Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The challenge for companies that do not have the creative freedom to begin at square one is how do we create that same culture of innovation? How do we build an environment where we are comfortable at chipping away the things that no longer add value?

How many systems would we switch off as opposed to trying to integrate them with the new? How much complexity in our processes could we design out to create something that is elegant and simple?

For me, this feels very different from how most large organizations function. But if we are going to create magnificent works of art within our day-to-day working lives, we need to embrace the concept of curation – of removing the superfluous and keeping only that which is beautiful in its simplicity....

But Medium isn’t just taking a revolutionary approach to digital publishing — it’s changing the way companies operate too. As one of the fiercest and most faithful adopters of Holacracy – a radical new theory of corporate structure — Medium is experimenting with a completely management-free environment that’s laser focused on getting things done. Stirman couldn’t be more thrilled with the results: the freedom, the momentum, the productivity are all unparalleled, he says.

But companies don’t have to go all-in on Holacracy to reap the benefits. If his transition from Twitter to Medium taught him anything, there are always more tactics to try to make things work better. Below, he shares his lessons from taking the leap....

Nooyi says she isn't sure her daughters would say she's a good mom.

While interviewing Indra K. Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo, at the Aspen Ideas Festival Monday*, David Bradley, who owns The Atlantic, asked two questions that elicited as frank a discussion of work-life balance as I've seen from a U.S. CEO. Below is a lightly edited transcript. The second question was preceded by a brief discussion of Anne-Marie Slaughter's "Why Women Still Can't Have It All.".

B2B marketing strategies are having to constantly change and adjust in the light of new trends driven by B2B buyers and technology. We have identified the key B2B marketing trends and how they may shape your future strategy. To keep this article short, as there is a lot to cover, we have put in links to more detailed articles as appropriate, should you want to read further.

Typically B2B marketing is segmented into outbound marketing such as email campaigns and inbound marketing such as SEO, social media and content marketing. The general shift has been towards inbound marketing as buyers increasingly manage the early stages of the buying process without contacting vendors by reviewing websites, talking to peers in the industry and reviewing resources. This allows them to often filter and shortlist without ever talking to a sales rep....

Bland mission statements are worse than boring; they confuse your strategy.

Let's start with a game. Below are three mission statements from three Fortune 500 companies. Try to match each company with its mission statement...

How did you do? The largely indistinguishable statements make the task almost impossible. Such statements may still be considered "best practice" in some quarters but in so many cases they do not achieve what they were intended to achieve. Ironically, many "directional documents" are not fit for purpose: they do not provide direction....

[This was a refreshing POV and must-read ~ Jeff]

Say you have a startup idea. You assemble a team and in six months, you have a product you are actually confident to release. When that day finally comes, you launch and nothing happens. If you are lucky, you get an article on Techcrunch, a top spot in Product Hunt and several thousand users, but most of them stop using it after a few days.

I bet you were hoping for a huge, viral growth curve. Instead, you face with the harsh reality: you only have handful of users registered, and they are churning incredibly fast. At Piktochart we went through the same problem, that’s why in this post we’ll analyze 11 different growth hacking tactics that actually work...

Fast-moving technologies, rapid global expansion, shifting business models, mergers and acquisitions all hold out dazzling possibilities.

But leadership remains a huge challenge, even for companies relatively unscathed by the economic by economic turmoil. Today, employees continue to seek guidance from their leaders, who must find time to reassure their people while trying to establish a pole position for the future.Make sure to read....

You might not have known it, but all those episodes of ‘‘The Simpsons’’ were just secret economics lessons. Turns out the yellowish, four-fingered cartoon characters have a lot of insight to offer on basic economic theory.

We know this thanks to Joshua Hall, an associate professor of economics at West Virginia University — and the brains behind the new book ‘‘Homer Economicus: The Simpsons and Economics’’ (Stanford University Press)....

In content marketing, your ability to execute strategy is as important – if not more important – than the strategy itself.

I had a marketing strategy professor who used to say, “A mediocre strategy with good execution beats a great strategy with poor execution every time.”He wasn’t promoting mediocre strategies. He was emphasizing the most important reason for strategic planning: to EXECUTE a strategy that achieves your business objectives.Otherwise, there’s no point in strategic planning....

When I first started in venture capital five years ago, I wanted to create a programmatic way to analyze companies well. My goal was to be able to step into a meeting with an entrepreneur with some kind of form that I would fill out throughout the meeting, so that by the end of the meeting I might have an understanding how the startup fits into its ecosystem.

It took quite a while to devise this framework and to revise it until it became useful, practical and insightful. I spoke with friends who were consultants and who analyze companies for a living. I read many books on the topics of competition and strategy. Last, I spoke with other investors.

But in the end I chose three simple frameworks that were already well-known and which fit together on two sheets of paper: The Business Model Canvas, Porter’s Five Forces, and Value Chain Analysis....

Even avid readers may be missing a genre valuable to their personal and professional development.

...I've written in the past about how business leaders should be readers, but even those of us prone to read avidly often restrict ourselves to contemporary nonfiction or novels. By doing so, we overlook a genre that could be valuable to our personal and professional development: poetry. Here's why we shouldn't.

For one, poetry teaches us to wrestle with and simplify complexity. Harman Industries founder Sidney Harman once told The New York Times, "I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers. Poets are our original systems thinkers. They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand." Emily Dickinson, for example, masterfully simplified complex topics with poems like "Because I could not stop for Death," and many poets are similarly adept. Business leaders live in multifaceted, dynamic environments. Their challenge is to take that chaos and make it meaningful and understandable. Reading and writing poetry can exercise that capacity, improving one's ability to better conceptualize the world and communicate it — through presentations or writing — to others....

[Poetry in PR or your business? You may not want to present this idea to the CEO just yet. But if it gets results, it's a winner. A tantalizing and poetic approach to management. ~ Jeff]

To innovate, stop worrying about "failure" and start thinking of "learning."...

...For me, the most important insight from design thinking was that you have to make sure you've defined the right problem before you try to solve it. So, you act like an anthropologist to understand human needs and problems before jumping to solutions. Most of us in business, if we need to discover how to do something new, use PowerPoint or Excel spreadsheets to rationalize our approach. This is what I call "the illusion of rationality." Whether motivated by a lack of insight arrogance, or stupidity, the illusion of rationality is a waste of time and resources — yet one that keeps a lot of people employed in management consulting, as I learned first hand.

Instead, if you don't have the data, you have to create the data. That does not mean plugging random numbers into your spreadsheet. It means generating real insight, from nothing. Designers and bootstrapped entrepreneurs I've worked with use rapid low cost experiments to create data. I refer to these "affordable losses" in the interest of learning, creativity, and discovery as "little bets."

This seems like common sense; so why is it so hard? Three words: fear of failure.

If you're an MBA-trained manager or executive, the odds are you were never, at any point in your educational or professional career given permission to fail, even on a "little bet." Your parents wanted you to achieve, achieve, achieve — in sports, the classroom, and scouting or work. Your teachers penalized you for having the "wrong" answers, or knocked your grades down if you were imperfect, according to however your adult figures defined perfection. Similarly, modern industrial management is still predicated largely on mitigating risks and preventing errors, not innovating or inventing....