How To Drive Digital Change and Social Media into the C-Suite
Few companies have a culture of change like PepsiCo’s. Its culture embraces digital change with intensity and passion, and backs it with substantial human and monetary resources. The results are tangible: consistent earnings, brand leadership, and high market valuation.
CEOs have a lot to learn from PepsiCo’s digital story that can help them succeed.
That’s the focus of a presentation by Bonin Bough, Director of Digital at PepsiCo and Stephanie Agresta, EVP, Managing Director of Social Media at Weber Shandwick to The Columbia Business School Alumni Club of New York on June 15th, 2011.
Here are my notes from the presentation with some minor personal elaboration.
Background
- The pace of innovation, fueled by consumer consumption for innovation, is driving us toward a 100% digital society. Organizations must adapt to survive.
- Look to social vs. organizational forces for answers: organizations are not adapting as rapidly as society. Ordinary people (you and I) are voraciously consuming change and demanding more.
- Digital in not a magic bullet, but another lever to pull around core business strategies.
How to Adapt
Push the organization beyond its comfort level, but where it needs to be: at the point of innovation. Five Steps:
- Invite management into digital innovation via participation at digital events, listening to speakers and influencers.
- Challenge Convention: identify barriers to entry.
- Experiment: Go slowly and gradually develop a comfort level with innovation. Become a user. Get yours hands dirty with actual usage. The goal is to get a gut level feel on innovation commensurate with the gut level feel on traditional marketing.
- Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Everything digital is in “beta”. By the time you hit perfection (if you could) the cheese has been moved. Understand the mentality of innovation: it is an iterative process.
- Learn, rise, and repeat. This is the digital mantra.
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