Jennifer Rice

The power of brands to change the world, part 2

Posted the second in a series of three posts on world-changing brands on my business blog. This one looks at power and permission (which is linked to brand extendibility). Take a look and leave a comment! 

Coherence: The Prerequisite for Resilience

Resilience has become quite the buzzword these days. The term originated back in the 1970s in the field of ecology, and since then others have been refining and expanding to personal, organizational, societal systems. Resilience is essentially the ability of a system to bounce back from unforeseen shocks, and that ability depends on:

• the measure of change the system can undergo and still remain the same, 
• how capable it is of self-organization, and
• how well can it learn and adapt

Gary Hamel wrote about resilience back in 2003 in a business context, defining it as “the ability to dynamically reinvent business models and strategies as circumstances change.” And of course Andrew Zolli popularized this rather complex concept in his recent book Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back (which I recommend if you haven’t read it.)

Now while resilience is certainly a good goal for any system, we will never achieve resilience if we continue our fragmented, siloed, independent way of life. We need to start acting like a system if we’re ever going to reap the benefits.

The problem: Compartments, not connections

Our society is slowly coming to the realization that everything is connected and interdependent. Crises are occurring more frequently – from bank crashes to droughts and hurricanes – prompting individuals, corporations and governments to consider how actions ripple outwards to create unintentional effects.

Yet most of us spend our waking moments in fragmented, siloed, disconnected lives and organizations. Interconnection is still relegated to theory, not part of daily routine. Our education system and MBA programs drill students on facts, subjects and specialties, not relationships and systems. Chain booksellers and big data slice the book market into ever-smaller niche categories that don’t reflect the complex nature of our actual lives. Healthcare specialists treat isolated aspects of systemic diseases without addressing the full complexity of the human body. Like a fish unaware of the water in which it swims, we take this pervasive worldview for granted even while we bemoan its side effects.

Yet a look at Asian culture reveals a fundamentally different way of seeing the world. Eastern philosophy and society are more holistic, with a focus on relationships, context and interconnection. Language reinforces these differences: Chinese characters are pictograms, the meaning of which must be interpreted through context, whereas in the West our language is built on modular letters and words. We are philosophical descendants of the ancient Greeks who celebrated individuality, autonomy, and personal control. Our ancestors invented logic, categorization and modularity, and our modern civilization is built on these premises (for more on this topic, see my previous post, Wired for Failure.)

So we’re at a real disadvantage in today’s highly complex society. The big issues of our day – poverty, climate change, spiraling healthcare costs, declining global competitiveness – require a new way of thinking, one that doesn’t come naturally to us.

Bridging the gap through intentional coherence

Miriam-Webster defines coherence as (a) systematic or logical connection or consistency, and (b) integration of diverse elements, relationships, or values. The benefits of coherence manifest across a wide range of topics:

• In the realm of science, coherence is what gives a laser its power. While regular light is fragmented and diffuse, lasers emit almost perfectly coherent light; all the photons emitted by a laser have the same frequency and are in phase. 
• In the corporate world, a coherent brand and business (like Apple, Patagonia or Method) creates strong competitive advantage. Booz & Co analysis showed that more coherent capabilities are correlated with higher profitability.
• Brain scans show a high level of brain-wave coherence in experienced meditators, which is associated with more integrated and effective thinking and behavior.
• Water, properly channeled over time, is powerful enough to carve out the Grand Canyon. A waterjet produces a coherent pressurized water stream – 30 times the pressure of a car wash – that can slice through steel.

We can learn much from the natural world about coherence. Bodies, brains, ecosystems, and swarms all instinctively operate in a deeply interconnected and unified way. Yet in the social realm, coherence doesn’t just happen; intentionality is required. Human beings uniquely have volitional consciousness: we choose what we want and how we go about getting it. Our ability to align our actions to our values, collaborate with others, or consider our impact to the environment is not automatic.

Like light and water in their everyday states, we humans can operate in a fragmented, diffuse, and ultimately powerless way. Lack of coherence can create a stuck, stagnant situation or, at worst, a self-reinforcing negative spiral that spawns personal and organization dysfunction and a host of social ills including poverty, hunger, poor health, ecological destruction, and more.

Yet like light and water properly channeled, creating intentional alignment can produce the power to transform even the most difficult problems. By operating in a collaborative, cohesive manner towards shared outcomes, we get “all the wood behind one arrow” to create a positive self-reinforcing spiral. We discover and manifest our collective strength and power. Applying coherence is finding the middle way between independence and interdependence – moving from silos towards systems without disregarding the fact of our deeply embedded cultural tendency of self-interest and self-determination. Consider it a way to bridge the gap between today's disfunction and tomorrow's resilience. 

I’ll cover the 8 guidelines for creating coherence in the next post. Stay tuned. 

The Power of Brands to Change the World, part 1

I just posted the first of a series of three articles on The Power of Brands to Change the World on my business blog. This post highlights our 5 Sustainable Brand stages and framework, and plots a back-of-the-napkin audit of Apple and Nike. 

Please go visit and let me know your thoughts! 

20% discount for Sustainable Brands '13

I'll be teaching a workshop called Sustainable Brands 101: Integrating Sustainabilty at the Brand Level at the upcoming SB'13 conference in San Diego, June 3 - 6. Use discount code NWSPKSB13 to get 20% off. 

Wired for Failure? Why Western Culture is Unsustainable

Our society is slowly coming to the realization that everything is connected and interdependent. Crises are occurring more frequently – from bank crashes to droughts and hurricanes – prompting individuals, corporations and governments to consider how actions ripple outwards to create unintentional effects.

Most of us, however, spend our waking moments immersed in fragmented, siloed, disconnected lives and organizations. Interconnection is still relegated to theory, not part of daily routine. Our education system and MBA programs drill students on facts, subjects and linear cause/effect, not relationships and systems. Chain booksellers and big data slice the book market into ever-smaller niche categories that don’t reflect the complex nature of our actual lives. Healthcare specialists treat isolated aspects of systemic diseases without addressing the full complexity of the human body. Like a fish unaware of the water in which it swims, we take this pervasive worldview as “just how things are” even as we gripe about its side effects.

Ours is not the only worldview

Yet a look at Asian culture reveals a fundamentally dissimilar way of seeing the world. Eastern philosophy and society are more holistic, with a focus on relationships, context and interconnection. Language reinforces these differences: Chinese characters are pictograms, the meaning of which must be interpreted through context, whereas in the West our language is built on modular letters, words and grammar. Even the practice of feng shui for choosing building sites (including Hong Kong skyscrapers) reflects the idea that the factors affecting outcomes are extraordinarily complex and interactive.

History can shed some light on these differences. Ancient Chinese culture was strongly influenced by Confucianism, which focused on relationships and co-humanity, and by the need to navigate society’s complex social structures. Conversely, Westerners are philosophical descendants of the ancient Greeks who celebrated individuality, autonomy, and personal control. Their inventions of logic, categorization and linear “cause & effect” thinking comprise the now-invisible foundation of so-called developed civilizations.

"The Greeks tended to focus on the object and to explain its behavior with reference only to its properties and the categories to which it belonged. In contrast, the Chinese recognized that action always occurs in a field of forces… The ancient Greeks saw stability in their worlds, while the ancient Chinese saw change; indeed, in line with the yin and yang of the Tao, always being in the process of reverting to the opposite of the current state." (source)

Today, these differences manifest along two key dimensions:

• Social orientation: Independence (uniqueness) versus interdependence (harmony)
• Cognitive style: Analytic (object-focused, categorization, causality) versus holistic (field-focused, relationships). 

Studies have shown that the two dimensions are highly correlated; ie. cultures that think independently like the US also think analytically, and cultures that think interdependently like east Asia also think holistically. Theorists propose that "this relation occurs because interdependence prompts wide attention to context whereas independence focuses attention on objects.”

These cultural differences have profound implications for solving the complex challenges of our day. An article in Psychology Today observed that

"analytic thinkers are more likely than holistic thinkers to commit the fundamental attribution error—overestimating the impact of persons and underestimating the impact of situations when explaining events. They’re also more likely to predict that a trend (in the stock market, for example) will persist and not reverse direction."

So unlike holistic-thinking cultures who understand that “events are the products of external forces and situations” and who think in terms of systems and change, most Westerners may be wired to think and act in a way that undermines our long-term sustainability: me versus we, silos versus systems. 

It's complicated.

Perhaps this cultural programming is why complexity and systems thinking hasn’t gained much traction in the corporate world after a couple decades of buzz in the business press. A recent post on HBR.com titled “Why Managers Haven’t Embraced Complexity” highlighted several of our culturally inherited traits:

"Complexity wasn't a convenient reality given managers' desire for control. The promise of applying complexity science to business has undoubtedly been held up by managers' reluctance to see the world as it is. Where complexity exists, managers have always created models and mechanisms that wish it away. It is much easier to make decisions with fewer variables and a straightforward understanding of cause-and-effect... Placing a rigid priority on maximizing shareholder returns makes things clear for decision-makers and relieves them of considering difficult tradeoffs."

In a similar vein, a Fast Company article noted that “systems thinking, despite its wartime successes never really captured the imagination of business leaders…. the number and sequence of things that must be done has become so arcane that to master it seems all but impossible to the managers in question.”

Me, not we

Our cultural programming not only affects business but also our society’s response to altruistic calls to act and serve for the betterment of others and the planet. New research published in Psychological Science revealed that “public campaigns that call upon people to think and act interdependently may undermine motivation among Americans.” Across three different experiments, the researchers found that European Americans who were primed to think about interdependent behavior showed less motivation and persistence in research tasks than European Americans primed to think about independence.

"Decades of research in the social sciences have shown that fostering people’s sense of independence is the most effective driver of behavior among Americans. “Appeals to interdependence might sound nice or like the right thing to do, but they will not get the job done for many Americans,” says Hamedani. A better strategy for motivating action among European Americans may be to encourage individual effort for the good of the team or collective, urging each individual to 'be the change YOU want to see in the world.'" 

Can we shift? 

Interestingly, across the previous three studies, Asian American students’ behavior did not vary when interdependence vs. independence was emphasized. The researchers hypothesized that bi-cultural Americans, having been exposed to both modes of thought, were able to see the benefits of both approaches.

Fortunately for us, we’re finding that modes of cognition are not permanently locked in place by either culture or genetics (an implication with which many of you Western systems-thinking readers would agree.) Not only do working-class American adults show “more holistic patterns of cognition” than the average middle-class Americans, we also see differences in cultures like Eastern Europeans, Orthodox Jewish boys, southern versus northern Italians, and even farming villages versus non-farming villages in Turkey. (source) 

A report in Psychology Today observed that “each of us has the ability to think either analytically or holistically, a talent that often goes unrecognized,” and goes on to reassure us:

"Can Westerners think like East Asians? Absolutely. And East Asians can think like Westerners. In fact, most of us have the capacity to think analytically or holistically, depending on our state of mind. When East Asians are encouraged to think about their uniqueness, they often “wheel in” their analytical mental module, so to speak. When Westerners are primed to think about their relatedness to others, they often switch to a more holistic way of thinking. The default (or habit) for most Westerners, especially men, is to think analytically—and the default for most East Asians is to think holistically."

Good news indeed. However, our extremely independent, fragmented culture has been built over hundreds and thousands of years; our education system starts the silo-indoctrination process very young, and every other aspect of our society reinforces this view. So attempts to shift our modes of thinking are a bit like turning the Titanic, and we need baby steps to begin weaning ourselves off the “me-me-me” and overly simplistic programming.

An analogy from the Buddhist idea of self can give us direction: We can see a hand as one unit, or a collection of five independent fingers. Each finger is distinct and serves its own role, yet it doesn’t operate independently of the whole. Likewise, our Western culture has focused for too long on individual fingers; we simply need to expand our awareness to realize how we’re connected. And yet we must remember in this process to not solely focus on “the hand” at the expense of the fingers; individualism is a fact of life in our society, and failure to honor that fact will set us up for failure.

So this is a call for both/and thinking. We can celebrate our uniqueness and analytical strengths while also expanding our horizons to include our shared humanity and the environment in which we live; we can align individuals and enable movement towards shared goals as long as the right structures are in place. The next post will introduce one way to do that: what I call creating "intentional coherence" across personal, organizational and cross-sector levels. 

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Dear reader, I'd love your thoughts. Have our siloed culture and independent cognitive styles gotten us so stuck in "me" that we'll be unable to see "we" before it's too late? What will America's role be (realistically) in solving the systemic problems that we face given our aversion to complexity? 

20% off my session at Sustainable Brand Seminar Series

This fall, I’ll be teaching Brand Strategy: Building the Credible Sustainable Brand as part of the newly launched Sustainable Brands Seminar Series.  The 5 one-day individual courses will be held in four cities:

• San Francisco, hosted by Williams Sonoma – Week of October 4
• Twin Cities, hosted by 3M – Week of November 29
• New Jersey/NYC, hosted by Johnson & Johnson – Week of December 6
• Austin, hosted by AMD – Week of January 24

In addition to my course on Brand Strategy, the seminars include training on Communications, Product Design, Supply Chain and Data & Metrics taught by experts in those fields who share industry case studies and provide you with state-of-the-art best practices you can apply in the work that you do. Classes are limited to 30 students, so there’s a good opportunity to get some direct instruction on issues critical to you and your job specifically.

This is the same one-day seminar that I lead on a custom basis for corporations at 5x the cost, so it’s quite a bargain. And as an instructor, I’m able to offer you 20% off the tuition fee for however many days you’d like to attend.  You can register here using the code spksbs. You can also call my friends at Sustainable Life Media at 415.626.2212 for more information.

10 strategies for building a credible sustainable brand

I recently conducted a webinar on 10 Strategies for Building a Credible Sustainable Brand in conjunction with Sustainable Life Media. While I'll never again agree to develop an hour's worth of new content with 1 week's notice (!), I appreciated the opportunity to pull together a fairly comprehensive set of strategies that help brands build credibility from the ground up and minimize the risk of greenwashing. The 10 strategies include:

1. Be proactive

2. Be transparent

3. Know your limits

4. Be relevant

5. Borrow credibility

6. Leverage brand strengths

7. Create a brand strategy

8. Be consistent

9. Educate

10. Engage

This list gives some good fodder for future blog posts, so stay tuned.

Role of Retail in Sustainability

Just posted Role of Retail in Sustainability on my business blog. I'm surprised at how few retailers are stepping up to the plate and helping consumers make educated choices on sustainable products. Best Buy is a laggard, Home Depot is a leader. If you know what Wal-Mart is doing in customer education, would love for you to contribute a comment.  

Creating competitive advantage through sustainability

I just published a post on my business blog outlining the five steps to creating competitive advantage through sustainability. Go take a peek and let me know what you think. 

July newsletter: Sustainability business case

In addition to the email newsletter we send out every month (you can sign up on this page by entering your email address) we’ve recently designed an easier-to-read PDF.

This issue kicks off a series on connecting sustainability with top-line revenue, a topic of interest to many sustainability pros who want to move beyond cost-savings initiatives and build reputation and revenue (and also to marketers looking for additional ways to grow topline revenue). I’ll also be posting the articles here on my blog, and I’d love comments and questions so that I can address key concerns and questions throughout the series.

Click here for the FruitfulBusiness July newsletter.