We’ve all heard bromides such as “the only constant is change,” and the simple reality is that change is being thrust upon all of us, all the time. Some anticipate it, most react to it. In some cases, change leads to chaos. Organizations experience change at an even greater rate: consider the cumulative effect of the changes happening to all the individuals who comprise the organization, for example. Plus changes occurring both upstream and down, among suppliers and customers, clients and constituents of various stripes.

With the focus right now on the slowing economy, it’s appropriate to consider that we are most likely embarking on the sort of systemic change that alters not only the ways in which we earn money, but entire lifestyles, communities, social orders and, ultimately, history itself. We’ve read about the transition from rural to urban, from agricultural to industrial. Most of us have experienced in some way the transition to post-industrial and then to the Information Age. It appears that we’re on the cusp of something at least as dramatic: the post-information age, the age of the Green Economy, complete with a new set of green collar jobs, green chip stocks, and new opportunities to prosper while helping solve the problems associated with global warming and dependence on antiquated fuel sources and uses – a chance to “do well by doing good.”

Are you ready? It’s going to be a wonderful ride!

The Maine Community Foundation is a champion of the concept of social capital, and while that organization is currently planning how to optimize the return on investment of social capital, it also cites the responses to the ice storm as perhaps the finest example hereabouts of social capital at work. At a time when, led by the efforts of GrowSmart Maine, the state legislature is now beginning to recognize the importance of quality of place, those rather elusive characteristics that make Maine unique and attractive, it is important to note that such qualities are the product not just of careful economic development along with responsible stewardship of the environment, our natural resources and traditional land and sea-based industries. It is also very much a function of social capital applied just where and when it is most needed.

So here we are, waxing nostalgic for a shared disaster – not because of the privations it imposed, but rather because of the renewal of spirit it invoked.

Branding is an essential element of commercial communications, much of the time. It is the means of leading a horse to water, to both encourage your prospects to listen to what you have to say and, just as importantly, to reaffirm the commitment of your current customers. But you still have to provide that horse a reason to drink from your well, and simply feeling good about you usually isn’t reason enough; especially when your prospects probably aren’t all that unhappy with whatever institutions with which they currently do business.

The value of brand equity is vastly different in the process of establishing (or maintaining) a long-term relationship with a financial institution than it is for, say, consumer package goods; or automobiles. It’s different for retail banking than it is for stockbrokers and related investment counselors, too. I guess the point I was trying to make in the earlier post was that branding efforts should be employed to capitalize on inherent and unique competitive advantages, distinctions in the way one does business that are genuine and, especially, meaningful to customers. And such differences must be demonstrated rather than proclaimed, proven rather than asked to be taken on faith. “Trust me,” is not a brand. And brand, alone, is not reason enough for me to give you my money.

I know people who believe that their considerable investments in advertising – and other forms of marketing-oriented communications, for that matter – are justified when their friends tell them how much they’ve admired their ads. Many of these same people are loath to invest anything in research, in strategic planning, in customer or client relations, often because they think that doing so will deflect resources from their advertising budget. I’m not making this up: these are real people, real businesses, real circumstances. And, too often, real disasters.

Nearly everyone has had the experience of selling securities too soon, or not soon enough. Those problems, like those of the people who are more impressed with their friends’ comments than with the strategic realities of business, are exacerbated when we don’t have clear expectations of what those investments were supposed to do for us in the first place: a reasonable expectation of return-on-investment. What is a specific investment supposed to do for me (or for my enterprise) is a question that seldom gets the attention it deserves.

There’s a TV commercial this holiday season for a back massage machine. It’s been getting an enormous amount of exposure, clearly the product of a sizable investment. But I’m left wondering how many of those units the manufacturer must sell to justify the exorbitant budget; how can that level of expenditure possibly be cost-justified? Now, while I have to admit that there is a good deal of art involved in the science of marketing, it is nevertheless possible to establish realistic marketing or planning investment goals, to monitor progress toward the realization of those goals, and to thereby optimize ROI. Regardless of what your friends may or may not think of what you have to say.

Make no mistake: Making resolutions is assuredly not the same as strategic planning. I once heard a set of business objectives dismissed as unrealistic with the admonition that “Those aren’t goals. They’re aspirations!” What’s the difference? Well, to begin with, meaningful strategic planning does not embrace the alchemy, the touchy-feely, warm fuzzy sort of bromides that are typical of many resolutions in this season. Real strategic planning is as much of a tangible and dispassionate component of business operations as accounting, legal assistance, insurance, or membership in professional and trade associations.

Strategic planning is specific, finite, deliberate and systematic. There have been, of course, all sorts of successes achieved without formal planning – and some people do win the lottery, too. And while it appears that somewhere between ninety-four and ninety-nine percent of New Year’s resolutions fail, the inverse is true for realistic strategic plans. I’ve yet to encounter an enterprise whose principals did not believe they were better off for having engaged in appropriate planning than not.

There are references elsewhere in this blog to the need for specificity and clarity in planning, and the essential role of articulating the how component of implementation, a need to be resolute about determining who will be responsible for what, by when, and (again) how. Perhaps if more resolutions addressed those component stages, too, we might all lose weight, stop smoking, exercise more and spend less time with our cell phones and Blackberries.

In an ideal environment, it’s possible to have two faces without being, well, two-faced. There will certainly be content differences between your outbound messages and those intended for your private, internal audience. Trouble brews, though, when there are differences of attitude – when the two primary messages aren’t sufficiently congruent, when the outbound message is too short on reality and too long on spin.

One way to get into trouble is to believe your own spin, your own hype: to take as fact the most positive possible interpretation of data that is the guts of the message you want to convey to the outside world. Another risk is when the internal realities sometime overtake an outward-facing message that has been spun beyond all recognition (think politicians).

Your inward-facing message should be as candid and complete as possible, and while the outward-facing message will be less complete, it should not be appreciably out of synch with internal realities. It’s a fine line for most of us, certainly, but an objective analysis by a dispassionate third party – a professional neutral – is often a good way to ensure that you focus on what’s real and meaningful, that you do not over-commit to the outside world but yet remain able to put the best face forward, to be positive without misleading and to remain realistic without being negative. Good luck!

I’ll guess they would assert that the sound-bite format of the debates doesn’t really accommodate detailed explanations of strategy, and while that may be true, they don’t offer detailed explanations in any other format, either: not on the stump, not on their websites (generally). They ask us to take on faith that they will devise some means of accomplishing what they’ve said they’ll establish as priorities.

It’s not so very different when engaging in strategic planning for business and organizations: it's a rather simple exercise to determine what should be done, and usually in the context of why it should be done. The planning process is sometimes abetted by determining who might be held accountable for addressing various objectives, often accompanied by some suggestion of when; a time-line.

Still missing the element of how: process, technique, strategy, tactics, utilization of resources. So, to those who say, “my goal is to end the war,” or, “I intend to provide healthcare for everyone,” I would say: “How?” To those who say, “I intend to increase gross sales by 6%,” or, “I intend to establish a capital campaign to fund infrastructure improvements,” I would say: “How?”

Most of us already have a pretty good – albeit perhaps a little vague – idea of what needs to be done in our workplaces, our neighborhoods, our government; for ourselves, our clients, our communities. Where most of us need some help is in determining how what needs to be done, will.

One of the factors exacerbating pessimism, in fact, seems to be simple nostalgia for the industrial era, overtaken by the evolution to a post-industrial economy. That trend is neither positive nor negative, intrinsically. It only achieves positive or negative characteristics once we react – or fail to react – to it. Consider, once again, the implications of the Shift Happens video, which simply delineates a series of potentially frightening evolutionary factoids. The operative word is potentially, because none of the emerging trends needs to mature into a full-scale problem, so long as we respond appropriately.

Among the perceived barriers to economic optimism, according to panelists, was the observation that many businesses and communities have simply failed to adequately determine “what [they] want to be when [they] grow up,” and that is the fundamental underpinning of strategic planning. All organizations and institutions operate with limited resources – human, capital, physical – and are thus precluded from accomplishing everything they might, in an ideal world, like to do. And that basic fact is compounded by an inability to prioritize effectively because there is no clear understanding of the ultimate target, goal or purpose.

Without a clear understanding of where you’re going, it’s impossible to measure progress. And the lack of perceived progress is certainly cause for pessimism. Economic pessimism, in this sense, is largely self-imposed, and should therefore be relatively easy to correct.

Information Overload: much has been written about it and each of us experiences some small part of it everyday. If you’ve looked at the Shift Happens video elsewhere on this blog, you have a better sense of how pervasive the problem has become. For example, the video asserts that “1.5 exabytes (1.5 x 10¹⁸) of new information will be created this year,” more than in the past 5,000 years combined. The video also predicts that for those studying science and technology in college today, half of what they learn will be obsolete before they graduate.

My first reaction to the video was a sense of being overwhelmed, but reason ultimately prevailed. Livingston Consulting has been helping clients with data mining projects for more than a decade. When we first logged onto the fledgling Internet for that purpose, we were all amused by the millions of hits the early search engines would deliver with but a single keystroke. Not quite so amusing now. Few people who are otherwise engaged in trying to run their own enterprises productively have the resources to sort through the proliferation of data, information, and just general stuff that is so easily accessed yet so cumbersome to assimilate, analyze and put to use.

Outsourcing this function often makes sense, but the temptation to engage a student may not always be the most efficient solution. Sure, most students are far more electronically adept than are even recent graduates, but the real problem with TMI is relevance. Finding information is easy; too easy, in fact. Making sense of it all – especially in a particular context – is perhaps more challenging than it has ever been. The fact is that no one needs to access all the information available (nor can they, for that matter).  Finding the meaningful wheat amongst the surfeit of chaff can be daunting, but is yet another opportunity in which careful strategic assessments can really help simplify your life.

We must not let TMI distract us, yet we also must not be dissuaded from the pursuit of new answers. We just have to be careful and calculated in our approach.

The funny thing is that even with TMI, there are often specific, parochial situations where the right new information simply doesn’t exist yet – where it’s necessary for you to actually create still more information. Simply asking – customers, clients, constituents, employees – can be the first step in genuinely expanding knowledge. J.D. Salinger once had one of his characters fret about the observation that “no one ever suggests that knowledge is supposed to lead to wisdom,” so we just did.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljbI-363A2Q