The i2a Top 10 Tips for Good Business in the 2010s
- No Spin is the New Spin: Embrace transparency. Put the corporate spin doctor out to pasture. His services are no longer required in a world in which 'spin' or obfuscation is detected in the blink of an eye and the cynical recipient of it spreads the word more rapidly and effectively than any corporate PR man ever thought possible just a few years ago.
- Social Media is the New Punk Rock: There's real substance behind the razzmatazz. Be prepared for open, rapid and engaged dialogue with the new generation of communicators. The defensive, corporate rebuttal when an article does not go well will not be enough in the next decade. Social Media offers an opportunity for dialogue with customers and other stakeholders and at the very least you should use it to listen to what people are saying about you in web chat forums, blogs and on Twitter just as you will have monitored press coverage in the past. The only difference now is that you need to be open to more honest, open two-way dialogue than was previously the norm and you will need to do it fast to stop false rumours and to keep up with the pace of conversations.
- Engineer Values into Corporate DNA: Continually reward and reinforce corporate values so that they shine through in everything you do. It is not enough to have a set of values published in some obscure employees' manual that no one reads. You must proactively communicate these values internally. Values articulation needs to extend to a code of conduct which makes it clear how these should work practically for employees and consequently be embedded into behaviours. A senior director should be given the role of championing the code and ensuring no exemptions or deviations from it are encouraged or authorised. The values need to be simple and unambiguous enough to communicate easily and be strong enough to be open to scrutiny by the outside world. Support values communication with training and work with Compliance and Legal departments to ensure they are being enforced.
- Out of Sight is no Longer Out of Mind: Apply corporate values throughout your supply chain. There is an increasing intolerance of inconsistencies in attitudes which show that suppliers are less than scrupulous in their employment policies or attitudes to doing business. Consider suppliers as part of your 'extended enterprise', their employees need to have the same rights and treatment as your own employees. Outsourced service providers and other suppliers need to live by these same values which should also cover social responsibility, legal compliance, quality standards as well as safety and security policies.
- Good Business Benefits All: Ensure your business provides benefit to the communities in which it operates. By building good relations with the communities in which you operate an organisation is likely to benefit from more business, more successful recruitment, reputation-enhancing media coverage, improved staff morale and a number of other unforeseen business benefits. Ultimately businesses cannot operate without the support of the community in which they operate. In this sense corporate social responsibly adds value to all other areas of your operation and makes for sustainable, Good Business.
- Spreading Risk Does Not Reduce It: As your interests spread and globalisation continues apace it becomes increasingly imperative that companies find an over-arching methodology for measuring and assessing operational risk. Through a centralised system senior management can properly understand not only the risk levels of the work their own department is doing, but also the departments of other directors, right across the business. Apply 'Root Cause Analysis' thinking to assess measure and prioritise action to mitigate risk. Open the ivory towers of other specialist divisions to measures which everyone understands.
- Lead Self Regulation to Competitive Advantage: Make changes guided by your values proactively and before changes are forced upon you. This way it becomes possible to lead change and call the shots when regulators seek to prod the laggards into action. You are automatically rewarded with a platform to comment on what the industry should be doing because you have taken the moral high ground. The great thing is you don't need to be the market leader to behave like one. Too many companies resist change which they perceive will cost them money. They fail to understand that longer term they will be forced to comply and by the time they have had compliance forced upon them they have suffered damage to their reputation. Better to act decisively and with a view to long-term sustainable business and, in the meantime, by doing the right thing by all the company's stakeholders not just their shareholders.
- Demonstrate Progress Towards 'Good Business' Targets: Communicate about successful compliance and progress towards compliance to all stakeholders. If there are sticking points be prepared to enter into dialogue with interested parties about these shortcomings and talk about what remedial action you are taking to ensure compliance in the future. Doing these things in the spirit of openness is the key.
- Act Sustainably: In an increasingly globalised and connected world, scrutiny of corporate impact on the environment and society, both direct and indirect, will continue to grow. NGOs and pressure groups will tackle low standards by targeting the most high-profile link in any chain. By anticipating and proactively managing sustainability across its supply chain, an organisation can build trust with its customers, business partners and the wider public, improving its reputation and gaining competitive advantage. Environmental impact assessments, target setting and reporting on environmental issues enable businesses, and their detractors, to fully understand the sustainability of their operations and the actions they are taking to improve this.
- Strike the Right Balance Between Short and Long-term Thinking: The banking crisis demonstrates that short-term thinking generates rapid returns but may have negative impacts which are only partially understood at the outset. Long-term planning mitigates against any ill effects of actions because routes to market and tactics tend to be more carefully considered and agreed upon as a result. Monitor this balance carefully to keep the natural drift towards short-term, opportunistic decision-making in check and make corrections through routine senior management reporting forums.
i2a's Guide to Good Business (opens as pdf in a new window) provides a more comprehensive summary our our thinking, including the Top Ten Tips described above.
If you have any comments or questions, please contact us at talk@i2a.co.uk
