Here's What I Know: Tim Sanders
By
Fred Cohn
Tim Sanders left his berth at Yahoo! (first as chief solutions officer, then as leadership coach) and took his business know-how on the road. His current obsession: corporate social responsibility. In his new book, Saving the World at Work, Sanders argues that CSR is increasingly an imperative—a necessary concern for the next generation of business leaders. Hear him out.
Sustainability is the new quality. At Microsoft, the managers who do all the packaging no longer report to legal or sustainability; they report to quality—because sustainability is a part of product quality.
In 2015, the bench strength on Wall Street will be recent MBAs. They’ve been raised on Habitat for Humanity and Al Gore. They’re resistant to the 90-day box—that’s what their grandparents did. It’s the equivalent of carrying water down the hill on your head. Marketing is better than advertising—by a mile—in terms of selling product. You can cut advertising, but when companies cut community outreach, they feel the pain on the bottom line much quicker.
The department that deals with sustainability and CSR issues now reports to the chief marketing officer. Community affairs at Google reports to marketing, because everybody realizes it is the brand.
The average Facebook user is twice as likely to recycle as everyone else—not 10 percent more likely, twice as likely. The more information you consume that’s not published media, the more likely you are to be environmentally sensitive.
Web 2.0 is social networking; web 3.0 is knowledge networking. It will be about “Who do I want to connect with to be successful?” Venture capitalists are funding companies that are taking everything MySpace and Facebook have and retooling it to make it useful. That will be the next Google.
As they said at Sony: “Don’t disrespect me by putting the on/off button in the wrong place.” All of a sudden, it became unethical for a product to have to be reworked. It wasn’t because it saved money; it wasn’t to become more competitive—it was because Japanese executives began to see quality as a moral/ethical issue.
When the high-tech business goes green, it’ll happen in a year. All of a sudden you’re going to wake up and the companies that aren’t off the grid, that are not using cloud computing, that aren’t eliminating all the printer-friendly buttons from their website—those are the companies that won’t get funding. I predict that between 2010 and 2012 there’ll be a tipping point in Silicon Valley: Every web company will go green like that.
You better be good at crafting good subject lines on your email. If people stop reading your email, you’re cooked: You should just quit your job and go to work somewhere else. In the Crackberry world we live in, the subject line is everything.
MBA Jungle, Winter 2008-2009