Interbrand’s Chairman Rita Clifton believes that good branding is the only way of generating sustainable value.

I heard Clifton speak at my livery last night about the winners and losers of the international brand world. 

US brands account for 51 of the world’s leading top 100 brands, Germany for 11, France for eight and the UK for only four.

The most dramatic entry into this league has been Google. Clifton attributes its success to the consistency between external messages and internal culture. “It’s no longer possible to look nice on the outside and have an axe-murdering culture on the inside.”

Apple is another winner. Its design has brought humanity to technology. “You just want to lick their products!”
If you are a brand owner, you have to remember three key points: clarity (as to what you stand for), consistency and leadership (to rally people around brand values).

Yang-May and I believe that the interactive web has made it possible for the man/woman in the street to promote their personal brand online the same way celebrities and products do. Web 2.0 has levelled the playing ground. This is one of the main points we will be making this evening as part of our guest lecture at London Metropolitan University.

If you work in cross-cultural communications, what you want to avoid at all cost is the cookie cutter. 

Koushik Chatterjee, CFO of Tata Steel, gave a great definition of it in a recent interview with McKinsey: “We do these five things, and therefore these five things must be done by everyone.”

His approach to international M&A is different: “we quite genuinely tend to look at an acquisition as a partnership rather than an acquisition”.

“We don’t send planeloads of people into a new company. Instead, we only send a few integrators. That’s been the key interface.”

I particularly like his way of engaging employees from the acquired company, a process he calls “shared change”: “we share and adopt good practices across the organisation through performance-improvement teams…This gives employees in the acquired organisation a sense of confidence that they too have good things that the parent company is absorbing”.

Chatterjee admits that “it takes time to positively influence a large organisation”. But the secret is to build “trust in the sincerity of the shared vision”.

Trust might take longer to establish but once you are there, “things move faster; you don’t have to go around reassuring people”.

I am intrigued by the concept of fusion leadership.

I heard Jagdish Sheth speak at my livery last night. He is the author of the much publicised Chindia Rising.

Jag believes that what the world is currently experiencing is not a clash but rather a fusion of civilisations.

Asia is becoming Westernised and the West is being strongly influenced by Asia (there are 6 million practicing Buddhists in the US today…).

All this is having an impact on international management practices. The result is fusion leadership, a mixture of Western and Asian styles. What Jag calls “a balance of orchestration and improvisation.”

He uses weddings as an example.

“A Christian wedding is orchestrated, while an Indian wedding is all about improvisation.”

When Jag’s grandniece got married in India four years ago, the priest got a phone call on his cell during the ceremony. Jag was horrified to see him take the call while nobody in the audience seemed to be upset. “You have forgotten India“, a relative teased him.

Budgeting in the West is sacrosanct. However corporate leaders will have to learn to combine strategic planning with flexibility, if they want to succeed in a globalised market place.

Jag believes that leadership is all “about shaping the expectations of others”. This is what the leader of the future will need to have in order to succeed:

1. Passion
2. Empathy
3. Competence

I was thrilled to see empathy high on the list. Finally! Let the post-modern era begin!