twitter as a real-time source of information.

In 2013, I think that the big opportunity is for journalists to curate news video from social platforms and to make sure that whatever they present on their online reports and blogs gives mobile users the best reading experience — and opportunity to share.

Overall, I do not find many reporters objecting to using social media for reporting. And, now we have hundreds of journalists tweeting.  When I became social media editor, I did not have a staff and so it was a challenge to scale change without a team. Honestly, that is one reason why I wanted to return to storytelling because I thought it might be easier for me to help create change by showing, rather than talking about it. We have some excellent news this year at The Times, in terms of resources for social media. Our social media efforts are now led by a terrific journalist, Sasha Koren, who is the deputy editor for Interactive Graphics. Sasha has finally been able to hire a team, about a half-dozen super talented people as social media producers, to help more of our journalists use these tools for reporting and presentation and so I am expecting great things in the coming year.

4/ What are the hurdles and pitfalls when it comes to aggregating and relying on people’s comments and contributions?

 Jennifer Preston: My colleague, Sasha Koren, is in charge of our community efforts and she has taken a lot of steps to help improve the tools for our comment users and moderators. Unlike some media companies, we moderate comments. We have a new tool — the brain — that helps do an initial sift of comments, but we have a staff of moderators who read them before they are posted so we can make sure there is a high-level of conversation on our site. That said, we do not pre-moderate comments on our social media platforms. One of the important steps was to identify “trusted commenters.” {Please do tweet this out!} These are people we trust to post their comment without much fuss.

“Information found on the social web is a clue to be checked, not a fact.”

In regards to user-generated content from social platforms for storytelling, there are many considerations from intellectual property rights to ethics. We apply the same standards to UGC as we do any content that we produce. We go through a thorough verification process, applying all the rigor that we use for our overall reporting. We don’t post anything without checking it out.  We consider information that we find on social platforms to be a tip, not a fact.  {East to tweet this out!} This includes YouTube videos. Questions we pose include: Did someone edit important content out before posting? Who created it? What was their motive? Many politicians and advocacy groups are now sharing and creating content on social platforms. This can be useful for reporting, but journalists need to be wary that they do not simply publish someone’s online press release without critically thinking and reporting out all the information. We are very mindful and sensitive of copyright issues and so we are careful, for example, not to use photos or images from platforms without checking the terms of services. That means we can embed a photo from Twitter, using Twitter’s app, but we will not automatically post a photo created on Instagram without checking rights. And I would never use a photo from Flickr without checking rights.

Thank you to Olivier Cimeliere and to Jennifer Preston for this interview.  And will be happy to make sure any further questions are covered in the comments!

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Great leadership is undoubtedly rare.  Establishing the best leadership credentials is a tricky task for any board.  Every culture has their preferences, and it would be foolish to suggest that the best perceived schools are bad credentials anywhere.  Schools act as social networks and schoolmates are, hopefully, lifelong friends.  However, there comes a point in time in one’s career where leadership credentials must be based on actions and results. In France, there is a lingering habit of announcing executive changes and promotions with the following formula (see the excerpt from the magazine Challenges below):

PERSON, AGE, graduate of a certain SCHOOL, has been nominated to a NEW POST…

Leadership credentials start with…

In the lastest edition of Challenges, the weekly business magazine in France, there is a column reserved for recent leadership changes.  To the left, you have the French text and I have added an English translation to the right.

Really, you would think that one’s credentials could be more appropriately cited.  Why must the age be cited so upfront?  Is your university degree still relevant?  I’d love to understand why this anachronistic way of writing up people continues in France?  Here is what it could look like in the US if I took a few rather emblematic figures.

US Leadership credentials, The Myndset Brand Strategy and Digital Marketing

The lasting role of schools in leadership credentials

In France, there is a perpetual fascination with the school that the executive attended some 30 years ago — as if that is what defines him/her.  Of course, schools are founding stones in our business life.  They remain the cornerstone of your social networks (to wit, many well known social networks began on university campuses).  That said, we are not made alone by the name of the school we attends. The other element that might hit you like a hammer: the importance of the “right” age.  Of the nine executives cited in Challenges, just one is over 52 years old.   The remainder are between 41 and 52.    When will start to see a few twenty-year old drop-outs among them, too?  [In the US sample from above, there is no woman.  This is unfortunate, but I also have struggled to find women drop-outs who have made the big time.  A comment unto itself?] Is it not time for a change in this approach in France?  {Click here if you agree, to tweet it out!}  Your reactions?

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Welcome to the Minter Dialogue Radio Show number #32.

Inspiring and Educational: Dario Cotroneo

March 2012: DCI Aspira Collection

This interview is with Dario Cotroneo, someone whom I met back in my L’Oreal days. From the first time I met Dario (2006), I found him to be a true visionary. Aside from being one of the top ranked stylists in Sydney, much less Australia, Dario is a dynamic entrepreneur, on a mission. He innovated well before any of the manufacturers in creating an online elearning platform with a truly global reach.  That site is called DCI Online.  We hooked up on my recent trip down under to Sydney and got caught up on his activities, especially what he is doing online.  Dario’s business values are Dream.Connect.Inspire.  Kind of believe he is living up to that, too!  Pictured is one of his latest creations.  ENJOY!

To connect with Dario Cotroneo:

• You can find more about and connect with Dario here on Linkedin or on Twitter
• Dario’s salon in Sydney, Australia (you can book online, of course)
• Dario’s professional curling equipment: MyCurl

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Further resources for the Minter Dialogue Radio Show:

Meanwhile, you can find my other English-speaking interviews on the Minter Dialogue Radio Show on Buzzsprout or via iTunes. Please don’t be shying about rating this podcast on iTunes! And for the francophones reading this, if you want to get more podcasts, you can also find my radio show en français over at : MinterDial.fr, on Buzzsprout or in iTunes.

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Most companies whose Corporate University program I have had a chance to view have a robust set of courses dealing with categories such as “metier” training, productivity enhancements and management skills. Few will have as part of their program, courses or seminars that truly work on self-improvement, courses that will provide useful skills that will enhance our daily personal lives outside of work.  I am particularly interested in those types of courses that involve emotion. Naturally, one can experience emotion in a powerpoint skills class, but it’s rare.

There are three reasons why I believe Corporate Universities should add more “fanciful” courses that are not directly designed to drive a superior ROI.

• It is motivating for the employee to believe one’s employer wants to improve one’s quality of life (not only at work).
• Adding emotion into the workplace creates a more agreeable environment.
• Most importantly, adding emotion into the workplace is one of the most potent untapped ways to increase productivity.

As I have written before, it is my belief that branding must get more personal in order to get greater traction and loyalty among customers.  However, that heightened engagement will have increasingly to pass via the employee workforce.  To this effect, it strikes me as relevant that in-house training programs facilitate the crossing of the literal Khyber Pass that separates the professional from the personal spheres at work. Here are my recommendations of 4 courses that any self-respecting internal training university might want to consider including in their curriculum:

• Sleep – How to get the best night’s sleep.
• Laughter – Why it’s good to laugh and how to laugh without due cause = laughing with not at someone.
• Yoga – Or other ways to relax, reduce stress.
• Social Media – Optimizing and managing your own (and your children’s) social media profiles.

Do you think I’m standing on my head?  What do you think about your company offering such courses?  To what extent would you be motivated to attend such courses if your company offered them?  Do you know of any companies who offer such courses in their permanent education (aka internal training) programs?  Any feedback to share with us?

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I thought I would reprint a great set of tips and tricks from Alan Stevens, the excellent Media Coach and speaker*, for improving your presentations.

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Do you like museums? It’s funny, but we all know that, at least a part of us, MUST like visiting museums. It’s a necessary part of understanding who and why we are the way we are. Too often, though, it seems that museums are rendered a necessary evil for kids, or are teaming with confused tourists!

Taking museums from pure value to valuetainment

If you take a look at the origin of the word, museum, you need to go back to the Greek meaning “library, study,” which seems a far cry from a muse, or even an amusing place.  Today’s definition of a museum is “a building or place where works of art, scientific specimens, or other objects of permanent value are kept and displayed.” (Source: Dictionary Online).   If museums are a place to store permanent value, that value must also be measured — at least to some extent — in the eye of the beholder, that is, the paying customer (whether it is the taxed citizen or ticket paying punter).  Thus, I believe that museums would do well to increase the entertainment value of their place of study.  Maybe we could coin the term valuetainment?

Bringing new technology into play

Just because there is value in the location, does not mean that the confines must be stodgy and “old fashioned”.  In the world of curators and art historians, there is great value placed in academia and tradition.  However, the challenge is to stay up with the times.  It seems, meanwhile, that a number of museums have started to integrate new technologies in an effort to make the learning more accessible, enjoyable and, therefore, effective.  What about an interactive iPad audio/video guide to accompany us, instead of those clunky, poor sounding albatrosses one must put around the neck.  There have been some cases of augmented reality being used by museums (e.g. Getty, Louvre); and I loved this Street Museum app from the Museum of London (see picture below).  For the museums taking the plunge into new technologies, I would wager that ticket sales are better, hopefully providing a reasonable ROI!  Any feedback welcome!

Augmenting today's reality with art from the past (London Streets)

Museum Management Mindset

Another notion that struck me recently is that museums are typically considered a place to display pieces of our history.   Thus, it is funny that, these days, a museum may contain items that are less than 30 years old.  What better proof that time has accelerated?  Motorola’s Dynatac “mobile” telephone (much less those POTS from the 1920s and 1930s) is now a true relic.  The famed Nokia Mobira cell phone from 1982 or the 2nd generation (pictured left) is now a dinosaur.  The first PC is hysterical for its size and slowness.

Constant change

This acceleration in technology implies an even more pressing need for ongoing learning and updating.  This means that management must put heightened emphasis on permanent education and constant learning.   The reason this is so vital is that this technology is more often than not central to our communication systems.  And, communication is the lifeblood of our society, our armed forces, not to mention our businesses.

Some people live with the belief that museums must have items that are hundreds of years old. The same people too often look at new technology with distant eyes.  If museums can now expose artifacts that are just twenty years old, it is now incredibly important (I mean strategic) for management to keep up with the new technology.  Both HR and IT departments must accompany the organization to avoid falling into a museum mindset.

Charge your batteries

Consider the knowledge bank as a battery.  It needs to be recharged on a regular basis… and, as processor speed improves, the faster that battery must be improved in efficiency, to enhance endurance and portability.  A transformation in management mindset is called upon urgently to move from what I call “a museum mentality” to a state of constant learning.  I would love to hear what your company is doing to shift mindsets and improve its digital IQ?

Photo credit for Phildelphia Museum of Art : http://artsmarttalk.blogspot.se/2011/09/philadelphia-local-works-on-paper-at.html

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For anyone who is interested in mobile learning (aka mLearning), I highly recommend taking a look this wonderful new mobile app.  You don’t need to be a hairdresser to appreciate the quality of the experience.

mLearning for professionals

My good friends, Kris Sorbie (Redken Global Performing Artist) and Khalid Meniri (Six Agency), have launched a most interesting mLearning app for the iPhone, Kris Sorbie Touch Pro.  The app is FREE. Down the road, meanwhile, the Kris has announced that there will be premium video education as well.

The idea of this app is to provide some handy education for hairdressers during what I call “dwell time,” i.e. those little moments when you find yourself with a few extra minutes to spare.  It’s a genuine adaptation of “education” for the mobile interface.

Other features on Touch Pro:

• ‘How To’ Up Styling Videos and step by step hair coloring techniques
• Consultation tools (categories include design, up styling, color and texture)
• The app comes with an Inspirational Image Library
• There are daily tips on business and hairdresser techniques (who can be pushed to you)
• In the Navigation section, there is FolioCam which allows the stylist (hairdresser) to capture before & after images of clients and automatically save them in the in-app portfolio
• Touch Pro also allows for interaction with other stylists or with Kris herself.

What else is cool?

• The navigation “wheel” (pictured right) is wonderfully intuitive and it comes with non-invasive sound effects (which you can easily mute).  In case it were not easy enough, there is even a tutorial on how to use
• You can shrink or enlarge the text size (more apps and sites should offer this on the iphone)
• The app loads up with some nice visual effects (and a little music jingle)
• The app is thought out for English speaking countries outside of North America with measurements in ounces and liters
• The Kris Sorbie Geographic Tracker – you can track Kris’ whereabouts via Foursquare.

What might be improved?

• The app is not very “social,” as in integrated with social media.  It does use Foursquare and also allows for interaction with others, etc.; but, there is no gateway with the outsidesocial media, much less the web, in general.
• The app is only for the iOS (and that’s probably the good first choice for the hairdresser community) — presumably Android will follow.

The eLearning lessons for brands

Design is key.  TouchPro is very intuitive and made for the “casual” moments that are perfect for the mobile platform (for example, during a cigarette pause).

The functionality of TouchPro is such that it will be rather easy to add on new modules.  Keeping the content fresh and allowing for “new developments” is key for discovery.

While the audience for this app may be for hairdressers (therefore, B2B), it’s a testament to Kris and Khalid that such an app was developed before the hairdresser brands could come up with something as suave. {NB I just saw that Redken has now come out with its own app, Stylestation.}  Kudos to Kris and Khalid.

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Tablet Reading: Making Digital Media A Beautiful Experience

Sometimes the aha moment comes in mysterious ways.  But this weekend, it dawned on me: I actually prefer to read on my iPad than on my computer, and probably more than a  regular book if you take my pulse count.  The reason: well curated content via a wonderfully sexy digital platform.  In fact, I use a combination of 2 platforms, which cover the range of content that I need: Flipboard & Zite.  Call it the 1-2 punch.  Each is effectively a socially curated online magazine, that allows for a seamless navigation beween previously selected topics, with sources coming from the internet and the social web.  Flipboard is more of a social magazine, while Zite labels itself an intelligent magazine.  Zite and Flipboard give a new and very real meaning to social learning.

eLearning – put the emotion into the E of eLearning

I have long been a proponent of the power of well-constructed distance learning programs, hopefully seamlessly blended into our everyday learning environments.  However, for the most part, there is a dearth in eLearning engineering expertise and there are not enough allocated resources in universities and corporations.  It remains a “luxury” in the eyes of most executives and managers to make a platform-suitable, learner-focused environment.  Too often, when eLearning is put into place, the content may be rich, but the experience is often bereft of sentiment and pleasure (i.e. text heavy) and the interaction is minimalist.  But, what if text books could be converted to be read with same intelligence, pleasure of discovery, ease of use & sharing, and rapidity of loading as you will find on Zite and Flipboard…?  And, I might add, there are others that are worth the visit too: Feedly, Pulse.  What if…  we tailored the learning on platforms similar to Zite and Flipboard?  Of course, we might also need to justify the investment in tablets for everyone, too…  But, prices will come down dizzily, I’m sure.

The “teacher” learns from you

What I particularly like about Zite (which just released version 1.3.2 on Jan 27th) is that it gets smarter as you use it.  It also has wickedly easy social sharing functionality.  Zite alone made me realize that I prefered reading and sharing via my iPad than on my computer, by a wide margin.  It is mobile and the enjoyment is multiple, since the discovery is unending.  I absolutely revere the moments when I can dig into my Zitegeist!

Here is a schema provided on Zite’s site about how it works.

If there is one cloud on the horizon, it is that Zite is owned by CNN (Zite was purchased in August 2011).  Flipboard is as yet an independent entity (though I’m sure that Apple has a beady eye on them: Flipboard was voted best app of 2010 by Apple).

Feedback please

I’d love to hear of any similarly fashioned learning platforms that are live or in the works!

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In search of the CEO Myndset

In a world of economic crises, burgeoning competition, regulatory oversight and the revolution that is the Internet, I think it would be fair to say that the role of the CEO is under siege.   The “strategic” allocation [read = reduction] of  resources in search of that extra margin — against a backdrop of a dour economic forecast — is top of mind for pretty much every CEO of a publicly traded company.  With drained confidence, many CEO’s are obliged to pay heightened attention to shareholders and the Board of Directors in order just to hold down their position.

Mind the client

Keeping an eye on you

Just as a principle of survival in a volatile and largely negative environment, the typical CEO is programmed to develop a highly rational plan — thoroughly thought through, rational and rationalized.   The paradox, for most CEOs, is that such a process is generally not congruent with being client centric, nor with helping to motivate staff, much less attract talent.  Rather than merely focusing on where to cut costs and comparing one’s performance to a [stale] budget or last year’s comparisons, I argue that companies are in need of a new CEO myndset, trained more explicitly on the most important stakeholders: employees and clients.  Naturally, depending on the size of the company, the mindset must be able to permeate all levels of management, throughout the subsidiaries.

This new CEO myndset means reconfiguring the organization to be more focused de facto on the client — the person who fundamentally pays the bills.  Just as Peter Drucker said, so presciently, the purpose of a business is to create a customer.  This mindset involves being more agile in communication, decision making and process, in general.  The ability to create and open channels for direct feedback from staff and clients alike is vital.   At its core, the new CEO myndset means adopting an entrepreneurial spirit and the acceptance of error. It means opening up more to the outside.  Inevitably, because of the speed, its distributed nature and potentially cheaper options, the internet becomes a central part of the story, if not the solution.

She/he who tends to the client: the employee

Taking care of business: the service attitude

Using the new tools of communication at our disposal and taking into account the often tenuous, if not fragile, loyalty of employees — distrust with management, concerns about layoffs —  the new CEO myndset must take pains to create a service culture, regardless of the product being sold, within the company.  This would suggest thinking of servicing your employees … in the way that you would have them service your clients.  It is an eco-system and I am convinced that the winners will be those who can with great congruency, transparency and consistency, create an internal organization and culture that reflects the commercial relationship desired with its clients.  [I have written before about the need to align the employer brand with the corporate message with the commercial message.] Obviously, this needs to be adapted according to the industry.  And, for some sectors, this subject is as yet off the radar (for example, banking, security, government…).   The new CEO myndset means taking care of your employees, leading by example and orienting both behavior and systems around the client.    This new environment must foster constant learning, and encourage sharing and frequent multi-channel communications.  In this new world, distance learning (aka e-learning) rhymes with distance working, supported by the confidence of knowing that employees want to learn (something new every day) and want to achieve their objectives.

When investment is considered a cost

The deeper investments will count

The wranglings that define the budget writing process are typically tortuous and, depressingly, become obsolete within just a few months, as soon it becomes evident that the economic forecasts are inaccurate (and that the client hasn’t bought as many as you had expected).  The chances are that this year will be an even more tempestuous year than 2011, with the threat of double dip recession, compounded by nearly 60 Presidential elections around the world (including the RIC of BRIC, USA, France, South Korea and Turkey) and the burgeoning euro crisis.  In this context, cutting costs as a security measure is the systematic refrain or mot d’ordre. However, CEO’s that have scrapped the budget for the “funny money” pegged for systems infrastructure (equipment/bandwidth) and digital education will pay the price sooner or later.

One of the keys (and it’s “so simple” to say) is to stop re-doing what has always been done in the past to make way for the new activities.  A great question to pose:  What value is each investment bringing to the customer?  One of the areas in which I have seen little by way of innovation is the way the P&L is constituted, to reflect this new style of management and accommodate the new investment needs.  I think it’s time that CFO’s got the new myndset as well!

I’d be curious to hear of any best in class examples!

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