提
Chapter 4
Promote
In Chinese culture, we are not accustomed to promoting or talking about our accomplishments. This is not accepted as appropriate behavior. However, “Once upon a time …” one of my American bosses told me he was moving certain of my colleagues to the next higher level because they knew how to promote their own accomplishments. Some of them, I knew, even claimed credit for other people's accomplishments. As he put it, “Madge, do you know how to blow your own horn?” I told him that it was not in our culture to do so. He replied, “Then you need to learn American culture, if you want to work in America.” I realized, hard as it was, I was going to have to learn, in spite of my culture and my upbringing. It wasn't easy, and I tried to figure out how to “blow my own horn” somewhat gracefully, so it didn't sound like bragging.
Throughout the years, as my job responsibilities grew, I came to realize that, not only did I have to make sure my boss knew about our successes, I had to make sure that he also understood what my team had accomplished, since we worked on highly technical issues. I came to realize the importance of recording our accomplishments promptly and accurately. I also came to see that the best way to promote achievement is through facts and data. Reporting facts and data cannot be considered bragging, so it became a very comfortable way to register our performance. I'd put together reports showing our financial achievements, how we performed against industry benchmarks, recognition, and awards. This way, my team had actual numbers to establish our financial contributions to the company—while at the same time demonstrating our accomplishments by comparison with our professional colleagues outside of our company.
Successful innovators promote our ideas and solutions across the lifecycle of our projects. In the early stages, we promote to get funding and staff. Once underway, we promote to get support and buy-in. As momentum builds, we promote to generate awareness and interest. And as we begin to realize our vision, we promote to demonstrate the value and benefits we have achieved.
Innovators can't afford to miss a single one of these steps, yet they do—surprisingly often. In many corporate cultures, innovation is seen as a type of “skunk-works” project, one that's off the traditional radar screen. There are times and circumstances when this is certainly effective, but it's not really conducive to a business-as-usual approach to innovation. And while there's often a certain comfort to operating in secret and isolation, there are costs to that as well. It's much harder to gain acceptance and integration after the fact, for example. Although many innovators go “underground” to avoid the challenges of dealing with stakeholders, there are better solutions, which we will discuss in Chapter 5, Connect. In this chapter, Promote, we recognize that more issues are caused by a lack of communication than by a surplus.
Ti belongs to the radical 手 shou, meaning “hand/hands,” represented here with a variant used as part of a more complex character. The character itself has the root meaning “to raise, to take, to bring along or about,” or “to carry.” The right part of the character for 提 ti is the character 是 shi, made up of the modern version of the ancient pictograph for the sun, 日 ri, over 正 zheng, which means “correct,” in the sense of “correct in the light of day.” 是 is also the character for a variant of “to be,” or “yes.”
正 is also the generational name or middle name given to myself, my siblings, and indeed all first cousins of the same generation in the Mao family. A traditional, extended Chinese family could consist of three or four generations. To distinguish who is an uncle or who is a nephew, these generational middle names provide a guide to proper behavior.
Branding
Another aspect of promotion that successful innovators often leverage is branding. By that I mean that they develop and uphold a consistent theme and a respected performance standard. By communicating the common strategic intent behind different ideas, projects, and accomplishments, they differentiate their work, show how the individual pieces tie together, and more clearly communicate value. They inspire confidence. Clear branding is important when presenting to venture capitalists, executives, or the public. But it's important in a wider respect, too. Personal, project, and organizational brands are always connected. What we do in one sphere impacts others.
In the corporate world, I've met a number of very creative and productive people who were determined to bring about change and create value, yet were content to do so behind the scenes. They took great satisfaction in knowing that they made a difference, yet because they did not see themselves as future leaders or corporate executives, they never clarified the important role that they played. Many times, they even stepped back and let others reap the rewards of their hard work. I think the future needs leaders and executives with this creative, improvement-driven mind-set, so I always urge people not to shy away from clearly communicating the value of their personal brand and the contributions they have made for their organization's success. That's not to say that someone should leverage the successful efforts of the team to promote themselves. I think it's critically important for long-term success to give credit where credit is due, a topic I will get back to later in the chapter.
The Importance of Establishing a Baseline for Innovation
I've found that many people don't take the time to understand, capture, and communicate the business impact of their work. Maybe they assume that important people already know their record and recognize their value. I don't think that's a fair assumption, though. I believe that we need to establish a “baseline” to promote the business value of what we are changing or improving with facts and data.
We never know when we'll encounter a good idea. And when we do, we usually attack it with a “laser focus.” By the time we finish implementing, though, we've already changed our environment so much that we can't provide data on the situation before we went about improving it! It's like losing 50 pounds and not having a “before” picture! A big part of promotion is showing the “before” and the “after.” Therefore, it's always smart to have a baseline measurement in place so when that good idea strikes, we can hit the ground running. The other benefit of a good baseline measurement is that it can actually generate good ideas. When people really see how long it takes to do something or how much it costs or the amount of rework involved, it generates the creative problem-solving mind-set that is behind so many innovations.
There are two kinds of metrics that we want to establish as our baselines. The first are our own operational management metrics—how many units of work we process, how long it takes, the number of errors encountered, productivity, cycle-time, and so on. The other type of metrics we need are business-focused. They demonstrate the impact of our work on revenue, expenses, customer satisfaction, unit costs for business transactions, or some other tangible, business-focused result.
Promoting Our Innovation Ideas
As I've said before, when it comes to communication and promotion, few corporate functions are more challenged than IT infrastructure. The eyes of business decision makers quickly glaze over when technical folks launch into the details and acronyms associated with their ideas. The spell is typically broken only when the word dollars is heard, and then suddenly executive attention is rapt. Many times, infrastructure folks—and others too—fill those precious few moments of attention with detail about what their idea will cost. Successful innovators communicate in terms of business value, what their ideas will gain, save, or achieve. This is true whether we're pitching ideas to corporate decision makers, venture capitalists, or potential customers.
I often meet with a variety of vendors to learn about their newest and planned products. Surprisingly often, I come across a vendor that has a fascinating and innovative offering, yet has difficulty articulating the value proposition of their offering in a business context. Sure, they talk about saving money or time or some other generic benefit. Yet their pitch is usually focused on the details of their product, not on the total costs and benefits to the business. For example, vendors will certainly provide information regarding licensing and other costs that they charge, but they sometimes seem oblivious about other transition-related costs that the business would obviously need to incur in order to leverage their product. Even the best pitch cannot account for everything, but a good one accounts for as much as possible. It speaks to business decision makers about their interests, in their language, crisply and clearly articulating why they should care. This doesn't require a fancy slide deck, as Dr. Eugene Chan, founder of the DNA Medicine Institute, will attest:
I was filing my first patent for my first company, and my patent lawyer just happened to say, hey, I know this guy who invests in companies. So, I arranged to meet him and actually forgot my slides! I just drew out the idea on his yellow note pad, and right away he said, “Ok, I'll put in $300,000.” I thought, Wow, okay, what should I do now?” It was fantastic! I guess there's always an element of luck.
I won't argue that luck may have helped Eugene get an audience with this investor, but I'm quite certain that it was Eugene's ability to clearly and convincingly convey the value proposition of his idea that earned him the investment.
As Jim Phalen, executive vice president of State Street, put it:
Big companies are good at problem-solving. If there's an issue, you can probably galvanize an army to solve it. But new ideas often get lost or overwhelmed by the culture. Sometimes the management structure just kills it. Sometimes there's just not a good process for moving it forward. A lot of ideas get killed because of perception—hey, they didn't approve my product idea last year and I was only asking for $1 million. You're going to need $10 million? Forget it. But the $10 million idea may be better than the $1 million idea. Figure out what the issue was with the $1 million idea; why couldn't they make a case? If you believe strongly in your idea, take it forward.
The ideal, of course, is to not even need funding in the first place. We leverage our asset Life Cycle Management process—which is to always replace older technologies with the most current version of the technologies before the end of any asset's life cycle. This is a way of making a capital investment that typically reduces operating expense at the same time. It allows us to self-fund many projects. Before the useful life of our technology asset ends, we get ready with a replacement that is better, cheaper, and consistent with our technology blueprint. Most of the time, the new technology will not increase our operating expenses. In fact, expenses are usually reduced, because the more innovative solution is also more cost-effective. We get more for less. Sometimes, growth requirements consume the difference, although it's still transparent to the business. We're able to provide more capacity and improved performance at the same cost. Other times, we return a significant amount of our budget savings back to the organization, as demonstrating savings is key to effective promotion. And a third option is to reinvest the savings in another area where the payback period might take more than a single budget cycle. This technique of self-funding innovation through asset Life Cycle Management can just as easily be applied to areas other than infrastructure. It requires that innovators, or those leading them, have a good grasp of their financial baselines and the impact that their idea can have on their annual forecast.
Sometimes, self-funding just isn't possible. An understanding of the financial impact and a projected ROI (return on investment) or payback period will provide the firmest foundation for obtaining funding and staffing for innovative initiatives. Metrics that forecast the expected improvements will demonstrate a solid focus on results. Not all improvement ideas can be directly translated to increase revenue or reduce expenses, of course. And the more innovative the proposal, the less predictable the results. However, we try to get as close as we can to some measure of expected business value, whether it's in terms of cycle time, customer satisfaction, risk reduction, or some other important measure.
Even in organizations where special funding has been set aside for experimental projects, we're still potentially competing against other good ideas, so the more concrete we can be about our expected benefits, the better. This doesn't necessarily mean that only projects with short-term tangible benefits get funded. Companies are increasingly recognizing the value of innovation project portfolios that deliver over multiple time horizons. However, projects with short-term tangible benefits are far less likely to be rejected, especially if they also have even greater long-term potential. So successful innovators think in the long term, but do their best to deliver in the short term. Whenever possible, they structure their proposal in a way that demonstrates and delivers tangible benefits as early as possible. While some innovative ideas can be translated into short-term benefits and some cannot, virtually all will have a future potential that's either difficult or impossible to predict. That's the nature of innovation! So, innovators are always in a situation where they need to consider the best way to communicate that potential.
Dr. Eugene Chan, the medical innovator, has encountered the challenge many times in his own business and offers some great some advice through this story:
You really need to think about the right way to communicate about something that people haven't experienced yet. Everyone knows what it means to buy a diagnostic device because it measures the one thing they're interested in. But, if it actually measures ten things and gives them ten values, and also provides a diagnosis or predicts their physical state, that's very different. So, I have some business students working on a small project for me to figure out which of the two dozen or so tests is the best one for people to get started on. Maybe there's a disease people are managing and we can provide a really valuable test for them. That way we don't have to depend on a whole educational program that says, hey this is a completely brand new device and works differently in this way. I think once people start actually using this, they'll figure out the new features pretty soon afterward.
I think we'll also have help getting the message out because of the partners we're funded by. In 2015, our technology will be up on the NASA Space Station and in the National Institute of Health. They're backing our project and are incredibly supportive. If you watch Star Trek, you know about the Tricorder, so the folks at NASA were absolutely among the first to be on board with this.
There's no formula to use for promoting potential—it's a judgment call based on the specific decision makers, culture, appetite for risk, and many other factors. There's no need to minimize it, just a need to be thoughtful about what promises our proposal may imply. Now, I'm rarely, if ever, considered a conservative person. But this is one area where I'm often more realistic than others. I don't like to promise something that I may not be able to deliver. That's why I work very hard to take great ideas and find ways to get value from them early on, while building our way toward that greater, longer-term potential. When I don't know what I can reasonably deliver, my first proposal is a study or proof-of-concept or a pilot, which is a much smaller project. That gives the team the resources we need to do some research and experimentation in order to get to a closer estimate of what's possible and by when.
Some organizations formalize a similar process where funds are earmarked for limited initial funding to promising ideas. This allows the team to test their assumptions and more accurately assess potential through studies and experimentation. Ideas that are thus validated can then proceed through another funded stage as the real costs, benefits, and potential become increasingly clear.
Unfortunately, some organizations put their innovation projects through the same program management mill that traditional projects undergo. That can create issues since the usual role of program management is to measure progress to already-established expectations, not to reassess expectations after each stage.
It's clear that corporate innovators need to employ sound judgment to ensure that legacy processes—or inappropriate processes—don't slow or prevent progress. It's important that we have a good understanding of current processes and expectations (managing expectations is an essential aspect of effective promotion) and are able to anticipate what the potential issues and challenges might be. Then we can constructively address questions and potential concerns up front, rather than wind up in a defensive position later.
Creating a Promotion Plan
Once an idea becomes a project, a marketing and communications plan should be developed. A common plan format addresses these important choices:
- Audience: Who will we choose to communicate with?
- Timing: When will we choose to communicate?
- Content: What will we choose to communicate?
- Method: How will we choose to communicate?
- Approach: What attitude will we choose to communicate effectively?
It's important to consider the impact and role of trends such as mobile computing, analytics, and social media in each of the above. We can leverage advances in social media and related technologies to enhance awareness, interest, and engagement. In the past, promotion was largely a one-way broadcast. Information was “pushed out” using very traditional channels. Social media has significantly changed that by creating wide-open spaces for public conversations. Very direct message targeting is possible using advances such as analytics and location-awareness. This increases opportunities as well as the risks, especially in terms of brand promotion.
Chef Ming Tsai has an interesting take on the power of social media. He told me this story:
I decided to open a new restaurant called Blue Dragon that we planned to open in February in Boston. This was a great move for me, for employees, and the company. But to be honest—I got too much press about the new restaurant too early. I didn't want to announce it until the end of December, but people saw me in the neighborhood and started speculating and found out that I had gotten a liquor license. People started writing and tweeting about it. We got a fantastic preopening, but we weren't going to open our doors for another two and a half months. I didn't think people were going to forget about us, but once the word is out there, you have to take advantage of it. We wanted to keep this story alive, so we turned to social media and kept the interest up. Funny, once people saw me talking about Blue Dragon, they said, “Yeah, we've got to get back to Blue Ginger!” You know, it all plays a part, which is a good thing.
As we develop our communications plan, we need to carefully consider the different audiences and stakeholders we will communicate with. Poor promotion can generate resistance or negative press and impact our ability to succeed. Are we telling others our plans? Or are we asking for input? How are questions and concerns communicated and addressed? How are different and perhaps even better ideas handled? The answers to these questions, and others like them, often mean the difference between generating enthusiasm and creating opposition. Since both of these can spread very quickly, the better we are at managing how we are perceived, the more success we will have. Communications that are open, inclusive, and responsive tend to dissolve resistance and invite support.
When John Swainson took over as CEO at CA Technologies (formerly Computer Associates), the company was in trouble. By the time John left CA, it had not only fully recovered but had regained its industry leadership. When I asked John how he managed to achieve this transformation, he was characteristically modest, yet identified the role of an effective communications plan:
Cultures get destroyed quickly but take a long time to rebuild, particularly after they have been damaged. What we did (after I joined CA) was ultimately restore people's trust in the management team and the company's management processes. It was not any one big thing but rather a whole series of small things, delivering on what we said we were going to do and just sort of keeping at it and keeping at it and keeping at it—in my case for five years. We did a lot of communicating with people, we did a lot of town hall meetings, we did quarterly webcasts, we did blogs, e-mails, we did a lot of things. Mostly, we told people what we were trying to do. We gave them regular feedback on what was happening and gave them progress reports. And ultimately they saw that most of the time, what we said was going to happen was happening, and their confidence was restored.
As John indicates, communicating plans and results is a key element of success in any transformation or project. Even the most successful results can easily go unnoticed given the size and complexity of many organizations. As innovators, we can't assume that people see and understand them. We need to connect the dots. When we want someone else to see the value of our solution, we should make that as easy for them as we possibly can. We need to do that in a way that reflects the perspective of those to whom we're communicating, rather than our own perspective. This is much more difficult to do than most people realize. In fact, it's not a practice that I see demonstrated very often. Our target audience shouldn't have to understand how we see the world to recognize how our solution brings value to them. We need to understand how they see the world, and how our solution fits into it. The ability to listen well to and understand the people with whom we want to communicate before we begin communicating is an essential component of this.
Developing a clear, consistent message that reflects the interests of our different stakeholders requires planning, focus, and careful execution. John Thompson, CEO of Virtual Instruments and former CEO of Symantec, relays what he calls an “uncanny experience” during a trip to Japan when the news media there:
… talked about how Symantec stock price was up 10 percent for the day based upon the strength of their announcement with AT&T, an announcement that I didn't know anything about. So I picked up the phone and I called the corporate PR leader to ask what we had announced that day with AT&T. And he said, well, gee, I don't know, we should find out about it. I said, If you are the corporate PR leader, how could you not know what happened? Well, the discovery was that we had communications spread across the company and if you were in Europe, you did it one way, if you were in the United States, you did it another way, if you were in a business unit, you did it one way, if you were in the field team, you did it in another way. So we hired a colleague of mine from IBM, who was a very, very good communications leader and consolidated all communications under him. Whether it was external or internal, whether it was a customer or press or investors, he had all the words that were to be spoken about the company. Internally or externally, it would all flow through him. And it was after he was put in place that we started to promote the idea that Symantec was in fact the world leader in security. And the rest is basically history.
The principles illustrated in John's story apply whether we are communicating internally to colleagues or superiors or externally to the wide world.
Developing and executing a well-thought-out communications plan speeds and simplifies progress for innovators. It anticipates and avoids misunderstandings, and it generates interest and enthusiasm. Yet it's important that we remember that even the best plan cannot take the place of the other essential element of an effective promotion strategy—the passionate and tightly crafted value statement.
Using Industry Awards and Recognition
Industry recognition enhances our brand and competitive position and also rewards and inspires our people. After our storage team at State Street implemented a new storage technology to consolidate and virtualize our massive library of e-mail files, we entered a storage industry award competition, and we received a notification that our company was among the few finalists. We sent the chief engineer and the manager of the storage group to the awards ceremony. The engineer took the stage with the other finalists and awaited the announcement of the winner—and it was us! This young man was thrilled to accept the award on behalf of our State Street team. On his way back, he sent me a note saying, “Madge, it was such a thrilling feeling when I was on stage—I am already working on our next storage award.” At that moment, I realized that receiving outside recognition was not only great for our company, but also a huge motivator for my team. Team members are proud to say, “I was part of that.” It inspires everyone and promotes the value of innovation.
I like to say that professional sales people are not the only people who need great sales and communication skills. Everyone involved in the process of innovation needs to seek out opportunities for promotion, continually attempting to gain support and spark interest. And once a new initiative has been successfully implemented, industry awards can serve as additional proof of the value it can deliver. They benchmark our progress against our peers and communicate and celebrate success internally and externally.
Several years ago, my team was chosen as one of the finalists for an award being given in the United Kingdom. It was a big deal and my European Regional Manager and I made plans to attend the formal awards dinner and ceremony. I also invited my former manager, Joe Antonellis, who was living in London. He had by then become vice chairman, head of all State Street business for Europe, Africa, and Asia-Pacific. At his suggestion, I extended invitations to all of the top business executives in our U.K. office to join us. The awards dinner was a great evening. It gave us a chance to get to know the business executives a lot better. Enjoying a celebratory evening with them and their spouses allowed us to bond and establish relationships. Throughout the dinner, they were interested in learning about our nominated project and they quickly recognized the value and advantage it would bring to State Street in Europe. We were one of the top three winners for that category, and State Street's name was on the board shining along with the other two winners. The evening gave us an unparalleled opportunity to establish our brand among all the attendees and beyond, and to communicate our value to State Street's top executives in the United Kingdom.
Promote—Don't Brag
As I hope I've made clear in the preceding pages, all aspiring innovators need to learn how to articulate and communicate their ideas in order to promote innovation. This is not to be confused with bragging—“blowing your own horn,” as that former boss of mine put it. We must do it in a way that is acceptable to the norms of behavior of the corporate culture, does not offend our colleagues, and is provable. We should make both colleagues and superiors aware of the value innovation can bring to the company, in a businesslike manner. We have to learn how to package our accomplishments and include relevant metrics and proofs of strategic compatibility, and then to communicate them both internally and externally when the time is right.
Opportunities to Promote
As important as promotion is, endlessly communicating benefits can be counterproductive. We need to choose our timing carefully. Our goal is to ensure that people know about—and understand the value of—the benefits that matter to them. Communicating that value and establishing credibility is vitally important, but we also want to demonstrate that we understand their needs by not wasting their time, monopolizing their attention, or telling them what they already know.
Extremely effective promoters view every interaction with executives, staff, colleagues, and customers as an opportunity to promote. They keep it short and sweet, but they don't let a good opportunity pass them by. For example, at State Street, as a general courtesy, most executives would say, “Hi, Madge! How are you doing?” when they passed by me or we met in the elevator or parking garage. Instead of just replying “Very well, thank you,” I would take that opportunity to tell them that we had just received an award from whatever industry or organization had most recently honored us. Most of the time, they would respond with great enthusiasm, asking about the award and what we did to earn it.
Executives have an essential role in promotion. Their public support makes a great deal of difference. It honors the work that has already been done, and inspires others to succeed as well. Listen to what Tom Mendoza, vice chairman of NetApp does every day:
I wanted a very positive culture, so one of the things I started doing way back in 1994, right after I got to NetApp, was try to catch someone doing something right. I had been in many environments where people were always looking for what was wrong—but never in their group, by the way, always in someone else's group. Instead, I wanted a “thank-you culture.” I don't think you can say “thank you” enough. I feel that if people know they are respected and appreciated, they will do almost anything for you, and that's part of creating the sort of safe culture leads to a lot of good new ideas.
So, when I see someone doing something right, or if anyone at NetApp sees somebody do something extraordinary, whether it's helping a customer or helping a colleague, or just helping society, they send me an e-mail and I make a phone call. We log all those calls. I make about ten of them a day, and I make them seven days a week—wherever I am in the world I continue to make those calls. When I got to NetApp there were thirty-two of us; now we number more than 14,000, but people still hear about it when someone in the company they know gets a call from me. They always ask: “Why did he call you?”
Success stories are always a great way to demonstrate value, and innovators should cultivate and communicate them. Tarkan Maner, previous CEO of Wyse Technology, serial entrepreneur, and investor, describes an experience he had several years ago when first venturing into one of his great passions—bringing Internet access to remote areas of the world:
We had written a case study about how we brought Internet access to villages in several emerging markets, and we showed pictures of children seeing and using the Internet for the first time. Our team was focused on providing success for customers, and we wanted to share the great results. It was a popular story and people in the media jumped on it, resulting in many unique stories in the press and various outlets. In just two months, we were on the cover of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and a few other leading publications. We couldn't believe it!
Tarkan was able to paint a very dramatic picture of his achievement. He communicated it effectively, and his story spread around the world. Even if all of our achievements are not quite as dramatic or world-changing—although I believe many of them can be—we need to become as effective as we can in the art of promotion. Here are three different levels with which we can estimate our own skills in this area.
Promote: Levels of Effectiveness
Level One: Creates Uncertainty
At Level One we have little or no focus on ensuring the value and brand are clearly communicated. Instead, we create uncertainty about it. We fail to gain necessary buy-in and support. Nor are we able to achieve appropriate recognition of potential and actual benefits.
Level Two: Creates Understanding
At Level Two we are able to clearly communicate the value proposition and secure funding and buy-in. We use regular and reliable channels to build awareness, knowledge, and interest. We are deliberate about measuring and communicating results.
Level Three: Creates Excitement
Level Three people are master promoters who create buzz and ensure endorsement by appealing to the interests of others. We never assume the message is already out there or understood. We leverage every opportunity to educate others, and we generate interest and enthusiasm (e.g., elevator pitches, awards). We benchmark against industry and differentiate brand and strategic value as well as results.
Promoting State Street's Environmental Sustainability and Green Programs
In 2001, State Street management prepared to build an enormous global enterprise data center. At the time, worldwide environmental sustainability initiatives were not yet a part of most corporate cultures. However, as a believer in preserving natural resources—and equally as important, preserving profit—I had long focused on reducing consumption of electricity and water.
This may have had something to do with my having grown up in China, where electricity was very expensive. As we grew up, we made a habit of conservation, because there wasn't much, and so we didn't want to waste such a precious resource. And in Hong Kong, when I was there, there was always a shortage of water. The city water was always shut off before lunch, and not turned on again until late afternoon before dinner. As a result, most households had a water tank to collect enough for urgent needs.
In America, many years later, my team of engineers and technologists designed the data center with the same sort of optimization and efficiency in mind. In fact, in creating our Technology Infrastructure Blueprint, we had already positioned ourselves for energy efficiency and conservation, with official standards in place for our technology environmental sustainability program, our efficiency program, and our design for the global data center infrastructure. State Street received twelve Green IT industry awards for its innovative efforts in sustainability and for its green initiatives. All the awards were for our innovative solutions backed by actual metrics to demonstrate our results. The awards stand as a great example of the positive impact that recognition within the industry can have. After all our hard work in this area, our team was gratified to be recognized for its efforts, State Street's employees were proud of the company as a whole, and the company's customers were pleased to know that State Street took sustainability seriously.
We started our formal efficiency and optimization program with the intention of lowering our operating expenses, lowering the unit cost of each technology infrastructure area, and reducing our consumption of resources. The program was so successful that State Street's business growth benefited for years to come.
The program focused on three major areas:
Culture and Communications
To begin, we established a structured management system capable of driving the program throughout the entire organization. With well-defined program goals, we formed an executive committee consisting of the senior leaders in Global Infrastructure Service. Then, we appointed a program lead and assembled work groups composed of chief engineers and engineers from each functional area. These engineers helped draw, define, and document our overall blueprint, and they laid out detailed project plans phase by phase. The team also defined the key metrics we wanted to measure and monitor and communicated them using an executive dashboard.
We also conducted regular town hall and functional area meetings to communicate the status and progress of the plan and the accomplishments of every employee. Further, we created a website with information about the program and news regarding our accomplishments.
Promoting this program through a clear and passionate message was one critical factor in its success. Inspiring everyone by benchmarking our achievements against our competitors was another. And we continued to compete for awards and recognition around the world. Altogether we created a culture of urgency and focus on change that reverberated throughout the entire organization.
Method and Technology
Our promotional plan also sought to leverage all available technologies and processes to accelerate our green program. Our Zero Footprint, Maximum Impact™ solution reduced the number of new datacenters we would have to construct and maintain. And we utilized virtualization for every key infrastructure component to reduce the amount of physical hardware and data center space. By this I mean we managed a group of technology infrastructure components, like servers, storage, and middleware, into one environment. This in turn increased asset utilization, which together reduced the data center space, utility costs such as electricity and water, and cost of support staff. Virtualization, in fact, was a major factor in our successful Green program.
We even pulled in cold air during the winter to help cool down the data centers, instead of only using air conditioning. And we pulled hot air out of the data centers to lower their temperature, significantly reducing their consumption of electricity.
Consumption Control
Most aspects of consumption control can be inexpensive and easy to accomplish—when the proper culture and attitude exist. (Some aspects, such as storage consumption, are not so easy to control.) To begin, we focused on power management, ensuring that all rooms had automatic lights. Then we implemented a new technology that allowed us to start or shut down the desktop computers when the system needed to update, or for security reasons, or when the computer were not in use. In this way, we could save electricity. We also purchased hardware with lower voltage requirements, supported a work from home program, championed hybrid cars, replaced all old monitors with flat screens, and recycled obsolete technology equipment and media. We instituted video-conferencing, too, reducing the travel costs associated with face-to-face meetings and lowering the company's carbon footprint. We also implemented usage-based chargeback, providing business areas with useful and detailed information about the IT infrastructure resources that they used each month. This gave business managers insight into what was driving their IT infrastructure costs. Once they understood that, they could put controls into place to minimize unnecessary usage.
Most of our environmental sustainability initiatives were completed before the major focus on “green” that we see all around us today. We were early innovators in these efforts, and one side benefit I should mention was that our achievements in this area made State Street even more visible and popular. Many of our new hires were excited to be working for a company that took such a serious interest in sustainability and had already accomplished so much. All of us were gratified by the way we had promoted steps that every individual could take to help reduce our company's overall impact on the environment!
Promote—Concrete Steps for Putting This Discipline into Action
Individual
To promote ourselves and our work, we should learn to “blow our own horn,” but in a way that cannot be mistaken as bragging. The most effective method is through metrics. As a matter of course, when we innovate, we should establish a baseline to which we reference and compare our new and improved results. In effect, we provide before and after pictures as a way of showing how our innovation is improving things.
We should always communicate our ideas—and our accomplishments—in terms of business value. What will our ideas gain, save, or achieve? When we answer these questions in our presentations, we earn the attention our audience, whether it be our company's decision makers, venture capitalists, or potential customers. Once an idea does become a project, we should develop a marketing and communications plan to support it.
Team and Organization
Teams and organizations, like individuals, should also be referencing metrics and business value in promoting their work. Teams can make a policy of promoting ideas and solutions through the lifecycle of their projects. First, we promote in an effort to get funding and staff, then to garner support and buy-in, then to encourage awareness and interest. Finally, when our vision becomes a reality, we promote to demonstrate the value and benefits of our work. Throughout, we should be thinking long term, but striving to deliver short-term benefits as early as possible—and promoting that fact.
Organizations can formalize a process where money is earmarked for limited initial funding of promising ideas, allowing teams to test assumptions and potential through smaller studies and experimentation. Ideas that prove promising can then move to another funded stage as the real costs and potential benefits become clear.
Organizations should encourage teams to benchmark and apply for industry awards and recognition. Both provide a great way to promote a company's innovation accomplishments and to motivate teams and individuals to even greater achievements.