This month I am honored to be speaking at the 140conference in NYC about what I believe to be the future of building brands…Open Book Branding.

Over the past few years I’ve been fortunate to speak at a number of events… everything from digital marketing summits, social media conferences, event planning think tanks, American Heart Association global conferences, Asset-Based Thinking workshops to local town hall meetings with moms and kids. And now, I am fortunate to be teaching at USC’s Marshall School of Business creating lectures and engaging students in the digital classroom.  For me, these experiences have been an invigorating, ever expanding exposure to a new world of communications, knowledge sharing and re-discovering the art of building brands in a digital age at The Concept Farm.

Open Brands Will Thrive. Closed Brands Will Struggle To Survive.

Open Brands are built by companies that operate on strong values based business models supported and enhanced by transparent and empowering company cultures. The drivers of this open mindset are enlightened CEOs who recognize that long term profitable brands and businesses require building and leveraging both hard and soft assets.

More and more of today’s CEO’s now see a three tiered metric of profit as essential to building a strong and sustainable business. Dollar profit for fiscal sustainability. Emotional Profit of company stakeholders to engender a sustainable corporate culture and ethos. Greater Good Profit that extends benefits beyond the company to long term connected communities.

A recent study seems to confirm that this enlightened profit perspective may do a lot more than just make a company CEO feel good. Valuing and building soft assets can actually be the key to delivering even better financial results and  healthier, stronger companies and brands. Recent research shows that CEOs who make it their business to place a higher priority on stakeholders’ interests and well-being rather than a relentless pursuit of delivering dollar profit come out on top.

The research, entitled Unrequited Profit: How Stakeholder and Economic Values Relate To Subordinates’ Perceptions of Leadership and Firm Performance was conducted by top people in the their field: Mary Sully de Luque, of Thunderbird School of Global Management; David A. Waldman, of Arizona State University West; and Robert J. House, of the University of Pennsylvania. Their findings are based on survey data gathered from 520 business organizations in 17 countries. Here’s how the authors summed up their study.

We were testing the hypothesis that if a CEO’s primary focus is on profit maximization, employees develop negative feelings toward the organization. They tend to perceive the CEO as autocratic and focused on the short term, and they report being somewhat less willing to sacrifice for the company. Corporate performance is poorer as a result.

It turns out that this reordering of priorities and balanced perspective generate greater workforce engagement and extra effort that in turn yield significantly better operations and superior financial results. There also appears to be some risk to a CEO’s leadership effectiveness associated with a “profit above all else attitude”… the mantra of many a “hard driving” CEO. The exclusively profit driven CEO is seen as an autocratic leader and is less likely to garner employee commitment.

The S.O.S. Of The Values Based CEO

The values driven CEO is seen as a visionary, a motivator  and is more likely to positively influence loyalty and inspire  “extra effort”. He or she is viewed as a kinder, more empathetic breed of CEO superhero. This holistic view  being embraced by CEOs is Asset-Based Thinking at its best. It builds upon core asset-based leadership skills we call S.O.S. Leading with Substance. Sizzle. Soul. The hard assets of performance and skills are the substance. The costs of entry. Sizzle is the personal style and presentation that get attention. Soul is “why” it is personally important and meaningful…the secret ingredient that makes it all work.

A while ago I read a New York Times article about values based organizations and business cultures that included this sage Asset-Based Thinking advice from Brandon Busteed, co-founder of Outside the Classroom. “Run like a business, act like a nonprofit, care to be better.”

Simple, smart, savvy advice for any business, any brand, or anyone simply involved in the business of life.

Here comes Open Book Branding. It’s about time.

Hank Wasiak is a communications industry leader who has worked with the corporate elite of global businesses and the former Vice Chairman of McCann-Erickson. He is a-partner at The Concept Farm, best selling author, teacher, keynote speaker, three time Emmy award winning television host and a Reiki Master.

Hank teamed up with Dr. Kathryn D. Cramer, Ph.D. to create a best selling business – self help book series based on Asset-Based Thinking. Running Press has published three books in the series including the lead title ”Change The Way You See Everything”

A self-proclaimed “Mad Man Turned Twitterholic”, Hank has seen and done it all in a marketing communications career that spans five decades. Today he is a leading advocate for harnessing the positive, disruptive power of digital communications and social platforms to build a new generation of “Open Brands”. Hank is a frequent speaker at interactive conferences, guest writer for Mashable and authors columns on Technorati’s blogcritics.org. Hank is an Adjunct Professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business and a member of the national board of directors of the American Heart Association.