KLC Newsletter

Biz Sense Media

Featured Articles

Newsletter: April 2011

How to Create a Culture and Brand That Makes and Actually Keeps Brand Promises

It’s one thing to make a promise. It’s quite another to keep it. Yet, businesses make promises every day. Some keep them. Some companies like AT&T, Bank of America and US Airways have good intentions, but can’t keep them because their strong culture and strong brand are misaligned. And, worst of all, some businesses have no sincere intention of keeping them at all, regardless of what they say.

How are you and your business at keeping your promises?

Well, how you answered this questioned just defined your brand and your culture. Yes the two are connected, and this connection can be either:

  • Strong and reinforcing – they are in alignment
  • Strong but negatively reinforcing – they are competing or demonstrating dissonance
  • Weak because they have not been defined and developed

Creating the Promise – Your Brand

To grow your business, you must identify your target market. This is the market niche you want to focus on and the position you want to hold within that market. You need to know and understand exactly:

  • What products or services you want to provide to your market
  • What you can do and what you do not want to do
  • Your competition and why you are different

This provides the essential elements for branding your company.

Branding presents you to the marketplace. It defines you in the mind of your customers and prospects. It creates the promise: what your clients can expect from you when they do business with you. Think of Apple, Google, Zappos, Amazon.com, Nordstrom… We know what to expect from them, and we are rarely disappointed.

Branding expresses this promise in the:

  • Logo
  • Website concept and content
  • Tag line
  • Advertisements
  • Marketing materials
  • All forms of internal and external expression/communication about the company.

There is a consistency that should carry over to all methods of interacting with the customer and the prospect. Regardless of how your prospect and customers enter your sales cycle, they should see, feel, and interpret who you are, what you stand for and what they can expect based on your branding.

So, you’ve got their attention with relevant and compelling branding.

You’re done, right? No, not so quickly.

Creating the Culture to Deliver the Promise

Now it’s time to deliver: to keep the promise made in and through your branding.

Culture is the way work is done in your company. It’s how people work together, how you build your teams and processes to deliver on your promise. It represents how strongly you believe in your promise and builds your repute.

Culture is grounded in the understanding and practices around the Purpose/Mission, Vision and Guiding Values of the company. It drives how decisions are made, how responsibility is assumed and your behavior in front of customers and within your group. It should be reflected in the standards and consistency with which you deliver your product or service.

One quick point: Are organizations with a strong positive culture and good brand expression perfect? Far from it. They are just much better than their competition, as they know how to course correct when required, and they know why they exist as a business.

Brand + Culture = Market Growth

Without a strong base (your culture and brand) it is nearly impossible to deliver consistent and high quality products and services to your market. (In this case, what you end up delivering are excuses.)

Companies with a strong brand and a strong culture are leaders in their market, whether it’s a small local market or a large international market. It doesn’t matter. A positive brand and cultural alignment is a powerful competitive strategy!

The greatest opportunity for performance improvement and growth is to concentrate on building a strong brand expression (the promise) and focusing your culture in delivering on that promise.

Identifying your market and building a strong base (culture and brand) to deliver to that market is a competitive differentiator. Why? Because many of your competitors (and could be competitors) will not take the time to do this. And your clients and customers will notice and will reward your efforts.

Healthcare Corner – Health Reform and Bending the Curve

The healthcare legislative debate is turning into a debacle (some may say a circus act). We started with the Affordable Care Act, which shortly after it was passed efforts started for repeal. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) is introducing a plan to reduce the cost of Medicare, which the Congressional Budget Office says will cost seniors more. It is difficult to sort through all the initiatives portending to reduce healthcare costs and to understand who is really talking about improvement and who is politically posturing. But the issue is important for all of us.

The Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at the Brookings Institute in 2009 published a report entitled: Bending the Curve: Effective Steps to Address Long-Term Health Care Spending Growth. (http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2009/0901_btc.aspx)

There is a certain elegance, practicality and truthfulness in the phrase – Bending the Curve. Because that’s what we are working to achieve, and slowing the growth of health care costs is not about reducing costs alone. To think so is to get caught up in political hyperbole. It’s not only about paying less. It’s about providing cost-effective quality care in a population that is not only aging, but in the process of aging - changing how we need to provide healthcare. We are less a country of acute health care needs and more a country of preventive and chronic care needs and that requires a different care model not just a cry to reduce costs.

The Brookings Report focused on four overarching initiatives:

  • Building the Necessary Foundation for Cost Containment and Value-Based Care
    • Key Reform 1 – Ensure Investments in Health IT are effective
    • Key Reform 2 – Make Best Use of Comparative Effectiveness Research
    • Key Reform 3 – Improve the Health Care Workforce
  • Reforming Provider Payment Systems to Create Accountability for Lower-Cost, High Quality Care
    • Initial Reforms: Adjust Medicare and Medicaid Fee-for-Service Payment Systems
    • Key Reform 1 – Build New Payment Systems for Provider Accountability
    • Key Reform 2 – Apply pressure to “Non-Accountable” Medicare Payments
    • Key Reform 3 – Improve Payment/Coverage Flexibility and Rapid Learning to Achieve Lower Costs and Better Quality
  • Improving Health Insurance Markets
    • Key Reform 1 – Restructure Non-Group and Small-Group Markets around an Exchange Model that Promotes Competition on Cost Reduction and Quality Improvement
    • Key Reform 2 – Reduce Inefficient Subsidies for Employer-provided Health Insurance
    • Key Reform 3 – Promote Competitive Bidding on Medicare Advantage
  • Supporting Better Individual Choices
    • Key Reform 1 – Reform Medicare Benefits Design to Promote Value and Beneficiary Savings
    • Key Reform 2 – Promote Prevention and Wellness that Reduces Costs
    • Key Reform 3 – Support Patient Preferences for Palliative Care

This is a good primer on health care reform issues. Pay particular attention to IT, quality, comparative effectiveness research, improving the health care workforce, and payment systems to create incentives for lower cost / higher quality care, because these areas will contribute and support the shift to a more effective care model.

Talent Management Corner

Is “Temp” the New “Perm”?

According to a New York Times article, many employers and employees alike are moving more towards a temporary staffing model. Even before the recession hit, many employers were having concerns about the rising costs associated with hiring on a “permanent” basis. A term that is losing its meaning in the working world today.

Historically, temporary staffing preceded a recovering economy. Companies are still a bit skittish about the hiring costs involved with training, health care benefits, and undoubtedly losing new hires to the competition. A large number of qualified workers have taken positions below their skill level just to pay the bills, and employers are acutely aware of this. Companies are now even more cognizant as to how cost effective temporary workers are. In 2010, 26.6% of the 1.17 million private sector jobs that were added were temporary. With more project-based work within departments and the advances in technology, organizations are more effectively able to predict their employment needs and “right size” their full time hires. Bureau of Labor and Statistics April 1, 2011 report those numbers have only dropped slightly in the first quarter since the holiday season.

Conversely, some workers have chosen not to pursue full time employment and instead become independent contractors. Sophisticated telecommunications are enabling highly skilled individuals to opt for a freelance lifestyle. Being able to work offsite, from any location with an internet connection, allows workers with skills in high demand to broker themselves to multiple projects at once. Independent contracting also allows candidates to test the waters with a potential employer should they have an interest in fulltime employment. And the added benefit, independent contracting can be lucrative for those with the right skills.

Will this continue? We believe so, at least for the next few years. We also believe that due to the internet, the past experience individuals had with their employment experience, and the reticence for employers to commit to a full time employee, temporary work may in fact become a more “permanent” business staffing model. Consulting companies use this model. And, we find more people forming their own business and becoming “temporary” as their business model.