And the winner is…

A little birdy’s told me that a project I consulted on for SAS has won a Red Dot Design Award, and I’m really chuffed about it.

Not because I can claim the core insight that unlocked the whole solution (it’s not an ego thing, honest!); what really makes me smile is that the client in question couldn’t be more deserving.

They weren’t the biggest or most prestigious client in the world (certainly not a household name), nor was the project exactly rocket science (the creation of a brand book); yet it’s hands-down the most enjoyable project I’ve ever worked on.

That’s in very large part due to their willingness to give us our heads, so to speak, and engage whole-heartedly and enthusiastically in a process that a more belligerent client might have dismissed as out-of-scope (the kind of “whole systems” analysis that Kevin Keohane and I have been banging on about for ages – examples here and here).

Their modesty to know what they didn’t know – basically to sit back and enjoy the ride in the first instance – was incredibly refreshing. Equally energising was how, when we came back with our insights, they jumped in and really got involved in fine tuning the proposed brand positioning and message framework.

It was proper co-creation, with the result that everyone in the company has really embraced the outcome and made it their own. Indeed, they’re so proud of what we achieved together that a brand book initially intended strictly for an internal audience is regularly dished out to clients (now there’s an authentic brand for you!).

Amy, Mark, Chris (you know who you are): many congratulations. It was an absolute pleasure working with you and I only wish more clients were like you!

More pearls of wisdom from Marty Neumeier

Whilst travelling in and out of London yesterday, I started (and indeed finished) reading the latest offering in Marty Neumeier’s series of “whiteboard overviews” – The Designful Company.

As anyone who’s read The Brand Gap or Zag will know, that’s the real beauty of Marty’s books. In terms of insight gained per minute spent, you just can’t beat them. (If you’re remotely interested in brand, and you haven’t read them, then shame on you – they should be compulsory additions to your library.)

As ever, The Designful Company is full of really great insights but, naturally, what particularly drew my attention was the stuff on sustainability – highlighted by Marty as one of the “wicked problems” facing business and society in the 21st century that can only be worked through by abductive reasoning and the intuition, imagination and idealism of design thinking.

A while back, I suggested a killer question to get to the heart of what sustainability means to a given organisation – why will you still be in business in 50 years’ time?

Thanks to Marty, I now have an additional thought experiment to get businesses people thinking, and it goes like this:

“Imagine a future in which all companies were compelled to take back every product they made. How would that change their behaviour?”

A simple but incredibly profound question. And, if you view Ray Anderson’s TED talk and clock the critical role of reverse logistics in the Interface business model, you’ll get a pretty decent clue as to the answer.

There’s no accounting for idiocy

I’ve just got back home after a great day out at the England v BaaBaas game at Twickenham, courtesy of the ever generous Mr. Kevin Keohane.

As is often the way with attending live sporting events, the rugby (great as it was) turned out to be largely incidental to the conversation, aided by the odd pint or four of the black stuff.

The high point? Wondering how on earth I’m going to get to and from the bar in time for the start of the second half, I emerge from the stand directly opposite a dedicated Guinness bar (there is a God!).

The low point? My illusions of rugby as a game for people of superior intellect is shattered when the guy in front of me finally reaches the front of the queue and orders two pints of lager.

(Apparently the backdrop of 50 or so half-poured pints, bar staff all dressed head to toe in Guinness gear and the words “GUINNESS BAR” written in large, friendly letters above the concession aren’t enough of a clue.)

Just goes to show, I guess. You can brand a space to within an inch of its life but, if your audience doesn’t get it, it’s all for nought.

Authenticity, transparency and opportunity

I’ve just been reading an interesting Ethical Corporation interview with Jeff Swartz, CEO of Timberland – particularly interesting to me because it taps into the dominant themes of this blog over recent months…

On CR and the recession – the global economic downturn only sounds the death knell for CR as practiced by the ”CR as PR” brigade. For champions of CR 2.0, with a genuine commitment to sustainability, it actually represents a great opportunity to reconnect with disillusioned consumers.

On authenticity and transparency – these ideas represent the biggest challenges for brands today. Admidst the current fallout, more than ever, consumers are searching for brands they can trust. Sustainable brands (sustainable in the original sense of being capable of surviving and prospering in the long term) must be built on truth, from the inside out.

There’s much to admire about what Swartz has to say, and the very honest and pragmatic way in which he says it – including frank admissions of previous gaffs, such as its virtual tree planting experiment on Facebook.

You get the sense that Timberland has learned from such mistakes and is now focusing much more closely on issues that are truly material to its business - building an ethical supply chain, and developing more sustainable products. And their commitment to transparency – as illustrated by their “nutritional labelling” approach – is particularly impressive.

The only disappointment is the slightly defeatist tone of Swartz’s remarks that his company’s shoes, “are toxic, by definition,” pointing to slower-than-desired progress towards products that are fully recyclable and biodegradeable.

I hope he takes the opportunity to learn from the work that Nike has done with two of my sustainability heroes, Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart. If he took a look at their article in green@work, or at Bill’s excellent TED talk on cradle-to-cradle design, he’d see that there’s plenty of room for optimism on this front too.

Death to engagement?

Reflecting on a recent post by Kevin Keohane, I’ve been asking myself the question…

When there’s so much evidence out there about the links between engagement and superior business performance (perhaps most famously embodied in the principles of the Service Profit Chain), how is it that there’s still such a massive capability gap in so many organisations?

I’m starting to wonder if the problem lies with the term engagement itself.

It gets bandied about with such gay abandon by so many people that it’s rather lost its meaning. Even among skilled professionals there are different interpretations as to what it is – is it a process (the alignment of personal and corporate ambitions, for example) or is it simply a state of mind?

Either way, what it emphatically isn’t is an end in itself. It may sound like an oxymoron, but the ultimate purpose of engagement is not to engage people. What matters is what that engaged state actually delivers – greater discretionary effort and an improvement in business performance.

Much as I’ve argued in relation to diversity, engagement is the delivery mechanism, not the outcome. Going back to the question, I suspect this is a big part of the problem, leading to assumptions and prejudgements by some that its all about process and “soft” stuff, and closing their minds to evidence of the hard business benefits.

As I’ve also argued in relation to CR, maybe it’s time to make these links much more explicit through the language that we use – toning down talk of soft principles and turning up the volume on the financial benefits to be derived from doing these things properly.

We already talk of the Employee Value Proposition (EVP) in relation to employer branding, so why not Employee Value Creation as an alternative to engagement?

Let’s face it, that’s what it’s really about: value creation, both by and for employees.