Recently Apple sent their employees a letter asking them to come back to work at the office three days a week in late May 2022 (now delayed due to COVID resurging in the Bay Area, but employees must continue to work at the office two days a week). 

It is a seemingly reasonable request, and as part of the plan, employees can work fully remote for “up to four weeks a year.” A group of current and former Apple employees called “Apple Together” are protesting the company’s new policy, and sent an open letter to company leadership demanding more flexibility.

What can business leaders learn from this Apple employee response about their role and the best ways to manage organizations?

As a successful software company founder and business consultant for 30+ years, this type of employee reaction was unthinkable. The leaders in charge would have considered this change not as a request, but something employees should accept as a standard policy or find another job (what Netflix said to employees when they recently announced their new content policy).

Executives should reflect on their roles today as organizational leaders and answer the question clearly…Who is really running their organizations? Judging by the declining levels of customer service at most companies, the customer is no longer the most important factor in establishing goals and policies…it is the employees. How did this happen? How did we get to a place where the executives at Apple are “begging” their employees to come back to work?

There are several drivers of this mind shift. Perhaps the chief cause is a break down in the relationship between leaders and followers. Today, the employees are given powers that traditionally were reserved for leaders. It seems that a generation raised by parents who catered to their Millennial offspring seem to think they have executive powers. I am not blaming the Millennials. Yes, many are entitled and lazy… so are many Baby Boomers. I blame the adults. Throughout my career, I hired, managed and worked with hundreds of Millennials (Gen Y)…including my daughter. And they are not all lazy and entitled as many Baby Boomers think. 

But there is a large and influential percentage of this 26-41 year-old generation (born between 1981 and 1996)that somehow never got the message that they are not the boss of everything. The problem, however; is that this group has been conditioned by parents to believe they are equal decision makers. Parents abdicated their role as experienced decision-makers to those completely lacking in any life experience, which can unfairly set the children up to fail. 

As a result, we have the employees at Apple telling the executives that they are not coming back to work, and leaders are not clearly saying no. Why? Parents and business leaders should really be making firm decisions based on their vast experience and responsibility levels (personal and financial), and communicate the new policy like Netflix did recently. 

If Apple’s leadership team caves to their employees, it will be a recipe for organization mistrust. Traditional and working relationship of leaders and followers will be unproductively turned on its’ head. 

In my experience, most people, including Millennials, want to go to work, receive direction from a boss, master new skills, and meet expectations set by the organization to move both the individual and team forward. It is incumbent upon leaders to define the organization structure, decision-making authority, and goals with roles and responsibilities clearly defined. This process is how trust is built, respect is created and productivity and fairness can create more wins for everyone.

Yes, times have changed, but human nature really has not. The “old-school methods” which I practiced as a parent and as a leader were simple. In general, people want to do well. They want to feel like their work is important, and their boss cares about their success. They want feedback, and to grow by learning from their leaders. Being a parent or business executive comes with great responsibility to create a culture of dignity and respect, which includes knowing when to say no.  

If you want respect as a leader, listen to your team. Put yourself in their shoes in achieving the goals and expectations. I’ve discovered too often that what managers think takes ten hours to perform an assignment may in reality take 100 hours because of lack of clarity, resources, systems and team play. If a leader asks questions, the differences in expectations can be addressed to make real change, create real learning and ultimately build trust. 

Clear communications by leaders ensures success for a team, company, society and a family working together. When my brilliant daughter was 7 years old, she informed me that I was not the boss of her. As a single dad, I explained to her very nicely and logically that I was for now. Years later, I hired her at my Aspire Software company, and she was one of our best employees. She now works elsewhere, and is highly effective and respected.

Based on what I was taught by bosses, expecting more from your employees makes the good ones feel valued and challenged. Isn’t this what we want as managers? Someone must be the boss or the organization will be held back by mistrust and lack of honesty that are essential to learn and perform. 

What would you do if you were Tim Cook or a leader at Apple managing this pushback?

COVID-19 has disrupted many areas of our lives, including our careers. Fortunately, you can take steps to strengthen and secure your career during these uncertain times. 

Due to the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the restaurant industry, one of my coaching clients, Alex, who served as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) in a regional chain of 24 diners in the Northeast US, wanted to explore switching her career to a different industry. 

Alex turned to me as her executive coach and asked for my guidance. I recommended a 5-step decision-making process to her that addresses the dangerous judgment errors we make called. I coached her through the process to help her make the wisest and most profitable decision. 

Step 1

Identify the need to launch a decision-making process and gather relevant information from various informed perspectives on the issue at hand.

Alex had already decided to evaluate the decision to switch to another role and industry, so we were able to proceed with this step immediately. I asked her to gather information from various people with relevant perspectives. 

Step 2

With the data gathered, decide the goals you want to reach and develop a transparent decision-making process criteria to weigh the various options of how you’d like to get to your vision. Rank the importance of each criterion on a scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high).

With the data she had on hand, I asked Alex to come up with a list of critical goals, which should also address underlying issues. 

Among the goals identified were: 

• To make sure that within a year, she had a role that would pay her at least 75% of the salary that she was getting as COO of the restaurant chain, whether by staying at the chain or switching to another industry, per her accountant’s guidance.

• To ensure that she had substantial room for career growth if she did make the switch.

• Alex wanted to step into a role that was conducive to innovation. 

Alex then came up with several criteria relevant for the switch and ranked them on 

her priorities, with one at the low end and ten at the high end:

• Salary in a year (8)

• Innovation opportunity (5)

• Room for growth (6)

• Stability for the industry and the company in the foreseeable medium and long-term future (7)

• Ease of transition (5)

Step 3

Generate several options that can achieve your decision-making process goals. Go for five options as the minimum. Weigh these options, picking the best of the bunch. When weighing options, beware of going with your initial preferences.

Initially, Alex listed just one option for switching: it was obvious that she was already leaning towards the food delivery industry. However, I convinced her to add three more options to have five at the minimum. She took a bit more time deliberating and finally came up with five options: 

• Stay in her current position

• Food delivery industry

• Meal kit industry

• Food processing industry

• Grocery store industry

At this point, Alex was still leaning towards her favored option, which was to shift to the food delivery industry. However, I cautioned her to consider each one carefully. We went together through each option, and she ranked each option on each criteria variable. We made a table with options on the left and variables on the top to do so. Then, after ranking each option on the relevant criteria, we multiplied the ranking by the weight of the criteria.

Alex was surprised that the grocery store option was the best option. That’s because grocery stores boomed due to the pandemic and were hiring both workers and executives left and right, and the post-pandemic recovery looked like a good time to be in that industry. 

Step 4

Implement the option you chose. First, imagine the decision completely fails and brainstorm the reasons for the failure.

Next, consider how you might solve these problems and integrate the solutions into your implementation plan. 

Then, imagine the decision succeeded. Brainstorm all the reasons for success and integrate these into the plan. 

Alex imagined that the switch to the grocery store industry failed because of her lack of a proper network to source for job opportunities and her unwillingness to step down to a lower-ranking role. 

To address these, she decided to spend a month growing her network so that she could make new contacts. Alex also decided to get in touch with former colleagues and mentors who had stepped down from top leadership roles to gain insight into what they learned from the experience.

Finally, when she imagined that the decision to shift to a new role and industry was a success, she determined that this was mainly due to her efforts to efficiently transition to her new role and industry by building new core skills.  

Step 5

Evaluate the implementation of the decision. Develop clear metrics of success that you can measure throughout the implementation process. Check-in regularly and revise as needed. 

Alex was able to shift industries successfully. Within six weeks, she was able to get into a large grocery chain as Senior Vice President of Prepared Foods. While it was a step down from her role as COO, she was able to get a compensation package that was 85% of what she received as COO in her former company because she had joined a much larger organization in a booming industry.

She decided on the following as her metrics of success:  

• Expand her network by adding six contacts/month specifically from the grocery store industry 

• Identify and work on four core skills that she needs in order to thrive in her new role and industry

• Develop mentors within this new industry

Conclusion

Changing jobs or even industries during this post-pandemic recovery might be critically important for achieving your career potential. Use the best decision-making steps so that you and your career can thrive, not just survive.

You’re thinking about selling your business to get that great big pot of gold that will let you ride off into the sunset of retirement. In your mind, it’s a great exit strategy. Now the big question is: will your business attract buyers?

When positioning your business for a sale, don’t make the mistake of focusing solely on your financial statements. Of course, profit is important, but focusing on EBITDA—earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization—and industry multiples isn’t always a winning strategy. Your off-balance sheet assets matter, too.

According to the Ocean Tomo 2021 data on intangible assets, 90% of the value of S&P 500 companies is comprised of intangible assets. This trend has almost tripled over the last 35 years as our economy has shifted away from manufacturing to the service industry. This statistic applies to privately held businesses as well, not just big public companies.

Every business has intangible assets

Intangible assets aren’t physical and don’t appear on your balance sheet. They might include intellectual property, such as patents, trademarks, and copyrights. Or your company’s brand recognition. Of course, not every business has intellectual property or brand recognition, but every business has intangible assets that provide great value.

The top three intangible assets that drive value are:

1. Human capital. The quality and depth of your employee teams are critical drivers of your business’s value. This includes leaders who have a vision for growth and the skills to execute your strategic plan. Employees whose skills, certifications, and experience exceed those of your competitors also add tremendous value. So does a positive corporate culture that creates high employee retention.

When evaluating the value of your team, an investor will want to understand your strategy to identify and attract new talent, your plan to continuously develop your employees, and how you retain your people.

Employees are so critical to a company’s success that there are “acqui-hiring” deals in which a buyer is primarily motivated to purchase a company for its talent rather than its product. This strategy to acquire employees has dominated the technology industry; as our labor market continues to tighten, this motivation has spread across other sectors.

A valuable organization has the right people in the right place at the right time—with the right skills at the right price!

2. Customers. A well-diversified customer base, with a high retention rate that provides recurring revenue, will always be the gold standard of value drivers.

Maintaining customer diversification is often the Achilles’ heel of growing privately held businesses. While it’s always fun to go after the big whale of a client, most investors will label a business as “too risky” if more than 15% of revenue comes from one customer.

High customer retention rates are the result of impeccable customer service protocols, and every investor will analyze your data as part of their valuation process.

Keep in mind: all customer revenue isn’t equal in an investor’s eyes. A business model that produces recurring revenue via auto-renewal subscriptions, service contracts, or hard contracts will always be more attractive to investors than transactional or project-based revenue.

3. Suppliers. A strong, reliable supply chain is critical to the success of any business. Investors will dive deep into your supply chain strategy and management to confirm it protects the flow of information, resources, and materials your company needs to produce its products or services.

As we’ve witnessed during the pandemic, healthy supplier relationships that avoid disruption can mean millions of dollars in value. Your business is truly only as good as your supply chain.

Suppliers are your ally and can be the secret sauce that maintains your competitive edge if you take care of them. For example, if your business has an exclusive agreement with a supplier, you’ll most likely have better pricing and delivery times than your competitors do—which will make your company more desirable to investors.

The bottom line

These top three intangible assets—human capital, customers, and suppliers—are interdependent. Strong supplier management that’s strategized and managed by top-tier employees supports customer expansion and retention. You can drive the value and marketability of your company enormously by focusing on these three intangible assets.

Be strategic and develop your intangible assets; document and defend them. They matter.

Business schools teach about business model innovation to make more money. Engineering schools teach about technical innovation to make a better product. Very few institutions teach impact innovation.

Finally, we’ve reached a point where impact leaders can come together to foster a culture of impact innovation. 

For a long time, it was thought that separating the money-making tasks from the doing good tasks was a good idea, but this has been proven wrong. The combination of the two is precisely where today’s opportunities lie and will be the inspiration for the world’s next wave of business innovation. 

So, how does an established company pivot to embrace these new opportunities? For many companies, this can be a tough thing to do. Gary Pisano’s book Creative Construction: The DNA of Sustained Innovation offers some solutions. He argues that every company wants to grow, and the most proven way is through innovation. He begins with the simple reality that bigger companies are different. Demanding that they “be like Uber” is no more realistic than commanding your dog to speak French. 

Bigger companies are complex. They need to sustain revenue streams from existing businesses and deal with Wall Street’s demands. These organizations require different management practices and approaches — a discipline focused on the strategies, systems, and culture for taking their companies to the next level. Big can be beautiful, but it requires creative construction by leaders to avoid the creative destruction that is all-too-often the fate of too many.

One strategy is to seek out a “revolutionary” group within your organization — people you identify as having a better direction or some crazy ideas — and protect them. Separate them from the main organization and create a think tank overseen by senior management. Don’t let this group become pulled back to convention by the rest of the organization. The best creative constructors think as much about their organization’s innovativeness as they do about what innovations they implement. As we move into an impact economy, this approach can help unlock the necessary thinking and skills needed to reimagine the companies and customers of the future. As Pisano says, “Whether we rise to society’s great challenges through transformative, life-changing innovation depends on us, and only us. The need for creative constructor leaders has never been greater.”

Business leaders should not simply stick the sustainability label onto their businesses but instead embark on a conscious process of creating a framework in which innovation can thrive. A real leader should also tap into the energy source of younger generations and unleash it. Importantly, this needs to be a planned strategy and not approached in a naive, free-for-all manner. 

Ultimately, impact leaders should be tuned in to the world around them in an intimate way, seeking seemingly unrelated issues that may offer a single solution. Take Dr. Jane Goodall as an example. She recognized the relationship between human poverty and effective wildlife preservation at an early stage. If people remained hungry, endangered animals would always be at risk — whether from illegal trading or as food. Impact leaders tie together social impact, cause, and business to create companies with which everyone wants to do business.

Google recently announced its new post-pandemic hybrid work policy, requiring employees work in the office for at least three days a week. That policy goes against the desires of many rank-and-file Google employees.

A survey of over 1,000 Google employees showed that two-thirds feel unhappy with being forced to be in the office three days a week, with many threatening to leave in internal meetings and public letters, and some already quitting to go to other companies with more flexible options.

Yet Google’s leadership is defending its requirement of mostly in-office work as necessary to protect the company’s social capital, meaning people’s connections to and trust in each other. In fact, according to the former head of HR at Google Laszlo Brock, three days a week is just a transition period. Google’s leadership intends to enforce full-time in-office work in the next couple of years. Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt supports this notion, saying that it’s “important that these people be at the office” to get the benefit of on-the-job training for junior team members.

Google’s position on returning to the office for the sake of protecting social capital echoes that of Apple, which is requiring a three-day work week. Similarly, it is also facing employee discontent, with many intending to leave if forced to return. 

By contrast, plenty of large tech companies, such as Amazon and Twitter, are offering employees much more flexibility with extensive remote work options. The same applies to many non-tech companies, such as Nationwide, Deloitte, 3M, and Applied Materials. Are they giving up on social capital?

Not at all. What forward-looking companies discovered is that hybrid and even fully remote work arrangements don’t automatically lead to losing social capital.

However, you do lose social capital if you try to shoehorn traditional, office-centric methods of collaboration into hybrid and remote work. That’s why research findings highlight how companies that transposed their existing pre-pandemic work arrangement onto remote work during the lockdowns lost social capital. Yet studies show that by adopting best practices for hybrid and remote work, organizations can boost their social capital.

Why Have Organizations Failed to Appreciate Hybrid Work

Leaders often fail to adopt best practices because of dangerous judgment errors called cognitive biases. These mental blindspots impact decision making in all life areas, including business to relationships. Fortunately, recent research has shown effective strategies to defeat these dangerous judgment errors, such as by constraining our choices by focusing on the top available options, for example by using this comparison website.

One of these biases is called functional fixedness. When we have a certain perception of appropriate practices, we tend to disregard other more appropriate alternatives. 

Trying to transpose existing ways of collaboration in “office-culture” to hybrid and remote work is a prime example of functional fixedness. That’s why leaders failed to address strategically the problems arising with the abrupt transition to telework in March 2020. 

Another cognitive bias, related to functional fixedness, is called the not-invented-here syndrome. It’s a leader’s antipathy towards adopting practices not invented within their organization, no matter how useful, such as external best practices on hybrid and remote work. 

Defeating these cognitive biases requires the use of research-based best practices. It means adopting a hybrid-first model, with most coming to the office at least once a week and a minority fully remote. To do so successfully requires creating a new work culture well-suited for the hybrid and remote future of work.

Virtual Coworking for Hybrid Work Collaboration

One critically-important best practice is virtual coworking, which gives much of the social capital benefits of in-person coworking without the stress of the commute. Virtual coworking involves members of small teams working on their own individual tasks while on a video conference call together.

This experience replicates the benefit of a shared cubicle space, where you work alongside your team members, but on your own task. As team members have questions, they can ask them and get them quickly answered. 

This technique offers a wonderful opportunity for on-the-job training: the essence of such training comes from coworkers answering questions and showing junior staff what to do. But it also benefits more experienced team members, who might need an answer to a question from another team member’s area of expertise. 

Occasionally, issues might come up that would benefit from a brief discussion and clarification. Often, team members save up their more complex or confusing tasks to do during a coworking session, for just such assistance. 

Sometimes team members will just share about themselves and chat about how things are going in work and life. That’s the benefit of a shared cubicle space, and virtual coworking replicates that experience.

The Virtual Water Cooler for Hybrid Work Social Cohesion

Another excellent technique for a hybrid or fully-remote format is the virtual water cooler. It aims to replace the social capital built by team members chatting in the break room or around the water cooler.

Each team established a channel in their collaboration software – such as Slack or Microsoft Teams – dedicated to personal, non-work discussions by team members. Every morning – whether they come to the office or work at home – all team members send a message answering the following questions: 

1) How are you doing overall? 

2) What’s been interesting in your life recently outside of work? 

3) What’s going on in your work: what’s going well, and what are some challenges? 

4) What is one thing about you or the world that most other team members do not know about?

Employees are encouraged to post photos or videos as part of their answers. They are also asked to respond to at least three other employees who made an update that day. 

Most of these questions are about life outside of work, and aim to help people get to know each other. They humanize team members to each other, helping them get to know each other as human beings, and building up social capital.

There is also one work question, focusing on helping team members learn what others are working on right now. That question helps them collaborate together more effectively.

Then, during the day, team members use that same channel for personal sharing. Anyone who feels inspired can share about what’s going on in their life and respond to others who do so. 

The combination of mandated morning updates combined with the autonomy of personal sharing provides a good balance for building relationships and cultivating trust. It fits the different preferences and personalities of the company’s employees.

Hybrid and even fully-remote work don’t have to mean the loss of social capital. These work arrangements only lead to weakened connections if stubborn, traditional-style leaders try to force old-school, office-centric methods of collaboration onto the new world of hybrid and remote work. No wonder Eric Schmidt says “I’m a traditionalist” when advocating for in-office work.

Conclusion

Google, Apple, and similar traditionalist companies are refusing to adopt best practices for hybrid and remote work such as virtual coworking and virtual water coolers, and then blaming hybrid and remote work arrangements for the loss of social capital. The people leaving Google and Apple due to their inflexible work arrangements are moving to more forward-thinking, progressive companies that use best practices for hybrid and remote work to build social capital and recruit excellent staff. Such companies will seize competitive advantage and old-school companies will be left in the dust in the war for talent.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos gets more than his fair share of negative press in the court of public opinion. Whether he’s a benefit or a blight to society depends on who you listen to, however the facts lean clearly in one direction.  

For Amazon to exist, one person needed to shoulder the burden. Jeff Bezos is the visionary leader who, through hard work and enormous risk, contributes immensely to the prosperity of the free world through the creation of his internet-based enterprise.   

Amazon makes money for everyone, least of all Jeff Bezos. In 2020, the value of Amazon jumped by $570 billion! Jeff Bezos owns about 10 percent of the company he created, so his personal net worth increased by $57 billion. This was derided by some as too much, however it was a testament to the magnificence of the company he founded.   

At the same time that his personal fortunes increased, Jeff Bezos created $513 billion (that’s half a trillion dollars!) of value for the other shareholders of Amazon. Banks, pension funds, labor unions, insurance companies and other institutional investors own the majority of Amazon. When you get a loan for a car, a pension as a teacher, strike pay from a union or home insurance after a fire, there’s very likely a little bit of Amazon wealth making each transaction possible. Amazon primarily makes money for the institutions and shareholders that own it, not for Bezos.    

It’s popular to talk about the perceived value of a company when share prices rise, but little attention is given when a company fails and the value evaporates almost entirely. The founders of Yahoo, the first internet brand, saw the value of their company go from $128 billion in 2000 to $5 billion in 2021 when Apollo bought the final version of the company — a dramatic loss of 96 percent of the value. Blockbuster founder David Cook saw the market value of the company he founded peak at $5 billion in 2002 then go into bankruptcy in 2010. You can see how it’s remarkable to consistently grow a company over a span of decades as Amazon has done.  

Amazon helps the little guys, too. It boosted retail sales on products to magnitudes never before seen. If you have a small business selling handcrafted jewelry or a large business selling millions in electronics, Amazon Marketplace brings customers around the world to your doorstep. In 2021 third-party sellers accounted for 60 percent of sales on Amazon.  Global consumers had more choice, and consumers showed up in droves to buy. Last year 54 percent of all product searches on the internet took place inside the Amazon online store.    

Amazon is a large employer with 1.6 million employees and it’s a good employer, providing jobs for everyone from MBA grads to people who never finished high school. The average starting wage is more than $18 an hour, or over $36,000 a year for a fulltime worker.   

Jeff Bezos pays his taxes, too. In spite of what many believe, he paid $1.4 billion on income of $6.5 billion between 2006 and 2018. Within that time frame, he paid no taxes (in 2007 and 2011) because in those two years Bezos had no need to pay himself a salary or sell any of his Amazon shares and so had no taxable income. He was among a large percent of the U.S. population that pays no federal taxes. (In 2021, 57 percent paid no federal taxes.) 

Apart from the annual cornucopia of 1.6 million jobs, with a median pay of $29,007 USD globally (totaling $46.4 billion paid in salaries), $43 billion in research and development, and billions in new shareholder value, Jeff Bezos made the largest philanthropic donation in 2020 with a $10 billion donation to launch the Bezos Earth Fund to fight the climate crisis. That is far better than most of us. More than half of all Americans donated to a charity last year and the average donation was $567.    

Despite all of these accomplishments and stunning figures, U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich labels Bezos a Scrooge capitalist. Reich emphasizes that the working people of America outnumber corporate executives by a wide margin. He puts this idea forward as if the leadership, appetite for risk, insane work hours and innovation are on par between the two groups. Amazon employs 1.6 million people, however only Bezos had the drive, foresight and ability to create something that didn’t exist before.   

Building Amazon wasn’t easy. Naysayers were abundant. Bezos originally selling books online in 1995, then started selling electronics in 1999. In 2000 he allowed third-party vendors to sell goods online via Amazon Marketplace. Each time the company moved further into its future identity, few people cheered it on. It took a lot of grit for Bezos to keep moving forward. In May 1999, Barron’s ran the story AMAZON.BOMB, calling the concept of online sales “silly.” 

Bezos is a unicorn capitalist, similar to unicorn capitalists Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Thomas Edison and Elon Musk. He boosts the world’s prosperity. We don’t need fewer people like Bezos, we need more. 

Business-to-business marketing is delusional. We continue to act as if customers make buying decisions in a rational void, free from any messy emotional constraints. The truth is that they never have, and they never will.

Many studies back up this idea and provide a more clear picture of the drivers that go into business purchasing decisions. Some B2B marketers have taken this research to heart and are beginning to talk about their customers as if they were humans and not just numbers. We can achieve more as professionals if we’re prepared to go further to benefit our brands, our customers, and ourselves.   

It’s partly because customers continuously evolve, seeking emotional connections and purposes that resonate with them. Customers should be at the heart of your business, not just lucky to be considered at the end of the product development and sales process.   

How do marketers deal with the current challenges and changes in B2B marketing? We must shift our focus from products to people, make a meaningful and positive difference, and continually self-improve.  

To keep up with the ever-changing market, look to your customers and embrace a new mindset to engage them using these approaches:  

1. Shift your focus 

Most businesses try to put their customers first, but that doesn’t always happen. Even business-to-customer companies have to try hard to remember that customers are the essential element of their operations. Putting products first in businesses is no longer sustainable.   

Products don’t buy themselves; people keep businesses afloat. Everyone you engage with is a human being with feelings, preferences, and insecurities, just like you. Of course, in B2B marketing, you’re speaking not to just one person, but a whole audience made up of employees and business partners. They don’t come to you as a brand or business to hear your corporate technical jargon. They want to know that there’s a human behind the product.   

Customers don’t just buy from you. They buy into you. As a business, your primary goal should be following your vision and improving your customers’ lives, even before profit. More than this, you need to use emotion to unlock people’s understanding so that you can move minds. You can make a substantial, meaningful, and positive difference by doing so. That’s what humanizing B2B marketing is all about.  

2. Make a positive difference  

Having a purpose requires that your company show up in the world in a way that proves you’re trying to make a meaningful and positive difference to the lives of your customers — and not just selling products for the sake of it. Having an overarching human purpose and communicating it well improves lives.   

The customer will always be an afterthought if you treat B2B marketing as a production process. Instead, say to yourself, “We have these amazing customers. What can we create for them? What would inspire them? What could change and make their lives better?” Think how transformational that would be. You’d be addressing their needs.   

You want to be a teacher, not a salesperson; a trusted educator, not a mere advisor. Offering new insights through your products, services, and marketing makes you indispensable and irreplaceable. But, more importantly, you’re positively impacting your customers.   

3. Access your likeability  

In the new era of business, being liked is a fundamental requirement for your brand success. It gives you a commercial advantage. Your customers make their buying decisions based on which company or brand they like the best — it’s as simple as that. This has always been the case to a certain extent, but it’s essential today.   

Over the past 10 years, there’s been a massive shift in how buyers think, act, and feel about business brands. For many years companies relied on expensive salespeople to create the likeability factor. Still, today, when communications are usually online rather than face-to-face, they recognize that they need to invest in their brands to deliver a positive and friendly experience.  

In this new era, it’s vital that you don’t think of business as a sales game to be won or lost. You must have a voice, be relevant, and make a positive impact.    

It’s no longer sustainable to do business as usual. The discussion surrounding humanizing B2B marketing is prominent because it’s essential. People are the foundation of the success of our businesses and industry. We rely on them as much as they depend on us. Customers search for new insights and wisdom through their favorite products. Like the brands they buy from, they want to trust and feel their lives impacted positively and substantially.   

It’s easy to put profit at the center of the mission and vision of a business. Truly understanding your customers and all their human motivations, thoughts, and desires is far more complicated. It takes time, energy, and empathy. But it’s worth it for everyone involved. Humanizing B2B marketing changes lives in both big and small ways.  

Bill Gates. Richard Branson. Steve Jobs. When you hear these names, you immediately think of business legends. Billionaires with success stories so profound they’ll continue to influence generations of entrepreneurs. But what you might not realize is that this group has something else in common: they’re all college dropouts. 

These stories aren’t the standard path, of course. The skills and experience we can gain from college is invaluable to our business success. But what if you’re eager to start your entrepreneurial journey and don’t want to wait until after graduation? You might get a lot of pushback from people telling you to hold off until you’re out of school, but the stories of Michael Dell and Mark Zuckerberg serve as proof that it’s possible — though not easy — to start building a business while earning a degree. Just like Dell and Zuckerberg, I was also so excited to bring my ideas to life that I started my first company out of my dorm room as well.

There’s some unique advantages to being a student entrepreneur that other founders lack. You have access to free or subsidized educational resources, mentorship opportunities from faculty members and/or other students, as well as a large pool of potential customers to target your products or services to. It does come with its fair share of obstacles though, like limited time to focus on both school and work, as well as a higher rate of stress. All of this on top of the lingering pressure that 20 percent of small business don’t survive past their first year. Don’t let this prevent you from working towards your dream of running your own business. Below are some tips for successfully starting a company while also earning your degree.

1. Come up with a unique business idea

This isn’t the time to try to come up with a business that’s never been done before. Instead, start small and think of a unique way to monetize something that’s already an interest of yours. What simple service or product can you offer to someone to make their lives easier? What problems can you help solve through your business idea? As you begin developing this idea, you can also align some of your electives with your goals to help you gain the skills and knowledge to push yourself further. If there aren’t any specific electives that align with your industry, or these courses wouldn’t apply to your degree, try doing more general classes, like marketing or writing. As your business grows, these skills will also be a critical part of your growth and profitability.

2. Create a customer base

Having a business idea is important, but don’t get so wrapped up in the idea that you spend all your time finalizing your product or service only to quickly realize you have no customers. When you’re first starting out, you need sales in order to even have a business, so it often makes more sense to build a customer base before going all-in on a product or service. That way, when you do put all of your time, energy, and money into developing your business idea, you know you’ll have people who are waiting to buy from you.Being in college, your customer base could be right in front of your nose. Your fellow classmates could be the perfect group of people to center your products or services around. It makes selling even easier too, since you have access to them on campus at all times. They could also give you some valuable insight into the kinds of things they like or don’t like, so don’t forget to use them as a sounding board for your ideas.

3. Develop a business plan and get funding

This is what sets the real entrepreneurs apart from the amateurs. You need a working business plan with a budget in order to launch a successful startup. Here is what every business plan must have:

• An executive summary, which provides the fundamental details about your business (information about your product or service, your target audience. etc.)
• A mission statement, which should specify the products or services you’re offering
• A marketing plan, which should show how you plan to reach your target audience
• An operational plan, which will detail the day-to-day of your business
• A list of your company’s managerial organization and fiscal planning

Then, there’s the funding side of launching a startup. As a college student, you should look into grants, loans, and scholarships that have been designed for people in your unique position. 

4. Build your brand

This is perhaps the most fun part of starting a business. In this step, you want to make your business legitimate and actually put it out into the public’s eye. The first step is building a website. There are affordable ways to do this, including using free platforms like WordPress and Wix. Then, you’ll want to create and personalize your social media profiles. The socials you create will depend on the audience you’re trying to reach, but the big five include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok. Tie all of these elements together and start building your following so you can start making sales. The most important thing to remember as a college student trying to launch your first business is to find balance. You don’t want your business to distract you from your studies, but you also need to be able to find between classes and homework to focus on getting your business in order. Once you have that balance, follow these steps and you’ll be well on your way to being a successful entrepreneur even before you graduate college. 

Everywhere you look these days, companies, governments, and communities are talking about ‘better business,’ what it means, who it affects, and why it is relevant.

The UK’s proposed Better Business Act is rallying behind the cries for how we define the ‘future of the corporation.’ The suggested contract defines it as the legal obligation for every company to align their interests with those of the wider society and the environment.

I want to talk about one successful public-private partnership evidencing this ethos in action; TRANSFORM.

TRANSFORM is a collaboration between Unilever, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), and EY that supports social entrepreneurs in South Asia and Africa, improving the lives of low-income households. We offer a combination of grant funding and bespoke business support through expertise and connections to corporate value chains.

Driven by the UN SDGs, in particular no.17, “partnerships for the goals,” it follows the mantra that no other UN SDG is possible without it – which is why it is so key for sustainable progression.

At the initiative’s six-year mark, and now with governments and corporations worldwide leaning further into their broader purpose-led strategies, it seems appropriate to share our learnings on building a global public-private partnership that supports the world’s most innovative impact enterprises. 

These enterprises range from the likes of Folia Water, an enterprise increasing access to clean drinking water for low-income consumers in Bangladesh, to Mr. Green Africa, the first recycling company to be a Certified B Corporation on the African continent.

With this in mind, I’ve selected our five significant learnings for building a successful public-private partnership.

1. The Holy Trinity: 3 core organizations are the perfect balance

These core organizations should be responsible for the overriding vision and direction of the partnership and the relationships with suppliers, enterprises, and stakeholders. A leaner central body will strengthen the management of potentially conflicting processes, rules, and requirements all partnerships undoubtedly face!

2.  Start small

A committed group of kick-starters allows the core organizations to form trusted relationships, stress-test, and empower the initiative. Avoid getting overexcited about the PR – the successes built from a tight-knit foundation will speak for themselves. 

3.  Define a shared purpose

Ask yourself, where do the common values between the core organizations lie? And how do we ensure this forms the foundation for a specific partnership goal? Remember, the optimal point you’re trying to hit is a vision with enough specificity that the whole team is clear and aligned while allowing enough room to explore different avenues and respond to crises.

4.  The Compatibility Test

Testing your area of collaboration helps build a pipeline by reviewing real projects and finding out where to set your boundaries. This is where reality starts to sink in, and the funding prospects are front and center of the conversation. Remember, if you encounter difficulties with the projects, you can always return to the mapping stage and redefine the shared values.

5.  Ground rules: balancing everyone’s needs

Make sure you prioritize the necessary requirements for each organization. Creating contractual templates means you’ll be best placed to deal with even the most unprecedented of events – for TRANSFORM, this meant a well-established blueprint for a rapid Covid-19 response. The model built on the collaboration’s firm relationships and frameworks meant that Unilever and the FCDO could launch the Hygiene & Behaviour Change Coalition (HBCC), which provided funding, technical assistance, and hygiene products to over 20 NGOs throughout 2020.

The partnership in practice 

Over the last six years, TRANSFORM has brought together three organizations with distinct areas of expertise, meaning we can offer blended business support; the accomplishments of the enterprises speak for themselves.

With advice from TRANSFORM, Drinkwell overcame growing pains to develop a new business model and partnered with Unilever’s extensive sales force to help sell their new innovative water ATM to communities in Bangladesh. This helped make Drinkwell what it is today: a nationally viable business model that solves the shortage of sanitized drinking water.

Similarly, Unilever’s counsel on recruiting, training, and expanding a network of formidable sales and distribution representatives, contributed to the growth of e-commerce and self-care platform Kasha. Experiencing five times year-on-year revenue growth, it has become one of the leading FemTech organizations in Africa.

TRANSFORM has shown that building a successful public-private partnership takes time, commitment, and resilience. The same is true of reaching the SDGs; no one organization can do it alone. We wanted to put the needs of society at the heart of our mission – and in the hands of some of the most exciting social entrepreneurs. TRANSFORM has shown that combining market-based ingenuity with unique capabilities of business and government offers a pathway to accelerate progress quicker.

If that’s not better business, I’m not sure what is.

Strategy is one of those business terms that is critical to understand but difficult to define. This ambiguity makes it hard to distinguish what makes up a good or bad strategy.

Fortunately for entrepreneurs, Professor Richard Rumelt’s book, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, does an incredible job of defining the various elements of strategy and laying out the foundation for establishing a good strategy while avoiding a bad one. This book has been an influential part of my entrepreneurial path over the years, so I had to make it the cornerstone of this piece. 

So let’s begin — and to do that, we must first start with what Rumelt calls the kernels of strategy. Because for you to set yourself up with a successful strategy, you must understand what lies at the heart of strategy.

The Kernels of Good Strategy

The basic underlying structure of a good strategy is as follows:

Diagnosis

Part of developing a sound strategy is understanding how to leverage your resources to achieve results. To do this, and to do it successfully, you have to understand the challenges facing your organization. Ask yourself: What’s important? What’s not? This will hone your focus on diagnosing what’s most critical and then lead you down the path of figuring out how you can approach and address each challenge. If your diagnosis isn’t clear, your path to action won’t be either, so it’s important to get the diagnosis right.

Guiding Policy

Your diagnosis will inform your strategy. The purpose of a guiding policy is that it helps you establish your intentions so you can focus your attention in the right direction. There will be so many options available to you to begin setting your action plan, so you need to ensure you’re pursuing the path that makes the most sense for your goals. When you follow your policy and adapt your organization, you set yourself up for success.

Coherent Action Plan

Strategy without action is nothing, just as action without strategy is futile. Your diagnosis should inform your guiding policy, and then your guiding policy should help you develop steps to accomplish your goal. These steps should be clear and concise, but they won’t always be easy. The difficult part of strategy is that it comes with tough choices, but you must have the discipline to see these steps through to the very end. 

Good Strategy vs. Bad Strategy

Before we explore the elements of good strategy vs. bad strategy, it’s essential to understand the difference between them. Where a good strategy honestly acknowledges challenges and offers ways to overcome them, a bad strategy overlooks problems and creates aimless ambitions. So now, let’s take a deeper dive.

At the heart of a good strategy are the following elements:

1. Leverage your strengths: A leader’s strategic leverage comes from their ability to anticipate predictions that point them in the right direction, pivot when small adjustments are necessary, and concentrate their efforts on fewer objectives to be more impactful.
2. Press your advantages: A promising strategy pinpoints a company’s strengths or advantages, and then presses those advantages in the market.
3. Look for internal weakness: Leaders can’t just focus on the competition’s weakness; they must also prioritize strengthening the weakest links within their own organizations.
4. Watch for inertia and entropy: Inertia and entropy can pose risks to a business. Be mindful of inertia (a company’s resistance to change) and entropy (how a company devolves into chaos if not properly managed). 
5. Narrow your focus: Don’t divide up attention into too many channels. Instead, focus on one or two critical issues and work on resolving those. 
6. Choose feasible objectives: Leaders must pick feasible goals if they hope to reach the larger goals they’ve set for their companies. Too much ambition could lead to failure.
7. Beware of chasing growth: Don’t strive for growth just for the sake of growth. This could lead to unhealthy growth that is forced rather than intentional.
8. Treat your strategy as a design: Strategy isn’t chosen; it’s constructed. A good strategy must be tightly designed to form a whole that will help bring about a leader’s success.
9. Anticipate change: A leader should constantly predict what changes could impact their industry and, as a result, their business, and look for opportunities in these changes to help drive their competitive advantage.

Now, let’s transition into bad strategy. Rumelt defines the four characteristics of bad strategy as follows:

1. Fluff: Many leaders use grandiose phrasing to create an illusion of high-level thinking. Don’t do this. Instead, be honest, and make it simple. 
2. Failure to face the challenge: If a leader cannot correctly define their organization’s challenges, they will not accurately address them.
3. Mistaking goals for strategy: Setting a goal to achieve is different from actually developing a strategy to overcome the obstacles that will help you achieve those goals.
4. Bad strategic objectives: Objectives are considered harmful when they fail to address critical challenges or when they’re just altogether impractical. 

Rumelt wrote his book to challenge leaders to look at things from a new perspective. He didn’t want to offer formulas for building a good strategy but, instead, wanted to impart logic behind what makes a strategy good or bad. I hope you found as much help in his words as I have from reading his book, which I cannot recommend enough.