The Latest in Fast Company Leadership

CSR Goes Global: Find Out What You Need to Do to Operate With Success (Part One)

So you are a global company, but don't quite yet have a handle on global CSR? Maybe you have a domestic program in place, or even give to a crisis here and there. But expanding to the international realm is quite another level.

Many internationally-minded companies don't yet have an international CSR presence. Yet there is an effective way to increase your bottom line, your brand, and your local presence through CSR, while also serving communities. Here are some starter ideas on how to achieve an effective global CSR vision: Include the right planning, listen to both local and central objectives, and establish a local license to operate. In this post, we'll take a look at objectives:

Have a Plan Based on Your Company's Objectives

It sounds simple. But you can't just react to a crisis, or have your foundation give money and expect that to build your CSR brand. It's not that easy. Any good CSR program develops from starting with your company's objectives and goals.

A balanced, thoughtful global CSR plan is a company-wide effort which should take into account forprofit and community-minded objectives.

Digital Media Director 2.0: Jack-of-all-Trades, Master of Many

The role of the digital media director is quickly gaining importance as we continue to shift media dollars to digital from broadcast and print. I work with many clients whose digital spend is north of 50% of the total media budget. But it is the relentless and rapid evolution of media platforms, buying options, technology, and privacy law that make this role even more difficult. Let's look at some of the details behind this evolution.

Digital Media Director Skill Sets--Version 1.0 There is a core set of principles that have always been important in Digital Media planning. A partial list includes:

In the early days of digital, it was important to build a digital media plan that reached the right audience at the right price--and to understand how this audience accumulated over time. Additionally, creating media plans that were harmonious with the creative and messaging strategy has been and always will be important.

Understanding how all this comes together in an effective media plan is not trivial and often requires years of training and experience. However, these skills are no longer enough to guarantee success--the world has changed and so has the skill set required to be successful.

Digital Media Director Skill Sets--Version 2.0 There are several new skill sets that are important. We can break these into five categories: Technology, Analytics, Data, Privacy law, and Optimization.

Technology Perhaps no area has become as complex as technology. A basic understanding of the technology behind "tags" or "cookies" is essential. Every display ad must be effectively tagged otherwise future measurement isn't possible. And the display ad tags need to be able to talk to the brand Web site tags and should ideally be linked to search activity.

Ad networks, or exchanges, are now a standard part of every online plan. New networks arrive weekly, with promises of increased performance and lower costs. Understanding the difference between these networks can be a full time job. And this space is filled with jargon, premium vs. remnant, blind vs. non-blind, horizontal vs. vertical, etc. And because no good director wants to be tied to only using one network, we now have trading desks that sit on top of multiple ad networks to create commodities like trading in near real time.

New to the landscape is the addition of data networks that can be used in conjunction with the ad networks. We can combine online and offline data and buy very specific shopping behaviors. When combined with media inventory, we can serve ads to a pre-qualified audience based on a staggering array of requirements. We can target "Soccer Moms, who have two boys in pre-school, drive domestic mini-vans, reside in the smile belt, live at odd number addresses, and have bought Lucky Charms cereal in the last 30 days." Granted this includes a bit of hyperbole but you get the idea. Good directors need to navigate these waters and build complex behavioral models to reach their desired targets.

This is only a partial list of the technologies that a good director needs to be familiar with. But the implication is clear--good digital media directors need to be more than just tech friendly--they need to be downright geeky.

Analytics Digital media has always been more performance oriented compared to broadcast and print, simply because it is more easily measured. But performance measures have moved beyond CPMs, click-throughs and view-throughs. ROI models that connect ad exposure to brand site behavior and offline shopping activity are now the norm.

It is these ROI models that are key to keeping the ad exchanges honest and ensuring that we are indeed getting the promised value for our spending. It is not as if we can get a look "under the hood" and see that our ad was delivered to the specified target. We need sophisticated performance measures to ensure our results and this clearly requires a close working relationship between the media and analytics groups.

As a result of this, effective digital media directors must be math friendly. The analytics group will routinely employ a variety of econometric models, including: time series analysis, logistic regression, attribution modeling, multiple log-on-log regressions, and Granger causality testing.

If this sounds like a lot of heavy math, that's because it is. This is not to say that digital media directors need to conduct these analyses themselves. But because their plans will be evaluated using these concepts, they need to understand the approach and choices made within the models. Good media directors will participate in the model's development and keep the analytics team focused on delivering model outputs that can be actualized in the marketplace--not an easy task.

Data The idea ought to be that digital media is really becoming a commodity with an unconstrained supply. So, now the data is just as valuable as the impression. We can't find an audience by context alone anymore and expect to reach any type of scale. In the future, it is all about the data and the ability to identify the individual to meet your campaign needs.

Questions of data integrity, storage, and hygiene are critical. And an understanding of how data is organized from an individual record to a meta level is also important. It is not that the media team needs to be fluent in Business Objects or SQL code, but they need to care about the data that increasingly drives their decisions.

Privacy Law Five years ago few would have predicted that a law degree would be a plus for a digital media director. But you would have to live in a cave to not be aware of the legal battles that are currently raging within federal and state legislators regarding digital privacy.

The very existence of ad exchanges, data networks, and ROI models are all predicated on the ability to track online behavior. Consumers are increasingly aware and concerned about these practices. And the recent issues with Facebook have only heightened everyone's focus.

The process of aligning a client's, agencies' and advertiser's privacy "Terms & Conditions" is time consuming beyond belief and a source of endless billing hours for legal counsel. Everyone wants to mitigate risk while maximizing the performance of his or her media dollars. And, of course the digital media planner is at the unwinnable center of all this, acting as the glue that can bring about a détente of sorts among these warring factions.

Real-Time Optimization The most successful media planners have learned to optimize their plans in real-time. After all, this is the promise of digital. They don't wait until the media has run to evaluate is effectiveness and make changes for the next campaign.

Changing a media plan while it is still in flight is no easy task. It needs to be based on complex attribution and ROI models and executed through ad exchanges and trading desks. Quick decisions, similar to trading commodities in a live exchange, must be made. And the results of these decisions are imminently transparent to everyone, either the changes performed better or they didn't.

What is next? As if this wasn't enough there are other changes to consider. We all recognize that the next tectonic shift will be the merger of the PC and TV set top box. Adding interactivity, and Web-like track ability to the TV will be another game changer. Broadcast media will have all of the measurability and performance pressure of digital media. And if I had to place a bet on who would best navigate this space it would be the next generation of digital media directors.

Where will the next generation of digital media directors come from? Now that we have reviewed a litany of requirements, where do you find the training to get these new skills? The simple answer is "Cross Training."

Focusing on digital media alone is not the answer. A rotation through other, closely aligned areas is invaluable in providing the context and cross discipline skills necessary to succeed. Some suggestions include:

In the end, an insatiable curiosity and a commitment to always be learning will serve future digital media directors best. But the responsibility for their development also lies with senior management. Cross training opportunities don't happen by accident. They require time, money and planning--all of which have been in short supply these last few years. But, ask yourself this: can your organization afford not to develop your next generation of digital media directors?

Steve Kerho is the SVP, Analytics, Marketing Optimization at Organic (www.organic.com)

Scoring Big Both On and Off the Field of Business

I'll be the first to admit that sports are not my thing. I usually roll my eyes when people start throwing out sports analogies, as if I can really relate to them. But Dan Coughlin's book, Find a Way To Win, is different. Coughlin provides us with direct access inside the head of one of America's "all time winningest" soccer coach, Terry Michler. The book is about one man's mission to be the best at what he does and how he succeeds big time. Coughlin's eloquently translates Michler's strategies into everyday plays businesses can use to create successful organizations.

Here's just one of the many examples that makes this playbook so valuable. Michler talks about selecting the very best players regardless of how old they are. He states, "You need all the right ingredients to build a championship team." Coughlin reminds us why you must have the very best talent for your organization, regardless of the person's age. He goes on to point out this is a starting place to eventually achieving extraordinary results as a group.

I'm glad my former employer felt the same way as Michler and Coughlin when they promoted me into the role of HR Director at the age of twenty-four. I worked side-by-side with other young managers who were new to the game and I also worked with some folks who had retired on the field. Only they forgot to tell others they were no longer playing for the team. Which brings me to another point that Coughlin drills home. "Good players don't automatically make good teams." And I'd like to add that being a great athlete doesn't necessarily mean a person will be competitive in the field of sales either.

So as you think about assembling your own winning teams, consider taking a few plays from Coughlin's book, which is available at worldclasscoaching.com. Be sure to come back and let me know how your team is faring both on and off the field.

Roberta Chinsky Matuson is the President of Human Resource Solutions and author of the forthcoming book, Suddenly in Charge! Managing Up, Managing Down, Succeeding All Around (Nicholas Brealey, January 2011). Visit Roberta's Blog on the Generations at Work or her Linked-in Group Suddenly in Charge! Sign up to receive a complimentary subscription to Roberta's monthly newsletter, HR Matters.

Analyzing Steve Ballmer's Language: He "Thinks" a "Lot" About "Things"

Ballmer's eccentricity can be exemplified in one sentence, taken directly from Microsoft's official transcript of the session: "Now, we've got some other competitive actions coming back, and we'll talk about slates and tablets and blah, blah, blah, blah...." Yes, Steve actually said he was going to talk "blah." And he did. Interestingly enough, this part of his speech was tackling the iPad, and how Apple had "done an interesting job of putting together a synthesis and putting a product out," and completely owned a market that MS probably wished was theirs. In fact we know this to be true, since Ballmer noted "they sold certainly more than I'd like them to sell, let me just be clear about that."

Anyway, check out the word cloud at the top there. It's from Ballmer's long introduction to the event, constituting some 13,000 words--quite enough to get a flavor of how Steve's words came out.

What can you see? Immediately we're reminded that MS is almost a one-trick pony, and that trick is called Windows. That word came up 39 times in the first part of Ballmer's speech, compared to just 13 appearances of "Office" and 12 for "Xbox". Interesting, no? On the other hand, Steve used the word "thing" 46 times, as in "let's talk about this thing" and the word "think" 34 times. "People" are also things Ballmer's fond of, as that word showed up 37 times.

Other stand-out words are "kind," "consumer," "going," and "got." What's conspicuous by its absence are words like "success" or "positive" or "great" or "well"--indeed there were only nine "good"s used during Ballmer's segment. Is MS really not performing well, or is Ballmer merely not happy about the state of things? You'd be forgiven for thinking that, but there are also remarkably few "bad"s, no "fail," and just 3 "quit"s. In other words, Ballmer was treading a very neutral road, in terms of his language--neither being overly enthusiastic or revealingly critical.

For fun, contrast Ballmer's words with Steve Jobs' ones from the big D8 conference in June. Sure, it's a different context, but Jobs said words like "well" and "going" and "want" and "like" a lot. Almost as much as he used the word "people." So while Ballmer "blahs" and "thinks" "people" "kind" of "get" "windows" "things," Jobs is "going" to do "well" for "people." If you were being super-insightful, you may even see these words as a window into the two different CEO's management styles. Just maybe.

To keep up with this news, follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.

Innovation Contests: A Super Idea for Global Entrepreneurs

Tony Stark, the entrepreneur-turned-superhero from the Iron Man movies and comics may be fictional, but the Tony Stark Innovation Challenge, an award for young entrepreneurs, is quite real. Earlier this month, MIT graduate student Nathan Linder flew off with the $15,000 top prize for his invention of a digital bulb to project Web content onto any surface. The prize was furnished by Audi of America.

The Stark Challenge is only the latest (and most opportunistic) of a booming trend in innovation and entrepreneurship competitions that is helping to bring new ideas to the attention of investors, customers and a public hungry for some good economic news. In the U.S., where entrepreneurial culture and infrastructure are already well-developed, this is an incremental increase in opportunities for the mad scientists and dreamers among us. But in the rest of the world, it's a revolution that's kicking up a new wave of business creation with the potential to uplift billions.

Last month in Lima, Peru, The Innovation Contest of the Americas (TIC Americas, sponsored by the non-profit Young Americas Business Trust in collaboration with the Organization of American States) recognized more than a dozen young entrepreneurs from Central and South America, culled from over 3,200 submissions. Full disclosure: I was a judge in this contest and saw with my own eyes the depth, sophistication, ambition, and ingenuity that is fermenting throughout the hemisphere, from Mexico to Argentina, Chile to Jamaica.

In addition to providing a forum for great ideas, these contests accelerate the flow of resources to promising ventures in parts of the world where venture capital, seed money and incubation are only starting to emerge as alternatives to traditional bootstrapping or family-based financing. "Finance is a big problem," said Luis Viguria, Executive Director of Young Americas Business Trust. "The financial sector doesn't give money to young people because they are too risky. That's something we're trying to fight with TIC Americas: to showcase to the financial sector that investments in our young people will pay back. We need to give them a chance."

In India, one of the world's burgeoning centers of new entrepreneurship, innovation contests are becoming one of the premier venues for attracting attention from private finance, NGOs and government. "Idea competition is very recent in India," said Dr. A.S. Rao, an official in the Indian Ministry of Science and Technology who judges these contests from time to time. "There is a large number of young people and students putting themselves in competition for these idea awards. Their perspective is very different. We feel they probably would be able to fix long-festering problems because of the technology now in their hands."

Typically, the contests showcase the best new ideas in social entrepreneurship and eco-innovation alongside commercial and technology-oriented projects. Sometimes the lines are not so easy to draw. DUTO, SA, the winner of the 2007 TIC Americas award as well as a host of others, invented a sensory-based display that allows visually-impaired people to perceive information on a computer monitor. Their socially-oriented goal is to make the product affordable and accessible to primary schools in Latin America, but DUTO is a commercial business.

Winning an innovation contest brings financial resources and recognition, which are both valuable commodities to startup businesses, but in emerging markets, they serve an even more important function. They validate the risks and efforts of innovators: the long hours and sacrifices that dreamers have made, rather than settling for the traditional paths of advancement or stagnation.

Never mind Tony Stark and Iron Man: the winners of these contests are real-life heroes in their hometowns and role-models for young people hungry for change and new opportunities. Very often, successful entrepreneurs in these regions invest considerable amounts of their time and resources to build, strengthen, and advocate for a local entrepreneurial ecosystem, including better infrastructure, greater attention from the financial sector, and more pro-entrepreneurial policies from the government.

Student Starts First Tuition-free School in Africa’s Largest Slum

DoSomething award winner Jessica Posner brings education to Kibera.

DoSomething, headed by Fast Company columnist Nancy Lublin, has recognized five young social entrepreneurs with $10,000 grants--and one with a prize of $100,000. Fast Company will profile one of these enterprising youth each day this week. Click here to read the other winners' stories.

More than 1.5 million people live in Nairobi’s Kibera slum, squeezed together in a labyrinth of rusted tin shacks and garbage-lined alleyways. Although Kibera is Africa’s largest slum, the Kenyan government considers it an illegal settlement and provides no public services to the impoverished residents. Access to clean water and electricity is almost non-existent; HIV rates are some of the highest in the world; a fifth of all children die before the age of five; and roughly 66% of young women routinely trade sex for food. Here, 23-year-old Denver-native Jessica Posner decided to start a school for girls.

Posner first visited Kibera as a Wesleyan student studying abroad in Kenya. An experienced stage performer, she began working with a youth organization called Shining Hope for Community that used theater as an engine for education and healing. “[Founder] Kennedy Odede had been doing theater to teach public health, and to start a conversation in the community about gender and equality,” says Posner. “We used the space to talk through difficult issues.”

Before long, Posner decided to move into the Kibera slums to bring herself closer to the residents and their everyday struggles. “People were totally shocked--they’d never seen anything like it. Kennedy even said no,” explains Posner, recalling the resistance she met. “But I wanted to be exposed to a world that was totally different than my own.” She describes her experience to me: how fragile life is in the slums, how difficult it is to live without water and electricity. But she’s not looking for sympathy. “I’m lucky,” she makes clear. “I made a choice to live in Kibera--everybody else there did not have that choice.”

Inspired by her time living there and working with Shining Hope, Posner began envisioning another project: a school for girls. “Such staggering odds are stacked against women--there is such a need for opportunities for them,” says Posner, who points out that just 8% of girls in Kibera will ever have access to school. “We wanted to place women at the center of development--we felt it would be the best possible way to change the society as a whole.”

The following year, Posner returned from her second trip to Kibera, and turned all her attention to furiously raising funds. Along with Odede, she established Shining Hope as a 501(c)3 non-profit. She wrote to friends and family, appealed to the Wesleyan community, and applied for grants. After raising thousands of dollars through her grassroots efforts (“I sent out a lot of emails”) and winning a grant from 100 Projects For Peace, she returned to Kibera to turn her dream into a reality. Soon, she had secured land, engaged the community to build an eight-classroom school, and hired teachers and an education specialist to design a curriculum based on the needs of the children--a curriculum that encouraged theater and the arts.

Of her endless passion, Posner credits her youth. “Being young, people are often skeptical, but I don’t think about it,” says Posner, now 24. “It just means I have a lot more energy, and the ability to be more optimistic. When challenges and obstacles come up, I am less likely to be deterred.”

In the summer of 2009, the Kibera School for Girls opened as the first and only tuition-free school for girls in the Kibera slum. But even after overcoming so many challenges, she had yet to face her most difficult. “The hardest part,” she says, “was selecting only the students we had the resources to take.” Of the some 500 applications the Kibera School for Girls received, Posner could only accept 45.

But her school is rapidly expanding thanks to aggressive fundraising efforts. In the past year, Posner won the Dell Social Innovation competition, a Newman’s Own Foundation grant, and the Echoing Green Fellowship. And just last week, she won the Do Something award, a prize of $100,000. “We built our school with just $25,000,” she exclaims. “With $100,000, the possibilities for Kibera are endless.”

The school now serves 65 students, and will soon take on 370 through 8th grade. Posner has also launched the Shining Hope Community Center, which provides much-needed public services including a library and health clinic, literacy and computer classes, Internet access, and other infrastructure.

Posner isn’t celebrating yet though--there’s still work to be done. When I tried contacting her shortly after the awards ceremony, she couldn’t be reached. She was already on a flight back to Kibera, ready to put the money to good use.

More winners' stories: Micaela Connery: Knocking Down Barriers With the Power of Performance Jacqueline Murekatete: Genocide Survivor Embraces Her Ordeal to Educate Others Will Perez: Med Student Pioneers “Political Medicine” in Rural Haiti Mark Rembert: DoSomething Winner Returns to Save His Stricken Hometown

From Confucius to Communism: How the Past Is Affecting China's Green Future

My introduction to China was giving a talk on "Green Values" at the 2010 China Green Companies Summit in Chengdu. Upon arrival to Shanghai International I was greeted by people bearing signs with my name, and whisked away in a limo with a gentleman wearing pinstripes and cuff links, who told me he deals in carbon credits. At the Hotel Shambhala, I was escorted into the main ballroom, where hundreds of people sat under the glare of TV lighting. We sneaked up to our front row seats, and I put on the earphone that provided real-time translation. I listened to Jet Li, who is known worldwide for his kung fu movies. Another speaker followed him, and suddenly I heard my name. It was my turn to share my vision of Green Values.

What I came to understand is that for China, the world's largest economy, going green may be as much about understanding the past as it is about embracing the future: the country's cultural, social, and ethical values play an overlooked and largely underestimated role in China's ability to shift toward sustainability. The core value of the traditional Chinese ethical system, established by the First Emperor, is Tai He, or "The Great Peace of All Under Heaven." In this system, the pursuit of profit threatens order, so businesses must be controlled by the state. The result of this system, in a nutshell: order, but often accompanied by stagnation and cronyism.

In contrast, the Confucian system of thought, which the West wrongly assumes is the foundation of modern Chinese values, says that private business doesn't necessarily pose a threat to society because individuals can be motivated as much by responsibility for others' well being as by their own personal gain. This model is more in line with many Westerners' modern thinking about sustainability in the enterprise, but it's not actually what drives most modern Chinese businesses.

Whatever the West thinks of Chinese values, attendees at the China Green Companies Summit this spring told me that traditional Tai He values have been put through the wringer over the last century. First, Chairman Mao and his Communist Party overthrew the Imperial society (and religious beliefs) that had maintained a continuous civilization for the past 5,000 years. Shortly after, Deng Xiaoping abandoned many of the worst trappings of Communism, after Mao's Cultural Revolution killed off millions of intellectuals and other innocent people. The Chinese people were left in a vacuum, with no uncontested values to which they could turn. Many Chinese now feel that green values may offer a way to get back in touch with some of the deep traditional values of the past, while also adapting to the concerns of today.

The Chinese embrace of sustainability--like that in most other countries--is manifesting itself in ways that sometimes don't seem to be driven by truly green values. In evaluating the companies that were up for Green Company awards, I found most of them really are doing exciting new things but, nevertheless, there is an ever-present concern with image--especially maintaining an image that will guarantee a good relationship with governments, at both the local and national levels.

Even the location of the conference projected an image: it was held in Chengdu, which provides a screen on which to project the sensitivity of Chinese cities and state-owned enterprises, who sent substantial sums of money to aid with earthquake response after the horrifying Wenchuan earthquake of 2008 left over 4.8 million people homeless. In fact, when the conference organizers kindly took me, Jill Buck (founder of the Go Green Initiative), and Jonathan Lash (President of the World Resources Institute) on a local tour, the first stop was a photo opportunity for the local government, that included new homes for peasants displaced by the earthquake and a new elementary school.

There's a contradiction here: businesses seem keen to demonstrate goodwill, and keen to do be seen as cooperative with both internal and international governments that can influence those companies' success. But at the same time, the state (and corporate) doctrine of growth at all costs is causing undeniable environmental harm, and pressing the whole world up against the threat of climate change. CSR is a popular topic among business people in China, but it seems to be viewed as a charity designed to enhance image, not a core part of business strategy. To the outside world, sustainability pressures in China are too often reduced to trade-barrier gamesmanship in China.

Ironically, one of the big headlines in the national China Daily newspaper during my stay was "Climate Change Mechanism Set Up" between China and E.U. Turns out it is an agreement to hold regular talks and put in a "hotline" between the two countries, not a policy shift or legislative action with teeth.

As Chinese green values collide with Chinese growth, sustainability still seems to be less than meets the eye. I've been told there have been many "green company" conferences springing up over the last year or two. The Chinese know how to get on a bandwagon when they see one--but only time will tell whether that bandwagon turns into a vehicle that will carry the country into a sustainable future.

Thomas P. Lyon is a Director and the Dow Chemical Professor of Sustainable Science, Technology and Commerce at the Erb Institute of the University of Michigan. Professor Lyon's teaching experience includes managerial economics, business and government, game theory, business strategy, and the management of innovation. He is the author of Good Cop/ Bad Cop: Environmental NGOs and Their Strategies Toward Business.