All posts filed under: Transformation

5 reasons why cultures don’t change willingly

By Mark Di Somma

Here’s some great insights for anyone involved in making change programmes or new ideas work. The key to successfully transforming organisations doesn’t lie in explaining what’s required. It actually lies in better understanding what people feel threatened by. In this article in Reuters from some time back, David Rock takes the view that “People are not rational, they are social”. According to him, what we’re told is not the fundamental driver for acceptance. The key issue is that we are intuitively programmed to respond positively to social rewards, and are instinctually committed to minimising social threats. Perceived threats to our senses of status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness (a model Rock refers to as SCARF) will cause us to act defensively towards an event or an idea. Such threats cause people to close off the energy being passed through the prefrontal cortex, the home of conscious thinking in the bank. Change might make sense. It may even be responsible. But when information about change is conveyed to us in this manner, people react emotionally, productivity …

The brands that dare: gamechangers

By Mark Di Somma

Some brands seem to rule the world. They’re big, powerful, profitable and widely adored. They talk and the world listens. They are the game-makers. They made the game and they continue to run it. Their playbook seems to pretty much decide the rules for most. But not everyone aspires to that level of success and not every market leader is at the apex of a totally satisfied segment. Which is why some brands opt for a different agenda. The gamechangers’ intentions are, quite literally, to change the world, or at least to shake the tree of the mighty incumbents. How do you do that without getting crushed or ignored? It depends. Did your brand start out as a challenger, or did challenging the status quo become your purpose as a brand? Because the starting point drives very different strategies and storylines. If your brand was a challenger from the start, one of the most powerful assets you have, providing it’s true of course, is a dirt-poor story. The brands that start from nothing and with …

Outperforming as a brand: making the right investment in disruption

By Mark Di Somma

Everybody professes an interest in growing. Everyone wants to outperform the market. Yet the challenges to do so are for the most part under-estimated and the appetite required to resource adequately in order to decisively disrupt is generally lacking. An interview with Stephen Hall and Conor Kehoe, two McKinsey directors, on why companies are reluctant to aggressively reallocate resources reveals that strategic inertia springs from two sources. According to Kehoe, there is unwillingness internally to move people and/or capital to unproven initiatives. And there is resistance from investors who, even though they like the long term results, are hesitant to accept short term downturns. The business case for redistributing strategic energy though is clear. In this study, the firm compared those who reallocate resources at a high level with those that were much more reluctant to do so. The difference was a 3.9% difference in annual incremental returns to shareholders. Over 20 years, that amounts to a doubling in total returns to shareholders (assuming all dividends are reinvested). Companies that actively reallocated resources continued to …

Brand repositioning: Radicalising your brand

By Mark Di Somma

Comes a point in the lifecycle of most brands when they hit critical complacency. The marque has mainstreamed to the point where it effectively blends with its surroundings to form part of the amorphous middle. That’s the black hole towards which all brands are drawn. Competitiveness erodes. Prices start to fall. Comfort levels and intransigence soar. Appetites for risk, so apparent in the early years, fall away. Eventually, the lights go out. We could all run a list of those that have succumbed. But whilst complacency and conservatism are easily spotted, they are much more reluctantly abandoned. Getting off the merry-go-round is difficult, because it requires management to re-radicalise; to muster the courage and the energy to pick new fights and wage new wars; to attack what they operate so efficiently and effectively now in order to save it. (Seth Godin in his book The Icarus Deception expresses clearly and strongly how and why industrialisation works this way.) It’s hard to be radical and commercial: hard because it so often looks unreasonable. As Gary Hamel …

Inspiration: Step 2 in building a purposeful culture

By Mark Di Somma

An amazing thing happens when you ask people to imagine their current workplace working to its potential. First, they smile. Then they hesitate. Then they want to talk about everything that’s wrong and why a better workplace is not real or practical or feasible. If you’re patient though and you persist, slowly, very slowly, they start talking about what’s possible. And once that happens, before long, there are diagrams and dreams and the volume in the room rises from a gentle murmur to an excited buzz. It’s hard to get people to quantify the possibilities. All their disappointments and concerns quickly crowd in to stifle the magic. But if you ask them patiently to put that aside and form a vision of what work should be like, aspiration slowly gets the better of them. This isn’t about creating a dream kingdom. In fact, what works best I’ve found is getting people to forecast what a “better us” looks like – and a key component to achieving that is asking them to find proof for what’s …

How would you like your brand story to end?

By Mark Di Somma

Bill Taylor has said that if your customers can live without you, eventually they will. Conversely, I’m fascinated by how so many industries will stick to business-as-usual for as long as they can before they have to change. In each case, the rules of supply and demand will at some point over-ride the sentiment of legacy. The more people who do what you do, the more easily you can be replaced, and the less noticed your absence will remain. Everyone nods at this point. But … That realisation actually spurs a fundamental question that businesses and brands should be asking themselves. And it’s a very uncomfortable question to confront. How would you like your brand to come to an end? To reference TS Eliot, with a bang or a whimper? Your answer will drive your strategy. Or rather it will drive the mindset behind your strategy. You can ride your current train of thought all the way to silence – do what you do for as long as you can until the margins become unbearable …

Agitation: Step 1 in building a purposeful culture

By Mark Di Somma

You can’t and shouldn’t change a culture just for the sake of it. Obvious, right? And yet managers often announce change programmes without referencing and quantifying specific motivations. There’s little doubt that people act more positively and decisively when they are presented with a context for actions. A real context. A pain point they can feel. An opportunity that stares them in the eye and says “Come get me”. So often, the reasons given for changing a culture are far too broad. They’re couched around concepts or theory – productivity gains or the need to downsize or an economic change of fortune. The thing is, none of those reasons sound like reasons. They sound like excuses or, worse, prompts. They’re mantras not motives. In this wonderful article courtesy of Bain & Co, authors Patrick Litre and Kevin Murphy trace the ups and downs of the traditional change programme: Specifically, the Agitation stage of a culture change programme needs to address the three change resistors that cause that significant dip at the start: •  Anchoring locks …

Evolution or transformation? 17 key brand factors

By Mark Di Somma

No business these days can just sit pretty. But the extent and nature of changes confuses many. Brands evolve. Or die. But they must also retain something of what consumers know. Or they fade. So which is more important? And how should a brand act, when? I get asked about this a lot. So here are my takes on what must stay and what can go (sometimes): Keep: 1. Your good name (in every sense) – it’s the thing people know you by. Unless of course you need to re-engineer your reputation or your old name doesn’t fit what you do anymore. 2. Your purpose – the ways you intend to change the world should remain an inspiring constant for staff and customers (providing it’s inspiring to start with, of course) 3. Your values – only change them if you’re going to make them more challenging 4. Your promises – trust is the basis for any brand’s success. Without that, you’re nothing. 5. Your principles – in today’s transparent markets, transgressions will be discovered. It’s …

30 things you should tell employees before you change the culture

By Mark Di Somma

By Mark Di Somma What sort of information should decision makers share with employees as an organisation prepares to go through a significant cultural shift? These are my thoughts sized in digestible chunks. Order of course may vary. 1.   The future that we now see for the organisation 2.   How we discovered that we needed to change 3.   How quickly we need to change 4.   Why we need to make changes at that pace 5.   How the new vision changes what the organisation intends to achieve 6.   Where our new priorities lie 7.   How this will change the ways we behave 8.   How this will change the ways we compete 9.   How this will change the ways we work 10. How this will change the ways you work 11. How we will now judge success 12. What we think the chances of success are 13. What we will be doing to stack the odds in our favour 14. Where we will be looking to make changes first 15. How far changes will extend …

The future myth

By Mark Di Somma

Transformation isn’t about plotting a meeting point for your brand with the predicted future. It’s not about getting to where the puck will be, to paraphrase Wayne Gretsky. Because depending on the arrival of the next big thing or that breaking wave, that hot new trend, the long-awaited demographic or anything else for that matter is conjecture. Banking on it is simply speculation. To evolve successfully, brands must grow out of what they have into what they need to be. They cannot shape the future. They can only shape their future. That is what they have control of. That is what they are responsible for. The customers they take with them into the future. The actions they drive in the future. The products they will make. The culture they build for the future. All strategists and decision makers can and should read out of the macro-trends, and even the supposedly “specific” future trends for that matter, are the broad indicators of the change that’s coming and perhaps a sense of where it might be coming …