values

Five ways to strengthen your company’s immune system

I’m not usually a germophobe, but the last few months I’ve been walking around opening doors with my elbows and washing my hands constantly. I’ve been freaked out by the constant updates on Facebook about what my friends/friends’ kids have come down with now. So far, my immune system has held up pretty well, but I always worry that H1N1 is only a doorknob away.

These are trying times for corporate immune systems too. The economic meltdown has exposed corporations to all sorts of risks they don’t deal with in the regular course of business. Many corporate immune systems have failed, putting millions of people out of work. It begs the question: how resilient is your company? And how can you make your corporate immune system stronger?

I got to thinking about this corporate immune system concept after reading the new book The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It by Joshua Cooper Ramo. In this fantastic book, Ramo (former foreign editor of Time Magazine, now a foreign policy/strategy consultant at Kissinger Associates) offers his thoughts on what we as a society need to do to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

Ramo talks a lot about the idea of creating a stronger global immune system. Here’s what he means:

“What we need now, both for our world and in each of our lives, is a way of living that resembles nothing so much as a global immune system: always ready, capable of dealing with the unexpected, as dynamic as the world itself. An immune system can’t prevent the existence of a disease, but without one even the slightest of germs have deadly implications.”

Ramo presents this in idea in the context of how we protect ourselves from a scary world– terrorists, rogue nations, nuclear proliferation, and all that, but the concept applies well to the corporate world as well– tough competitors, fickle customers, shrinking budgets– we corporate folks have our own demons.

So how do we shore up the ol’ immune system? Ramo refers to the philosophy of building resilience or “deep security” into the organization. Continue reading →

Jack Welch on transparency, meritocracy, and the death of hierarchy

On Tuesday I’m heading up to New York to share an open source perspective with GE marketing executives at the legendary GE leadership center in Crotonville. I wrote a post a few months ago praising GE Chairman Jeffrey Immelt’s compelling new vision for corporate America, and I have an enormous amount of respect for GE as an innovation engine. I’m excited about the opportunity to exchange ideas with the smart folks there.

In 2009, Forbes ranked GE as the world’s largest company, so I’ve figured before I went up to Crotonville it’d be a good idea to do some homework and see what elements of what we call the open source way are already in practice within one of the most successful companies in history. I’ve found some interesting stuff in my research.

One piece in particular grabbed me. Sitting on the beach today over the holiday weekend, I finished the 2001 biography of Jack Welch (the legendary predecessor to Immelt as Chairman of GE) entitled Jack: Straight from the Gut. I thought I’d share a Jack Welch prediction (written almost ten years ago) that fits right in with our open source view of what the 21st century organization looks like.

Continue reading →

Whole Foods and the brand promise

Whole Foods is a clear example of a mission-driven company. Over the years, they’ve taken strong activist stances on a number of topics related to healthy living. In fact, they are one of the few big corporations that I’ve seen actually link to their values as a main navigation element on their homepage. You’ve probably also seen these same values posted in your local store. I think this is awesome.

And personally, I love Whole Foods. My guess is, based on their corporate values, that their core customer leans to the left politically.

This week, in the Wall Street Journal, John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, wrote an editorial entitled The Whole Foods alternative to Obamacare.

I see the strategy… a few weeks ago, Whole Foods launched a campaign to help empower Americans to lead healthier lives. At the campaign launch, Mackey even said Whole Foods is going to reverse the 14 year trend toward having more pre-processed food in their stores. I’m sure this editorial was one piece of a larger campaign strategy. And certainly most people would agree that Americans could use a healthier diet.

In moving from talking about healthier food into talking about healthcare, Whole Foods has hit on a massively politicized issue. When your core customers lean to the left, and as a corporate leader you take a position to the right, you take a risk that people might start to question whether they really affiliate themselves with your brand promise.

Continue reading →

Brand positioning tip #3: the brand mantra

In previous posts, we’ve covered three of the four elements of good brand positioning as I learned them from Dr. Kevin Keller, author of the classic branding textbook Strategic Brand Management:

1. Points of difference: the things that make you different from your competition (and that your customers value)
2. Points of parity: the places where you may be weaker than the competition and need to ensure you are “good enough” so you can still win on the merits of your points of difference
3. Competitive frame of reference: the market or competitive landscape in which you are positioning yourself

Today we will be covering the 4th element of good brand positioning: the brand mantra.

What is a brand mantra?

A brand mantra is a 3-5 word shorthand encapsulation of your brand position. It is not an advertising slogan, and, in most cases, it won’t be something you use publicly.

According to Scott Bedbury, author of A New Brand World (one the of top 10 books behind Dark Matter Matters), the term brand mantra was coined during his time at Nike.

Continue reading →

When good companies go bad

A few weeks ago I finished the new Jim Collins book How the Mighty Fall and Why Some Companies Never Give In. If you read this blog much, you’re probably sick of me prattling on about how much I love Jim Collins’ work (here, here, and here). Over the years at Red Hat, we’ve based many projects related to the values, mission, and other corporate-level structural thinking on ideas we got from him.

Well, it’s been almost eight years since Collins wrote his last full-length book, Good to Great (which ranked number one on my list of the top ten books behind Dark Matter Matters). How the Mighty Fall is a short book, and in it, Collins is clearly a bit on the defensive about his previous work. The issue? In the economic meltdown last year, some of his Built to Last companies didn’t last, and some of his Good to Great companies are back to good… or gone.

Collins explains it this way:

…the principles in Good to Great were derived primarily from studying specific periods in history when the good-to-great companies showed a substantial transformation into an era of superior performance that lasted fifteen years. The research did not attempt to predict which companies would remain great after their fifteen-year run. Indeed, as this work shows, even the mightiest of companies can self-destruct.

…I’ve come to see institutional decline like a staged disease: harder to detect but easier to cure in the earlier stages, easier to detect but harder to cure in the later stages. An institution can look strong on the outside but already be sick in the inside, dangerously on the cusp of a precipitous fall.

So this book is Collins’ attempt to discover why exactly some very good companies went oh so very bad. If Good to Great was Star Wars, this book is The Empire Strikes Back— a long, hard look into the dark side (even the cover is black).

Collins did extensive research using an interesting approach. He studied these companies, not as history has judged them, but based on what the company was saying, what the press was saying, what financial analysts were saying during the time period being studied– before we knew the outcome. And all of the research was done in historical order, almost like he was following the companies through time.

The results of the research play out like a Greek tragedy. He identified 5 stages of decline in the companies that had gone from great to… not so great:

Continue reading →

Red Hat brand/culture link featured on brandchannel.com

There’s a nice article out today on brandchannel.com called Build Your Brand from the Inside Out, interviewing me and Ashley Stockwell from Virgin Media on the role of employees in building a brand. Even Dark Matter Matters gets a plug. Thanks Morgan!

The top 10 books behind Dark Matter Matters

Books are important to me. Growing up, almost every free wall in my parents’ house was lined with bookshelves, some of them stacked two deep.  I spent most of my pre- Red Hat career in book publishing, first working during college at The University of North Carolina Press. After college, I went to work for a literary agent named Rafe Sagalyn in Washington DC. Working for Rafe was a great experience because he built his reputation on big think/idea books and business books.

His first big book was the huge bestseller Megatrends by John Naisbitt back in the early 80s. When I was there, I personally got to work with, among others, Bill Strauss and Neil Howe on their great books about generational patterns in society (check out The Fourth Turning… very prophetic these days) and Don Peppers, author of some books back in the 90s like The 1:1 Future about relationship marketing that were the grandparents of today’s books on social media marketing.

I also got to play agent and author myself too. As an agent, I represented some of Tom Bodett’s work (yes, he is the Motel 6 guy, but was also a commentator on NPR) and sold a wonderful novel called The Frequency of Souls to FSG. As author, I helped Rafe write two “cutting edge” books about getting free and open access to government information (they have not aged well, I’m afraid).

Fast forwarding to today, Rafe actually was the agent for two recent big think books that I love, Authenticity and A Whole New Mind, so he is still making things happen.

After I left book publishing, reading became fun again. I read novels and travel literature for a while, nothing that made me think too much. But when I got to Red Hat, I relapsed and started reading the big think books like the ones I used to work on with Rafe. I thought it might be worth taking a few minutes to try to remember the books that have been the biggest influences on my thinking, and get them all down in one place, so here goes:

Top 10 Dark Matter Matters books

Without these ten books, Dark Matter might not even matter to me.

Continue reading →

Why did I just write a post about Viking Longships?

A great brand can seem from the outside to be an awesome speedboat, like the kind they rode around on Miami Vice… Just grab the wheel, hit the throttle, and send it screaming through the water to wherever you want to go. He who controls the brand has all of the power to steer and go wherever he wants… right?

I’ve always envied those brand managers (kind of…) who have a marketing budget of millions and can go out and “buy” an image for their brand using advertising. They are driving the speedboats. If they want, they can associate their brand with skydivers and bungee jumping (Do the Dew, man!) or whatever they choose.

But the reality is that a brand like Red Hat is more like a Viking longship. Here’s what Wikipedia says about how longships moved:

Continue reading →

Matt Asay on the Red Hat Mission

Matt Asay just posted about Red Hat’s new mission, which he discovered on a visit to our Westford office in one of our “bathroom briefings” (important aside: we post some internal company news right front and center in the bathroom… if you want people to read something, post it in the bathroom– not everyone reads mailing lists, but everyone pees! Remember, internal communications is a strategic role at Red Hat!).

It’s not a secret, so I don’t mind that he saw the mission or posted about it. In fact, we are pretty happy with the transparent process we employed to get it done. Those of you who have read some previous posts know how strongly I feel about having the entire company aligned on mission and vision and values– the core stuff.

Continue reading →

People who get it #2: Marty Neumeier

I ordered 3 copies of Marty Neumeier’s new book, The Designful Company, yesterday for the team. Will let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to read it. His two previous books, The Brand Gap and Zag, both had a profound influence on the Red Hat overall brand strategy. I especially love The Brand Gap, which David Burney first introduced to me in 2005.

I’ve probably bought 20-30 copies of The Brand Gap over the last few years, try to keep a few at my desk to hand out to any potential brand converts I meet (why do I never get the copies back?). What’s beautiful about this book is the design and content are one–the message of the book is communicated by its design and its content together. And it is short– any busy executive can read it on a plane up to NYC.

In addition to helping us articulate the overall organizational design of the Brand Communications + Design group within Red Hat, this book has given us many other good ideas to chew on over the years. Probably the most famous quote from the book is:

A brand is not what YOU say it is, it’s what THEY say it is.

which many other people have glommed onto over the last couple of years (including me).

Even if you don’t have time to check out Marty’s books, go check out his great (and beautiful) presentation that explains many of the key concepts of his thinking here.