Firms of Endearment

Book Review: The Future of Management

How practical do you think it would be for rank-and-file employees to make hiring decisions on job candidates for positions on their teams?

What would you expect employees to do if management let them democratically determine their benefits?

What would be the expected outcomes in a company that permits any employee to refuse any task set before him or her?

How much would a company that allows most of their workers to establish their own wages be exploited by employees gaming the system or thinking they’re worth more than they are?

How much would a company benefit from insisting that 20% of an employee’s time be spent doing whatever the employee wants to do?

In his new book, The Future of Management, business guru Gary Hamel writes about companies where nontraditional management practices are the rule.

Whole Foods lets employees choose their teammates and lets employees determine their benefits packages. Gore-Tex allows all employees to say no to any task request. At Semco, management and supervisory employees determine their own wages. Google’s production staff members are required to devote 20% of their time to tasks of their own choosing.

A pillar of traditional management philosophy is that supervisory and nonmanagerial employees cannot be trusted to have the wisdom, will or ways to do what is best for a company.

But companies that Hamel holds out as exemplars of a different view of frontline employees are rendering whole libraries of business books obsolete. These companies demonstrate the efficacy of what James Surowiecki calls “the wisdom of crowds” in his recent book by that name.

As royal families discovered long ago, position does not confer special insight. We’ve seen several examples recently of esteemed CEOs making grievously damaging decisions, including CEOs at Merrill Lynch and Citicorp.

Traditional hierarchical command and control business organizations are organizational dinosaurs. In an age dominated by older populations that more aggressively assert their autonomy and the Internet, which gives ordinary people extraordinary power to exercise their autonomy, hierarchically operating structures are obsolete.

Nearly three decades ago Tom Peters and Bob Waterman shook up the business world with their out-of-the-park, bases loaded homerun book, In Search of Excellence. Then, a dozen years later, Michael Hammer and James Champy implied that searching for excellence along traditional paths was inadequate. The times call for “reengineering” the corporation, they said.

In 2001, Jim Collins and company gave us Good to Great, one of the best selling business books of all time that was stunning with respect to the depth and breadth of research. The only problem is, despites its continuing success for its publishers, six of the 11 companies that were culled from the original 1,435 companies scrupulously examined, and that met Collins’ definition of greatness were already underperforming at the time we sent our manuscript for Firms of Endearment to our publishers in January 2006. We proposed in FoE that what made a company great should be redefined in view of the fact that six formerly “great” companies had fallen off Jim Collins’ pedestal.

The great companies of the 21^st century might not fit Collin’s criteria for greatness, but many are leading the pack in share price performance, as well as in Gary Hamel’s mind as to what constitutes greatness in “the future of management.”

Hamel’s thinking will take you well outside the proverbial box. If you plan to still be toiling away in the world of business five years from now, you will be better prepared for “the future of you” by reading this remarkable treatise on business models that will become the standard in as little time as a decade.

_________________

In case you don't have plans to do anything particularly noteworthy come Nov. 29 & 30, you might not do better than to check out the Good and Green conference in Chicago on those days. There are some outstanding presenters as you will see when you stop in at www.goodandgreen.biz. Of course you'd get a chance to meet me because I'm doing the wrap up keynote on the 30th!

DBW

This post also appears at http://agelessmarketing.typepad.com

The Largest Movement in the World (That Almost No One Saw Coming)

Sometimes something happens that almost no one sees coming. The mainstreaming of the Internet was such an event. When MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte was asked in 1994 why he had not foreseen the coming ubiquity of the Internet. He lamely responded, "The Internet for us was like air. It was there all the time - you wouldn't notice it existed unless it was missing."

Paul Hawken’s new book, Blessed Unrest describes another and potentially even greater event in terms of humankind's future: a massive social transformation of government and business quietly taking place beyond the awareness of most people. The stealthy nature of this event is hinted in the book’s subtitle, How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming.

Hawken takes the reader on a journey through time, starting out many centuries ago, to show how we got to where we are today in terms of how we are dealing with major societal problems, such as the beleaguered state of our natural environments.

At times a reader might wonder why Hawken pauses in the journey he takes us on to talk about life centuries ago. However, in the end he pulls together threads harvested from multiple spools of thought into a beautifully fashioned literary tapestry depicting humankind’s present situation on this planet.

The explosion of interest by companies the world over in addressing many issues we’ve become accustomed to government taking a lead in seeking solutions to is staggering. These issues include environmental problems and a host of social causes ranging from severe poverty and education to health and medical challenges in Third World nations.

Of the world’s 100 largest economic entities, 63 are countries. The other 37 are companies. The combined annual turnover of the 10 largest companies in the world exceeds the GDP of most countries. At the present pace of corporate wealth building, it will not be long before capitalistic enterprises make up the majority of economic entities.

Like politicians and – yes, marketers – denizens of the corporate enterprise universe have not ranked very high in public polls that ask people about their levels of trust and respect for those in government and business who serve them. Marketers have been ranked just a notch above used car salesmen in some polls.

In a recent Gallop poll, 7 in 10 people said they did not trust CEOs of large companies, and nearly 8 in 10 believe that top executives will take improper actions to help themselves at the expense of their companies. In less than a year following 9/11, the number of Americans who see big corporations as an actual threat to America’s future doubled to 38%.

I see a different picture of the role of business enterprise in America’s – and indeed, the future of all humankind. We talk about this picture in Firms of Endearment, of which I am co-author. It seems obvious that people are hungry for a more optimistic image of business judging by the sales record of Firms of Endearment. Released just in February, it is already in its third printing and will soon be out in both Chinese and Italian versions.

Paul Hawken’s optimism about the path being taken toward a better world by a rapidly growing body of business enterprises is similar to our own. While Firms of Endearment gets down to the nitty-gritty of specific companies that take a broader view of their role in making the world a better place, Blessed Unrest works from a different perspective. It provides a 40,000 foot view of the greatest social transformation in the theory and practice of business since Adam Smith published Wealth of Nations in 1776. The view from 40,000 feet is truly breathtaking.

As he went to work on the book, Hawken estimated that there were some 100,000 organizations including NGOs (non-governmental eleemosynary organizations) as well as entities that operate more like profit-making enterprises but with a defined social purpose. Mohamed Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank that issues micro business loans to the poor in developing nations won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his successful capitalistic approach to reducing severe poverty.

Hawken’s research revealed that the number of quasi-public and business entities dedicated to “saving the planet” and elevating life quality for people everywhere runs at least to a million, and perhaps to as much as 2 million organizations.

I do not agree with everything Hawken posits in Blessed Unrest but that doesn’t detract from my opinion that this is one of the most important reads I’ve had in my hands for sometime. Without the benefit of many insights Hawken delivers to us in Blessed Unrest you will be groping toward the future through a fog of misperceptions wafting up from old, outdated paradigms.

This is a critical fact: The future cannot be predicted by what has happened in the past. We have entered a discontinuous state in which is replacing a several centuries-old obsessive focus on the individual with a more holistic focus on human survival. As I see it, in this scenario, private organizations of every description in alliances with business enterprises – not government – represent the last best hope for our survival. You’ll understand better why that is when you read Blessed Unrest.

DBW ([email protected])

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On Sloppy Scholarship and Critical Thinking

Many years ago, Walt Kelly's Muppet-like cartoon character Pogo famously observed, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Centuries before, Shakespeare expressed the same idea when he penned in Julius Caesar, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."

We unquestionably live in times treacherous and challenging but of unprecedented opportunity. Just think, for example, how many millionaires and even billionaires have emerged from garages, basements and spare bedrooms over the past two decades.

Take Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, for example. They launched Google in 1998, when both were 25 years old. Nine years later, each is worth overe $16 billion. Not that money is the measure of their worth in their's and in many other's mind.

Search engines had been around for some time: Archie was the first, coming on line in 1990. Then came InfoSeek, Lycos, Yahoo, Alta Vista, and others. So how did Google jump ahead of everyone else and become the most dominant Internet company on the planet? By not trying to improve on other models, but formulating their own.

Most companies pattern themselves and their products after others. Rather than applying critical thinking to an opportunity, they apply creative theme-and variation thinking to the way others have approached the same opportunity.

These are times that call for the kind of critical thinking approach employed by Page and Brin to create the Google juggernaut. What do I mean by "critical thinking?" I mean a cognitive mode that accepts no proposition without questioning its validity.  In a Cartesian sense, critical thinking presumes everything to be wrong until proven otherwise.

The trouble is today, is that in a hurry to get to a goal, we too often accept what others have claimed to be true without going through our own proof.

In workshops I conduct, I often use the aging of the population as a platform for showing how much we base our thinking about a matter on unchallenged, erroneous claims.

In a Fast Company article several years ago, Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Support Economy, wrote:

“Modern adulthood is a place with no maps. Until the late 20th century, there was no concept of midlife, because there just wasn't enough time in between climbing out of adolescence and dying.”

We've all heard how older people today are unlike any previous generation of older people, starting with how adults now live much longer. But the truth is, however, adults are not living much longer than they did a hundred years ago. People - including infants and children are living a lot longer, but not adults as a single category of people.

About 23 years of the total 30 years in life expectancy gains between 1900 and 2000 accrued to people under 18. 

Adult longevity increased relatively little during the 20th century. According to Social Security, a man reaching 65 today can expect to live only about 2.6 years longer than a man reaching 65 in 1940.

Perhaps more mind-catching, a person celebrating her 85th birthday today has barely a year greater life expectancy than her 85-year-old counterpart a century ago. In other words, the human life span (how long we can live) has not changed in modern times. It is the same as it was a thousand, two thousand, even 10,000 years ago. Our only gains have been in longevity – how long we do live. And since 1900, those gains have been relatively little for adults, especially after the age of 50.

Zuboff further said:

This new new adulthood is about becoming a truly unique individual who cannot be reduced to a role or a Rolodex, a net worth or a network -- a person who is more than the sum of his or her own parts, more than achievements and the expectations of others, more than titles, statuses, and all the glittering prizes.”

There is no “ new new adulthood.” Zuboff ignores what Maslow called self-actualization, Carl Jung called self-realization, and theologians and philosophers for centuries have described as a letting go of worldliness when youth is spent. Midlife was not, as Zuboff claims, a 20th century concept.

The term “midlife” may have been coined in the 20th century, but what it stands for has been around for millennia, spoken to in the annals of Vedic scriptures, classical Greece and notably in the works of the Roman stoic philosopher, Seneca.

If an esteemed Harvard Business School professor like Shoshanna Zuboff can get away with such sloppy scholarship, one wonders about the long-term costs to our society of continuing to “dumb down” entertainment, advertising, news presentations – and higher education. As time goes on, we seem less able to discriminate between truth and fancy, for opinion increasingly outweighs critical thinking in human affairs.

The next time you're involved in seeking out the truth for a major undertaking, try to identify the fundamental assumptions as to what is true that you and your colleagues have until now simply taken as givens. Invite everyone to do the same. Then raise questions about what might make those assumptions false. Following that, try thinking of new ways to approach the task at hand that do not depend on those assumptions. In other words, formulate new assumptions.

This exercise will start moving you outside the box. As you get there, it may become apparent to you that when most people think they are operating outside the box, they are really only looking outside the window of the box. Getting outside the box means casting off the shackles of unexamined claims.

DBW

 

 

   

“Modern adulthood is a place with no maps. Until the late 20th century, there was no concept of midlife, because there just wasn't enough time in between climbing out of adolescence and dying.”

We've all heard how older people today are unlike any previous generation of older people, starting with how adults now live much longer. But the truth is, however, adults are not living much longer than they did a hundred years ago. People - including infants and children are living a lot longer, but not adults as a single category of people.

About 23 years of the total 30 years in life expectancy gains between 1900 and 2000 accrued to people under 18. 

Adult longevity increased relatively little during the 20th century. According to Social Security, a man reaching 65 today can expect to live only about 2.6 years longer than a man reaching 65 in 1940.

Perhaps more mind-catching, a person celebrating her 85th birthday today has barely a year greater life expectancy than her 85-year-old counterpart a century ago. In other words, the human life span (how long we can live) has not changed in modern times. It is the same as it was a thousand, two thousand, even 10,000 years ago. Our only gains have been in longevity – how long we do live. And since 1900, those gains have been relatively little for adults, especially after the age of 50.

Zuboff further said:

This new new adulthood is about becoming a truly unique individual who cannot be reduced to a role or a Rolodex, a net worth or a network -- a person who is more than the sum of his or her own parts, more than achievements and the expectations of others, more than titles, statuses, and all the glittering prizes.”

There is no “ new new adulthood.” Zuboff ignores what Maslow called self-actualization, Carl Jung called self-realization, and theologians and philosophers for centuries have described as a letting go of worldliness when youth is spent. Midlife was not, as Zuboff claims, a 20th century concept.

The term “midlife” may have been coined in the 20th century, but what it stands for has been around for millennia, spoken to in the annals of Vedic scriptures, classical Greece and notably in the works of the Roman stoic philosopher, Seneca.

If an esteemed Harvard Business School professor like Shoshanna Zuboff can get away with such sloppy scholarship, one wonders about the long-term costs to our society of continuing to “dumb down” entertainment, advertising, news presentations – and higher education. As time goes on, we seem less able to discriminate between truth and fancy, for opinion increasingly outweighs critical thinking in human affairs.

The next time you're involved in seeking out the truth for a major undertaking, try to identify the fundamental assumptions as to what is true that you and your colleagues have until now simply taken as givens. Invite everyone to do the same. Then raise questions about what might make those assumptions false. Following that, try thinking of new ways to approach the task at hand that do not depend on those assumptions. In other words, formulate new assumptions.

This exercise will start moving you outside the box. As you get there, it may become apparent to you that when most people think they are operating outside the box, they are really only looking outside the window of the box. Getting outside the box means casting off the shackles of unexamined claims.

DBW

 

 

Creating a More Peaceful World through Capitalism

One of my colleagues, Jeff Cherry who is managing director of The Concinnity Group, a financial management firm inspired by the firms of endearment idea believes strongly that the stakeholder relationship management (SRM) business model followed by FoEs could change dramatically change matters in developing nations. The current issue of Fortune carries an article that supports Jeff's notion.

The article, “Why CEOs Love Rwanda,”  is about emerging business opportunities in Rwanda and how FoEs Costco, Google and Starbucks are helping the Rwanda government become a free market economy.

While many see military means as necessary to quell insurrection around the world, others believe that capitalism will work better and produce more durable solutions. The story in Rwanda strongly supports that idea. Yes, in the absence of hope, insurrectionists can take hold of a society as seems to be happening in Iraq. However, the whole idea of capitalism is about giving hope a realistic foundation and using it to fuel ambitions for a better life.

A Fortune article that ran last November, “Chasing the Base of the Pyramid” carries another story about business enterprise stepping out  to help needy nations more effectively than governmental intercession often  seems to be in these days. The article is about how household products giant SC Johnson & Sons – quite probably an FoE, though we’ve not yet determined that it – is helping to build stronger economies in some of the poorest countries on earth. It is not just about altruism, though. These are whole new markets.

Says the article:

SC Johnson's experiment will test a theory about doing business at what's called the "base of the pyramid". That's where the 4 billion poorest people live. At the top of the pyramid are the 600 million people earning more than $15,000 a year, where most big companies do business. In the middle are the 1.4 billion earning $1,500 to $15,000 a year.

In this era, which we call the Age of Transcendence in Firms of Endearment, companies everywhere are transcending business’s traditionally predominant self-focus with its “what’s in it for us kind of thinking.” More and more companies are addressing some of the thorniest social problems on earth starting with chronic abject poverty. Keeping shareholders happy, these companies have discovered that even in the poorest corners of the planet there is money to be made. A plus for these companies is enhanced reputations back home from helping the most needy of nations to improve the quality of their own citizens’ lives.

DBW

The Capitalist Fundamentalists Are Sharpening Their Swords

In Firms of Endearment we talk about “capitalist fundamentalists.” These are people who cannot get beyond the Milton Friedman famously espoused idea that the only social responsibility of a company “is to lawfully make profits for its owners.”

As we wrote the book, my co-author Raj Sisodia and I continuously reminded ourselves that to the degree the book was successful, it would attract the attention of capitalist fundamentalists bent on telling the world about how unpardonably flawed the book is.

Lo and behold, the first review at Amazon did just that, charging us with intellectual sloppiness. The reviewer’s position stimulated a number of responses challenging his position.

Today, I ran across another article that was inspired by the rants of another capitalist fundamentalist. Here it is in part, from CRO (for corporate responsibility officer) magazine:

Corporate responsibility and profitability can co-exist.

By Jay Whitehead

I was caught completely flabbergasted by American Prospect Editor Robert Kuttner’s editorial “Beware of Corporate Do-Gooding” this past Sunday in The Boston Globe. In a sophomoric search for attention, Kuttner wrote that any and all responsible behaviors by corporations should be waived off as cynical diversionary tactics of profit-hungry devils. “Whenever hugely profitable corporations mount a charm offensive, keep your hand on your wallet,” Kuttner wrote.

Read more …

DBW

Social Responsibility in Movie-making

New Hollywood Genre: Message Movies

Have you heard about Participant Productions? If you haven’t you should know about this nontraditional film company. Under founder Jeff Skoll, Participant Productions is nullifying the classic Hollywood advice that if you want to send a message, call Western Union. People supposedly don’t go to the movies to get lectured at but for entertainment.

But Jeff Skoll, with an estimated $$2 billion fortune earned fas the number two employee of E-Bay, resigned as its first president to take up the mission of changing the world through film.

Skoll's productions include An Inconvenient Truth (the Al Gore global warming documentary), Good Night and Good Luck (the story of Edward R. Murrow’s attack on McCarthyism) , Murderball (the inspirational story of handicapped athletes), Fast Food Nation (about how America got so fat), North Country (about the story behind the first sexual harassment lawsuit) and Syriana (about intrigue and avarice in the global oil industry).

Critical acclaim and box office receipts indicate that Skoll's confidence in "message" movie making is paying off.

In this era, which I have dubbed the Age of Transcendence, the zeitgeist – the spirit of the times – has risen to a higher and more complex level of expression than ever before in human history. Legions of people in mainstream society are coming to believe that the materialistic foundations of the past century stand in the way of creating a better world for all.

Formerly, only people at the fringes of society renounced materialism for an experiential connection to the world.

This historic shift in worldview on a society wide basis reflects the emergence of people over 40 as the adult majority, with those in midlife (almost entirely boomers) exerting the largest influence on the zeitgeist.

Successful marketing is obviously dependent on connecting the dots between an offering and perhaps the company behind it and the consumer. That makes it important to come to a full understanding of the makeup of people’s worldviews in today’s marketplace.

By worldview I don’t mean what people believe, but how they connect to the world. In the first half of life connections to the world tend to be highly egocentric: my connections are based on what I can get from them. In the second half of life, connections to the world more often are based in altruistic aspirations: what can I give to them.

The first half of life is mostly about the individual; the second half of life is (or should be) mostly about the group, or more broadly, the species. This is why we survived and other hominid lines in homo sapiens’ ancestry did not. The latter turned out to be more successful in preserving their tribes and indeed the species.

Today, we are witnessing the ongoing struggle to improve humankind’s condition as efforts to do so take us into new, higher and more complex states of human beingness. I’ll say more about this in my next post.

   

 

Have you heard about Participant Productions? If you haven’t you should know about this nontraditional film company. Under founder Jeff Skoll, Participant Productions is nullifying the classic Hollywood advice that if you want to send a message, call Western Union. People supposedly don’t go to the movies to get lectured at but for entertainment.

But Jeff Skoll, with an estimated $$2 billion fortune earned fas the number two employee of E-Bay, resigned as its first president to take up the mission of changing the world through film.

Skoll's productions include An Inconvenient Truth (the Al Gore global warming documentary), Good Night and Good Luck (the story of Edward R. Murrow’s attack on McCarthyism) , Murderball (the inspirational story of handicapped athletes), Fast Food Nation (about how America got so fat), North Country (about the story behind the first sexual harassment lawsuit) and Syriana (about intrigue and avarice in the global oil industry).

Critical acclaim and box office receipts indicate that Skoll's confidence in "message" movie making is paying off.

In this era, which I have dubbed the Age of Transcendence, the zeitgeist – the spirit of the times – has risen to a higher and more complex level of expression than ever before in human history. Legions of people in mainstream society are coming to believe that the materialistic foundations of the past century stand in the way of creating a better world for all.

Formerly, only people at the fringes of society renounced materialism for an experiential connection to the world.

This historic shift in worldview on a society wide basis reflects the emergence of people over 40 as the adult majority, with those in midlife (almost entirely boomers) exerting the largest influence on the zeitgeist.

Successful marketing is obviously dependent on connecting the dots between an offering and perhaps the company behind it and the consumer. That makes it important to come to a full understanding of the makeup of people’s worldviews in today’s marketplace.

By worldview I don’t mean what people believe, but how they connect to the world. In the first half of life connections to the world tend to be highly egocentric: my connections are based on what I can get from them. In the second half of life, connections to the world more often are based in altruistic aspirations: what can I give to them.

The first half of life is mostly about the individual; the second half of life is (or should be) mostly about the group, or more broadly, the species. This is why we survived and other hominid lines in homo sapiens’ ancestry did not. The latter turned out to be more successful in preserving their tribes and indeed the species.

Today, we are witnessing the ongoing struggle to improve humankind’s condition as efforts to do so take us into new, higher and more complex states of human beingness. I’ll say more about this in my next post.

New Hollywood Genre: Message Movies

Have you heard about Participant Productions? If you haven’t you should know about this nontraditional film company. Under founder Jeff Skoll, Participant Productions is nullifying the classic Hollywood advice that if you want to send a message, call Western Union. People supposedly don’t go to the movies to get lectured at but for entertainment.

But Jeff Skoll, with an estimated $$2 billion fortune earned fas the number two employee of E-Bay, resigned as its first president to take up the mission of changing the world through film.

Skoll's productions include An Inconvenient Truth (the Al Gore global warming documentary), Good Night and Good Luck (the story of Edward R. Murrow’s attack on McCarthyism) , Murderball (the inspirational story of handicapped athletes), Fast Food Nation (about how America got so fat), North Country (about the story behind the first sexual harassment lawsuit) and Syriana (about intrigue and avarice in the global oil industry).

Critical acclaim and box office receipts indicate that Skoll's confidence in "message" movie making is paying off.

In this era, which I have dubbed the Age of Transcendence, the zeitgeist – the spirit of the times – has risen to a higher and more complex level of expression than ever before in human history. Legions of people in mainstream society are coming to believe that the materialistic foundations of the past century stand in the way of creating a better world for all.

Formerly, only people at the fringes of society renounced materialism for an experiential connection to the world.

This historic shift in worldview on a society wide basis reflects the emergence of people over 40 as the adult majority, with those in midlife (almost entirely boomers) exerting the largest influence on the zeitgeist.

Successful marketing is obviously dependent on connecting the dots between an offering and perhaps the company behind it and the consumer. That makes it important to come to a full understanding of the makeup of people’s worldviews in today’s marketplace.

By worldview I don’t mean what people believe, but how they connect to the world. In the first half of life connections to the world tend to be highly egocentric: my connections are based on what I can get from them. In the second half of life, connections to the world more often are based in altruistic aspirations: what can I give to them.

The first half of life is mostly about the individual; the second half of life is (or should be) mostly about the group, or more broadly, the species. This is why we survived and other hominid lines in homo sapiens’ ancestry did not. The latter turned out to be more successful in preserving their tribes and indeed the species.

Today, we are witnessing the ongoing struggle to improve humankind’s condition as efforts to do so take us into new, higher and more complex states of human beingness. I’ll say more about this in my next post.

The SRM Movement Gathers Steam

This past January, Time magazine developed a special report, "Getting Smart at Being Good ...  Are Companies Better Off for It?” Partially answering that question in the article’s subtitle, the report observed, “Not everyone says yes, but a growing phalanx of CEOs thinks that, done right, corporate caring bolsters bottom lines.”  Click here to read the full report.

Five months later, the June 12 edition of Advertising Age carried a special report, The New Samaritans” that observed, “Corporate social responsibility grows as marketers find that doing good is good business.” 

More recently the June 26 issue of Business Week carries an article entitled, “Charm Offensive; Why America's CEOs are suddenly so eager to be loved.”

Not everyone looks on the trend towards more humanistic enterprises in a positive  light. Stephen Bainbridge, a corporate-law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles said in the Time special report, "In a nutshell, the problem with CSR (corporate social responsibility) is that managers who are responsible to all of their constituencies are accountable to one."

But Mr. Bainbridge is dead wrong. He represents the either/or mindset that provides a sharp binary focus, but that restricts creativity. It is a mindset born in Newtonian physics where every event in nature has a predictable cause. But humans are not as predictable many would like, and business corporations as extensions of human personalities similarly resist deterministic explanations of their behavior. Advocates of CSR tend to have a more adaptive view of matters: "There is only so much we can change, but we almost always can adapt."

The number of articles devoted to the subject of corporate social responsibility is rising rapidly. CSR has reached the critical mass of a full-blown movement. One of the casualties of this movement is the silo view of organizational structure. In the companies that we researched for the forthcoming Firms of Endearment (January 2007) there are few if any marketing departments in a traditional sense. Marketing is a company wide function in which in the grocery business even checkout clerks are part of the marketing team.

Interestingly, few of the companies we cited as exemplars in Firms of Endearment have much of an advertising budget. They are masters at creating buzz on a low cost basis. A number of the brands we feature in the book have an almost cultish quality about them. In fact Commerce Bank founder Vernon Hill unabashedly tells his employees, “You are all cult members. And if you can’t buy in, this isn’t the place for you.”

Harley-Davidson, Whole Foods, Patagonia and others we identify as exemplars of CSR hold a special place in the hearts of a large segment of their consumer constituencies. This is true also among their employees, the communities in which they operate and, of course, their shareholders.

Looking at these developments in a marketing context, as the future unfolds, marketing will be  less about creating award-winning ads and more about harnessing the residual energies in all stakeholder groups to shape company success. This is why we prefer the term stakeholder relationship management (SRM) to corporate social responsibility. In fact, we believe that SRM will replace CRM (customer relationship management) as a strategic tool. CRM’s value will be in its use as just another tactical tool used in marketing.