The Business of Strategy

Last week I did a “Spotlight On” The Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship. As I mentioned, their courses are excellent and it’s really the best place to go if you want to learn how to take your community outreach efforts to the next level.

Surprisingly, I’m very much a left brain analyst masquerading as a touch-feely, creative type. Ok, ok. I really am touchy-feely but I’m also into charts and graphs. A little less surprising, I’ve also been known for being more of the anarchist, revolutionary type. For me, The Center classes taught me a lot about how to move a CR program from ad hoc to something that is more strategic to the company – turns out it’s so much simpler, and more effective, to accomplish this through evolution than by revolution. Go figure.

Actually that was Lesson Learned #2 because at the time, I didn’t even realize that CR efforts could be evolved. Through their training, I quickly learned that the sum of the parts could become greater than the whole.

When I took my first class from the Center for Corporate Citizenship, I was working for a company who happens to be a supplier of Avnet’s. They had great CR programs but their outreach efforts were all over the place. The company had been at it for years, was very committed to the community, spent quite a bit of resources investing in the community, but wasn’t getting much bang for their buck. In fact, they didn’t even realize they needed to get a bang for their buck. They were just doing community outreach work because it was the right thing to do.

My ah-ha moment came when I looked at the following chart.

I realized that, after years of being a good corporate citizen, we were still at the “balloons and t-shirt” phase at the bottom of this triangle — putting our logo on shirts and passing out balloons when we could have been more strategically mobilizing employees and creating partnerships that affected change.

What this chart tells you is how to go from someone who simply gives out cash, toward being a change agent within your company and your community. And, that’s what we are working toward here at Avnet. It’s been fun to see how well things are evolving. Plus, this approach gives you way fewer gray hairs than staging a revolution!