Jamie Beckland

In arguments over business and the economy, you often hear that the job of corporations is to “maximize shareholder value.”

People use this phrase to justify all kinds of things that are ethically ambiguous (e.g. polluting as much as possible up to the legal limit), or seen as distasteful to some (e.g. layoffs).

But, is that the right goal of a corporation? Is it even a good benchmark of a successful corporation? And, does it even work anymore?

In order to understand if “maximizing shareholder value” makes sense as a primary business objective, it’s important to understand the historical forces that led to this goal for corporations being broadly adopted. This concept has not been fixed as the sole, or even primary, goal of corporations, but instead was created in response to a specific set of circumstances.

Basically, U.S. corporations performed relatively poorly in the 1970s because of their huge size and inefficiencies (it’s difficult for lumbering giants to find and invest in good ideas). This, combined with increased competition from smaller (and therefore more efficient) Japanese firms caused U.S. firms to profit even less.

The primary operating mantra for U.S. corporations was “reinvest and retain,” meaning that corporations should use their profits to 1) reinvest in new, productive inventions, and 2) retain both their earnings and their talent to build capacity to take advantage of those productive inventions.

To our modern business eyes, this might seem foolish, but you should remember that this strategy had worked basically since the start of the industrial revolution.

So, in the 1980s, the ~100 year objective of “reinvest and retain” wasn’t working anymore. Smaller, more nimble firms were eating away at larger, slower competitors.

In addition, the 1980s saw the rise of large institutional investors – basically guys who just aggregated capital and pushed it around. These started out being guys who aggregated retirement savings for hundreds of thousands of workers, and therefore had big dollars to push into productive companies.

Large institutional investors did not care about ongoing R&D, or about retaining quality talent. And, this model was not working very well at the time. So, “maximize shareholder return” was born out of this primordial business ooze. It aligned big capital with big business in order to produce stellar returns for both.

Of course, this begs the question: does “maximize shareholder value” work as a business objective today?

I would argue that it doesn’t because:
1. Large organizations are much leaner now (after 30 years of rightsizing and justifying every head against a P&L), and feedback loops on productivity of R&D and internal investments are much more equal across all sizes of companies
2. The large institutional investors have gotten so large as to overwhelm any (and every) capital market, and therefore, every company within the market. Currency traders can crash economies. Banks control both commodities traders and commodities storage and transport facilities, allowing them to manipulate commodities markets. And 70+% of market trades are made by algorithm, introducing manipulation through HFT (yes, yes, as well as liquidity, because when you want to sell a stock, you HAVE to do it RIGHT THIS SECOND so very often).
3. We have learned to manipulate stock prices (the most common and simplest proxy for shareholder value) with a host of tricks that have nothing to do with value creation. I’m talking about things like splits and buybacks; special dividends; shifting borrowing costs and bond holdings; offshoring tax liabilities with no way of repatriation of profits sans tax (unless – or until? – large companies strongarm the federal government into a repatriation tax holiday); the creation of shell corporations; etc. These things do not add to the productive economy, but do line the wallets of bettors and financial manipulators.

I would posit that a return to “retain and reinvest” as a main objective of corporations would be good for the companies, their employees, tax rolls, the broader business climate, and society at large.

In fact, the smartest businesses that I know of are using this model to grow very, very profitable companies (albeit, probably without saying it in this way).

Look at the organizing structure and operating model of these very, very innovative, and very, very profitable companies:

Google: Two classes of shares, with minimal voting rights of money investors. No dividends. Basically, the board cannot be controlled and the huge profitability of search ads can’t escape Google’s walls to be frittered away by dumb Wall Street people. Instead, it’s tightly held by the business leaders, who reinvest in a whole host of productive innovations.

Facebook: Two classes of shares, and 57% of the voting interest held in one person – Mark Zuckerberg. He gets to take risks with money from big institutional investors without being beholden to anyone for the performance of the company. Hence, you get huge moves like the $19B acquisition of WhatsApp, even when P/E is over 100.

Berkshire Hathaway: Has never split stock. Has never paid a dividend due to tax inefficiencies of doing so. Added a second class of stock to be more affordable to newer investors, but with reduced voting rights. Buys to hold literally forever, with no plans to ever sell a company. Keeps management in place to continue growing their business units. Takes FCF from business units into a BDC structure to mount the next acquisition. This is the definition of “retain and reinvest.” 

If this is interesting, you should check out a deeper overview of the history of “maximize shareholder value” (warning: PDF).

This past weekend, I attended the World Domination Summit right here in Portland, OR. Chris Guillebeau organized this conference for the second year in a row, and this was my first year going.

I didn’t have many pre-conceived notions about what the event would hold, because I know Chris’s audience is diverse – travel hackers, nomads, bloggers, startup people, musicians, and basically anyone who is interested in living a life of non-conformity. So, there is no telling where things will go.

And, as a result, it felt like a little taste of many things. Enough to whet your whistle, and hopefully stir something in you to make you want to go deeper on your own.

Brene Brown was outstanding – I was not familiar with her work before the conference, and am now an instant fan. Her work focuses on authenticity, shame, empathy, and vulnerability. Pretty woo-woo stuff, except she is a Ph.D. researcher on these topics, and has done a ton of quant work proving out the concepts she talks through.

One key takeaway from Brene was that you can’t experience joy without being vulnerable – we must risk something in order to allow someone else to respond to us in an affirming way. What occurred to me was that gay people who have gone through the process of coming out understand this concept – and the vulnerability and exposure of coming out is exactly what makes gay people able to live authentic lives in other ways. Using this very fundamental reality about yourself as an opportunity for vulnerability is pretty empowering.

The other stellar speaker was Cal Newport, who talked about how to “Follow Your Passion” is terrible advice. Instead, he offered up another model that is much more productive, leads to better overall outcomes, and is actually proven to be successful: create a skill that is rare and useful, then use that skill to trade for the values that are important to you.

The model works this way: by developing a marketable skill through the process of mastery, you can use the scarcity of what you offer as leverage for the things you really want. Of course, that means you need to be accurate in your assessment of what skills will be useful and rare, and how to master them. It also means you have to understand what you really want. But it offers myriad ways to a path of success.

While many of the sessions were long on the “why” to do something, and short on the “how,” the attendees made the experience worthwhile. Being around interesting, passionate, motivated people was motivating in and of itself. I’m looking forward to next year already.

This is a cross-post from Mashable.

Google has raised a lot of digital hackles with its new policy requiring real names for Google+. Cory Doctorow says that real identities are bad because they make it easy to sell us to advertisers. danah boyd goes further, saying that the policy is an abuse of power, because it may compromise users’ safety.

But they vastly understate the case, and ask for the wrong solution.

The hugeness of Google’s error is in misunderstanding the basic human need for a flexible framework for identity creation. People change and evolve, and throughout the entirety of human history, we have been able to shed old versions of ourselves, and construct new identities. This is so universally true as to be a cliche. How many films have this arc as the first act: A stranger comes to town. What is the mysterious secret he hides? What did he run away from?

Our identities are complicated. In fact, the need for multiple identities only accelerates in today’s internet culture. Digital natives understand the notion of curation so much so that they curate their own existence on social networks. Julia Allison and iJustine are extreme examples of this phenomena, but it happens all over every Friday night when young people spend more time shooting photos of themselves to upload to Facebook to show how great a time they’re having, instead of, you know, actually having a great time.

The act of identity creation happens on the social network, through the curation process. Not by the things that are really happening to the person.

In this context, we are becoming more like celebrities. We manage our personas by curating which pictures get tagged on Facebook with our identity (hint: only the ones where we look good). We portray the most interesting aspects of our lives through status updates (“I found a dollar on the street!” gets 27 Likes not because it’s important, but because it’s interesting.) We understand that parts of our personalities are most appropriate for different audiences.

The rise of celebrity culture is actually an attempt to create shared experiences for a large, fragmented society. Smaller countries have smaller celebrities in the U.S. (Incidentally, that’s why Kylie Minogue had to redeem her post-Locomotion career in the U.S. with the wonderful “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head;” and why David Beckham left a hugely successful career in the U.K. to bring soccer to a country that would rather watching boring old baseball than see a low-scoring soccer game.)

So, as our own social circles continue to grow, we become more like celebrities ourselves. So, we can learn something from celebrities about the importance of alternate identities. Increasingly, artists have created alter egos for themselves to make space for a different or new part of their personality to emerge. As they get boxed in by the expectations of their fans, they need to create an outlet that allows them to risk something by creating work that is outside of their traditional oeuvre.

Madonna took the persona of Dita when she released Erotica and her Sex book in order to explore sexuality in a deeper way than she could as the Material Girl.

Sean Combs became the rapper Puff Daddy, then P. Diddy when he needed to refresh his stale 90s image. Instead of creating a new personality, he just kept beating that dead horse, and when it stopped working, he dropped the “P” and just became Diddy. But, for his serious menswear clothing line, he uses the moniker Sean John.

Marshall Mathers became Eminem, and when there was still too much darkness and bile, he created the persona of Slim Shady.

The most extreme example is Nicki Minaj, who has taken the notion of alter egos to the insanely logical extreme. She has only released one album, but has no less than eight distinct personas:

1. Onika Tanya Maraj is her given name

2. Cookie is the first identity she created to escape her troubled home life

3. Harajuku Barbie is the playful Minaj

4. Nicki Minaj is her primary performing identity

5. Roman Zolanski is the hard charging, angry brute

6. Martha Zolanski is Roman’s mother

7. Nicki Theresa is a Mother Theresa-inspired saint

8. Rosa is her Spanish moniker

The value of multiple identities to these artists is indisputable. One of the most extreme examples is Roman’s Revenge, the 2010 Nicki Minaj and Eminem duet. Both rappers spend the entire song spewing hate-filled lyrics at their fans. This is not a song that a musician would want to present to the public as part of their late night talk show personality. Without alternate identities, this song could not exist. And while it’s a tough song to listen to, the world is a better place for having the song in it.

One single name will never be able to contain all of the aspects of any individual person, in all their complicated, contradictory glory. That’s why Google+ will ultimately fail in its attempts to create an “identity service” with their real name policy.

Quora also has a real names policy. But it never came under serious scrutiny because it was always clear about what kind of community it was: a serious-sounding, wonky intellectual place where deep-ish knowledge, packaged well, is appreciated. It’s a very specific niche, and it is more interested in keeping quality high than getting lots of users to interact.

Google+ wants us to give it everything, which means that we will end up giving it nothing of value. By requiring real names, Google+ is sending clear signals that it wants to be a specific type of community: the kind where people share cat videos and links about current events that can inform Google’s own search rankings. Paradoxically, even this banality will still create a huge amount of value for Google, because of how bad computers are at truly understanding people. Google’s ability to sell advertising will still grow tremendously, even from this crappy level of information.

Critics of the Real Name policy want Google to change its mind and see the error of its ways. That is the wrong solution.

The right solution, of course, is to do nothing. Allow Google+ exactly the kind of community they ask for: the one where you use your real identity, but in return, only share a certain, specific part of yourself: the part that you don’t mind being indexed by Google’s servers and made available to the entire world. In other words, the most boring, unimportant, and universal version of yourself.

If you have come over from my post on Mashable on The End of Demographics, welcome!

Take a peek around. You might find some things interesting – here’s some content curation ideas, mobile thoughts, of course, you’ll see a lot about social media marketing.

Over the past several years, I have seen a variety of organizations wrestle with the enormous implications of social media. Nothing less than the very DNA of the company must shift in order to take advantage of the power of your own customers.

The most advanced organizations are working through Jeremiah Owyang’s 8 steps of integrating social media into a corporate website. Step 7 of 8 is using social sign on, which allows users to log in with existing identity providers, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo and others.

Social sign on is, in fact, the core functionality that opens the corporate website to true social media experiences.

That’s why I’m excited to join the team at Janrain, as their digital marketing and social media strategist. Janrain has been the pioneer in social identity management for years. They understand better than anyone how crucial social identity management is because they have been focused on creating huge value for their clients by bridging the fluid, quicksand of social media fashions (since before My_____ was called MySpace) and real marketing challenges.

So far, most brands have just toyed with the idea of bringing social functionality into their websites, and those early experiments have not gone very far. But Janrain’s partners are different – they have a deep, institutional understanding of how social media is reshaping customer relationships, and therefore, marketing strategy. Janrain stands at the front door of creating social experiences, with critical technology for nearly every website.

Janrain Engage, their social sign on solution, makes it easy for digital marketing teams to integrate existing identity providers into their website. That means more sign ups, more sign ins, and more conversions. It means more opportunities to personalize messaging. It means a more relevant and useful site experience for every visitor.

And that’s just the start.

Janrain’s other products aggregate social profile data to feed into existing CRM systems, and create single sign on for website networks.

This is infrastructure that must just work - marketing teams need to focus on creating experiences, not on the plumbing. And Janrain has built the tools to take the pain out of creating social experiences.

I am incredibly proud of the Emerging Media practice I built at White Horse. The social media methodologies and the mobile marketing resources I created there will continue to move forward with a strong group of marketers, creatives, and problem solvers. And White Horse’s clients will build even more successful marketing programs than ever.

Thank you to everyone I worked with at White Horse. Your passion, commitment, vision, and downright grit got me to dig deeper than I ever have before.

And, I expect to dig even deeper still at Janrain. The solutions are real, and substantial. The biggest challenge now is seizing the fullness of the opportunity. Janrain is ready to deliver outstanding solutions to all of the marketers who can benefit from our technology – which is every website in existence. A tall order, to be sure. But that’s just how I like it.

Onward!

Tags: CRM, Janrain, social sign on, White Horse

This is  cross-posted from the White Horse blog.

If you’re trying to develop your geolocation marketing strategy, but don’t know where to begin, look no further than your social media strategy. These two components go hand in hand, and spending energy on geolocation without tight social integration will lead to a marketing program that’s dead on arrival.

White Horse recently conducted a survey of smartphone users to determine how geolocation apps like Foursquare and Gowalla were being used by consumers, and how marketers should integrate check-in functionality and location information to their marketing plan.

The results were clear: Facebook Places was, far and away, the most utilized geolocation check-in service. And that has big implications for every brand with a digital presence.

Facebook Places is deployed on far, far more phones than any other geolocation service. Foursquare has about 7.5 million mobile users, Facebook Places has well over 150 million mobile users (this number is from July, so it’s a bit outdated). You are 20 times more likely to find your prospects on Facebook Places than on Foursquare.

For marketers, then, the choice is clear. When looking to build out a location-based marketing strategy with a strong digital component, Facebook Places will yield the greatest success right now.

By leveraging your existing investment in social media, to promote your location-based touchpoints, you will also ensure that there is strong brand affinity and purchase intent with your geolocation initiatives.

When a marketing geolocation strategy starts with your existing Facebook Fans, it’s easy to build successful engagements with an incremental, test-and-learn approach. It also provides valuable insight into your social media community and drives additional value for your most connected and most important customers.

This is just one of the insights from our new webinar on mobile marketing strategies. We’ll review original, proprietary research on how consumers are using location-based applications, and how to show quick results in mobile marketing initiatives. Sign up for the March 30 5 Breakaway Mobile Marketing Insights webinar now.

Tags: facebook, Facebook Places, geolocation, mobile, White Horse

This is cross-posted on the White Horse blog – go there for all types of digital marketing goodness.

Recently, Downy fabric softener and Macy’s bedding department sponsored an event where comedian Mike Birbiglia slept in a Macy’s store window display for a week. People all over the world could watch “Mike in the Window” on Downy’s Facebook page, and see videos of him trying to sleep.

If you’re asking “why?” right about now, you are not alone. Continue Reading »

Tags: Downy, facebook, radian6, social media, twitter