Nonlinear Thinking

Doughnut Economics

Via Doughnut Economics Action Lab:

The Doughnut offers a vision of what it means for humanity to thrive in the 21st century - and Doughnut Economics explores the mindset and ways of thinking needed to get us there.

First published in 2012 in an Oxfam report by Kate Raworth, the concept rapidly gained traction internationally, from the UN General Assembly to the Occupy movement.

Kate's 2017 book, Doughnut Economics: seven ways to think like a 21st century economist,  further explored the economic thinking needed to bring humanity into the Doughnut, drawing together insights from diverse economic perspectives in a way that everyone can understand

The Doughnut's holistic scope and visual simplicity, coupled with its scientific grounding, has turned it into a convening space for big conversations about reimagining and remaking the future. It is now being discussed, debated and put into practice in education and in communities, in business and in government, in towns, cities and nations worldwide.

Think of it as a compass for human prosperity in the 21st century, with the aim of meeting the needs of all people within the means of the living planet.

The Doughnut consists of two concentric rings: a social foundation, to ensure that no one is left falling short on life’s essentials, and an ecological ceiling, to ensure that humanity does not collectively overshoot the planetary boundaries that protect Earth's life-supporting systems. Between these two sets of boundaries lies a doughnut-shaped space that is both ecologically safe and socially just: a space in which humanity can thrive.

 

"This is a Generic Brand Video" Video

Funny and disquieting on multiple levels, this is a creative evocation of  Kendra Eash's brilliant advertising takedown, "This Is a Generic Brand Video," originally published by McSweeney's.  Stock video provider Dissolve has taken the text of Eash's screed and set it to actual stock video clips.

From Adweek:

The results, narrated by Dallas McClain, are outstanding. You've seen all of this footage in ads from major brands. It's everywhere. And it's great that a stock video house would so gleefully celebrate the soul-sucking manipulations for which its offerings are generally used.

Watch below, and have an epiphany on how you can continue to make marketing, and brand building, more credible going forward.

 

 

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Everything You Hate About Advertising in One Fake Video That's Almost Too Real

Get Digital or Go Home

A recent study conducted by MIT Sloan Management Review and Capgemini Consulting suggests that organizations are now facing a digital imperative and must adopt new technologies effectively or face competitive obsolescence.

Among employees, while there is consensus on the importance of adopting digital technology, most find the process in their organizations to be too complex and slow and believe their leaders lack urgency and a vision for how technology can change the business. As with most initiatives, companies that successfully execute a digital transformation tend to have leaders who share their vision and define a road map, create cross-organizational authority for adoption and reward employees for working towards it.

 

Other key findings from the survey are:

• According to 78% of respondents, achieving digital transformation will become critical to their organizations within the next two years.
• However, 63% said the pace of technology change in their organization is too slow.
• The most frequently cited obstacle to digital transformation was “lack of urgency.”
• Only 38% of respondents said that digital transformation was a permanent fixture on their CEO’s agenda.
• Where CEOs have shared their vision for digital transformation, 93% of employees feel that it is the right thing for the organization. But, a mere 36% of CEOs have shared such a vision.

Companies that effectively manage the digital transformation can expect to gain in one or more of three areas:

• Better customer experiences and engagement
• Streamlined operations
• New lines of business or business models

Though innovative new business models are what every CEO dreams of, companies more often see digital technologies support a transformation of their customer experience or operations.

 

Addendum: Social Business Gains Traction

As an addendum to an earlier post on social business, this chart from the second annual MIT and Deloitte Social Business Global Executive Study and Research Project survey on how businesses use social media suggests that the concept of social business is being adopted aggressively across all industries.  How well and how strategically it is being adopted is still an open question.

 In all 12 of the major industry sectors covered by the survey, the percentage of respondents who said social software or social business was “important to their organization today” increased from the previous year’s survey. No industry sector declined and none remained flat.

Interestingly, the industry sector with the strongest year over year increase in the survey was energy and utilities, moving from 7% of respondents ranking social business as “important” in 2011 to 29.1% in 2012.  That exponential increase may be linked with the increasing adoption of smart grid technologies that allow utilities to more easily interact with their customers.  A 2012 research report by Navigant Research predicted that by the end of 2017, the number of utility customers using social media to engage with the utility companies would rise from 57 million in 2011 to 624 million.

Unsurprisingly, for the second year in a row, the technology/media/telecommunications sector respondents were most likely to rate social business as important to their organization with 87% saying that social business was important or somewhat important to their organizations in 2012.  A bit more surprising was that the education (82%) and professional services sectors (76%) followed closely behind.

Another finding from the survey was that while companies in most industries are generating social data from their initiatives, few businesses were analyzing the data or integrating it into their organization’s systems and processes.

The new study from MIT and Deloitte will be released in July.

On Becoming a Social Business

Call it the tipping point, the moment of truth, a watershed event or any other synonym for when things have arrived at a point of irreversible, no-going-back, change.  Is 2013 going to be the year when social media truly becomes social business and social business morphs into business as usual?

Probably not.  Reams of data suggest that most companies are using social media.  Most of those are still really just dabbling.  Truly embracing social media as a core element of business going forward requires a belief and commitment that is still difficult to find in companies with more traditional business models and a bias towards the tried-and-true.  But with proof points on the efficacy of the practice/process/technology/culture of social media becoming more and more plentiful, it would seem that the more programmatic embrace of social media is coming closer to a need-to-have more than a nice-to-have.

The concept of a “social business” is still probably nascent enough that there remain a number of definitions running around.  In a recent report from Altimeter Group, Charlene Li and Brian Solis outlined the difference between a social media strategy and a social business strategy:

A social media strategy lays out the channels, platforms, and tactics to support publishing, listening, and engagement. A social business strategy is the integration of social technologies and processes into business values, processes, and practices to build relationships and spark conversations inside and outside the organization, creating value and optimizing impact for customers and the business alike. The most important criteria for a successful social business strategy are twofold: clear alignment with the strategic business goals of an organization AND organizational alignment and support that enables execution of that strategy.

Social media broadly permeates society (perhaps too much!) and that means it permeates business operations on all levels.  Ad hoc social activity runs rampant across the enterprise so it stands to reason that sooner or later, every company will want to formalize and harmonize these activities into a coherent strategy and plan.  Social business technologies help people connect, communicate, and share information and, whether informal or formal, use of those technologies allow companies to respond more quickly, take advantage more easily, and create competitive advantage.

Companies have historically tended to demonize those things that impact their business but remain beyond their control.  Though it may be stating the obvious, social media is one big, fat dynamic that is altering the playbook for business and not just in the marketing discipline.  De facto, every business today is a social business; they may just not have internalized it yet.  Possessing a strategy is merely the first step in the formal embrace of social.  That way, all those “Likes”, “Friends”, “Links”, and “Follows” can mean something more than a distraction.

Along those lines, here is a video from GE on their progression towards becoming a social business.

 

 

 

The Inevitability of Digital Marketing and the Digital CMO

A favorite debate focuses on the ascension of digital marketing over traditional marketing in today’s marketing model. Too many companies, even in the technology sector, still seem unable to grasp that such a transformation is taking place.

Perhaps the issue is that, even now, spending on analog/traditional marketing continues to exceed spending on digital marketing by a significant ratio according to Gartner Group’s 2013 U.S. Digital Marketing Spending Survey.  Based on the survey, average marketing spend as a percent of annual revenue, across all industries, is 10.4% while digital marketing spend is 2.5%. 

It should be noted that analog marketing tactics continue to be more expensive than digital options – media advertising being just the most obvious example.  Had the survey been broken down between B2C and B2B companies/industries, my guess is that analog and digital spending would be on a more even spending arc.

A related trend - how the advent of the digital marketing technologies that are reinventing much of the marketing model have altered the dynamic between CMO and CIO – is also highlighted by the results of the survey.  The CIOs of those same companies have seen their budget decline to 3.5% of annual revenue and with digital marketing spend at that 2.5% level, parity in technology-related spend seems not too far away.

In fact, in a 2012 report, Gartner predicted that by 2017, the CMO's technology budget will exceed the CIO's.  Pretty much every business should broadly consider itself a digital business but, right or wrong, marketing has emerged as the de facto owner of digital.  That makes the CMO responsible for driving the organization’s digital transformation, which clearly is built on many of the emerging technologies that are changing the conduct of business – mobile, social, cloud, SaaS/PaaS/IaaS.

SaaS and cloud technologies have had much to do with the changing balance of power between the two functions.  The ability to bypass the CIO organization to access key marketing technology platforms/solutions with ease in the new environment allows marketing leadership, or any other functional leadership, to avoid the traditional IT development/procurement queue and execute much more quickly on critical initiatives.

This would all seem to set the stage for the emergence and confirmation of the digital CMO, a marketing leader that not only recognizes the inevitability of this transition in the marketing model, but embraces and builds an organization to take greatest advantage of the new digital/social/mobile media.  Marketing strategy is still marketing strategy.  It is the tools, technologies, and channels that have been disrupted.  If there is a crossing of the Rubicon occurring in marketing today it is probably better to start thinking and acting digitally now than learn in some harder, and perhaps more final, way.

Authenticity, Point-of-View and Telling Stories

For an organization, your point-of-view (POV) is the expression of what your company believes, what makes you different, and why people (customers, partners, employees & investors) should care.

The vast majorities of businesses just blend, or disappear, into the crowd. While their critical metrics – sales, growth rates, margins, earnings, and market capitalization – position them as viable competitors in their chosen markets, being average should never be the aspiration.

Truly great and lasting enterprises have a great story to tell.  They stand for something. They are also able to articulate their unique value in a manner that is both clear and compelling and positions them in a way that separates them from their peer group. They are different and are able to continually and consistently demonstrate that difference through both words and actions.  Telling their story and institutionalizing their POV allows them to remain steadfast as they navigate both choppy and calm waters.  And this makes them valuable to all their stakeholders.

For consistently successful companies, the POV forms the core of both content and context.  It drives content in the way that their story informs every market facing document they share, online or offline.  It also informs their internal communication.  It provides context for both strategic and tactical decision making, including what products and services to offer and how to market and sell them and to whom they partner with and who they hire.

The best way for an organization to remain relevant in today’s dynamic marketplace, is to be authentic.  To be authentic, they must be able to tell their story and express their POV, in the most compelling manner possible, across every traditional and contemporary medium that might touch their key constituencies.  In such a fast moving, global business environment, telling your story is how you do business, how you turn suspects into prospects, prospects into customers, opportunities into deals, and investments into revenue.

At its essence, an enterprise POV is the compelling argument as to why a business problem exists and how that enterprise can provide the most valuable response to that problem.

 

OBTW, You Don’t Got Game

Having looked at the strategic intent, market activities, and business models of hundreds of companies over the past two decades, I am sure of only one thing:  most companies don’t really understand strategy.  A recent article in Strategy + Business by Ken Favaro tackled this issue head on.

“When discussing strategy, executives often invoke some version of a vision, a mission, a purpose, a plan, or a set of goals. I call these “the corporate five” Each is important in driving execution, no doubt, but none should be mistaken for a strategy.”

When I discuss strategy within organizations, I try to get to the heart of intent by asking four simple questions:

• Who are you?
• Why are you here?
• What do you do?
• Why should I care?

Now, those questions don’t cover all the bases, but if an organization can’t answer those, they don’t understand where they are trying to go or what they are trying to be.  Favaro has a different set of questions that crosses the same territory.  He calls them” the strategic five”.

“Before they get to the corporate five, companies need to address five much more fundamental, and difficult, questions. Let's call them the “the strategic five”:

1. What business or businesses should you be in?
2. How do you add value to your businesses?
3. Who are the target customers for your businesses?
4. What are your value propositions to those target customers?
5. What capabilities are essential to adding value to your businesses and differentiating their value propositions?”

I also think it is important to recognize that “the corporate five” have historically become hard-coded as an “aspirational” raison d’être, often resulting in sclerotic environments that are neither agile nor adaptable enough to maintain success in today’s rapidly evolving markets.

Answering Favaro’s “strategic five” prepares an organization to much more easily roll with the punches that their marketplace will almost certainly attempt to throw their way.

Compendium/Miscellanea/Almanac 04.17.2013

Stuff that has crossed my radar lately for one reason or another.

• The Strategic Plan is Dead.  Long Live Strategy. (Stanford Social Innovation Review)
• A new reality between the CMO and CIO (ZDNet)
• We’re from Corporate and We’re Here to Help (Strategy + Business)
• The Software Revolution Behind LinkedIn’s Gushing Profits (Wired)
• Pragmatic Pathway – New Approaches to Organizational Change (Deloitte University Press)
• Global Information Technology Report 2013 (World Economic Forum)
• Viral’s Secret Formula (Huffington Post)
• All eyes on the sharing economy (The Economist)
• 13 Hot Business Model Innovations (Sustainable Brands)
• Challenges and Opportunities of Investing in Cleantech and Renewable Energy (IGEL@Wharton)
• Marketers Rise to the Cloud Challenge (CMO.com)

Hotel California?

For some reason, this line from the Eagles classic Hotel California became lodged in my cerebral cortex when I saw the artist rendering of Google’s next headquarters campus.

"We are programmed to receive. You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave! "