Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1570

The Era of Corporate Silence on Climate Policy Is Ending

"Tackling climate change is one of America's greatest economic opportunities." So proclaims the Climate Declaration, a public statement signed by a fast-growing list of U.S. corporate giants, including GM, Nike, Intel, Starbucks, Unilever, eBay, Swiss Re, and even The Weather Channel.

This new attempt to encourage companies to lobby for climate action is gaining steam. President Obama gave the movement a boost in June when he highlighted the declaration in his big climate speech.

More companies are taking a proactive role in climate policy, and for good reasons.

First, many of these corporate leaders believe that climate change is a risk today, not in some distant future. In the World Economic Forum's Global Risks 2013 report, the respondents named "rising greenhouse gas emissions" as the third most likely risk to the global economy (after inequity and deficits/debt). There's too much at stake for the private sector to sit this one out - or worse, to lobby against policy and government action (which is basically the mission of the government relations function in most companies).

Second, it makes strategic sense to engage in the discussion now. As the impacts of climate change become even more evident, we will see calls for increased regulation to help us move away from carbon-emitting energy. Shouldn't companies get involved now instead of waiting to see what governments come up with on their own?

Third, the leading companies realize that coordinated climate action will be very good for our economy and well-being. The Climate Declaration, created by the NGO Ceres as part of its BICEP advocacy group, makes a simple case for action: Taking on climate change will save money, improve efficiency, and drive innovation, all of which will keep America competitive internationally.

The declaration is not about specific policy prescriptions — that's what BICEP is for — but more about bringing companies to the table to change the dialogue. As Ceres' president Mindy Lubber told me, the declaration is "an entry-level point for a large number of companies to come in and say 'climate is not a job-killing, regulation creating platform, but quite the opposite.'"

In other words, we're getting some of our corporate bigwigs on the record saying that building a clean economy is good for us. These companies can help change the conversation — they have significant clout and reach, not just in Washington, but also through their extensive employee networks (millions of people), supply chains (hundreds of billions of purchasing), and marketing and social media machines (millions of tweeters).

Before getting too excited about the potential here though, we should humbly remember that the Climate Declaration and BICEP are not the first attempts to engage companies in climate policy advocacy. In 2007, Alcoa, GE, DuPont, Johnson & Johnson, Caterpillar, and other corporate giants formed the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), led mainly by the NGO Environmental Defense. USCAP called for large reductions in emissions, but focused mainly on supporting a "cap and trade" program. When the climate bill featuring this policy failed to pass through Congress in 2010, USCAP became quasi-defunct.

More recently, in 2011, a large group of mostly European companies, led by the Prince of Wales Corporate Leaders Group, signed the 2°C Challenge Communique. This statement asked the world's governments to "break the deadlock on international negotiations" and enact policies that would hold global warning to 2 degrees Celsius.

Unlike in 2007 and 2011, it seems like there's a larger momentum for change now for the three reasons I mentioned above. So what should companies advocate for specifically? My list of high-priority lobbying efforts includes (a) putting a price on carbon; (b) eliminating fossil fuel subsidies or potentially all energy subsidies; (c) encouraging massive public-private investment in the green economy; and (d) improving product and production efficiency standards for cars and appliances.

It doesn't take an advance political science degree to recognize that this list of policies will help us tackle climate change. What's new is that large companies are signing on to support these priorities. BICEP's specific policy goals run along the same lines, and the Prince of Wales' group created a more targeted Carbon Price Communique to push for the most important policy of all.

But let's be honest: in the end, statements are just that. To back up the intentions, we need aggressive corporate lobbying on the ground in statehouses and Congress. Only then, when these companies fight with gloves off, will we break down the perception that business is against carbon reductions. Some very powerful groups with deeply vested interests — basically the fossil fuel industry and some powerful co-conspirators like the Koch brothers — are still fighting hard to maintain the status quo.

But the other corporate bigwigs who know that they, and all of us, will benefit from aggressive climate policies need to speak loudly to legislators, employees, and citizens. And with the Climate Declaration, it looks like that's finally beginning to happen.

How to Ditch Marketing And Make Friends

There's a chasm widening between old school and new school marketers. New school marketers, typically those closer to social marketing channels targeted at Millennials, are telling me they're having a hard time getting their projects funded internally because old school marketers in the C-suite don't understand the new context and metrics driving social marketing.

This often results in CMOs retreating to their comfort zones and wasting money on what I call "studio-based" marketing channels, which still take their cue from the traditional awareness-consideration-action sales model that was debunked almost five years ago by McKinsey.

Studio-based channels require the slow and methodical creation of studio assets (via film or photo shoot) with the goal of beaming the creative to a designated "appointment" (a slot on Modern Family). The guiding principle is the content itself — any hope of conversation around that creative is mitigated by a marketing (not consumer) defined hashtag burned into the spot. It's a one-way proposition at best, as useless and pretentious as the ethnocentric American who shouts the same thing louder and louder hoping that the Korean tourist he's giving directions to will finally understand.

This type of marketing isn't the be-all-end-all that it once was simply because the one unit of measure it relies heaviest on — time — is the same measure that will render its obsolescence. In today's social communities, quick-thinking and hustle (not a precious and polished spot) are the currencies most revered. That's because the audience most addicted to these social channels — Millennials — expect brands to live in the same world they live in, speaking the same language about the same issues they care about, find humorous, or strike an emotional chord. And since this generation collaborates online more freely than any other, the exponential reward of their sharing pays off with a far higher return on customer acquisition. For every Millennial customer acquired, chances are you'll acquire another two Millennials for free just from their word-of-mouth endorsement on social channels (the "share" at its purest form).

In order to create content that thrives in this social environment and maximizes shareability — people having conversations related to your brands — marketers need to behave less like studios that charge by the hour and more like newsrooms that charge by the word (even if those words are limited to a mere 140 characters).

For brands that were born into the world with a Facebook page on launch day — think Virgin America, Lululemon, and Warby Parker (the Ryan Gosling of brands at the moment) — conversions don't result from shouting product promotions; they result from a deeper emotional connection stemming from what's actually going on in its customers' lives and communities. It's almost like making new friends in high school: You don't walk up to someone and say, "Be my friend. Be my friend! I'll pay for your lunch if you be my friend!" You need a savvier approach, striking up a conversation about something you may have in common with the prospective friend.

In order to contribute to and sustain a presence in social communities, brands need to post with the in-the-know mentality of your hyper-social friend on Facebook or Twitter — the one who's exhausting to hang out with, but still knows what's hot at the end of the day.

I refer to this method as "newsroom marketing". Every post, every engagement is breaking news optimized for the speed of pop culture. In this model, it takes hours, not weeks, to create content — and it will cost you less than a :30 network ad on TV. These newsroom tactics complement typical display advertising, which now has the job of retargeting the user with promotional messaging several sites after the prospect enjoyed the newsroom-style branded engagement.

If all goes according to plan, the brand's daily commentary becomes the opening joke of a stump speech, and the audience is more likely to consider that brand's products and services when they are prepped for product investigation or purchase. Unlike studio marketing, the content isn't king; context is.

So how do you gain footing in this new arena? At Virgin Mobile, we made the decision to learn from platforms that thrive in this environment — and who in turn need brands to help fund their innovation through paid media.

Our results from working with BuzzFeed for the past year have been extraordinary. On the day Instagram launched on Android, for example, Virgin Mobile could have simply announced its arrival on our Facebook page. Instead, we created an emotional connection among fans. "11 Things No One Wants to See You Instagram" hit a chord with readers who were huge Instagram fans, but could also relate to the trappings of tragic, try-hard Instagram posts. The piece's virality shot up, allowing for roughly 1.2 million views of the post from over 8,000 sharers across Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and LinkedIn.

In general, our subsequent clickthroughs from retargeted banner ads following campaigns like this are higher, and if we append a targeted flash sale to the campaign, we'll often see lifts of 95% in phone sales. According to a Vizu study BuzzFeed conducted earlier this year, prospects who enjoyed our branded social content were 235% more likely to investigate Virgin Mobile for their next phone service versus those that didn't see our content.

Currently, Virgin Mobile boasts an average 3 million views a month for its social content, rivaling the online audiences of Pitchfork and Rolling Stone. Why? Because we create content on a platform that was perfectly optimized for shareability. The name of the post, the length of the list, the photos selected — all these choices were thoughtful results from the A/B tests that founder Jonah Peretti and his disciples ferreted through before indoctrinating them as gospel. Of course, there are several platform options marketers can choose to take advantage of this trend in native advertising. But to truly reap the benefits of it, marketers need to tailor all of their assets — even their studio assets — to drive prospects to conversion by bridging seductive content with hard-core commerce. If a platform like BuzzFeed can optimize storytelling for content shareability, why can't marketers optimize storytelling for sharing products?

The social "share" metric has single-handedly redefined what it means to engage with an audience on a regular basis. New school marketers are less concerned with the unique monthly views on their microsites and are increasingly more obsessed with "owning the water cooler" — that is, owning the spaces where stories spread most. Even if you don't have a partner like BuzzFeed you can share a stream of photos on Instagram during Fashion Week, provide real-time commentary during the Oscars on Twitter, or create gasp-inducing fireworks GIFs on Tumblr to help strengthen your voice.

Before your C-suite execs finalize their bloated budgets in the fall, they should first take a hard look at the total "shares" from the campaigns conducted by their new school marketers. Hopefully they'll realize that some of the best acquisition tactics are earned, not bought. In other words, stop acting like a marketer. Act like a friend.

CIOs Must Lead Outside of IT

The CIO paradox is a set of contradictions that lies at the heart of IT leadership. Be strategic and operational. Stay secure and boost innovation. Adopt emerging technologies, while weighed down by the past. Many CIOs have buckled under the CIO paradox, while others have managed to be effective despite it. In working with these successful CIOs over the years, I have found that they all share a common set of practices, philosophies and approaches. We are in the midst of a computing renaissance, when all CIOs will need to raise their game and master this same set of practices. Herewith, three items that should have a permanent place on any CIO's "breaking the paradox" checklist.

Sell the foundation

Most large companies have underinvested in IT for decades. They've spent the bare minimum, and that's been fine, since IT has had to function merely as a "keep the lights on" necessity. As long as the mainframe systems aren't broken, let's not fix them. Today, however, technology innovation is creating a drastic change — across all major industries — in the way customers want to interact with their suppliers. Companies can no longer get away with treating IT as a commodity. These companies face a technical debt, and it's time to pay up.

Most CIOs find it relatively easy to convince an executive team to invest in a technology that increases near-term revenue. They find it considerably harder to ask their colleagues to invest in a major infrastructure upgrade that will take 12 months or more before delivering direct business benefit. But all CIOs need to find a way to convince their peers that without these infrastructure investments, they will be mortgaging their company's future. Through visuals, storytelling, and metaphors that resonate with the company's business leaders, CIOs must develop the skill of showing their stakeholders that foundational investments are the table stakes of innovation. If they do not, they will get crushed between the rock and hard-place of legacy technologies and business demand.

Grow blended executives

The companies that have underinvested in IT have also underinvested in IT talent. IT leaders are a unique breed, and they need to possess a heady brew of business, technology, and interpersonal skills. High-performing IT organizations appoint executives to sit at the intersection of business areas and the IT function, helping business leaders to shape their IT strategies and marshaling a technology team to deliver against that demand. Ideally, these "business relationship executives" would have two heads: one for business and one for technology. Since cloning is still an imperfect science — and these gorgeously blended executives are in short supply in the talent market — companies will need to grow their own.

The most effective approach to developing blended executives is to develop a program that rotates IT people into business roles, and business people into IT. But regardless of which approach companies take, they need to start now. We are in the midst of war for IT talent, and companies that always have to go outside for their IT leaders, are at a disadvantage. A far better strategy is to take the people that they have and develop them into blended executives. You know you are on the right track when you walk into a business unit meeting, and from the dialogue taking place, you cannot easily distinguish the IT person from everyone else.

Reach beyond IT

The IT function is not easy to manage. IT is highly strategic, intensely operational, hard to staff and extremely expensive. CIOs who are successful in running IT tend to develop expertise in important areas including project management, continuous improvement, people development, M&A, and strategic planning. These disciplines are critical to every other department in the company. CIOs who want to be effective in the future will extend their leadership and expertise beyond the IT function. They will set up enterprise project management offices; they will take the reigns as their company's continuous improvement champion; they will absorb HR and legal and procurement, along with IT, into a new Chief Shared Services Officer role. They will step out of their IT boxes because they know it is good for the company. They will not wait to be asked.

With cloud, mobility, consumerization, and big data, the CIO paradox is not disappearing; it is growing stronger. The contradictory forces that define IT are getting more acute, and CIOs will work harder than ever to perform. Those who are already struggling under the paradox will continue to struggle. But those who can rise to the occasion, break the paradox, and deliver value in our new technology marketplace will secure themselves a place of leadership in what promises to be an exciting new era.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





The CIO In Crisis: What You Told Us
How to Compete When IT Is Abundant
Can UX Save Enterprise IT?
The Metamorphosis of the CIO

Rediscover Your Company's Humanity

We've heard the rallying cry for the past few years for companies to "be customer-centric" and to transform into "a social business." But what does that really mean?



As I've said before, It's hard for most organizations to come to any real consensus because each part of the company only sees one small sliver of the customer, a sliver that comes with different meanings and measurement: a segmentation profile in marketing, website traffic for the digital team, "call volume" to the customer service team, a "conversion" to the sales team, or an "impression" to the advertising team. The real risk here is that no one sees the customer as an actual human being.

But the challenge the corporation really needs to answer — listening to and understanding the customer more deeply — can start with the concept of empathy: encouraging employees to put aside their particular duties with the company and put themselves in their customer's shoes.



This process need not require deeply specialized skills: it can be as simple as it sounds. The problem is, professional training has distanced us from fundamental principles of human communication. We now tend to focus on empirical data from survey results and analytics or customer insights from feedback forms and focus groups constrained by what the company knows to ask.



And, just as challenging, the differences in each of our professional trainings as we look across disciplines within any organization means that people think and talk differently about their relationship with that customer. Even more confusing, we are often using the same words for somewhat different purposes from department to department.



As a result, empathy with the customer, which is among the simplest of principles, can be among the most challenging to master, especially for employees managing communication with a community to which they've never actually belonged themselves.

At our agency, Peppercomm, this core philosophy of listening and empathy has transformed the way we work. We strive to see ourselves as beholden not just to the clients paying us for our consulting but equally so to the audiences they seek to reach, who give their time and who ultimately determine the success of our clients' businesses.



We've largely accomplished this through putting a deeper focus on helping our clients see the world from the eyes of their various audiences. We make it a priority to think about the communications experience of various stakeholders at every step along the way.



Thinking this way is a challenge. We still find ourselves accepting assumptions passed along by clients about their audiences without thinking them through from the audience's perspective. Occasionally, we'll catch one another talking about the customer as a number, or a profile, or a concept instead of an actual human being. And we sometimes still realize that we have created a communications strategy or drafted content more intent on capturing what everyone within the company would like to communicate without much thought as to what audiences actually want or need to know.



Customer empathy is a goal we'll never claim to "master," because it requires constantly challenging ourselves to work as a team from the common place of the perspective of the customer, the employee, the journalist, or any other constituency. But we pride ourselves on holding it up as our rallying cry and our filter on a daily basis.



As all of our companies continue acclimating to the realities of today's communications environment, it's imperative that those of us who see listening and empathy as a critical determinant of organizational health make it a company priority. We must all ensure our daily work reflects these principles. And we have to spread that message, both vertically and horizontally, within our organizations (and, for those of us in professional services, inside those companies we work with).



It will likely be frustrating and occasionally disheartening, especially since it seems so deceptively simple. But it is vital work, not just for the sake of our companies but for those audiences we serve. Only when all employees, from the C-suite to the interns, work to truly understand the world from their customer's points of view can we truly call ourselves "customer-centric" and a "social business."

Surprises Are the New Normal; Resilience Is the New Skill

The difference between winners and losers is how they handle losing.

That's a key finding from my ongoing research on great companies and effective leaders: no one can completely avoid troubles and potential pitfalls are everywhere, so the real skill is the resilience to climb out of the hole and bounce back.

Volatile times bring disruptions, interruptions, and setbacks, even for the most successful among us. Companies at the top of the heap still have times when they are blindsided by a competing product and must play catch-up. Sports teams that win regularly are often behind during the game. Writers can face dozens of rejections before finding a publisher that puts them on the map. Some successful politicians get caught with their pants down (so to speak) and still go on to lead, although such self-inflicted wounds are harder to heal.

Resilience is the ability to recover from fumbles or outright mistakes and bounce back. But flexibility alone is not enough. You have to learn from your errors. Those with resilience build on the cornerstones of confidence — accountability (taking responsibility and showing remorse), collaboration (supporting others in reaching a common goal), and initiative (focusing on positive steps and improvements). As outlined in my book Confidence, these factors underpin the resilience of people, teams, and organizations that can stumble but resume winning.

For anyone who wants to get beyond adversity or start over rather than give up, America is the Land of Second Chances. According to Jon Huntsman, former US Ambassador to China, getting back on our feet is an American strength widely admired in China. And everywhere, rapid recovery from natural disasters is increasingly a key to a robust economy. Entrepreneurs and innovators must be willing to fail and try again. The point isn't to learn to fail, it is to learn to bounce back.

Some stumbles are due to circumstances outside of most people's control, including weather events and geopolitical shocks. But while people might not control the larger problem, they control their reactions to it — whether to give up or find a new path. Recession in Europe is an example. I recently spoke to European audiences at public conferences and within companies about cultivating resilience in their businesses even when markets are shrinking, so that they hold their own as recession continues and are well-positioned for recovery. A German machinery company showed resilience by growing its service contracts when demand for machines slowed, and it mobilized employees to find new service possibilities. An Italian cosmetics firm grabbed talent from job-shedding multinationals and increased its international marketing tied to both health and fashion; new sales followed. In both companies, like others described in my book SuperCorp, such initiatives were made possible by a strong sense of purpose that drew members together and motivated them to take responsibility to help the companies survive and thrive. Employees were resilient because they cared, and that made the companies resilient.

Complacency, arrogance, and greed crowd out resilience. Humility and a noble purpose fuel it. Those with an authentic desire to serve, not just narcissism about wanting to be at the top, are willing to settle for less as an investment in better things later. Raymond Barre, former Premier of France, after being defeated for reelection at the national level, ran for a lesser office as Mayor of Lyon and became a hero of his region. That's the strategy Eliot Spitzer is taking by running for a lesser city office after having been governor of a state. He showed remorse quickly when scandal surfaced and then reentered the public conversation talking about the issues, increasing his comeback prospects.

Some observers say it is harder for women to stage comebacks. Still, consider Martha Stewart. She served prison time for insider trading rather graciously, showing remorse, and that graciousness restored much of her fan base afterward. In a more positive vein, Hillary Clinton was not a sore loser to President Obama in 2008 (though some of her followers were) and accepted his offer to become his Secretary of State. She's now perhaps even better-positioned for a 2016 Presidential run. In the long term, graciousness beats sour grapes.

Resilience draws from strength of character, from a core set of values that motivate efforts to overcome the setback and resume walking the path to success. It involves self-control and willingness to acknowledge one's own role in defeat. Resilience also thrives on a sense of community — the desire to pick oneself up because of an obligation to others and because of support from others who want the same thing. Resilience is manifested in actions — a new contribution, a small win, a goal that takes attention off of the past and creates excitement about the future.

Potential troubles lurk around every corner, whether they stem from unexpected environmental jolts or individual flaws and mistakes. Whatever the source, what matters is how we deal with them. When surprises are the new normal, resilience is the new skill.

Avoiding the Soft "Yes"

It was undoubtedly a high-quality piece of work. The project team had spent the past six months designing a new strategy to accelerate growth in a critical emerging market for a multibillion-dollar multinational. The summary document had that rare combination: a compelling long-term vision and a credible set of near-term actions addressing critical strategic unknowns.

The last page of the 50-page document concluded the compelling story with a small request — four dedicated individuals for six months and $250,000 to conduct an in-market pilot. The project leader believed the modest request would translate into an easy yes.



I could see the logic in that approach, but I feared it wasn't going to work the way she was expecting. In actual fact, I've found, saving "the ask" for the end of the document increases the risks of encountering a hidden enemy of innovation inside large companies: the "soft yes." This happens when executives get jazzed about a broad innovation strategy, nod their head vigorously in support of it, but stop short of committing real, tangible resources, however modest.

It was the four dedicated people that were going to be the sticking point, I thought. You almost always can find money in someone's budget, or find creative ways around financial constraints to progress a new idea. But there are only so many hours in the day. Executives often hesitate to hire additional staff ("What happens if this doesn't work — then what do we do?" they say). They're equally reluctant to ask their best performers to shift from what are perceived to be critical tasks related to running the core business to risky innovation efforts.

They're more comfortable asking busy people to add another item to their to-do list. But since most people's incentives are tied to delivering against the core business, they'll likely nod their heads and agree to help out — but prioritize the tasks they feel they're being paid to do over the pursuit of uncertain ideas.

Thus, the soft yes — people agree (in principle) to your request, but they don't come through whole-heartedly. The net result is that innovation efforts limp along, making just enough progress to keep management intrigued, but not enough to have any material impact.

One way to avoid the soft yes is to make your resource request clear early — within the first 10 minutes of any review meeting. Be specific. Then lay out the logic for the request. Detail the metrics that senior management can monitor as they watch their investment. Consider creating an exit strategy in case things don't go according to plan. If you are hiring new people, for example, perhaps they could be redeployed to other functions, if things don't pan out. Or maybe they could be brought on using temporary contracts. End your meeting by repeating the resource request. If you obtain verbal agreement, send a written summary to stakeholders to nail it down.

This all might sound like overkill, but remember that companies left to their own devices will naturally default to executing today's business, not creating tomorrow's. Being clear in intent, consistent in your explanations, and persistent in getting formal agreement can ensure that you get the resources you need when you need them.

Narcissistic CEOs Take Bold Action When There's an Appreciative Audience

Highly narcissistic CEOs were nearly 3 times more likely than very un-narcissistic leaders to take bold steps to embrace potentially disruptive technologies when media interest in the disruption was high. But when interest was low, the narcissistic CEOs showed no such heightened propensity to act, says a team led by Wolf-Christian Gerstner of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. The research, which analyzed the U.S. pharmaceutical industry when biotech was disrupting it, measured such actions as acquisition of biotech firms as a function of CEO narcissism (calculated by factors including the leaders' prominence in annual reports). Narcissistic CEOs, who crave admiration, tend to take bold action when there's an audience that is likely to see their actions as daring, the researchers suggest.

How the Voice of the People Is Driving Corporate Social Responsibility

The business case for corporate social responsibility (CSR) is becoming easier and easier to make. You can argue that it boosts a company's brand, manages risk, and just plain saves money. But perhaps most importantly the general public is clamoring for companies to enact good, fair business practices — and most of that public pressure comes through social media.

There are plenty of (very public) examples of businesses moved into more sustainable practices by a social media backlash: Immediately following this year's factory collapse disaster in Bangladesh, companies who sourced materials from the country quickly came under fire; now retailers including H&M, Zara, and Abercrombie & Fitch have banded together to create a safety plan to improve conditions in Bangladeshi factories, and the Gap was not far behind. In another example, last year the Internet cried foul when the Susan G Komen foundation decided to yank funding for Planned Parenthood, and the outcry caused the non-profit to reverse its decision within days. And in 2010, Greenpeace attacked Nestlé with a viral video over its use of unsustainable palm oil. After 3 months of holding its ground against vocal naysayers on Facebook, the company finally agreed to cancel contracts with vendors who clear cut rainforests to make room for palm oil plantations. (Nestlé is now much more proactive about CSR.)

Feedback through social media is immediate, permanent, and extremely public. When individuals feel strongly about a company's performance on social or environmental issues, one small voice can quickly become a swarm, difficult for even the most shielded executive to ignore. For this reason, social has become a driving force in many companies' CSR agendas

One of the easiest ways to be on the right side of the social media tide is to be proactive — and personal — by listening to feedback and responding in an authentic way. Firms that are excelling in this regard have active, branded Twitter accounts, but they also encourage their executives to use Twitter as well. You can easily reach Dave Stangis, Campbell's Soup's CSR lead on Twitter, where he talks about the company's initiatives as well as global sustainability issues. Another great example is Bruno Sarda, Sustainability Operations Director at Dell. Both of these execs, and many more, make their company's corporate sustainability extremely personal, just by being present and approachable to the people of Twitter. To get a similar impact, make sure that the people in charge of your social media accounts understand what your CSR efforts mean for your brand, and empower them to act in a positive way to support your company.

One company that is leading the way on using social media to inform its sustainability program and communicate about its CSR agenda is Unilever. The personal care product and food conglomerate has dozens of brands and thousands of products, which makes its sustainability program both extremely important and difficult to communicate, because it spans issues from health and hygiene to greenhouse gas reductions. Yet, Unilever has managed to bundle them all under one umbrella, the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. The plan includes a multifaceted plan for communicating progress through a wide variety of methods, from video to Facebook to Twitter chats. It also includes traditional advertising tactics and public awareness campaigns from Dove's Real Beauty Sketches to a Lifebuoy hand-washing campaign delivered by roti in India.

Behind every great communicator is a great strategy. These campaigns and individuals are successful because they reinforce the company's brand and goals around both sustainability and consumer engagement. Unilever is an excellent example of a company with a bold, high-level strategy which informs all its sustainability communications. The company uses a variety of in-person and virtual strategies — like its online global dialogue, the Sustainable Living Lab, which in April had 550 attendees from 80 countries. Participants were extremely active, sharing 1,750 comments on all aspects of sustainability. Through these initiatives, Unilever has demonstrated that interactive communication through social media is one regular component of its CSR strategy. This comprehensive strategy also allows communication teams at far reaching brands from Dove to Ben and Jerry's to put the strategy into practice in a way that suits the individual brand, while supporting the company's overall sustainability mission.

Ultimately, social media is just a communication tool like any other. But it is one consumers use to talk about brands, and the world is listening. It is easy to fear the tide of social media for the risks it can bring, but this onslaught of information can also be viewed as an opportunity. By listening to those early whispers of complaint, companies can act quickly to minimize the fallout — while also gaining important knowledge that can inform and improve a company's internal CSR report.

Three Rules to Make Your Company Exceptional

Michael E. Raynor, director at Deloitte Services LP, explains how to keep your decisions on track for long-term success. For more, read his article, Three Rules for Making a Company Truly Great.

The Rise of UX Leadership

UX, as user experience is known, is the new black in business culture. Most of the executives I meet with, regardless of their industry, now promote UX as key to their product strategy. That's a big change from only five years ago, when UX wasn't on anyone's radar outside the tech world. For a designer like myself, it's easy to recognize which executives know their products intimately, and which manage from a spreadsheet. Thankfully, I'm seeing the emergence of a new generation of UX-oriented leaders with little patience for the hands-off approach. They recognize that as UX eclipses traditional brand marketing, they need to be more hands-on with their products.

The CEO as Lead Product Designer

Steve Jobs famously ushered in an era of the CEO as "Lead Product Designer," as described by one of his close collaborators, Glenn Reid, who worked with Jobs at NeXT and Apple: "(Steve) told me once that part of the reason he wanted to be CEO was so that nobody could tell him that he wasn't allowed to participate in the nitty-gritty of product design. He was right there in the middle of it. All of it."

Given Apple's success, it is not surprising to see many executives following Jobs' lead. I recently met a top executive at a major enterprise technology firm who runs an $8 billion dollar product line and describes himself as the "Chief Product Designer" for his division (even though his title is SVP and General Manager, and he has never before considered himself a "designer"). A few years ago, this characterization would have seemed like a step down for a senior executive. The nitty-gritty of product design has become a badge of pride in many organizations, like Facebook, which has embraced a "learn by making" executive culture.

This product-centric mindset is not entirely new. The auto industry invented the blockbuster product "reveal" long before Jobs, with auto execs unveiling new "concept cars" at auto shows in an annual ritual of one-upmanship that continues today. For example, the now ubiquitous and much beloved Fiat 500 was first unveiled by Sergio Marchionne, no stranger to showmanship, at the Geneva Motorshow in 2004 following the buzz generated by the 2001 re-launch of the Mini-Cooper by BMW. This spirit is exemplified by executives like Akio Toyoda, the CEO of Toyota, who worked his way up the through the ranks from the assembly line. In a 2008 New York Times interview, he said, "If I am going to be at the top of the car company, I want to be the owner-chef — with knowledge not just of its vehicles but their ingredients. I taste my car, and if it tastes good, I provide it to the customer." As Toyota CEO, Mr. Toyoda has lived up to his word, launching the radically redesigned Toyota Crown last year in a hot pink bubble gum hue that you could practically taste.

Photo courtesy of Morio, Wikimedia Commons

With consumer technology becoming such a status symbol in our culture, tech CEOs must put on a few good UX demos each year to reaffirm the connection to their products, or risk losing face with their peers and seeing their stock price plummet. This is a good first step, but it won't make corporate culture more sensitive to UX. For that, CEOs must move beyond showmanship.

Some CEOs do get UX. They use their products on a daily basis. I recently met a senior executive of a financial services company who is so obsessed with his corporation's product experience that he calls customer service with a new complaint each day, just to make sure the customer service representatives know their way around his product offering.

"Customers" Have Become "Users"

The opposite problem for some executives is that they can be too close to customers (for instance, IT managers who buy a solution) without understanding end-users (the people who actually use the solution on a daily basis) They get so much feedback from their sales teams that it leads to feature creep — adding features to satisfy every customer. Along the way, any semblance of a coherent user experience is lost. The result: a highly-reactive product development culture in which extra features are continuously bolted on, making the company vulnerable to more pro-active competitors who have a laser-like focus on UX, which can be a potent disruptor in many industries.

So, how do you know if your UX is actually working for your end-users? Start by conducting a UX audit that captures the sequence of interactions your customers need to take to complete basic tasks with key products, be it renting a car or checking into a hotel room. Most executive flinch when presented with stark visual evidence of the convoluted nature of their user experience.

Here is an example of the sort of visual audit that usually turns heads with executives. This map provides a concrete picture of each step that is required to complete a simple task, in this case installing a home router for an IP telephony company (this map was created in 2005 and does not in any way represent the current state of their products and services). The map is divided into three key stages in the "Out of Box Experience": purchase and open, explore and setup, use and grow. We developed this map after observing a small set of novice users try to complete the process. We used quotes and anecdotes from these sessions to help make the case with executives for the need to overhaul the entire user experience around install, and not just redesign the physical router itself. (Click to see a larger image.)

The Next Wave (Put on Your Hoodie!)

The gap is growing between traditional sales-and-marketing-driven behemoths with their "customer-centric" approach and the new breed of organizations like Square and Zipcar, who have a "UX-centric" culture. Tomorrow's leaders need to be able to close this gap. Fortunately, there is a great training ground for new UX leadership: the startup market. MBAs and other aspiring professionals are seizing the opportunity to create something new, emulating start-up heroes like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Dennis Crowley. Not all of these startups will succeed, but leaders who join their ranks will learn valuable lessons seeing products and ideas rejected by end-users firsthand. These new UX-minded executives will take top jobs elsewhere, seeding a new UX culture in corporate America. And they'll certainly be looking to join companies that "get" UX.

But what if you can't jump ship and join a start-up to learn UX skills? Many organizations are developing strategies to increase their UX capacity and promote product-centric entrepreneurship. Some large corporations, like Comcast, have launched venture investing arms. Others, like Google Ventures, are seeing these activities as more than just a way to make money, and rather as a way to engage the UX community. Design Staff, Google Venture's fantastic blog, has become an online hub for sharing lean UX methodologies. Similarly, organizations like GE are investing in innovation accelerators that pair product teams with outside experts (like Eric Ries, author of Lean Startup) to coach teams in launching new initiatives with a more entrepreneurial mindset. (We can only hope that this UX mindset migrates to Crotonville, GE's vaunted leadership academy.) You can learn more about these sorts of strategies in my previous post on "Scaling Your UX Strategy" in order to prepare your own company for the rising tide of UX leadership