The corporation is dying…in some respects it’s already dead!

Well, maybe we’re over-stating things a bit. It’s not so much that the corporation is dead – what has changed is how they are organized and how they operate.

Senior executives sitting in corporate headquarters dictating to workers from down on high about what the strategy of the firm is, and how they will work, just doesn’t work anymore. Well, not if a firm wants to be successful that is. Traditional forms of hierarchical ‘command and control’ organizational structures and related ways of working and thinking just don’t fit the modern commercial environment. Not only are traditional powerhouses losing market share because of ‘upstarts’ in their industry – but competition is coming from firms in previously unrelated sectors. This is why companies like Sony are losing market share to Spotify and companies like Canon have lost market share to Apple.

An increasingly turbulent environment means that how organizations compete, where they compete, and what they’re competing over has changed dramatically, and continues to change at an ever-increasing rate.

These broader environmental shifts are not just impacting the business community.

Militaries around the world – some of the most hierarchical of all organizations – are modifying their traditional ‘command and control’ techniques. Drawing on analyses of guerilla warfare, the USA’s troubled time in Vietnam and problems with the recent and ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria – militaries around the world, including the US military – are focusing much of their organizational efforts and energy on preparing themselves for engaging in asymmetric conflicts.

Popular for a number of years in military planning circles the term ‘asymmetric conflict’ was first used in a 1975 article by Andrew Mack entitled Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars. For Mack, asymmetry meant a significant disparity in power between opposing actors in a conflict. This realization has been so powerful that it is one of the key factors underlying the continued evolution of the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ (RMA). The greatest practical shift in military planning and operations as a result of this change has been the growth of ‘special forces’ groups within militaries. Small, highly trained groups of operatives – these groups operate in a targeted and disruptive way in a conflict environment.

A similar shift has been underway in the broader business environment for decades as well. It’s almost twenty years now since Clayton Christensen published his book The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Demonstrating how successful companies can do everything ‘right’ and still lose their market position to new competitors Christensen’s work did much to attract leaders to the concept of disruptive innovation as a way to help ensure that their companies stayed ‘on top of their game’.

As a result of these shifts, and the work of people like Christensen, companies began to establish ‘skunk works’ operations or innovation centers within the broader organizational structures. However, while shifts like these have occurred, their impact is still generally relatively limited. This is because senior managers tend to think of these new structures and processes of working as ‘bolt on’ apparatuses that augment traditional capabilities rather than mechanisms to entirely restructure a way a firm might work.

In this respect many companies still subscribe to the corporate version of the military doctrine of overwhelming force – where the larger or better-trained military force will win the conflict. But given that since 1950 weaker actors have won the majority of all asymmetric military conflicts this does not bode well for established corporate actors.

As militaries around the world have re-configured themselves to deal more effectively with asymmetric conflicts since the early 2000s these changes have been accompanied by a range of other shifts including an increased focus on inter-operability within and between militaries. Almost twenty years later we are seeing similar shifts in the corporate world.

In early 2015 Sony shut down their ‘Music Unlimited’ service – originally set up in 2010 to combat moves by groups such as Spotify – and announced their new partnership with Spotify who would now power their new music service ‘Playstation Music’. Like global military powers – networks of organizations working together provides a way for all involved to create more value than operating individually might otherwise allow.

The key to success in this changing environment is the reconfiguration of structures to deal with the realities of increasingly asymmetric competition. Learning from the experiences of the military means that part of this reconfiguration is not only a focus on the creation and deployability of agile elements within an organization (like special forces elements within militaries) but also a focus on interoperability within and across organizational boundaries. While this will not guarantee organizational success it will at least allow larger organizational structures to begin to compete more effectively in the new market environment. Cross-organizational networks are an important tool to be used in the adaptation of organizations to these new spaces of asymmetric competition.

We’re in the midst of a Revolution in Corporate Affairs (RCA). Asymmetric competition is the new norm. Incumbent corporate leaders would do well to take a leaf from the page of the world’s militaries and understand how these competition asymmetries require that their organizations increase both the agility of their structures and processes while also looking to increase their inter-operability and engagement not only within their organization but with external partners too.

Images courtesy of: Pixabay

Brand is important.

We all know this.

But brand is more than just an exercise in organizational communication for consumers and clients. Brand is about communicating the very essence of an organization – what an organization is, and what it stands for – to all stakeholders.

In a market place where meaning and values are becoming ever more important in purchasing decisions, brand is becoming both more and more important and increasingly multi-dimensional.

It is becoming more important as, in an ever more complex and crowded market place, brand is one of the key markers of how people will engage with an organization due to an alignment, or not, between the values of the organization and the values of the stakeholder. And, it is becoming increasingly multi-dimensional as people realize that the values of an organization – ideally encapsulated by a brand – are of importance to not only consumers but so too, to an increasingly wider range of stakeholders from suppliers through to employees.

The multi-dimensional nature of brand therefore means that it is a powerful tool for communicating values and meaning to not only external stakeholders but also to prospective and current employees. In this very important respect then brand acts as a point of articulation between internal organizational culture and external brand communities.

As a result of these shifts, brands can increasingly play an important role in organizational work by helping create alignment between broader organizational aims and goals and the behaviors of employees. This realization provides immense value for organizations – as the alignment of brand values with individual employees’ values has a massive potential payoff in terms of such important issues as employee retention and employee productivity.

And so, beyond just impacting on consumers’ perceptions and their creation of meaning around a product or a company, going beyond even the brand advocacy role of employees, brand is becoming increasingly important in understanding the creation and management of meaning at work for employees themselves.

In this respect:

brands are both internal and external facing, and they work to provide meaning for both consumers and employees; and
consumers and employees actively participate in the consumption and creation of brand through the actions and their engagements with others.

At base, and at it’s most simple, this implies that an organization needs to live up to the values that it professes to follow. If an organization says that it values transparency then it needs to be transparent in its practices. If an organization says that it values environmental sustainability then it needs to show that it values environmental sustainability in its practices. And so on.

Not doing this leads to ‘brand dissonance’ – that is, it can lead to a disconnection between what an organization says that it does and values and what people perceive an organization actually values. And, in a increasingly connected digital world, brand dissonance and the discontent and ill-will that it can provoke can spread quickly due to the viral nature of information dispersion on digital platforms like social media. This discontent and associated negative sentiment can quickly undermine broader aspects of brand and reputation that may have taken decades to build up.

So much more than just the creation of a range of visual collateral to communicate with external stakeholders such as consumers, brand is something that needs to be brought to life through the actions and practices of an organization. At it’s most basic this means that the organization, and those who constitute it (ie it’s staff and employees), must bring to life the values that underpin the brand through their actions and everyday practices. And, importantly they must do this not just for external facing stakeholders such as consumers but with one another. For, it’s through their day-to-day interactions with one another that these values become concrete and real. It’s at this point that an organization’s culture and their brand come together.

Beyond a more traditional focus on things like visual collateral (such as logos etc) on the power of brand we need to realize that, in an increasingly crowded market place, one of the most powerful builders of brand are our everyday practices. It’s through the combination of these approaches that the values of our organizations are best and most ably communicated to the world. At it’s most basic, the key takeaway from this piece is that brand is something that is built through our everyday actions and practices and we need to be accountable to that.

Images courtesy of: Pixabay