HR Hero Line editor Wendi Watts reviews Brains on Fire by Robbin Phillips, Greg Cordell, and Geno Church, finding useful insight into engaging both employees and customers.
Do your customers and employees love you? Do you love your customers and employees?
Those two questions about love really get to the heart of Brains on Fire written by Robbin Phillips, Greg Cordell, and Geno Church of Brains on Fire, a word-of-mouth marketing and identity company. While that may sound a bit too touchy-feely for a business book, in a world where management often refers to the people who buy or use your products or services or potential customers as “end users,” “leads,” “audience,” or “consumers,” this book is good reminder that they are human beings with minds and emotions. The same is true for your employees. Does management frequently refer to the people who work for you as “production,” “billable hours,” or otherwise reduce their identity within the organization to just numbers or tasks? Once that happens, any passion that your employees or customers might have for your company goes out the window and they see your organization as merely another cog in the wheel of industry.
That’s where all that loving mentioned above comes in. Brains on Fire asks how your organization would be different if your employees and customers were your biggest fans — no, we aren’t talking about Facebook fans — and if you were your employees’ and customers’ biggest fans. Think about that for a minute. Try to imagine what that would look like in your workplace. Then, what would it take to make that happen? Money is not the answer to that question (and aren’t you glad since your “making employees’ happy” budget has been slashed so many times it looks like Zorro’s worst enemy).
Brains on Fire encourages readers to think differently about how they engage with their employees, customers, potential customers, vendors, everyone. One of the keys is deciding you are going to start a movement, not mount a campaign. Movements are sustainable. Campaigns have a start and end and aren’t sustainable, at least without an enormous amount of effort and money.
The book offers 10 lessons on creating movements using case studies of organizations with whom Brains on Fire has worked. The lessons include having inspirational leadership, empowering people with knowledge, sharing ownership, having powerful identities, and making advocates feel like rock stars. While Brains on Fire doesn’t negate the power of social media, it drives home the idea that real connections are made and nurtured offline. Online interactions mainly support offline interactions. So in addition to not requiring a budget the size of the federal debt, engaging your employees and customers (and everyone else) doesn’t require lots of IT skills or resources.
Brains on Fire doesn’t give you an action plan or checklists or “take aways.” It asks questions — hard and sometimes uncomfortable questions — to help your organization figure out what its identity is, what it’s committed to do, and maybe get the courage to love its employees and customers and trust that they will return that love.
Wendi Watts is the Web content specialist at M. Lee Smith Publishers and editor of HR Hero Line. Before moving to the online world at HRHero.com, Wendi worked as an editor for the state Employment Law Letters. She has worked as an editorial assistant for the IT Division at Middle Tennessee State University, was the school and community liaison for Rutherford County Schools in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and was a journalist at two Middle Tennessee newspapers.