Live from #BlogHer: PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi on the leadership principles that guide her

Written by Jessica Miller-Merrell on August 8, 2011 | Comments (15)

This post is by Jessica Miller-Merrell, a leadership blogger at Blogging4Jobs. She is a digital strategist with a passion for recruiting, human resources, training and social media and is the author of “Tweet This! Twitter for Business,” a how-to business guide for Twitter.

Female business leaders hold an advantage over their their male counterparts because they nurture and add humanity to the position, PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi said during her keynote address at BlogHer last week. “Women globally represent 70% of the buying decisions around the world,” Nooyi said. ”There’s a shift happening among women in the world.”

This shift Nooyi mentioned is happening across the board, and conferences such as BlogHer are an example. The importance of incorporating humanity into advertising, business and the executive role is something that has become extremely important since the recession. Nooyi told the audience that senior leaders must balance their IQ with their EQ, or emotional intelligence. This emotional intelligence provides female leaders a huge advantage to relate directly to their employees and consumers. “Employees perform better when they bring their whole selves to work,” Nooyi said.

The proportion of women in leadership positions at organizations has yet to reflect the shift Nooyi mentions. Only 12 women hold the CEO position at Fortune 500 companies.

Nooyi distills her leadership philosophy into “Five C’s,” which she shared with the audience.

• Competency. Stand out from the pack and be a lifelong learner. Remain ahead and abreast in your field.

• Courage and Confidence. Speak out. Establish your knowledge base and be confident in it as a leader.

• Communication. Over-invest in written and oral communication. Leaders constantly have to motivate the troops.

• Consistency. Remaining steady, reliable, and determined allows for credibility and a baseline to measure your successes and failures.

• Compass. Integrity is critical in this job.

Weber Shandwick - Insights - Thought Leadership - Thought Leadership - 2011 - Five Rules for Socializing Your Brand by Harris Diamond, Marketing News, March 28, 2011

Weber Shandwick - Insights - Thought Leadership - Thought Leadership - 2011 - Five Rules for Socializing Your Brand by Harris Diamond, Marketing News, March 28, 2011

Harris Diamond is CEO of

Weber Shandwick, a global

public relations firm in New York.

The world has entered a new place where people interact with brands pretty much anywhere and everywhere. We are seeing every day how social media allows people and, in some cases, whole companies to have a real dialogue around products and services. How people value a brand today has vastly expanded to include their perceptions and interaction with brands and products, and it comes unvarnished and from every angle. Companies need to focus on better socializing their brands so they can resonate with influential online communities. To market a socialized brand today you need to think about how to speak directly to consumers’ needs and satisfy them fully on an emotional level. The following are some guidelines to effectively create and manage socialized brands:

• Create a community of advocates. Today’s brand community is a place where people get to share their thoughts or feelings about a brand and product. Dialogue is now wide open and inclusive. It can happen on your site, your Facebook page, your Smartphone or anywhere your customers are talking with each other, such as a mom community or fan site. These spaces welcome dialogue and ignore one-way messages that are directed at them by companies or brands. Sometimes these communities also are built in person such as at events, trade shows, in-store demonstrations, retail counters or even Meetup groups. With today’s channel agnostic consumers, the best communications must focus on reaching the right people online or offline, and encourage them to join your network of advocates.

• Move beyond “Likes.” Increasingly, Facebook is not just a destination for consumers but a part of a larger fabric of the Internet. The “Like” button shows up on content from news sources to product pages. Company Facebook pages are rapidly changing from a secondary to primary source of interaction with consumers, with the company website still relevant and important, but oft en less current. However, “Like” is similar to a free admission to the carnival—people will walk past the uninteresting booths and won’t play. Getting large numbers of people to “Like” your page is not the end goal; it is the starting point. If you can get customers past the equivalent of “Like” and engage them, you will create affection, affinity and ultimately advocacy for your brand and products. One-to-one engagement that can be scaled easily is a mandate for any company hoping to build and manage a successful socialized brand.

• Protect your brand’s reputation. We’ve all seen the challenges presented when a brand reputation is damaged online. The negative stories in major media that start from blogs, Tweets and user-generated videos can overwhelm the steadiest of brands. Companies need to be more proactive about monitoring their online reputations and be prepared to act quickly and strategically to the viral spread of rumors, misinformation and hear say that can erupt overnight. Online crisis simulation before you need it, as Weber Shandwick developed in our product FireBell, can help mitigate these types of crises and activate your dedicated community of advocates ready to go to your defense.

• Socialize your C-suite. More executives now recognize that the Internet has swept through corporate corridors and boardrooms, transforming the media landscape. A growing number of them at all levels are starting to consider taking advantage of these newer social channels to tell their company and brand stories. As storytellers and narrators of their brand promises, C-suite executives will gradually become more socialized and willingly participate in video on their websites, Facebook and YouTube company-sponsored channels and will demand that their speeches and interviews get repurposed through the many channels now available online.

• Be relevant. Make sure the campaign being created is relevant to your audiences and that expectations are based on achievable goals. Compound the interest in your brand and products by not only repurposing existing content, but by adding value to your communities of interest wherever they may be. Creativity moves people, and focusing on delivering creative ways to engage your customer can have a tremendous impact on people’s perceptions and behaviors when it comes to your brand and products. Work to find as many ways as possible to add value first and be confident that an engaged base of customers will follow. This core will allow you to build a bigger base over time.

Even by following all of the above, your customers today will still always be more connected, spread out and unified than your brand can possibly be. The key is to give them better access to relevant information, timely answers to the questions they ask and the means to protect reputation at all times. If you create engaged communities and give customers a place to congregate and interact, you will mitigate challenges that arise in real time. Your advocates can help you; they’ll answer questions of other customers and ease your load in trying to manage millions of peer-to-peer interactions. That’s the real social savvy we all aspire to.

BY HARRIS DIAMOND

hdiamond@webershandwick.com

Five Rules for Socializing Your Brand

President Obama's battles over health-care reform show innovation and leadership in action. Executives should take note

Great article from Bloomberg Business Week News I wanted to share! I hope you enjoy.

Innovation: From White House to C-Suite

President Obama's battles over health-care reform show innovation and leadership in action. Executives should take note

By Robert Brands

Health-care reform was a tale of two Presidents.

The first, President Barack Obama (circa 2009), had the expectation that health-care reform could be driven through Congress and straight to his desk with little more than his mandate that it get done. Last summer, he demanded a bill on his desk by Labor Day.

Washington laughed.

His leadership was in question. The innovation that got this little-known senator from Illinois elected was nowhere to be seen.

Facing failure, President Obama (circa 2010) remembered the skills required to cajole a team into working together. He recalled the leadership and creative innovation necessary to craft a workable bill. In February, he held a televised address with GOP leaders at a Conservative conference. He crossed the country to attend Town Hall meetings and other public forums. He took an Ohio woman who lost her health insurance before being diagnosed with cancer and made her the face of reform.

On Mar. 21, Congress passed the Health-Care Reform Bill.

Though some people debate the comprehensiveness of the reform, and some lament the backroom politicking that seemingly went on, friend and foe alike have commented on how the President's resurrected leadership guided this measure through.

INNOVATION AT THE WHITE HOUSE

Innovation has been a key ingredient of the Obama Presidency. Last September, his office drafted the "Strategy for American Innovation." The document paper called for "agencies to increase their ability to promote and harness innovation by using policy tools such as prizes and challenges." The State Dept., the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, NASA, the Energy Dept., and the Environmental Protection Agency have so far risen to the challenge. Each is using prizes, grants, and recognition to encourage private-sector participation in a greater innovation renaissance and public-private partnership. President Obama set a goal and communicated it across governmental agencies.

Transfer that thinking from Pennsylvania Avenue to Main Street, from Inside the Beltway to the Halls of Corporate America. Envision each of those departments and agencies as silos within a company. Each is charged with serving the greater corporate good by developing innovation.

The White House is driving inspired innovation. You can too. Here are four ideas to bear in mind when looking to implement innovation within an organization.

Inspiration

With the President's and White House's support, independent agencies are charged with seeking innovation—and to encourage it in others. That's the CEO's role, too. Corporate chiefs have to inspire and lead by example. When Obama faced stern opposition over the health-care bill, he led by example, walked the talk, and stayed engaged throughout the process.

Net Results / Net Rewards

In March, the Office of Management & Budget released a memorandum, Guidance on the Use of Challenges and Prizes to Promote Open Government. The document outlined the "potential benefits of prizes" to pay for results, to highlight excellence and to motivate, inspire, and guide others. In addition, prizes "further a Federal agency's mission by attracting more interest and attention to a defined program, activity, or issue of concern." Does your organization reward innovative employees with encouragement, recognition from management, or the chance to lead a team or project? These simple nods can be powerful motivators.

Value Creation

No leader is an island. Nor is a government agency—or corporate department. Successful innovation starts at the top and then trickles down throughout an organization—all with the aim of creating value. For-profit corporations find value in supporting the bottom line. Does your innovation have its focus there?

Results

Success—whether it arises in innovation that leads to new product development or a system that streamlines an organization—must be observable and measurable. It must stem from accountability and lead to tangible results. Leaders lay out their goals, inspire their team, and set a common, results-focused goal.

For Chief Innovation Officer Obama, inspiration, rewards, value creation and results were key imperatives on the path to the successful passage of health-care reform legislation. Do you employ the same imperatives?

—With Jeff Zbar

Robert Brands is the founder of InnovationCoach.com, and the author of Robert's Rules of Innovation: A 10-Step Program for Corporate Survival, published in March 2010.