However, when they do get noticed and acted upon, that’s when the magic happens.

Let’s take Mara Swan’s (Manpower’s VP Strategy) superb presentation at the recent ERE conference in San Diego. The presentation was incredibly rich with thought provoking insights. This post looks at just one part of it: the change in world population and migration that is linked to it.

Mara Swan shared the map from Worldmapper below,  showing the predicted distribution for the estimated world population in 2050. It shows that the population is moving east (which represents a big challenge for values and mind-sets – most of our companies are based on Western and Christian values, yet most of the workforce’s are based on Eastern and Buddhist values).

© Copyright SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).

At the same time the working population will shrink. This will have a massive effect on migration, as most Western countries depend on immigration to supplement their workforce and to act as drivers for innovation and diversity. If the working population shrinks there are more opportunities at home, resulting in less migration. If you consider that by then we will have more stable middle classes in the emerging economies and more wealth being created in the countries, then the people who are migrating today are unlikely to do it tomorrow.

With the underlying assumptions changing, we also need to adjust our assumptions on talent supply and demand.

At the moment, if a person/team isn’t working out, the answer is to replace them with a new one. This might work at the moment, but most certainly won’t work in 2050. Overlay this with a shortening of skill cycles (3-8 years before a skill is outdated) – and we have a perfect storm, or as Mara Swan said: “The internal workforce is a key factor and a key issue: with fewer people we can’t just get rid of people and hire news ones. Re-skilling and training gains new importance.”

It’s fascinating.

Even more fascinating are the companies that have already implemented programmes and initiatives to tackle this issue.  Let’s take Sodexo, as an example:

Arie Ball, their VP of Talent Acquisition, is one of those remarkable people who takes new info and immediately implements change, way before the rest of us even wake up to it.

Sodexo is now headhunting internally. Their internal recruiters have access to succession and performance data, and use this information to help guide their internal searches. You can imagine that many of  the line managers weren’t too enamoured about this internal headhunting.  At the same time, the internal recruiter also supports and coaches the internal candidates in presentation for interviews. This is to address the issue whereby typically in organisations, external candidates come much better prepared, as the internal candidate often doesn’t prepare for the interview as they believe that the manager already knows about them. Sodexo’s approach makes sense on so many dimensions.

It works for the individual; they feel valued and feel good about themselves and about the company. Too often, the employees are passive candidates and not actively seeking out new opportunities even within the company. Getting a call from the internal recruiter underscores their value and the opportunities for growth.  That results in the individual becoming an even stronger brand ambassador.

It works for the company, as they can keep talent (because let’s face it, if the employee believes they wouldn’t be headhunted internally and sees not a chance of change and success, they’ll leave anyway), and they can now up-skill their staff not only through courses and coaches but real world experience. This in itself will result in a reduced time to hire and time to productivity. Additionally, it’s a great way to reinforce new behaviours, spread skills and enable more impactful cultural change, yet in a very subtle way.

This just makes so much sense now and even more so in light of all the future trends. I find this active portfolio management of the employees admirable, because a company’s talent pool starts and ends with the existing workforce.

Let’s build clear characteristics of the players we want on our roster. Let us be ruthless in applying these when bringing in fresh talent and appraising existing talent, but let’s then support our talent and give them the opportunity in becoming the best they can be.

Talent Acquisition thrives for exactly the same as every other function: closer alignment, better integration of the tech stack and becoming more candidate-centric.

• Closer alignment with the overall business and its objectives but also within the teams to ensure common understanding and shared goals and language.
• Better integration of all the different technologies that are being used in the talent acquisition process – ideally to aid the closer alignment mentioned above as this will result in meaningful integration.
• Becoming more candidate-centric to ensure a better candidate experience and deeper engagement – which is more aligned and integrated to the overall brand experience and values of the company.

All three of these are interconnected. For example, Joanna Clark (Recruiting Leader for Community Bank’s Western Mountain Region and Shared Services at Wells Fargo) explained that social recruiting had stalled as it has been separated from overall talent acquisition.  And she is right, there is no such thing as social recruiting – nor is there mobile recruiting – it is all just one part of the jobseeker’s way of interacting with organisations. For it to flourish and become integral it requires integration into the incumbent systems as well as alignment with the overall business goals. Only when it results in gratification for the jobseeker (= finding a job), for the recruiter (= finding an interested and relevant candidate) and the company (=increasing productivity) does it become useful.

We define ourselves more often by our differences to others, instead of our communalities, but vendors, innovators and change agents of mobile, social and other cool new acquisition avenues would be advised to find the communalities and align with talent acquisition. Only then can they properly exploit changes in the external environment and in user behavior in a meaningful manner.

We differentiate to integrate. In the continuum of reputation-optimisation-innovation, talent acquisition is currently firmly focused on optimisation instead of further innovation.  Especially as there is a growing awareness that a greater focus on optimisation will result in a heighten reputation. (For more detail about the interplay, have a read of the post: The Anatomy of a company: skills, mindsets and harmony.) It is maybe a sign of the times, as I can see this focus on optimisation in many other companies and functions. There was and is a lot of innovation happening, but now businesses and people are separating the useful from the useless, often by creating useful adoptions and adaptations for their own purposes. Now profound change will happen everywhere.

Courtesy to Worldblu & John Firth

Paulo Coelho, Manuscrito de Accra

When I was at university I spent a year in the Erasmus program studying in Málaga, Spain. Mobile phones weren’t common place, the internet as we know it still a distant dream. So I was cut off from immediate and instant communication with my family and friends. All phone contact was instigated by me, standing in a phone box with stack of 100 Pesetas coins, otherwise contact was limited to letters, which meant arranging a visit took several months. No texts about boarding, no apps to check any flights delay, just a lot of trust, tolerance, faith and leeway. Lots of time waiting, pondering and just living.

Being disconnected from my life in Germany, in a country whose language I initially struggled with, was scary. In those early days I would have loved Facebook. That said, not having it, not being connected instantly and permanently was incredibly liberating and empowering. Those experiences shaped me as a person, gave me a new understanding and appreciation of who I was and enabled me to build and nurture new friendships.

Compare that with our current set up, the ‘connected age’ and the emergence of ‘Gen C’. Tomi Ahonen describes Gen C as always connected, making decisions together, facing all of the difficulties and celebrating all the opportunities jointly. It’s all in all very positive and very desirable, isn’t it?

The instant communication, the permanent connection, also leads to a new and different pressure and stress: the anxiety of missing out. The latest Evenbase Mobile research shows that “Mobile is vital in a changing market but also contributes to an intensive, stressful job search experience”, because it gives job seekers an even greater feeling that they might miss out in this ever connected world. It heightens the anxiety and stress that they already feel.

Each one of us has our own example of when our behaviors, our beliefs have increased anxiety, when we check mobile phones repeatedly, refresh websites franticly, only to discover that life lacks the speed and urgency we desire.

Some German companies, such as VW, are disconnecting the email service on their executives’ mobile phones at weekends, as they want them to rest and recover (as Chris Shambrook & co will tell you one of the most important yet least appreciated phases for any high performer).  Some people take social media holidays. Now, whilst I am not a fan of these draconian methods, I completely understand the point they are making: They want to reconnect to the slower, natural rhythm of life.

We would be better off accepting and connecting to this pace of life instead of desperately trying to speed it up, intensify the feelings we have. The feedback/feedforward mechanism becomes the ever growing snowball. Some urgency is positive, too much urgency is detrimental. Or as the Navy Seals say: “Slow is Smooth. Smooth is Fast.”

For me, it is not about going on social media holidays or being forced when to stop and start, that’s just like extreme yo-yo dieting and binge drinking.  For me, it is about about striking a balance between all the good things of social and mobile – such as the direct and instant person-to-person communication that brings us all closer together, experiencing the vitality across the world, sharing our knowledge, accessing the phenomenal richness of information and knowledge and the unrestricted flow of information – and the times when we are connecting with the present, the Here and Now, the people and places in our presence. The latter doesn’t signify being disconnected, but being connected in a different, often deeper, unconscious manner, finding one’s own rhythm and ultimately internalising the social/mobile connectedness at a different level.

So, if I choose to answer your email tomorrow instead of today, if I choose to update my blog only every 4 months, if I use Twitter more erratically, it isn’t a reflection on the importance of the sender or the usefulness of social media, it is just because I have chosen to integrate the digital world properly into the rhythm of (my) life.

And she does need to be creative, because RMS is based in Silicon Valley and therefore competes for talent with the likes of Google, Facebook, and a multitude of cool and colourful start-ups.  RMS obviously doesn’t have the same brand awareness and brand recognition or the apparent attractiveness of their competitors.   So RMS has to contact a lot of people before they get one to bite.

RMS is offering sophisticated products and services for the management of catastrophe risk associated with natural perils such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and windstorms, as well as products for weather derivatives and enterprise risk management for the P&C insurance industry.

Today, RMS also leads the market in risk modelling for man-made disasters associated with acts of terrorism, and recently released the first infectious disease model to quantify and manage the risks associated with pandemic disease on the world’s population and economy.

So to build some serious brand recognition in their key recruitment market segments, Amelia and the team have come up with an ingenious solution. RMS is featured in the game “Plague Inc.” Plague Inc. is not any old game, but one of the most played games on iPhone and iPad. And RMS isn’t included in the usual advertising ways, but as a character in the game.

Have a look yourself. This video was used for the internal kick-off and explains the “Plague Inc.” to the current employees:

It is cool, isn’t it? I especially like that it is so closely linked to the actual RMS brand and its business. As Amelia Merrill explained:

“The game is challenging, fun and educational just like RMS. We could never get in front of this many people this quickly.  Over 1 million games have already been sold and they are finishing up an android version right now.  While playing the game people will see the RMS brand pop up at least 4 times and not in a cheesy way.  We are a character in the game…an expert advisor.  Lastly, our LifeRisk business actually builds similar, much more complex of course, models.  So this gives us an easy fun way to explain a part of our business to people inside and outside our industry.”

The real beauty besides the creativity is the understanding and building on some key principles of recruitment and marketing.

• It is a great, real world example of the fact the employment branding is only a facet of the overall company brand (instead of a weird, loosely connected, separate entity)
• It follows the traditional marketing principles of Segmenting, Targeting, and Positioning & shows an in-depth understanding of the target audience.
• It is built on the knowledge that the internal and external audience are intrinsically linked and uses this initiative to enhance and reinforce RMS’ culture – after all your employees are your most important brand ambassadors. 

But it doesn’t stop with the release of the game. Amelia Merrill and team have already planned further steps to deliver against their objectives, both internally…:

“People who have played are really excited about it.  We are about to give out free games to anyone in the company with an iPad or iPhone so they can play.  We will also be having an internal contest where an employee will create a situation which will cause the virus to react differently during game play.

… as well as externally:

“We created a game card with a code (which we just got from the printer this week) that we will be giving out at all kinds of events.  Some will be given to customers, some to employees and a lot to candidates. In addition, when anyone comes to a meeting in one of our offices they will be able to play a game while they wait for their meeting in our lobby and can of course pick up a card to download it later. “

This is smart and creative recruiting. I’m especially impressed by the stable yet flexible approach, by the understanding of the fundamentals and the multi-dimensional impacts it will generate. In time, I’m sure, it will also generate the results and deliver against the objectives Amelia Merrill and the team are aiming for.

“It’s not about mobile as much as it is about understanding mobility. Mobility means information, convenience and social all served up on the go, across a variety of screen sizes and devices. Mobility is radically different from the stationary ‘desktop’ experience. In some cases, mobility is a ‘lean back’ experience like sitting on a commuter train watching a video. In other cases it can be “lean forward” – like shopping for a gift while you take your lunch break at the part. And in many cases, it’s ‘lean free’ when your body is in motion, or you’re standing in line scanning news headlines or photos while you want for your turn to be called.”

As part of a highly interesting qualitative research comparing some internet properties that we have conducted at Evenbase, mobility also made an appearance when looking at candidate behavior. Job seekers have three key pressures:

1.            Doubt, uncertainty, lack of confidence

2.            Time & effort

3.            Staying on top of the search

So all in all, it boils down to the known components of relevancy and speed (convenience) overlaid with an ineffective emotional state.

When looking at a day, the research concludes that the majority of the jobseekers, be they passive or active, are concentrating their efforts at home in the evening.  Let’s divide the day into three parts, before work, at work and after work and look at the different behaviours displayed by jobseekers in the UK & US:

Before work, mainly in the morning, is the most common time to check email alerts. Many rely solely on alerts to learn of opportunities – saves having to check the source repeatedly. Reviewing alerts often takes place on the move using mobile or tablet devices to bookmark interesting roles and positions for further research at a later time.

At work, it’s all about covert searching in downtime/lunch. Interestingly, mobile wasn’t mentioned, but LinkedIn is seen as a safe way to job search at work. Water cooler discussions can also inform the job search.

After work, this is the point when more in-depth job search is done at home in the evenings. It is also the most popular time with passive searchers who search in conjunction with recreation, such as watching TV. Passive searchers are less likely to have email alerts or feel compelled to look when they are otherwise busy.

So, depending on how you target, there is some “lean back”, “lean forward” and “lean free” mobility happening during the job search.

So when talking about mobile in the jobhunting context, as David Armano states, it really is about ‘mobility’ and not  ‘delivery via a mobile device’. It’s a matter of looking at the user journey and working out how to minimise the frustrations of the individual while in their different job hunting mode.

For example, our study showed in-depth research and job seeking happens in the evening at home. Therefore a mobile offering does not necessarily need to include the option to upload and/or alter neither CV/resume nor the ability to write a covering letter.

We also know that individuals use their commute to check job alerts, which means, in order for a busy commuter to make full use of the alert, they tend to expect details of the jobs available within the email on the move.   As internet connection might be patchy, the results need to contain enough information to allow the decision to skip or save without having to click through to a website.

Another alternative is to release an app that integrates well into job seekers’ daily behaviour, especially if users can view stored content without an internet connection.  After all the commute is used to decide ‘is this job worth more consideration in the evening’?

But beware of local differences: In the UK there is a heavier use of mobile in job search than the US, possibly as communicating on public transport is more common. And as highlighted in my last blog post, mobile in many emerging countries is mainly about SMS. So whilst the underlying principles still stand, the interface may differ significantly.

This point brings me neatly to the delivery mechanism. Instead of talking about “mobile” I find it much more helpful to refer to “touch”.  That way, we separate mobility and its part in the actual user behaviour, versus the delivery of our service via mobile devices and actually also hone in on a much bigger trend, the move away from mouse-clicks.

When designing and developing, let’s not ask “how does it work for mobile”, but “how does it work for an individual using a ‘touch’ device” (the best interface I have seen for a touch device is by CVgram.me – an Argentinian start up).

Or maybe (echoing Lee Shupp’s ‘path to singularity‘) we should already be starting to think about “gesture” – how would your service be delivered to individuals that interact with their device via gesture.  Google Goggles anyone?  Perhaps we could even go a step further and work out how to take “mind control” into consideration.

However we look at it, we will see new ideas and uses that are utterly different from those available through the internet in its current form.   In assessing the likelihood these changes will be taken up, it is especially important to remember that successful adaption relies on acceptable change – and this will always be linked to current user behaviour (sometimes this edges forward slowly, sometimes it leaps).

For the jobseekers in our study, it will involve new ideas that allow them to feel confident in achieving their objectives and which make everything so much more convenient.  At some point these new ideas will go from, as Jason Fried and David Heinemeier put it, “cool to useful”. At that point underlying behavioural principles meet with new technology developments to deliver a meaningful, even empowering service to the people. That’s what it’s all about.

photo credit: h.koppdelaney

Over the summer I had a couple of map moments. Moments when I realised that my map wasn’t the territory, not even near it. Moments, when once I realised the limitations, it altered my map.

At Evenbase we recently have done a lot of research into different countries and their recruitment markets (we’ll share this soon over at Evenmore). That in itself is highly interesting as the UK is looking really like a market that one wouldn’t want to enter in the near to medium future.  But for me, it is important to visit countries, speak and listen to people to get a real feeling behind all the research.

The first moment came when I visited Argentina and Brazil.

Brazil only has a 6% unemployment rate and businesses struggle to recruit the right staff at the right time. Highly skilled professional positions are looked for abroad. Last year over 200,000 professional positions were covered by foreigners. The most successful model so far seems to be around charging candidates to get a better listing in the CV searches, which seems odd given the low unemployment rate. As a result the current market leader Catho is changing its model as the business is struggling to maintain its leadership. Employees are incredibly well protected, to the point that there is an industry of people making a living out of suing for wrongful dismissal and apparently always win.

On our trip, we saw two digital recruitment models, amongst many others, that use SMS to target the casual workers at the bottom of the chain (Empregoligado and TrabalhoJa.com). Interestingly they are both set up by non-Brazilians with a non-recruitment but management consultancy background that identified Brazil as a growth country. Apparently all Brazilian-born entrepreneurs are very young; once a Brazilian has embarked on employment it is unlikely that he or she will make the switch to becoming an entrepreneur as all the salaries are increasing significantly and many opportunities with other companies exist. This is a recent trend -most successful Brazilian businesses so far have been local and it has been incredibly difficult for a foreign business to become successful in the Brazilian market, unless it was done through acquisition.

This is completely different to Argentina, where the current state of play (25% inflation, nationalisation of many entities and very protective import regulations) drives the intelligent and ambitious people to build their own business and therefore get around some of the regulations and restrictions (e.g. through registering companies in other countries, to the switch from Peso to Dollar). Entrepreneurism happens out of necessity.  As the market is relatively small, the rest of the Spanish-speaking region, Brazil and/or the USA are the big countries of interest. It is apparently quite common that the development is happening in Argentina, whilst the commercialising happens abroad, many also looking straightaway at the USA.

This produces a creative, curious and determined mind-set and people leave employment to set up their own businesses. The start-up scene in Argentina is rawer, more down-to-earth, more genuine yet more innovative, more pragmatic and more international than what I have seen in the other more developed nations at the moment. We often look for innovations in the USA, when actually we are better off looking into emerging countries.

Brazil and Argentina are less formalised markets in terms of HR technology, for example; ATS are only being used by big global operations, social media and mobile penetration is much lower than in the USA and the UK and some parts of the candidate set still use paper CVs and are easiest reached by SMS. These differences in the external environment need to be considered in all cases. Globalisation and localisation certainly go hand in hand and in a fascinating way reinforce each other.

To understand these differences, let’s view developments from a new perspective. To benefit from the talent pool, it is very important that we engage more closely with people from and/or living in the region. We are often still too UK and US focused in our outlook, in our inputs and in the influences we take on board.

Let’s take Workana as an example. They are a new start-up that focuses on freelancers, remote employment and casual work market, like oDesk and Elance. They have built a neat solution but what stood out most is that their market entry strategy into the US is via the Hispanic/Latino/ Spanish speaking community. When we, from Europe, look at the US, we often just think about one monolithic country, instead of the eleven nations, as well as one language instead of several ones.

This trip certainly widened and changed my perspective, not only on other countries, but also our own.  As a consequence, whilst in Europe we have different cultures and languages that need to be considered, the difference between the European nations seems less now than they seemed before (and are clearly more accentuated due to the different languages). I could even see the UK joining a closer European set-up. After all you first need to differentiate to integrate.

The second moment of understanding a cultural difference (therefore altering my map) was not driven by geographical difference but by generational difference. It was actually triggered by an A&N Media/Tech Hub pitch event and resulted in me meeting Jack Tang, the founder and CEO of TheStudentJob.com.  I was impressed by the simple yet impactful – and in a way – natural way they integrate into Facebook and how they’ve started developing mobile. This is what social recruiting is all about.

Whilst I’m not a fan of Gen Y platitudes – I believe the difference within generations are often wider than the difference between generations – it has to be said that people like Jack just know what to do, instead of having to learn what to do. They don’t go down the awkward integration route. Their route seems elegantly effortless.

I have to admit, this second moment made me feel old – for just a short moment – and then excited, as it shows that we are moving from ‘cool’ to ‘useful’ and ‘theory’ to ‘practice’ when talking about the rule of the casual work and that the social web is now beginning to show it’s true, deep colours, also in recruitment.

So, my map of the world has shifted significantly over the last couple of months, but there are a couple of items that remain in place, such as the knowledge that I still feel like 28 inside.

“One might ask how such a tyrannical society could have produced some of the greatest champions of republicanism, such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison. The answer is that Tidewater’s gentry embraced classical republicanism, meaning a republic modelled after those of ancient Greece and Rome. They emulated the learned, slave-holding elite of ancient Athens, basing their enlightened political philosophy around the ancient Latin concept of liberates, or liberty. This was a fundamentally different notion from the Germanic concept of Freiheit, or freedom…” (p.54).

Woodward then continues to explain the distinction, first the concept of freedom:
“For the Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Dutch and other Germanic tribes of northern Europe, “freedom” was a birthright of free peoples, which they considered themselves to be. Individuals might have differences in status and wealth, but all were literally “born free.” All were equal before the law and all had come into the world possessing “rights” that had to be mutually respected on threat of banishment.”

And then the concept of liberty:
“The Greek and Roman political philosophy embraced by Tidewater gentry assumed the opposite: most humans were born into bondage. Liberty was something that was granted and was thus a privilege, not a right. Some people were permitted many liberties, others had very few, and many had none at all. The Roman republic was one in which only a handful of people had the full privileges of speech (senators, magistrates), a minority had the right to vote on what their superiors had decided (citizens), and most people had no say at all (slaves). Liberties were valuable because most people did not have them and were thought meaningless without the presence of a hierarchy. “

It is a fascinating distinction in itself and explains a lot of the rhetoric and the Kulturkampf in the current US election. Let’s apply this to the democratic workplace for a moment:
Most workplaces follow the Greek and Roman model . It is the do as I say, don’t do as I do mentality. Citizens might not be able to vote, but they can influence. But the lowest workers in the company hierarchy are the ones with the least privilege, as the privileges are given by the few at the top and are closely guarded by every single one having a privilege over somebody else. It’s quite the control system through self-interest, envy and to a certain level even fear, the fear of losing one’s privilege or being pushed further away from gaining a privilege the individual deems they deserve. 

More advanced workplaces might actually have a certain type of voting, as for example Brainpark, one of the WorldBlu companies, where employee citizens can vote for their CEO.
I believe a company and brand is defined by the people within. So part of the company culture, set up and democracy style and level are therefore defined by the individuals. And what strikes me most when thinking about it, is the fact that most individuals actually don’t act and therefore don’t perceive themselves as individuals under the concept of freedom but rather as individuals under the concept of liberty. In other words, they don’t see themselves as equal to others regardless of title or standing, they see themselves as needing to earn privilege. It is also interesting that this seems to differ from cultural background to cultural background and I have experienced it as more prevalent in the British mindset, which would make sense as the “Tidewater gentry” where decedents of the British rural nobility.

So a first and potentially most important step in creating a democratic workplace is the change of perception by the individual from the concept of libertas to the concept of Freiheit. Whilst companies can help individual employees to build the framework for it, the employee therefore participates as a citizen and uses his/her rights and responsibilities in accordance of the new framework. Obviously it is easier said than done, but surely it would be a highly beneficial for everybody involved. I actually also believe that this would be embraced by most company founders and leaders as it leads to a more mature, open and fluid company culture. It might get rejected by middle management as privilege could be lost, but the most interesting part for me is: are employees/staff actually prepared to a make this change and choose freedom and choice.

These Olympic Games are just wonderful. What strikes me most, is once again the impact that they have on individuals and nations. Now we all know about the positive internal impact, the new role models, and the pride in a nation and its performance that can bring a real uplift and increases the desire of the people of a nation to work together, to do better, and to move to the next plane. The national identity becomes alive and forms the social cohesion. It allows a nation to believe, to believe in their achievements, in a better future and in the knowledge that determination, concentration and creativity still can lead to success and that success doesn’t corrupt. It also hopefully gets everybody to remember that they are ‘owners’ of this nation and to behave accordingly.

As internal and external are intrinsically linked, the virtuous circle described above also influences the external perception. It influences what other people think about a nation, how they perceive it. I have mentioned in in several blog posts before, that public diplomacy – the person to person, citizen to citizen interaction – is the strongest form of diplomacy. The individual is the single most important brand ambassador. But it needs to be reinforced with every single act, watching Jessica Ennis, is not enough, it needs to be backed up by the next personal interaction. That is another reason why volunteers are such an invaluable part of the Olympic experience and the nation brand creation.

The effectiveness of this public diplomacy depends on the level of pride, ownership and voluntary participation of the individual citizen towards his or her own nation brand, which is exactly what the Olympic Games are achieving in the UK.

At the same time, the personalisation of a brand is mainly driven by the one outstanding performer. Individual star performers and athletes are the embodiment of the national team and therefore of the nation brand. While teams may be respected, only individuals receive the strongest form of admiration and will be remembered even long after the actual event. That makes individuals more important than the team and in extreme cases the public may transfer the individual’s values onto the nation brand. David Beckham stands for Brand Beckham and Brand England, with his brand values being transferred onto the nation brand. It has to be said, however, that he is one of only a handful of athletes in the world with such a strong influence. Usain Bolt certainly does the same for Jamaica. But I also think that a nation that has several smaller yet still powerful personalities can benefit and I am very glad if the values that Jessica Ennis and the British Olympic athletes display are transferred to the nation brand. That can only be good.

And what is the take away for companies from this?

Treat your employees as citizens. (and watch this video). Don’t try to silence them, but allow them to develop ownership, as through ownership becomes pride and through pride comes voluntary participation. Instead of people showing up just because they need a job, they arrive because they want to participate. They know they matter and they know that their performance influences the perception and therefore ultimately the results and success of their company. And they care about it, as they feel and behave like owners. Work is suddenly filled with enjoyment and excitement.