The Poison of Presenteeism

Source: www.tonystone.com

You'd think we'd learn by now.  But history has a history of repeating itself.

Organizations change their leaders in a desperate attempt to goose their numbers.  Wall Street's impatience fuels the tyranny of the quarter.

Less than a year after firing Mark Hurd and eventually replacing him with Leo Apotheker, the Hewlett-Packard board has now let Apotheker go and hired former eBay chief Meg Whitman as CEO.

While intense scrutiny is expended on the words, actions and first impressions of new leaders -- who are understandably focused on external communications -- not nearly enough consideration is given to what's said and shared within the company, to shore up the impact of the upheavals on employee morale.

Half the employees within HP's PC division must be wondering if they're coming or going.  But there's no doubt where their motivation and productivity is going: down the tubes.

The contagion is universal. I'm reminded of an article in Campaign Asia which caught my eye when it came out half a year ago.  A top-10 advertising agency in Singapore had announced the hire of a new Executive Creative Director.  While I have nothing but respect for the man's creative credentials, I recall his joining remarks giving me some discomfort:

"In Singapore, we have a new CEO, client service director, and now myself as ECD. It really doesn't get any fresher than that, working together as we rip up the plan, start anew and maintain the positive feeling that comes with change."

Ouch.

For all the survivors of that beleagered agency, a new leader had arrived to make his mark, never mind if it unravelled the good work of the past 18 months.

The fact is, change is uncomfortable. Our head tells us it is a necessary part of personal growth and remaining relevant to our organizations, but our heart rebels at being dragged outside our comfort zone.  People often resist change because of one or more of the following reasons:

1. They don’t see a burning platform for change.
2. They’re not convinced that the benefits of change will outweigh the costs.
3. No one has made the effort to paint a clear description of the end-goal for them.
4. They fear change because of perceived loss (loss of control, of credibility and power, of confidence and competence, of physical space, relationships, even jobs).
5. There is inadequate leadership at the top (change leaders don’t walk the talk, or are too pre-occupied with their own future).
6. There is a lack of transparency and proactive communication.

I suspect some of my friends at HP are hurting right now, and oozing the 'poison of presenteeism'.  I sincerely hope Meg Whitman, through the sheer force of her dedication and personality, will be able to render some first aid to staunch the flow.

Because at the end of the day, it's not the people who quit and leave that you should be worried about. 

It's the people who quit and stay.

The Forgotten Half of Brand Management

Source: TIME magazine

No one takes organizational alignment as seriously as the Army.

When the going gets tough and lives are at stake, you want to be sure that everyone's focused on the same objective, pushing as hard as you are, and that your buddy's got your back.

Achieving this state of operational nirvana doesn't come easy.

Earning the right to become an officer in the Singapore Armed Forces cost me 9 months of intense physical and mental effort in a previous life.  Even basic military training today takes up to 4 months of (arguably inhuman) drills designed to deconstruct individualism and resistance to authority, then reconstruct thinking soldiers to form a cohesive unit that acts as One.

Now the commercial world is not so cut and dried. You may not get your head blown apart by a 'frenemy' in the jungle out there.  But the consequences of a lack of internal alignment can be just as crippling: Low morale, fuzzy roles and responsibilities, squabbling factions, measly pockets of excellence, lackadaisical purpose, petering productivity, poor time-to-market.

Which is why I'm amazed when companies on a rebranding run think the heavy lifting is done when their corporate vision, mission and core values are articulated and the brand strategy is defined. That's all well and good; but in fact, it's only half the job done.

You need to activate the whole shebang. Induct employees in the game plan.  Cascade all that good stuff down the ranks 'til it seeps into the frontline troops -- your brand ambassadors at the coalface, who are consciously or unconsciously building or breaking your brand at each and every customer touchpoint.

Organizational alignment doesn't just happen on its own. It needs the visible endorsement of senior management, and their demonstrated commitment of funding and resourcing appropriate programs to give employees a clear line of sight between their on-the-job actions and the resultant impact on company performance.

That's the only way we'll bring down the damning statistic that says 4 out of 5 workers are not engaged in doing the things that drive business results.

What causes this misalignment?  Cumulative missteps, large and small, that include:
- senior executive behaviours that don't match the message;
- complicated and lengthy approval processes that prevent timely
  distribution of  information;
- employees who don't get to hear things before the outside world
  does -- resulting in a loss of faith; and conversely,
- too much communication, such that more important messages are
  lost in the clutter.

But is it really worth the effort to pursue organizational alignment?  It's too idealistic, I hear you say.  It takes too much effort.  So what if a few people are off doing their own thing?

Well, consider this:  A recent Towers Watson study found that companies with highly effective internal communication practices have a 47% higher shareholder return than companies without such disciplines in place.  An informed, equipped and inspired workforce can truly achieve great things.
 
As for a team that's not? Well, like the recruits struggling to lift their log in the photo above, you ain't gonna get anywhere fast.

Brands Behaving Badly

If you have young children, chances are the Maclaren scandal would have been brought to your attention recently. No, we're not talking about fast cars here, but furious parents outraged at reports of Maclaren strollers being responsible for fingertip laceration or amputation in the USA. In 8 cases over the past two years (and 15 such reported incidents over a 10-year period), children's fingertips were lacerated or amputated when they got caught in the pushchairs' hinges. The 42-year-old British brand's response has been revealing.

Maclaren had planned to announce a product recall on Tuesday Nov 10th, but the news leaked over the weekend of Nov 7th-8th, so concerned parents jammed Maclaren's consumer hotline -- which was not set up to take those calls -- on the Monday, effectively short-circuiting any hope Maclaren might have harboured to conduct a low-key, orderly recall. The company scrambled to issue their recall announcement by the end of that day, affecting about 1 million strollers that had been sold nationwide over the past 10 years.

Significantly, the company chose not to recall affected strollers in its home base of Britain -- perhaps because there have been fewer reported cases of injury across the pond. (The company's website lists 53 markets in which it does business -- should the rest of us take comfort in Maclaren's tacit message: that our kids are less reckless and we are less litigious than the Americans?) Instead, it merely issued safety warnings -- only to amend this policy a week later to offer hinge covers to any customer who requested them, after being inundated with protests closer to home.

What can we learn from this sorry sequence of events? Can the brand's reputation for quality survive this very public smear?

First, be prepared. Conduct disaster planning and run the drills annually at the very least. We can hope for the best -- but should plan for the worst.

Second, don't discriminate. Maclaren inexplicably seemed to be treating American children's fingertips as more precious than those of children in the UK and other countries. It failed to remember that in the Internet Age, a local problem can easily become a global one.

Third, remember that some things just won't stay quiet. In a TIME magazine article on the unfolding saga (http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091110/us_time/08599193700300), Pete Blackshaw, a brand consultant for Nielsen Online, states that "anything relative to child safety tends to be off-the-charts viral". New mothers are more likely to use social media and start blogs than other consumer segments. The search term "Maclaren fingertip amputation" has pulled more than 5,000 results on Google.

Other brands have misbehaved -- to their detriment -- in the past. In 2000, Ford Explorers and the Firestone tyres mounted on them came under fire for hundreds of deaths and injuries caused by tyre blowouts while on the road. Ford and Firestone executives bickered publicly while a wave of negative publicity mounted against both brands on the Web. Ford finally ended up recalling 13 million tyres at a cost of US$3 billion.

In 2004 an Internet posting reported that Kryptonite bicycle locks -- a long-standing market leader -- could be opened with a Bic ballpoint pen. Other postings quickly surfaced with similar tales. The company totally ignored the blogosphere before issuing a statement after five interminable days -- stubbornly contending that Kryptonite locks were completely theft-deterrent. The final outcome: A recall of the locks which cost the company US$10 million (nearly half its annual revenue).

Thankfully, some brands are better-behaved. In 2007 a freak snowstorm hit New York's JFK airport on a winter's day. Over 1,000 flights were cancelled. JetBlue, the fledgling entrepreneurial airline, suffered a startling breakdown, and took nearly a week to get its services back to normal. The difference here? CEO David Neeleman handled the crisis with authenticity and humility. He accepted responsibility for bad decisions and overwhelmed departments. He said he'd fix the problems and promised refunds and credits for angry passengers. He apologized repeatedly on his company's website, in his blog, on TV and in print. Despite the collosal Valentine's Day meltdown, a consumer poll conducted a month later revealed that 43% preferred JetBlue, the most for any airline.

A brand's story and mythology are fundamental building-blocks of how the brand is built over time. Brand stories help to articulate the persona and identity of the brand, and define the role and behaviour you can expect from it. Storytelling conceptualizes a strategic message in a far more emotive and engaging way than a press release could ever hope to accomplish. Maclaren's website speaks of the renowned features of all Maclaren strollers (or "buggys" as the Brits would say): from "the lightweight frame, durable fabric and one-hand fold, to the above-industry standard safety features".... but its current misadventures are shredding that hard-earned credibility. Negative stories can't always be avoided. However, it is not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

David Neeleman and JetBlue understand that intimately. It remains to be seen if Maclaren will recover sufficiently to make some belatedly wise moves as this saga is played to its conclusion. All may not be forgotten ... but perhaps it can be forgiven.

Carly for California?

Big brands tell a never-ending story. Earlier this month, a brand from my past resurfaced with a new chapter, when Carly Fiorina announced she was running for the US Senate. Now anyone who's been around IT or lived in Silicon Valley recently will recall the high-profile celebrity CEO of Hewlett-Packard whose tenure from 1999 to 2005 was exhilarating and yes, excruciating at times, for HP employees of that era. I vividly recall her story; I am one of the survivors.

Carly oversaw arguably the most audacious merger in business history to that point in time, when HP acquired Compaq over a long-drawn campaign in 2002. The merger was approved at a watershed EGM by the narrowest of margins (less than a percentage point, if I recall correctly); and the company spent the next 3 years fighting to prove the wisdom of the strategy.

Sadly our progress wasn't quite enough or fast enough for Wall Street; so in 2005 Carly was given the boot. In
the intervening years, Mark Hurd has come in and
delivered what Carly could not -- operational efficiency and subsequent marketplace success. Carly, for her part, has had to contend with an even larger, more personal battle -- with cancer. She has reportedly come through it, and is now ready to represent the people of California.

It isn't going to be smooth sailing. The reception to Carly over the past few weeks has been, well, frosty and skeptical. Some more vocal bloggers & commentators have hauled her over the coals with seeming relish. (By the way, notice how that's the way with many high-profile brands? They are not shy of -- and indeed polarize -- public opinion. You either love them or loathe them: think about Microsoft or Nike of a few years back.) Yes, she made some gaffes when announcing her intentions and in follow-on interviews. And yes, her campaign website, http://www.carlyforcalifornia.com/, gives a little too much credit to herself for HP's current standing and not enough to Mark Hurd. But I wouldn't be too quick to write her off as an unworthy candidate.

This is the CEO who inspired a whole generation of HP employees to believe, to give of their best, and who came along with her on that incredible journey to preserve the best and reinvent the rest of the proud HP legacy. (She made it easy for me to conduct brandjams across the Asia-Pacific by providing an inspiring keynote that rallied our troops around the cause -- first time I've seen an intelligent audience give a videotape a standing ovation.) While history has shown -- through Mark Hurd's success -- that Carly was probably not equipped with enough operational savvy to execute her grand plan ... it is clear to me that Mr Hurd (with due respect) would probably not have been able to get the merger approved in the first place. It needed someone with the personal charisma and communication skills of Carly to seal the deal. In summary, Carly was the right leader for HP then; as Mark Hurd is absolutely right for HP today.

So. What are the chances of Carly bringing some change to California? I'd say, let's give her a bit of room to flex and engage. Good leadership is hard to come by. My only caveat, is this: That government doesn't go out of business -- whereas employees in private companies realize their jobs depend on executing the leader's strategy flawlessly. Civil servants, speaking bluntly, have a more iron-clad ricebowl. They may be unwilling to accept the need for change.

Carly may yet find this hill even harder to climb than HP.