 |
|
ENGAGE TREND REPORT 03.04.10
Is Accenture out of the Woods?
Accenture has dumped Tiger Woods. It is peeling his image off airport billboards and train platforms as fast as possible. It would appear that Mr. Woods is not the poster child of 'high performance' and 'excellence' that Accenture promoted.
A cynical ad agency exec we know says "They got their money's worth for years". For him, what Tiger Woods did or did not do isn't the point as much as the measurable value of the sponsorship. Is he right? What is Accenture's vulnerability to the allegations and the recent behavior of Tiger Woods? They built their brand on his shoulders. What does that say about their judgment? Did they vet him appropriately? Worse -- did they know he was the scoundrel he appears to be - perhaps condone it and align with him anyway? Will their clients continue to associate his face as the face of Accenture now that his mask has come off?
Either way, Accenture made four tactical errors in their use of Mr. Woods in their decade-long relationship with him.
1) Accenture made the brand building of Tiger Woods an equal part of their own brand building. When one of these two ships starts sinking, it could take the other down with it. Can Accenture sell 'high performance' solutions as its own brand and not as a jointly branded effort?
2) Accenture tied their brand to a living, young celebrity/personality. There's a reason that some firms use long-deceased icons like Abraham Lincoln or George Washington as brand identifiers. Other firms use animals like geckos or lions as brand identifiers for similar reasons.
3) Accenture failed to see how over-extended Tiger's brand is, endorsing products for Nike, Gatorade, Gillette, Buick, Titleist, American Express, Rolex, General Mills, etc. If Accenture and Mr. Woods really are high performance players, would an Accenture staffer who wore Nike shoes and a Rolex watch be an even higher performance systems integrator?
4) Accenture has overstayed its joint branding with Tiger by a few years. Had anyone asked "How long should this partnership last?" "When does the risk (and cost) start to outweigh the benefit of continuing this relationship?"
Tying a company's brand to a celebrity is always risky. Celebrities are human and they suffer the same foibles that you and I do. They get addicted to sex, gambling, food, drugs, etc. They can have bad parents, bad parenting skills, bad kids, etc. They get photographed in unflattering poses, places, etc. Some know no end to the depths of their human condition and get private, intimate movies of themselves sold on the Internet. Psychology Today succinctly opines on Tiger's actions as being relatively natural. Celebrity endorsements are ripe for trouble and few celebrity endorsements can last a long time.
When you sell soda pop it can be damaging. When you sell acumen and judgment its far worse. Accenture must learn to market and promote itself without the crutch of a celebrity. Accenture needs to make its solutions and abilities (not the golfing industry) sexy and exciting. In his blog, Brian Sommer (ex-Accenture) probes this topic in-depth. High performance is something that potentially exists in all of us. Maybe Accenture can focus more on how they draw that out and bring it to bear on client projects.
|
|
|
ENGAGE TREND REPORT 11.04.09
FarmVille: All the Rage on Facebook
FarmVille has quickly become the most popular application in the history of Facebook. At high schools and colleges across the country, students are hard at work, tilling land and harvesting their virtual vegetables.
More than 62 million people have signed up to play the farming simulation since June. 22 million log on at least once a day.
FarmVille is the latest incarnation of Occupational Simulations that allow model business data to deliver engaging, fun learning experiences. These include fantasy "careers" like Urban Planner (Sim City), Waitress (Diner Dash), and Amusement Park Tycoon, and real careers like Soldier, Accountant and Investment Banker.
What's new is the integration directly into Facebook social networking. There are implications for both the game industry and for branded game outreach from corporate recruiters.
FarmVille starts off simply: You are given land and seeds that can be planted, harvested and sold for online coins. As you accrue currency, you can buy things, from basics like rice and pumpkin seeds to the truly superfluous, like elephants and hot-air balloons. Impatient players can use credit cards or a PayPal account to buy more money, although purists tend to frown on the practice. Crops must be harvested in a timely fashion, cows must be milked, and social obligations - like exchanging gifts and fertilizing your neighbor's pumpkins - must be met.
The game seems to have mesmerized people from all walks of life. Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, said he had seen the craze firsthand among his students.
"Just like Guitar Hero lets you feel a little like being a rock star - you get to pose and dance a little while you're doing it - with FarmVille there is a real sense that you're actually doing something that has a cause and effect," he said. "The method of dragging food out of the ground and getting something for it is really satisfying."
|
|
|
|
|
ENGAGE TREND REPORT 10.05.09
Could you land Flight 1549?
Recent interviews with Capt. Chesley Sullenberger underscore the role that experience and training played in the miraculous river landing.
Capt. Sullenberger said he had his work cut out for him.
"I needed to touch down with the wings exactly level," he said. "I needed to touch down with the nose slightly up. I needed to touch down at...a descent rate that was survivable. And I needed to touch down just above our minimum flying speed but not below it. And I needed to make all these things happen simultaneously."
Not only did he bring 29 years of experience to the moment, but like all pilots he'd benefited from hundreds of hours of Flight Simulator training before ever touching a fighter plane or a commercial jet.
Try the landing yourself. See if your success increases with practice.
It's a tangible affirmation of the theory on performance excellence put forth in the Malcolm Gladwell book Outliers. The idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. Researchers have uncovered a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.
Endless practice has elevated Cardinals receiver Larry Fitzgerald's "predictive control." to track the ball's flight pattern - to the point where he can catch it with his eyes closed.
The lessons for businesses? Training works. Practice makes perfect. Now, some companies are using develop "Flight Simulators" for their own workforces through game-based technology. A step by step "Sim" immerses employees in key scenarios, to experience culture, mission, values concepts and skills. The strategy: give them the confidence to man the controls - and be able do their jobs with their eyes closed before even touching the customer.
|
|
|
|
|
ENGAGE TREND REPORT 09.21.09
Engagement at the Top
Employee engagement is falling faster among top executives than any other group.
Only 13% of senior executives (VP-level or higher) say they are "willing to go above and beyond what is expected of them" - a decline from 29% two years ago. In a December survey of 79,000 members of the Corporate Executive Board, 20% of all respondents said they were disengaged vs. 10% two years ago.
Companies tend to think that in the downturn, senior leaders are grateful just to have a job. In fact, valued players are increasingly likely to be looking around. Among high-potential employees, one out of four plans on quitting in the next 12 months.
"Executive engagement has been under pressure from ever-increasing demand and activism from shareholders, negative attention on executive pay and pay differentiation, and the pace of change, both within companies as well as the industries and geographies in which they operate," says Ray Baumruk of Hewitt Associates.
"As with employees at other levels, key drivers of engagement for executives are opportunities within the organization, the work they do, quality of life, total rewards and the people they work with," Baumruk says. "For upper-level employees however, factors such as status, the ability to influence decisions and outcomes, alignment of personal and company values, and staff support are additional drivers of engagement"
In a contrasting view, the CEB study reported that compensation-based incentives are three times as likely to improve engagement among senior executives as among the workforce as a whole.
Either way, companies that ignore critical concerns and dismiss fear and disengagement among their ranks are not going to be in a position to maximize and retain valuable human capital as business improves and hiring expands.
Companies that have done their best to keep senior management engaged during the downturn will be the quickest to prosper and retain these valued employees when the tide turns.
|
|
|
|
|
ENGAGE TREND REPORT 09.07.09
Experiential Learning: Just What the Doctor Ordered
Two recent New York Times features highlight the importance that experiential learning plays in the medical community.
The first is a Short Video that looks at how medical interns learn how to deliver bad news through role-playing. First-year physicians practice giving diagnoses to actors with live observation with direct feedback as well as videotaping with playback and feedback. According to the report "the use of standardized patients and faculty observation of people doing actual clinical work is part of a growing movement in medical teaching." One of the greatest benefits of this type of teaching is the opportunity for instant feedback on communication skills from observing faculty members.
The second feature is an article about a program that is run by the University of New England called Learning By Living. The program offers medical students who are interested in geriatric medicine the opportunity to spend a two-week period experiencing life as a nursing home patient. Students are given a "diagnosis" of an ailment and expected to live as someone with the condition does. They keep a daily journal chronicling their experiences and, in most cases, debunking their preconceived notions about the patients and the professionals who care for them. The program goes beyond just an experiment, it also provides the student with a realistic job preview that can play a vital role in attracting the right types of people to the field of geriatric care and allow candidates to make informed decisions about their career goals.
For learning needs where a live experience is too difficult or expensive to coordinate, schools and corporations have been utilizing virtual simulated experiential learning programs. A recent Johnson & Johnson program teaches new nurses soft skills via a 3D virtual hospital environment. The nurses pilot an avatar through the halls and rooms of the hospital where they encounter characters that challenge them with real-time decision-making questions in areas such as conflict resolution, legal compliance, and agitated patients. The program allows new nurses to acquaint themselves with common issues that arise in the hospital in a risk-free environment.
The use of experiential learning for medical soft-skills training is a logical step for education. Experiential learning focuses on the learning and discovery process for the individual. For example, going to the zoo and learning through observation of and interaction with the animals allows a learner to make discoveries and experiments with knowledge firsthand, as opposed to reading about others' experiences in a book. For the adult learner especially, experience becomes a "living textbook" to which they can refer. As Aristotle once said, "For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them."
|
|
|
|
|
ENGAGE TREND REPORT 08.24.09
Malcolm Gladwell Emphasizes Training: "Practice makes perfect"
Malcolm Gladwell's new book may make CEOs blink twice before slashing training budgets. Gladwell writes that in the midst of financial challenges it is more important than ever to focus on retaining and developing top talent. Talent should be "thought about as something a company develops, rather than something that is 'acquired'.
Yes, the human trait we commonly call "talent" or "ability" is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers - whether in memory or surgery, ballet, sales or computer programming - are nearly always made, not born.
Ability, according to Gladwell, is just one factor in success. He points to research that suggests that once you have enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. What's more, the people at the very top don't just work much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
Practice does make perfect. The greatest athletes, entrepreneurs, musicians and scientists emerge only after spending at least three hours a day for a decade mastering their chosen field. This idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.
Fortune magazine's review of Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success highlights the importance of investing in communicating company mission, culture and skills. "Look around Wall Street, or what's left of it today," he says, "and you'll see lots and lots and lots of people from Goldman Sachs. That's not a coincidence. It's because they took their mission to invest in people seriously."
Gladwell argues that the state of today's economy is the perfect time to invest in talent development. "When it's easy to make money, you have no incentive to think about development of talent. Now, you're forced to."
|
|
|
|
|
ENGAGE TREND REPORT 08.10.09
Uncle Sam Wants You - And he's hiring!
First there was Army of One. Then the America's Army recruiting videogame. The latest recruiting technique? Recession.
As the number of jobs across the nation dwindles, more Americans are joining the military, lured by a steady paycheck, benefits and training.
As a rule, when unemployment rates climb, so do military enlistments. In November, the Army recruited 5,605 active-duty soldiers, 6 percent more than its target, and the Army Reserve signed up 3,270 soldiers, 16 percent more than its goal.
The last fiscal year was a banner one for the military, with all active-duty and reserve forces meeting or exceeding their recruitment goals for the first time since 2004, the year that violence in Iraq intensified drastically, Pentagon officials said.
And the trend seems to be accelerating. The Army exceeded its targets each month for October, November and December, bringing in 21,443 new soldiers on active duty and in the reserves.
Recruiters also report that more people are inquiring about joining the military, a trend that could further bolster the ranks. Of the four armed services, the Army has faced the toughest recruiting challenge in recent years because of high casualty rates in Iraq and long deployments overseas.
The economy alone does not account for the military's success in attracting more recruits. The recent decline in violence in Iraq has "also had a positive effect," the Pentagon said.
Another lure is the new G.I. Bill, which will significantly expand education benefits. Beginning this August, service members who spend at least three years on active duty can attend any public college at government expense or apply the payment toward tuition at a private university.
This might mean the end of the recruiting road for Kid Rock.... but that's how it goes when times get tough.
|
|
|
|
|
|
