Tuesday, 23rd June, 2009 at 19:24
Anne McCrossan on business transformation: part 3
This post forms part of a series of guest articles by experts in different fields around business and social media.
Anne McCrossan, founder of Visceral Business, is a branding and change management consultant with a dizzying track record and client list. After reading her recent article on ‘Recalibrating Organizations’, I interviewed her with the goal of drawing out some of her ideas around change and corporate leadership for a SOMESSO guest article.
The resulting hour-long conversation is published here as a 3-part series. Part 1 examined how companies need to move from pushing a message to galvanizing people around an idea; part 2 explored in more detail why companies need real values. This final part looks in more detail at how organizations structured around values and relationships work in practice.
Scaling whole-company community outreach
If an organization’s overriding purpose and values are clear, then you will see people self-selecting as potential community leaders. These individuals will not necessarily be your employees: you must seek out and cultivate those that have the most committed affinity with your brand - these are the most important members of your community. This has implications for your approach to recruitment: as people move closer to your organization, you can start thinking about relationships that should be funded because they’re valuable - employing the people who are already committed. In this way you will build business around affinity as opposed to structure. And, like cell division, this kind of community building is infinitely scalable.