I’ll soon be heading off to a conference of Social and Affective Neuroscientists, to hear what they’re learning about the brain vis a vis culture, empathy, social Interaction, and health, plus a debate about mirror neurons. It’s a heady mix, to be sure. My meta-question is:

What can we trust our brains to tell us?
How do our brains bias what we perceive?

I’ll no doubt have new reflections to share next month.

Meanwhile, two rich books and an article have my neurons firing: Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler's Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think, and from Sunday's New York Times Just the Facts, All of Them. Gilad Elbaz, a Techno-preneur turned social entrepreneur believes that knowing all the facts a) is possible and b) will set us free from the seemingly endless conflicts that squander our energy. Diamandis and Kotler provide abundant evidence of the power of innovation – past and present – to surmount seemingly insoluble problems. Kahneman chronicles brain research through 2011 to illuminate how our brains bias what we ‘know.'

All three bring what we know into serious question.
Thus: how reliable are the assumptions and assessments on which our business models are based?

All three would say, “not reliable.” Certainly we have plenty of evidence of that from the past four years.

Another interesting insight that emerges from Abundance and the Times article: base your business on what you’re absolutely committed to. I agree. As a Business Anthropologist, I have been reflecting for decades about what business people can count on. Here my friends the Social and Affective Neuroscientists have something important to offer: we can rely on people knowing who is committed to them.

Thus my suggestion for a business model you can rely on: build your business from your core promise.

It will certainly challenge your thinking. And that’s good, right?

I’d love to see workplace wellness work.

Certainly the cost of healthcare must come down, and prevention – especially turning around epidemic obesity and chronic disease - is key.

But I’m not sure the workplace is the best locus. Employers who succeed will reap great rewards: reduced healthcare costs, improved productivity, retention, and recruiting. Plus, for the same investment, a learning organization . (Because Wellness is a form of ongoing learning, the big payoff for those who step up to the challenges is that, while succeeding at prevention, the practices of learning will boost responsiveness, accountability, and competitiveness.)

But the risks are high - failure looms – for 4 main reasons:

Workplace wellness involves cultural change: a notoriously sensitive task. In 32 years of practice as a Business Anthropologist, I’ve seen many attempts backfire, and been brought in to fix a couple where new business imperatives were essential. All that came roaring back recently as I dug into a “Culture of Health” project for a prestigious company whose first attempts did not go well.

Successful Wellness initiatives, approached as culture change, will require internal dialogue between Benefits teams, Training and Development teams, and senior strategists crafting corporate culture. (The latter often overlooked: who owns corporate culture in your company?)

Wellness demands Lifestyle change: very tricky territory.
In addition to good old fashioned denial, employee concerns for privacy are high, and questioning lifestyle choices triggers concerns about diversity, autonomy and dignity. Food and eating are hardly rational matters: they’re deeply tied to early emotional experience and culture of origin.

Physicians and other healthcare providers attest to dogged resistance to lifestyle change, even among individual patients facing serious consequences. Well-established in diabetes and cancer treatment, success requires a great deal of reinforcement, role modeling, and social support.

Desired behavior changes require treating employees as customers of both benefits and corporate culture – customers who live in an environment shaped by the likes of Apple, Facebook, Google, Zappos, and Zynga. Engaging employees in new behaviors is possible, but it’s a big departure from traditional benefits communications .

“It starts with customers and the ability to create a better future for them.”

- From Liedtka and Ogilvie, Designing for Growth

The task is to get overworked employees’ attention, and then - in seconds - spark their curiosity about how their future could be better if they engaged in the wellness behaviors you're requesting. An authoritarian approach is likely to boomerang to the opposite of the desired effects.

Employee cynicism is high ; people who have been working long hours for years are quick to ask, “In addition to all the extra work now required for my job, you want me to do what?” You might think that in this job market, after 3 years of recession, employees would be grateful to have a job. But this 2012 MetLife study warns:

“This year’s findings reveal a workplace that has grown more dissatisfied and disloyal, to the point where one in three employees hopes to be working elsewhere in the next twelve months.”

A group of us asked ourselves, “What’s it going to take to consistently succeed in the kinds of behavior change that would be required to significantly reduce both risk and cost to both employers and employees?” We surveyed the literature. Not surprisingly, we found some good points, and a few key missing links:

I would love to see workplace wellness succeed. That reward will come to those who take the cultural challenge and ‘employees as customers’ seriously: explicitly tying a new focus on wellness to an updated company core promise, treating the introduction of Wellness like launching any new product or service, and becoming a highly-responsive learning organization for the same investment.

It’s not for the faint-hearted.

A must-read review of the top 3 marketing books of 2011 provides a quick way to get up to date on the real challenges every business faces in the mission-critical game of staying connected to customers.  It goes way beyond marketing.

Simon Mainwaring
We First: How Brands and Consumers Use Social Media to Build a Better World
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

David A. Aaker
Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant
(Jossey-Bass, 2011)

Gary Vaynerchuk
The Thank You Economy
(Harper Business, 2011)

“At first glance, the three best business books of 2011 on marketing seem to go in very different directions. However, they do share one trait: They pay only lip service to marketing. A couple of decades ago that might have disqualified them from consideration, but these days, a surprising number of marketing books aren’t all that high on marketing…

“The real action is in the much tougher arena of rethinking the companies that sell the brands. So, in We First: How Brands and Consumers Use Social Media to Build a Better World, brand consultant Simon Mainwaring ponders the role of the corporation in addressing the world’s ills, tackling such topics as charitable giving, environmentalism, and sustainability. In Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant, David A. Aaker, professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, looks at how companies can build brands that aren’t just new and improved, but unequaled. And in The Thank You Economy, wine-selling social media guru Gary Vaynerchuk advocates that marketers build a culture in which “good intent” is paramount. In each case, the authors emphasize that making these things happen requires fundamental shifts in corporate culture, not just marketing window dressing.

“Yes, marketing is no longer about simple brand repositioning, but about corporate reinvention”

The clarion call may appear idealistic, but it’s eminently practical: specifically, what it takes to survive.  This review cuts to the chase. Take a deep breath, sharpen your red pencil, bring in your best thinkers, and be ready to rethink your strategy and culture.  The three best marketing books of 2011 demand no less than being a responsible citizen, an inventor of new games, and operating with impeccable manners.

“Only the companies that can figure out how to mind their manners in a very old-fashioned way — and do it authentically — are going to have a prayer of competing.”   -  The Thank You Economy

I couldn’t agree more.