Leadership BS

Very interesting NPR interview; Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer‘s latest book is “Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time.” The leading management thinker and columnist for Fortune magazine says almost anyone these days can call themselves a leadership expert.

He explains why people gravitate to leaders who are “lying narcissists” even though the best leaders exhibit qualities such as modesty, authenticity, truthfulness, trustworthiness and concern about the well-being of others.

Pfeffer tells Here & Now‘s Meghna Chakrabarti that CEOs who create bad workplace environments should be held accountable. Pfeffer says “just as we hold people and companies responsible for their environmental pollution, we ought to hold them… accountable for their social pollution.”

August 14, 2015

Basecamp co founder on valuations

Basecamp’s co-founder doesn’t obsess over valuation

How much are we worth? I don’t know and I don’t care.

I was recently speaking to a class at a local university and the topic of valuations came up. One student asked me what our valuation was. I gave her the honest answer: I haven’t a clue.

How is it possible that a successful software company today doesn’t know its worth? A valuation is what other people think your business is worth. I’ve only ever been interested in what our company is worth to us.

Startups these days are bantered about as if they were in a fantasy football bracket. Did you hear Lyft raised another $150 million at a $2.5 billion valuation? But Uber got tossed another $2.8 billion at a $41.2 billion valuation! Then there are the companies barely off the ground getting VC backing with 25x valuations, despite having no product or business model.

Entrepreneurs by nature are competitive. But fundraising has become the sport in place of the nuts and bolts of building a sustainable business.

The last time I considered Basecamp’s valuation was nearly a decade ago. We’d been approached by dozens of VC firms looking to invest. But with a solid product, a growing consumer base, and increasing profitability, we didn’t entertain any offers.

Then, in 2006, I got an email from Jeff Bezos’s personal assistant. Jeff wanted to meet. I’d long admired him for what he was building at Amazon, and how he generally sees the world. I took the meeting.

After a visit to Seattle and a few more calls, Jeff bought a small piece of our company. I didn’t take the cash out of some fantastical desire to turn Basecamp into a rocket ship. Instead, his purchasing shares from me and my co-founder took a little risk off the table and gave us direct access to the brain of one of today’s greatest living entrepreneurs.

Read the rest of the story

August 5, 2015

Porsche Social Media Backbone of its Digital Strategy

For Porsche social media is not just an additional tool in order to connect to online-savvy audiences, it’s the backbone of their online strategy

Porsche is mining the always-on sensibilities of social media to encourage fans to share and consume content from one integrated platform, which is www.porsche.com . Porsche is using content curation tool Storystream to steer this efforts, building microsites that give fans a holistic view of what’s being said about certain car launches of campaigns worldwide.

“We do not believe in a linear progression through a virtual funnel, but recognise that each customer chooses their individual path to form a purchase decision. We thus believe that Porsche must understand the specific needs of the customer in his individual situation and listen to signals he/she is sending in order to cater the right content at the right point in time. In order to work in this context, every bit of content needs to be responsive,” Porche’s digital marketing and dialogue manager and Deniz Keskin told The Drum.

To accelerate the plan, Porsche is encouraging its agencies and ad tech vendors to get tighter to companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter in order to create content that fuels business goals. It’s an approach the car maker tries to balance with what it hopes are more agile ways of working directly with its marketing partners so that it can respond to communication challenges.

“Social media is more than an efficient and speedy way of communicating to a (primarily) younger target group. As a luxury manufacturer, we see more and more of our actual customers in that space,” said Keskin. The discipline is used to hit three key goals; building additional awareness for Porsche’s communications, amplifying the conversation around through brand ambassadors and listening to conversations that could become early signals for business issues.

“This is why we regard Social Media not only as an additional tool in order to connect to online-savvy audiences, but as the backbone of our online strategy,” said Keskin.

July 24, 2015July 24, 2015

Hospitals Now Focus on Patient Experience and Reputation Management

Patient experience and reputation management now priorities for healthcare facilities

Laura Markowski used to worry every time a text alerted her that a patient had posted a negative review online of a doctor at her health-care system.

She’s in charge of “reputation management” at a group of hospitals and clinics in Virginia, and it’s her job to monitor complaints about rudeness, long waits, lack of face time with a doctor or something more serious.

But after several months of reviewing comments in real time on nearly a dozen Web sites, including Healthgrades.com, ZocDoc.com and Google Plus, as well as Facebook and Twitter, she’s calmer.

Most reviews have been “one-offs for different physicians,” she said, not focused on just one doctor or group practice that would raise a red flag.

Markowski is part of a new and urgent effort by hospitals and health systems to track and control their online reputations. As out-of-pocket costs for health care have risen, people are increasingly shopping for their medical care and comparing reviews. And younger consumers who have grown up on Yelp and Rate My Professors expect the same seamless, digital experience with health care that they have used in other aspects of their lives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShILNHgnEjU

Patient satisfaction, long ignored by the health-care industry, is a strategic priority for another simple reason: It’s playing a more important role in determining how the federal government pays hospitals. In the last three years the government has been taking into account patient satisfaction data when determining how much to reimburse hospitals for Medicare patients.

But putting hospitals and doctors into the online rating world is fraught with possible problems. For one, patients and doctors have widely differing expectations.

When patients are asked to rate how doctor quality should be measured, clinical outcomes, such as getting cured of a disease, rarely come up, said Lisa Suennen, who advises health-care companies. Patients talk about whether a doctor or nurse was kind to them, or whether their experience was fast and convenient. It’s assumed that the doctor is going to treat their illness or condition.

Physicians, on the other hand, go straight to the clinical. The cancer is gone. Or the person can walk again. “They don’t even talk about the other stuff,” Suennen said. The two groups “are really disconnected.”

Physicians are not eager to be rated like restaurants. It’s hard for them to wrap their minds around the process, because taking care of patients is exceptionally complex, said Adrienne Boissy, the chief experience officer at the Cleveland Clinic.

“We don’t have consumers, we have patients,” she said. “Health care isn’t necessarily like shopping at Target.”

And some experts fear that the focus is more on burnishing the online reputations of doctors and hospitals than improving delivery of care.

Continue reading “Hospitals Now Focus on Patient Experience and Reputation Management”

July 24, 2015

Lessons Learned From NATO’s Communications Team

When the rise of digital changed the communications landscape, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had a problem. Like many other international organizations, their communications strategy wasn’t yet used to digital systems, and they had to make a number of changes to re-calibrate.

Steven Mehringer, NATO’s head of communication services, told us how they did it and what they learned along the way. Here are the top takeaways from his workshop at our social media summit..

1. Channel separation is a myth.

That a lot of people consume media differently across devices, platforms, and services is nothing new. You need only look to technologies like Netflix and HBO Go to see that computers are becoming televisions. At the same time, televisions are becoming our computers. Smart TVs, Google Chromecast, and Apple TV all make sure of that.

Social media has already changed publishing and digital across the board, not to mention its effect on things like email and instant messaging. The social layer that is now omnipresent over every aspect of digital will only become more important moving forward. This is true for brands, for media, and for governmental and international organizations as well.

2. Internal teams must integrate.

When it comes to storytelling for political and international organizations, there are a ton of moving parts involved. But that doesn’t mean each moving part should operate separately. They can’t.

Having isolated teams for specific channels is hurting us. You can’t have a social media team that’s isolated from your creative team or your content team or your traditional marketing team. Organizations need to integrate these teams so that they’re grouped by their common goal instead of by their day-to-day tasks. Further, all of the involved parties must be taught how to integrate and work with each other, even if it requires a lot of effort. In the end, it’s well worth the investment.

July 22, 2015July 22, 2015

FTC Social Media Endorsements Guidelines

Endorsements and reviews are big in social media, they can be effective decision making tools for consumers if they are truthful. the FTC published endorsement guidelines to help brands and businesses stay out of trouble

Suppose you meet someone who tells you about a great new product. She tells you it performs wonderfully and offers fantastic new features that nobody else has. Would that recommendation factor into your decision to buy the product? Probably.

Now suppose the person works for the company that sells the product – or has been paid by the company to tout the product. Would you want to know that when you’re evaluating the endorser’s glowing recommendation? You bet. That common-sense premise is at the heart of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Endorsement Guides.

The Guides, at their core, reflect the basic truth-in-advertising principle that endorsements must be honest and not misleading. An endorsement must reflect the honest opinion of the endorser and can’t be used to make a claim that the product’s marketer couldn’t legally make. Continue reading “FTC Social Media Endorsements Guidelines”