I realize that jobs serve as a measure of economic growth, but I’d like to go a step further and give the private sector its due. In the 21^st century worldwide innovation economy, companies are much more than Job Creators. They are the Culture Creators. The advantage goes to businesses who create thriving cultural environments that inspire, train, and focus the team on extraordinary performance in the global economy.

Right before our eyes, the world has changed. In the 20^th century industrial economy−built from products, labor, and capital−top-down management made organizational decisions and business success was measured largely by the creation of jobs, products, and profit. Today, in the 21^st century innovation economy−built from knowledge, people, and technology−every team member makes organizational decisions in a flat, networked environment and business success is measured largely by the creation of competencies, innovations, and value.

This shift toward an innovation economy is well articulated by Thomas Friedman, who says that in the flat world everyone has access to the same technology and tools. The innovative economy is all about originality:

“There is no future in vanilla for most companies in a flat world. For most companies, the commercial future belongs to those who know how to make the richest chocolate sauce, the sweetest, lightest whipped cream, and the juiciest cherries to sit on top, or how to put them all together into a sundae.” (Source: Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat, page 105)

As Friedman points out, advantage for companies in the 21^st century resides in originality, and originality comes from people. The capital that matters so much in the 21^st century global economy is human capital.

To find this originality, you actually have to forget about commodities, customers, and competition, just for a while. To find what’s unique, we need to find the life within the organization. We need to focus on the people who create products and services, not their products and services.

A leading world expert on business strategy, Gary Hamel, maintains that financial, structural, and intellectual capital by themselves do not create new wealth. He offers other kinds of organizational capital for today’s competitive era: “imagination capital,” “entrepreneurial capital,” and “relationship capital,” all of which are different forms of human capital.

The bottom line is still important, but the overall ROI in business today has changed. In the innovation economy, human capital is the essential element that creates great business cultures and makes work much more than a job. Successful companies are comprised of team players involved in an intense and rewarding game that requires their collective team focus and coordination. Each team member in this 21^st century global competition matters.

Companies in the innovation economy are alive with character, originality, knowledge, influence, and potential. They are collective intellect, personality, and energy at work. To succeed, they must grow collective passion, mastery skills, and knowledge niches. They are guided by their belief systems, vision, values, insights, and wisdom. They make discoveries and invent new methods and processes. They cultivate leaders, generate revenue, donate to great causes, solve pressing world problems and influence the future.

A more holistic view of capitalism will serve us better in this 21^st century global innovation economy. Let’s think beyond jobs. Let’s spur our economy and our regions by being part of something bigger. Let’s usher our workforce into high performing and rewarding work environments.

Those who build companies are so much more than Job Creators. These entrepreneurial teams are the Culture Creators, growing connective tissue each day from their people, people who create, and share ideas and information through experiences, environments, and technology that they create.

The post The Culture Creators of the Worldwide Innovation Economy appeared first on WestWordVision.

First, you want to know the internal thought, emotion, and behavior that defines and drives your organization or community.

Second, you want to contribute your most successful and original traits to become more relevant to others.

Third, you want to align your character and relevance with future events and trends.

This third step will connect your community or organization to the future. Naturally, you want to catch the wave of what is coming in the world economy and create your place in it.

To get there, we’ll need to do some market research. What major trends do we see occurring that are already shaping the future? We want to look at technology advancements, ethnic and cultural influences, work process transformation, corporate mentality and pressures, and shifts in government.

To get more specific you might find data on:

▪   Changing internet and social media patterns
▪   Increasing virtual companies, work groups and networks
▪   The role of alternative energy and local foods
▪   Movements in food and water security
▪   Trends on the future size and role of government

Next, you’ll want to observe and predict the future based on patterns you see now.  Take a stake, based on all your research, at where the world is going.

It’s not news that we’ve shifted from an industrial, mass production consumer culture to a knowledge based world economy. The question is, as a result, what changes will occur in the future and how will we flow with these changes?

Personally for my industry, branding and marketing communications, I think the face of marketing business in a world economy has changed significantly and I think, in general, my industry is lagging behind. This provides an opening, an opportunity for my company to contribute in a new way. The point is, you want to find openings and fill them.

The age of high pressure selling is fading. Instead of branding’s customer centric perspective that is based on selling material commodities to consumers, we are seeing a new era evolve that is more focused on relationships and substance.

Edie Raether, an authority on the neuroscience of success and breakthrough thinking, has some wise words in her article, “Chasing Customers is Like Herding Cats; Why Attraction is the Heart of Customer Service:”

Chasing customers is like herding cats. Customer care is not about competition, but cooperation and collaboration. The rules in sports are not universal laws. Know your game, the league you’re in, what balls you’re hitting and where you want them to fall. Be a risk-taker, not a risk-wisher who merely goes with the flow. A risk-taker creates the flow. Know who you are, what you want, and whom you want to attract as customers to best fit your niche. Believe in yourself and your customers will trust and believe in you.

It is my belief that commodities, customers and competition are being replaced with purpose, relationships, and contribution. It’s about finding your passion and mastery skills instead of pushing commodities. It’s about building authentic relationship, not winning customers. It’s about contributing instead of competing.

The outcome of this third phase will be strategic action based on aligning your character and relevance with where the world is going. Truthfully, it will take thought and observation after you’ve done the digging to figure out what action to take. To hear the answers, you’ll have patiently listen.

The post Create your place in the future. appeared first on WestWordVision.

After we’ve defined your character, we apply these assets to increase your contextual relevance. We use the goods on the inside to contribute and integrate with the outside world.

Part of arriving at contextual relevance, a place where we increase the odds of becoming more relevant to our customers and other key constituents, is by developing greater mastery. Being a proven master will lead to advantage.

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success. He coins the term “10,000-Hour Rule” in the book, claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.

While branding is built on competition and taking market share, in contrast, creator mastery attracts more business in the areas where the organization or community excels. You can and will “own” what you’ve mastered. It will lead to your advantage.

Mastery is what I call a learned asset, one that has been mastered through development of skill or knowledge. You master what you repeatedly choose to focus on. So one of the ways to gain mastery is by learning it, if you have not inherited it. This is what we want to touch on in this post.

Gabrielle Hamilton, renowned chef and owner of Prune in New York City, speaks of success through mastery in her trade in her recent book Blood, Bones & Butter: “Get in the kitchen; cook well; and the rest will take care of itself;” “Put your head down and do your job and let the recognition end of things sort itself out.” (Source: Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood, Bones & Butter, page 206 and 204)

Now, I recommend arriving at mastery and advantage by following passion, the flow of energy, to gain consummate skills, ownership positions and leadership roles. You will master what you love and practice.

Do this simple exercise for the next week. Watch what you repeatedly find yourself wanting to do. Pay attention to where your joy wells up. Discover what you really love to do. Then follow that energy vein. Conversely if you have low energy, watch your thoughts and what you are doing. Then, shift to something you love to do. Drop the work that is causing resistance and energy depletion and pick up something that energizes you.

Collective groups, organizations and communities, can harness what they love and become much more productive and satisfied. And they surely will attract business in the areas they master. Customers and audiences will recognize your relevance, expressed as mastery of a unique niche or role, as evidenced by what you know, do and love over and over again.

In a sense, you can forget competition and focus on mastery. It will be hard for others to touch you in your mastery area and they will excel in other complementary areas.

Doing what you know and love moment by moment is the way to “compete.”

The post Watch for passion. It leads to mastery and advantage. appeared first on WestWordVision.

Our clients pictured at right, Anita Bell and Jessa Turner, are holding the award for University of Arizona’s Office of University Research Parks. IMPACT Awards are coveted recognition of outstanding efforts and commitment to the practice of public communications.

An article in ‘Inside Tucson Business’ describes this year’s awards as: No spin: IMPACT Awards honor the best in PR. According to reporter Kimberly Schmitz, “This year’s entries were reviewed and judged by a panel of public relations professionals from the PRSA chapter in Hampton Roads, Va.”

If you’d like to see the other award recipients, link to the Inside Tucson Business article.

Or perhaps you’d like to view the award-winning video, Thinking the Impossible. Enjoy!

The post “Thinking the Impossible” video wins IMPACT award. appeared first on WestWordVision.

As a result, you’ll create a more invigorating culture, increase confidence, and stimulate innovation and creativity.

This week I invite you to look outward to see how your community or organization fits into the bigger picture. During this second step, we will consider what you’ve “got” on the inside that is relevant and of value to others on the outside.

You will identify how your community or organization uniquely contributes to external entities. I refer to this “other” reference perspective as contextual relevance. We explore these areas:

▪   Competitive comparison and analysis

▪   Current market environment and conditions

▪   Organizational relevance and positioning

▪   Service/product relevance and positions

▪   External audience demographics, psychographics and prioritization

▪   Market segments and prioritization

This is much more like conventional marketing and branding, except we are building on a strongly articulated self-reference platform that includes more originality assets. This gives us more opportunities to identify contexts where you are relevant to others.

Here’s an example:

Krikawa Jewelry Designs, an award-winning jewelry design and production studio, asked WestWordVision to develop a national advertising and public relations campaign that would position the company as the premier international custom jeweler. After creating a character profile of the company’s unique personality, culture, products and processes, we began evaluating the company in light of its market relevance.

Our discovery process substantiated two things we already knew regarding product and market niche: Krikawa Jewelry Designs had created a portfolio of beautiful, unique products and Krikawa had carved out a niche in the wedding and engagement market.

What we discovered that was new and useful was that Krikawa had built a direct line from commissioned fine art to sophisticated art connoisseurs around the world by marrying high-tech advancements with high-touch service. This enterprising approach had become the cornerstone of the company’s huge growth and success. We compared the company to other fine art custom jewelers around the world and found no other with a successful international business model like Krikawa’s.

We leveraged this innovation in a press kit that tells the remarkable story of how owner Lisa Kriakwa had designed an art form into a beautiful business. In addition, we embedded the company’s newly articulated collaborative and inventive personality in an advertising campaign that invites readers to co-create the art of their imagination with Krikawa.

Your contextual relevancy can be based on an inherited or learned asset, like nature vs. nurture. Krikawa had learned its innovative business model as an adaptive strategy when the traditional route didn’t work. A learned asset is one that has been mastered through development of skill or knowledge. You master what you repeatedly choose to focus on. We’ll dedicate a blog post to this topic next.

Here’s an example of an inherited asset:

As with many small, rural communities near urban centers, the Town of Marana saw itself as potentially squeezed or overshadowed by neighboring Tucson. WestWordVision realized that Marana had a superior geographic “porch position” between Phoenix and Tucson on a busy, historic trade corridor.  As a result, we recommended that the town actively take advantage of this inherited position in two ways. First, Marana can observe what’s going on with other satellite communities near Arizona’s two commercial markets, then act by embracing what works and discarding what doesn’t. Second, Marana can create the best of both worlds by drawing on amenities from the nearby urban centers and maintaining a Western, rural lifestyle through careful open space planning.

And of course, we all know how Tombstone leveraged an inherited historic event, the gunfight at O.K. Corral, to build a successful tourist destination.

Contextual relevance, the second step in the process, is when comparison with others using your character profile begins. We define how what you’ve both inherited and learned can contribute to ownership position in the marketplace!

As a result communities and organizations will:

▪   Establish a distinctive platform for marketing and branding

▪   Capitalize on niche mastery to gain distinct market advantage

▪   Showcase originality to attract new customers and audiences

Our first step, character profile, discovers and excavates the goods on the inside. Our second step, contextual relevance, contributes the goods to the outside. And with more originality assets on the inside we increase the odds of being relevant to others.

Ah! There is so much more to be discovered inside that can then be used to succeed.

The post The theory of relevancy. appeared first on WestWordVision.

What I call self-centeredness is simply a way to move the focus of organizations and communities to the inside. So what on the inside is of value?

Character.

Character begins and grows from the inside. You will not arrive at community character or corporate character by focusing outwardly on customers or competition.

Character is a word I use to describe what is your very own. It includes originality, authenticity, creativity, ingenuity and innovation.

A character profile, or self-reference/knowledge platform, will identify what internal forces drive and define your organization or community today. Here are some of the areas to explore:

▪   Genesis, heritage, evolutionary milestones
▪   Passions, motivations, avocation
▪   Vision, mission, aspiration, purpose
▪   Personality, character, voice, image
▪   Beliefs, values, principles, philosophies
▪   Culture, organization, roles, relationships
▪   Mindsets, motives, perspectives, viewpoints
▪   Inventions, innovations, discoveries

This is not a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis. The purpose of the SWOT analysis is to provide information on strengths and weaknesses in relation to the opportunities and threats being faced.

If you are talking about threats and opportunities, you’re too far down the road. If you are comparing yourself to others, you’ve left something valuable behind.

Your character and it’s of extreme value.

The competitive strategy beneath character profiling is differentiation advantage.

Michael E. Porter, the father of the modern strategy field, is a leading authority on competitive strategy, the competitiveness and economic development of nations, states, and regions. Porter identified two basic types of competitive advantage:

▪   Cost advantage: when a firm or community is able to deliver the same benefits as competitors but at a lower cost

▪   Differentiation advantage: when a firm or community is able to deliver benefits that exceed those of competing products

With a character profile, we are securing goods for differentiation advantage. If cost alone is your strategy, defining your character will not be of much use. In the global innovation economy, cost advantage is less important for U.S. businesses. Other countries will do much better on that front.

For differentiation advantage, character matters for two major reasons, especially in the innovation economy and with the growing class of Cultural Creatives:

▪   To increase/communicate/enhance cultural pride and originality and improve/communicate/gain competitive niche mastery
▪   To attract and enroll audiences who love authenticity

You must define and use your character because your audience is attracted to it and your competitive advantage is defined by it.

With a character profile, we are also securing the goods for a new kind of corporate capital: “imagination capital.”

Rowan Gibson, a global business strategist and author of Rethinking the Future, provides an accurate history in his article “Building a company’s innovation capital” on his site www.innovationtools.com. The highlights of his entry describe several centuries in which companies possessed only two kinds of capital: financial and structural. In the 1980s and 1990s, that began to change and British futurologist Hugh Macdonald coined the phrase “intellectual capital” to describe the intangible assets of companies reflected in their stock market value as opposed to their book value.

In 2001, strategy guru Gary Hamel argued that financial, structural and intellectual capital by themselves do not create new wealth. He offered three new kinds of organizational capital for today’s competitive era: “imagination capital,” “entrepreneurial capital,” and “relationship capital,” all of which are different forms of human capital.

And Gibson concludes that: Knowledge has become a commodity. Let’s face it, you can go online and find out almost anything with just one or two clicks. So the issue is not how much you know but how creatively you can leverage what you know. Today, the advantage increasingly goes to those firms that develop “imagination capital” – which is the capacity to dramatically re-conceive what the firm is and imagine entirely new uses for its financial, structural and intellectual capital. Einstein’s oft-quoted reflection that “imagination is more important than knowledge” becomes the mantra of the innovation economy.

If being original is linked to your success, then harvesting and harnessing your originality is the first step to your success.

The post Character is King…or Queen. appeared first on WestWordVision.

Our ultimate goal with this inward look is to create a strongly articulated self-reference platform. The outcome of this platform will include:

▪   Clarity of vision and purpose
▪   Individuality and unique personality traits
▪   Passion for the business and work
▪   Commitment to beliefs and values through communications and action
▪   Awareness of self and others
▪   Honest and respectful relationships
▪   Innovative approaches and processes
▪   Original products and services

Start by describing the circumstances under which your organization or business was formed. What was going on in the world at the time? What were the founders thinking or trying to achieve through their action? What were their personal and commercial motivations during that time?

Knowing the details of your origin can provide valuable clues about your predominant character traits and purpose, and reveal how you can attain greater results going forward. This is valuable strategic information.

WestWordVision was asked to create a new suite of communications tools to increase awareness of Arizona-Mexico Commission’s (AMC) vital mission during its  50th anniversary. Through in-depth personal interviews and archival exploration, we discovered a link between AMC’s formation during the 1959 cold-war climate of fear and its contemporary role as a cross-border collaborator. As AMC began, so it remains today, a collaborative visionary in the service of regional prosperity regardless of prevailing social and political rhetoric.

After Arizona’s passage of Senate Bill 1070 which enacted anti-illegal immigration measures, AMC was back in its original position, going against the grain of popular opinion.

What to do? As in the beginning, hold to the universal truth that launched you: cross-border collaboration does indeed lead to mutual prosperity.

It is very likely that the conditions under which an organization was born will contribute to its character and inform the best course of action for the future.

Another valuable tool is to  hone in on what your community or organization’s vocational role is. Once you identify the vocation, get more specific and use adjectives to describe more precisely what kind of professional you are.

While doing a permanent exhibit for Waste Management, we wanted to understand what kind of professional the organization most closely resembles to shed light on its product. We realized that Waste Management was not only a supply chain manager interested in the logistics of moving and managing our waste. After thoughtful consideration WestWordVision realized that the organization was an enterprising, efficient, high-tech engineer or production executive. Identifying its corporate vocation explained why it is creating the “seed” for a new commodity from the things we would otherwise throw into the landfill. As a result, we were able to communicate the value of their product in a powerful way through their Arizona Community Ecocenter exhibit.

There are many other internal assets to be discovered and leveraged for future business success. The objective is to create a deep and powerful inventory of original and unique assets that can be drawn upon for marketing, operational and financial strategies.

The first step to flipping your perspective includes dedicating some time and energy to organizational or community self-exploration. We call it self-indulgence and the rewards are priceless.

The post Indulge in self-centeredness. appeared first on WestWordVision.

The first breakdown is that branding, at its very foundation, is a consumer-focused approach. It originated and still primarily focuses on how outsiders see the brand. Phrases like “reasons to believe” and “loyalty beyond reason” and “unique selling proposition” are based on courting customers so they make emotive decisions to purchase more product.

The second breakdown is that people and places are very complex. They possess multi-dimensional facets of  personality and “authentic self” created and expressed through collective internal vision, purpose, meaning, inventiveness, independence, and leadership.

According to renowned brand strategy company Stealing Share, their process looks at the market from the outside in:

Your customers’ perceptions form the bedrock and foundation of our brand work. We value the outside-in perspective for branding because it defines the complete category of choices from the perspective of the target market. It sees the category from the most important point of view – the customer. (Stealing Share website)

While this “other” or objective perspective is critical, you first want to develop a strongly articulated self-reference platform for your actions and messages.

Why? Because when organizations and communities base their actions and the content of their messages on their deeper more powerful self, not only the consumer perspective, they create a stronger public persona, or brand. This “inside out” perspective builds organizational and community pride, increases productivity, and creates market pull.

The premise: There are many raw materials and points of connection that attract, unite, and excite people who live in a destination or work together at a company or organization. We are interested in finding the qualities that distinguish it from any other, things like historic milestones, stories, talents, originality, belief systems, societal structures, vision, geography, and landscapes.

If you really want to stand out in the market, you’ve got to dig deeper and start branding from the core. Before you compare, find your own unique character, then align it with your audiences and the future.

Today, I invite you to flip it, and first see the market from the inside out. It’s like digging for gold. You will discover many valuable and untapped assets.

The post Flip it! See the market from the inside out. appeared first on WestWordVision.

“There is no future in vanilla for most companies in a flat world. For most companies, the commercial future belongs to those who know how to make the richest chocolate sauce, the sweetest, lightest whipped cream, and the juiciest cherries to sit on top, or how to put them all together into a sundae.” (Source: Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat, page 105)

Thank goodness, because quite honesty I’m sick of the 20th century narrow focus on products, bottom line, and jobs! This is not a holistic view of what companies are and can be in the 21st century. In the new world-wide knowledge economy, organizational structures are flat and networked, and require collective thinking and a shared vision of the people. Today’s economy is about people who create and share ideas and information through technology that they created.

So, I like to start with the people who create products and services, not their products and services, and find out what is original about these creators. I ask clients to forget about their customers and competition, just for a while. We’ll get back to them later after we’ve discovered what’s truly unique about the organization.

To find what’s unique, we need to find the life within the organization. Imagine a circle called community or company. You could fill it with: people, relationships, culture, beliefs, stories, knowledge (big), experiences (broad), environment, vocations, money, products, services, purpose, will, passion, mastery, learning, vision, methods, inventions, discoveries.

We need to find the collective passion and mastery skills. It’s about building authentic relationship, not winning customers. It was about contributing instead of competing. It was about identifying messages and actions that reveal who you are, what you know, why you’re relevant, and how you can contribute in a meaningful way. It’s bigger than great products, making money, and gaining recognition. It’s about your BIG purpose.

So here’s a simple suggestion. Next time you meet with your marketing firm or brand specialist, observe how many questions focus on consumer beliefs, target audience, competition, and the brand identity in the marketplace.

If you’re not spending time talking about your community or company vision and purpose, motivations and aspirations, reasons for success, lessons learned, innovative models and processes, beliefs and values, then you’re likely missing out on some pretty powerful content that has meaning to your team and your customers.

This is especially true in tourism for communities that want to be distinctive, but share similar attributes to other communities in their region. The question becomes, what is the stuff that is you? Why are you different from another community?

I always say promoting a community’s weather, landscape features, livelihoods in the West is like seeking individuality in through tattoos, piercings, and leather. Everyone has that, so now what? It’s only communicating at a surface level.

Go deeper into who your community or organization is and gain more self-awareness of yourself and others. It’s actually really fun and invigorating. You can create market pull with enough aliveness and originality oozing out!

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