This is part 3 in a weekly blog post series about CSR & sustainability.

A running theme throughout this CSR blog series is the idea that, CSR should be a strategic activity, whereby your CSR activities are in line with your core business capabilities.  However, we’ve heard that for a lot of our members, CSR has emerged by way of response to stakeholder pressure – reactive CSR.

In truth, the balance lies somewhere between the two.  Of course, your CSR activities should align with your organizational strategy and with your operational capabilities, but you can’t ignore your external stakeholders’ demands altogether either.

So what rules apply to stakeholder engagement – and particularly to those stakeholders (we all have them!) who go out of their way to criticize you?

Stora Enso (who have been nominated as one of the world’s most ethical companies for a third time) provides us with a great example.  Stora Enso is a large producer of paper and wood products.  As such, their major raw material is wood, and more specifically (and much to the chagrin of environmental activists!) – trees.

Now, the provision of wood and wooden products to the world is a tricky business; despite the high praise Stora Enso receive, the nature of their business attracts a lot of activist attention.  It’s worth looking at how they deal with the negativity that comes their way: Read More »

This is the final post in a three-part series about thought leadership. 

It takes more than one person to develop a thought leadership program.

“People come and go, but thought leadership lives on.” –Matt Broder, VP of External Communications at Pitney Bowes 

Funny isn’t it?  For a company to be viewed as a thought leader, it needs to have smart, standout people within the company to share its ideas.  Yet, any company that is key-person dependent in its thought leadership risks sacrificing the company’s long-term recognition as a thought leader. 

Fortunately, that’s where you in Corporate Communications come in. 

Communications’ role is to build the foundation and create the environment for thought leadership to flourish within a company regardless of its current “face.”  It is Communications’ responsibility to develop processes to support the discovery, creation, and sharing of thought leadership.  Read More »

As economies went into freefall roughly two years ago, executives across different functional areas converged on a short set of priorities.  In fact, you might say just one priority – survival.  That meant shedding costs and doing anything possible to drive cash flow, quickly.  But as markets pulled back from the brink, functional heads returned to a (more normal) pursuit of their individual agendas, from social media adoption to staff development.

As we talk to heads of Sales, Marketing and Communications about 2011, I see a swing back to handling a common enemy – this time, ongoing uncertainty.  Uncertainty isn’t terribly attractive to most, but executives seem to be accepting it as part of the new normal and are trying to figure out ways to live alongside it.  That presents a little differently depending on your role in the organization. 

• In Sales for example, the problem is that deals are getting “stuck” with customers whose response to uncertainty is indecision. But it looks like most sales teams aren’t doing enough to make deals easy for customers, abandoning them prematurely in the sales cycle.
• For marketers, the challenge lies in figuring out – and then using to their advantage – changes in the way customers think about purchasing (triggered by the uncertainty customers face).  Coping mechanisms like in-the-moment comparison and peer feedback are driving psychology few companies fully understand, but must.
• Communicators are trying to help their organizations deal with uncertainty.  Specifically, as companies try to become more agile and responsive, the premium on moving information and aligning the organization increases.  But those are new-ish areas to most Communications teams.

How is uncertainty affecting you and your organization?  What are you planning to do about it?  Our research makes it clear that early movers in moments like this stand to gain disproportionately. I hope you’re one of them.

My experience with the utility industry began at an early age.  I was always one of those kids that just couldn’t resist a closer inspection of a down power line.  Growing up, I actually thought power outages were fun and assiduously tracked the progress of repairs – if only because the pace was closely related to the potential of a day off from school. 

Hence, it is with years of “expertise” that I announce I have been appointed this blog’s official commentator on the utility industry.  I’ll give some of my thoughts/observations on the industry, and I thought I’d also turn to you all to hear about your specific challenges and concerns.  Below is what I’ve heard in conversations with utility members over the past couple of years.  Please let me know what’s biggest for you.

What Utilities Are Good At:

Utility companies have not only unique characteristics that warrant targeted discussion, but they’re also lead members on a number of common issues.  Here are a few areas of potential expertise  for utilities:

Issue Management: Utility companies face a variety of local, national, and global issues from construction rights, to regulatory philosophies, to global environmental standards — and “winning” the issue is vital to the organization’s growth and, if publically traded, value.  The utility industry must manage a number of complex alliances and rivals on each side of these issues.

Crisis Management: Storms, kids, power lines – enough said.  Seriously, though, one of our members is working on arming the Communications team with a revolving satellite phone in preparation of a particularly debilitating event.

Customer Service and Communications Integration: Many of our members are taking the lead in customer service initiatives, particularly in various forms of online service (social media or otherwise).   As lines seem to increasingly blur among all forms of communication (whether it’s a call to a service center or a tweet about an outage), more and more of you see opportunity in such Customer Service/Communications partnerships. Read More »

Like many Communications functions, we at the CEC are in the midst formulating our 2011 plans.  We begin our planning process not only by polling and interviewing our members, but also by looking at broader topics on the corporate agenda.  Communicators’ input and the broader corporate agenda came together this year in a very interesting way.

(A quick aside – in doing this, we take our own advice, and ensure that our agenda is derived from corporate strategy.  CEC members, if you’re not familiar with our Communications-specific work in this area, check out the Strategic Planning Resource Center.)

Back to what we learned as we scanned the agenda of communicators + other C-suite execs – we heard from a number of leading communicators about how they are transforming the role of Communications from being creators of messages like press releases, speeches, newsletters, and articles, to being enablers of others’ communication.  This transformation brings with it a number of interesting challenges, such as identifying the areas of greatest potential leverage for Communications and improving the team’s consultative skills.

Next, we heard from senior business executives that they perceive a number of barriers to intelligent growth for their enterprises, and many of those barriers have their roots in communication breakdowns.  Read More »

By Laura Newman

“I’m in the early stages of social media and still need to convince our leadership team that it’s the future.”  In my conversations with European financial services companies, it is all too common for the Communications team to respond with a similar comment when describing their company’s progress on social media.  In an often conservative and data-driven environment, building the case internally for social media isn’t an easy task.

Last week, while attending a strategy offsite for a large FS company in the Czech Republic, I had the opportunity to briefly explore the dynamics of leadership and the bank’s attitude to social media.  The management team had planned to dedicate a half-day of their two-day offsite to investigating the power of social media and exploring potential opportunities for their business. Read More »

Ever feel that you could get more impact from your CSR activities?  Ever feel that they’re a little disjointed – not related either to company strategy, or to each other?

If so, you’re certainly not alone – we’ve heard this from a lot of your peers over the course of CEC’s latest project around CSR. It’s not surprising when you think about how a lot of our CSR activities came to be – largely reactively due to local stakeholder pressure (well documented by Mark Kramer) rather than strategically, based on a central decision around the highest impact opportunities to create value.

Hill-Rom provides a fantastic example of a company taking a step back, thinking strategically, and assessing where they could add the greatest value.  They streamlined their CSR activities, and ensured that they were based around their core operational strengths.

For those that don’t know Hill-Rom, they’re one of the world’s largest manufacturers of hospital beds.  They recently reconstituted their entire CSR program based on two key observations:

1. They had a great culture of volunteerism, but it was spread across a collection of hugely divergent CSR activities, making it hard to see the overall impact.
2. There was an opportunity for them to take advantage of their old hospital beds  instead of scrapping them. Read More »

This is the second in a three-part series on thought leadership.

Once you consider what thought leadership means at your company, you’ll need to develop a strategy.  After all good thought leadership is neither haphazard nor a series of one-off campaigns. It’s deliberate and strategic.  There are (at least) two ways to think about your strategy.

Inside-Out Approach

Outside-In Approach

Read More »

Today’s post is the first in a weekly series where I’ll blog about the smart approaches to CSR challenges that we’ve heard over the course of conversations with your peers.  First up: The scoop on the folks at TNT, who came up with a smart method of engaging their workforce around their strategic CSR initiatives…

For readers who don’t know them, TNT is a global transportation and distribution company with operations all over the world.  They’re conscious of the environmental impact of their fleet of vehicles, which are responsible for more than half of their total CO2 emissions.  TNT calculated that some drivers could improve their fuel efficiency and decrease CO2 emissions by up to 25%, so they took an innovative approach to getting drivers to reduce their impact.

In 2008, they launched a competition amongst their drivers, the Drive Me Challenge.  It involves an F1-style dash, in their usual TNT delivery vehicles, and around a racing track!  We’re assured it’s great fun for all involved… But this involves more than racing, like Sebastian Vettel or Lewis Hamilton, around a track ; TNT has added an extra dimension, which ties to their CSR objectives, which link in turn to the strategic success of the business.

Drivers can only qualify for the Drive Me Challenge by driving both fuel efficiently and safely – drivers from all over the world are ranked against this criteria, and only the regional champions qualify for the main event.  As drivers bid to qualify for the finals of the Drive Me Challenge, which has become a very prestigious annual event, TNT has improved the fuel efficiency of their vehicle fleet by 5%. Read More »