Walking the Talk

Starbuck’s brand positioning and focus on the importance of the customer come through in this article about their social media strategy. It covers the ten ideas they use to govern their use of social media to engage customers and promote brand loyalty, while staying true to their coffeehouse culture.

Waste Management is aiming to transform their business from disposing waste via landfill sites to “extracting value from waste” to help the environment. Reflecting the characteristics of a Greater-Good culture, CEO David P. Steiner believes that he can help the environment and produce profit for shareholders, rather than believing that a choice needs to be made between the two. An example of one of their environmental initiatives is the configuration of a landfill site into a biofuel gas plant which they use to power over half of their fleet, (click here for more information).

Steiner states in this article that the most important aspect of his job is to change the culture. The article captures some of his personal learnings about the messages he sends as a leader. Interestingly, engaging 45,000 employees was not an issue, and neither was marketing their offer to customers, as Steiner notes that both groups were already on board.

The Grameen Bank founder and Nobel prize winner Muhammed Yunus is campaigning for a new type of business he calls “social business”. He argues that social businesses will not only help address global human concerns but also give consumers more choice. A social business measures success by the impact it has on people (for example, access to safe drinking water) and the environment (such as renewable energy) rather than the profit it makes.

Click here to read the Yunus Foundation’s seven principles of social business

For real-world application of this style of doing business, you can take a look at those case studies for Danone and Intel.

Here’s an article from Time magazine outlining Toyota’s quality control and product recall problems which has been reported as a breakdown of its organizational culture. Toyota’s famous principles of “kaizen” and “jidoka” helped to propel them to great success.

What happened and what can we learn?

Click here to read the full article

In this interview with the New York Times, Vineet Nayar, CEO of Indian tech company HCL Technologies explains the personal leadership strategies he initiated in the company’s attempts to create a culture where employees matter and feel valued. Such traits align to a People-First archetype. He explains that building a culture where the employee comes first required sending messages which built trust and transparency. There are some good examples of the practical steps they have taken (for example, making changes to financial policies and feedback mechanisms), as well as his personal leadership mission to demystify the hero-CEO and why he felt that was important in his organization.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/business/14cornerweb.html?pagewanted=2