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Scott Jeffrey

The Mindful Leader

Virtually all C-level executives are smart. Cognitive intelligence alone, however, is not a good indicator of leadership effectiveness.

When was the last time you checked in on your leadership effectiveness?

I’m not just talking about the objective performance of your organization or department; I’m referring to the more subtle, subjective qualities that are often more difficult to measure.

Research by psychologist Daniel Goleman suggests that emotional intelligence is the differentiating factor in outperforming leaders. Think of emotional intelligence as your ability to relate to other people.

It makes sense when you think about it: Your ability to relate to others impacts how much influence you have on others, how well you manage relationships, and even how well you manage yourself.

Evaluating Your Leadership Effectiveness

So here’s an exercise, if you’re game.

Perform an informal evaluation of your organization or department.

But before you can do this, you need to step outside yourself and put on a different hat. Imagine that you’re an outside consultant or a perhaps stealth ninja—whatever works for you.

Adopt what’s called a Beginner’s Mind where you have no preconceived notions. Look on your organization with a fresh pair of eyes.

Now, what do you see?

Here are a few questions to assist you in your evaluation:

  • What is the overall level of trust among employees? High? Average? Low?
  • Can you observe open, honest dialogue in meetings and around the workplace?
  • Do you feel a sense of camaraderie? Do people look like they want to be where they are?
  • Do you have reason to believe that the executives and employees have a sense of purpose in their work—that what they do matters?
  • How much fear can you observe? Are people more open or walled-off? Are they collaborating with one another or are they mainly operating in silos?
  • Are individuals focused on supporting the actualization of organizational and departmental results? Or are they predominantly focused on climbing higher on the corporate food chain?
  • Do you get a sense that individuals show genuine care for one another, the organization, and the customers that give the business its existence?

All of these questions speak to mindful leadership. They each reveal a dimension of the organization’s overall health.

Assessing Leadership Performance

Now return to your role as a leader of the organization. How did you do?

If the results of this performance review weren’t stellar, fear not. The fact that you can be honest about that demonstrates another quality of effective leaders: humility.

There’s always significant room for improvement. What’s important is that we stay conscious of these factors and continuously find ways to develop our abilities.

Without conscious attention, these factors head toward the lowest common denominators, none of which support a thriving, collaborative, and profitable enterprise. Creating a truly inspired organization takes conscious effort.

Leading Toward a Common Vision

Your first objective is to look at what’s really there. Be radically honest with the human dynamics you observe.

But then see the potential: How can the way people communicate and exchange ideas in your organization be improved? How can you foster an environment where a group of talented humans, aligned to a set of shared values, work together toward a common vision?

After all, that’s the role of a visionary leader: To see what others don’t, and to guide the organization to a compelling vision. It always starts with vision.

May 13, 2014 by

Core Values, Culture, Customers, and You

Our team was discussing last week’s mammoth post on core values, reflecting on how core values became such an integral component of what we do. As a marketing consulting firm, we certainly didn’t start out emphasizing the importance of “values” in business.

But having spent over a decade studying and analyzing a unique breed of companies that have an uncanny way of attracting and retaining loyal customers, the topic of values became unavoidable.

The Link Between Cult Brands and Core Values

As you know, we call these companies Cult Brands and we call their loyal customers Brand Lovers. We think Cult Brands are special, both from a humanistic as well as a business perspective.

Three reasons for their specialness stand out:

  1. Yes, Cult Brands tend to be highly profitable businesses. Just look at Apple, Southwest Airlines, and IKEA for prime examples.
  2. But they also create a meaningful, emotional connection with their customers. They appear to care more and to invest in the customer relationship in ways that don’t clearly translate to increased revenue in the short run.  Take, for example, Harley-Davidson’s investment in supporting HOG or in MINI’s investment in Takes the State.
  3. Finally, Cult Brands find ways to build unique, supportive corporate cultures. Companies like Amazon, Google, Apple, Netflix, Zappos, Southwest, and The Container Store all have distinct cultures that attract good, talented people that help shape their brand.

We believe all three of these elements are related; they are all important. Profit is a consequence of creating an emotional connection with your customers and fostering a unique culture that stands for something meaningful to its employees.

Establishing core values, as we saw last week, is a critical part of cultivating your culture.

The Link Between Core Values and Customers

Did you review the 100+ examples of core values from a dozen successful companies last week?

It’s interesting to note that many (but not all) of these companies emphasize a focus on their customers in at least one core value. For example:

  • Google: Focus on the user and all else will follow
  • Zappos.com:  Deliver WOW Through Service
  • Whole Foods: We satisfy, delight and nourish our customers
  • Amazon: Customer obsession
  • Zipcar: Obsess about the member experience
  • Ritz-Carlton: I build strong relationships and create Ritz-Carlton guests for life

With the exception of Whole Foods, all of these customer-focused values topped their respective lists (for Whole Foods it was #2). This isn’t to say that a customer-centric company must include a customer-forward core value; only that they do seem more likely to do so.

Consider how powerful it is to have a core value—one of your organization’s foundational principles that you live and breathe every day—centered on your customer. This means that every person in your organization, from top-level executives to your front line workers, knows that their customers are important.

The employees understand that their behavior and decisions must be in alignment with their customers’ best interest. They realize that the company that employs them places a special emphasis on serving their customers.

Core Values + Customer-Centric Culture = Inspiring Leadership

Numerous studies show that outperforming CEOs place an incredibly high degree of emphasis on obsessing about their customers. The above examples are certainly consistent with these findings.

Remember, core values reflect the idealized beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of an organization. It’s one thing to establish a core value for your enterprise; it’s quite another to actualize it throughout your organization. To make any core value stick requires a great deal of consistent effort on the part of leadership.

Creating a distinct, collaborative culture is a challenging task for today’s chief executives. Cultivating a culture that is also customer-forward, however, is where the magic happens.

 

P.S. Thank you for all of your responses to our brief survey last week. We’ll soon be announcing a leadership workshop for executives interested in getting more obsessed about their customers. Stay tuned!

April 29, 2014 by

Cause Marketing: Can A Feel-Good Strategy Make Good Sense?

Cause-Marketing-Map-UBS

The contemporary art world was buzzing about an announced collaboration between UBS Wealth Management and the Guggenheim Museum. It’s easy to see what the excitement was about, especially from a creative perspective. The five year initiative is going to chart creative activity and contemporary art from around the world.

The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative identifies and supports a network of art, artists, and curators from South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and North Africa as part of a comprehensive program involving curatorial residencies, acquisitions for the Guggenheim’s collection, international touring exhibitions, and far-reaching educational activities.

It’s a huge project and it’s also a beautiful example of brilliantly conceived cause marketing—one of our 52 Types of Marketing Strategies. UBS hasn’t officially shared numbers, but there are well-regarded rumors that they’re putting as much as $40 million into the project. What are they expecting in return for that kind of investment?

The Appeal of Causes for Your Customers

UBS is the second largest wealth management company in the world. They’ve expressed an interest in art as an asset class, and participating in a project designed to pinpoint rising stars and emerging trends in the global art market provides this already formidable company with another tool with which to better serve its customers.

It’s important to remember that UBS could have achieved these goals without such a significant and visible investment. It’s interesting to move the conversation to the consideration of cause marketing, and examine the subconscious psychological factors that will make this specific initiative appealing to UBS’s customers.

The Philanthropic Drive: The Need to Do Good

Up to 90% of all human behavior is subconscious. This means we’re motivated by drives and urges that we’re not always fully aware of.

Maslow did important research in this area—his hierarchy of needs—identifying physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization needs. For most businesses, identifying and meeting needs on higher levels can be an absolute game changer. This is where dominant organizations begin to separate themselves from the rest of the pack.

Cause marketing becomes increasingly relevant and appealing as our customers level up through the hierarchy. It is when they are at the apex, the point of self-actualization, we see the needs for creativity, expression, morality—with an emphasis on making life better for other people, often expressed through philanthropy—and freedom from prejudice.

It’s important to note that these are needs everyone has, to some degree or another, but we aren’t all equally consciously aware of or focused on them. Self-actualization is not a top priority for everyone.

UBS’s clientele is uniquely positioned, however, to ensure that they have their self-actualization needs met. An audience absent of any other differentiating factors, relatively free from the constraints of material wants, will choose the wealth management service that provides the extra value of meeting these higher-order self-actualization needs.

The collaboration with the Guggenheim allows UBS’s clients to participate in a creative endeavor on a global scale. They are doing so in the position of philanthropist or benefactor, filling their need to make positive change in the lives of others. There are certainly esteem needs being met here, too—it feels good to be able to self-identify with the Rockefellers and Carnegies of the world.

Selecting Causes In Alignment Your Organization And Your Customers

Selecting the right cause is imperative. This is where comprehensive customer intelligence becomes essential. UBS has a clientele with a global perspective, which influences them to prefer projects on a similar scale. Other organizations may find the cause closer to home, such as Kellog’s embrace of National Breakfast Week.

The key is identifying and presenting causes in such a way that your customer feels that their participation fulfills their self-actualization needs in multiple ways. This strengthens and reinforces the customer-brand relationship, and ensures the cause marketing initiative delivers far more than feel-good results.

April 16, 2014 by

5 Steps To Listening To Your Customers

We’ve always been fascinated by the phenomenon of popularity. What causes customers to flock to one brand while remaining coldly indifferent to another—even when the offerings of the companies in question are similar?

Years of consumer research have revealed that the single most important factor that separated the good companies from the great companies—Adidas from the Nike, Kawasakis from Harley-Davidson, HP from Apple—is the ability to listen to what the customer has to say.

That is the starting point.

Dominant organizations, we’ve learned, are those that can discern meaning from the information given. They’re doing more than listening. They’re hearing, and they’re choosing their direction from what they hear.

How, exactly, does that work?

Effective Listening Takes Effort

Effective listening is not simply an intuitive process. There’s no automatic structure inside our minds that allows us to understand each other deeply, effortlessly, and effectively. We have to work at understanding.

Luckily for us, there have been generations of great thinkers, philosophers, and researchers who have delved deeply into the nuances of human nature. You’ve heard of a lot of these people; Maslow, Jung, and Campbell are familiar names for any student of the psyche or mind.

It’s by taking an integrative approach to customer analysis, drawing upon and combining these insights that we equip ourselves to listen to our customers.

Here’s what that looks like from our perspective:

Step 1: Understand the Subconscious Mind

The first step in listening to the customer is understanding that the vast majority of human experience, communication, and thought takes place on a level below our conscious awareness. This means that even though we may not be aware we’re doing this, we’re continually taking note of the environment around us, how people interact within that environment, and the role we play as an individual.

This is information that has a profound role in guiding consumer behavior. Begin by realizing truly effective communication means being able to listen on multiple levels, to what is said and what is left unsaid.

Step 2: Harness Humanistic Drivers

As human beings, we come with certain needs and compulsions hard-wired into our minds. We call these needs and compulsions humanistic drivers. These drives act as motivators to ensure not only human survival, but a high quality survival, rich with enjoyable, fulfilling experiences. These drivers are generally viewed in a hierarchal structure, with the most universal needs at the bottom, and more refined needs at higher levels. We begin with basic survival needs and level up to aesthetic and transcendence needs.

To listen to your customer, you need to understand what humanistic drivers are at play in their lives when they engage with your brand. It’s only by satisfying these needs that you’ll attract and retain more customers.

Step 3: Access Archetypal Images

A single image is worth a thousand words for a simple reason: the subconscious mind does not bother with language. Symbols, pictures, and iconography speak directly to your customer’s mind, bypassing and transcending all other forms of communication to take on the leading role in influencing your customer.

Listening to the customer means understanding which archetypal images resonate most and are most relevant to your customer base.

Step 4: Check Cultural Narratives

We live in a world made of stories. Every day, our customers are exposed to stories that tell them everything they need to know about who they are, who their friends and neighbors are, and what they need to accomplish in the course of their lives if they are to be happy, fulfilled people.

These stories vary wildly depending on the culture and socio-economic niches our customers occupy. If we have a story called “Good Mom,” for example, the single Hispanic Mom in Houston is hearing a different version than the Wealthy Mom in Westchester.

Listening to your customers means identifying the cultural narratives most relevant to your customer base. That enables you to craft messaging they’re predisposed to hear.

Step 5: Aggregate Your Insights and Align Your Organization

Preparing ourselves to listen deeply and intently to our customers puts us in a position where we can learn an awful lot about them. Aggregating all of the insights gathered—a process we call Brand Modeling—allows an organization to project, with a high degree of certainty, how customers will respond to changes in marketing or operations before those changes are made.

Bringing organizational performance into alignment with customer expectation is the essential step in achieving market dominance.

The better we know our customers, the more equipped we are to listen to what they have to say. The better we listen, the easier it is to serve our customers wants and needs efficiently and effectively—often before our customers know what they want or need! That’s what dominant organizations do to win. It’s the secret of putting customers first.

April 9, 2014 by

How Great Businesses Tap into Higher Values

Abraham Maslow, one of the founding fathers of humanistic psychology, taught us that human beings have a higher, transcendent nature, which he visualized most eloquently in his Hierarchy of Human Needs.

This simple pyramid gives us a framework from which to understand the essence of Cult Brands and how they inspire their most loyal and devoted followers.

The bottom four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called Deficiency needs or D-needs. Nothing is felt if these needs are met, but in their absence, anxiety ensues.

Intrinsic Values of Being

When the top level of self-actualization is reached, D-needs are transcended, and Being values (or B-values) are realized. These “intrinsic values of Being” when fulfilled, motivate and inspire humans to grow and reach their fullest potential.

B-values includes:

TruthCompletion
GoodnessJustice
BeautySimplicity
WholenessRichness
AlivenessEffortlessness
UniquenessPlayfulness
PerfectionSelf-Sufficiency

Simply stated, individuals who are more self-actualized tend to embrace more B-values than those suspended at lower levels.

How Cult Brands Celebrate B-Values

Just like self-actualized individuals, Cult Brands are those self-realized companies that encompass more B-values than other businesses. These brands galvanize others towards greater fulfillment, wholeness, and integrity.

Let’s see how Cult Brands actually do it.

The principles of Cult Branding tell us that consumers want to be part of a group that’s different. Here, Star Trek, Apple, and Volkswagen lead the pack, in their wholehearted embrace of the B-value of uniqueness. These brands are not afraid to go against conventional wisdom, and celebrate their differences.

Cult Brand loyalists happily congregate together on common ground, proudly declaring their  “be weird together, be weird no more” mantra.

When Cult Brands listen to the choirs, and take consumer feedback to heart, they uphold the B-values of truth and perfection.

Apple’s commitment to their Mac User Groups serves as the perfect example. By interacting with these groups and constantly integrating their feedback, Apple honors and ultimately relies on their Brand Lover. Through this dynamic process of uncovering the truth about consumers’ experiences, they continually strive for perfection in their offerings.

What other Cult Brand than Jimmy Buffett, the King of Fun, and his loyal following of Parrot Heads could better personify the B-values of aliveness and playfulness? Cult Brands like Star Trek and Harley Davidson are also aligned with these B-values, in that they create consumer communities that celebrate lifestyles filled with youthful fantasy and adventure.

Cult Brands promote personal freedom and draw power from their enemies. No other Cult Brand has accomplished this with more grace, style, and ease than Oprah. Oprah drew power from her backwater competitors and aligned herself with more positive, uplifting stories rather than succumb to the ubiquitous drama of catfights and bar brawls.

Oprah wanted to showcase people at their best, unlike other talk show hosts who exposed the darkest sides of human behavior. Her intention to do good in the world is magnetic and irresistible, as evidenced by her loyal fans and ever-expanding media companies.

Cult Brands like Oprah, through their devotion to charitable causes, their mission to improve people’s lives, and their commitment to promote freedom personify the B-values of goodness, beauty, and justice.

Improving the Lives of Your Customers

In more simple terms, Cult Brands want to improve the lives of others. By harnessing the power and magnetism of B-values, these brands tap into our innate reservoirs of self-actualization.

We are drawn to Cult Brands because they make us feel good about ourselves, but on a deeper level, they lift us higher up the hierarchy to illuminate our Being needs. This drive towards self-actualization is intrinsic to our nature. Maslow understood it, and Cult Brands do too.

Now it’s your turn: How can your business tap into B-values to improve the lives of your customers? What are you doing to express these values? What can you be doing differently?

March 11, 2014 by

Big Data: Your Business’ Natural Resource

Big-Data-IBM-nrf-big-show-2014

In our visit to the National Retail Federation’s Big Show last month, we had the opportunity to hear Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM, discuss the technological trends that are shaping the future of retail.

Thanks to the explosion of new data, the business landscape is shifting. Rometty sees data as the world’s vast new natural resource. She describes how big data and changing expectations are intersecting with a confluence of major technological shifts—cloud computing, analytics, social, and mobile—to fundamentally reshape commerce.

Following Rometty’s remarks, she and Terry Lundgren, Chairman, President, and CEO of Macy’s, engage in an in-depth dialogue on the implications of these shifts for retailers everywhere with Macys promo code.

If you’re interested, you can watch this thought-provoking talk here.

February 24, 2014 by

The Quest to Know Your Customers

Tip of the Iceberg

You understand that the game of modern business isn’t won by capturing the next transaction. You’re passed that. Now you’re learning how to relate to your customers.

Look at any of your personal relationships to see how difficult relating to another human being can be. Here, you’re tasked with relating to a customer—someone you don’t know and probably will never know personally. This challenge is so formidable it dissuades many business leaders from even trying.

The task of relating is made easier by knowledge and understanding. You may not get to meet all of your customers face to face, but the better you understand who they are, the easier it is to relate to them through every interaction they have with your brand.

So we begin our journey with customer intelligence. We often start in the obvious places: market and consumer research.

Understanding the Outer Life of Your Customers

We acquire a lot of data on our customers’ purchasing behavior: their likes and dislikes, their social groups, their web habits, and a host of other easily trackable forms of “big data.” We come to know their age, income level, level of education, occupation, marital status, how many kids they have, and where they go to dinner on Friday nights.

All of this information is useful, and in the hands of a competent marketer, this data can be used to help win market share in the short term. But does it really help you relate to your customers? Is it enough to forge a meaningful bond? Unlikely.

Customer intelligence starts with knowledge of our customers’ outer worlds (all of the metrics listed above). But forming a meaningful relationship with our customers require us to go deeper—to probe the hearts and minds of the people we are trying to serve.

Exploring Your Customers’ Subconscious Mind

True “consumer insights” reveal what’s below the surface. To explore the inner lives of our customers we must ask a different set of questions, including:

  • How do our customers feel about us?

  • What do they believe we stand for?

  • What do they value above all else?

  • What are their hopes and dreams?

  • What are the dominant images they associate with us?

  • What needs are they striving to meet? How can we help them meet those needs?

  • What tensions are they wrestling with each day? How can we help resolve these tensions?

Try answering these questions for yourself and for someone close to you to appreciate the complexities of our inner lives. These are not easy questions to answer and yet this is the task of today’s inspired business leaders looking to know their customers.

Forging into this arena is certainly not for everyone. You might have to let go of many cherished beliefs about your customers. You might come to realize how little you know about the people who give your business existence—the very lifeblood of your enterprise.

But if you’re brave, if you dare to discover, and if you’re excited about the possibilities this new customer intelligence can bring to your business, give us a ring. We love helping businesses see their customers as human beings rather than statistics. It’s why we exist to serve you.

February 19, 2014 by

Enlightened Management

zappos-company-core-values

Organizations that foster brand loyalty—that place an unusually high level of focus on their customers—on average, demonstrate a more enlightened approach to management.

Why is this so? Cult Brands and other customer-centric businesses tend to be more humanistic. That is, they tend to place a greater emphasis on treating humans well—whether those humans happen to be customers or employees.

A Humanistic Approach to Management

A humanistic approach to management emphasizes the softer, more feminine aspects of effective and inspiring leadership, principles like respect, dignity, and the fulfillment of higher needs (for example, the self-actualization of the workforce). Principles themselves are also called core values, something humanistic organizations know quite a bit about.

Humanistic organizations tend to put energy and investment into their work environment because they understand how a healthy work environment promotes healthy individuals (and vice versa: an unhealthy work environment fosters ill and less effective employees).

Humanistic psychology clearly links positive mental health with creativity, peak experiences (states of effortless flow), and integrity. That is, positive mental health in the workplace translates into more innovative, productive workers who can collaborate effectively and get along with one another.

Perhaps that’s why Google launched their Search Inside Yourself program to help its employees develop emotional intelligence, self-awareness, empathy, and compassion through various contemplative practices.

Perhaps that’s why CEO Tony Hsieh has placed such a large emphasis on Zappos’ 10 Core Family Values within his organization. And in promoting the self-actualization of their employees, the company maintains their own Zappos Family Library, a list of books provided to them free of charge.

Perhaps that’s why The Life is good Company promotes the message of optimism to its customers, organization, and community.

Why CEOs Need to Adopt a Humanistic Perspective

The truth is that many of us spend most of our time in the office. Think about how you can transform the lives of your employees by improving the work environment.

You can invite your employees to grow by finding ways to make the workplace more engaging (less static), more inspiring (less mundane), more open (less fixed), and more democratic (less authoritarian).

This shift toward more humanistic management practices doesn’t simply improve productivity, creativity, collaboration, loyalty, and profitability. It can also help your employees become better spouses, better parents, and better citizens.

As Abraham Maslow put it, “We must try to make a particular kind of people, of personality, of character, of soul one might say, rather than try to create directly particular kinds of behavior.”

Business leaders have an opportunity (and one could argue, a moral responsibility) to establish enlightened management practices using a humanistic lens, focusing on cultivating a work environment that produces healthy, more well-adjusted human beings. Integrating humanistic practices into your organization isn’t simply altruistic; it’s capitalistic. And that is good news indeed.

(In case you’re interested, our team has written numerous articles to give you ideas on how to improvement your workplace, addressing topics like trust, mindfulness, humor, and freedom.)

February 3, 2014 by

The Alchemy of Data and Intuition

left-right-brain-Marketing

In walking the massive floors of the National Retail Federation’s Big Show in Jacob Javits Center last week, we noticed the same themes and language echoed throughout the great halls of exhibitors serving the retail industry: analytics, big data, and other research tools—services and technologies for improving your customer intelligence in an effort to better compete and serve your customers.

With retail’s major shift toward statistical analysis and improvement of data-gathering technologies is important, its easy to arrive at the belief that all business decisions need not be made, but rather analyzed.

This important shift toward objective data and statistical analysis isn’t just happening in the retail industry but virtually every field of knowledge and inquiry. And this, ultimately, is a good thing. The more reliable objective data we have, the more accurate knowledge we have. The more accurate data CEOs have about their customers, their competition, and the overall marketplace, the better informed decisions they can make.

Armed with big data, chief executives have a powerful form of intelligence to access and mine in their pursuit of market dominance, brand loyalty, improved ROI, and greater profitability. What better way to become obsessed and knowledgeable about your customers than to have access to reports that highlight customer interests, activities, perceptions, behaviors, and beliefs associated with your brand.

The Dark Side of Consumer Research

All good things, however, can be taken to extremes. Objective data and statistics is one form of information. It is the kind of information technology can provide as well as the kind our logical, rational minds love. But we (and our customers) are not purely rational beings.

Humans often behave irrationally and any customer intelligence that doesn’t address our irrational side is incomplete and can lead us astray. And with raw analytics alone it is difficult to penetrate our customer’s psyche, to mine the unconscious motivations and less rational aspects of our customers.

This means that we can’t exclusively rely on technology to inform us about customers and markets. We need to tap into our innate human faculties as well.

The Missing Ingredient in Consumer Intelligence

Intuition and feelings are doorways to our customer’s irrational perspectives. When we learn to access these functions in ourselves, big data and market research can become an empowering servant instead of a dominating master.

Big data needs human assistance. We must learn to access our left brain (logic and reason) AND our right brain (intuition and non-rational) in our interpretation of consumer data.

Then, magic can happen. Statistics begin to dance and our customers come to life; our understanding of them (and perhaps even ourselves) finds new ground.

The Future of Market Research

Our experience shows us that CEOs who adopt a more humanistic understanding of their customers will become better leaders of their organizations and will be better equipped to interpret the massive amount of data companies will continue to generate about their customers.

These well-informed chief executives will lead their business to market dominance by better addressing the needs of their customers and their employees. They will be able to make superior decisions and spot consumer trends before their competitors.

We’ll discuss ways humanistic psychology suggests we can open up to these non-rational functions in an upcoming post.

January 21, 2014 by

Core Values and the Future of Business

It was an enlivening trip to the National Retail Federation’s Big Show this year. With over 30,000 attendees pacing over 800,000 square feet of exhibitors serving the retail market, it was difficult not to marvel at what human consciousness can do in its effort to survive and thrive.

On the same stage that former President George Bush occupied the previous day, our firm’s founder, BJ Bueno, held the keynote last Tuesday with the CEO of Life is good, Bert Jacobs.

On what topic did 3,000 of retail’s finest minds come to get inspiration from Bueno and Jacobs? They spoke about the most vital resource of any enterprise: human capital. Without good people steering the enterprise—without a strong, collaborative, and adaptable organization—business growth in our technological age is becoming unattainable. Human capital affects both the inside and outside of every business, its operations as well as its customer.

And so Bueno and Jacobs spoke about what’s on the minds of every out-performing CEO: empowering employees through values.

Businesses Are Getting a Humanistic Makeover

I find it exciting that values has become a hot topic among chief executives because it suggests that business is moving in a more humanistic direction.

Abraham Maslow spoke of the importance of enlightened management practices in the 1960s, suggesting that only those organizations that adopt a more democratic and humanistic approach to business will survive in the coming age. Maslow always was ahead of his time.

What Are Core Values?

What are core values then? Values are what we stand for. They are what we deem most important to us. There are many different values people can hold including compassion, joy, safety, love, peace, optimism, authenticity, fun, accountability, adventure, simplicity, boldness, effectiveness, curiosity, creativity, health. (Here’s a list of almost 400 different values.)

Our values influence everything we do: our behaviors, where we invest our time and with whom, and how we make decisions. If we don’t consciously unearth our values, they operate outside of our conscious awareness. If you haven’t undergone a process of discovering your personal values, individually or with a personal coach, you probably are conscious of some of your values, while foggy about others.

Bj-Bueno-Cult-Branding-Company-Bert-Jacobs-Life-is-good-Lori Mitchell-Keller-SAP-NRF-2014Lori Mitchell-Keller Senior VP SAP, Bert Jacobs CEO Life is good, and BJ Bueno Founder The Cult Branding Company.

The Power of Values for Cult Brands

At an organizational level, CEOs have discovered the vital role values play in cultivating organizational health. A defined set of corporate values helps align a large group of people under a common set of banners. Values help define what the organization stands for, how it will behave, and what missions it will rally around. It helps bring meaning, direction, and clarity to the workplace. It influences internal communication as well as customer service.

We’ve been studying the role values play in organizations since the inception of our firm. Cult Brands, by nature are aligned with very specific core values. And it is these core values that their loyal customers and raving fans rally around.

Core values are fundamental to brands like Apple, Harley-Davidson, IKEA, Southwest, Zappos, Life is good, Oprah, Vans, Star Trek, and all of the rest. (In an upcoming post we’ll highlight the values these Cult Brands stand for, so stay tuned.)

Values: The CEO’s Primary Agenda

To summarize, CEOs are putting an emphasis on core values for several important reasons.

First, CEOs are focusing on core values to improve the performance of their organization. While vales might appear “soft.” they yield hard business results.

Second, an organization guided by core values will naturally differentiate itself in the marketplace and attract more customers aligned with the same values. Values, then, play a vital role in branding and brand positioning. They become a key strategy for building customer loyalty.

Third, employees inspired by core values will treat their customers better; that is, they will treat their customers more as individuals, as humans. That’s a natural by-product of values; they tend to humanize us. The more human we feel, the more human our interactions with others become.

January 20, 2014 by