mediante pulsos ultra-cortos
4.2. Interacción luz-materia
One area where this book would like to challenge traditional business thinking and approaches is in how we define value. Most corporations define and manage the value they create solely by financial measures – profitability and growth – with very little (if any) concern about the wider implications of their business processes. We believe this single- minded view is incomplete, in that it ignores the component relation- ships among stakeholders and the brand that are the true drivers of corporate value.
True, there is a compelling argument to be made that investors buy shares for financial gain, not for any other reason. But there’s growing evidence that this dynamic is changing; that other concerns of investors and the demands of other stakeholders are taking a more active role in determining the value of a business in the world, and that financial performance is increasingly dependent on multiple measures of trust and goodwill among stakeholders.
In early 2003, I interviewed 40 US corporate executives, board members and accounting industry regulators about the forces changing their jobs, their companies and their lives. These interviews provided a concise summary of the evolving environment:
ᔡ Demand for corporate transparency, openness and performance
One result of this demand is new standards in personal accountability for corporate leaders. An overt manifestation is the new Sarbanes–Oxley Act in the United States that requires CEOs and CFOs personally to sign and attest to the accuracy of their companies’ financial statements. The Act outlines harsh new penalties for fraud or negligence, including fines and possible imprisonment. The Act has created significant new compliance and internal control requirements for corporations, and especially for executives.
Additionally, many companies are revamping their boards of directors to make them more independent and more accountable to capital investors, other stakeholders and the long-term health of the business. The result is new friction and tensions between management and boards, with boards demanding more information and more over- sight of executive decision making and performance.
Because employees, customers, investors and communities increas- ingly enjoy open access to each other and to information about the brands and companies they choose, inconsistencies between corporate stated values and behaviours/actions, and inconsistencies in managing expectations across multiple stakeholder classes create unnecessary risks to good brand and business relationships.
ᔡ Interdependence of multiple performance-drivers
The changes in CxO accountability and in CxO relationships with directors are amplifying a recent trend towards performance meas- urement of all business functions. As corporations have sought to drive superior performance, managers have sought new ways to understand and manage component performance-drivers like customer loyalty and acquisition costs, employee satisfaction and retention, IT inte- gration and implementation, productivity and knowledge management, innovation and speed to market.
The first step is recognizing the link between individual areas and the market. The second step is recognizing how these areas operate interdependently to drive excellence. In one of my interviews, a CIO spoke of ‘touching one area, and seeing the ripples manifest across the entire organization’. Even while the connections between independent drivers and bottom-line profit are still tenuous, there’s a growing recog- nition that these areas (and the people within them) must be managed interdependently.
These areas can be understood and managed as groups of people (performance communities, perhaps), not as business functions in their own functional silos.
ᔡ Emerging recognition of multiple stakeholder classes and their power
Increasingly, corporate boards are behaving more like a class of stake- holders for leaders to manage rather than insiders that management can count on to play along. But both CEOs and boards are also starting to recognize that other stakeholders are using public demands for openness and transparency and a new electronic media environment to push their way to centre-stage and be heard.
The media environment is a major factor, and the media can be seen as a stakeholder class in itself. The Internet has made more information from more sources more available to more people. Rather than replacing traditional media, the Internet has combined with 30 I Beyond Branding
phenomena like 24-hour business news and new satellite television stations so that corporations (and governments) are less able to control what is said about them than ever. It’s not the volume that’s important, but the freedom of information that makes the difference, and the ability for all stakeholders to access the same media sources.
While capital investors used to be a relatively small part of the popu- lation, the West’s baby-boom has fuelled a corresponding boom in stock ownership. Stock ownership in the West has become a mass phenomenon, and capital investors today are also likely to be a company’s potential consumers, strategic partners and employees. The current generation of capital investors demands financial performance, but it’s their other demands, such as for environmentally responsible practices or fair labour policies, that increasingly challenge leaders to manage multiple and competing priorities.
Employees have been gaining power as well. The information economy puts a premium on education, and the freedom and skills needed to act and engage other stakeholders. As mentioned, employees have more information about their employers than ever before and in a service economy are the face of the brand. The result is less ability to control and more need for leaders to recruit and engage employees to deliver for customers.
Corporate brand managers are losing not only their ability to control what is said about their brands and where, but even their ability to control and define who is a stakeholder. Socially conscious investors, consumers concerned about the quality and safety of mass-produced and mass-marketed food, and crusading NGOs can be viewed as a new class of self-defining stakeholders who are choosing to engage with the brand. Importantly, these stakeholders may not engage for reasons that are intended by the company, such as to buy the product or service, but for reasons that may be hostile to the assumptions of corporate managers (eg to impact corporate policy and behaviour).
The conclusion is that a single-minded focus on business functions is not enough. Increasingly, business performance is being broken down into its component parts but, instead of a value chain of functions serving the customer, we see a value web of interdependent stakeholder classes. The web’s classes each have somewhat different needs, but feed on similar information that often comes not from corporate leaders but from other
stakeholders in the marketplace. Trust and goodwill towards leaders and towards the brand come from consistency, keeping promises and openness. And trust and goodwill make the difference between superior and mediocre performance, since these are the drivers of loyalty, produc- tivity and engagement.