Bob Rinderle / Business & Beyond

Branding In The Digital Age

The Internet has upended how (we) engage with brands. It is transforming the economics of marketing and making obsolete many of the function's traditional strategies and structures. For marketers the old way of doing business is unsustainable.

The changes buffeting marketers in the digital era are not incremental, they are fundamental. Perception of a brand during the decision journey has always been important, but the phenomenal reach, speed, and interactivity of digital touch points makes close attention to the brand experience essential, and requires an executive-level steward.

From Branding In The Digital Age, by David C. Edelman; HBR December 2010

Best CEOs Not Always MBAs

Surprisingly, the majority of Best-Performing CEOs (as ranked by HBR) do not have their MBAs. 

This is true for 13 of the Top 20, and 36 of the Top 50 Chief Executive Officers. 

Harvard Business Review also found, however, that of the 1,100+ CEOs rated, the 32% with an MBA ranked, on average, 40 places ahead of the CEOs who did not have one.  Interesting to note the dichotomy between the total sample and those at the top.

The Vision Thing

Being forward-looking - envisioning exciting possibilities and enlisting others in a shared view of the future - is the attribute that most distinguishes leaders from nonleaders, according to an article in this month's HBR.  

The top requirement of a leader—honesty—was also the top-ranking attribute of a good colleague. But the second-highest requirement of a leader, that he or she be forward-looking, applied only to the leader role: 88% of respondents holding senior roles in organizations want this in a leader.  No other quality showed such a dramatic difference between being viewed as a leader versus being viewed as a colleague.

Yet researchers believe only 3% of a business leader’s time is spent envisioning and developing a vision for the organization. 

George H.W. Bush is famous for deriding "the vision thing."  But apparently it is often overlooked in the C-level suite as well.  It is often easier to deal with the urgency of day-to-day issues as doing so provides a sense of engagement, progress, and importance.  But Jack Welch had a better view.  He said that if he wasn't careful with his time, "he could spend days at the company's headquarters knee deep in bureaucratic crap and add no value to the company."

As Tichy and Bennis recount in Judgment, Jeff Immelt told a group of Michgain MBAs in 2004, "There's more importance today on strategy, on picking  businesses than ever before....  In the environment we're in , good execution and good operations aren't enough to fix a business with a flawed strategy.  So you need to spend time understanding what businesses you think are going to work, what business models seem to make sense.  Strategy is more important than ever before."

The Science Behind Six Degrees

Building on my previous post regarding the relationship between influencers and social epidemics, reprised below are abbreviated comments from an interview with Duncan Watts published in Harvard Business Review in February, 2003.

"People tend to think that successful products are somehow destined to succeed because of some intrinsic combination of features that creates and sustains demand. But network science suggests there’s more to the picture.

In the case of Harry Potter, before Bloomsbury bought the rights, several other publishers rejected the manuscript. It’s tempting to think of them as fools who missed a sure thing. In fact, it never was a sure thing. For every Harry Potter that explodes out of nowhere, there are thousands of books, movies, authors, and actors who live their entire lives in obscurity, and my work suggests that it’s not because they lack quality or desirability. In other words, the market for a successful product should not be thought of as existing in some latent state before the product launch waiting for the product to arrive. Rather, it arises dynamically, driven in large part by the growing success of the product itself. In economics, this phenomenon is known as an information cascade: a social chain reaction in which increasing numbers of people buy a product principally because other people are buying it.

We’re finding that the structure of the networks is probably much more important than anyone thought in influencing the dispersion of ideas or behaviors. Harry’s success may have more to do with particular attributes of the social and media network it’s spread across than with any inherent quality of the book. That turns our traditional notions about cause and effect on their head.

So which network structure best encourages information cascades or idea contagion? We don’t know yet. But our work is beginning to identify some basic principles. For instance, it appears that having a wide range of personality types in a population can actually enhance the odds that a new idea or product will catch on. We also think that information cascades can be squelched if people in a network are exposed to too many opinions, or too few. Clearly, poorly connected networks inhibit idea contagion. What’s less obvious is that if the people in a network are too densely connected, that may also prevent a fad or a product from catching on.

Network science suggests that our notions of cause and effect are skewed, that we’re sometimes looking at the wrong actors in the play to try to understand why the drama is unfolding the way it is."