Back in April in this space we discussed whether there’s a talent shortage in America, particularly in light of the coming retirement of many baby boomers.  We examined whether there is indeed a pervasive labor shortfall, or if the laws of supply and demand are out of balance in certain industries or geographies.

An article this week in the Wall Street Journal by Mark Whitehouse expands on this topic.  The piece, titled “Some Firms Struggle to Hire Despite High Unemployment”, cites why, despite the tough economy, some companies are having a difficult time filling job openings.

Some excerpts: 

…With a 9.5% jobless rate and some 15 million Americans looking for work, many employers are inundated with applicants. But a surprising number say they are getting an underwhelming response, and many are having trouble filling open positions.

“This is as bad now as at the height of business back in the 1990s,” says Dan Cunningham, chief executive of the Long-Stanton Manufacturing Co., a maker of stamped-metal parts in West Chester, Ohio, that has been struggling to hire a few toolmakers. “It’s bizarre. We are just not getting applicants.”

Employers and economists point to several explanations. Extending jobless benefits to 99 weeks gives the unemployed less incentive to search out new work. Millions of homeowners are unable to move for a job because the real-estate collapse leaves them owing more on their homes than they are worth.

The job market itself also has changed. During the crisis, companies slashed millions of middle-skill, middle-wage jobs. That has created a glut of people who can’t qualify for highly skilled jobs but have a hard time adjusting to low-pay, unskilled work like the food servers that Pilot Flying J seeks for its truck stops.

… Matching people with available jobs is always difficult after a recession as the economy remakes itself. But Labor Department data suggest the disconnect is particularly acute this time around. Since the economy bottomed out in mid-2009, the number of job openings has risen more than twice as fast as actual hires, a gap that didn’t appear until much later in the last recovery. The disparity is most notable in manufacturing, which has had among the biggest increases in openings. But it is also appearing in other areas, such as business services, education and health care.

If the job market were working normally—that is, if openings were getting filled as they usually do—the U.S. should have about five million more gainfully employed people than it does, estimates David Altig, research director at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. That would correspond to an unemployment rate of 6.8%, instead of 9.5%.

… Longer-term trends are at play. For one, the U.S. education system hasn’t been producing enough people with the highly specialized skills that many companies, particularly in manufacturing, require to keep driving productivity gains. “There are a lot of people who are unemployed, but those aren’t necessarily the people employers are looking for,” says David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Manufacturers of high-precision products such as automobile and aircraft parts are in a particularly tough spot. Global competition keeps them from raising wages much. But they need workers with the combination of math skills, intuition and stamina required to operate the computer-controlled metalworking machines that now dominate the factory floor.

Clearly, there are many angles to explore here, ranging from the state of the economy to the effects of long-term unemployment benefits to the quality of our public education system. 

For the high end of the market, there is also a healthy debate about whether there are enough skilled workers in the right place at the right time to help companies advance their strategic priorities.  Many companies continue to seek out interim specialists and consulting talent to help them during the peaks and valleys of normal business cycles.

Stay tuned as we continue to follow developments on this important subject.

To help your organization leverage the top-tier of the flexible workforce, visit www.msquared.com or call 1-888-818-2505

By guest writer Margaret Jennings, M Squared Consulting

Despite being aware that balance in all things in life (including business) is a good thing, I was quite surprised to read some of the figures quoted by Whitney Johnson in her recent HBR post about the impact women in leadership positions can have on a business.

She cited findings by the University of Michigan and Cornell University that showed that “…IPOs of companies with greater gender diversity outperformed (others) by as much as 30%.”   She also quotes the research of David Gaddis Ross of Columbia University that “organizations most inclusive of women in top management achieve 35% higher ROE and 34% better total return to shareholders versus their peers.”

It is not difficult to reason that there are significant benefits for a business with a female presence in senior management in any business.  However, the 2009 Catalyst Census of FORTUNE 500 Women Board Directors revealed that less than one fifth of companies have three or more women on their boards, and more than 40 percent have no women directors whatsoever.

How can organizations increase the presence of women in leadership roles and across the workforce?  An article in HR Management offers insight from some leading companies:

• “What General Mills does is look at everything from soup to nuts. It looks at the hiring of women to make sure that they’re bringing in women that they know are going to stay and succeed. And, interestingly, the turnover rate is very low at General Mills. They think long-term. They hire someone to stay and not just to fill a gap.”
• Healthcare company WellPoint consistently ranks in NAFE’s list of the top 50 companies for executive women. CEO Angela Braly is also the only woman to serve as CEO of a Fortune 50 company.  Their company ethos is “…you don’t have to check who you are at the front door. Bring your whole self to work. You’re not just an executive, but you’re an executive and a mom or a dad, if you have kids, and it’s important that you be able to spend time on both.”  They also have many work-at-home programs.
• IBM has been supporting women in the work place for over 120 years.  “Work/life integration is extremely important and luckily IBM is a leader in this field. For example, we offer flexible work options and job sharing, and in 2000 IBM created a $50 million global work/life fund to support our employee’s child and elderly care needs around the world.”

Clearly, gender diversity in corporate leadership is good for business, and there is no shortage of examples to demonstrate that fact.

To help your organization leverage the top-tier of the flexible workforce, visit www.msquared.com

A recent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review  asks “Is Your Company As Customer-Focused As You Think?”   It is a terrific piece about assessing and improving your organizational readiness:

Most managers agree that achieving sustainable, organic profit growth requires delivering on a clear, precise customer promise; continuously improving on that promise; periodically innovating beyond the familiar; and supporting all of that with an organization open to new ideas and negative feedback.

But how can senior executives ensure that everyone in the organization grasps and supports the brand promise? How can managers create an open organization, so that rank-and-file employees are unabashed about sharing customer complaints with upper management?

Based on interactions with more than 150 senior managers and a wide-ranging review of pertinent case studies, marketing professors Patrick Barwise and Seán Meehan developed five questions managers can pose to help assess their organization’s ongoing ability to satisfy customers–and thereby ensure that their products and services stay relevant.

No. 1: Can your middle managers accurately describe your customer promise?

By asking middle managers this question, senior executives can gauge whether those further down in the hierarchy understand the customer promise. Encouraging middle managers to articulate the customer promise can also help senior executives learn how clear and explicit the customer promise really is. The more clear and explicit it is, the better it is.

For example, Procter & Gamble’s Tide detergent promised to get clothes cleaner than any other product when it launched in 1946. This clear and explicit promise was–and remains–easy to state; it is not subject to misinterpretation by the customer. It is unambiguous. By contrast, “overnight delivery” implies delivery first thing in the morning. But to an office worker, it probably means 9 a.m., whereas to a construction site foreman it could mean 7 a.m.

No. 2: Can all the members of your senior executive team name the three things that most undermine trust among your existing customers?

Since bad news tends to get filtered on its way up the hierarchy, there’s a danger top management won’t hear about the organization’s failures to deliver on its customer promise. The goal of this question is to transmit the voice of unhappy customers to the top of the company.

Yes, focusing on customer dissatisfaction–which typically occurs when the company fails to deliver on its promise–is hard, because it involves pointing fingers or revisiting bad decisions. But focusing on dissatisfaction also allows managers to uncover and act on the root causes. Why is this important? Because customer dissatisfaction undermines customer trust, which in turn diminishes the value of the brand.

Back in April in this space we debated whether there is a looming talent shortage in America.  Now, in a related piece, an insightful blog article from the Harvard Business Review by authors Sue Ashford and Scott DeRue discusses how best to address the leadership talent shortage that they suggest exists in companies today:

Nearly 60% of companies are facing leadership talent shortages that are impeding their performance. Another 31% expect a lack of leadership talent to impede their performance in the next several years. Yet, in 2009, U.S. companies spent an estimated $12 billion (24% of their overall training budgets) on leadership development programs and services. By any reasonable standard, what we are currently doing to grow and develop future leaders is not working. Here are five critical attributes that we believe are necessary for developing the leaders of today and tomorrow:

1. The best learners make the best leaders. We must teach people how to learn leadership from life experiences. We argue that learning leadership is a function of how people approach, go through, and reflect on developmental experiences — a process we call “mindful engagement,” We need to stop teaching leadership theory in a vacuum, and start teaching people how to learn leadership from real-world experiences.
2. Leadership as a set of principles. Business education is largely oriented toward teaching an important but narrow set of technical knowledge and skills. We need to expand our teaching to encompass a set of leadership principles that can be globally applied across situations. Doing so will build an adaptive capacity that enables people to more effectively lead in today’s complex and dynamic business environment.
3. Reward leadership development (FINALLY!). All companies pay lip service to the importance of developing people, but how many companies actually reward (with any significance) the development of people? Answer: very few. Also, how many companies penalize managers for hoarding key talent? Answer: almost none. Yet, managers often do everything they can to avoid losing key talent to other opportunities because, as one executive put it to us the other day: “I can’t afford to lose my best people.”
4. Leadership development at all levels.  We previously argued that leadership is not about position. If that is true, then why do most leadership development programs focus on senior executives? We need to expand our focus to figure out ways to efficiently and economically develop leaders throughout the organization.
5. Keep it simple. Leadership is complex, but leadership development cannot be. We must provide key talent with clear metrics and development priorities that provide a straightforward roadmap for realizing their leadership potential. Unfortunately, that is not the case in most companies. One Fortune 500 company that we are working with developed a leadership competency model that specifies 54 distinct competencies across 15 different leadership skills. The result? Employees are confused, and assessment data are poor. Instead, identify the three or four competencies that really differentiate top performers across different levels of the organization, and then reward and promote based on those competencies.

Contributors:  Sue Ashford is Associate Dean for Leadership Programming and Executive MBA Program and the Michael & Susan Jandernoa Professor of Management and Organizations at the at the University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business.  Scott DeRue is an Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at the University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business.

For more information on leveraging leaders from the flexible workforce, visit www.msquared.com.

A recent piece in Workforce Management (www.workforce.com) about the influence of community on work caught my eye.  It confirmed that online communities of practice give far-flung employees a chance to network, share knowledge and communicate best practices that trainers can capture and incorporate into future learning events.

For example, early in 2008, American soldiers training Afghan and Iraqi armies were having problems using a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The equipment was old and had a tendency to jam, misfire and explode prematurely.  Frustrated, a unit commander posted a question to one of the U.S. Army’s communities of practice, which are online forums where soldiers ask questions and share ideas with peers around the world.

“Within a few days, someone who’d had a similar experience with the launcher posted a simple solution to the site on how to safely prevent misfiring,” says Mike Prevou, president and co-founder of Strategic Knowledge Solutions and senior knowledge management advisor to the Army in Leavenworth, Kansas.

The solution worked, and when the unit commander followed up to discuss his experiences, the issue became a hot topic in the community. The conversation thread was soon picked up by the Army’s safety commander, who issued a formal safety policy on how to deal with the rocket launcher’s safety issues that was sent out to all the units using this equipment. And it all took place within 15 days of the original post.

“Without the community, those soldiers may never have found a solution to their problem, and they probably would have just put the equipment away,” Prevou says.

Communities of practice aren’t just valuable for military personnel. They are becoming vital corporate tools that allow employees with similar jobs or interests to get advice and share best practices. “Communities of practice are a super-fast way for users to produce and share content,” says Eric Suave, CEO and co-founder of Tomoye, a collaboration software vendor in Ottawa. Prevou uses Tomoye’s technology to build the Army’s communities. “It’s a more responsive way to share information when it’s needed that allows organizations to collect ideas for formal training.”

That capturing of knowledge is critical for organizations that need to tap into the expertise of a far-flung employee population. It’s also an important issue for organizations with aging employee populations who might soon retire, taking with them important but informal knowledge about processes, customers or corporate culture.

 ”Both groups can work in concert,” Suave says. “On one side you have fast dissemination of information; on the other you have long-term planning that can draw on what people are talking about and turn it into policies and core content.”

This combined value is why communities of practice are cropping up in organizations around the world. They link globally dispersed workers who can serve as mentors to each other and share knowledge in an informal setting. There are pockets of excellence everywhere in organizations, Prevou says. “Communities of practice are a tool to tap into that excellence. It’s a way to share knowledge and build networks among people who might otherwise never connect.”

To help your organization develop strategies about how to best leverage the top-tier of the flexible workforce, visit www.msquared.com

A recent piece by psychiatrist and business consultant Kerry J. Sulkowicz about how best to give advice caught my eye: 

Much has been said about how to deliver feedback, because giving it is so often fraught with anxiety. Bosses shy away from the negative, critical part, even though they know it’s one of their most important responsibilities. But relatively little has been written about the art of giving good, old-fashioned advice. Unencumbered by some of the complications of performance reviews — nothing official, nothing related to compensation or promotion, nothing necessarily critical or painful to hear — well-intentioned advice should be a treat to give and to receive.

Why should you get better at giving advice? Lots of reasons: it’s helpful to pass your wisdom on to others; it extends your own influence, regardless of whether you ever get “paid back”; it’s a way to gain trust, stature and gravitas; and it’s just plain gratifying to be valued for what’s in your head. This is ego gratification of the very best sort.

So why do people who are sought for advice still manage to screw it up? In my experience, it’s less about the quality of advice and more because of the way it’s delivered. The way advice is given can inadvertently increase the receiver’s resistance to hearing it or acting on it, which is such a shame, because that undoes the best of intentions. You want the advisee to come away with good advice, rather than bad feelings about the advisor. Here are four tips on how to give advice well. (Remember that giving it well doesn’t necessarily make it good advice. Caveat emptor.)

1.    Bear in mind the difference between solicited and unsolicited advice. Both are perfectly fine ways to be helpful, but remember that the unsolicited variety may not always be welcome, so the recipient might be more vulnerable to a bruised ego if you push the advice too far.

2.    Say thank you before plunging in. This applies to solicited advice. Before offering any of your wisdom, express some gratitude for being asked. After all, it’s flattering to be seen as wise and helpful. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like being asked for advice. In fact, doing so is one of the best ways to deepen a relationship, because it’s a mutually gratifying human interaction and flattering without being obsequious.

3.    Make sure you understand the limits of the question. There’s nothing more annoying than asking for advice on one thing (like “What do I need to do to get a promotion?”) and getting advice on your marriage and your vacations plans, with a few golf tips thrown in. Stick to the subject at hand, unless somehow there’s a connection.

4.    Be confident, but not arrogant. This distinction is blurry for some folks. There really is a difference between coming across as authoritative (presumably the solicitor wouldn’t be seeking your advice if they didn’t think you knew your stuff) as opposed to authoritarian (using your power to compel someone to follow your advice, or being pathologically certain that you’re always right). Being authoritative can be done with humility, like saying “I’ve seen a lot of situations like this, and I’m concerned that if you don’t deal with this problem executive now, the damage will only get worse with time.” An authoritarian way of giving the same advice might be, “Look, you have to get rid of that guy now, or else I’ll do it for you.” The latter is obnoxious, off-putting, and not helpful.

5.    Give the recipient an “out.” This is related to No. 4. While there’s plenty of room for passion in the giving advice, a bit of humility also helps. You can say, for instance, that you’ve seen such-and-such approach work for yourself and for others, but it might not be for everybody. Or you can preface it with a turn of phrase like, “I’m not sure about this, but I think you could benefit from doing x, y, and z.” Or my personal favorite: “Have you considered…?”

6.    After giving advice, ask how it sounds. Often the best advice is created in an iterative way, rather than being delivered from on high. So after you’re done expounding, ask the recipient if that makes sense, or how they might feel about acting on your advice. Their reactions can help you refine it together and make it even more meaningful.

7.    Ask for follow-up. Not only does it show you care if you ask your advice-seeker to let you know how it goes, but it also conveys that you have a stake in giving good advice. Whether or not they take you up on the offer, it will leave them feeling even better about you and more confident in acting on what you’ve shared.

I’ve learned that giving advice is one of life’s great pleasures, especially when it turns out that I was right. I’m also grateful for all the good advice I’ve received over the years.

For good advice on how to maximize your workforce strategies, visit M Squared Consulting at www.msquared.com or call us at 888-818-2505.

Last week’s 2010 Staffing Industry Analysts Executive Forum in Las Vegas gathered more than 500 senior executives from the staffing industry for three days of learning and networking.  The conference, the 19^th annual, had a theme of “The Upside of the Downturn…Thriving in a Brave New Staffing World.”  Representatives from many “brand name” companies (Manpower, Allegis, Spherion, and others) were in attendance, in addition to hundreds of others from up-and-coming enterprises.

In reviewing the state of the staffing industry, new SIA president and chief analyst Barry Asin struck a cautiously optimistic tone in his opening keynote address:

·         U.S. staffing revenue was down 26% in 2009, but is expected to grow 5% in 2010

·         The Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI)’s leading index indicates growth

·         Unemployment claims were down in February

·         Bureau of Labor Statistics shows Temp employment heading higher

While his talk was optimistic, he tempered his remarks in light of the ongoing challenges many companies face, including continuing pressure on margins, market consolidation, and the vagaries of an unsettled economy.  Among the keys to achieving success, Asin says, are critically assessing the markets you compete in and refining your positioning (find a defensible niche).

Geoff Colvin, author and senior editor of Fortune Magazine give a fascinating address entitled, “The Upside of the Downturn: Ten Management Strategies to Prevail in the Recession and Thrive in the Aftermath.”  As the economy recovers, the business world we’re entering won’t be anything like the pre-recession world.  What is the new normal?  What are your most valuable assets?  Dramatic changes aren’t necessarily dangers – they’re typically opportunities for companies and leaders that respond fastest and smartest.

Among his recommendations on how to ensure that your business moves from recession to recovery:

·         Evaluate employees better.  In good times it’s easy for employees to look like stars, so evaluations tend to be less rigorous.  In tough times it’s much easier to distinguish the true stars from the third-stringers.

·         Set new priorities to confront new realities.  Example:  Government is taking a larger role in the life of every business.  The global economy is becoming less U.S.-centric.  What are the ramifications for your business?

·         Find new solutions to new problems; don’t just discount prices on current inventory.  Develop a creative culture that looks for needs customers didn’t know they had.

·         Re-examine your business model.  What is your essence?  The core?  What is the one thing you’d never cut?  Also, what is the profile of your customer base, and has it changed with the recession?  Take a look at your industry – has it changed fundamentally, or just been thrown off a bit?

·         Grow yourself.  Expand beyond your previous limits.  Be seen early and often.  Act fast.  And show fearlessness; employees want their leaders to demonstrate that they’re not afraid.  In business that means facing bad news head-on without cringing.

Separately, the SIA conference breakout sessions were also worthwhile, with each finishing with a list of actionable takeaways.  Overall, the 2010 Staffing Industry Analysts Executive Forum was a worthwhile event that provided a good snapshot of the development of the industry.

For more about how to intelligently use the high-end of the flexible workforce, visit www.msquared.com or call us at 888-818-2505.

Corporate Responsibility Magazine (the new name of CRO Magazine) has announced its 11th annual 100 Best Corporate Citizens List.  Hewlett-Packard, once tainted by a 2006 boardroom espionage case that brought down its chairman, topped the list. The Palo Alto, Calif., tech giant beat out the other companies considered–those that make up the Russell 1000 large-cap index–because of its high rankings in categories like corporate governance, philanthropy and environmental impact.

Hewlett-Packard had ranked fifth in 2009 and bumped Bristol-Myers Squibb from the top spot. Gabi Zedlmayer, the vice president of HP’s office of global social innovation, credits the company’s philanthropic efforts for the ranking, particularly its $23 million in “innovation grants” to universities. Good marketing has helped too. “We’ve done a better job of communicating the progress we’re making,” Zedlmayer says.

The 100 Best Corporate Citizens list, now in its 11th year, ranks companies based on publicly available information in seven categories: environmental impact, climate change, human rights, philanthropy, employee relations, financial performance and governance. The list’s creators assign a 19.5% weighting to environmental impact and employee relations, because they think they are what consumers, shareholders and employees care most about. Technology and electric utility businesses dominate the 2010 list, which has 25 of them. “Electric utilities are already highly regulated and transparent, and tech companies are young and mostly venture capital-backed and accustomed to transparency and dealing with investors,” says Jay Whitehead, the publisher of CRO.

Among this year’s high-profile no-shows: Google, which Whitehead describes as “one of the least transparent companies ever.” “Google’s opacity is high for a tech company,” he says. “They made a conscious decision early on not to disclose a lot, because they thought it would make them less competitive. ’Don’t be evil’ is their motto, but ‘Don’t be transparent’ is part of their culture.” Google rival Microsoft ranked No. 14.

The list suggests that companies have ramped up their do-gooding ways, or are at least doing a better job of promoting them. Between 2009 and 2010 the top company’s score improved by 66%, and the average score of all companies improved by 19%. A low score denotes good corporate citizenship, and the aggregate score of the top 100 companies was 30% less than the aggregate score last year.

Forty companies that made the 2009 list disappeared from it this year, including Goldman Sachs, which had the same score as last year. Only three companies, Intel, Starbucks and Cisco, have made the list all 11 years.

The 100 Best Corporate Citizens are selected from among the large-cap Russell 1000 companies, based on data provided by leading ESG investor data firm IW Financial.  More information is at www.thecro.com.

For information on how to enhance your corporate citizenship strategies, contact M Squared Consulting at msquared@msquared.com or 1-888-818-2505.

Business is all about customers and selling. That’s why every manager and executive should be a salesperson once in his career. The skills and lessons are indispensible and difficult to learn any other way. 

Whether you manage engineers, marketing, operations, or customer service; you’re still a salesperson. You sell every day. You don’t just sell products and services; you sell your projects, budget, ideas, and capabilities. And your customers aren’t just the paying kind; they include everybody you interface with.

What Every Manager Should Learn From Sales 

In an article this week, Forbes reported that three decades ago as much as 95% of the average corporation’s value consisted of tangible assets.  Today 75% of that average corporation’s value is intangible.   In other words, a business’s most valuable asset is its good name, its brand and reputation. In a recent survey by World Economic Forum, three-fifths of chief executives said they believed corporate brand and reputation represented more than 40% of their company’s market capitalization.  That value is the organization’s brand reputational value. Strong brand reputational value equals greater profits. 

Many companies that seek to protect and grow their brand contact M Squared Consulting for assistance.  A company’s brand reputational value has four basic elements: expectations, perceptions, business relationships and unique intellectual property assets. Improved quality in each of those areas increases financial value for the organization. For instance, a company with a reputation for quality and safety can charge more for the same product than their competitors because customers put a price premium on quality products and services that give them positive experiences. Companies with strong brands can retain employees better, too. A recent study suggests that 80% of employees between the ages of 18 and 30 will leave a company if they believe it has a weak brand or no association with ethics.

In today’s business climate there are four main avenues by which you can quickly lose your company’s brand reputational value. They are:

1. The Internet and social media. Any ethical or compliance failure, even an isolated and apparently minor one, can be instantly broadcast all over the world. Only a few years ago experts were saying you needed a top-notch public-relations capability to keep up with the 24-hour news cycle. Today 24 hours is an eternity. You need to be on your toes more than ever.

2. Subcontracting and outsourcing. A customer, partner or contractor may be the guilty party in violating ethical standards, but they don’t always receive the worst of the brand reputational value damage.

3. Regulatory. Litigation over ethics and compliance violations has been on the increase, and it will continue to increase. The Obama administration and other governments around the world are ratcheting up investigations and enforcement actions.

4. Employees. According to The Network, Inc., which runs the ethics hotline tnwinc.com, employees commit fraud more often during tough economic times. The company reports that of all the complaint calls it gets, the portion that were fraud-related whistle-blower calls rose from 14% in the first quarter of 2007 to 21% two years later.

Companies must treat their brand reputational value like any other asset. They should manage it just the way they manage real property and equipment. Here are five steps to take:

1. Invest in the three to five areas that will be most profitable. There are at least nine major areas in which ethics problems can hurt a business: markets and customers; strategy; product and service; design, brand and quality control; intellectual property and knowledge management; leadership; workforce; sub-cost-of-goods-sold expenses; risk management; and procurement. Determine which three to five of those represent the greatest business potential and risk for your organization.

2. Invest for the long term. Improving ethics in business for profitable gain is not a quarterly or one-year undertaking. Management needs to have at least a five-year plan and must try to foresee demographic and economic trends that can affect that plan. Ethical investments, just like investments in manufacturing facilities, can easily take five years to materially pay off.

3. Maintain an open communications structure. To protect a company’s brand and reputation, information has to be able to flow immediately to a sufficiently high level of the organization. One way to guarantee this is by having a consistently open line of contact between an ethics officer and senior management. If you don’t have a communication structure that allows concerns to become known, then build one.

4. Insure against individual idiocy and the ill-educated. It only takes the improper actions of one employee, one remote office or one outside agent representing the company to significantly damage your brand. Smart companies recognize and focus on the individual, always asking who exactly they’re hiring as an employee and whether they’ve done enough checking and testing of the person. Also, they know whether they are making sure their requirements concerning expected behavior reach every individual.

5. Insure against outside institutional incompetence. Apply all the same expectations for your company’s compliance, ethics and control standards to your vendors and partners as well. Not only must you exercise due diligence on entering into a relationship, but you also need to continually verify, at least for the top 10% of your supply chain, that your compliance and ethics controls are implemented and working.

In summary, your brand is a bigger part of your business’s assets than ever before. You can’t afford to let it be endangered.  For more information on how to protect and build your brand, visit www.msquared.com.