But wait, there’s hope. Wander over to HR and ask them to give you the last three years of your company’s employee engagement data (and if they don’t have employee engagement data tell them to get busy and start collecting it).

My hypothesis – and I am about to launch a research initiative to test it – is that organizations with low employee engagement scores have weak brands and those with high employee engagement scores have strong brands. I have observed this pattern in every organization I have worked with that has had the data available. Naturally I cannot name names as we are talking about confidential data but there are winners and losers.

Ya, sure I get why we matter.

This makes so much sense. Time and time again, engagement surveys tell us that one of the most important motivators for employees is the image, reputation and brand of their organization; followed quickly by whether or not the employee can see the link between what they do and that central purpose.

If your employees don’t get it, I can assure you that your customers won’t, and not just because it means that your value proposition is not clear – but because it means that your employees are not clear on how to deliver the brand. Compare a WestJet to a Delta, a Tim Hortons to a Dunkin, an Apple to a Dell. A Google to a Yahoo.

The natural question follows: if my engagement scores are low, do I focus on fixing that or on building the brand? My belief is that you focus first on getting a winning external proposition, then you work with employees to help them figure out how what they do contributes to its achievement.  Too many organizations get caught up in creating “employment brands” that are remote from their market brands. Big mistake, and usually the source of a lot of ugly confusion.

Get your brand story right and create the line-of-sight that every employee needs to make it happen. And watch both your brand and the engagement of your workforce increase in lock step.

Stay tuned for more as I head out and start testing the hypothesis with my clients and others. And let me know if you’re involved with an organization that would be good to talk to about this.

Then he had an even better idea: build a network of thinkers, practitioners and collaborators that would work together on exploring the issues and advising decision makers: www.nextgenleaders.ca/our-network/overview.html

I was fortunate enough to be asked to join this network and I feel privileged to be signed on with such and accomplished and generous group. Great listeners, strong thinkers, clear communicators, good people, all gathered around the biggest issues that will change the game for organizations of all kinds in the next 5-10 years. We are strategists, coaches, storytellers, change managers, organizational designers and we all care about the future of organizations and the individuals who will make them work.

Allen’s insight about the new demands of leadership is profound and simple. We cannot leave the development of our next generation of leaders to chance. High performing companies that want to develop from within must start now to connect with and inspire young leaders in the making. He is applying his work in a civic context through his role with the City Summit Alliance as its leadership advisor and coach.

Allen’s desire to develop his insight through a network of pals is also profound and simple and we are all enjoying the process of defining our roles together and apart.

The question of who will lead next and what we need to be doing now to support them is so critical. I am very excited to be included in the discovery.

You know what I mean: “Our vision is to be the leader (or the provider of choice) in the provision of fully integrated solutions that meet customer needs and generate shareholder value. Our mission is to continuously improve our effectiveness and efficiency through teamwork….bla bla bla…

Right out of the mission and vision bulls**t generator.

But these should be really really important, memorable, clear and motivating ideas. They should be the ideas that make the difference between coming into work everyday inspired and just showing up.

I think I’ve found the problem. People set about to write these things without any agreement on what the terms mean. Vision ends up being all about us, mission gets into a whole lot of “how” not “what” and values become generic ideas about respect and teamwork. If you listen to people arguing about mission statements you quickly realize that they are not actually arguing about the mission. They haven’t agreed on what a mission statement is. So the process ends in a negotiated solution that everyone hates. No wonder it’s relegated to SWAG.

Answer: agree on smart and simple defintions and stick to them. The rest will be so much easier. How’s this:

Vision: The perfect future we want to see (that we probably cannot achieve alone).

Mission: Our role in making that vision possible.

Values: The beliefs that shape successful behavior.

And don’t just use the definitions when you write the statements. Always have the definitions in place to accompany the statements wherever they are reproduced. That will eliminate all the confusion about what the heck these things are so people can focus on the meaning.

Keep it this simple and you will have ideas that inspire and provide real guidance to decision makers.

I think my favourite example of this was with a large provincial safety association whose vision was some gobbeldygook about taking a partnering role in the provision of excellent services to …… Ya, but isn’t your vision that no one dies from electical shock? Isn’t it that simple? Yes. (What a relief). Can we do that alone? No. Will we ever get there? Maybe not. Is it still worth aiming for? Yes. Good, let’s go with it.

With that kind of purpose behind you, everything else just writes itself.

And don’t weasel out by saying that in the private sector it’s all about market domination and shareholder value. If you want to motivate and orient your employees help them understand how what you do makes a positive difference in people’s lives – whether you manufacture washing machines, sell mutual funds or operate an airline. How do you liberate, simplify, secure, enliven and empower the world?

It’s time we dusted off this tired trio of mission, vision and values and got them meaning something again. Let’s move them off the lunchroom wall and into the conciousness of every employee, manager, executive, volunteer, investor and board member.

And if the term committed to integrated solutions appears in them anywhere you need to start again.

The Business of Design series had some great sessions on things like creative cities, the future of brands and  sustainable architecture. We particularly liked Tyler Brule’s session on brands with Martin Raymond, Co-director – Future Laboratory and Marek Reichman – Head of Design at Aston Martin. There was some good, honest discussion about authenticity in brands and the importance of protecting credibility (gee, do I have to?). We loved the tough talk about market research. The consensus seemed to be that while it is good to know all about your customers, it is not good to ask them if they like your new ideas. Market research kills new ideas. I could not agree more and have been advising my clients to pass on the testing. Do the right work up front, and you don’t need the stink testing later.

We were very happy to hear about the new trend of the return of light industry to city centres. While no one is ready to let go of their creative class, planners are starting to see the re-emergence of craft, and short-run, micro production in downtowns. What could be more modern? This is an exciting idea we liked.

What we saw at the various shows and studios around London suggested that there are a lot of young new designers busying themselves with creating the most exotic martini glass set they can come up with, using new-age materials and sustainable design principles. It was all a bit odd. The new stuff at Tent London seemed to be acres and acres of chic ways to waste time lounging around on hyper-cool sofas made of graffiti covered half-melted recycled plastic bottles. Everything very precious, decorative, tough and indulgent. Not what we wanted to think the best design talent in Europe was up to.

All-in-all a good week. Worth the trip. We’ll be back next year, September 19-27, 2009.

With sincerest apologies to the burgeoning authenticity industry, as documented in Gilmore and Pine’s What Consumers Really Want: Authenticity (and just about every bibliographic reference in it), what is mistaken as an appetite for authenticity is actually a desire for escape, denial, disguise, control and temporary or permanent identity shift. How can Gilmore, Pine and others claim that consumers want authenticity when even they agree that our world gets less real every day? Harley Davidson? Häagen-Dazs? Las Vegas? Plastic surgery? Reality television? Reality television about plastic surgery? Low calorie brownies? Designer knock-offs? Spas? Wrestling? PT Cruisers?

Maybe you can twist all this into some theory about real-fake, fake-fake and fake-real offerings (as Gilmore and Pike attempt), but the fact is, there is no mass market for the truly authentic in any category. Travel, food, clothing, health, entertainment, recreation, consumer goods, personal services, luxury and so on. There is craft, the quaint, home-made and farm stands, but not much else.

This is not to say that people want to be out-and-out lied to. The terms of the transaction have to be honest and the promises have to be kept, but the provider who can suspend my disbelief the longest, wins. We don’t want to be fooled, but we don’t mind fooling ourselves. Give me the perception of authenticity – no matter how un-real – and I’m yours.

And what is the quickest way to give the perception of authenticity? It is with story-telling, or as the ferociously authentic (skeptical empiricist) Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls it: the narrative fallacy – creating a story post-hoc so that an event will seem to have a cause. His words are meant to apply to our inability to accept randomness of events, but they describe as well the roots of our collective desire for the inauthentic.

“We love the tangible, the confirmation, the palpable, the real, the visible, the concrete, the known, the seen, the vivid, the visual, the social, the embedded, the emotional laden, the salient, the stereotypical, the moving, the theatrical, the romanced, the cosmetic, the official, the scholarly-sounding verbiage (b******t), the pompous Gaussian economist, the mathematicized crap, the pomp, the Academie Francaise, Harvard Business School, the Nobel Prize, dark business suits with white shirts and Ferragamo ties, the moving discourse, and the lurid. Most of all we favor the narrated.”

Okay he sounds bitter, but he is right. People want to be lulled to sleep with bedtime stories. We want to be one step removed from reality because reality is too much work, and too scary. This is why the average American watches 32 hours of television every week. Is there ANYTHING authentic about watching television?

Just because people buy products, services and experiences that are labelled genuine, real, original, authentic, the first, true, classic etc. does not mean they value those qualities; they just want the label and the back story to connect it to some cognitive trigger that will make them feel better about themselves.

If I sound angry, it’s because I am. The flagging demand for things and experiences that are actually authentic means you have to drive farther, go deeper and work a lot harder to find the simple, the original, the unpaved, the un-story-boarded, the real deal; and then once you find it, you’ve worked so hard for it that is doesn’t seem authentic any more.  The commercial world is being turned into a story line and the non-commercial world is following close behind.

Maybe this is why I like to work in settings where fake doesn’t rule (yet), like professional services, education, health care, B2B, manufacturing, utilities, transportation, telecom etc.

The horribly cynical implication from Gilmore and Pine is this: to succeed, create the perception of authenticity. Are they right? Or is there hope for real?

Regarding the former, no matter how unique, one-of-a-kind, quirky or pioneering you are, there is always something else that your customers can do with their money, their time and their affection. There are pure plays that eat away at your offer, giants for whom what you do is a rounding error and lots of competitors who will say they do what you do, but don’t. Heads up. Someone is eating your lunch; I guarantee it.

Regarding the latter, I need only quote the father of differentiation, Ted Levitt: “There is no such thing as a commodity. All goods and services can be differentiated and usually are.” (I always thought this would have been far more interesting if he had said …can be differentiated but usually are not). I don’t care if you run a hospital, a law firm, a country, a postal authority or a foodbank, you either already are different and may have lost sight of it, or you need to be. In fact I believe the biggest, most break-out opportunities in brand strategy are in the most highly commoditized categories. It’s shooting fish in a barrel. And I’m not talking about spin here. I’m talking about real, sustainable, valuable difference. Too often I encounter organizations with the potential to redefine their categories, lulled into believing that they are just along for the ride.

If you believe either of these things about your organization it is time to examine the consequences, and consider the alternatives. If you do, you may be able to define an totally new opportunity space and a renewed sense of purpose.

Full disclosure: Jeannette is a long-time collaborator of mine, and my sister-in-law, and I was very lucky to have been able to watch and cheer from the sidelines as the ideas in Ikonica took shape. The end product – which I hope is really just the beginning of a national discourse – is a treasure.

The book – structured as a field guide, beautifully designed by Paul Hodgson and written to be read with pleasure – opens by putting Canadian brands into their historical and cultural context. The authors propose an 11-point model of what makes Canadian brands Canadian. I love this part. Communitarian, chameleon-like, sceptical, collaborative….for example. When I think of the great Canadian brands I’ve worked with, these attributes are not just accurate, they are at the heart of what has made them successful.

Then come the stories. 24 interview-based stories – some with the usual suspects (Timmies, WestJet, Roots) – but also some lovely surprises (Dynamic Funds, TIFFG, Environics, McCain Foods). All the stories come across as intimate reflections by these organizations’ leaders about what has motivated them and the values they have built and modelled in order to succeed. These stories are at times funny, moving and silly but always persuasive.

The book will not disappoint practitioners with its very tidy little model that uses Community, Culture and Commerce as filters for values-based brand strategy. It’s just such great and useful stuff.

Ikonica is not going to change what it means to be Canadian. So much of what is in this book feels like us and is reassuringly familiar. What it could change is how we see the potential of our values to change the way the world thinks about brands, about Canada and about our role in shaping modern commerce.

The world is looking for what comes next after the monolithic all-about-me phase of American-style branding. Look no further. The future of the truly global brand starts here.

http://creativeclass.typepad.com/thecreativityexchange/2008/06/whos-your-city.html

I need your help for the new Canadian edition of Who’s Your City? I’m working on for publication in early 2009. My team and I at the Prosperity Institute are working through the data and rankings, building all sorts of tables and maps for Canada and North America.

But what we really need are your stories.

Back in September of 2006, I asked for personal stories about your city, and recieved more than 200 responses many of which made it into the book. Most of which were about US cities.

Now, I’d like to ask for your stories about Canadian cities Tell me about the place you live. Why did you pick your city or region? How did you go about picking it – what was your strategy? What other kinds of places did you look at? How has that choice affected the rest of your life? Your job or career? Friends, family, or romantic interests? Fulfillment and fun? Real estate jackpots or money pits? Would you do it differently next time? What cities and regions are on your radar for the future and why? That’s it. 100 or 200 words, on any or all of those subjects. 300-500 words could be even better.

Send your stories to Patrick Adler at patrick.adler@rotman.utoronto.ca , or post them on the comment section of this entry, or do both. Together, we’ll build a reservoir of community knowledge that I hope can make the book as relevant as possible for Canadian readers.