Tag Archives: social mission tactics

Why Your Company Should Have A Social Mission

Why integrate a social mission into your business? You’re an entrepreneur with an idea and maybe a business plan, a small-business owner or the head of mid-sized company.  To expect you to add social purpose to your business just because it’s a good thing to do, is foolish.  You have a bottom-line and other obligations […]

Why Mission Should Be Your Primary Product

How to let your mission guide you: Your mission should guide your decisions, but sometimes you’ll have to prioritize long-term mission over short-term consequences as Organic Valley did when it shipped milk from Ohio to North Carolina to help farmers there start a local business. The short-term compromise was the environmental impact of shipping milk so […]

Why Joie de Vivre Invests in Culture For The Most Bang For Its Bucks

The principle of the following story is so simple and effective that it’s a wonder we ever conjured up advertising to sell our wares. Take your largest and most expensive asset, your employees, and use it to build your business. During an interview last week with enlightened entrepreneur Chip Conley he mentioned that his company, […]

How To Grow Your Business By Giving Your Employees a Calling–with Chip Conley

When Chip Conley applied his interpretation of Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to his hospitality company Joie de Vivre, he tripled its size when most of his competitors were going bankrupt in the post-9/11, Travelocity-frenzy years. Click the player to listen to my 20-minute conversation with Chip or right-click and save for the MP3. [Audio clip: view […]

The Alternative Isn’t Nothing, It’s Something New: NetApp’s Free Fix To Going More Green

You want more green initiatives in your company and so do your employees and consumers.  You’d love to give employee rebates for hybrid car purchases or offer transportation stipends, but the funding for these programs just isn’t there right now.  It’s taking action (rather than any specific action) that counts. A year ago NetApp was […]

Why Investing Smartly Means Choosing Companies With Happy Employees

How does good beget good? And what are you doing to tip the domino? In his book, The HIP Investor: Make Bigger Profits by Building a Better World, R. Paul Herman lists employee satisfaction as an indicator of strong investment returns.  He points to Wharton finance professor Alex Edmans’ work identifying a “direct positive correlation over […]

Don’t Choose One Tactic and Expect Success

It takes more than one action to empower your employees.  As simple (and obvious!) as that sounds, it’s what struck me the most while writing yesterday’s post on enabling your employees.  Maybe a better way to structure the post would be to highlight tactics by company since each of the companies I included–King Arthur’s Flour, […]

Do Gooding Isn’t a Substitute for Marketing: 3 Low-buck Tactics to Get You On Your Way

This point is often overlooked.  Your do-gooding and good deeding aren’t a substitute for marketing.  Customers can’t love you for what you do if they don’t know you.  At this point you might be thinking: But Wait!  One of the benefits of a social mission is the visibility it brings to my company.  I’ve even […]

The Total Impact of Great Beer–With New Belgium Brewing’s Kim Jordan

Click the player to listen to my conversation with Kim or right-click and save for the MP3.  Either way, you should listen. I’d bet good money that most of us would love to have Kim Jordan’s job as New Belgium Brewing Company’s intrepid leader of good beer and good business. Beyond making (and tasting) great […]

3 Lessons For Your Cause Campaign From a Man Who’s Raised $25M For Charity–With Chris Noble

Like this interview?  You can thank Chris on Twitter like this. Cause marketing is the only marketing segment that grew last year, which is good news for Chris Noble, who runs Causemedia Group.  It means that when he has an idea for a social media fundraising campaign, he can find a sponsor who’s dying to […]