Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1566

Is Your Organization Ready for Total Digitization?

What do the following items have in common: credit cards and streaming or recorded music, robots for production, CAD systems, telephone networks, digital games, computers in products like cars and vacuum cleaners, sensors, and video consoles used in remote mining? Answer: They are all digital and connectable.

This is the world of total digitization: a multitude of digital devices and sensors creating streams of data, as well as any number of digital services and products for both internal and external use, distributed throughout the enterprise, and sometimes, but not always, connected. As the drive toward increased digitization continues, enterprises have to get a handle on this total digitization — and corporate CIOs have to step up to the challenge.

Three Approaches to Managing Total Digitization

How are enterprises managing the spread and scope of total digitization? We at MIT CISR have found that enterprises are using one or more of three approaches to managing total digitization: convergence, coordination, or a separate digital innovation stacks approach. Each approach has very different objectives and measures of success.

Convergence. This approach brings all digitization investments together and places them under a single executive. At Boeing, all enterprise technology (including digital) investments are managed by the CTO, which enables significant synergies. For Commonwealth Bank of Australia, convergence involved bringing together operations and IT into a new unit, Enterprise Services (ES), headed by the CIO. ES helped CBA achieve its goal of both reducing costs and becoming number one in customer experience. Convergence usually requires the introduction of new organizational structures to create efficiencies and synergies and to increase reuse of resources. Enterprises using a convergence approach will, wherever possible, organizationally consolidate the key assets of people, data, infrastructure, skills, and management processes.

Coordination. This approach doesn't change the organizational structure but adds mechanisms (such as committees or gates) onto a business case process, to increase the coordination of big digital investments across groups such as engineering, operations, or product owners. Leaving the organization structure "as is" reduces disruption while the mechanisms help facilitate working together across the units. A typical structure consists of separate organizational units supported by a shared infrastructure at the base and connected by customer-facing coordination mechanisms at the top.

For example, BMW set up two committees focused on digitization to deliver on its enterprise goals, including the design and delivery of a custom car within six days. These committees at BMW ensure the creation and smooth handoff of information. In a coordination approach, the mechanisms all work together to achieve a specific outcome. This approach works well when there are one or two enterprise-wide goals. But be aware, when there are numerous enterprise goals spanning multiple geographies and business units, the coordination approach can lead to a spaghetti-like set of governance committees and processes. But with just one or two overarching enterprise goals, the coordination approach helps to create a consistent customer experience or, in some companies, ensures regulatory compliance.

Separate Digital Innovation Stacks. Enterprises with this structure and approach believe the key to their success is innovation via local management. Each of the separate stacks — such as the different product groups, business units, or geographies — is left alone to maximize its own local value without any coordination overhead. Taking this approach (e.g. News Corp) commits a firm to local innovation, often organized by products or stand-alone businesses. These enterprises have decentralized management and diversified businesses. Capabilities are often duplicated with slight differences in each stack, and there is local accountability for profit and loss. Typically, though, some global risk management is necessary. As digitization increases and customers (and regulators) expect a more integrated multi-product experience, we expect to see far fewer business units pursuing a separate digital innovation stacks strategy. Diversified enterprises, however, may still find it a useful approach.

Identifying your enterprise's core strategic drivers is the key to deciding which approach is best to follow. Convergence is about reducing cost, reducing risk, and achieving synergies. Coordination is the right choice for enterprises that are trying to achieve a few enterprise-wide goals such as improving customer experience or asset utilization. Finally, the separate digital innovation stacks approach is right for enterprises that believe autonomy helps improve innovation and local customer responsiveness.

We believe that managing total digitization is one of the biggest opportunities and challenges facing enterprises — and their CIOs — today. We are already seeing companies in which the total digitization spend is over 25% of the operating budget and expect this will become commonplace. In our ever-more-fully digitized world, you need to strategically manage total digitization or you run the risk of digital anarchy in your enterprise.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





Exploit IT for Strategic Benefit
IT Cannot Be Only the CIO's Responsibility
CIOs Must Lead Outside of IT
You, Too, Can Move Your Company Into the Cloud

CEOs Are to Blame for Short CMO Tenures

About once a week it seems, we are reminded that CMO tenure is unusually short. I have heard figures ranging from 23 months to 45 months. Both of these numbers are astonishingly low compared to other execs in the C-Suite: eight years for CEOs and ten years for CFOs. So why is CMO tenure so short? Experts have pointed to a host of reasons: the explosion of social media, the rise of big data, general complexity and chaos, incompetence...

But what I haven't seen is a serious discussion of the person directly responsible for the length of employment of the CMO: the CEO.

As I argue in my new book, the best-run and most successful companies convey one clear, understandable story through every action that they take, not solely through their marketing. And these companies tell their story through the products that they make, the services they provide, even in the way they incentivize and reward employees. And the only person who can manage this story is the CEO.

Yet the majority of CEOs pass this responsibility to others — the CMO, usually. This needs to change, and shareholders and other stakeholders need to start holding CEOs' feet to the fire. Because there is a growing evidence that the most successful businesses today are run by CEOs who embrace story, and who think of themselves as Chief Story Officers.

There are a handful of enlightened CEOs, of course, who've embraced story for years. Nike founder and former CEO Phil Knight and current CEO Mark Parker take a personal interest in the Nike narrative. From shoes and shirts to digital platforms to physical retail spaces to ads — they make sure that everything Nike makes advances its story. David Neeleman, founder and former CEO of Jetblue, hated advertising, and preferred to convey JetBlue's story through innovation and customer experience. And Steve Jobs, of course, would spend two hours a week with his marketing partners looking at ad concepts in development. He didn't do this because he was a particular fan of advertising; he did this because he considered everything that Apple made to be a vital part of Apple's story, and therefore worthy of his personal attention.

A new generation of enlightened CEO's are taking the power of story even further, and by conveying their story almost exclusively through action, not communication, they are reducing costs in the process. These companies are almost all do and no tell. Dietrich Mateschitz at Redbull, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Blake Myckoskie at TOMS shoes and many more are creating huge successes with ad budgets approaching zero. They are doing this by first understanding the narrative they wish to advance in the world, and then by making sure that their products and customer experiences advance that narrative coherently and convincingly. In these companies, story and product are two sides of the same coin.

These leaders are a cause for optimism, but they're still exceptions to the rule.

The vast majority of CEOs aren't taking the time to understand their story and how it relates to their products. Instead, they are continuing to separate product from story, and pushing responsibility for story down to the marketing department. By doing this, they are giving their CMOs an impossible job — marshall a story that is unfolding across the entire enterprise — product development and customer service — areas that most CMO's don't touch or can't control. Yet they are still holding the CMO responsible for results. No wonder the qualities sought in a CMO these days might be mistaken for those of a bullfighter or a test pilot. CEOs who stick with this model will struggle to keep the best marketing talent over the coming years, as more enlightened competitors poach the most ambitious marketing stars and empower them to quarterback the story across the whole organization.

If you are a CEO or an aspiring CEO, the evidence is clear: becoming a student of the underlying narrative of your business, and learning how to manage and tell that story through coordinated action, not merely through communication, can be a powerful competitive advantage. Make understanding and telling your company's story both a shared responsibility across the whole organization and a core value of the company. If you do this, you (and more importantly, your shareholders) will reap the rewards.

You might find that your CMO lasts longer as well.

How to Fix the Bad Employee Syndrome

We've all wanted to please the boss. And if that sometimes means that we do something we think is stupid or misguided so be it — is it worth spending our social or political capital on making a fuss about just one small thing? Better to shrug and accept it and maybe build up some goodwill for when you really need it.

The problem with this attitude is that it becomes harder to take initiatives and employees never actually do take their bosses on. Of course, they suffer at least as much as the boss from the consequences of this. If the boss does make a fool of himself he's going to wonder why nobody told him. That leaves the employees looking either stupid (for not realizing there was a problem) or bad (for not telling him). If he gets into trouble himself then he's going to want to share out the blame ... and the whole cycle starts again

I call this the Bad Employee Syndrome. Part of the problem, of course, is rooted in a lack of self-confidence on the part of employees; not all bosses are monsters. But whatever the share of responsibility, it is a problem that really is best fixed by the boss, who after all has the greatest control over whether or not the workplace is a safe environment in which to make a positive contribution.

That was the conclusion that I drew when, as a young boss in my family company, I realized that nearly all employees were simply agreeing with what my father and I said all the time. I realized that if that was the way people were behaving then there must be something about the way we were managing that made them behave that way. Unless we did something to change what had come to be our company culture, we would miss out on the potentially important insights people on the front lines, who could tell us most about what our customers were looking for, and about what our competitors were up to.

So I set up an "Encouraging Initiative" Task Force, which included key managers and an outside coach. Its explicit brief was to change the people's perception that performance meant following their superiors' instructions to the letter by finding ways to reward employees for the quality and usefulness of the ideas and suggestions they brought to their superiors.

Among the incentives and processes that the task force came up with were holding regular idea brainstorming meetings and a prize for best idea of the month. A template for presenting new ideas was developed and a formal process for submitting them to superiors was established. The team also recommended a change in hiring criteria, and we started looking less for people that would fit in and more for people ready to take the risk of expressing their insights and ideas openly.

It proved harder than I expected to change what had come to be our culture, partly because many of our best employees were too deeply imbued with it to change. But the real problem was with our managers. Many struggled to accept the notion that the contributions of their subordinates could be as valuable as their own, a problem I have frequently encountered. The coach and I worked hard with the managers to get them to:

Think through and articulate carefully the gains and the risks each decision entailed for the company, themselves, and the employees involved in the decision, and of how best to mitigate the associated risks.
Show that they took their employees seriously by encouraging their open and candid inputs and getting them them to share their experience, knowledge and skills.

Most finally succeeded in making the adjustment. The few that that could not we eventually had to let go. Eventually we succeeded in transforming our closed and sterile management culture to one of dynamic openness. The fresh input now coming in from the front line opened us up to all sorts of new products, policies and practices, which quickly translated into improved revenues and profits.

I draw two lessons from this story. First, the Bad Employee Syndrome is very expensive for companies. I dread to think how many billions are wasted every year in every country because employees are discouraged from contributing the insights they gained from their experience. Second, it doesn't take a great deal to cure companies of the syndrome: but it takes persistence. My own experience shows that a few procedural changes and some coaching, accompanied by a genuine commitment to respecting employee ideas on the part of bosses are all it takes...

Good luck!

Birth Rates Fall for U.S. Younger Women but Rise for Older Women

The U.S. birth rate continues to decline overall, except in the case of women in their late thirties and early forties. The increase is most dramatic for women ages 40 to 44: In that group, the rate rose 1% from 2010 to 2011, hitting 10.3 births per 1,000 women, says Pew Research. (That's not a record: The rate for women in their early forties stood at 10.6 in 1967, when the country's overall birth rate was higher than it is today.) The birth rate dropped 8% from 2010 to 2011 among teenagers and 5% among women ages 20 to 24, hitting historic lows in both age groups.

Working from Home: A Work in Progress

It's now been about six weeks since all Yahoo! employees had to start showing up at the Internet giant's offices every day. The company-confidential but widely circulated memo that banned telecommuting stressed the importance of physical proximity for preserving the creative culture that new CEO Marissa Mayer had been trying to build. Many commentators criticized Mayer for limiting her employees' autonomy and signaling that she didn't trust them. Whatever the intention — and ultimate effects — of Mayer's new rule, it sparked fiery debates about the merits and drawbacks of the upward trend in working from home. New data that we recently collected add fuel to the flames.

For several weeks earlier this year, we collected daily electronic diaries from the employees of the HR department in a New York bank. Although we weren't looking for it, one particularly interesting pattern popped out of the data: strongly positive comments from employees on the occasional days that they worked from home. Again and again, we saw people writing about how refreshing it was to be freed from office distractions and to have the opportunity to catch up on work. On our end-of-study survey, we asked directly how they felt about working from home. The response was overwhelmingly positive. Of particular interest to us, participants felt that they made more progress when they worked from home. The reasons they cited included increased focus, greater creativity, saved time that would otherwise have been spent commuting, and feeling relaxed and comfortable. During the study, we also collected daily self-report ratings from each person on several emotion measures. Ratings for most of these items were the same for days at the office and days at home, except for frustration. Our participants consistently rated their frustration with the work lower when they worked from home.

Our past research found that, of all the events that can keep people happily engaged on the job, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. So, if working remotely leads people to feel more positive and make more progress, that's a pretty powerful endorsement. Other research fits with our findings. It seems that, in general, people like working from home. They appreciate the ability to schedule their lives around their work rather than the other way around - and some may even value this flexibility more than career advancement. Moreover, being alone helps some people avoid the frustrations and annoyances of office life. A study by Stanford researchers revealed significant differences between call center employees in a Chinese company who were randomly assigned to work from home for nine months and those who were not. Not only were the work-from-homers more productive than their non-remote peers, but they were also more satisfied with their job and less likely to leave. Brand new research similarly points to the importance of flexible work arrangements for attracting and retaining the most talented employees. In a survey of over 700 MBA grads, Catalyst discovered that those whose firms had flexible work arrangements were more likely to aspire to senior positions at their companies than those working at less flexible firms.

Of course, there's a catch. The participants in our study, like those in the Chinese call center study, were doing work of an inherently independent nature, and much of it was rather repetitive; there was little need for collaboration and little room for creativity.
Forcing employees into the office could be very important if the success of your company is largely dependent on the frequent exchange of novel ideas between workers. A recent
Gallup report showed that remote workers were more engaged than on-site workers, but emphasized that working remotely was best in moderation. Only the remote workers who spent less than 20% of their time working from home were more engaged; remote workers who spent almost all of their time working from home had the same level of engagement as on-site workers. Keep in mind that the people we studied in that New York bank worked from home only occasionally; for the vast majority, it was fewer than eight days spread out over eight weeks. Also keep in mind that working at home can have its own distractions. In one survey by Citrix (a Florida company that designs technology for employees to work remotely), a quarter of employees even admitted to having an alcoholic beverage while working from home.

The bottom line is that working at home makes a lot of sense for some people and some kinds of work. Although our research and other studies suggest that employees and employers alike can benefit from telecommuting, Marissa Mayer's report-to-work order may still prove appropriate for Yahoo's employees because of the creative, collaborative nature of the work they do.

Many thanks to Katrina Flanagan for her help writing and revising this post.

Slingshot Your Career

Carrie Householder, senior manager of Buying and Product Management at Amazon, explains how a less-than-perfect job can propel your career forward.

Don't Neglect Your Power to Bring People Together

Out of the many ways that managers get things done, one of the most underused is what I call "convening authority": the ability to bring people together to share information, build alignment, or solve problems. To explain, let me share a quick example, in two acts:

In Act One, the manager of a corporate engineering group was tasked with reducing the cost of common materials used by a number of different product teams. To address the issue, she met with fellow engineers in each of the teams to understand their processes and how they utilized the materials. She also met with people from procurement and others in the supply chain organization to pull together a consolidated picture of the costs. Armed with this information, she then held one-on-one sessions with product-team managers to give them customized recommendations for reducing material usage and costs. Each meeting was cordial and the managers seemed to appreciate the input. Over the next few months, however, only a few of the recommendations were implemented, and there was little overall impact on material costs.

Now comes Act Two: Frustrated with the lack of progress, the manager decided to organize a working session for all of the product managers and their engineers, along with people from supply chain and finance. Although scheduling was a challenge, much to her surprise everyone invited agreed to attend. At the session, she shared the overall product cost data and the business requirement to make a substantial reduction. She then broke the group into cross-product and cross-functional teams to review the earlier recommendations, and lay out what it would take to make them happen. Within a couple of hours, the small groups had identified a number of common barriers to implementation, such as customer acceptance testing, renegotiating with suppliers, recalibrating equipment, and others. Working together, the group then developed a work plan for addressing these problems, eventually leading to a substantial reduction in material costs.

The question raised by this case of course is why our manager didn't start by convening all of the interested stakeholders in the first place. The easy answer perhaps is that she didn't think of it, or didn't realize that she had the authority. But the deeper reason, which is true for many managers, is the perception that convening people outside of your own hierarchy is risky and difficult. As a result, many managers unconsciously avoid taking this step.

The funny thing about this anxiety is that most managers don't hesitate at all to call meetings for their own direct staff and those who report to them. But bringing together subject matter experts, decision makers, and stakeholders from areas that don't report to you is much tougher: You have to make sure the issue is weighty enough to warrant people's time; you have to think through the potential participants, the sensitivities of leaving certain people out, and who gets along with whom; you have to collect data and materials so that the meeting will be productive; and you have to prepare an agenda that is compelling and has a high likelihood of leading to success. These factors alone can cause managers to hesitate.

Added to the difficulty of organizing the meeting is the fear that key participants will refuse to attend. We all know that people are busy enough doing their own jobs, so asking them to join in on something that is beyond the normal might easily be seen as an imposition. So rather than get turned down, it's easier to not call the meeting in the first place.

Finally, calling a meeting with multiple parties from across the organization also requires tremendous facilitation skill. Getting everyone together is hard enough, but making sure that the meeting is productive, that all parties are heard, and that real solutions emerge is daunting. And the truth is that many managers are not skilled at group facilitation. So for those managers, like the one in our case, it's easier to deal with everyone individually than try to tackle them as a group.

Given all of these fears and uncertainties, it's no wonder that many managers hesitate to utilize their convening authority. Unfortunately, bringing the right people together from across the organization (and even including suppliers and customers) is often the best way to get things done quickly. So if you want to step up to more effective leadership, you may need to conquer your fears and give convening a try.

Why Can't a CIO Be More Like a CFO?

Information governance is not IT's job. But it should be the CIO's job. It's time for CIOs to move beyond their roles as chief technology officers, and embrace the name with all of its implications: Chief Information Officer.



Why? Because no one is managing the store. The explosive growth of information is accelerating. According to the 2012 IDC/EMC report on the digital universe (PDF), it's doubling every two years. At the same time, technology budgets are static or contracting, and non-IT execs want more attention to cost-cutting.

We know this. We've heard it before. Yet we continue to ignore it. I'm fascinated by how deftly conversations about information growth turn immediately to hand-wringing over how to store and secure it, avoiding the issue of its creation. The time is ripe for CIOs to take a page from the CFOs' playbook to ensure both accountability and responsibility for information creation.

We all know that CFOs are accountable for the financial stewardship of the enterprise. They fulfill this role by delegating responsibility and establishing control systems such as budgets, directives, audits, and oversight to drive fiscal compliance. The day-to-day financial activity within the organization is then executed by management and staff, who shoulder the responsibility — delegated to them by the enterprise as part of their job — to account for funds, both incoming and outgoing. Incurring debt without approvals or other failures to comply with financial controls appropriately results in disciplinary action.

CIOs accountability, on the other hand, stops short of information stewardship and instead focuses only on technology stewardship, an intermediate step. CIO's are commonly accountable only for information in the middle of its lifecycle (storage, security, and availability), and their control systems reflect this. Unlike the world of the CFO, management and staff generally do what they like when it comes to creating and (not) disposing of information, creating a cavernous gap in accountability. There are no overarching frameworks, few controls, little guidance, no audits, and seldom consequences when staff create and hoard information. In financial terms, irresponsible creation and storage of information is like taking on unsecured, uncontrolled debt. It creates risk and encumbers the enterprise with additional costs to support the resulting digital landfill.

That landfill has been a money pit for corporations and a gold mine, in my experience, for plaintiffs' counsel and regulatory investigators, leading to average per case discovery costs ranging from $621,000 to more than $9 million. That's a lot of money for digging through old e-mail.

How did we get here?

We came to this place easily and methodically, by providing resources of quickly-evolving technology with no constraints. We came here by not establishing data stewardship, which is at the root of organizational confusion about information governance. We came here by allowing the "just keep everything" culture to take hold. Ironically, autonomy in corporate computing does not necessarily lead to greater productivity. In fact, our laissez faire approach to computer education — little guidance, hands-off, freedom to make decisions — leads to lower productivity absent a system for accountability. Without accountability, unproductive behaviors creep in: spending time on CYA, finger-pointing, waiting for guidance, ignoring problems, or waiting too long to act.

Given this failure to establish responsibility and accountability, it is also not surprising that most ECM projects fail, and a large percentage of IT projects generally fail to realize their potential or go well over budget. I believe the driving factor for these failures is that many projects are conceived and scoped only to address a symptom, rather than the disease of too much information.

Patchwork attempts to mitigate or repair our broken information management processes do not get to the core of the issue. It is ultimately up to each of us to make a difference. Of course, we are reminded during emergencies, like Hurricane Sandy, the "bet the company" lawsuit, or — dare I mention — the data security breach. (Can you spell S.N.O.W.D.E.N.?) But, when the crisis is over, we go back to the status quo.

There are those who still believe that technology alone solves all problems, thus policy-based governance is unnecessary and there is no downside to information growth. These proponents fail to account, however, for the three R's: Regulation, Risk, and Reward.



Regulatory requirements for information governance exist for every enterprise. They must be identified and addressed, and information management is a huge part of this.



At risk in most enterprises are databases, shared storage, and e-mail — and the latter two are almost exclusively controlled by end users, both in content and distribution. Risks stem from litigation exposure, privacy and data security breaches, and intellectual property theft, among others.

Reward can come from new insights for new initiatives gleaned from our "big data," but only if it is not "dark data" contaminated with the ROT (redundant, obsolete, and trivial) of 30 years of computing. In each of these, unmanaged volume and content is our enemy.

Back to the Future

CIO's must re-invigorate the vision of 1987, when the inaugural issue of CIO magazine stated that, "information is a corporate asset to be managed by a top-ranking executive." CIO's have never broadly achieved their destiny. They have remained, instead, CTO's. I submit they are — or should be — something different.



CIO's need to move beyond technology myopia to become information governance leaders and executive partners in policy direction and enforcement. Someone needs to take control, and CIO's are in an ideal position to mandate the structure, direction, resources, and accountability necessary to achieve coherent governance of information assets. If the prospect of tackling the legacy problem is daunting, consider another finance-inspired concept: zero-based budgeting. With "Zero-Based Information Governance" tied to bottom-up accountability, we have an opportunity to look forward first and stop the bleeding. We can cost cut by slowing the growth of information and applying a more critical eye to Band-Aid technology requests such as e-mail archives or yet more storage, and thereby also achieve better alignment with long-term business goals.

In my years of interviewing staff across a range of industries, the most common theme has been, "No one told me what to do, so I did nothing." Technology is intimidating, particularly to non-Millennials. Think like a parent. Create an environment where information is treated as a valued asset. Instruct, guide, and expect good stewardship. Be accountable.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





Exploit IT for Strategic Benefit
IT Cannot Be Only the CIO's Responsibility
CIOs Must Lead Outside of IT
You, Too, Can Move Your Company Into the Cloud

The Right Way to Hire Your Customers

Suppose I told you that you have access to a resource that is more empathetic, more interesting, and more persuasive to potential buyers of your products and services than even your best sales or marketing people. A resource that can do a significant amount of the marketing work that you're spending lots of dollars on, and can do so for free. A resource that can get you to the leading edge of innovation in your industry much faster than internal product developers — and at the same time, can show you how to forego superfluous services or product features that you thought were essential but that in fact, no one would miss.

I'm talking, of course, about your customers. It's astonishing to see companies that lavish so much time and attention (and money) on selecting just the right employees, but show little discernment in selecting their customers beyond making sure their check will clear.

Companies that are pickier about their customers reap major rewards for doing so, particularly in today's economy where customers are not only better able to do the activities described above, but are very often willing to execute them on behalf of the companies they do business with.

So what traits and capabilities should you look for in the customers you want to hire?

They're profitable.

This is not always obvious. Enterprise software firms were famous for signing big contracts generating lots of revenue with customers who turned out to cost more — due to demanding big discounts or excessive service levels — than the revenues they generated. Firms that failed to track the profitability of customers would have no clue there was a problem, until rapid growth stalled and costs caught up with revenues. A supposedly thriving, fast growth firm would suddenly find itself in danger of bankruptcy. Know which of your customers are profitable. For those who aren't, figure out how to make them so, or drop them.

Once you have a handle on their profitability, then look for additional ways they can contribute to your marketing, sales, and innovation efforts, and even help improve your operations.

They derive exceptional value in return.

An excellent, objective way to determine this is to ask customers the Net Promoter question in customer surveys: how likely would they be to recommend you to a colleague or friend. Customers who are highly likely to do so are not only more likely to remain loyal, but also have a positive story to tell to their network. Remember, your buyers find customers more persuasive than any sales rep and you need to put this to work. Even companies with a relatively low Net Promoter Score will still have a core of 25%-30% of their customers identify themselves as promoters. Allowing such a resource to lie fallow is a waste. "Hire" your promoters and help them to advocate for you

They like to affiliate with other customers and buyers.

Companies that build businesses in markets where buyers like to affiliate — or would like to do so if someone made this easy — can develop a whole new set of valuable customer "hires." Book readers, for example, love to form discussion groups. When a couple of bright entrepreneurs launched a vibrant, online community in 2007 to allow book readers from around the world to connect and talk about their favorite books — called Goodreads — the result became an 18 million-member community in just six and a half years. Jeff Bezos "hired" those customers to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, according to estimates.

Savvy firms such as SAS Institute working for government agencies have noticed the same thing. Conventional wisdom suggests it's impossible to get such customers to help in marketing and sales efforts due to legal restrictions against endorsing vendors. But government employees love to affiliate with each other, exchange ideas and contribute to the greater good that they collectively strive to represent. And the fact that they don't compete with each other removes a significant barrier to such sharing. So SAS and other companies help their best government customers do so by simply telling their story — "the good, the bad and the ugly" — to their colleagues in other government agencies. Such transparency often results in a more effective customer reference than you see in businesses who coach their references on what to say. That approach has allowed SAS institute over the past decade to win references from the US Departments of Treasury and Commerce, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard, and dozens of other prominent state and local government agencies.

They're on the leading edge of their industry.

Business customers who are pushing boundaries, and perhaps disrupting, their own industries are highly attractive "hires." They'll push you to help keep them at the leading edge. And such customers are also more likely to let the world know what they're doing to stay on the leading edge — especially if they're striving for recognition against an entrenched competitor, which means they're more likely to talk about how you're helping them do so. Cisco, for example, was well known for doing this as it was building a position of dominance in the 1990s. Find such customers in your industry — and hire them.

Also look for individual customers who are on the leading edge and who, impatient for the functionality that they need from suppliers, are making their own modifications to your products. Most industries have such customers, and using straightforward networking tools they can fairly readily be found. Indeed, in today's connected world where an increasing number of products have software, it's even easier as hackers will get into the software to make modifications. Even Apple — notoriously closed to any independent vendors wanting to modify their platform — has embraced this trend by allowing apps on its devices today. (These now number in the hundreds of thousands. Try to imagine an iPhone without them.) In your industry, find such "lead user" customers who are making modifications, and hire them.

They want to perform services for your other customers.

Companies are unlocking tremendous new value from customers by, in effect, turning over the jobs they once assumed they had to do (and pay for) to their customers (who do them for free). This includes software firms whose more knowledgeable customers provide support services to other users, or technology firms whose "hacker" customers modify the products they buy, make them substantially better, and share their work with other customers and potential buyers.

This is an area of great creativity, as Frances Frei and Anne Morriss have shown. The "car sharing" firm, Zipcar, for example, is mounting an impressive challenge to the rental car industry. By having customers return cars to an agreed location, gassed up and clean, they eliminate the hassle of having to go to a car rental location, wait in line, and deal with hidden charges. All the next customer has to do is show up with his Zipcar card, swipe it across the windshield, and the door opens ready for him to drive it off.

These days, if all your customers are doing to build your business is paying you money, you're leaving a lot of value on the table.

How Story Platforms Help Global Brands Go Local

While the current turmoil in Cairo may obscure the post-revolutionary optimism that pervaded the city last winter, that mood was powerful at the time. Despite the chaos in the virtual absence of government, the metropolitan region of some 14 million was taken over in January by an Arabic pop music video urging people to "go crazy" by committing acts of kindness to spread happiness. The film, produced by Coca Cola, features street scenes of people being kind and happy in well-known Cairo locations. Locals say it perfectly reflected the hopefulness and optimism of Egypt's people as they embarked on the difficult path of building a new democracy.

This spring, when I spent 10 days working in Cairo, the catchy song was still on everyone's lips. Asked about the video, Egyptians uniformly identified it as a local production — a combination of an ad, a pop song, a documentary and an accurate social commentary on post-revolution Egypt. Despite the truth of most of these observations, "Go Crazy" is part of a global campaign originated for Coke by Ogilvy Brazil.

The Coke campaign is one example of what three prominent co-authors addressed in a March HBR post titled "Great Advertising is Both Local and Global." As they wrote:

"It's hard to create relevant and timely global advertising themes, positioning, and stories that reinforce the brand, appeal to consumers around the world, and can be creatively delivered through all touch points... One solution to this tension is to pursue what we call glocal advertising strategy — locally adapting a universally embraced core idea that will resonate in any market anywhere in the world."

Coke rolled out the "Go Crazy" campaign in numerous locales, including South America, Africa, the Middle East and the UK. In each place the central story was identical, but the executions were quite different in virtually every aspect — music, people, locations, focus.

When executed flawlessly, such global-local campaigns combine the power and efficiency of a single global brand with the targeted, culturally nuanced appeal of a localized execution. It's not easy to do, however. The key question for global brands is, "How can marketers pull it off consistently?"

The steep rise in digital media has meant that a logo and tagline are not nearly sufficient to provide consistent, relevant branding. What's needed, clearly, is a disciplined, repeatable process that enables a brand and its agencies to locate, define and craft consistent global narratives — truly compelling brand stories — that unite brand attributes and business goals with deep audience interests and passions.

Coca-Cola, following a well-defined global trend among savvy advertisers, declared in 2011 that it's marketing practice was going to shift to content creation. It has since become a leading example of how a global brand can clearly embody a single core narrative while telling many different stories. In Coke's case, the unitary narrative is about spreading and celebrating happiness and optimism. Coke can produce hundreds and thousands of local creative executions across the world precisely because it keeps telling stories based on one central narrative that unambiguously embodies the brand.

At my agency, Story Worldwide, we've been doing storytelling work with brands around the world for some 15 years. Our first effort at global storytelling began with Toyota's luxury division, Lexus, where the task was to create emotional connection for a very rational brand. In those days, merely defining what a "global story" should be involved a year-long debate. The clients entered that debate believing global content had to be delivered in exactly the same form everywhere in the world, not an unusual position for a company concerned with precision engineering. But the discussion continued until we had all agreed that a global story should be told differently in different countries and cultures because the real goal is to create the same impact and effect everywhere.

Eight years ago, we began calling these defining core brand narratives "Story Platforms" and we've created dozens of them for some of the world's biggest brands. We've created and honed a detailed process that discovers the core narrative of a brand and charts a clear path for turning the Story Platform into advertising executions in any culture on any media channel.

The process is built around research and collaborative workshop exercises and results in a final report that sets out the core story and shows how to build communications on the platform.

To understand why these platforms are so useful and powerful, it's first important to understand what they are not. A Story Platform is not a tagline; not a campaign strategy; not a piece of ad copy; not usually a consumer-facing line at all. Instead, it is the simplest expression of a core story that narrates the most powerful relationship between a brand and its audiences.

The power of a brand's Story Platform is that it is singular (there is never more than one), unchanging over long periods of time (outliving any campaign by orders of magnitude), differentiating (focused on what makes the brand unique for its audiences) and contains the authentic truth of the brand. It also defines what subject areas a brand can credibly create content around — the brand's "authority to publish." Using a Story Platform properly, brands and their agencies can build a huge variety of brand stories over a long period of time and every story will ladder up to the brand's core proposition.

Finding and building such a global narrative core begins with the kind of careful research that should be very familiar to branding agencies. The so-called ABCs of the brand — audience, brand and category (or competition) — have to be thoroughly probed and evaluated with the energy and bluntness of a team of investigative journalists and social scientists.

The research must establish a baseline of facts for a workshop that is designed to bring out the clients' unique narrative and emotional knowledge about the brand. The exercises used in the workshop are probably unfamiliar to traditional advertising practitioners because this is where narrative approaches — storytelling techniques — begin to take over. A metaphor exercise teases out a wide range of potential emotional connections to the brand. A session on customer journeys frames the ways in which audiences encounter the brand and its messages. The clients are asked to debate and select the brand's archetype so the brand as character and personality can begin to emerge. And so on. From the research and the output of these workshop exercises, we then create the Story Platform.

The number of workshop attendees must be limited to no more than 15 people. This is enough to create 3 to 4 breakout groups on any given question, but small enough to allow the entire group to hold meaningful conversations and debates. Just as important, the participants must not all come from marketing. They need to represent every part of the company that touches the brand — sales, operations, distribution, customer service and so on. Getting input from everyone not only improves the outcome, it also builds backing for the outcome across the enterprise. The workshop is not just a marketing exercise; it is also a political exercise, in the best sense of that word, building consensus around the brand story. That sort of enterprise-wide buy-in is absolutely crucial for success because a brand's story must be something that connects with internal as well as external audiences.

The marketing guru Seth Godin recently announced that content marketing "is all the marketing that's left." In a world of exploding channels and increasing consumer control over media, Godin is probably right. The definition of advertising is under enormous pressure to change and it is swinging to brand-owned content that tells a consistent brand story and fosters long-term relationships with audiences. In this new media world, locating a brand's global story and telling it in its most powerful local form is becoming the central mission of all marketers. Disciplined processes and storytelling techniques will help brands do this critical job successfully.