Stanley Moss
DiGanZi
diganzi@gmail.com

Pierre d’Huy
Experts Consulting
ph@ph8.fr

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011

Parisian subway riders careening through the tunnels of the 3rd arrondissement barely notice a particular stop, one whose name contains a clue and potential warning as to the direction culture is headed in the coming era. The name of the station is Arts et Métiers, Art and Technology. It’s a name born of the era known as the Belle Époque, which occurred during the last decades of the Industrial Revolution, approximately 1880–1910.
   There’s a distinct arrogance emanating from a period of time whose inhabitants refer to it as a ‘beautiful era’. To make such a claim alone implies a single-minded confidence in the righteousness of one’s own actions. But the Belle Époque was sincerely powered by noble aspirations, a religion of progress, which held high hopes for the marriage of technology and art, and the sense that with such a conjunction everything was possible. Contained in this unbridled optimism was the powerful notion that beauty could be given to all at the same time. And that such beauty could be dispensed on any scale, with the orchestra as a meme for the simple model of progress, subdisciplines intersecting to create a harmonious whole. In today’s language we would call the phenomenon good management of new technologies.
   In the new millennium, we regard the visual style called Steam Punk—rivets and girders and turning gears—inseparable from Belle Époque’s worldview. Our conception of the era recollects Verne, Eiffel and Méliès. The submarine-builder, the tower-maker, the lunar explorer scientists. Theirs was a religion of progress, poised at direct odds with the church of Mother Mary. Technology had become the primary vehicle of faith, in which all grand aspirations were invested. It was an era that canonized its own creators.
   The transmission of knowledge mattered heavily to the technocrats of Belle Époque. Even the original lycées built during the era look like castles, lofty temples of enlightenment, unmistakeable semiotic statements about how human intelligence and potential were venerated. It heralded the heyday of the École des Beaux Arts, and the flowering of Art Nouveau. Great improvements were made in public education, resulting in concurrent elevation of literacy levels. Across the Atlantic the spirit of the times infected the consciousness of Andrew Carnegie, who in his lifetime built 2,811 libraries throughout the US and English-speaking world. The direct result could be gauged in the success of self-education pursued in libraries by individuals like Thomas Edison.
   So Belle Époque was real, the beginning of a new era, and it paid in discernable dividends. It was an age of notable advancements in public health, hygiene. longevity, nutrition, in the eradication of disease, and the completion of monumental public works like the Panama Canal. In 1908–9, during construction of the Parisian underground Number 4 Line, excavation for the tunnel crossing under the river Seine was effectively achieved by freezing the river, and involved the installation of two huge refrigeration plants which allowed the movement of supercooled brine to stabilize the saturated ground. In a world whose dreamers felt nothing was impossible, every great challenge like this one could be met, and every guiding mind was thought of as un marchand d’espoir, a dealer in hope.
   Belle Époque occurred during a long period of unprecedented peace in the western world. Its accomplishments, albeit remarkable, ended with the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand in 1914. What followed the era of such a religion du progrès was all the more surprising for the horror it brought, monumental demonstrations of the brutality of humanity which deployed the very technology once worshipped for all the good it promised. Over the next seventy-five years the world would experience WWI, Nazism, the Shoah, Hiroshima, the genocide in Rwanda, 9-11, the international financial collapse of 2010 and the epidemic suspicion that something unsavoury and sinister is at play with the globalization of our industrial economy. Perhaps we are poised at the threshold of a rebirth.
   The recent passing of Steven P. Jobs was followed by a wave of soul-searching and deconstructionist thinking about what made for the success of the Apple brand under his leadership. What had Jobs known, done, understood, achieved that explained the rise from a two-man start-up founded in 1976 in a garage to a company briefly rated the world’s most valuable in 2011? What explained the massive outpouring of grief for a man who gave the world devices: the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad? More than once the consensus turned in the direction of a successful intersection of art and technology, arts et métiers. We had been here before. The products Apple continually created brought the best of both universes together in the interest of progress and hope. Steve Jobs had demonstrated good management of new technologies.
   All the same signs are here again: visionary people deploying new technology, merging it with humanistic and artistic vision. If we are witnessing the beginning of a new and beautiful era, let it proceed like the last one. But let it not be followed by a gross abuse of the power, or the leveraging of these advancements for greater horror. The opportunity is here to push the reset button, to launch a renaissance of humanistic thought that optimistically celebrates the intersection of arts et métiers.
   Let’s think of it as a Belle Époque 2·0.

The article is a version of a paper published in the Journal of Brand Management (2011).

Jack Yan¹
Jack Yan & Associates
jack.yan@jyanet.com

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011

WEB 2.0 AND SOCIAL NETWORKS have been hailed as the next media for marketing, its proponents pointing to the presence of politicians and actors on Twitter and Facebook. Since mainstream media pointed out that actor-writer Stephen Fry was on Twitter, there was a sudden growth in subscribers in the UK. A further mention on The Oprah Winfrey Show saw some talk about an ‘Oprah effect’ on Twitter, spurring growth Stateside. The most complimentary publicity for Twitter, however, was for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, with some crediting the service for his success.
   Each one of these statements has an element of truth to them. There is no doubt that celebrities have managed to harness social media to broadcast to their fans, bypassing the press and setting the record straight. Fans feel somehow connected, as though their idol is talking to them directly.
   The Obama campaign, meanwhile, tapped in to a group of voters who are computer-savvy. The campaign managed to mobilize people who might not have voted, giving the senator an edge that his principal opponent, Sen. John McCain, did not consider.
   But how real are these phenomena and how do they impact on branding?
   Aside from setting some ideas for future research, this paper aims to provide an examination of blogs and social networks, considering their branding potential and what organizations need to consider to build their brands using them.

Why brand online?
The case for online branding has been set elsewhere, with the conclusion that most of the same rules apply. Brands still need to be differentiated and communicated to audiences, and it was found that successful online firms in the late 1990s tended to have strong CEO involvement in their websites.² As the web mainstreamed, countless exceptions emerged: there was no longer a talent vacuum when it came to managing website relations with consumers, and CEOs could step back from answering feedback forms. Staff who grew up in the web era understood how to deal with online questions; databases with copy-and-paste answers were developed; and, in some cases, “knowledge bases” looked for keywords in a submitted question and fielded prepared answers without human intervention.
   In essence, the promise of the 1990s’ World Wide Web began disappearing: once seen as a democratizing force where stakeholders could speak directly to company heads, especially in the small- to medium-sized enterprises that went online in the early days, it became just another medium.
   Blogs were seen as the next step: Chua and Parackal have done some incisive research into CEO blogs,³ which give some leaders a chance to provide audiences with an idea of their philosophy. But in an era of competing media and short attention spans, Facebook updates, fan pages and Tweets became part of the branding lexicon.
   Facebook’s commercial potential was always present, from the minute founder Mark Zuckerberg took the service away from its North American college-campus roots and allowed non-students to create profiles in 2006. It has become more commercialized (and arguably less concerned with user privacy)⁴ since then, in order to capture business and profits through advertising. Originally a site that aimed to connect friends and contacts, Facebook broadened to include groups and fan pages for organizations, creating a closed network of 400 million (and rising) users who advertisers might wish to pitch.
   Many flock to the service. Facebook allowed blogs to be imported, forcing more users to stay on the site rather than go to the source. It gave the impression of direct engagement: companies could, for instance, communicate directly with their supporters. It attempted to bridge the gap between organization and audience again, much like the web and email once did.
   In politics, the author is currently in a bid for the mayoralty in Wellington, New Zealand. A Facebook fan page has been set up, and the same behaviours are apparent: supporters seldom head to email to ask political questions. They field them on his Facebook fan page. Some of his opponents have set up rival pages, and other cities’ mayors and mayoral candidates have done the same in this election year. Interaction is often rewarded with additional supporters.
   Outside politics, the author has observed the growth of the designer Tamsin Cooper, whose Facebook page, set up during the first quarter of 2010, has brought 658 fans at the time of writing. Cooper lives in a town, Arrowtown, New Zealand, of 1,700: the Facebook page has been a way for her to centre her international marketing activities, complementing her website and online sales. Importantly, it allows Cooper to interact directly with her supporters and clients.
   Twitter, which claims to have Sen. Barack Obama as a user—though later it emerged that the ‘Tweets’ were those of his campaign team⁵—is less formal. One user Tweets a statement of 140 characters, usually an update of what that person is doing. In terms of the Obama campaign, the Tweets pertained to the senator’s political speeches and campaign ideals, and followers could ask questions and engage with him.
   It was a masterful use of the service. While it was not Sen. Obama himself on there, it gave the illusion of his presence. It certainly reflected his views. Secondly, his campaign team was careful to follow back as many supporters as possible—Twitter users can see who has become a “follower”, giving them an option to return the favour. This, too, satisfied netizens’ feeling of being engaged: that there was a genuine belief of a two-way street in communication with the senator.
   The desire for engagement is not limited to the United States. The Residents 2010 conference in Wellington, New Zealand, brought residents’ associations from around the country together for a day, discussing issues that were pertinent to them. The Hon Peter Dunne, MP, stated early in the conference that such organizations need to ‘band together’ to fight for their communities, acknowledging that ‘power resides in the community, with their representation and their engagement. Community engagement is not political … local democratization is occurring more in residents’ associations.’
   Showing a video from author John Ralston Saul,⁶ it was stressed that one of the causes of community alienation stems from specialized managers who are employed to solve various problems. But their specialization restricts citizens who have other ideas, which combats the democratic nature that one expects.
   Other comments heard include, ‘The Local Government Act does not empower local representatives to represent local people’; ‘Councils will become less representative, because their business objectives will alienate citizens’; and ‘As [local issues] become more pressing, how can we activate the public response?’
   In another speech, New Zealand’s native Māori population was a victim of “ticking the boxes” when it came to their needs, trivializing and indeed restricting what they were about. (Parallels were drawn with the rights of women and blacks in the US in earlier centuries.) There was a general fear of politicians losing power through engagement, and talk after talk highlighted that engagement was not happening early enough with citizens.
   If there was one sector where engagement was called for consistently, it was in local politics. In her concluding conference speech, New Zealand Chief Ombudsman Beverley Wakem stated, ‘The internet’s tools are important [in describing] how to mobilize and educate people regarding their rights and the legislation.’
   Short of an Obama-style campaign engaging the public, New Zealand’s local political scene was in dire need of politicians and political processes that could engage the public. In the wake of the American presidential election, citizens’ feeling of alienation could quickly be dealt with through social media.
   The author is currently in a bid for the mayoralty in Wellington, New Zealand. A Facebook fan page has been set up, and the same behaviours are apparent: supporters seldom head to email to ask political questions. They field them on his Facebook fan page. Some of his opponents have set up rival pages, and other cities’ mayors and mayoral candidates have done the same in this election year. Interaction is often rewarded with additional supporters.
   Far more trivial, though no less interesting from an academic perspective, is the Twitter account of a fictional character, Jim Keats, from the recently finished television show Ashes to Ashes. An unofficial account, it was set up in January 2010, long before the character was introduced on the show. After the show commenced, the Keats account (at twitter.com/jimkeats) attracted an average of 100 additional followers per week, of fans wishing to supplement their television viewing with Tweeting—even if it was with a fictional person. Very few of the 900 followers the account attracted were bots, surprisingly. ‘Jim Keats’ interacted with other fictional characters on the service, all role-played by other fans. It helped take the programme’s brand on to Twitter and provided viewers with an additional access point to the TV show.
   In most cases—those in which fictional characters are not involved (!)—blogs, Facebook and Twitter are helpful in revealing the thinking of the people behind the brands. They satisfy a need: the desire of engagement with a brand they wish to be associated with, or, to put it in Engeseth’s terms, to feel “one” with the brand.⁷ Their motives are connected to the idea of corporate citizenship and how successful brands promote its ideas.⁸
   Engeseth’s theory is that the separate nature of many brand relationships—the “them” and “us”—is obsolete. Companies need to collaborate with consumers not just for R&D, but for everyday marketing purposes. Examples he cites includes Linux, where the user base collaborate on developments to the operating system and become evangelists in the process. WordPress, the blogging platform, is another. Engeseth also points out that Michael Dell spends 40 per cent of his time dealing with Dell computer customers directly. As does Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Ikea.
   Brands cannot be controlled centrally or in a top-down manner in these circumstances. Coinciding with these developments has been the rise of virtual working, of people expected to unite under a single banner with a uniform brand despite being based in homes or in spread-out offices.
   But Linux is a real collaboration: the results speak for themselves. The real fear with brands in the social networking era is that they will fall into the same traps they did with email and the web, where the interaction with those in charge is gone. Facebook and Google, two brands that rank relatively highly in surveys, are notorious for being opaque: Facebook’s privacy changes frequently prompt criticism, while there is virtually no support for the free users of Google, unless they are lucky enough to find a person in authority. Both companies may provide tools for online interaction that can aid transparency, but neither practises it when it comes to their core products.
   Above, the author has pointed out that Barack Obama’s Twitter account, during the presidential campaign, was not manned by him. Thus, it is as easy to obscure one’s identity with these services as it is with any other medium.

   An analysis of some of the top celebrities and politicians indicate that they are not engaging their fan base, undermining the use of the Twitter service. There is little or no engagement by some of the most-followed users of the service, including Ashton Kutcher, Oprah Winfrey and Al Gore (Table 1). For them, Twitter is a one-way service, an extra broadcast channel where the relationship with the audience matters less than their own message. However, President Obama, Britney Spears and Stephen Fry have better ratios, indicating more engagement, or at least, a greater intention to engage. (The ideal number is 100 per cent, although this is impossible to expect, especially when a Twitter account acquires mass following over a short period of time.)
   Given this, are they genuine tools for transparency and the sort of “oneness” preached by Engeseth? And what advantages can organizations get from using them?

Brands and social networks
The theory behind social networking is sound. Brands must be genuine. Those that are “surface” are soon uncovered. It is no different from a government offering sound bites that seem pleasant to the public ear, but whose policies differ from the electorate. It is a sure way of being unelected at the polls the first chance voters get.
   By going to blogs and social networks, people can understand the personalities behind the scenes. In fact, this can prove more useful for the smaller organization because the principal can be the one who writes, updates the Facebook fan page, or Tweets. It allows that organization to be more responsive to audiences and consumer demands. It also allows the chief decision-maker in the organization to grasp the prevailing mood of the public.⁹ They are more cost-effective media than above-the-line advertising or even formal PR,¹⁰ and go some way to levelling the playing field for small- to medium-sized enterprises.
   Brands that are unsupported by additional media can fail because they are not letting their stories shine through. The importance of “legends” inside the organization have been shown by many writers and researchers to be important, providing a hook for brands to be understood internally and externally. Therefore, even the less well presented company, lacking the budget to look as swish as a richer competitor, might be able to exploit a competitive advantage by telling a story without the interference of a communications’ department.
   The personalities can come through: a traditional law firm might still Tweet but do so in a formal way—writing in complete sentences, never abbreviating or using internet acronyms, and providing useful knowledge to its followers. It would have to stop short at revealing any privileged information, but its personality can still come through. At the other end of the scale, a musician might provide samples of her work online, downloadable through a blog, and connect that blog automatically on to her Facebook page and Twitter account. Regardless of the situation, a unique voice can emerge, one that is sufficiently differentiated from competitors. The organization manages to solve not only the question of differentiation, but those of transparency, engagement and accessibility.

Issues
   With an increasing amount of activity happening in the social media sphere, it would seem prudent to examine how to incorporate the media into a brand strategy.
   Along with his colleagues at the Medinge Group, the author participated in writing Beyond Branding,¹¹ which dealt with the growing consumer desire for transparent brands. There is nothing to suggest that that desire has lessened in the last seven years: anecdotally, it has grown as social media have.
   It would suggest, for many organizations, a total change in how they communicate, abandoning the top-down process for something that accepts inputs from audiences to drive strategies.
   When many authors discuss transparency in branding, it is not simply about ethics. There are obvious savings in communicating the same message to internal and external audiences. By being open, every audience has the same potential access to the same information. Perhaps most importantly, stakeholders feel that sense of corporate citizenship and oneness, which helps build brand loyalty and grows awareness.
   Issues for practitioners will include:

• how to include this level of transparency into a branding strategy, and whether the organization itself can handle the added work. As part of the vision-setting for the organization, organizations must ask themselves if they desire extra scrutiny. Questions will include whether principals are willing to schedule in regular entries on to a corporate blog, and work alongside their communications’ department. The structure is flatter. They might want to consider whether they wish to read the feedback personally. Ideally, they will need to ensure that it is their voice and not one that has been too sanitized by communications. The organization has to consider whether these statements appear in a corporate account or a personal one, and the relationship between the two;
• it will have to look at researching its audiences and whether they demand the level of interaction that social media provide. Some businesses might not need it because their audiences are not connected online: those targeting elderly audiences might find conventional media to be more useful. The author notes that a growing number of clients are finding that their audiences are demanding, at the last, a Facebook presence;
• the organization will have to look at extending the rules surrounding its brand usage in to new media. It will also have to consider whether it is to influence the appearance of personal accounts. If personal blogs and Twitter accounts have already been set up before the organization has created its own, it needs to ask itself how official they are;
• the organization needs to consider how to measure the success of branding in social media, either through surveys on whether audiences believe transparency has increased, or using other measures, such as brand equity constructs, revenue, market share, or follower or fan numbers.

Challenges to transparency
   Labour malpractices, child exploitation and environmental harm have nothing to do with branding, even if, in the eyes of Klein¹² or Quart,¹³ the profession is complicit. Equally, the misuse of blogs and social media are not due to any inherent problem with the platforms. If certain parties choose to use Twitter as a one-way channel, then it is their choice: there is no rule book that governs the service. But it would be a wasted opportunity, doing little to promote interaction and understanding audiences. Instead, those that use the technologies as top-down media risk making themselves look separate, going against transparency and oneness. In an era when both are valued, the brand, whether personal or organizational, is weakened through appearing “above” one’s supporters.
   Secondly, there is the problem of having someone other than the claimed person behind the blog, Facebook or Twitter account. The organization should ensure that in the case of a shared blog or Facebook fan page, the identity of the writer is known; but ghost-written media can prompt criticism; this can only undermine the brand.¹⁴
   The looming problems are also technological. Each medium starts off being exclusive. The programming that appears on that medium appeals to that exclusive audience. But as it mainstreams, that exclusivity is lost.
   For the most part, there is nothing wrong with this diffusion of an innovation. Television would be useless if TV sets cost the equivalent of a motor car; motor cars would have failed to transform society if they remained the playthings of the rich.
   But with the democratization of technologies, they have become utilitarian. Email was once exclusive; it is now a tool, with few business people using it for leisure as they did 20 years ago. Along the way, spam threatened to make email useless; email newsletters risk being caught in spam filters.
   The same tendencies are emerging in the blogosphere, with some websites generating fake entries. Blogger, the blogging platform owned by Google, has been using a bot to detect fake blogs that are created using automated scripts. A small percentage of legitimate blogs have been deleted including, for a brief period in 2010, one for the respected UK firm Minale Tattersfield, which was out of action for two weeks. Vox, the blogging service owned by Californian firm Six Apart, is a target of many “sploggers” (spam bloggers).
   Twitter, which is much harder to patrol and easier to manipulate, has its share of fake accounts, with programs adding followers and Tweeting fake messages. Reports of Twitter’s growth stagnating have surfaced in the technological press during 2009 and early 2010.¹⁵
   Facebook, meanwhile, is turning off a small minority of users fed up with its privacy changes—although the carrot of 400 million users is too great for many organizations to abandon it.
   All may well turn users away at some point, especially when they feel they can no longer have the sense of engagement and oneness with the brand.
   Therefore, while these tools are useful, they may well be replaced by others in the 2010s. Perhaps those tools will integrate visuals and the person’s voice, things that are (at this point) harder to automate. For now, they are real, and they need to be considered in a branding strategy.

Conclusion
   Audiences have demanded greater ethics and transparency from brands for many years. However, that demand has become far louder as audiences found their voices through the internet, in particular, driving a greater awareness of social responsibility in the 2000s. Alongside those demands have been ones for transparency, forcing organizations to work more closely with their audiences. People want to know that they have some influence over the brands they connect with.
   As technologies change, social media are where audiences can interact with those brands. They have their pitfalls, with many organizations not building them into their overall branding strategies, or failing to use them to interact. In neither case is transparency increased. Technological problems limit their appeal.
   Nevertheless, if used correctly, blogs and social media can be useful tools for differentiation as they allow a company’s personality to shine through. They also provide means for audiences to engage and access brands. Importantly, they can provide greater transparency, a behind-the-scenes look at the thinking of organizations, giving their brands greater relevance and appeal.

Notes
   1. LLB, BCA (Hons.), MCA. CEO, Jack Yan & Associates (http://jya.net); Founding Publisher, Lucire (http://lucire.com); Director, the Medinge Group (http://medinge.org). Copyright ©2010 by Jack Yan & Associates. All rights reserved.
   2. J. Yan: ‘Online Branding: an Antipodean Experience’, in Kim, Ling, Lee and Park (eds.): Human Society and the Internet. Berlin: Springer 2001, pp. 185-202.
   3. A. P. H. Chua, and M. Parackal: ‘Co-creating value through corporate blogs: a proposed research framework’, 5th National Conference on Computing and Information Technology (NCCIT), Bangkok, Thailand, May 22-3, 2009.
   4. B. Krishnamurthy and C. E. Willis: ‘On the leakage of personally identifiable information via online social networks’, Workshop on Online Social Networks (WOSN), Barcelona, Spain, August 17, 2009.
   5. M. Kirkpatrick: ‘Obama: “I have never used Twitter”‘, ReadWriteWeb, November 15, 2009, <http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/obama_i_have_never_used_twitter.php>.
   6. Cf. J. R. Saul: The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World. Camberwell, Vic.: Penguin 2006.
   7. S. Engeseth: One: a Consumer Revolution in Business. London: Cyan-Marshall Cavendish 2005.
   8. N. Ind and R. Bjerke: Branding Governance: a Participatory Approach to the Brand Building Process. Chicester: J. Wiley & Sons 2007, pp. 51-7.
   9. An example of a responsive CEO is Christian von Koenigsegg, who made modifications to his company’s sports car after criticism on the TV show Top Gear. A new model was ready for testing within weeks. A larger company would have added the criticism to a longer improvement cycle and the modification might not have been seen for years.
   10. S. Engeseth: The Fall of PR and the Rise of Advertising. Stockholm: Stefan Engeseth Publishing 2009.
   11. N. Ind (ed.): Beyond Branding: How the New Values of Transparency and Integrity Are Changing the World of Brands. London: Kogan Page 2003.
   12. N. Klein: No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: Picador 2000.
   13. A. Quart: Branded: the Buying and Selling of Teenagers. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing 2003.
   14. Especially in politics: opponents of the two high-profile politicians in the 2008 US presidential election, Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, flung accusations about ghost-writing.
   15. D. Gross: ‘Has Twitter peaked?’, CNN.com, January 26, 2010, <http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/26/has.twitter.peaked/index.html>.

Stanley Moss
DiGanZi
diganzi@gmail.com

Pierre d’Huy
Experts Consulting
ph@ph8.fr

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011

GENERATIONS AGO in the time of the Ancients, and long before the current era of peace, two kingdoms lived side by side, separated by a mountain range and unending war. They had been enemies for as long as anyone could remember. People had forgotten what started the quarrel in the first place. There were years when an uneasy truce would prevail, but one side or the other would eventually break it, causing the kingdoms again to lay siege on each other, advancing, retreating, attacking, defending, plundering. They understood nothing but perpetual struggle.
   Finally, in the Year of the Hawk in the 10,000th Dawn, the advantage fell to the kingdom of the west, Jandrigar. They had worn down Indrigar, to the east. The ruler of Indrigar was an elderly monarch known as Karek the Wise. It was his misfortune to have presided over a disastrous campaign, which left the countryside in ruins, his subjects starving, his fortress surrounded. His councilors and generals were summoned, but they were of no help, and he dismissed them in exasperation.
   He had the further disadvantage of an impatient and disrespectful son named Prince Lorono. This short-tempered youth knew one day the throne would be his own. This particular prince kept his head in the clouds, and had a romantic notion about the power of political causes. He would often admonish his legions, urging them on with the hollow words claiming that together they could change the world. He pretended that he trusted and believed in his father, and falsely asserted that he knew in his heart there should always be hope.
   But behind closed doors, in the dark throne room of the king, amidst the light from torches hung upon the stone walls, and in desperation of their dire circumstances, he accused Karek. ‘You led us into this battle, and it is because of you we suffer now. We have no weapons left.’
   ‘Weapons will not win this war,’ his father countered. ‘We need to listen to the ancients.’
   ‘Will the ancients feed our families?’ the son asked. ‘All the food is gone. We have no sorcerers.’ He shifted his heavy shield to the other arm, and moved his sabre to the opposite shoulder. ‘How do we live today?’ the prince asked. ‘How do we live when your solution is not working? In the world of the ancients the king ruled, and you do nothing but recite the old words. Your father used to tell us, let the throne look to the mirror. I’ve looked in that mirror a hundred times and I don’t know what it tells me. I am trying to find acts which can change the world, or at least learn a way to behave in this situation.’
   ‘You don’t know what to think,’ the king said. ‘You don’t remember the great heroes—so how do you expect to act if you do not study our legends?’
   ‘Exactly,’ the prince thundered. ‘I am looking for a solution, any solution. I seek the ancient knowledge.’
    ‘The greatest person is the one who holds the blue box,’ the king said wearily. ‘It is so written. Let the throne look to the mirror. The person who holds the blue box will not be touched. Look to the mirror,’ the king repeated. ‘The truth is in the mirror.’
   The prince said, ‘That old story had been often repeated, but it does not help us with the invaders outside our walls.’ He knew the words by heart from childhood, yet the meaning eluded him. Still, he decided to placate his father, so he said loudly, ‘Yes, I think I begin to understand. We are supposed to look deep inside ourselves for the wisdom, as in a mirror, and the blue box represents the answer.’
   ‘The answer,’ his father said, ‘is something you deserve to get. You receive it at the moment you need it. Soon a secret will be revealed to you.’
   The Prince could take it no longer. He thought of the ragged people huddling along the walls, starving, frightened, sleepless. He remembered the army encamped outside the city walls, its bonfires blazing, war machines at the ready. Soldiers standing in a menacing line along the western horizon. He thought of the hardship of the war campaigns.
   ‘There is nothing left to do!’ he shouted. ‘Nothing left to think! I have seen enough of the mirror!’ And saying that he hurled the heavy shield at the mirror, which broke into a thousand shiny pieces. Behind the space where the mirror had been they could see the entrance into a chamber. Inside the chamber, all could see that the legendary blue box rested on a mountain of gold.
   ‘All you needed was the right key,’ Karek the Wise said.
   ‘We are saved,’ Prince Lorono exclaimed, and ran to the treasure, taking the blue box in his hands. He reached the parapet, where he stood facing the enemy. Then he held the blue box above his head.
   The enemy knew what had been written, that peace would come from the blue box. Nobody really believed in the legend any longer. But the time had come to sue for peace. One by one, the enemy put down its arms.
   Three days of feasting reunited the kingdoms of Indrigar and Jandrigar. And thus from the frontiers of the kingdom of the East to the deepest ends of the kingdom of the West began an era of lasting peace and joy.

Enric Bernal
Co-founder and partner, Pinea3
enric.bernal@pinea3.com

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011

PEOPLE CONTINUE TO ASK: ‘Will the economic crisis be going away anytime soon?’ Well, I hope not. I hope it will stay with us a bit longer until we all learn the lessons that we have to learn from it. Recently, I heard a radio commentator on a radio programme saying something like: ‘We have to take measures so that if a similar crisis comes to us again in the future, we will be prepared’. While many of us might be saying things like this, there is something fundamentally wrong in the way this person was talking. The so-called ‘crisis’ did not suddenly arrive without warning; the crisis is the system’s reaction to previous actions. Actions made by all of us, not by any evil third-party entity. As active contributors we need to assume our share of personal and collective responsibility.
   In periods of crisis people tend to look for strong leaders with clear answers and decisions; people who appear to know where we ought to be headed. But, significant problems like the ones we face today are not simple enough for any one person to solve. We need leaders who raise questions as well as, and perhaps even more than, providing answers. We need leaders who will challenge us to face problems in order to learn and grow from them. To make progress in solving the current set of problems requires more than just leaders who provide answers from on high, but also leaders who help us change our attitudes, behaviours, and values. This is a different concept of leadership that will also affect the correlated social contract because we need to redefine our civic life and the meaning of citizenship. We need to bring this renewed consciousness into our organizations.
   The topic of this article is conscious leadership and when I use the term leadership I am not only referring to the organization’s highest ranks; but to everyone, at every level. Leadership should be made available to all those who want to empower themselves to act as agents of transformation because we can all be leaders whether as a leader of a team, a division, a family or in our own lives.
   Today’s issues need a more conscious leadership that develops a more holistic approach to organizational issues. Elevating the level of organizational responsibility is the best way to improve an organization’s prosperity and performance and in this article I propose a clear, three-step methodology for doing so.¹

Is leadership a value-free concept?
Perhaps we think of leadership as being value-free and there are many scholars who will side with this connotation, since this perspective lends itself more easily to analytic reasoning and empirical examination. However, the concept of leadership itself carries with it implicit norms and values. We cannot say that we both desperately need new leadership while also proclaiming that leadership is value-free. Ronald Heifetz argues in his book, Leadership without Easy Answers,² that all the leadership theories developed over the past 80 years have their hidden values and this is so whether we talk about trait, behavioural, or situational theories of leadership. Further, recent supposedly value-fee, theories such as the transformational, charismatic, and authentic leadership theories, also all have implicit values within them.
   Conscious leadership explicitly implies that core values and principles should be part of the construct of leadership and as such it should be a focus for future leadership research. While there is not a universal set of core values and principles that everyone can agree with, the concept of conscious leadership assumes that leadership cares about the organization’s economic well-being as much as it cares about its social implications (internally and externally), and the environmental impact of its business and practices. This triple-bottom-line concept is a good starting-point for identifying an organization’s core values regarding both its economic well-being and the social and environmental implications of its activities. The United Nations has bravely proposed measuring companies against a triple bottom line—economically, socially, and environmentally.³ These measures are known as the ‘3 Ps’: Profit, People, Planet.
   This article postulates that the most successful 21st-century organizations will be those which consciously embrace the triple bottom line and hold themselves and their teams, accountable to its values and principles.
   If leadership has not been operating as a value-free process, then how did we end up in such a globally chaotic state during the past few years? The answer is this is much more a crisis of values than one of economics and ‘the crisis’ will continue until we change our behaviours. We have to modify our value set and incorporate new values into the ways that we approach business as a whole.
   Twentieth-century success meant making as much money as we could, as fast as possible so that we could retire early and then supposedly enjoy life. This is an old paradigm, through which the corporate world promoted consumption at all costs in order to meet the expectations of analyst–investor quarterly results. However, there is another way. There is a way of understanding life and business which redefines the term success by putting short-term gains into perspective with more balanced longer-term returns together and sustainable prosperity, The term prosperity should not be restricted to economics as it was in the old paradigm; prosperity should also be defined in social and environmental terms. We need to leave behind excessive consumerism and its attendant ills and instead connect to a new era of recycling and alternative energies.
   In the 20th century, our concern with people was how they fit within a set of job descriptions, instead of jobs that might fit people’s needs. We promoted competitive advantage by off-shoring and low-cost manufacturing instead of promoting Fair Trade and accounting for bottom-of-the-pyramid considerations. In the last century, we embraced rationality in management. We forgot to include emotions, intuition, love and spirituality in management concepts and this leaves us now in to find their place in 21st-century management practices. To succeed in the 21st century, we will need to develop a more harmonic approach of cooperating and co-existing in the world, and accept higher levels of personal and organizational responsibility. Lastly, we will need to empower ourselves and our organizations to behave with a higher value set than we did in the last century. What we need is more conscious leadership.

Where is my profit?
Some organizations continue to look, first and foremost, for profit in economic terms and although some momentum remains in this approach, with each passing day these sources of profit will disappear. Customers in the new era will not legitimize companies that only focus on increasing their profit without showing social and environmental respect.
   Some organizations still look for a “magic pill” to solve all their problems, as if they were fighting evil viruses. These organizations don’t see themselves as part of the problem and even less as part of its causes. They just want their normality back while they blame just about everyone else—the banks, the government, high employee turnover, competitors, or maybe even the low cost of foreign manufacturing. I have even heard some organizations turn to blaming their customers. All that I can do is wish these organizations good luck in their fight against imagined evil viruses.
   Companies that insist on finding their sources of revenue the old way will continue to experience the symptoms of the “crisis” as if it was a disease of the “old species”. They operate in a two-dimensional world: the pursuit of profit against an axis of time. What is missing for these organizations is the axis of consciousness. New sources of prosperity—triple-bottom-line prosperity—can only be attained by organizations that elevate their level of consciousness to a higher position. The alternative of taking such a path is to accept the decline of the organization. For those who accept the idea of needing to embrace a higher consciousness, what to do then? How should organizational leaders proceed and what are the next steps to raising the level of consciousness of the organization?

Living organizations
Before discussing what to do to reach higher levels of prosperity, it is important to establish a common concept and language to illustrate the path forward. As such, organizations can be thought of as living organisms⁴ with a life cycle in which they are born, develop, mature, and eventually die. Most Fortune 500-type companies don’t last longer than 50 years, as they are not able to adapt to the changing environment. This analogy of considering organizations to be living entities has been successfully used by others. A prominent example is Arie de Geus with his best seller, The Living Company,⁵ in which he proposed the keys to managing for a long and prosperous organizational life. De Gues identified four critical characteristics for organizational longevity, one of them being the company’s sensitivity to their environment in order to be able to learn and adapt.
   When we accept the concept of living organizations, then by extension we can speak of an organizational state of health. At any given time, an organization can be in a different state, which can dramatically affect their performance. Like a human body, when an organization is ill or wounded, it does not perform at its maximum potential. An organization that is interested in achieving higher levels of prosperity will first need to be in a healthy state. From this point of view, all organizations need to embrace a healing process of some sort. Who today would dare to say, ‘My organization is as healthy as it could possibly be. We are performing to the maximum of our capabilities’? As with the human body, organizational health—good or bad—is a continuous process. It is not something that is done once and then forgotten. Health should be promoted for the entirety of an organization’s life.
   Why do we talk of healing instead of curing? Healing refers to inside-out actions which lead to living a healthy life and it has very little to do with the removal of symptoms. Healing is a systemic approach that encompasses every aspect of the being. Healing is about harmonic alignment, wellness, and wholeness. On the other hand, curing is a much more utilized western term and refers to using external actions to fix the internal problems. In other words, the magic pill that is sought to fix our problems while this often means merely addressing the symptoms and not the fundamental causes.
   Typically, people enter the health care system when indications of illness can no longer be ignored. They tend to look for a cure for a specific issue when it arises, rather than maintaining good health through regular exercise, eating a healthy diet and other actions that contribute to our overall state of wellbeing. Similarly, organizations will only react when the symptoms of under-performance are too painful to ignore. In response, CEOs will be replaced, factories will be closed, and major restructuring will be implemented. Instead, what are the equivalent wellbeing exercises for organizations? How does an organization eat a healthy diet and practice yoga?
   The reality is that there are a number of actions that an organization can put in place to embrace a healing process and work towards prosperity. These actions address the four key elements of a living organization’s being: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. For example, a company should balance the pursuit of financial health (physical), with the development of efficient decision-making processes (mental), with the harmony of people’s personal interests (emotional), and with the respect to the community (spiritual).
   The process of healing and steering the organization towards a healthier and more prosperous state is a transformational journey that happens in stages. At each turn, we elevate the level of consciousness a notch higher. Organizations are not likely to make a quantum leap from a low to a high state of consciousness. Like the human body, the organizational system evolves by attaining these stages of health. Donald Epstein proposes in The 12 Stages of Healing⁶ that there are 12 stages of consciousness that a person must go through in order to heal to their maximum potential. Similarly, an organization’s ability to heal is directly proportional to its ability to ascend a spiral of consciousness. Each strand of this spiral represents a crisis and, yet, growth is not possible without it. As in human life, suffering is needed to learn and grow. If we want to reach higher levels of health and prosperity in our organizations, we will have to embrace crises and take them as opportunities to learn, grow and transform.

In search of prosperity
The first step towards a higher level of consciousness is not outwardly focused. Looking for and caring for customers, and the environment, will be a definite outcome of the process, still it must start with an inward look. This is why prosperity cannot be purchased; it has to be lived and experienced. Organizations have to first develop an awareness of their own state of health. What is working and giving energy currently to the organizational system, and what is not? As self-awareness is the key to taking the first step in any leadership development programme, so, too, the organization’s governance needs to analyse and understand the different parts of its being.

• Are the values, the mission and the purpose of our organization well founded?
• How do we make decisions?
• How well do we cooperate between divisions and departments?
• Is our vision inspirational and shared?
• How do we express our truths to the market?
• Is the organization’s foundational moment giving or taking energy from our current operation?
• How are emotions lived in the organization?

   As an organization begins to answer these and other important questions, it will become aware of potential blockage points to higher levels of performance and success. As in a personal development programme, higher levels of organizational consciousness will inevitably bring us to choose certain areas to be worked on and developed further. Therefore, the very first step towards prosperity is for the governance body to increase its awareness of how their organization is run, where the energy flows smoothly, and where it does not. This crucial first step provides a self-diagnosis of organizational performance in terms of energy.
   The second step towards prosperity consists of developing the organization’s capabilities and commitment for change. This process starts by assuming that we have some degree of influence over what happens to us and that we accept our share of responsibility for the situation, even if it is minor. There will always be excuses for us to avoid taking responsibility and while it is fair to say that we are not always in control of what happens elsewhere in the world; still, the question is: do we really not have any influence over other events? For those of us tempted to say, ‘No,’ I would ask you if there was anything that you might do to that could worsen a situation? If the answer is ‘Yes’—there are ways of making things worse—this implies that we do have a certain amount of influence. We are empowered. This necessary self-empowerment will help us to look for solutions instead of focusing on blaming external factors and others.
   During this phase the organization’s governance body needs to identify and empower a group of key senior and middle management individuals, to embrace the change at hand and to play the role of internal transformation agents. Organizational change is about modifying behaviours, which implies the modification of values and beliefs. Without a shift in vales and beliefs, organizational change programmes are often unsuccessful. Many of us have seen or lived through organizational change initiatives and know that without a group of empowered transformation agents from within, the changes will not stick. How many agents of change are required to create the critical mass needed to shift the balance? The answer obviously depends on the scope of change, the size of the organization, and the timing or resources we are willing to invest.
   The third step towards prosperity is to provide a catalyst and to facilitate a sustainable transformation of this living organization. With an accurate diagnosis and after having empowered our core team of advocates for change, we can advance and focus more specifically on all the necessary alterations for truly transforming and healing our organization. The length of this phase depends on the organization’s current state of health, as well as how much change is desired. This is potentially a long phase as organizational change is not something achieved in a few weeks, nor can transformational change simply be purchased. This deeper focus is an experience that the organization has to undergo in the first person., There are no short cuts to transforming an organization, changing corporate culture, improving inter-personal cooperation, or to establishing a sustainable business model that is respectful of the environment and social needs.
   In summary, the transformation journey towards healthier organizational states and higher levels of prosperity happens in spirals where at each turn the organization is becoming healthier. Organizational healing can be achieved through:

• developing organizational self-awareness about its own state of health;
• empowering a group of internal transformation agents that will enforce the change objectives throughout the organization;
• spreading the change plan and rolling-out the necessary workshops in order to reach the critical mass necessary for change to occur.

   Conscious leadership is about challenging the status quo to face the problems in order to learn and grow from them. It is about bringing transformation into organizations that otherwise will be outperformed by their competition. It is also about elevating the level of consciousness to the standards of our century. Doing so will benefit not only organizations but also the greater world and our own individual societies.

Notes
   1. E. Bernal, J. Cos and X. Tarré: Pinea3, Living Organizations, at www.pinea3.com.
   2. R. Heifetz: Leadership without Easy Answers. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1994.
   3. Sustainability: from Principle to Practice. München: Göthe-Institut, at www.goethe.de/ges/umw/dos/nac/den/en3106180.html.
   4. E. Bernal, J. Cos and X. Tarré, op. cit.
   5. A. de Geus: The Living Company. Boston: Harvard Business School Press 2002.
   6. D. Epstein: The 12 Stages of Healing: a Network Approach to Wholeness. Novato, Calif.: Amber–Allen Publishing and New World Publishing 1994.

Dr Nicholas Ind
Partner, Equilibrium
nind@equilibriumconsulting.com

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011

WHILE CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IS a widely used and well-understood term, conscientious brands is not. Its origins lie with the Medinge Group, which since 2004 has given its annual Brands with a Conscience awards. The Medinge Group argues that a brand with a conscience has the following attributes.

• It has a visible conscience.
• It apologizes when things go wrong.
• It invests time and energy in relationship building.
• It promotes the value of caring for one another.
• It acknowledges that we are all fundamentally equal.
• It’s visibly accountable for all its actions.
• It takes risks in line with its values.

The attributes were not defined through research, but rather were derived from discussion among members of the Group.
   In thinking about brands as conscientious, one important association to emphasize is that of services dominant logic.¹ Here we can argue that it is the connectedness of consumers and other stakeholders with the brand owner that creates the brand. A brand may be managed by an organization, but its meaning is formed out of the purchase, usage and dialogue that the organization and stakeholders engage in. This view is relational and suggests a model of inseparability between the one who offers and one who consumes. It shifts the idea of brand building from transactions to relationships: ’because a service-centred view is participatory and dynamic, service provision is maximized through an iterative learning process on the part of both the enterprise and the consumer.’² The importance of this change of perspective is not only due to the dominance of service industries in OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries³, but also to a reinterpretation of the process of exchange. Vargo and Lusch argue that everything, whether tangible or intangible, is a service. This distinction also serves to emphasize that increasingly brand owners cede control of their brands to consumers. As people use brands, discuss them with others, form communities of interest and interact online with companies, so the influence of the brand owner diminishes. Now a brand is created in a conversational space where the organization and the individual meet.
   The word conscientious also brings specific associations with it. It is a word that we normally apply to individuals and it suggests attributes such as hard-working, thorough and attentive. It conveys the idea that someone is aware of the needs of those around them. If we connect the word to brand, the implication is that the brand owner is capable of understanding and meeting the needs of diverse stakeholders; of extending sympathy and creating value for all.⁴ As Rorty notes,⁵ the moral imagination, which is essential to an ethical perspective, occurs when people are willing to move beyond the possibilties dictated by precedent and empathize with others. This is a view that is distinct from approaches that stress a narrow focus to creating value and recognizes instead the interconnectedness of all those that touch or are touched by an organization.
   This is becoming increasingly important as the size and influence of organizations and their impact on more aspects of people’s lives grows. Indeed, we can argue that the role of the organization has changed: ‘companies have to recognize their accountability not only to shareholders, but to all audiences and to society as a whole.’⁶ This is a point that Freeman⁷ makes when he writes that the stakeholder view is an ethical requirement for companies and that the linkage of different stakeholders requires a balanced approach. In their 2007 book Freeman, Harrison and Wicks⁸ note that the the primary aspect of corporations is cooperation. They suggest that the business organization should be a vehicle ‘by which stakeholders are engaged in a joint and cooperative enterprise of creating value for each other.’⁹

The attributes of ‘Conscientious Brands’
If we can argue that a conscientious brand is one that is cogniscent of, and tries to meet, the needs of all its stakeholders, what might this mean in terms of attributes? Building on the Medinge list, we would argue that there are three core attributes that are necessary for a brand to be seen as conscientious: a committed and inclusive approach, the ability to think long-term and a willingness to keep promises.
   One important omission from the core attributes however should be noted: altruism, which can be defined as an unselfish regard for the well-being of others. We encounter a problem here of who ‘others’ might be, but if we argue that ‘others’ encompasses stakeholders external to the organization, altruism creates a problem of imbalance. For as well as achieving the well-being of others, brands must be able to deliver well-being for themselves and those inside the organization. Altruism could consign a brand to destructive decisions. In its place we might argue that brands should have a selfish regard for themselves and for the well-being of others.

A committed and inclusive approach
A facet of conscientious brands is that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is not seen as a marketing tool or a department or a process that orbits far away from the corporate sun, but is integrated into the fabric of the organization. The greater the orientation towards a communications-based approach, the stronger the tendency for CSR to be seen as superficial. In fact, telling consumers about CSR through traditional media such as advertising increases the risk of provoking scepticism.¹⁰ However, there are examples such as the Norwegian sportswear brand Stormberg,¹¹ the Dutch Fair Trade pioneer Max Havelaar, the Swiss Bank, Pictet et Cie and the Bangladeshi telecoms operator Grameen Phone, that are stakeholder-focused and make CSR a part of everyday practice.
   For example, Pictet et Cie, which was founded in 1805, has a focus on sustainable development and encourages the maximum investment in sustainable areas for a given risk. The bank manages a Water fund, which was launched in 2000, and has become the world’s largest of its kind, with over €4 billion in assets; and a Clean Energy fund. The company has also establishe the Prix Pictet—the world’s first international prize dedicated to photography and sustainability—mandated to encourage the use and power of photography to communicate vital messages to a global audience. Pictet et Cie understands that business is not somehow separate from the world, but is very much part of it and must demonstrate a broad commitment to stakeholders and to society at large.
   Hewlett-Packard (HP) also exemplifies this in the way it works with other companies, governments and NGOs to improve the health, education and infrastructure in developing markets, because its long-term growth depends on new consumers. Anholt writes of HP and others, that ‘they (big companies) need consumers who are wealthy enough to buy their products, have enough free time to enjoy them, are educated enough to consume advertising messages and evaluate products and brands, and live in countries where there is the liberty to make money and spend it.’¹²

Long-term thinking
Key to the cited examples is the prevalence of long-term thinking, which runs counter to the sometimes short-term view of shareholders. Acting conscientiously means rejecting expediency for principle, temporary advantage for long-term gain. Grameen Phone didn’t look a good business prospect in the late 1990s in a country suffering from high levels of corruption, political uncertainty and poor infrastructure. But new distribution methods were established, low-cost pricing plans introduced and innovative and socially valuable services, such as HealthLine and Community Information Centres, established. Today, Grameen Phone has 23 million subscribers (February 2010) and is the most desired company to work for in Bangladesh.
   At Anglo-Dutch fast moving consumer goods company, Unilever, reducing environmental impacts while improving performance is the core vision and it means taking a longer-term view and tackling short-termism head on. In 2009, CEO, Paul Polman, in an attempt to move the focus away from short-term returns, stopped providing earnings guidance to investors. Seeing his mandate as more concerned with long-term success, he also railed against hedge funds, arguing, ‘they are not people who are there in the long-term interests of the company.’
   One implication of shareholder short-termism might be that it is easier for privately owned companies to act conscientiously. While Freeman et al¹³ argue for the mutual interest of different stakeholders, the power of shareholders in publicly quoted companies whose primary motivation is in above average returns can run into conflict with other stakeholders. In privately owned companies such as Pictet et Cie, Max Havelaar, Stormberg and also US outdoor brand, Patagonia, it is the long-term shared vision of owners and managers that drives decision-making.

Keeping promises
There has been a shift in emphasis in brand-building, from making promises to keeping them;¹⁴ from communication to people. This represents a turning away from traditional advertising and a focus on direct interaction. Indeed, some organizations are moving branding entirely away from communications and towards connecting strategy, culture and a wider stakeholder involvement. They recognize that branding is a process that is too important to be left just to the marketing or communications department. These organizations have understood that brand building is a participative process involving the whole organization and is the responsibility of all employees.¹⁵
   This suggests the importance of widespread employee engagement with the organization’s brand ideology—the set of ideas that define what the organization is, how it does things and what its aspirations are. The better individuals identify and internalize the ideology, the greater the likelihood of its delivery in the experiences that connect the organization and its stakeholders.
   As an example of this consider the software company, Mozilla. This is example of an organization that lives up to its stated mission of promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the web. It is a non-profit organization that grew out of Netscape and is involved in building communities of people that both help create and use their products such as the web browser, Firefox, an email client, Thunderbird, and a global community of innovators, Drumbeat. Mozilla employs a core group of people (around 300) that develop software, manage process and market the products, but since the start of the company, much of the development of products has been due to the enthusiasm and involvement of customers who have become volunteers.
   In the early days of Mozilla, when it was up against a very dominant competitor in the form of Microsoft, there weren’t enough resources internally. As many software developers identified with the ideology of keeping the web open and accessible to all, they gave up their spare time to develop products they themselves would like to use. It was also an opportunity to work with smart people and solve difficult problems. Of course, Mozilla could have closed their doors to these would-be helpers, but it would have shown up that the principle of openness was just a veneer. Asa Dotzler of Mozilla says, ‘by 2004, the majority of the code had been written by Netscape employees, but there were many hundreds of volunteers who played a substantial role in writing code including important features. For instance the first implementation of tabbed browsing was a volunteer written code. Our first implementation of pop-up blocking and session restore when you crash, and lots of other key features were developed by volunteers.’
   By 2010, more than 12,000 free community-generated add-ons had been implemented. Mozilla has encouraged outsiders to help evolve the project. The idea of improving the internet experience for people everywhere led to one volunteer choosing to pioneer disability access because he felt passionately about it, while volunteers around the world seized on the opportunity to preserve the integrity of their languages, by translating content. When Mozilla launches a new version of Firefox, it is delivered in 75-plus languages simultaneously (2010). As long as the initiatives align with the Mozilla ideology, the organization chooses to make it easier for people to do what they wanted with the brand. A similar philosophy has also been adopted for marketing the Mozilla brand whereby a community of marketing professionals and enthusiast consumers helped to construct and implement a marketing campaign, even to the extent of donating money to run a launch campaign for Firefox.

Challenges to the concept
The concept of conscientious brands and the blocks on which it is built can be challenged from different angles. First, the stakeholder perspective has been challenged by Frooman¹⁶ in particular for being too company-centric. While he recognizes the impact of Freeman’s 1984 book, he also judges that in his ‘hub-and-spoke conceptualization, relationships are dyadic, independent of one another, viewed largely from the firm’s vantage point, and defined in terms of actor attributes.’
   Certainly traditional models of organization-stakeholder interaction have emphasized the organization as doing things to, and communicating at, stakeholders. In a more networked world where interactions are fluid and organizations are more porous and transparent, it has become clear that the connections between stakeholders has become more complex and the locus of control has shifted away from the organization. This has become evident during uprisings in North Africa and riots in the UK (2011) as brands such as Facebook, Blackberry, Vodafone and Twitter have been used to facilitate civil unrest. As a consequence, these brands have been criticized by governments. Yet the point should be made here that it is citizens who are defining how these brands are used (whether it be for good or for bad) in ways that were never conceived of by the brand owners.
   Alternatively, Martin¹⁷ (2010) is critical of much management thinking because it lacks a sufficient customer orientation. He describes the stages of modern capitalism, from Berle and Means’ The Modern Corporation and Private Property,¹⁸ which signified the emergence of managerial capitalism to Jensen and Meckling’s Theory of the Firm,¹⁹ which signified a shift to shareholder capitalism. Jensen and Meckling’s emphasis on maximizing shareholder value has since become a standard of modern management and argues quite explicitly for the pre-eminence of the shareholder. Martin’s critique is that the focus on shareholders hasn’t done anything for shareholder returns: ‘there’s no sign that shareholders benefited more when their interests were put first and foremost.’ Shareholder capitalism has also made organizations dysfunctional, in that it also downplays the interdependence of their audiences. As several studies have shown, involved and engaged employees are important contributors to customer satisfaction which in turn leads to enhanced performance.²⁰ Similarly, having a positive reputation among influential people and organizations helps a business to achieve its broader goals. Where we might diverge from Martin is in his solution to shareholder capitalism. His argument is that the new orientation should be customer capitalism and he cites two key examples of organizations who have exemplary long-term performance and live up to their rhetoric: Johnson & Johnson and P&G. They are interesting choices and they certainly give prominence in their corporate statements to consumers, but the important thing is that they stress the intertwining of stakeholders. Johnson & Johnson’s credo is both long-lived and well known and connects doctors, nurses, patients, parents, children, communities and stockholders. P&G’s Principles state: ‘We will provide branded products and services of superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world’s consumers. As a result consumers will reward us with leadership sales, profit and value creation, allowing our people, our shareholders and the communities in which we live and work to prosper.’

A new approach
’Corporate brands are hugely influential on society and can either be part of the problem in fuelling excessive and high-impact consumption or part of the solution in driving consumers towards sustainable living.’
—Dax Lovegrove, Head of Business & Industry Relations, WWF UK

The central problem for the concept of conscientious brands is that one of the requirements for the organization is encouraging consumption, while a conscientious brand should be aiming to limit or shift consumption to ensure it is sustainable. As the philosopher Slavoj Zizek observes, you only have freedom to the extent that you make the right choices, which means: ‘you are free to do anything, as long as it involves shopping.’²¹
   Yet, there are some signs of resistance to the Zizek view in the emergence of the idea of voluntary simplicity. ‘Voluntary simplifiers’ describes a category of people who have made the conscious decision to reduce their consumption levels and find meaning through reducing their spend on products and services and spending more time on activities that generate meaning for them. This group is anti-consumerist and ideologically motivated.²² The size of this audience is difficult to estimate, but it is suggested that in the US there are some 60 million people who fit into the category.²³ These are still consuming individuals, but they are, in their eyes at least, consuming responsibly within self-defined boundaries. Kozinets has argued persuasively in his analysis of the Burning Man Festival that it is impossible to escape the market²⁴—except temporarily. Consumerism is all pervasive. Yet the emergence of voluntary simplifiers demonstrates that the ‘less is more’ mantra has a significant number of adherents.

Conclusion
Branding is changing. It is moving away from a focus on products and consumers to a services-dominant logic that weighs up and tries to balance the needs to all stakeholders in an increasingly transparent and fluid dialogue. What’s important for marketers and brand owners is to see this change not as a threat but as an enormous opportunity for brands to make a positive difference to the world. Brands can respond to the stated desire of consumers and citizens to live responsibly (even if there is a gap between stated intent and actions)²⁵ by using the tools of branding to change people’s behaviour so that it becomes more sustainable. This extends the role of brand owners beyond simply marketing products to helping people become more ethical. As Devinney, Auger and Eckhardt²⁶ argue, ethically oriented consumption requires consumers to become knowledgeable participants so that they can become more socially conscious in their purchasing and consumption. This will require organizations to move beyond their tendency to short-termism and their overt orientation on shareholder returns. Instead there will be a requirement to focus on the real needs of people and to engage with them in a services-dominant approach that recognizes the importance of participation and dialogue.

Notes
   1. S. L. Vargo and R. F. Lusch: ‘Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing’, Journal of Marketing, vol. 68, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1-17.
   2. Ibid., at p. 12.
   3. Thirty-four countries that are members of the forum that is committed to democracy and the market economy.
   4. D. Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature. London: Penguin 1969.
   5. R. Rorty: ‘Is Philosophy Relevant to Applied Ethics?’ Business Ethics Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 3, 2006, pp. 369-380.
   6. N. Ind (ed.): Beyond Branding: How the New Values of Transparency and Integrity Are Changing the World of Brands. London: Kogan Page 2003.
   7. R. E. Freeman: Strategic Management: a Stakeholder Approach. Boston: Pitman 1984.
   8. R. E. Freeman, J. S. Harrison and A. C. Wick: Managing for Stakeholders: Survival, Reputation and Success. New Haven: Yale University Press 2007.
   9. Ibid., at p. 6.
   10. A. M. Sjovall and A. C. Talk: ‘From Actions to Impressions: Cognitive Attribution Theory and the Formation of Corporate Reputation’, Corporate Reputation Review, vol. 7, no. 3, 2004, pp. 269-81.
   11. L. E. Olsen and A. Peretz: ‘Conscientious Brand Criteria: a Framework and a Case Example from the Clothing Industry’, Journal of Brand Management vol. 18, no. 9, 2011, pp. 639-49.
   12. S. Anholt: Brand New Justice: the Upside of Global Branding. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann 2003, at p. 160.
   13. R. E. Freeman, J. S. Harrison and A. C. Wick, op. cit.
   14. R. J. Brodie, M. S. Glyn, and V. Little: ‘The service brand and the service-dominant logic: missing fundamental premise or theneed for stronger theory?’ Marketing Theory, vol. 6, no. 3, 2009, pp. 363-79.
   15. N. Ind and M. Schultz: ‘Brand Building, Beyond Marketing’, Strategy & Business, July 2010.
   16. J. Frooman: ‘Stakeholder Influence Strategies’, Academy of Management Review, vol. 24, no. 2, 1999, pp. 191-205.
   17. R. Martin: ‘The Age of Customer Capitalism’, Harvard Business Review, vol. 88, nos. 1-2, 2010, pp. 58-65.
   18. A. Berle and G. Means: The Modern Corporation and Private Property. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers 1932.
   19. M. Jensen and W. Meckling: ‘Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behaviour, Agency Costs, and Ownership Structure’, Journal of Financial Economics, vol. 3, no. 4, 1976, pp. 305-60.
   20. A. Rucci, S. Kirn and R. Quinn: ‘The Employee-Customer-Profits Chain at Sears’, Harvard Business Review, vol. 76, no. 1, 1998, pp. 82-97; M. G. Patterson, M. A. West, R. Lawthom and S. Nickell: Impact of People Management Practices on Business Performance. London: the Institute of Personnel and Development 1997; D. Maister: Practice What You Preach: What Managers Must Do to Create a High Performance Culture. New York: Free Press 2001.
   21. S. Böhm and C. de Cock: ‘Liberalist Fantasies: Zizek and the Impossibility of the Open Society’, Organization, vol. 14, no. 6, 2007, pp. 815-36; S. Zizek: Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books 2008.
   22. F. M. Belz and K. Peattie: Sustainability Marketing: A Global Perspective. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons 2009; C. J. Oates, S. McDonald, P. Alevizou, K. Hwang and W. Young: ‘Marketing Sustainability: Use of Information Sources and Degrees of Voluntary Simplicity’, Journal of Marketing Communication, vol. 14, no. 5, 2008, pp. 351-65.
   23. J. A. Sandlin, and C. S. Walther: ‘Complicated Simplicity: Moral Identity Formation and Social Movement Learning in the Voluntary Simplicity Movement’, Adult Education Quarterly, vol. 59, 2009, pp. 298-317.
   24. R. V. Kozinets: ‘Can Consumers Escape the Market? Emancipatory Illuminations from Burning Man’, The Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 29, no. 1, 2002, pp. 20-38.
   25. Young et al. notes an estimated 30 per cent of consumers indicate concern about environmental issues but only around 5 per cent translate this concern into action. W. Young, K. Hwang, S. McDonald and C. J. Oates: ‘Sustainable Consumption: Green Consumer Behaviour When Purchasing Products’, Sustainable Development Journal, vol. 18, no. 1, 2010, pp. 20-31.
   26. T. Devinney, P. Auger and G. M. Eckhardt: ‘Values vs. Value’, Strategy & Business, no. 62, spring 2011.

The article is a version of a paper published in Medium, the journal of mediology, summer 2011.

Yousef Tuqan Tuqan
CEO, Flip Media
yousef@flip.me

Stanley Moss
DiGanZi
diganzi@gmail.com

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011

‘You only know that you have succeeded as a blogger when they put you in jail.’—Egyptian joke, circa 2010

ENDLESSLY RESOURCEFUL, humans long to transmit information even when extraneous conditions seem to conspire to thwart them. Take, for example, the case of Muhannad, a Bahraini journalist and news aggregator who in 2009 followed his entrepreneurial instincts and set up a daily news feed called Breaking News, via Blackberry Messenger. It mattered not that the devices can hold only a maximum of 2,000 contacts. Once he had attracted over 13,000 subscribers registered to receive his daily updates, including a 6 a.m. round-up of newspaper headlines, Muhannad had taken to carrying multiple devices with him, becoming much of a local celebrity, armed with his armada of Blackberries wherever he went.
   One morning in April 2010, subscribers to Muhannad’s daily news service received a message stating, ‘I am sorry about the inconvenience, but as you do know, it is well beyond my capabilities.’ The message, signed Muhannad Sulaiman Al Noaimi, continued, ‘I will suspend the service in compliance with the law, but it will be only for a few days until I complete the procedures to get the license. I will not give up this right to freedom of providing information.’
   In the years leading up to the Arab spring of 2011, Middle Eastern nations had experienced an unprecedented wave of change in how citizens were able to access media, and how governments struggled to contain it. For Arab citizens in the 1980s, access to media was restricted to terrestrial government-owned TV and radio broadcasters, local newspapers and a trickling of international newspapers and magazines, which had objectionable content either blacked out or ripped from the magazines. In Kuwait during that era, every story relating to Israel in a foreign publication was stamped with the message ‘Know your enemy.’
   Subsequently, the proliferation of satellite television, the internet and mobile phones created untold opportunities for Arab citizens to access, consume and produce media and content on their own terms. And their governments responded in the only way they know how: by blocking access wherever possible. The black marker of the 1980s was replaced with proxies that block Internet access, and legislation which criminalizes unlicensed broadcasting.
   A March 2010 report by the organization Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) entitled ‘Enemies of the Internet’ listed the ‘worst violators of freedom of expression on the Net’. Five of the twelve countries listed were Middle Eastern: Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Tunisia.
Since that report was published, two of the five (Egypt and Tunisia) have seen the overthrow of their government by popular protests, another two (Saudi Arabia and Iran) have seen widespread protests in the streets, and Syria has a revolution still in progress.
   Bahrain, meanwhile, was listed by RSF as ‘Under surveillance’ due to its practice of internet filtering, the surveillance of bloggers, and a requirement that all websites hosted in the country or abroad featuring information about the kingdom’s business, arts, religion, or politics be registered with the Ministry of Culture and Information.
   At the time of its shutdown by the Ministry in April 2011, Breaking News’ formidable following of 13,000 Blackberry Messenger subscribers was all the more significant, given the immediacy of the news and the fact that its circulation exceeded many of Bahrain’s largest daily newspapers. Bahrain’s Ministry of Culture and Information had announced a ban on the sharing of news via Blackberry citing the ‘impact that such news create among the public by causing chaos and confusion, especially since the source is individuals and agencies which have failed to obtain official permission by the ministry.’
   After a petition by Muhannad in May 2010, his Breaking News Blackberry service was restored, renamed Muhannad’s News. This indicated to its subscribers that it was not an official news source. By September 2010, Muhannad’s News—now broadcasting from 16 Blackberries—had attracted 32,000 subscribers. That was the point when his service was permanently shut down, along with his Breaking News website, which by then attracted over 122,000 visitors per month.
   ‘I have … thousands of subscribers who want to stay posted on latest news and developments in the kingdom,’ Muhannad stated. ‘I started this group in December last year and since then it has grown at a fast pace, [but] we respect Bahraini laws and regulations and will stop providing our free services for our Blackberry group and website subscribers until further notice.’
   While the ban in September may have spelled the end of his Blackberry news service, it has not been the end of Muhannad’s passion for journalism. On February 24, 2011, the Bahrain News Agency launched its own new website. At the launch, the BNA’s newly-appointed Director stated, ‘the website will be more interactive as it is connected to Facebook, Twitter and (has) special applications for Blackberry, iPhone and iPad.’
   The name of its newly appointed Director was Muhannad Sulaiman Al Noaimi.

The article is a version of a paper published in the Journal of Brand Management (2011).

Ava Maria Hakim
IBM Global Solutions
hakimava@us.ibm.com

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011

THE TRULY CONSCIENTIOUS BRAND cannot exist in a society based on consumerism. The challenge lies in the sociology of capitalism and a system which has created an environment of producers and consumers that support each other in an ongoing cycle of eco-terror and innovation decadence. Patterns of consumption and the animal spirits driving today’s prevailing economic systems have to change in order to go beyond corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the ethical capitalism that remain closely connected with the profit-responsibility of the corporation to its stakeholders. Positive change has to strike at the core of the problem—the model itself. By doing so, the opportunity exists to develop a sustainable economic and social model versus a model that, by its very nature, has more negative impact than the positive impact created from its “sustainability” efforts.
   The model would have at its core the following five concepts:

• Mass production = mass destruction
• Innovation should be mindful, not landfill
• Measure long term use value
• Quality is a craft
• Consumer needs are basic

Brand management plays a significant role in influencing and affecting consumer behaviour. Changing consumer behaviours and production philosophies, while expanding control of strategic brand direction, will determine the speed at which a socially responsible and environmentally friendly economic model will be developed.

Sustainability is parallel to the horizon
In a line diagram of production, sustainability is the horizontal baseline. This represents the essence of sustainability—the ability to endure the forces that act upon it. It also represents the goal—equilibrium of production with the resources needed to produce. In today’s consumption-based society, demand is increasing the distance from the ‘production’ line to the ‘sustainability’ baseline. As production increases, so does waste and the depletion of resources. This has a multiplying effect with more waste potentially impacting future resources and thereby negating any positive results from other pro-environment initiatives. In Figure 1, nothing is moving toward the ‘sustainability’ baseline. This is the production model of consumerism. Sell more, produce more, use more—in any order you like. Sustainable development defined as ‘that which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’¹ is not possible in this model. As long as development forces an increasing depletion of resources and continued growth rate of waste, “sustainable development” is in fact an oxymoron.²

Figure 1: Impact of a consumption-based model

   Ethical capitalism and CSR initiatives attempt to change the direction of these lines by injecting innovation. But in most cases the innovation can only impact the angle of the lines. For example, eco-efficient design may decrease the angle of the waste and resource line, but because production continues at the same or increasing rate (fuelled by consumers connecting to sustainability) the impact remains incremental. Similarly the use of renewable resources may decrease the rate of depletion of resources, but without a change in production numbers, the direction remains the same. Rarely is there an impact to the production line because by its nature, capitalism is about production and growth. The consumer becomes both the target and source of this destructive desire for growth.

Concept 1: Mass production = mass destruction
As long as the focus is on producing more stuff for more consumers, the ‘waste’ and ‘resource’ lines move away from sustainability. To move closer to the ‘sustainability’ baseline, both the ‘waste’ and ‘resource’ lines need to change direction—waste needs to be removed and resources need to be used at a rate less than or equal to the natural rate of replenishment.
   ‘Researchers have compared humans’ annual demand for resources with the area of land needed to generate the required resources and absorb the wastes … They calculated that in 1961 human demand for resources was about 70 percent of Earth’s ability to regenerate; by the 1980s demand had grown to equal the annual supply of resources, and by the end of the 1990s it exceeded by 20 percent Earth’s capacity to sustain consumption. “It takes the biosphere, therefore, at least a year and three months to renew what humanity uses in a single year”, so that humanity is now eating its capital, Earth’s natural capital.’³ Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh uses a powerful metaphor—the Sutra on the Son’s Flesh—to illustrate the outcome of maintaining current consumption patterns.⁴ The moral of the Sutra is that in effect we will be eating the flesh of our children if we do not make changes now to safeguard their future through more mindful consumption.
   To create more goods for more consumers, mass resources are taken from one location, often shipped to another location for development and then sent to distribution points for consumer masses around the world. Waste is created throughout the cycle not just at the end of the product’s life.
   To reduce waste, the amount of goods produced needs to be reduced and changes need to be made in how things are produced. Innovation and quality concepts need to be applied beyond mere product design to eco-efficient production systems—or “eco-systems” of production quality. In these “eco-systems” of production, waste is ultimately recycled into the “natural resource” and quality drives the need for fewer replacements and long-term use value (Anderson, Sarah et al 2004; Wessels, Tom 2006).⁵ Figure 2 illustrates the impact of innovation and quality to production reduction—narrowing the gap between waste and resources.

Figure 2: Impact of reduction in production

Muji, a Japanese retail company that sells a variety of household and consumer goods, was established in 1980 with the idea of ‘completely eliminating wastefulness … It started with careful selection of materials, streamlined processes and simplified packaging. The concept of rationalizing products by totally eliminating wastefulness, and at the same time making them more attractive, is at the heart of traditional Japanese æsthetics’.⁶ The company looked to add quality with a no-label philosophy. They design things based on simple functionality–‘not a fancy towel, but a useful towel. Socks with right angles like feet. Beautifully simple bicycles.’ The Muji design process resists technology and prototypes are produced with paper rather than computers, so as not to encourage unnecessary detail. The manufacturing process is determined on the basis of the consumer’s use of the product, which in turn is a design priority. Finishes, lines and forms are minimized for manufacturing ease. They maintain continuous and open communication with customers through the Quality Products for Everyday Life Research Center—a ‘laboratory’ where they have dialogue with customers to determine what ‘will suffice’. Muji does little or no advertising, gaining recognition purely from word of mouth, and quality of product.

Concept 2: Innovation should be mindful, not landfill
The current nature of innovation is iterative, rapid, and for competition’s sake. In an economic system where greater profit and continued growth is the goal, innovation becomes a source of survival and the means for “beating” the competition. This type of innovation creates an innovation decadence that spews products for the sake of creating something “new” rather than creating something useful or something needed. It produces an array of choices that are essentially the same with minor differences in features designed to appeal to the consumer looking for the latest thing or “lifestyle enhancer”.
   Take a look at the number of bottled water drinks. Carbonated water, sparkling water, spring water, filtered watered, water with flavour, and even water with vitamins (for those who prefer not to get their vitamins through proper nutrition). The water comes in big bottles, little bottles, plastic bottles, squirt bottles. The Container Recycling Institute reports that ‘Americans buy an estimated 34·6 billion single-serving (1 litre or less) plastic water bottles each year. Almost eight out of ten end up in a landfill or incinerator. Hundreds of millions end up as litter on roads and beaches or in streams and other waterways. Taxpayers pay hundreds millions of dollars each year in disposal and litter cleanup costs. That’s 877 bottles wasted every second’.⁷ Yet more than one of the water companies claims to be socially responsible with a sustainability focus.
   Furthermore, innovation focused on product differentiation not only stresses out the natural environment with unnecessary resource usage and waste, but it also causes societal stress as consumers, and labourers struggle to “keep up” with the latest technological advancements.⁸ Innovation in a sustainable model needs to be directed beyond the walls of the corporate cash register and the marketing department. It needs to address the entire product life cycle and focus on the resources not only to create but also to dispose of the product. If innovation ends up in landfill or on roads and beaches, it is not innovation—it is rubbish. Sustainable development requires innovation to define a process that changes production to reduce waste and maintain natural resources.
   Apple, Inc., ranked as the top most innovative company in 2011 by Fast Company,⁹ has an environmental approach that begins at the design stage and provides a comprehensive “cradle-to-grave” approach including a full Life Cycle Assessment. Apple tracks the environmental impact of each product by measuring greenhouse gas emissions for its facilities, the manufacturing process, product packaging, transportation, and customer usage of its products. An environmental report is provided for all products they currently ship. Their recycling programme ‘begins in the design stage, when we create compact, efficient products that require less material to produce. The materials we do use—including arsenic-free glass, high-grade aluminium, and strong polycarbonate—are highly valuable to recyclers, who can reclaim them for use in new products’.¹⁰ These practices enable Apple to drive greater efficiency and develop products that have less impact on the environment.
   Riversimple, a UK-based transport provider with the goal ‘to eliminate the environmental impact of personal transport’ is applying business model innovation to change an entire industry. Riversimple has applied what they are calling ‘whole system design’ to develop a completely new approach to auto manufacturing. This approach looks at the entire system (of business) and optimizes the whole versus focusing on one single subsystem.¹¹
   Today, auto manufacturing is based on a model that generates revenue by “selling more products”. Design and technology are used to sell more products and sell more products more often. By not defining their business as auto manufacturing, the Riversimple model looks to sell mobility as a service—shifting the auto manufacturing model mentality of “sell more products to make more money” to “generate revenue from less product”. The interest of the mobility provider becomes the efficiency, longevity and quality of the vehicle in order to optimize the revenue from each vehicle versus optimizing product sales. Like Muji, Riversimple looks to accomplish their goals via a collaborative innovation environment that is open to the world of designers and engineers.¹²

Concept 3: Measure long-term use value
The real measure of the value of an innovation, or product should be in the long-term life time use value—not share or transactional economic value. Our society of consumerism continually wants and buys the latest, throwing away the “old”. But in an environment of rapid innovation, old becomes younger and younger. Consider the life span of a cellphone—two to five years at the maximum? Nearly 2 billion cell phones were sold in 2007, double the sales number in 2000.¹³ Including the handset, battery and adapter, each represents about one pound of waste that needs to be managed.¹⁴ Add to that all the accessories, whose lifespan is even shorter and it becomes apparent that recycling efforts will have to increase significantly in order to be at all effective. According to Environmental Protection Agency reports, the amount of recycling is increasing, yet the actual percent of what is recycled has remained constant because consumption continues to grow at an ever increasing rate.¹⁵
   By designing for long-term use value rather than short-term profitability, the rate of waste production slows along with the need to produce more and more of the same basic thing. It also means creating a product that is built to last and bringing to market those innovations that make a significant difference—a difference that is worth the overall impact it has across its life time. Wouldn’t it be better to have a cellphone designed with the same principles as a fine Swiss watch? And rather than throwing them away every two years, we pass them along to the next generation who actually longs to use it.
   IWC Schaffhausen has been engineering master timepieces since 1868. The company was founded in Schaffhausen, Switzerland to take advantage of the skilled craftsmen, low wages and location. From the beginning, IWC used invention and innovation to design according to the founder’s ultimate mission: ‘simple but perfect, absolutely reliable mechanical watches for everyday use’. The company began keeping detailed records for every watch that has left the factory since 1885. Since 1885, details of the calibre, materials used and cases have been entered into the records. In the case of later models, the company claims that its service department has the parts and is capable of repairing and maintaining watches from every era since IWC’s foundation in 1868.¹⁶
   Today, IWC is still in Schaffhausen with a few hundred employees. Their timepieces are still produced to the quality goals set at inception with many of its models sought by collectors. Quality, treasured products—products likely to never occupy a landfill.

Concept 4: Quality is a craft
Schumpeter states in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy that capitalism forced out the artisan and craftsman. ‘The world of the artisan was destroyed primarily by the automatic effects of the competition that came from the capitalist entrepreneur’.¹⁷ Gone with the artisan and craftsman is the passion for producing individual items of quality and moreover, gone is the connection of the producer to the final product. With the assembly line and the “factory” concept (applied even in service organizations today) workers have become more and more disconnected from the final product and from the actual consumer of the product. Rather than one person putting their name on the product and holding accountability, there are now sales organizations that sell, factories that produce, and a whole host of directors driven by their own agendas. In very few cases do sales work in the factory or vice versa. The factory worker has no connection or accountability to the consumer. After all, if there is a problem, the consumer will call the help desk in a low-cost country and be assisted by someone who is “scripted” and has no impact on the design or production of the product. And all sales wants to do is sell. How authentic is that? Yet you will find that many corporations utilizing these practices are also branding themselves as socially responsible.
   In the proposed model, the craftsman is brought back into the picture with the sole responsibility to add more “soul”—to bring back a passion for quality. Quality—not quantity—is the key to sustainability. IWC is one example of the true value of quality. But this also requires that consumers understand the value of quality and change their compulsive buying behaviour. Conscientious brands need to influence conscientious consumption.

Concept 5: Consumer needs are basic
According to Jeffrey Sachs in The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time, ‘the extreme poor and the poor make up about 40 percent of humanity’.¹⁸ He continues, ‘The gulf between today’s rich and poor countries is … a new phenomenon, a yawning gap that opened during the period of modern economic growth … Today’s vast income inequalities illuminate two centuries of highly uneven patterns of economic growth.’ He goes on to explain that this discrepancy is due to the ability of some regions to achieve unprecedented ‘long-term increases in total production’ with technological innovation being the main force behind this achievement.¹⁹ But, at what cost?
   Numerous studies and indices show that human development and satisfaction do not continue to grow with personal expenditures or Gross Domestic Product (GDP).²⁰ ‘Despite high and sustained levels of economic growth in the West over a period of 50 years—growth that has seen average real incomes increase several times over—the mass of people are no more satisfied with their lives now that they were then’.²¹ The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), a measure that looks at human development and welfare of a nation in relation to economic progress shows that in fact the ‘well-being’ of Americans has declined even though GDP has increased. Similarly, the Happy Planet Index (HPI) which measures the relative efficiency with which nations convert the planet’s natural resources into long and happy lives for their citizens²² shows a negative correlation between GDP and the changes in HPI. The Index supports the view that ‘Over-consumption in rich countries represents one of the key barriers to sustainable well-being worldwide’.²³
   So although growth is needed to provide 40 per cent of humanity to a standard of living that ensures survival, there appears to be a point where growth no longer provides positive benefits. ‘Growth not only fails to make people contented; it destroys many of the things that do. Growth fosters empty consumerism, degrades the natural environment, weakens social cohesion and corrodes character’.²⁴ This occurs because once basic needs are satisfied, the market and promoters of growth convince us that we need more—more to demonstrate that we are accomplished, that we live a certain lifestyle and that we have meaningful, progressive lives. But meaning does not come from manufactured objects of identity. Moreover, this consumption-based model is not sustainable. It does not positively impact our behaviours, our sense of well-being or the well-being of our society and the planet. Even as global consumption expands without precedence, consumers basic needs are not being met—sanitation, water, food, and happiness.
   The United Nations Millennium Development Goals to cut poverty in half by 2015 are certainly noble. But if the thought is to progress billions of people along the path of the current “high-income”, consumption based countries, the plan is strongly faulted. It has been stated that ‘if everyone in the world were to consume as much as the average consumer in the rich countries we would require four planets the size of earth’.²⁵ Without a change in the culture of capitalism itself, without the development of a more conscientious consumer and society as a whole, the dream of ending poverty may be achievable but totally unsustainable. Such progress will be void of what people really want—happiness.

The role of brand management
To develop the “truly conscientious” brand will require an expansion of brand management’s influence on production, development and areas of innovation. Without some ability to influence the development of products and services, brand management is not managing the brand but simply creating marketing messaging.
   Brand management plays a significant role in influencing consumer behaviour and brand managers have a key role in helping to eliminate those things that drive excessive consumption and social and environmental destruction. Consumption in itself is not a bad thing. Rather it is the increasing rate of consumption by a relatively small part of the global population that puts strain on the environment and forces consumption patterns on others that are not sustainable. Eliminating shallow marketing messaging and “lifestyle” advertising is the first step toward positive change and influencing the development of a conscientious consumer—one that demands quality, eco-efficient products with long-term use value—from all the products that they purchase. The same type of creativity that is applied to developing identities and campaigns needs to be applied to developing products that eliminate wastefulness. The goal is more with less. More meaning, less stuff. More quality, less waste.
   Change has to occur in production and consumption. Corporate social responsibility initiatives typically only address the symptoms and in some cases drive further increases in the rate of production, waste and consumption inequalities. Brand management has the ability to influence both production and consumption, but to do so brand management will also need to change. Brand management has to become the catalyst for sustainable development and an activist for the conscientious consumer. In developing countries, there is great opportunity to create models for sustainable development from which conscientious brands can arise naturally. In developed countries this change will be more challenging but the implications are great. Models to address these challenges deserve further investigation and immediate thought.
   ‘When we’re able to get out of the shell of our small self and see that we are interrelated with everyone and everything, we see that each of our acts affects the whole of humankind, the whole cosmos … Mindful consumption brings about health and healing, for ourselves and our planet.’²⁶

Notes
   1. Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1987, p. 54. Viewed November 2010, http://www.un-documents.net/ocf-02.htm#I.
   2. S. Harding: Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing Co. 2006; S. L. Hart: Capitalism at the Crossroads: Aligning Business, Earth, and Humanity, 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing 2007.
   3. C. Hamilton: Growth Fetish. London: Pluto Press 2004.
   4. T. N. Hanh: The World We Have: a Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology. Berkeley, Calif.: Parallax Press 2008.
   5. S. Anderson, et al: Alternatives to Economic Globalization: a Better World Is Possible. San Francisco: Berrett–Koehler Publishers, Inc. 2004; T. Wessels: The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable Future. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England 2006.
   6. ‘Back to Our Origins, Into the Future’, Muji Global 2010, http://www.muji.com/message/. Viewed November 2010.
   7. ‘Bottled Water’, Container Recycling Institute 2010, http://www.container-recycling.org/issues/bottledwater.htm. Viewed November 2010.
   8. D. Harvey: The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
   9. ‘Most Innovative Companies 2011’, Fast Company, no. 153, March 2011, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/153. Viewed March 2011.
   10. ‘Apple and the Environment’, Apple Inc. 2010, http://www.apple.com/environment/. Viewed November 2010.
   11. ‘About us’, Riversimple LLP 2010, http://www.riversimple.com/Content.aspx?type=7&mode=menu&key=136c7243-2378-407e-96cf-750d15de37a8. Viewed November 2010.
   12. Ibid.
   13. Electronics Waste Management in the United States. Washington, DC: Office of Solid Waste, US Environmental Protection Agency 2008, EPA530-R-08-009, p. 11, http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/ecycling/docs/app-1.pdf. Viewed November 2010.
   14. B. K. M. Fishbein: Waste in the Wireless World: the Challenge of Cell Phones. New York: Inform, Inc. 2002, p. 23.
   15. Fact Sheet: Management of Electronic Waste in the US. Washington, DC: US Environmental Protection Agency 2008, EPA530-F-08-014, p. 8, http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/ecycling/manage.htm. Viewed November 2010.
   16. ‘About IWC’, International Watch Company 2010, http://www.iwc.com/history/. Viewed November 2010.
   17. J. A. Schumpeter: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London: George Allen & Unwin 1976.
   18. J. D. Sachs: The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time. New York: Penguin Books 2005, p. 19.
   19. Ibid., at pp. 28–31.
   20. C. Hamilton, op. cit., at pp. 54–61; S. Harding, op. cit.; J. G. Speth: The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. Yale, Conn.: Yale University Press 2008.
   21. C. Hamilton, op. cit., at p. 3.
   22. ‘About the Happy Planet Index’, Happy Planet Index 2·0, 2009, http://www.happyplanetindex.org/learn/. Viewed November 2010.
   23. S. Abdallah, S. Thompson, M. Michaelson, and N. Steuer: The Happy Planet Index 2.0: Why Good Lives Don’t Have to Cost the Earth. London: New Economics Foundation 2009.
   24. C. Hamilton, op. cit.
   25. C. Hamilton, op. cit., at p. 174.
   26. T. N. Hanh, op. cit., at p. 27.

Adapted from the book, Meaning at Work, by Nicholas Ind. Published by Cappelen, 2010.

I CAN FIND examples of both freedom and happiness within 400 m of where I live. First there is a women’s clothing shop, which also sells Swedish Gustavian-style furniture, that proclaims in its window, in a nice hand-written script, Shopping makes us happy. I’m never quite sure if this refers to the owners of the shop or is aimed at would be shoppers—perhaps, in a recognition of mutuality, it is both. Anyway, once I have contemplated, or even experienced, happiness, I only have to walk down the road to arrive at my nearest 7-Eleven. This is a shop that is defined as a convenience store and sells a limited range of everyday items, but the advertising banners inside the shop shout one thing: freedom. An interesting use of such a fought-over and argued-about word. Is this the same freedom that John Stuart Mill wrote about or Gandhi protested for or Che Guevara died for? Seemingly not. It is, in fact, the freedom to shop early in the morning and late at night. That such diversity can be contained in one word is perhaps a problem of the inadequacy of language, but it also points to a problem in our world: the inadequacy of ourselves. In other words, we too often fail to spot the difference between the significant and insignificant. It may be true that my 7-Eleven offers me some sort of freedom, but it is not in any way a profound freedom. Similarly, maybe purchasing a nice Gustavian table might give me a temporary lift (if I did indeed covet such a piece of furniture), but that happiness will be impermanent. When we think about finding meaning at work, we face the same problem—how to find that which is enduring and significant. This requires us to unpick the meaning of such ideas as freedom, happiness and fulfilment and to understand their relevance for our working lives. ¹
   Freedom is something that we seek and chafe against when we don’t have enough of it. Its denial seems particularly important for us, for as the philosopher, Isaiah Berlin argues, freedom is a requirement of humanity: ‘to surrender one’s freedom is to surrender oneself, to lose one’s humanity.’ ² Indeed, Berlin argues that the only reason we should submit to authority is for utilitarian reasons—because it seems to make sense to do so. Much influenced by Mill, Berlin argues that individuals should be free to follow their own interests, to ‘allow more spontaneous, individual variation (for which the individual must in the end assume full responsibility) will always be worth more than the neatest and most delicately fashioned imposed pattern.’ ³ What Berlin is reacting against are totalizing systems that seek perfection and that require individuals to conform to an ideal. We might judge that rather than accepting the dictates and directives of an organization, we ought to have the courage to be sceptical and questioning. This is not an argument for sabotage, because the point Berlin makes about responsibility ought to be at the front of our minds. It is the attitude we adopt when we challenge that is important. The idea of responsibility is not a cover for only making the right conformist choice, but rather for choosing with courage. ⁴ If we are part of an organization, we ought to assume a minimum of alignment of values—a degree of mutual interest. Yet, the result of this identification should not be passive acquiescence in the seeming certitude of managers, but a positive participation that is driven by the desire to improve the organization, together with others. This way of thinking is not about individualism as such, but the individual seeking change for the betterment of all. Managers might groan at the thought of all this unfettered freedom. If everyone takes up the opportunity to challenge—even if they are thinking of the good of the organization—might it not generate a state of anarchy and destroy the unity of the organization? It certainly might be messy and require a lot of dialogue—even perhaps a need for what Deirdre McCloskey calls ‘sweet talk’⁵—but it has the real virtue of utilizing the intelligence and creativity of all of an organization’s members, rather than just a select élite.
   Yet the challenge here is that societies, organizations and communities can place the commitment to unity above the integrity of the individual. Sometimes they might be right to do so, but the repression of individuals may be the result of a desire to preserve what is convenient and comfortable. A common theme that we see, for example, in Ibsen’s drama, is the constraint imposed by a society that tries to hide the unpleasant and the unpalatable—and the consequences of avoiding difficult truths. It’s a theme we see surface again and again in films and books from Charles Dickens to Ingmar Bergman to David Lynch—the superficial veneer of outward well-being and conformity that masks deceit and violence. It should be a strong reminder to managers of the need for openness and freedom; to not repress individual desire, but to give it some focus. Berlin gives us a guide as to how to manage this by making a distinction between negative freedom—the degree to which individuals are free from man-made barriers—and positive freedom—the degree to which individuals are free to determine how they do things and their ability to self-organize. ⁶ For the organization to have some degree of unity and to distinguish it from the unstructured world around it, there must be some limit to freedom from. Freedom to, on the other hand, comes from the desire of the individual to be master of their own life and not dependent on the will of others; to be free to realize potential. The issue here for the organization is how freedom from and freedom to are dynamically determined, for organizations all to some degree try to coerce, manipulate or encourage the individual to adhere to certain goals and a way of doing things. Generally we accept this Faustian pact because freedom from is an instrumental freedom in that it enables discovery and creativity within specific constraints. However, it does of course depend on the space of freedom. There is a specific metaphor I sometimes use to explain this: a framed painting, by the semi-abstractionist, Howard Hodgkin. Hodgkin spends a lot of time—sometimes several years—on his paintings, returning to them periodically as his ideas and perspective change. He also paints on the frame of the picture, exploring its boundaries. The frame signifies the area of negative freedom. An individual can explore and create within that boundary and can also explore the extent of the boundaries, questioning the frame of freedom from. The painted area represents that which the individual has mastery over—the domain of positive freedom, where we generate content and a sense of meaning.
   As with all metaphors, while the idea of the picture attunes us to certain ideas, it also closes down others. It misses out the sense that this is a picture that is painted in an organic way together with other members of the organization (and even interested and influential outsiders). It is also a rather static metaphor in that ideally the frame itself should change shape to reflect the dynamic nature of freedom and the likelihood that our space will be invaded by the incursions of others. We might even argue that a lot of the time we are not consciously painting, but simply daubing without real thought. And yet, in spite of these limitations, Hodgkin’s paintings remind us that we exist in different worlds. In other words each individual participates in several pictures which vary depending on the space of freedom. The sports team we belong to, the community we are part of and the place where we work all offer different spaces. Additionally, the picture space changes depending on the organization. For someone who works in a call centre or in a logistics organization, where the rules and policies are perhaps more tightly defined, the canvas might be quite small, whereas for an academic or an innovation consultant, where there are fewer constraints, it might be quite large. Yet, we should always argue for maximizing the space for the benefit of the organization and for the individual as a means of self-discovery and self-realization; to provide the opportunity to overcome a sense of alienation and purposelessness and to create something of value. That the space of freedom is rarely maximized in practice seems largely to do with blinkers. Organizations fail to trust their people sufficiently, preferring the security of control and continuity to the adventure of freedom, while individuals are inured to the possibilities of thinking differently. If we only use the freedom that we have to do the mundane, the obvious and the superficial, it is not much of a freedom. Nietzsche sees the way people use their freedom in terms of a dull morality that trains them to follow the herd.
   We might conclude that freedom creates opportunity, but how we use that opportunity at work determines whether freedom has any larger relevance both for the organization and ourselves as individuals. The issue then becomes what ‘relevance’ might mean. Traditionally for the organization that has meant that individuals use what freedom they have for the greater good to deliver a certain level of performance. Economists and analysts like this type of relevance because it is easy to measure. However, some question where the individual is in all this. They suggest that it is all well and good to have an employee benefiting the organization, but what about the individual’s happiness. Shouldn’t work contribute to happiness? And wouldn’t happier workers also contribute more? We might answer yes to both these questions, but I think there are several problems with the concept of happiness. Frankly, happiness is over-rated.
   The first problem with happiness is to determine what it is. We might argue that is a feeling of well-being, of satisfaction, perhaps of euphoria. Yet, we should also note that happiness tends to be a temporary condition. We might on balance look at our life and say we have been happy, but there will undoubtedly have been ups and downs. Richard Layard in his book Happiness (2005) asserts that it is not possible to be both happy and unhappy at the same time—that we move from one to the other and back again. When we talk of happiness we might think about how it seems to lift us above our normal state, but while we can perhaps share some common notions of happiness, it’s always an individual experience. We can analyse brain activity and we can conduct research into the attributes of happiness, but I cannot exactly communicate the feeling, nor is it easy to judge the happiness of others. When it comes to work and happiness, the concept feels misplaced. I might be able to correlate work and being happy, but what drives me at work is more about fulfilment. If we think about people such as Mark Rothko or Ingmar Bergman or Samuel Beckett we do not see a quest for happiness. Rothko’s life, for example, was full of challenges, anguish and only the realization in late middle age of his artistic potential. If Rothko was happy at some point it was as a result of his finding meaning in his work. Happiness then is a result, even a by-product, of the discovery of meaning. It derives from our failures, wrong turns and miscalculations as much as our successes. Indeed, misery can contribute just as much to our fulfilment as happiness. It is when we try and make happiness the primary focus that we end up pursuing the wrong things—by which I mean experiences that lack any substantive resonance in our lives. We can see this in John Logan’s Red (2009), a play which weaves a narrative around the real life commission of Mark Rothko to produce a series of large scale paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in the iconic Seagram Building on Park Avenue, New York. Rothko, who has been commissioned by the architect, Philip Johnson, is excited about the status the paintings will give him. In the play he walks around his newly acquired downtown Manhattan studio happily musing to himself, ‘Rembrandt and Rothko … Rembrandt and Rothko … Rothko and Rembrandt … Rothko and Rembrandt … And Turner.’ His vanity has been stirred by his sense of outdoing his peers and he justifies doing the commission by arguing that his paintings will not just be decoration for ‘the richest bastards in New York’, but ‘will transcend the setting.’ However, stirred by the challenge of his assistant, Rothko comes to realize what he is doing is pointless and superficial. He might be enjoying the accolades, but he is not being true to himself and his quest for fulfilment. He calls Philip Johnson and tells him he will return the $35,000 he has been paid (equivalent to $2 million today) and keep the pictures himself. As he hangs up the phone his assistant says, proudly, ‘Now … now you are Mark Rothko.’ ⁷
   The desire to uncover a deeper meaning in what we do is, I believe, widespread. Take, for example Randy Hodson’s ethnographic study of individuals. It features numerous examples of individuals who bemoan the lack of opportunity to find meaning at work. In the words of one, ‘There isn’t anyone among us who doesn’t resent how the factory is operated so fast and sloppy, because there’s no way to respect what we’re doing and what we’re making. In fact, most people here like it best when things don’t work right and production goes to hell, and I’m right along with them. And that’s a crummy way to waste your working time.’ Hodson concludes that ‘meaning and satisfaction in work are grounded in doing quality work … employees prefer to act positively at the workplace and do so whenever the workplace situation allows positive action.’ ⁸
   The second issue I have with happiness is that it has become our god. We pursue it blindly and we try to restructure our worlds so that happiness is somehow contained within everything we do. The philosopher, Alenka Zupancic points out that ‘it has become imperative that we perceive all the terrible things that happen to us as ultimately something positive … negativity, lack, dissatisfaction, unhappiness, are perceived more and more as moral faults—worse as a corruption at the level of our very being or bare life.’ Life must encompass challenges and failure and rather than wishing it were not so, we should rather accept and learn from it. Of course, when we fail to learn from experience it becomes either tragic or comic, or perhaps both. If we simply try to make everything and everybody happy we must distort the world and the way we see it. It is suggested by some that all we need to make our lives happier is the power of positive thinking; that we can overcome adversity by attuning our minds to success. Yet this ignores the importance of questioning ourselves and those around us. We should not accept things at face value and we should understand that the negative things in life are as much a part of our being as the positive. Positivity might encourage us to try new things and help us to persist in the face of adversity, but we might also end up arrogant and deluded. We ought to have the courage to confront the new, but some cynicism helps us to get through life.
   The third failing of happiness is that organizational happiness must be seen collectively. My vision of greatest happiness might be total freedom to pursue my own interests, including spending every afternoon watching films, while my colleague might like to work very hard and be completely dedicated to working life. These and all the other countervailing ideas that co-exist in an organization need to be managed. In most contexts there needs to be order and constraint, so the absolute individualism of happiness must be denied. Individual happiness must be tempered by the principle of the greatest happiness. Yet this view, which was espoused by utilitarian thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, seems particularly difficult to apply. We might look at statistics of happiness and see that certain groups or nations are particularly happy, but we would still have to pose the question as to how we might actively create and maintain happiness. There might be some argument here about the value of equality—that as many people as possible in a community share in both the decision-making and the rewards that result—but in practice collective happiness seems both dubious and simplistic. We might imagine a scenario in an organization where industry over-capacity has led to consistent losses. The business logic here might be to cut volumes and people, yet this would clearly make a large number of people unhappy, in favour of perhaps the happiness of a limited number of institutional shareholders. The greatest happiness principle would argue that large numbers of employees should not be made redundant, yet by continuing with high levels of production, the long-term sustainability of the company is undermined and perhaps in time, everyone will lose their jobs. Also we might raise the more complex issue that if institutional shareholders suffer, then that would have an implication for the pension funds (and the individual pensions within the fund). The connectivity of different audiences and the length of time over which the issue of happiness is viewed, create significant problems. We might also wonder: who is best positioned to be the overall objective judge of happiness? Who enjoys a perspective over all the impacts of a decision and is sufficiently disinterested to make the right choice? It’s an impossible call to make, for even if we accepted happiness as the determining principle, we cannot decide what happiness might mean for every singular person in a multiplicity. As the narrator says in Conrad’s Lord Jim ‘It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.’ ⁹ The only antidote to these problems is to let individuals decide their own route to nirvana, but with the proviso that their quest must take account of the needs of others and the entity that is the organization.
   It is my belief, based on the arguments above, that happiness is an illusory ideal which is neither the basis for working in an organization nor for managing it. Organizations exist for a purpose—and the purpose is not based on the greatest happiness principle. That people might enjoy their work is a result of a belief that a positive working environment is conducive to success; that we work harder when we feel connected. Yet this is far more than happiness. And far more than freedom. It is more about the quest to find meaning in our lives and to attain a sense of fulfilment.
   How might we define this idea of fulfilment? It clearly connects to the idea of meaning in the suggestion of something beyond an immediate experience. It is the feeling of lightness, of pleasure, of enlightenment, of expressivity that is generated when we go beyond our perceived limits. There is in this a sense of fulfilment as liminal and as connected to Bataille’s ideas about challenging boundaries, such as when Rothko stepped out of his derivative past and into originality when he painted No. 1 in 1941. ¹⁰ To fulfil we must exceed. Whether fulfilment comes because of our active involvement in a political group or in the writing of a novel or in the leading of an organization, we must surpass our expectations. Anything less is just satisfaction or well-being—a sense of having done what was expected of us. This does not create fulfilment, but rather a cosiness that we might find comfortable or reassuring. Fulfilment is something different in that it can derive from discomfort, from destruction, from disharmony, from danger, from necessary suffering and from the tragic. We seek fulfilment because in exceeding we extend our sense of self, and we find that which gives a life meaning. Fulfilment is thus connected to memory, because it is the recall of past euphoric moments of fulfilment that drive us to seek future fulfilments. Fulfilment is born of restlessness; a desire not to repeat but to find difference, to find the new. An apt example of this was Igor Stravinsky’s 1951 opera, The Rake’s Progress. When it premièred in Venice it was accorded respect, applause and plaudits across Europe. Stravinsky, then 69, should have been pleased; it was far removed from the booing, fights and riot that had accompanied the first performance in 1913 of his seemingly shocking, The Rite of Spring, which challenged the accepted norms of classical ballet. W. H. Auden, who was the co-author of the libretto of The Rake’s Progress, wrote later of Stravinsky, ‘Once he has done something to his satisfaction, he attempts to do something he has never done before.’ After 1951, Stravinsky set out to reinvent himself and to challenge the expectations others had of him. He borrowed the ideas of atonal twelve tone serialism that had originally been devised by Schoenberg and melded it with what the biographer Stephen Walsh calls his ‘vibrant physicality,’ ¹¹ to create a new style that was distinct from that of his younger rivals. This sense of the need to go beyond the comfortable accolade of critics and others is also given voice by the artist John Baldessari who, when accorded critical acclaim and a Whitney retrospective, suggested, ‘It’s a bit scary to have acceptance. You wonder what you’re doing wrong.’
   We might say that people like Stravinsky and Baldessari, while exemplifying a quest for fulfilment, are very individualistic; yet both of them, while exploring their own limits, were fully aware of the participation of the viewer. Indeed, whether the individual is a software developer, a sales assistant or a composer, one cannot but be affected by the thoughts and actions of others. Our sense of responsibility should extend to those around us. The danger is that in seeking our own fulfilment, we deny the potential for fulfilment of others. Here we could use the word ‘ought’ to make a judgement that we ought not inhibit others and we ought to be aware of the mutuality that exists in our working lives. Kant believed we should ‘act on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’¹² while Karl Popper in The Open Society (1945) refers to the value of reciprocity (do unto others) in terms of ‘the golden rule is a good standard which is further improved by doing unto others, wherever possible, as they want to be done by.’ ¹³ Yet the power of these ‘oughts’, while carrying weight with some people, is not always reflected in practice. People do act out of self-interested motives and sometimes actively work against others. To counter this we should stress the performance benefits of working together because it maximizes the knowledge and skills of organizational members.
   The challenge with this whole way of thinking is the impossibility of universalizing fulfilment. When we little know how to generate our own self-fulfilment, how can we make judgements about it for others? Fulfilment is an individualized experience, even if it is generated with and for others. If, for example, a group of people come together to form a new business, they perhaps do so with a broadly common perspective, but it may be that one member is concerned primarily with the organizational cause, another with an individual quest of finding meaning through action and another with the social goal of working with like-minded and interesting people. All these motivating desires are potentially realizable within the group, but in realizing the business opportunity, some needs may be catered for more than others. As the business evolves and develops, choices must be made and some of the founders may leave as it ceases to meet their needs. The implication of this is that there needs to be a strong emphasis on communication within the group—a dialogic approach that helps to produce thought in common that brings meaning forward. Rather than focusing on an end state, we should concentrate on the journey.
   It is in the way we interact with others and create a world that we each become ‘we’, and the ‘we’ creates new and previously unseen links. If we are open we can move beyond the narrow confines of our own thought and gain new insights—together. In this way ‘we’ act ourselves into organization—the ‘ment’ of fulfilment indicating action or process. This is not about compromise, but about creating the movement that leads to deeper understanding, which rewards each individual and benefits the organization. As John Shotter says, ‘if Wittgenstein is right, meanings are not hidden in people’s heads, but occur out in the ceaseless flow of living language-interwoven relations between ourselves and the other and othernesses around us.’ ¹⁴ This Wittgensteinian idea feels true to experience. In our social world, most of us do not sit thinking about the meaning of things and developing theoretical frameworks. Rather we think and act with others. We uncover ideas through writing and speaking to others and in hearing and seeing their responses.
    Yet the caution we have to exercise here is that we have to be receptive to moments of discovery. When we work with others, if we approach a problem believing we already have the answers, we close down the flow of thought. Meaning cannot be uncovered by adopting a fixed perspective, but only through participation and openness to others. When working cultures lack the means to adapt and prevent the vitality generated through questioning and new ways of thinking, it reduces the opportunity for new ways of seeing the world. Working with creativity may not always be comfortable for managers, but curiosity is something that should be encouraged. It is a source of energy for the individual and innovation for the organization. As Noam Chomsky says, ‘a fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work, for creative inquiry’. ¹⁵

Notes
1. Böhm and de Cock write in their paper on the Slovenian philsopher, Zizek, that there are certain fantasies that sustain the hegemony of the global capitalist system including, ‘you are free to do anything, as long as it involves shopping.’ S. Böhm, and C. de Cock: ‘Liberalist Fantasies: Zizek and the Impossibility of the Open Society’, Organization, vol. 14, no. 6, 2007, pp. 815–36.
2. I. Berlin in H. Hardy (ed.): The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. London: Pimlico 2003, p. 222.
3. I. Berlin in H. Hardy (ed.): Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005, pp. 92–3.
4. Zizek argues that freedom with responsibility is a variation on forced choice. You have freedom as long as you make the right choice. He also argues that in the west, ‘oppression itself is obliterated and masked as free choice.’ S. Zizek: Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books 2008.
5. D. McCloskey: Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994.
6. I. Berlin in H. Hardy: Liberty, op. cit., at pp. 166–217.
7. J. Logan: Red. London: Oberon Books 2009. First performed at the Donmar Warehouse, London, December 2009.
8. Hodson, Randy. (2001). Dignity at Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press p. 257.
9. J. Conrad: Lord Jim. New York: Bantam Classic 2007, p. 134. (Originally published by Doubleday 1900.)
10. ‘Suddenly the middle-aged balding chain smoker (Rothko) who, on the strength of everything he had done up to that point (1949), would have been remembered at best as a mildly interesting, derivative talent, produced eye-popping miracle after miracle.’ S. Schama: Power of Art. London: BBC Books 2006, p. 415.
11. C. Fox: ‘Igor the Great’, The Guardian, May 1, 2009.
12. I. Kant (tr. M. Gregor): Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004.
13. K. Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: Routledge 2002. (Originally published by Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1945.)
14. J. Shotter: ‘Peripheral Vision’, Organization Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, 2005, pp. 113–35, at p. 130.
15. N. Chomsky and M. Foucault: The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature. New York: the New Press 2006, p. 37.

THE EMERGENCE of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been both rapid and significant. Twenty years ago it was a subject of marginal interest to businesses, but now every organization of any size has a policy on CSR. The growth of CSR is a reflection of the continuing (although sometimes resisted) move to a stakeholder view of capitalism. Some well established businesses had long practiced this philosophy based on an understanding of the inter-connectedness of all their stakeholders; that social well-being, engaged employees, satisfied customers and suitably rewarded investors were inextricably linked. However, for many, CSR has been seen as more utilitarian: a sticking plaster that could heal a company’s reputation and improve its appeal. The challenge here is that in such organizations, CSR is a peripheral activity rather than core to business thinking.

Getting to the core
Organizations often see CSR as a tool to improve the legislative climate, enhance media attitudes and inspire current and potential employees. As a consequence, business television and newspapers are awash with advertising that makes claims for the social virtues and long-term perspectives of corporate brands. Yet most of the activities, while laudable in themselves, remain superficial. Scratch the surface and you find that CSR does not run very deep. When it comes to facing up to dilemmas about doing the right or the expedient thing, there is a temptation to take the easier option and satisfy the short-term needs of shareholders.
   Lorna Tilbian, Executive Director of the London-based bank Numis stresses that reputation-building is about being principled and having a long-term perspective—both of which are subject to pressures. She says, ‘Short-termism influences the managers of the company to cut corners to keep performing on a quarterly basis. The only test that really matters is the test of time.’
   For a business to really commit to CSR, it has to be truly integrated into strategic thinking. This seems to be easier for organizations which are not publicly owned. For example, the privately owned, outdoor sports clothing business, Patagonia, has a long-term perspective and a mission statement that says, ‘to use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.’ The ideal implied here has led the company to move out of businesses that it believes are environmentally damaging, to provide customers with a lifetime guarantee (on the basis it’s better to keep the product you have rather than buy a new one), to provide full traceability on all its products, to develop new materials that are recycled and recyclable and to support actively environmental causes. At Patagonia environmentalism is not an add-on—it permeates everything the company does and says.
   When the whole organization (and its customers) is engaged in adhering to a principle, then it creates a focus for decision-making and moves idea about CSR to the core. At Patagonia there is no CSR department as such, although there are individuals specifically concerned with looking at CSR based issues, rather every person from the receptionist (who developed a frisbee from recycled materials) to the designers (who are driven by environmentalism) delivers on the mission day-in, day-out. It’s part of the reason that Fortune magazine labelled Patagonia the coolest company on the planet.
   Similarly, the Dutch financial services’ group, Rabobank, which has 60,000 employees and 9·6 million customers, has long adhered to policies that are designed to connect it to all its stakeholders. This is not surprising given that it is a cooperative bank that is owned by its members. The continuous dialogue the bank enjoys with its customers and other stakeholders helps ensure it delivers on broader social needs as well as meeting its performance goals. As a symbol of this closeness and the integration of its audiences, anyone who is approved by the bank can visit its new headquarters and wander freely throughout the building.
   Both Rabobank and Patagonia are adept at balancing and integrating different stakeholder needs, but you have to search harder for publicly quoted businesses that deliver on this score. The requirement to deliver ever-increasing returns to shareholders tends to hinder a full-blooded commitment to CSR. We might, for example, look at the Norwegian oil company, Statoil, and its approach to extracting oil from the sands of Northern Alberta in Canada (a contentious issue) and argue that they have been socially responsible in consulting with communities and using sound extraction methods, but we could also counter that true social responsibility would argue against being there in the first place and avoiding the environmental damage.
   One business that has been trying to tackle the dilemma of competing interests, head-on, is Unilever. Last year, CEO Paul Polman stopped providing earnings guidance to investors, in an attempt to move the focus away from short-term returns. Seeing his mandate as more concerned with long term success, he also railed against hedge funds, when he said, ‘They would sell their grandmother if they could make money. They are not people who are there in the long-term interests of the company.’
   Unilever has been integrating its approach to sustainability across its brand portfolio, focusing on renewable resources (such that all the palm oil it sources will be from renewable supplies by 2015) and thinking about the implications not only of the act of purchase but also the use of product.
   Unilever has 400 brands that are used 2 billion times a day around the planet, with about 70 per cent of the greenhouse gas imprint occurring during use. Encouraging sensible and environmentally responsible use of products, therefore, can have a big impact. As Santiago Gowland, VP of Brand & Global Corporate Responsibility, argues, ‘Marketers, with their expertise in innovation and behaviour change, can, and should, be making a significant contribution towards societal goals by enabling consumers to make more conscious choices and encouraging people to adopt conscientious consumption habits.’

Conscientious brands
At the Medinge Group, our annual awards, known as Brands with a Conscience tries to uncover and reward organizations that have integrated corporate responsibility into the core of their thinking: brands such as One Water, that exist to give all their profits away to water projects in Africa, the Swiss private bank, Pictet et Cie that demonstrates a long term perspective and a commitment to environmentalism and Merci, the Paris-based lifestyle retailer whose very existence is based on the idea of improving the lives of people in Madagascar. These brands are all genuinely people-focused and reap benefits in terms of highly motivated employees, committed customers and supportive communities. The interesting challenge is to see whether more businesses (especially larger organizations that can have a significant impact) can fully integrate CSR and become truly conscientious.

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 4, no. 1, 2010

IN MARCH OF THIS YEAR, I took my wife to a desert island to celebrate our anniversary. Situated 9 km off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, Sir Bani Yas Island is a nature reserve accessible only by seaplane or boat, and offers a wonderful location for a romantic getaway.
   While on the island, we were taken on a nature drive with a local guide who showed us the various flora and fauna, as well as the island’s various landmarks. While driving near the palace of Sheikh Zayed, named for the late president of the UAE, the tour guide told us that the football-field sized plantation we were driving through had been made into a curious shape, and asked if we could guess what it was.
   I promptly took my iPhone out of my pocket, opened the Google Maps application, and pushed a button that showed me my location on a satellite map. ‘A coffee pot!’ I exclaimed proudly. And then it quickly dawned on me what has just taken place.
   I had just called up a geolocated satellite image of where I was standing. With my mobile phone. On a desert island.
   Beyond the hype and Twitter-madness that we read about every day, a new reality is dawning. The technologies and platforms we are currently experiencing are fundamentally changing the ways in which we live our lives.
   If we just think back to the summer of 2006, Italy had just won the World Cup, Lebanon and Israel were at war and Shakira was telling us her hips don’t lie.
   However, at the same time, Facebook was an invitation-only student community none of us had heard of, Twitter was making its quiet début and the iPhone had not even been announced.
   If we fast-forward to our lives today, we cannot comprehend a world in which we could not communicate with our global networks of friends on Facebook, talk to a brand that did not tweet, or have a mobile phone that could only make phone calls and text messages.
   Our world is changing faster than we can imagine, and with it, the way in which brands are built in the minds of their consumers. Suddenly, the internet has no longer become an afterthought in the minds of brands and consumers, but the fundamental infrastructure on which our lives are being built.
   We all know that change happens, but the speed with which the old paradigm of media consumption has been destroyed has left advertisers everywhere scrambling to pick up the pieces and make sense of this new world.
   First, the internet happened. Suddenly, people could consume news and content from millions of places that didn’t exist the year before. There was a fundamental break in the covenant between advertisers and the media. It goes something like this: ‘We, the advertisers, need you (the media) in order to communicate our messages and control the story.’
   Suddenly, ‘the media’ were not the only way consumers could see what was happening around them, nor was it the only way brands could speak to consumers.
   And then, something else happened: the tools became easier. Not only were they not consuming content on their own terms; they were now producing content on their own terms. And suddenly, the consumer was in charge. And this has led to some interesting new developments.
   Now, any idiot with a smattering of ability could create a blog, post a video, upload a picture, or act like a real journalist. And suddenly, we went from mass media to mass broadcast, where any kid in his bedroom could shout as loudly as any brand on the internet. And given the fact that many major brands still treat the internet like it’s a bizarre scientific experiment, is it that surprising?
   The tools for them to speak to us have become more effective, and now brands have no excuse but to listen. On every channel and across the universe, the biggest brands in the world can set up listening posts now and hear what is being said about them for a few thousand dollars a month. Suddenly, they were trumping the media with every story.
   And the most important realization that has emerged from this discovery is that if brands and governments don’t do their jobs, someone else would do it for them.

The Dubai Mall
Opened in 2008, the Dubai Mall holds the title of the biggest mall in the world based on total area.
   While they have a lovely website (I should know, my agency made it), the need for a mobile application to allow consumers to easily navigate their way through 1,200 shops in an area the size of 50 football fields should be obvious. However, budgetary constraints have always kept them from making this necessary investment.
   However, a quick search of the iTunes App Store for ‘Dubai Mall’ features an app for the Dubai Mall, as well as apps for three other iconic malls in Dubai. These apps are free, and were made by a freelancer in the hopes of eventually selling them to the malls.
   The apps are nothing short of awful, and their maps for the Dubai Mall were stolen from our website, but the reality is that because a brand failed to do its job to meet a basic consumer need, someone else has done it, to the detriment of that brand.

The Haiti Crisis Map
In the wake of the devastating Haiti earthquake in January 2010, aid groups from across the globe were deployed to the island to assist in the recovery effort. However, in the absence of a coordinated effort to map and identify problem areas, aid groups were uncoordinated and “working blind” in order to focus their efforts.
   However, help quickly arrived in the form of the Crisis Map of Haiti. Mapped in real-time with information from SMS, web, email, radio, phone, Twitter, Facebook, television, list-serves, live streams, and situation reports, the Crisis Map continues to be the most accurate source of information for aid groups on the ground.
   However, what is most interesting about this Crisis Map is where it came from. It was not made by the UN or USAID or MSF. It was made by a handful of volunteers at Tufts University and Ushahidi, an African open-source project website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008.
   According to Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier, ‘I first heard about the major earthquake around 7:30pm (Boston time) … What happened between 7:30pm and midnight was inspiring. We went live with a basic deployment within half an hour.’
   The fact that a handful of students could mobilize so quickly to meet such a challenge speaks not only to the power of the individual, but also to the inability of governments to react faster than their citizens to a crisis.

While the intentions of the Dubai Mall app developer and the students at Tufts University were noble, they both show how individuals are now trumping our existing power structures in order to fill a need. As traditional media channels are fading in influence, so are any other channels that brands and governments have any control over.
   While we create more of these “unofficial” ways for consumers to engage with brands and governments on their own terms, we are denying these organizations the chance to speak to consumers with any real control over the message or the medium.
   Organizations need to work harder to anticipate customer needs, work with existing and emerging technologies and address these gaps in service before they completely hand over their brands.