Anthropos is a place of learning – if you aren’t learning you’re not living with awareness. Reading is a necessary supplement to learning and here are some books that give insight into the way we think and learn.

First some books on branding:

Articles

Beyond Measure

By Johnny Johnson*

 

Peter Drucker’s quotation: ‘What gets measured gets managed’ has become axiomatic of good business and rightly so, but it is worth noting that the oft quoted phase is a truncated version. The full quotation is: ‘What gets measured gets managed – even when its pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so.’

 

A fixation on measurement can make the whole point of both measurement and management farcical: ‘If it can’t be measured, we won’t manage it.’

 

The reality is that, increasingly, so much can be measured so that targets are set, and accountability advanced by the pursuit of said targets. Even the behaviour of the people endeavouring to reach those targets can be measured because of the fascinating insights provided by the advances in neuroscience, but to ignore what cannot be measured means that those targets might be hit but not exceeded.

 

If everything is reduced to measurement then people become numbers rather than sentient, creative beings who achieve only within the constraints of the known, rather than using innovative genius to unlock the unknown.

 

When numbers rule then Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes the future and the future becomes more of the now, in an endless repetition of doing the same thing the same way, over and over again – Einstein’s definition of madness: if he had accepted Newton’s measurement of the shortest distance between two points being a straight line we would not have the theory of relativity which would have meant that humankind would not have been able to propel the New Horizon space probe through three billion miles of silence and darkness for nine lonely years, so that we now know there are mountains on Pluto and perhaps, not so far in the future, that there are minerals in those mountains that we can mine.

 

It can be persuasively argued that the utilitarianism of measurement restricts the creativity of people, making them a utility only capable of repetitive, predictive behaviour.

 

We know that we are more than that.

 

Peter Drucker knew we were more than that and hence another of his important quotes: ‘Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right thing.’

 

Doing the right thing requires inspiration and purpose. You can measure a person’s motivation, but you can’t measure inspiration, in much the same way that you can’t measure love, hope and faith.

 

The recognition that certain things are beyond measure, has even been commercialised, for example in Mastercard’s priceless campaign – which, given that they are promoting credit, is priceless.

 

There are those that will say these things can be measured by the application of neurology but here’s the thing: if new things are constantly being discovered in neurology it by definition means there’s lots (difficult to measure!) that we still need to be philosophical about.

 

This doesn’t mean that managers shouldn’t measure, on the contrary, but measure what needs to be measured as a means to an end, not as an end in itself, and don’t suppose that if it isn’t measured it’s not important.

 

Perhaps the way to look at it is that leadership starts where measurement ends.

 

* Johnny Johnson is a brand and communication strategist at Anthropos Brand Strategy.

Brandkind

 

Before getting to the point of this piece, a brand insight and a fortunate fact, starting with brand. A pithy definition of a brand is that it is a badge of trust and trust is earned by making a promise and then keeping it with integrity. But all too often the emphasis in brand building is put on the making of the promise rather than the keeping of it. This in no way implies that having the courage to put an ambitious promise out there isn’t important, it is because the integrity of keeping a promise and thereby building trust starts with making a commitment in the first place.

 

But if those required to deliver on the promise made don’t do so then brand building is seriously undermined, especially in a world of increasing cynicism driven by a combination of connectivity and disappointing leadership.

 

Which brings us to the fortunate fact that what has made human beings so successful as a species is our ability to work together. Neuroscience shows that we are wired to be collaborative, that our natural behaviour is to help each other to our mutual benefit. Good reference material for this can be found in Rutger Bregman’s Humankind and in The Ten Types of Human by Dexter Dias.

 

So, getting a company of people to work together to deliver on a promise is natural, as long as the promise is authentic and as long as the people feel they are working together to mutual benefit, with mutuality being understood to encompass all the stakeholders dependent on the satisfaction derived from keeping that promise, from those owning the company, to those leading the company and those working under that leadership, to those benefiting from the product made or the service delivered.

 

But all too often, the working together bit just isn’t there. One example of this is the practice of putting chief executives into their position for a relatively short-term contract, running the risk that utilitarian decisions will drive short-term efficiency rather than investing in sustainability. A good example of this is the reluctance of power generations to move from carbon to sustainable. The pressure being put on these executives by shareholders (ExxonMobil) and by the courts (Shell) is indicative of the natural human drive to uphold the common good.

 

Another example is the division often created in companies of people who should be working together in pursuit of a promise. A pertinent example of this is the inability of the public servant unions to understand and accept the impact of the pandemic on the public purse and to continue in their demands and threats for unrealistic increases of remuneration. Of course, their ability to understand and accept is undermined by leadership being exposed as corrupt and inept.

 

Generalisations are odious, nevertheless there is a tendency in corporates to do the them-and-us: them the workers, us the management. The result is a transactional culture: I pay you as little as I can vs. I do as little work as I can. And yet there is obviously a shared purpose to deliver on the company’s brand promise to the benefit of all stakeholders.

 

The point is that our natural inclination, the way we are wired, is to work together, so if leadership inspires common purpose this will be well received. But if leadership allows divisiveness, then this tendency to work together becomes destructive, because employees define themselves as a group, working not towards a shared purpose, but towards what they perceive as beneficial to their own needs. And the more diverse a workforce is the greater the propensity for divisiveness. Keeping common purpose in a small, homogenous group is relatively easy, but the bigger and more heterogenous the group is, the more challenging this becomes.

 

To overcome this challenge, to benefit from natural human behaviour, leadership has to start with clearly defining its brand promise; then it needs to define the common purpose required to inspire the satisfaction of this promise to the benefit of all stakeholders; and then it needs to communicate both the promise and the purpose in a way that inspired belief. But this can’t be done if it isn’t authentic – there has to be an acceptance of diversity and the understanding required to turn diversity into genuine advantage of all concerned.

 

And here, again, if a fortunate fact about how we are wired, related to our natural compulsion to work together: we are exceptional at empathy and at understanding each other’s needs, so we have this innate ability to be kind to each other and this helps bridge differences. But, again, the empathy must be authentic, because this ability to understand each other also helps us identify insincerity.

 

Achieving an inspiring sense of collective purpose has implications that go beyond the sustainability of business. In The Future of Capitalism, Professor Paul Collier of Oxford University makes the persuasive argument that if we want the world to keep benefitting from capitalism, as it undoubtedly has, then leadership is obliged to embrace diversity and sustainability, in pursuit of far better and fairer benefit to all stakeholders, and this starts with possibly leadership’s main function: communicating intent. The alternative is clearly articulated and substantiated by Collier: inevitable disaster.

 

Hence brandkind: make a brand promise and keep it by tapping into the collaborative kindness inherent in all of us, to the benefit of all of us.