The most promising feature of a community of commerce is the way that members in the community work to ensure each other’s success, even if doing that costs them something.

When members in a community help each other, we often don’t notice that there is a real cost in giving that help. Instead, because we are so trained to presume that any business-related action has a profit motive, we mis-interpret the cost of helping a customer as treat is as an “investment”.

It isn’t. It’s a give of support, with no expectation of return. This gifting is what distinguishes a human community from an impersonal marketplace. What these gifts from different members create, in aggregate, is a different experience and a different quality of participation in commerce.

Community of Commerce, in Action

Just today, I’ve been watching the Etsy Community of Commerce operating in real time, as Etsy Inc. delivers its springtime Etsy Success Symposium.

There are about 120+ Etsy merchants in person in the Etsy Inc lab/workshop space in Brooklyn. With them are perhaps 20 presenters leading the workshops. Some of the presenters are from Etsy Inc., some are Etsy merchants, and others are from the larger Etsy Community. A few are independent consultants there to teach a specific business skill, and some independent consultants have come just to help out.

Then, online, there are about 3000 Etsy merchants watching a LiveStream of the workshops, running a simultaneous chat, using the Etsy Success Symposium workbook they downloaded from the Etsy site, and offering each other suggestions and encouragements while the presentations unfold.

Before I can describe the community dynamic, let me identify the different sets of participants:

Etsy Inc.: The legal entity, the site, and the people who create and run it

Etsy Merchants (also known as Sellers): Individuals and small business that have a store or shop in the Etsy site, where they display for sale items that they make and/or what they curate

Etsy B2B Partners: Businesses that don’t sell wares on Etsy to ‘retail’ customers, but instead who provide a third party service that helps Etsy Inc. serve the Merchants or that helps the Merchants run their business back offices more effectively

Etsy Customers: People like me who troll the site endlessly, looking at and buying all the beautiful things

The community also has members such as Etsy-related blogs that feature craft techniques, business building tactics, or tools that help merchants with their businesses, and software/digital development companies that are using Etsy’s API to create third-party applications that help sellers do extra things like manage their taxes more effectively. And this is without even discussing Etsy Inc.’s contributions to the software developer community and startup communities in NYC. Or the effect that all of this interactive commercial and community activity has on the ultimate experience of the end consumer.

What is actually going on here at the Etsy Success Symposium.?

It looks straightforward on the surface:

Etsy Inc. is running a training/outreach event for some nice PR, and ultimately to improve merchants’ performance on the site. Etsy Inc. is paying for the day, the speakers, the media accessibility. The merchants are there to build their skills so that they can grow their businesses. And, Etsy Inc. is going to benefit with increased revenues from listings and transactions.

But wait, there’s more…

Although the Merchants at this event irl and online will all improve their businesses as a result of the workshops, Etsy Inc. won’t necessarily get a piece of their increased business. Often, as merchants get better at what they do and how they sell it, they branch out beyond the Etsy site. They go off to craft shows, retail shops, and other online sites like FAB.com and Refinery29, and sell their stuff elsewhere. Some even create online, stand-alone shops. They take their business away from Etsy Inc.

Going the other direction, Etsy merchants are participating not only to learn how to build their business but also to participate in the merchant community. Online and offline, merchants help each other out in ways that cost them time and energy and don’t increase their individual profits. For example, many merchants put together “Treasuries” — 16-image pages of items curated around a theme. These Treasuries get used on Etsy’s homepage as an advertisement of what’s available on the site. But the merchants who curate the Treasuries don’t (and can’t) use them to promote their own items. They create these to promote other merchants’ wares that they love.

There is a complex network of helping behaviors circulating within the community of commerce.

The complete list of

• What Etsy Inc does for Merchants
• What Merchants do for Etsy Inc.
• What Etsy Partners do for Etsy Inc.
• What Etsy Inc. does for Etsy Partners
• What Etsy Partners do for Etsy Merchants
• What Etsy Merchants do for Etsy Partners

is very long. I won’t do it justice here. But, let me point out what all these actions have in common.

Features of these Success Sharing actions

• Actions are intended to help the other member do better.

• There is no quid pro quo expected.

• Members refrain from taking each other’s business even when they could.

• Members put their own interests next to or behind, but never always in front of, the interests of the other members.

A cynical person could look at at the relationship between Etsy Inc., Etsy merchants, and Etsy- related businesses and say that what they are doing is merely “investing” in these other parties. That cynical person would find something that looked like pay-back, and negate the idea of a gift.

An economist could find a way to assign a ‘utility’ to a non-monetary element and connect that metric to a profit or cost. They’d find a way to create a balance of costs and benefits.  But just because economists find ways do that doesn’t mean that they are in fact adequately capturing what’s going on and how it all works.

There is something else going on in a Community of Commerce.

Listening to the conversation at the Etsy Success Symposium and watching the comments streaming online, you can feel any energy that is about the community, that emphasizes sharing, and that isn’t selfish. There’s a very different ethos, one where each member puts the community’s interests on par with her or his own interests.

I can’t begin to do it justice here— maybe you can capture it?

See also:

Communities of Commerce: Where the Marketplace is also the Meaning Place
Connecting to the Company Story: Coding is Crafting for Etsy’s Engineers

image: Etsy Symposium Logo from The Etsy Blog

What level of change do you really want from social business?

Do you want a little bit, or a whole lot?

Do you want process improvement? Or,

Do you want organizational transformation?

Social technology means organizational change.

Social Business and social technologies are indeed bringing changes into your organization. That we know.

But what we don’t know is–what kind of change will ‘social’ bring? What are the people in charge of social technology in your organization looking for?

Social technology can drive different levels of organizational change.

The confusing and sometimes contradictory advice about employing social technology within the organization starts to make more sense, once you separate advocates by the level of change that they seek.

Do the advocates you’re listening to want:

• Level I Change: Incremental, local improvement in a current process (e.g., “social” CRM) in the organization?

• Level 2 Change: Incremental and systemic process improvement, from end to end in a particular value change (e.g., building social back from ‘customer facing’ employees to the internal employees and customer-specific systems)? Or,

• Level 3 Change: Systemic, significant transformation throughout the entire organizational ecosystem? Changing how we think about what we do together, as well changing how we act together?

When we disagree with a social technology advocate or when her or his advice doesn’t ring true, knowing which level of change s/he is looking for can help us identify whether the difference is in the end vision or instead in the tactics. Then, we can figure out if that person’s advice seems helpful and wise.

Choose your level of organizational change

So, before you start evaluating some social business advocate’s advice, first ask yourself:

– What kind of organizational change do we seek?
– What kind of organizational change is this person presuming?

Then, go on to the tactics and ask:

– What’s the best way to get to our goal?
– Can this person’s advice help us get there?

I’m sure that asking that first question — What level of change do they seek? — will help me step back from conversations where what I have to offer isn’t relevant. It will also help me step towards conversations where people are looking for the same level of change as me.

Deploy, build, and use social technology designed for your change goals.

The kind of change I’m seeking, change that creates a truly “social” organization, can only come from Level 3 change.  Level 3 Change involves new technologies, new processes, and new relationships. It requires that we think deliberately not only about ‘adopting technology’, but also about the deep, difficult, meaningful work of organizational change.

Despite the fact that social technologies have built into them more democratic assumptions about how people should communicate, the defaults of these systems can’t drive Level 3 Change alone.

What also has to change is how we think about people, about relationships, about each other, about the role of our organization in its larger community, and about the purpose of the organization itself.

To drive Level 3 Change with social technology, we need more than savvy marketers focused on customer engagement and super-competent CTOs who can integrate data streams and enterprise applications. We need change agents. We need open, trustworthy, generative, courageous, purpose-driven people.

Truth is, although technology-driven change intrigues me on its own, I’m not interested in social technology by itself.  I’m interested in social technology as a way to achieve more human organizations.

So, I’m looking for insights and tactics to help use social technology to

“Build the change we want to see in the world”.

See also:

Growing Social: 4 Different Paths to Social Organization
When will “Social Business” Become “Social Change Business”?
Social Media for Social Change — Inside the Organization?
7 Ways That Social Business Advice is Wrong for Your Organization

If Social Business is the Answer, What Is the Question? by Deb Lavoy

hat tip to @desireeadaway and @socialchgdiva
Image: Blue vintage china tiered tea stand Some rights reserved by highteaforalice

Why doesn’t every piece of cake come with two forks?

There’s no fixed reason why the cake can only come with one fork. But, having only one fork is an obstacle to sharing, even for the most generous of potential dessert-sharers.

Why not bring me a second fork, to make it easy for me to share?

Even better, why not serve every piece of cake with two forks?

Why not make it easy for everyone to make sharing their default behavior?

Design decisions drive our behaviors more than we realize. Design decisions intentionally make some behaviors difficult to do, while making other behaviors easy.  Some behaviors occur by deliberately-designed ‘default’.

And, if we change the defaults, we change our behaviors.

This is true for individuals, and it’s true for organizations.

In organizations, deliberate changes to the defaults in our systems can lead to changes in our collective behaviors.

You know how this works– when your organization requires you to use a photo id to get into your building, people eventually start clipping those id’s on their belts. And soon enough, everyone’s wearing a name-tag. Those name-tags make it easier to refer to a person by name when you strike up a conversation in the elevator.

If we want to help our organizations thrive – to become truly social in ways that engage members in positive interactive behaviors– we need to change our systems of social interaction.

One great place to start is with our digital social networks. Here’s how that might work:

Dash off a list of some of the interpersonal behaviors that would make your organization more social, more positive, if only these behaviors could be increased in number. Think of behaviors like:

• Thanking
• Affirming
• Sharing
• Celebrating
• Listening

Can you imagine ways that you could deliberately design your collective activity streaming, your data requests, your emails, and even your group meeting scheduler so that these activities invited people to thank each other, recognize each other, or share with each other?

This is not such a weird idea. Everyone on Facebook has seen this in action, with birthday greetings.

On Facebook, friends are flooded with online happy wishes on their birthdays. You might even have sent a few birthday wishes yourself. Why does this happen?

That flood of positive behavior doesn’t happen because you care more about that individual than you do about others.

And, that flood of positive behavior certainly doesn’t happen because everyone on Facebook went to some corporate meeting where they were urged to recognize people’s birthdays.

That flood of good wishes happens because Facebook’s systems have a built in reminder on the top right of your page: “Hey, His/Her birthday is tomorrow!”

Similarly, Gmail also has some built- in reminders to be more social. One tool recommends other people who might be added to the address field. Another tool reminds you to upload a document if the body of your email includes the words ‘attach’ or ‘attachment’.

Already, some enterprise-wide social recognition platforms have these positive triggers designed right in, so that they nudge us to change our behaviors towards the positive.

We can design in more positive behaviors, for example by designing  online employee profiles that recommend people to connect with, based on work role, project area, and even personal interests. We can import social platforms like Contactually to invite employees to design into their own email habits some regular invitations to reconnect with email contacts & colleagues.

Added 3/22: Here’s another example, from the new gmail interface Fluent.io => Fluent.io’s  formatting highlights the sender’s visual avatar, to “remind you that there’s an actual human being on the other end of the message, not just some infernal robot trying to waste your time.” A simple design change builds in the [ositive behavior of affirming the person

In each of these examples, positive social behavior isn’t required; it’s merely prompted. But sometimes, all we need is a prompt to share, or a reminder to recognize and celebrate someone’s contribution, to actually take that positive step.

Image how this could work in an organization, if the social tools that everyone uses had positive behavior triggers built right in!

If we change the default behaviors that are built into our social technologies, we can change how people interact across these systems. And, these online changes can even infect our offline behavior, making that more positive too.

Of course, there is a fine line between nudges and requirements. And, there’s a fine line between controlling these nudges ourselves and having the organization’s systems ‘big brother’ us with automatic suggestions.

• But why not start thinking more deliberately about the positive behaviors we want?
• Why not starting thinking more deliberately about the positive behavioral norms that we want to establish?

We’ve already predisposed certain behaviors and reinforced certain norms — less social ones — by designing systems without triggers for sharing, without triggers for remembering, and without triggers for thanking each other.

We’ve got communication systems and work flow systems that give us the equivalent of only one fork. If we want to encourage sharing, we need to design systems that give us that second fork. Or even a third one.

When tools make it easy to share, and defaults make it likely we’ll share, our behavior will become more generous — by design.

That way, we can have our cake, and so can you.

see also:

Images: Bigger than your head Some rights reserved by gregoryperez on Flickr
Two Forks Some rights reserved by mmahaffie

With the growing interest in social business and how social technology can change organizations, we’re starting to hear more and more mainstream business commenters weigh in with their opinions.

While these new and novice commenters won’t drown out the voices of the well-established experts (especially those who have corporate support behind them), the increase in commenters may make it harder for you to find independent voices with unique perspectives. These independent voices are important, because these are the folks who are shaking up the conversation and asking us to think broadly about what social technology could do.

Here are 7 experts whose views on social technology will change how you think about “social” in organizations.  

Each of these experts has something unique and wise to say about social technologies, digitally-mediated work activity, social business, and the movement towards more social organizations. These experts are particularly curious, so they read widely and think deeply. And, they are particularly adept at bringing ideas from a range of disciplines into the conversation about social technology at work.

I rely on these folks to lead me to think more expansively — and so should you.

Pound for pound, post for post, following these experts will help you understand the fundamental challenges of social media in organizations.  They’ll raise sophisticated questions and connections for you to ponder. And, they’ll help you be a better leader and advocate for transformation and change.

7 Frame-Changing Social Business / Social Organization Experts

• Elizabeth Lupfer
• Rachel Happe
• Maddie Grant
• Deb Lavoy
• Anne Marie Mc Ewan
• John Tropea
• Thomas Vander Wal

Elizabeth Lupfer
@socialworkplace
TheSocialWorkplace
Senior Manager, HR Technology & Employee Experience, Verizon

Elizabeth puts social technology into the day-to-day work of the organization. Elizabeth’s blog posts are entertaining, real-world windows on how social media is influencing (even transforming) how people work in organizations, especially how it can transform employees’ experiences with “the organization” ( e.g., HR and employee ‘touchpoints’). (Her posts have helped me understand the nitty gritty of how the social intranet in particular will transform organizations.)

On her blog TheSocialWorkplace, Elizabeth curates posts about social technology from other experts, and her blog is a great place to find good case studies. Her blog and twitter feed are your one-stop-shopping for relevant and provocative writing about all things social.

Elizabeth is more than just a curator, though. She’s a very original thinker. Because Elizabeth designs and implements social systems in her own job at Verizon, she’s able to bs-test pretty much any idea or opinion. She sees both the flaws and the opportunities of social tech in organizations. Her elegant and approachable writing finds connections between other peoples’ ideas, shows how an idea can be well implemented, and projects future concerns and trends.

• A Socially Networked Company Makes for a More Human Workforce (Revisited)
• Why the Super Bowl’s Social Media Command Center Scores a Winning Touchdown
• When Employees aren’t Happy, then the Company Isn’t Happy

Rachel Happe
@rhappe TheSocialOrganization (her business blog)
TheCommunityRoundtable (her company, with Jim Storer)

Rachel Happe looks at how “social” will change organizations, with a special focus on the role that communities and community managers will play in creating a more social workplace. Rachel’s perspective on social media flows from a real-world understanding of the dynamics of groups in organizations. She understands how group dynamics can be shaped and nurtured by savvy and attentive managers. Plus, she pays attention to how these dynamics affect organizational-level capabilities.

Rachel writes comprehensive, thoughtful pieces about what social organizations could be — she’s a well-grounded visionary, if you can imagine such a perspective.  This combination, along with Rachel’s ‘former consultant’ skill at creating models and frameworks (like the Community Maturity Model), lets her simplify complex relationships to help us understand them better.

• Radical Transparency: Where the Rubber Hits the Road
• Why Socializing Organizations Matters to Me
• Social Media is not Community

Maddie Grant
@maddiegrant
SocialFish (her business blog)
Social strategist for associations & nonprofits at SocialFish

Maddie focuses on social technologies for associations and nonprofits, and she’s sensitive to the added importance of social media for establishing members’ connections and for sustaining a shared sense of purpose.  Maddie approaches social technology not only as a way to serve an organization’s strategic agenda, but also as a way to serve members. Even when her posts offer practical advice (and they usually do) there’s an understanding of the big picture and the big goals behind the recommended behaviors.

With co-conspirator Jamie Notter, Maddie recently published Humanize: How people-centric organizations succeed in a social world. Humanize is the best book you could possibly find about the multi-level, value-driven changes facing organizations who really want to succeed with social. In Humanize, Maddie and Jamie advocate for wholesale organizational change, with or without social technology, but always with an emphasis on what’s good for members individually and collectively.

• Why communities of practice are the key to the future
• 6 Steps for Getting Started with Social CRM for Membership Orgs

Deb Lavoy
@Deb_Lavoy
ProductFour (her blog)

Deb is the sage of collaborative work/ innovative teams. She’s also Director of Product Marketing for Social Media at OpenText. Deb has an engineer’s understanding of how data parts and human wholes fit together, and an advocate’s appreciation for the possibilities of socialized tools. Deb is quick to see what’s common to both internal, task oriented systems and externally focused customer/ service oriented systems, so she’s able to bridge the disciplinary divide between Enterprise2.0 and Social CRM.

Deb also writes about the cultural, value-centered foundations of social technology. She was one of the earliest voices in the social business community to call attention to central concepts like shared purpose, meaning, and organizational change.  Because she combines the roles of philosopher and pragmatist, Deb’s vision and advice are credible, actionable, and inspiring.

• If Social Business Is the Answer, What is the Question?
• The Pursuit of (Organizational) Purpose
• Is collaboration enough to connect-the-dots?

Anne Marie Mc Ewan
@SmartCo
The Smart Work Company(blog)

Anne Marie’s unique perspective is grounded in her research as a management academic and her consulting experience in organizational development.  AnneMarie’s in the middle of writing a book and has blogged less often lately, but her posts are always pretty deep, and challenging. Anne Marie is the only person I’ve heard talking about the links between (what we think of as) new dynamics triggered by social technologies and long standing wisdom about technologies of organizational change.

Because Anne Marie is able to reach back to what we learned in these previous change movements, like work redesign, total quality, Six Sigma, and the Human Relations Approach, she refuses to treat old ideas as though they were new. Instead, she fills in the space between old and new by highlighting timeless lessons.

• Factories: The original social business
• Smart Work Basics (intro to her book)
• Social Business is Not Rocket Science

John Tropea
@JohnT
LibraryClips (blog)
Snippets (Tumblr)
John on Google+

John is a terrific curator of ideas that are directly relevant to social business/ social organizations, as well as ideas in related fields like complexity science, network theory, decision-making, and leadership. Following John’s twitter stream and his posts is like having your own curiousity bot scouring the web for bits of insight, and then bringing them home to assemble and interpret.

John will find the odd quote, the revealing example, and the assumption-stomping question to help you expand your perspective. Even better, John usually comments on what he finds, not only by evaluating ideas (which is quite useful in and of itself) but also by showing you where else to look to develop your own opinion.  John’s thinking is so wide ranging he’ll connect dots that aren’t even on the same page.

• Teams in Online Organizations Need Both Online Pages and Online Groups
• The role of knowledge management is to enable shared contexts
• Do you know social business theory?

Thomas Vander Wal
@vanderwal
PersonalInfoCloud (blog)

Thomas is an expert in big data and industry level problems and systems. Thomas is also a philosopher of science who works the gaps  beween epistemology,  ontology and everyday life. Thomas has that rather rare ability to tranlate the structure, dymanics, constraints, and complexities of the acual software engineering challenge into social language that explains how people work. He never confuses human processing with data processing, or vice versa. Thomas’s combination of logic and warmth make complex ideas more welcoming to the novice techie reader, and his posts leave you feeling smarter, kinder and more capable.

• Getting Beyond Simple Social
• Social Scaling and Maturity

A funny thing happened on the way to the end of this post….

I sent each Frame-Changer a copy of my draft so that they could correct any mistakes or add any information.  No one had anything for me to revise. But, each one demurred at the suggestion that s/he was an ‘expert’ — they all see themselves as co-learners. And, they all recommended other experts who they claimed had a unique and valuable perspective to offer.  I hope to write another post that includes their recommendations along with the other valuable Frame-Changers that I didn’t fit into this first post.

In the meantime, take advantage of the opportunities to be challenged and to learn from these Frame Changers. Subscribe to their blogs, follow them on Twitter, and look for them on LinkedIn. And, engage with them on their blogs and on Google+ .

The best way to learn, I think, is to hash out ideas and questions with people who are comfortable challenging ‘accepted wisdom’ and experimenting with new ideas.  These 7 Frame Changers challenge conventional wisdom fabulously well, and they’ll make organizations better by changing the way we see the promise of social technology.

Social Technologies — all those different tools we talk about as ‘social media’ — are creating the opportunity for
a social change trifecta.

Social technologies are making it possible for us to transform how individuals, organizations and economics interact with each other, in ways that can help all three thrive.

Social technologies make rich, complex, widespread, accessible communication possible. That’s exactly the kind of communication we need to really free ourselves of the constraints of previous models of organizing and working together.

We often forget that the constraints we pushing up against now, constraints like disengagement, organizational silos, and competition without cooperation, all result from ‘obstructed’ communication.

When communication is obstructed, people and organizations have unequal access to the knowledge, the allies and the influence they need to make sure they thrive.

Individuals can’t share themselves fully, organizations can’t coordinate effectively, and commercial communities can’t negotiate fairly because we can’t get everyone to the table, get everyone talking, and get everyone listening well enough to act in ways that benefit all.

Social Technologies create the opportunity for change at all three levels of productive participation.

• At the Individual level, social technologies give us tools for self-expression, self-affirmation, voice and agency. They give us places to participate and actual things to do that can make a difference.

• At the Organizational level, social technologies connect us and coordinate us through communication networks and locations. They let us find the information and the colleagues we need, when we need them. They let us share resources so that we work more efficiently, and share ideas so that we work more effectively. They let us collaborate to pursue shared purpose.

• At the Economic level, social technologies help organizations rethink their relationships with their stakeholders. They let organizations align and negotiate with stakeholders across both similarities and differences.

Social technologies make it possible for organizations to connect with other organizations and actors to create communities that surpass the functionality of markets.  These communities of commerce can create new types of economic opportunity for organizations large and small, because they offer different terms for conducting commerce. These communities have the social and technical structures to let us distribute the total value generated by our interdependent work in a way that is more fair.

Social Technologies work because they subvert and circumvent the kinds of power dynamics that organizations depended on when communication was more constrained.

Social Technologies Make Democratic Participation Possible

These technologies can make real the dream of democratic participation by individuals in organizations, of democracy as a guiding process in organizations, and of democratic negation within the economy for a more just distribution of net value.

A bonus opportunity is that social technologies make it possible for changes at any level to stimulate, support and power change at other levels. By design, social technologies integrate individual communication with group communication with stakeholder communication. Shift one level of communication and you nudge them all.

For example, digital collaborative work systems organize colleagues around shared goals and shared purpose while simultaneously making it possible for individuals to contribute to work projects that are personally meaningful. While both collaborative work and individual opportunity for meaningful work have always been potentially linked, social technology tools that routinize collaboration make personal connection the default option, not the occasional benefit.

We need leaders who can see the Trifecta of Possibility

As promising as they are, social technologies create only the possibility of these interacting opportunities for change. Social technologies still require ‘leadership’ from managers and engaged participation by most members before these opportunities can lead to real change.

Before we can really take advantage of social technologies for liberating us as individuals, organizations and economies, we need to recognize that change at one level requires change at all levels.

Social business advocates who talk about how technology can transform organizations also must address:

• How will these same social technologies create opportunity for individuals?

• When social technologies put pressure on an organization’s relationships with other organizations, how can we use this pressure to transform inter-organizational (economic) relationships?

Leaders must think bigger. They can’t just focus on transforming their particular work organization. Leaders must also have a vision of how the individuals who compose the organization will transform, and how the economic communities these organizations participate in should be transformed.

We’ve talked about how making organizations “social” requires leadership as well as technology. But in fact, what social organizations really require is for people — not just managers but all members — to think bigger about the kinds of changes social technologies can support for us.

Social organizations will thrive has members are freed to become more human, and as stakeholder communities are pressed to become more just.

If we choose to be truly visionary, social technology can drive all three forms of change, so that we all thrive.

Must see also:

If Social Business is the Answer, What is the Question? 3 Driving Forces, by Deb Lavoy at CMSWire.com

Factories: The Original Social Businesses by Anne McEwan, Phd The Smart Work Company

When will “Social Business” Become “Social Change Business”?

Image: WinPlaceShow Some rights reserved by Professor of Death

There are many fledgling businesses that have laudable intent and shaky commercial foundations.  

This is a problem because, in an ideal world, the businesses that stand for values we share should also be able to sustain themselves as businesses. That’s the key premise underneath social entrepreneurship and conscious capitalism.

Purpose-driven organizations need compelling values, but they also need coherent business models. 

People want to buy products that support values they believe in. To meet this consumer need, some businesses now make their values visible in their products and services, and sell them to customers who share those very values. 

But what happens when the values are more popular than the products, as with Holstee and their Holstee Manifesto? What kind of business can you create then?

This problem of organizations with compelling values that can’t seem to make a business out of them came to mind when a friend shared a Washington Post article about a company called Holstee.  Holstee is experiencing a somewhat dramatic version of this problem.

Holstee has a company values statement that people are crazy about and a business model that is underwhelming.

Who is Holstee?

Holstee is a Brooklyn-based, mostly e-commerce business that sells clothing and accessories described as “products with a conscience.” These products include upcycled wallets, t-shirts, messenger bags, and similar lifestyle items.

By designing and curating with a conscience, Holstee offers a place for mindful shoppers to find meaningful products.

However, Holstee doesn’t seem to support itself by selling these lifestyle products. Instead, Holstee supports itself by selling its actual values — The Holstee Manifesto — in the form of a poster.

The Holstee Manifesto

The Holstee Manifesto is the Holstee founders’ life vision put into words.  It’s been typeset and printed on high-quality paper stock, and is sold on the Holstee website.

The Holstee Manifesto is Holstee’s most popular product.

So far, the Manifesto has been viewed over 500 million times and translated into 12 languages. There are Flickr groups, Facebook conversations, and blog post after blog post focused on how inspiring the Holstee manifesto is. Holstee sold over 11,00 posters in 2011, at $25 a pop, and posters accounted for half of Holstee’s revenue in Nov. of 2011.

Holstee “isn’t a Manifesto Company”

In an interview in Inc. magazine, the founders explain that

“We’re not a manifesto company, whatever that would be. The success of the posters helped us bootstrap, but at the end of the day, we’re about products with a unique story that are designed with a conscience.”

I’d take those words at face value, if it wasn’t for Holstee’s second most popular product.²

Holstee’s “Lifecycle” video sets the Manifesto to evocative images and music. Released only three months ago (Nov 2011), the Lifecycle video has been viewed almost 900,000 times to date, and has inspired its own Tumblr.

Clearly, Holstee is putting time, money, creative energy, and not a little bit of love into sharing their Manifesto. Why, then, aren’t they a manifesto company?

Is Holstee a Manifesto Company?

If half of your revenue, the majority of your units sold, and 99% of your public’s awareness can be attributed to the manifesto you sell, aren’t you a manifesto company?

And, given the hundreds of companies that sell ethically-sourced, free trade, biodegradable t-shirts, isn’t there something neat about being the only one also selling a Manifesto?

In the words of Holstee’s founders,

We wrote a manifesto but we never wrote a business plan.

If that’s true, what does that tell the founders about what really matters to them, as a business?

Is there a business behind the values statement?

The 50 million and 900,000 views that the Manifesto is generating are telling Holstee that there is demand for the values in their Manifesto to be articulated, shared, and made visible.

But while the millions of views are good public relations, they aren’t helping Holstee they way(s) they could be, since   these page views aren’t making Holstee any money.

I don’t know how much non-manifesto merchandise Holstee is selling, but using sales from the Manifesto to bootstrap their non-manifesto product business suggests that the products are not selling enough to sustain the business on their own.¹

• Why does Holstee see their Manifesto as a short-term way to provide start-up capital (i. e., as bootstrapping) but not as a source of ongoing, growing revenue?
• Why hasn’t Holstee “productized” and monetized the Manifesto further?
• Why can’t people buy the Manifesto on mugs and mousepads?

Holstee is leaving a lot of money on the table.

When the posters of your values statement outsell your intended product line, you’ve got a business problem and a business opportunity. 

The market is telling Holstee something.

The market is telling Holstee that their values are more desired than their current products. And, the market is telling Holstee that it’s missing an opportunity to meet consumers’ needs and to build themselves a sustainable business by promoting the values in their manifesto.

Right now, Holstee doesn’t seem to have a business model that fully supports their values. They need to rethink their busiess plan, and they need to ask themselves what kind of business they are, and what kind of business they want to be.

A Lifestyle Products Business?

If Holstee wants to be a Brooklyn-based purveyor of clothing and accessories “with a conscience”, they might focus on developing a product mix that conveys their values more prominently.

A Life Inspiration Business?

If Holstee wants to be a Brooklyn-based organization devoted to inspiring individuals’ hopes and dreams for a meaningful life, they might look for different ways to convey the actual words of their Manifesto.

Can’t Holstee capitalize on people’s desire for inspiration? Look at all the “Keep Calm and ….” merchandise — all purchased by people who want a reminder of what’s important to them.

Maybe what consumers want is the most streamlined exchange possible, where they literally buy the meaning itself, so that the item on which the words are placed is largely irrelevant.

There’s nothing wrong with mousepads and mugs with inspiring words on them. Words printed on various everyday items aren’t any less noble or less impressive than t-shirts. They can all be made “with a conscience”.

What should Holstee do to match its business model and its values?

Should Holstee develop the organization’s capacity to translate their values into products so that the products are more meaningful?

Or, is it time for Holstee to pivot, and change their business model so that they are selling the values directly through words and images?

Either way, don’t you think that Holstee should do more with their Manifesto?

¹ I’m interpreting and opining based on publicly available information. There may be important details I don’t know about that would reshape the conversation. If so, I’d love to learn about them. Email me at cvharquail at authentic organizations dot com.
² Measured by page views.
Also, I hear from mutual friends that the Holstee founders are lovely people, which you’d expect given the ideas in the manifesto. 

See also:
Why Your Company Should Have A Social Mission, by Olivia Khalili at CauseCapitalism.com
Communities of Commerce: Where the Marketplace is also the Meaning Place
Their Need or Your Ability: Why does your organization exist?
Make Distinctiveness Matter by Linking It To Organizational Purpose

Images: © Holstee and AllPosters

Hat tip: I was introduced to Holstee by @BrainPicker. I’ve been to their site to see what I could buy to support them, and I bought a poster that’s now on our refrigerator.

What does it mean for organizations to become more “social”?

Becoming “social” means that more people across the organization can contribute their ideas and have influence. Why? Because social technologies make it possible for more people to have Voice.

What is Voice?

Voice is having a say with the expectation that you will also be heard. Voice is one of  famous options for individuals who are dissatisfied with governments and organizations.¹ Voice is the only option through which people can be constructive and make a difference.

Along with Exit, Loyalty and Neglect, Voice  is also one of four ways to imagine organization members across the spectrum from ‘engaged’ to ‘disengaged’.²

Organization members who are engaged have Voice. They are able to contribute because their ideas can be heard. Organization members without Voice can only be compliant (loyal) or be disengaged (neglectful). Organization members who don’t have effective Voice and have somewhere to go simply leave (exit).

When Members Lack Voice

If you’ve never worked in non-social organization, you may not realize just how common it is not to have Voice. It’s not only common, it’s awful. Not having Voice means you have no way to speak up, no way to be heard and thus no way to have a positive impact outside your immediate purview. Being without voice means that what you want and what you think can easily be ignored.

Organizational structures like bureaucracies, hierarchies, and silos make broad-scale, effective Voice difficult.

The combination of the power dynamics and the lack of interactive communication up, down and across these organizational boundaries means that people have few options for getting their ideas outside their immediate group. They have no way to connect with others who share their interests, concerns, or sense of purpose,  or to connect with others whose skills or roles enable them to transform an idea into an innovation.

Social Technologies Enable Voice

Social technologies within and across organizations are intentionally designed to cross structural barriers and stakeholder boundaries. And, they are designed with the expectation that users/ employees/ members/ constituents will initiate their own participation.

Social technologies are biased towards Voice and away from silencing.

With social media technologies like SocialCRM, Social Intranets, systems of engagement, digital communities, activity streaming, and social collaboration systems, everyone from employees to customers to interested constituents to fans can find a place to speak and a forum in which they might be heard.

For example, instead of waiting for the corporate retreat to train folks on a new initiative, a member with an idea to contribute to this initiative can comment on a blog post, or start a conversation on the organization’s social intranet. Instead of waiting for an annual performance review, an employee can list the skills she’d like to develop on her online profile, so that the HR folks sponsoring training classes can find her and sign her up. Instead of waiting for the company to upgrade their product and finally include the tool you really want, you can connect with them in customer forums to discuss the specific features you need next.

Social technologies don’t insure that your voice is heard, listened to, and responded to. We all know what it’s like to tweet about a customer service issue and never hear back from the twitter account of the organization responsible for the service failure. But, social media makes it more likely that people’s Voices will be heard, because their participation is located somewhere specific, visible to others, easy to find, and stored for later access.

Influence Without Social Technologies

It used to be that, if you wanted to have Voice in an organization and you didn’t have your own platform (i.e., you were not powerful yourself),  you had to align yourself with someone who was powerful. You had to rely on — really, depend upon — some other person to speak for you. This process for getting your voice represented by someone else only worked occasionally, because that person had his or her own interests to represent, and could easily distort your message (intentionally or not) for their own needs.

With social media, participants get to speak for themselves, in their own words, advancing their own reputations, creating their own relationships throughout the organization’s network.

And, with social technologies, participants get to speak in ways that matter. Voice is not only critical to innovation, collaboration, service, crowdsourcing, and knowledge sharing, but voice is also critical to a sense of contribution, a sense of personal significance, and to the creation of personal meaning.

Voice is not freedom, but …

In organizational networks, the Voice enabled by social technology is not the same as “freedom”. Just because social technologies give us a platform for speaking doesn’t mean we should say what we want, to whom we want, when we want, and in the style we want.

Voice operates within the constraints of context and common courtesy. Words that are irrelevant (e.g., thread hijacking), words that exist only to be mean (e.g., trolling) and words that are tone deaf (e.g., all promotion and no response) are not Voice — they are noise.

Social media doesn’t create Voice, it makes Voice possible. When Voice is possible, influence, contribution and meaning are also possible. With Voice, stakeholders can stay engaged with each other and with the organization in ways that make a positive difference.

See also:
4 Reasons Why Socializing Your Intranet Makes Organizational Change Easier
Are Your Social Business Systems Designed for Extraction or Contribution?
Growing Social: 4 Different Paths to Social Organizations
7 Ways That Social Business Advice is Wrong for Your Organization

Could E2.0 really mean Enlightenment 2.0? by Deb Lavoy
White Paper: Social Intranets and Employee Engagement: An HR Solution for Meaningful Morale Building by ThoughtFarmer

 Re-creating Reputation Through Authentic Interaction: Using Social Media to Connect with Individual Stakeholders (book chapter, by me)

References:
¹ Hirschman, Albert O. (1970). Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
² Farrell, D. (1983). Exit, Voice, Loyalty, and Neglect as Responses toJob Dissatisfaction: A Multidimensional Scaling Study. Academy of Management Journal, 26(4), 596-607.
Rusbult, C. E., Farrell, D., Rogers, G., & Mainous III, A. G. (1988). Impact of Exchange Variables on Exit, Voice, Loyalty, and Neglect: An integrative model of responses to declining job satisfaction.Academy Of Management Journal, 31(3), 599-627.

Images: Puffing Up Some rights reserved by Property#1, Chirping Carol Some rights reserved by bogenfreund, on Flickr

What do start-ups and coffee beans have in common?

For both, the place they grow shapes who they become.

We don’t talk much about the role of place in shaping organizational identity, but the physical circumstance of where we are located as we do our work together helps to determine who we become as a company. Place shapes our character.

Terroir = Distinctiveness

For both coffee and companies, distinctive features of who they are come from the specific, physical place where they are grown. Coffee snobs, oenophiles and the French call this place terroir.  

Terroir is literally the dirt in which coffee plants are grown. The soil, the minerals, the decomposing leaves, the orientation of the sun, the slope, and the wind influence how the plants grow, which of their features mature and which do not, and ultimately how the plants perform to create a product. Two beans may be the “same” variety, but when they are grown in different dirt, in different places, how do they taste? Different. Why?

Because place matters.

Terroir matters to companies, too. Whether it’s the location of the founders’ parents’ garage or the co-working space where the team meets, the place where your company is planted influences how you feel about yourselves as a group and influences who you become.

We tend to forget the role of place, of physicality, of geographic circumstance, because so much of our work is digitized, and in that way removed from dirt, from damp, from light, and from elevation. We work internationally, across timelines, and even across language barriers, to the point where it all feels like the same black words in the same white box on the same grey-blue screen, no matter where you are.

And, when we do think about the effect of “place” on an organization’s identity or character, we think about the ways that the organization arranges their offices, or designs their new headquarters. These deliberate decisions telegraph and reinforce the ways that organizations want to shape their sense of self.

When I talk about ‘place’ though, I’m thinking not only about the ‘built environment’ – the physical locations that we rent, furnish, and decorate deliberately – but also the physical environment that is simply there. I’m thinking about the subway stations, the pavement, the streetscape, the falafel truck on the far corner, the wind, the shadows, the noise, the smell, and their effects on each other.

The other people in the place matter too — not so much as personalities, but as co-presence. 

You’re not the only entrepreneur, not the only team, walking in these shadows, feeling that dampness, stepping into this building that was a shirt factory before you planted your computers there. People in other companies near you also lose their breath climbing the stairs out of the subway, inhale the aromas of the falafel truck, and even on the hottest summer day feel braced by the cool dampness under the overpass.

Each person experiences this place in his or her own way, but nonetheless you all are responding to the physicality of that shared place.

The place tells us where we are, and our responses to it tell us who we are.

On Washington Street on a rainy day, you’re battered by the wind off the East River. Standing up to it, you feel resistant, oddly stronger, able to handle the against-the-current trajectory a start-up requires. The unevenness of the cobblestone pavement of the side street, the dips and edges in the pine planks on the workspace floor, require that you rebalance with every step. Each tiny re-positioning reminds you to adjust in real time, to be flexible, to stay steady while in motion.

Place is, quite literally, a way that we and our companies can stay grounded.

• Place gives us somewhere to feel centered, somewhere to start from, somewhere to return to.
• Physical places hold us, they are containers for our together-ness.
• Places help us mark who is ‘us’ and who is ‘not us’.
• Places each have a resonance, a unique energy that we can feel. We can tap into that energy to reinforce our own, we can tap into this energy to release ourselves from psychic constraints.
• Places have rhythms, cycles, and seasons that can help set a tempo to coordinate our work.
• Places connect us to the people who were there before us and help join us to the timeline of progress.

Of course, there are other forces shaping an organization’s character more powerfully than place. From the founders’ personality to the talents of the group to the type of business itself, there is much we can use, easily, to explain why we are who we are.

With place, though, the influence is usually sub-liminal, under our consciousness and far from our words.

Instead of being something we know, place is usually something we feel.

The ways that we stand and move in physical space and the ways we collectively respond to the physical texture around us work to connect our cognitions and our emotions. Even for people and companies that don’t want to pay attention to their place, their thoughts and feelings in the space anchor their experience of who they are.

Every organization has a certain ‘je ne sai quoi’, a uniqueness and difference that can’t be put into words.

The Etsy grown in Brooklyn’s Dumbo is different from the Etsy that would have grown in Austin’s SoCo, or that could have grown in Vancouver’s Gaslight. The difference between the three possibilities– with the same founder, the same talents, and the same business model —  finds its source in the unique place. Why? Because it is that place, with all its specific feelings, thoughts, and actions,  where the core members of the organization experience being together.

A few weeks ago I went to visit a company just blocks away from where I lived just out of college. A few decades later, the neighborhood has more upscale shops, more business activity, fewer homeless people, and no broken windows. But the place is largely the same — still damp, still metallic, still punctuated by the constant rumble of the trucks on the BQE.

Still lifted by the arch of the bridge.

Still raw, still elevating, still inspiring.

And the companies growing there? 

Rooted there, to be shaped by that very place. 

Images from Flickr:

Hit the Road  Some rights reserved by Pensiero
Dumbo Manhattan Bridge Some rights reserved by wallyg
Water under the Bridge, Some rights reservedby moriza

Facebook has a gender problem. We want Sheryl Sandberg to fix it.

Facebook has had a gender problem since its beginning. Now, with the publicity around Facebook’s upcoming IPO, business analysts, portfolio managers, potential investors, and feminist businesspeople are calling attention to the most glaring symptom of Facebook’s gender problem:

Facebook has only white men on its Board of Directors. No women, no men of color, no one to represent the 70+% of Facebook users and advertisers who are not white men.

As with all organizations, Facebook’s gender problem has deep roots and will be hard to fix. However, fixing this one thing– getting women on Facebook’s Board — is not only an easy step, it is also a powerful step.  This is one piece of the gender problem that Facebook can fix right away.

And, Facebook has an advantage that most other organizations with gender problems do not. That advantage? A powerful, visible, well-like, self-described feminist as a COO -  Sheryl Sandberg.

Sheryl Sandberg — the not-so-secret feminist businessperson

Sheryl Sandberg is one of the most successful business women of her generation. As the COO of Facebook, she runs a business that grossed $3.7 billion in 2011. In the hierarchy of Facebook, she is second only to Mark Zuckerberg, and significantly ahead of her closest possible peer, Facebook’s chief financial officer, David Ebersman.

Sandberg has set and executed the strategy behind Facebook’s internal and commercial success. She has also lead the way publicly, as Facebook has confronted complaints, burnished its corporate reputation, strengthened its corporate relationships, and worked to position the company for its IPO.

We could write pages and pages about how admirable a leader Sandberg is. Born into a family with a certain level of class, race, and social privilege, Sandberg has worked hard to turn her opportunities into real accomplishments. She has made hard choices, personally and professionally. And, Sandberg has earned her money and her position in ways that capitalism deems fair.

Sandberg is a highly-accomplished business women, a soon-to-be billionaire, and a public figure who’s influential nationally and internationally. And, Sandberg is also considered by many, both female and male, to be a role model for aspiring leaders.

Despite all this well deserved, well earned praise for Sandberg’s leadership, there is one thing that she hasn’t done. This one public action would demonstrate not only Sandberg’s power, but also her authenticity as a leader.

It’s time for Sandberg to put her words into action right at Facebook, and use her power to address Facebook’s gender issue. Starting at the top, with the Board of Directors. 

Aligning Presence, Platform & Power

Leadership requires the leader to use her presence, her platform, and her power to make a difference. And authentic leadership requires a person to align her presence, her platform, and her power to maximize their impact and make her leadership real.

We can give Sandberg high marks for how she’s using her leadership presence.

Sandberg is an inspiring, positive, personable, approachable role model. We know she’s a mom, a wife, and a girlfriend’s girl friend. We know how Sandberg thinks, that she feels, and why. People have a strong sense of who she is, they find her inspiring, and they seek advice in her personal journey.

As a personal presence, Sandberg seems authentic. Her personal life and the story she tells about herself seem aligned- she’s struggled with the demands of being a woman, a mother and a spouse at the same time as an ambitious business person. She’s worked to make a personal link between what she believes and how she presents herself.

As a public presence, Sandberg puts herself everywhere. From Vogue to Bloomberg, Davos to TED, she’s out there being seen as a savvy business woman leading an important company.

We can also give Sandberg high marks for how she’s using her leadership platform.

Sandberg is more than visible– she’s vocal.

Sandberg uses her platform to speak out, whether the message is about Facebook’s resistance to proposed chances in the EU’s data privacy policies or about how women must embrace and protect their ambition. With regard to her analysis of gender dynamics and her advice for women, she’s correct without being complete, and change-oriented without being controversial.

Even those of us who find Sandberg’s advice for change too individualistic and too tied to one kind of woman’s life story appreciate her anyway. Sandberg’s out there talking about feminism and women’s challenges on the road to equality in organizations. She talks about the ambition gap, taking a place at the table, not leaving until you’re ready to leave, and “owning your own power”.

Sandberg is a voice for women, and a voice for gender equality. In the world of business, she’s not only one of the loudest voices, she’s also one of very few advocating for gender equality.

But what about how Sandberg has used her power?

Leadership is not about ‘having’ power; it’s about using power. Anyone who wants to make a change in this world has to use what she’s got. So we ask:

How well has Sandberg used her ability to influence other powerful players at Facebook so that the company addresses and resolves its gender problem?

Specifically, how well has Sandberg used her power to influence Zuckerberg and Facebook’s Board of Directors to demonstrate a commitment to women’s achievement?

If Sandberg were using her power within Facebook, we’d see corporate policies and business results that put her public admonitions into actions.

All those things Sandberg talks about for addressing gender equity? They would be designed into Facebook’s organizational systems. We would see policies designed to get women to the table as well as keep them there.

If Sandberg were using her leadership power within Facebook on behalf of gender equality, we might also see:

• More than one highly visible, highly valued female employee
• More than white, heterosexual women at the top
• A higher percentage of women employees and male employees of color, tracking these group’s representation in the overall paid work force
• Pay equity/ absence of gender-based pay gaps
• Explicit policies & systems for increasing inclusion, that would addressing gender, race/ethnicity, as well as moving toward a work culture/ corporate culture that is free of sexism
• Work life fit policies that help men and women stay connected to their families and their communities while contributing fully at work
• Facebook Site policies that support women (for example, policies that can tell the difference between a photo of a breastfeeding mom and a photo of a topless pron star)

I recognize that these are all relatively big changes for an organization to make.  Certainly, Sandberg has demonstrated Facebook’s support for women by recruiting other prominent women to key positions of responsibility (and hopefully, influence) within Facebook. And, she has demonstrated her support for women on Boards of Directors by recommending women for positions on the Boards of other companies. There are likely to be other efforts by Sandberg that we simply don’t see, because we aren’t privy to the inside of the Facebook organization.

Yet, precisely because Sandberg’s possible internal efforts are invisible to us, it’s all the more important that she demonstrate her leadership by moving Facebook to do something visible to everyone.

Sandberg needs to use her power to get some women on Facebook’s Board of Directors

Sandberg should use her power at Facebook to get talented, competent and inspiring business women — yes, plural, in “at least 2 or 3″ onto Facebook’s Board.  Right now, the board is made up of “rich white guys—not terribly representative of the wide open world Facebook claims to represent“.

Getting women on the Facebook Board would be a public, symbolic, inspirational, functional and financially-responsible demonstration of commitment to gender equity at Facebook.

There are any number of reasons why Facebook should put women on its Board of Directors, right away:

• Women on the Facebook Board will help improve Facebook’s financial effectiveness and strategic thinking
• Women on the Facebook Board will represent Facebook’s largest groups of users
• Women on the Facebook Board will represent Facebook’s most profitable group of users
• Women on the Facebook Board will demonstrate that Facebook is a progressive corporation with enlightened (as in, not sexist, not racist) assumptions about human talent, skill and value
• And, women on the Facebook Board will burnish Facebook’s public image, keeping the stock price high.

When it comes right down to it, if Sandberg is really to be considered a ‘powerful’ woman, or a real leader, she needs to demonstrate that she has power, by tackling the ultimate leadership challenge– directing her influence upward, to get her boss(es) to do the right thing.

Sandberg herself has said that, to achieve gender equity, we need more women at the top of corporations.

Citing gender inequality as “this generation’s central moral problem”, Sandberg told Barnard graduates last Spring,

We need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women’s voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored.

If, as Sandberg claims, there’s a “stalled revolution especially with women at the top”, Sheryl Sandberg herself can jump start it. Not with her presence or her platform alone, but with her power.

What We Want — What We Need — From Sheryl Sandberg

We don’t need Sheryl Sandberg to resign, as contrition for some kind of leadership failure.

We don’t need her stalled one step from the top, to remind us that women haven’t quite “made it”.

We DO need Sandberg to publicly  “own her own power”.

We DO need Sheryl Sandberg to put her own advice into action right there in the organization she leads.

We need Sandberg to make gender equality happen — starting at the top, at Facebook.

 There are a whole lot of us out here, rooting for you, Sheryl. You’ve told us what to do. Now, show us how it’s done.

See also:
The Horrible Work-Life Truth I Learned at the Harvard Business School Reunion
Recognizing “Women” On The Far Side of Complexity
The (Feminist) Business Bloggers’ Lament

No Women on Facebook Board Shows White Male Influence , by Carol Hymowitz, Bloomberg, Feb. 2., 2012
Sheryl Sandberg: What She Saw At The Revolution, by Kevin Conley, Vogue

Heather A. Haveman and Lauren S. Beresford, (2012) If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You the Boss? Explaining the Persistent Vertical Gender Gap in Management, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 639: 114

The Path to More Women in Senior Leadership: A User’s Guide By Anne Perschel, PhD, and Jane Perdue Summarized at Forbes.com

It always hurts when organizations lie.

Lying hurts the organization, the employees, the organization’s partners, the organization’s prospects, and most importantly, lying hurts the organization’s constituents.

When an organization does something that sparks a”‘reputation crisis”, the absolute worst way to respond is to lie.

As the reputation crisis of the Susan J. Komen Foundation continues, everyone is watching how Komen’s corporate “explanation” is unfolding. Well, it’s actually not unfolding, it’s imploding and exploding at the same time. Each iteration of their explanation is more desperate and more tone deaf than the last, as they embellish their lies.

Some of their “explanations” are so far away from their original claims that you can feel sure that they are on-the-spot fabrications. But I digress.

It’s not the poor quality of the lying, but the fact that Komen continues to lie at all, that is hurting the organization and damaging its reputation.

In a reputation crisis, it never ever helps to lie. Here’s why:

10 Reasons Why The Komen Foundation Should Stop Lying

1. When your organization lies, the lies offend the intelligence of your constituents.

“Whaddya think, we’re stupid? ” they ask. Your audience can read the leaked memos in The Atlantic or the NYT, they can read the reports of people and organizations who’ve been lobbying you to go anti-choice for years, and they can read the public statements of your executives.

Your constituents and the larger audience can actually see the lies, right there in print. To assume they won’t see you contradict yourself treats them as stupid.

2. When your organization lies, it disrespects your constituents’ relationships with you.

By lying, you are telling your constituents that they are not important enough, that your relationship with them is not important enough, and their support is not important enough, to be respected with the truth.

3. When your organization lies, it’s proof positive that your organization is itself profoundly stupid.

What, you can’t find the real explanation for your own behavior? The real criteria for your own decisions? The real values that shape your priorities? If you can’t explain your behavior with a real understanding of their sources, you’re a stupid (as in, dumb) organization.

4. When your organization lies, it makes people wonder what else you’re lying about.

Organizations that lie don’t do it once and a while, just on special occasions. They do it over and over. It’s only a matter of time before your other lies are uncovered.

5.. When your organization lies, it reinforces all the emotional dynamics of denial.

You can’t avoid the anxiety, guilt, embarrassment or shame that are part and parcel of lies. Even if you think no one else sees the lies (see #1, above), you know you’re lying. That eats away at whatever’s left of your organization’s heart, and corrodes what’s left of your integrity.

6. When your organization lies, the activity devoted to lying distracts you from more effective damage control.

You’re too busy lying to acknowledge the pain you’re causing. Even if you are, for a time, unwilling to admit the breadth of your responsibility, the very least you can do is say you’re sorry to the people you’re hurting. But, while you’re busy lying to Andrea Mitchell, you’re wasting the very opportunity you could use to apologize to your constituents.

7. When your organization lies, it embarrasses your employees.

Your employees know the truth. Do you want them all to resign in protest, or even worse, to continue working for a company they can no longer respect? When employees can’t respect your organization, they won’t do anything more than they must. That’s a great way to push your organization to fail.

8. When your organization lies, you block your organization off from any opportunity to learn from the initial mistake.

You and your organization get wrapped up in ‘cognitive distortion’. You don’t hear the truth about others’ reactions to your betrayal, so you miss chances to hear helpful feedback. You don’t learn about your constituents and their concerns, you don’t learn how to handle a crisis, and you won’t learn about yourselves.

9. When your organization lies, your leaders look incompetent.

Because they are.

10. When your organization lies, it makes it hard for you ever to be forgiven, by anyone.

Only those with super-human spirituality can easily rise above a crushing blow of betrayal (see #2, above) to forgive you and give your organization another chance. The rest of your constituents will take a long time to come around, if ever. And in the meantime, they won’t be supporting you.

Finally, there’s a bonus reason why your organization should stop lying.

Bonus Reason #11. When your organization lies, it makes it hard for anyone to ever trust your organization again.

Even if your organization reverses the decision that caused exposed the problem in the first place,

Nothing gets fixed until you tell the truth, to your constituents and to yourselves.

images:
Waling into walls, on Flickr. Some rights reserved by marc dalio
Life’s a bitch, on Flickr. Some rights reserved by pfala