All posts filed under: Purpose

Purpose vs mission and vision

Purpose vs vision and mission

By Mark Di Somma

I hope the days of vision and mission statements are nearly over. They’re the paperwork of traditional management models. They’re strategic compliance, and as such, they get deliberated over at great length and then forgotten. For the most part, they’re also self-centred – all about what the organisation wants to achieve for itself, all about how it intends to achieve whatever it deems important. They often don’t suit the much more open, interactive, social ways in which business is increasingly being done.

Seeing past the problem

By Mark Di Somma

By Mark Di Somma Every transformation programme I have ever worked on has been set in motion by a problem. And in every case the issue that has galvinised action and that everyone is so focused on answering is not the real problem at all. As Simon Sinek has observed, people intuitively deal with what they know before they deal with the things they don’t know or feel less comfortable dealing with. The easiest question, and the place most people start is “what?” They deal first with the symptoms they can see and quantify. And often they address them with a “how” that is equally familiar – the methodology they always use. But while a particular problem may have set off the trip-wire, in reality that problem is probably a symptom of what’s really happened rather than the real cause. It’s the prompt. And just having a way to address that problem does not guarantee any quality of answer. It simply provides a process for everyone to map to. Do you know the lovely story …

Sustainability: Being good, not just doing good

By Mark Di Somma

Historically, corporate social responsibility has put the emphasis on how businesses are doing good. It’s become an increasingly varied checklist of “things we’ve done right”. Today though, socially aware audiences want more. They increasingly make judgments about you based on your overall likeability. They want to do business with brands that are good. And that in turn means that, at a social level, your reputation depends less on your ability to simply highlight good works done in isolation (through community activities or sponsorships for example), and much more on your ability to show that you are inherently principled in your dealings and that you behave consistently across your organisation in ways that align with your social and commercial reputation. That shift in the significance of social actions has a downstream effect on critical social initiatives such as sustainability. In my opinion, they should no longer be seen as nice-to-haves or even as opportunities to improve efficiencies across your supply chain. Rather, the actions you take in these areas are competitive opportunities to distinguish your company …

The strategy of radical beauty

By Mark Di Somma

Should you climb a mountain because it’s there, or because you believe you have a more than reasonable chance of conquering it? In a commercial setting at least, I’ll plumb for B – because presence alone is not a rational reason to participate. I continue to be intrigued though by the human instinct to believe that the odds are there for beating. I watch brands plunge into markets where they honestly believe they can do what others have failed to do for no other reason than that they believe in themselves and/or they have little respect for the current participants. Believing in your own brilliance and/or relying on the incompetence of others however, as Michael Porter reminds us, is not a strategy. In fact, it’s nothing short of a gamble. In a wonderful article on “How strategists lead”, Professor Cynthia Montgomery of the Harvard Business School gives a telling example of how some great companies have fancied their chances in the furniture manufacturing sector, only to become a cropper. They have, she says, looked to …

Strategy: 11 ways to purposefully achieve growth

By Mark Di Somma

You can’t build a sustainably purposeful culture it seems to me without having a deliberately purposeful strategy. Part of the problem of course is that, traditionally, strategy and purpose have lived in different parts of the organisation. My suggestion is that they shouldn’t, and that instead of simply allocating purpose to culture and strategy to planning, the business, the strategy and the culture all need to stem from the company’s driving purpose – its absolute reason for being. That in turn means that the purpose must be much more than a wish list or a broad hypothetical goal. It must be inspiring, engaging, profit-focused and it must work hard to stand the company apart from its competitors. Here’s how I use purpose and beliefs to drive distinctive business direction. 1. What is our core purpose (rather than just what is our core business)? When people think of our brand, what is their blinkpoint (the first association that snaps into their heads)? Are they aligned? 2. Why do people buy from us? How have we made …

Is behavioural change in a corporate culture all about timing?

By Mark Di Somma

“Is this the right time to change?” may not be the delaying question I often dismiss it as. To see why, read Caroline’s post at the Optimal Usability blog (subscribed to, not surprisingly, by the ever vigilant Alex). Caroline quotes from this very astute man – BJ Fogg – who runs the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University. Behavioural change, Fogg says, is what happens when Trigger, Ability and Motivation align. When there is a trigger for change, when people can change and when they are motivated to do so, then changes in behaviour can and will occur. Otherwise, pretty much, forget it. But each element must be of sufficient strength for the proposed change to succeed. In order for a trigger to be powerful enough to overcome existing habit or inertia, Fogg believes it must be noticeable, associated directly with the required behavioural shift and timely (it must occur whilst we are motivated and at a time when we can still change). Ability requires both capability and capacity to make the change required at …

Breaking the habit of dissent

By Mark Di Somma

Blair sent me this great story about harnessing the power of habit from NPR. It includes an explanation by business reporter Charles Duhigg from his upcoming book “The Power Of Habit” of how companies have successfully altered people’s habits by tapping into what the author refers to as the “habit loop.” According to Duhigg, this loop has three parts: the cue, which triggers a behaviour; the routine, which is the behaviour itself of course; and the reward, which is the signal that goes to the brain to store this habit for future use or not. Duhigg also talks about when Paul O’Neill took over as CEO of a dysfunctional Alcoa. By focusing on worker safety and the dangers of inefficient manufacturing to workers, O’Neill found a way to get everyone on the same page. He went on to build a highly profitable and efficient company. The story serves as a reminder that a change in culture only takes place when you achieve a change in mindset; when you break what Duhigg calls a “keystone habit”. …

Know thy enemy

By Mark Di Somma

I’m a great believer in brands having enemies. Here’s why. Enemies draw people of a common mind together. Enemies activate people to want to do something. Enemies provide a clear and present focus. Your enemies are not competing brands. Well, not directly anyway. Your enemies are the ideas that compete with, or conflict with, your purpose – specifically, they are ideas that run contrary to what your brand believes in and aspires to. An enemy could be another belief or an assumption. It could be an action or a way of working. It could be a state of the world. It could be a system. It could be an injustice or an intolerance. Whatever it is, it is something that your brand fundamentally opposes and want to change because your values dictate that it is necessary for you to do so. Tom’s has an enemy: bare feet. A fundamental tenet of the Tom’s brand is that it is unacceptable for children not to have shoes. Apple has an enemy: mass produced boredom. As a brand …

The power of being purposeful

The power of being purposeful

By Mark Di Somma

In an age where products are increasingly similar and of equal quality, the opportunities to compete just on the basis of what you sell are disappearing. In fact, I’d go further than that and say, they’re as good as gone. Even if you know that your product has some sort of technical advantage over that of a rival, the chances of you continuing to hold that advantage or of that advantage being of such significance that consumers actually care are as good as nil.