Every time I go to the barber, I see more and more gray hair falling to the floor.

Yes, I am becoming a “senior” communicator. The best part of being a senior is that younger communication professionals think I know what the heck I am doing. I am sometimes asked about my professional influences.

Throughout the course of my participation in this blog, I beg your indulgence in sharing with you some of my influences. Obviously, many of my influences are the type of professionals you see at the IABC International Conference.

However, many of my marketing communication influences are not from the marketing communication arena. One business book that has influenced the way I approach marketing communication is Good to Great by Jim Collins. This book shows, empirically, how featured companies have achieved sustained greatness.

Look through the table of contents and check out the index. You will not see the words marketing or communication. Yet this book has greatly shaped the way I approach marketing communication.

One way to better understand your organisation’s leadership is to take note of which books are influencing their business strategies. This will help you align your marketing communication efforts. And if you have not done so, I strongly recommend Good to Great.

In my career I have worked at three organisations listed in the Fortune 500. In fact, all three of those companies were in the upper half of the list.

Early in my career, I thought it incredulous that people did not know what my large, highly profitable companies did.

As my waist has grown thicker and my hair thinner, I noticed a trend at each of my Fortune 500 organisations – fellow employees at each bemoaned the fact that “no one knows who we are or what we do.”

As a communication professional I have sat in countless meetings with the intent of determining the best way to get people to “know who we are.”

Perhaps it’s wisdom. Perhaps I’m just a grumpy old man. But I have come to the conclusion that no one cares who you are or what you do. That is, unless, who you are and what you do has in impact on that person’s life and/or livelihood.

I have come to embrace the fact that my organisations have finite audiences. Chances are, your organisation has a finite universe of people who can (or will) participate* in your product or service.

As a marketing communication professional, it is crucial that you help your organisation’s leadership understand that the greatest return on marketing investment will be made by completely understanding your organisation’s finite universe and comprehensively addressing their wants and needs.

Once you have a full understanding of your finite universe and have put your product or service in the forefront of their minds, then you can go about the task of getting the rest of the world to “know who you are and what you do.”

Please do not infer that I am advocating ignoring the general populace. Good corporate citizenship is crucial. And I will address this, but that is a blog for another day.

*I use the term “participate” to generically capture that which you want from your audience (e.g., purchase, join, donate, become aware, etc.).

Some people who have listened to my yarping about brand issues for awhile eventually feel they have to challenge me: “You’re talking about operations, org dev, HR - you’re not talking about brand at all.”

True or false? Well, both. It just seems that when I dissect a case where a brand has gone wrong, I find that the underlying factors frequently lie well outside the purview of whoever in an organization is formally charged with branding activities. And when I see a brand that’s hitting on all cylinders, it doesn’t take long to understand how the nominal face of the branding activities are best understood as expressions of deeper organizational commitments to doing all kinds of other things right.

The upshot is that I tend to use the term “brand” in a lot broader context than some of my colleagues do. So, back to my days as a waiter and bartender…

Lesson 2: Failing brands usually make their workers feel meaningless.

Savvy organizations not only think about the system that delivers the brand, they structure so as to promote seamless teamwork and commitment. In the restaurant I worked in back in the early ‘80s, for instance, there might be a guy back in the kitchen with the ability to cost me $20 on a table. If his compensation is the same regardless of whether he helps me or hoses me, then we have a significant brand risk-point. From the perspective of the waiter taking the hit to the wallet, it’s a personal problem. From the standpoint of management, the issue isn’t that Sam got a bad tip, it’s that the structure of the organization resulted in a negative hit to the brand - that bad tip results from a customer who’s unhappy with something, and that customer will be telling friends.

A big part of the problem in that organization was related to how employees felt about their importance to the company. People in the trenches of the service industry don’t get paid all that well to start with, and the less they make the less they care, on average. Tip-sharing policies addressed some of these issues in the front of the house, but kitchen staff were provided with no mechanisms, financial or otherwise, that would allow them to participate in the perceived successes of the company.

These conditions hamstrung the restaurant’s ability to truly delight its customers at every turn. Uninvested back-of-house workers undercut the efficiency of waiters, for instance, and unless their actions were egregious, there weren’t likely to be significant consequences. Frustrated wait staff, inexperienced in negotiating their way through organizational minefields, often reacted in ways that only confirmed the us vs. them dynamic.

In the end, a disproportionate amount of the management team’s time and energy was consumed not by fine-tuning an exceptional customer experience with the brand, but by managing internal conflict. In operational terms, success was less about excellence and more about keeping the wheels from flying completely off.

There were productive options available to management, but in the final analysis their corporate philosophy saw their employees - front and back of house - as expendable and replaceable. (Never mind the conversation we can have about the cost implications of penny-wise and pound-foolish acceptance of turnover - we’ll address that one another day.) Employees knew they were irrelevant, that they weren’t valued, that no matter what they did they wouldn’t be missed. Their compensation communicated the message. Management’s refusal to take legitimate concerns seriously reinforced it. And seeing 90+ percent turnover rates tolerated as a natural course of business hammered the message home for even the best of employees: we entrust 99+ percent of our brand contact to people who do not matter to us.

A lot of number of companies today have similar employee relations policies, and none of them will admit it. When I encounter a business whose customers aren’t happy with their relationship to the brand, though, my first reaction is to examine the company’s view of its employees.

Did I mention that this once-booming restaurant chain went out of business a few years back?