All posts filed under: Purpose

It’s complicated

By Mark Di Somma

I really like this thought from Lars Bjork, CEO of QlikTech, in an interview in the NY Times: Love order, hate bureaucracy, he says … “Order is where you put a process into place because you want to scale the business to a different level. Bureaucracy is where nobody understands why you do it.” I’m constantly intrigued at how systems take on a life of their own. Everybody witnesses it. Everyone agrees it happens. What starts out, innocently enough, as a way of checking something soon grows its own mandate. It invades other areas. Then it gets a righteous title or attaches itself to a critical area (compliance, operations, efficiency, policy, framework etc), spawns a budget, a project team and a management structure, and suddenly it’s part of the war on chaos. It stalks the organisation gathering strength and credibility with every meeting. Before long it’s part of the sign-off, and once legal and HR take it under their wing, it’s part of the furniture. The sign-off gets longer, harder, more involved. ‘How’ overtakes ‘what’ …

Telling

By Mark Di Somma

What gives you the right to sell a product/service at margin today? It’s easy to assume you have a mandate. Or that you deserve one. But what is your brand doing to earn/retain the mandate it wants/has? Don’t tell me it’s because you opened. Because presence isn’t enough. Don’t tell me you worked hard to get here (past tense). Because then you’re relying on your history. Don’t tell me you’re doing a good job. Because most everyone’s doing a good job. Ditto service, people, methodologies, products, channels, technologies, systems, processes, efficiencies … for most companies anyway. Talk perhaps about the scarcity of what you offer, or the richness of the ideas that you encourage, or the loyalty you forge, or the need you are meeting that your competitors don’t, or the insights you’ve developed and applied that are truly valuable, or the excitement you generate, or the journey you’re taking people on, or how you are looking to generate the most wonderful change … Better yet talk about how you’re combining ideas and where that’s …

Which north?

By Mark Di Somma

Yesterday St John asked whether north meant true north or magnetic north. Good question. As I said, most people have a sense of what the company they work for should be like. It’s natural for people to look for tangible ways to improve things. As we all know, it doesn’t take long for employees to offer a multi-point to-do list. Listen very carefully to what you are being told. But, at the same time, be careful how you treat this information. Chances are what you are hearing is, at some level, a variation on today. It is magnetic north – the reality they are naturally drawn to. Taken literally, it’s probably an improvement on the reality people are part of – rather than an indication of where you truly need to be heading in order to be competitive. As Henry Ford so rightly pointed out, if he had asked people what form of transport they wanted before he delivered them the automobile, they’d have asked for a faster horse. Don’t get me wrong, many of …

CEO discretion is advised

By Mark Di Somma

Further to the post of a couple of days ago. One of the great temptations of the online age is that you can gain attention. A lot of attention. Very quickly. Do something outrageous – in the case of GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons, shoot an elephant and display the trophy video for all to see – and people will react. If you’re the CEO of a company, it must be tempting to think that a stunt like this is creating buzz, getting people talking, raising your brand’s profile. It’s all part of the job, right? All part of the controversy? All part of leading a challenging brand? Just a continuation of getting ads banned from Superbowl or whatever? The danger for colourful leaders is of course that at some point in the bid, they overstep the mark. Clearly someone forgot to tell the GoDaddy-in-chief that’s also what makes attention-seeking the ultimate brand honey-trap. Perhaps he doesn’t care, or notice? That may say something too of course. To some people, it may say quite a bit.

7 lessons from the Sevens

By Mark Di Somma

Mickey Mice, surgeons, musclemen, vampires, men in tutus … yes, it’s Rugby Sevens weekend in Wellington. And that means teams of people dressed thematically and wandering the streets of the CBD. Welcome to a brand of rugby where the games themselves are virtually the backdrop for the actions and celebrations going on in the crowd and beyond the stadium. But there are also some important lessons for the marketers amongst us. Here are my seven out-takes from the madness: Sometimes the event is strongest when it carries the name but isn’t actually the focus. In other words, it becomes the platform or prompt for a wider circle of participation. That wider circle may be where the money is. As per yesterday’s post – if you change the format, you also challenge the expectations of what must take place. In the case of Sevens, the change of game format has evolved into a social prompt for an audience-wide costume-party. If you give people genuine permission to behave differently, the initial hesitancy will give way to an …