As discussed here previously, to become more "ART-ful," your enterprise must become more agile, resilient, and trustworthy. As a conclusion to this series of posts, this one is intended to help you to achieve these challenging but worthwhile goals.
It is critical to understand that success in establishing and cultivating ART-fulness at your enterprise is largely an outreach-driven effort. It's something that requires consistently high levels of internal marketing, sales, and evangelism. These requirements may constitute the bulk of your challenges as you seek to establish, grow, and promote ART-fulness at your enterprise. Fortunately, there are some straightforward steps you can take to tame these challenges, steps based on some fundamental, consistently successful marketing and outreach techniques.
How to Make Your Enterprise More ART-ful
- Engage. This is definitely something you cannot achieve and do not even want to attempt without lots of help and support. Identify the influencers, leaders, and stakeholders who matter most to your efforts. Then, make sure their voices are heard and matter, and make sure that they know that these things are true.
- Inform. Once you've identified those who matter most, get and stay in touch with them. Tell them what you're doing and why. Tell them how their support is contributing to your efforts, and why those contributions matter. Regular, non-disruptive, non-intrusive communications, perhaps via a short e-mail newsletter, a dedicated internal Web site or portal, or both, can be low-effort, high-impact tools here.
- Persuade. Use the activities and information with which you engage and inform your constituents to persuade them that ART-fulness is essential to your enterprise's success. Find and share supporting external examples of ART-ful enterprises, as well as credible data that underscores the business value of ART-fulness and the costs of not being ART-ful enough. Free, simple Web monitoring tools such as Google Alerts can make finding such points of persuasion easier. Also, when you and your colleagues successfully improve agility, resilience, and/or trustworthiness within your enterprise, promote these successes to as many stakeholders and influencers as possible. Often, nothing persuades like success.
- Invite. This is one of the most critical and frequently overlooked elements of successful outreach. Every communication should include a call to action — an invitation to do something to continue the conversation. Ask your constituents for their opinions and suggestions wherever possible. Hold events such as Webinars and tweet chats, and invite constituents to participate. Solicit success stories (or even "epic fails) related to ART-fulness, and share these with attribution. Welcome input and feedback, and incorporate these explicitly into your enterprise's journey to greater ART-fulness. This is one of the most effective ways to turn the disinterested and skeptical into observers, stakeholders, and advocates.
An enterprise that is optimally agile, resilient, and trustworthy — an ART-ful enterprise — is one that is well positioned for sustained success, whatever its primary business. But ART-fulness never "just happens." It requires careful, consistent nurturing and support from a committed community of advocates.
Émile Zola was a French writer and social activist, probably best known for a letter he wrote to the president of France in 1898. Known as "J'Accuse!" ("I accuse!" in French) and published in the newspaper "L'Aurore ("The Dawn"), it accused the French military of covering up evidence that the conviction of French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus was based on forged documents. The Dreyfus Affair, as the scandal became known, ended with Dreyfus completely exonerated. "J'Accuse!" quickly became known as one of the most controversial and widely lauded newspaper articles ever written. (The Wikiquote article on Zola includes an English translation of "J'Accuse!")
Zola also said something directly relevant to your efforts to make your enterprise more ART-ful. "The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without the work." Your ability to help your enterprise to become and remain more ART-ful is in fact a great gift. To maximize the business value of that gift is going to take work, as described throughout this series of blog posts. But that work just may be some of the most personally and professionally rewarding work you and your colleagues ever get to do.
Feel free to reach out to me if you'd like to discuss how to increase ART-fulness at your enterprise, or to share stories of ART-fulness at your enterprise or elsewhere. I look forward to hearing from you, especially if I can help to begin or accelerate your enterprise's journey to greater ART-fulness!
