It may be one of the common denominators that make clients from diverse industries and across all practices of public relations alike.  Whether launching a brand, working an issue in Washington, conducting an investor road show or managing a crisis, having a compelling story is a fundamental requirement. 

In the public relations business, we’ve always been storytellers – whether you call it messaging, corporate/brand positioning or narrative – it’s all about the story.   And the greatest, most iconic brands and companies do it really, really well – Nike, GE, Apple and Starbucks all understand that to remain relevant as you grow and change, having a story that resonates is key.

This piece on Starbucks features the philosophies of noted brand evangelist Stanley Hainsworth, and credits great storytelling for transforming a commodity product into a $4 splurge.  He talks a lot about the art of storytelling, and gives us a glimpse into the approach he uses to create an emotional connection with stakeholders.  As I read this piece, I was struck with the significant alignment between his priorities and the way we approach developing a client’s narrative at MWW Group…in particular, the emphasis on tailoring your story for different audiences – what we call the Total Stakeholder Approach.   

The irony is that while this may be a fresh, new approach for the brand evangelist – it has been core to of great public relations programming and strategy from the beginning.   

How do you know if your story needs revisiting and refreshing?

• Any time there has been a significant change in your business – new leaders, new business strategy, new line of business.  Chances are you need to rethink your narrative.  A more thoughtful approach would have made a big difference for Netflix, and saved them lots of backpedaling.
• Significant changes in your industry also call for a new story – because your old story simply won’t be relevant anymore.
• Shift in strategy or emphasis on who, or what, is important.
• If you are underperforming – in sales, in employee retention, in share price performance – that may be a sign that your story isn’t resonating.
• If it feels stale, out of date or misaligned with your priorities – even if it isn’t impacting your stakeholders yet.

“Dear Mrs. Jones,

Little Johnny is bright, articulate and eager to learn. However, his disruptive behavior is a major concern, and penalizes the other 24 children in our class. Please have Johnny write ‘I will not disrupt the class’ 100 times for homework. Hopefully, this will get his disruptiveness under control.”

Increasingly, I am seeing disruptiveness categorized as a positive attribute…companies want to be known as disruptive (often in the context of innovation); leaders are hailed as disruptive. GM’s Dan Akerson recently held disruption exercises with his leadership team.

It is a radical application of common sense to see that doing “more of the same” isn’t going to get America back to work, or pull our economy out of its malaise. As leaders in Washington debate the debt ceiling and policy initiatives to stimulate the economy – in boardrooms everywhere, people are embracing disruption. They are holding up examples like Apple, Google, Southwest Airlines and Chipotle as examples of the inherent value of disruptiveness, and striving to find their own version of disruption.

When it comes to leadership, “disruptive” is the new black. Like most leadership trends, the devil is in the details. True disruptiveness can reinvent, reinvigorate and restore relevance of a company or a brand. But using the disruptive label, without substance, runs the risk of simply adding to the graveyard of overused, meaningless corporate buzzwords like paradigm shift, collaborate and alignment.

Can we disrupt the nature of corporate speak and preserve the authenticity of being truly disruptive? Only time will tell.

Using the MWW Group methodology and the critical elements of reputation,
organizations can build positive images methodically over time.

What does that mean?

First, when it comes to lists and rankings, perception lags reality – good or bad. It takes time for the lists to reflect recent events. It also suggests that there is merit to the schools of thought around goodwill banks, and my personal POV that how you respond to the crisis can have more significance than the crisis itself. But there are some other interesting learnings here:

1. Reputation begins at home. A key driver of Google’s performance on this reputation score was their workplace culture, governance and citizenship. Perhaps Google.org wasn’t a bust after all. To be considered for the list, companies had to rank high in their home market as a “table stakes” for consideration.

2. The Art of Storytelling – a quick breeze through the Top 10 suggests that the ability to tell a great story – to stand for something beyond just your products or services…whether it is innovation and design (Apple), family, fun and entertainment (Disney) or the Volkswagen lifestyle.

3. You’ve got to be relevant to consumers, even if you don’t sell directly to consumers – It is no surprise the big winners on this list are consumer brands, but it isn’t a requirement. Intel, No. 9 on the list, doesn’t sell anything to consumer directly. But they’ve done a great job making “Intel Inside” relevant to an audience far beyond the decision maker at Dell, for example.

The Reputation Institute also points out a key fact – the leaders on this list don’t treat Reputation as a brand imperative – they treat it as a business imperative – ingrained into their policies, business practices and operations.

The top spot in 2010 went to Berkshire Hathaway but not so this year after the Sokol fiasco, which we’ve previously written about here in Return on Reputation. Now Berkshire Hathaway is down to No. 4 – not bad, all things considered, but still a precipitous drop from a previous, largely untarnished image. Who dropped off the top 10 list entirely? Coke and Microsoft…replaced by Disney and Apple. Google moved up two spots to rank No. 1.

What does all this mean for companies who care about their reputation? That it’s a fickle thing and as Warren Buffett famously said, takes an instant to evaporate. Not only that, but everyone has a say these days in what kind of company you are. Google came in first for its financial performance and workplace environment…proof positive that all stakeholders weigh in when it comes to reputation.

Investors and employees clearly gave Google a boost on the ladder in today’s 24/7 interconnected world, and that matters. Every company spends a lot of time thinking about how they communicate with Wall Street – conference calls, press releases, one-on-ones with big institutional investors. But probably not as much time focusing on the way they talk to employees and how they empower their employees to talk about the company, too. Smart companies have “ambassador” employees blogging and participating on Facebook, Twitter, etc., after implementing forward-looking social media policies that lay out the ground rules. Google it and you’ll see.

Speculation abounds about Warren Buffett’s successor, with general consensus being that Berkshire Hathaway can succeed in naming a potential new CEO, but that Buffett couldn’t be replaced. The communication about identification of successors, “should Buffett need one” are presumably about Buffett’s age…and perhaps a bit of a reaction to all of the emphasis on succession planning due to recent photos of a frail, thin Steve Jobs (who missed Apple’s annual meeting) entering a cancer clinic.

In contrast, it would seem that discussion of a successor at Apple might, unfortunately, be prudent, in the midst of Steve Jobs third medical leave in seven years. Yet Apple’s shareholders rejected a proposal requiring that Apple detail a succession plan. The company had opposed this proposal from the Laborers International – who has been advocating for succession planning and disclosure of such for the past few years and made similar proposals to Whole Foods and Bank of America.

There is no doubt that succession planning is a Board of Directors’ imperative…but should it be a communications priority? Do your stakeholders need to know about your succession plans, or simply need to know that you have plans in place? This is particularly sticky when your leader is iconic, like Buffett and Jobs.

My two cents: stakeholders need to know that you have a succession plan in place, like Frontier Communications’ innovative board member/potential successor mentor program. Unless that succession is imminent – whether a planned succession like Gates or Welch, or potentially accelerated by a health problem, or scandal, like HP, the specifics of your succession plans need not be disclosed. It undermines the authority of the leader in place, and diminishes his or her relevance.

In a perfect world, a succession is planned with an appropriate transition period…the successor is named, has his or her “tires kicked” by key constituencies, and works closely with the current CEO through a transition period. By the time that transition occurs, it becomes somewhat of a non-event. But we all know that this isn’t a perfect world.

What to do when succession is forced, unexpected or accelerated? This is the time for amped up communications programs to support the new leader…to build trust, engage key stakeholders and create a leadership platform and profile for your new leader. Make the time. Or you may be dealing with another succession sooner than you planned.

Few would argue that founders care more than the average bear about their Company, its employees, its customers and its future. Transition of leadership from a founder can often cause angst in the marketplace – from Steve Jobs’ illness to the rather public ousting of Seventh Generation’s founder.

Which leads to an interesting case…Google. Larry Schmidt, who oversaw the Google IPO and navigated the early skepticism around search and ad models, is passing the reigns back to one of its founders, Larry Page. Continued day-to-day engagement of the founders is making lots of stakeholders feel comfortable and confident, and many point out that Schmidt has been mentoring Page to prepare him for the top job. All sounds good. Except for one thing – Larry Page has never been a CEO before, much less a public company CEO. Or the CEO of a Company facing competitive pressure like it’s never seen before – from giants like Facebook and Apple.

It is an interesting contrast that questions abound about whether acting CEO Tim Cook has the vision to lead Apple forward if Jobs doesn’t return, while Schmidt prepares to become “schmoozer in chief” claiming that adult supervision is no longer required at Google. (Not sure those would have been my recommended choice of words!)

Seems the “founder” currency is very powerful indeed.

Through a series of public relations fumbles, belated mea culpas and operational gaffes, J&J, a consumer healthcare icon, whose 1980s Tylenol tampering response was widely seen as the crisis communication gold standard, has seen its reputation significantly tarnished and its sales plummet. Generics and store brands from CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid have never had it so good.

This track record garnered for Mr. Weldon a place next to the likes of BP’s Tony Hayward and HP’s Mark Hurd a place on list of the worst CEOs of 2010 by Sydney Finkelstein, the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth as reported by CNBC.

Unfortunately, it appears that 2011 is starting right where 2010 left off for J&J as the company issued its latest recall of 43 million bottles of Tylenol, Sudafed, Benadryl and Sinutab manufactured at McNeil’s now infamous Fort Washington, PA plant. Using a time-worn public relations ploy, the news of the recall was released on a Friday evening prior to a long holiday weekend. Mr. Weldon, once again spoke of action plans, quality reviews and commitment to consumer safety.

For those of us in crisis communications who know all too well how reputation is tied to a company’s proactive, transparent and thoughtful response, it is sad to see what has become of J&J. The blogosphere is once again full of chatter with reminiscences of J&J’s gloried past, recollections of its expert management or previous crises and calls for executive changes long overdue.

This past weekend also brought news of another medical leave to be taken by Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The issues of Apple’s history of communications or non-communications about Mr. Jobs’ illness and succession planning at the Company are fodder for another blog post. This latest episode and the quick hit to Apple’s stock price shows the close relationship between corporate and executive reputation at Apple and what may happen with the Company’s visionary leader on the sideline. Conversely, for J&J and Mr. Weldon the reputational issue may be a CEO staying too long in a position.

Yet an informal poll around the office today failed to yield a single member of our MWW Group news junkie team that could name a single member of theirs (other than Jobs) — even with all of the media attention around this news and the management team at Apple.

Has Jobs become so larger than life, that Apple just couldn’t be Apple without him? Is his “brand” too much of a good thing?

The tech sector is filled with iconic, branded leaders –Ellison, Jobs, Gates, Bezos. No first names, or companies, needed. Even in that crowd, the Jobs mystique is legendary – it’s hard to say whether the iPad, and its migration to an entire i-lifestyle, made Jobs cool again, or if it was the other way around. (Remember, he was actually ousted from Apple in the mid 1980s).

I think the question isn’t whether Jobs has been “over-branded.” Plenty of organizations have transitioned an iconic CEO – Welch at GE, Gates at Microsoft, Kelleher at Southwest Airlines – to name a few. All of these companies have retained strong, positive reputations. The question really is whether Apple has done enough to prepare for an eventual transition. Should members of their team have better name recognition outside of Wall Street, particularly since this is not Jobs’ first time taking a leave of absence for serious health issues?

It is my sincerest hope (and seemingly that of the Twitter-verse) that Jobs will return to the helm, fit as a fiddle. But even under the best of circumstances, he can’t stay forever.

To me the real question is whether Apple can “culture-ize” the Jobs mystique, so it can continue beyond his years of service, like Walt Disney. Or will it need to re-invent itself under the vision of a new leader, and become a new, equally successful Apple?

This wasn’t actually intended to be advice, but apparently someone was listening. Seventh Generation announced the … hmmm, departure of the outspoken, high profile founder Jeffrey Hollender amidst all of the post-election hubbub.

Neither side is saying much, but the conventional wisdom suggests that it may have been an issue of affecting a true transition in the succession of leadership to the handpicked, Pepsi-grown CEO Chuck Maniscalco, who quietly resigned only a year after taking the CEO position.

The online community is lamenting over the loss and questioning the future commitment of Seventh Generation to the environmental principles that are the core of its brand. Some consumers are saying that they will go back to vinegar and baking soda because they don’t trust a company that would oust its founder. There have even been attempts to start a grassroots movement to call headquarters.

Hollender, an iconic folk hero among eco-loyalists, is admired for his direct, outspoken nature that is Vermont’s version of Richard Branson. More than one person is comparing his ousting to the now infamous and ultimately ill-advised ousting of Steve Jobs by Apple back in the day.

But at the heart of the issue is the lack of transparency. The suspicious timing of announcing a decision that was apparently determined more than a week ago, the unceremonious removal of Hollender’s bio from the company website, no press release about his departure and the vague comments of the company’s “conversationista,” such as describing the company’s recent history as a “difficult period.”

Sudden leadership transitions present unique communications challenges. It is even tougher when the CEO in question is as high profile and iconic as Hollender. The volume of blogs, tweets and re-tweets are testimony to our long-standing point of view on the need to tell your own story.

Nature abhors a vacuum. If you don’t tell your story, someone else will … and probably not to your liking.

I came across a list of the Ten Most Influential CEOs. It has the likely cast of characters – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Oprah, Inda Nooyi and Richard Branson – and a few you might not have expected – John Mackey (Whole Foods), Andrew Witty (GSK) and Mike Duke (Walmart).

It seems the formula for leadership boils down to a few simple qualities:

• Leaders are disruptive…and sometimes contrarian. Mike Duke made Walmart green – and he wasn’t talking about money. He changed (or at least diversified) the conversation about Walmart from labor issues, labor issues and labor issues to how the company is using its reach and influence to save the planet. Virgin’s Richard Branson has made a personal fortune by being disruptive. His latest focus? Finding new ways to fuel airplanes, and the world at the Carbon War Room. Steve Jobs is famous for his disruptiveness, and his temper. But who else can make the product you had to have under the Christmas tree this year obsolete by next Christmas? How many iPods do you have in a drawer?

• Leaders are nimble and open. John Mackey of Whole Foods is perhaps best known for his dismissal of global warming as hysteria. But did you know he became a vegan after a confrontation with an animal rights activist? That’s pretty open. And GSK’s Andrew Witty has made a name for himself by being open and urging the entire pharmaceutical industry to do the same, opening patent pools for HIV drugs.

• Leaders are fearless and take on the unsolvable problems. Oprah brought taboo topics – from incest to Dr. Oz’s health issue du jour – into the mainstream. Her latest campaign to make cars “No Phone Zones” is shining the light on the serious dangers of texting and driving. Bill Gates has declared that we will cure AIDS in Africa.

• Leaders put their money where their mouth is. After all, isn’t that what credibility is all about? Pepsi’s Inda Nooyi, who famously wore a sari on her first job interview because she couldn’t afford a suit, ties 50 percent of her personal bonus to diversity goals. John Mack of Morgan Stanley volunteered to forfeit his own bonus when the company’s performance declined, long before the Big Bank CEOs were paraded before Congress.

I can think of plenty of iconic leaders who didn’t make this list … Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Lee Iacocca (showing my age, I guess). While your list of leaders may be different, I’ll bet they all have these qualities.