Writing Samples
The writing samples on this page include press releases, blog articles, emails, and collateral samples.
Press Release Samples
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Pivoting Strategies Presents The New CEO Series: Meet Todd Ordal – CEO Coach
Washington, D.C., USA, January 2, 2020 In this four-part series, Todd Ordal, President of Applied Strategy, and author of “Never Kick a Cow Chip on a Hot Day: Real Lessons for Real CEOs and Those Who Want to Be,” discusses his journey from a Division President at Kinko’s to becoming a CEO for two medium sized firms and a start-up, including the scars and lessons he learned along the way.
A CEO Coach for mid-cap companies with revenues in the $50 million to $2 billion range for the past 15 years, Ordal believes, “What got you to $10 million bucks in revenue probably won’t get you to $50 million, and I guarantee it won’t get you to a billion. So, your skill sets have to change.”
“Your behaviors have to change,” he said. “Your calendar has to look different. Who you spend time with has to look different. And, if they don’t get that, they’re not going to make it. I mean it and that’s fine. Sell your company and go start another one.”
“Todd Ordal shares his experiences of growing a company and it’s based on having a strategy,” said Carla A. Fleming, CEO and Founder of Pivoting Strategies. “His honesty and insights about the types of investments a CEO needs to make in their company – including leadership, employees, and in the CEO – provides a set of different lenses an executive can use to evaluate and fine tune their company for success.”
In The New CEO series we also discuss his book, “Never Kick a Cow Chip on a Hot Day: Real Lessons for Real CEOs and Those Who Want to Be,” The New CEO, and the role of the stakeholder versus the shareholder’s role in a business.
Applied Strategy is a management consulting firm that helps CEOs and other executives lead better, profit more, and sleep soundly at night. Todd Ordal, President of Applied Strategy, is a former CEO and has led teams as large as 7,000 people. As a thought partner to CEOs, he’s been in your shoes. He understands your situation is unique, sees your challenges, and he knows what success and failure feel like - because it is lonely at the top.
A monthly blog, The New CEO Series explores how CEOs and Founders are thinking about redefining the CEO role and the internal capabilities required to grow a company. The challenges they’re grappling with include: the demographic shift; a focus on stakeholders; reimagination of physical products as digital products; the movement from customer behaviors to building customer relationships; and the rise of the Authenticity Age where leaders, consumers, and communities are leveraging social business and corporate social responsibility to solve the challenges we face.
Pivoting Strategies is a business strategy consulting firm that works with middle-market firms to build their internal capabilities for growth. The work we do allows our clients to develop deep-dive insights about their organization, customers, and marketspaces to recognize new opportunities. The result? Increased revenues, expanded customer lifetime value, and more meaningful, relevant customer engagements.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Pivoting Strategies Presents The New CEO Series: Meet Dr. Clishia Taylor – An Innovator
Washington, D.C., October 15, 2019. Next year we celebrate the 200th Anniversary of Florence Nightingale, and in 2020, the United Nations recognizes the International Year of Nursing and Midwife. In recognition of the anniversary, we kick off The New CEO Series with an interview with Dr. Clishia Taylor. Dr. Taylor is a nurse, CEO, administrator, lobbyist, and entrepreneur who reflects the ever-changing landscape of the new CEO.
In this four-part series, Dr. Taylor, CEO of American Health Care Professionals, Co-Founder of Bless My People Foundation, and Director of Global Health Access Institute, describes her career journey becoming a nurse, CEO, and innovator. She discusses how developing the internal capabilities of her organization, including investing in innovative solutions and customers, are sharpening her ability to grow her business.
“How we learn and how we enter the role of CEO is changing,” she said. “You can literally watch people start a business and overnight become a CEO on YouTube of a major company. We’re democratizing how and who becomes a CEO of a company,” said Dr. Taylor.
“The New CEO understands where the consumer experience is broken and is diving in to fix it, whether as a company or as a social business,” said Dr. Taylor.
“The insights Dr. Taylor shares are applicable to entrepreneurs, family business, and Fortune 500 companies alike,” said Carla A. Fleming, CEO and Founder, Pivoting Strategies. “Dr. Taylor takes us on a journey of how she thinks about a balanced company – one that masters the day-to-day activities, reads the future to innovate, and renews its business strategy to embrace the constantly changing marketspace.”
The New CEO series begins this week, with a new article rolling out over the next three weeks.
American Health Care Professionals (AHCP)
American Health Care Professionals (AHCP), established in 1995, is a Community Based Organization (CBO) located in Great Falls, Virginia. AHCP is accredited by The Joint Commission. Our company provides a comprehensive, patient-centric model inclusive of: Home Health, Telehealth, Mobile Health, Global Health, and Wellness Programs.
Bless My People Foundation (BMP) is a nonprofit 501(c) (3) health care professionals training center created specifically to help eliminate health care disparities by providing training, education, and health care promotion to women, children, the disabled, low income, and elderly populations.
Global Health Access (GHA) Institute
Global Health Institute provides Telemedicine/Telehealth Certifications and evidence-based wellness programs to universities, health care experts, non-governmental organizations (NGO’s), community-based organizations (CBO’s), interfaith-based organizations, government leaders, HUD Senior communities, and individuals.
A monthly blog, The New CEO Series explores how CEOs and Founders are thinking about redefining the CEO role and the internal capabilities required to grow a company. The challenges they’re grappling with include: the demographic shift; a focus on stakeholders; reimagination of physical products as digital products; the movement from customer behaviors to building customer relationships; and the rise of the Authenticity Age where leaders, consumers, and communities are leveraging social business and corporate social responsibility to solve the challenges we face.
Pivoting Strategies is a business strategy consulting firm that works with middle market firms to build their internal capabilities for growth. The work we do allows our clients to develop deep-dive insights about their organization, customers, and marketspaces to recognize new opportunities. The result? Increased revenues, expanded customer lifetime value, and more meaningful, relevant customer engagements.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Leaders in Energy, American Public Power Association (APPA) and Business Radar Co-host “Building a Resilient Energy Infrastructure for the Future”
Washington, DC-July 28, 2015 Over the past 10 years, the top five extreme weather events, including hurricanes, flooding, tornados, and droughts, have cost the country over $527B or over half-a-trillion dollars, according to NOAA.[1] Each natural disaster puts electric utility companies on the front lines to keep the electric infrastructure up and the lights on. “Building a Resilient Energy Infrastructure for the Future,” co-hosted by Leaders in Energy, American Public Power Association (APPA) and Business Radar will explore how utilities respond to weather challenges. Policy options and business opportunities for the integration of microgrids and distributed generation, technology changes, and green jobs will be discussed. The event will be held at the APPA facility in Crystal City, VA, from 6-8 p.m.
Global investment in renewable energy surged to $207B, up 17% in 2014, according to the United Nations Environment Program. In the U.S., investment in renewables topped $38.3B. However, with these new sources of energy come new challenges. Communities are placing new requirements on electric utilities to integrate renewables into the infrastructure. Utilities are beginning to experiment with how to add microgrids and distributed power to the equation while grappling with the long-term impact their addition will have on the national grid cost structure. Electric utilities must also determine the role technology will have in meeting augmented demand. At the same time, the workforce is primed for a transition with employees reaching retirement age in the next 3-5 years, creating new opportunities for conventional power jobs.
“After the Derecho storm impacted the Washington, D.C. region and left our neighborhoods without power for 5 days in sweltering heat several years ago, I became intrigued in finding out about ways to enhance the resiliency of the electric grid, including microgrids, and more decentralized power generation such as solar panels. I am looking forward to learning more about developments to enhance electric system reliability as well employment trends in the public utility sector as many of our members are interested in obtaining green jobs.” Says Janine Finnell, Clean Energy Ambassador and Founder of Leaders in Energy.
Carolyn Slaughter, Director of Environmental Policy, American Public Power Association (APPA) says, the electric utility sector is going through a transformative period in history, where technology and consumer choice is propelling some of the biggest changes in energy. Public power utilities stand ready to adapt to these changes, all while providing reliable electricity service at competitive costs,” says Slaughter.
“We’re delighted to partner with Leaders in Energy and the APPA on this event,” says Deepak Swamy, CEO of Business Radar, developers of iRestore. “Utilities face escalating challenges in ensuring reliability of the grid. Mobile technology creates unique opportunities for a utility to increase system availability by connecting with cities and communities to address some of these challenges. For anyone with an interest in mobile apps, big data and utility outage restoration, we look forward to sharing utility pilot feedback on these innovations.”
Leaders in Energy is now part of the Circular Economy Network Map which is managed by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Leaders in Energy engages professionals who delight in thinking about, discussing, and collaborating on energy, environmental, and sustainability topics through online and in-person networking events. We seek to attract like-minded individuals who are passionate about dialoguing, collaborating, and seeking solutions to energy, environmental and sustainability challenges. Through its 1,600 + member LinkedIn group and monthly professional networking events in the Washington, DC area, the group collects and exchanges ideas and information to build a specialized network of professionals who are interested in making a difference through transformative leadership and actions.
American Public Power Association (APPA)
The American Public Power Association (APPA), based in the Washington, D.C., metro area, is the service organization for the nation's more than 2,000 community-owned electric utilities. Collectively, these utilities serve more than 48 million Americans.
Business Radar is a provider of outage intelligence and restoration technologies for electric and gas utilities. Located in McLean, VA and San Jose, CA, Business Radar’s award-winning iRestore mobile platform provides utilities with “eyes-on visibility” that greatly speeds and increases accuracy of the utility damage assessment process. Deployed at one of the largest U.S. utilities, iRestore uniquely enables the utility to connect with first responders throughout their service area. First responders and utility crews use “intelligent assistant” smartphone apps that help the utility pinpoint utility damage, prioritize response, and perform repairs while reducing outage duration and costs.
[1] NOAA, “Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: Table of Events”, 2014.
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Smarsh Leads Capture and Archiving Market, First Vendor to be Certified for Enterprise Information Archive for Microsoft Teams
Archive solution enables regulated organizations to expand Teams capabilities, leveraging cloud-native and on-premise capture to enable companies of any size to meet regulatory and legal needs
LONDON (August 4, 2022) – Smarsh, a global leader in digital communications compliance and intelligence, today announced that they achieved the status of a certified Enterprise Information Archive (EIA) provider for Teams. Smarsh collaborated closely with Microsoft during the development period of the Teams Export APIs to support regulated industry use cases, and is the first Microsoft partner to complete the certification process in this EIA category.
With the transition to hybrid work, organizations are increasingly reliant on tools such as Teams to get work done from anywhere. Today’s announcement means that customers in regulated industries will have their Teams data being properly captured and available for regulatory and legal requests. Our solution:
Aligns with Microsoft support for new Teams features and enabled native capture
Removes the burden on Compliance, IT, and Legal teams by preserving context and threading to help improve the speed and efficiency of responding to regulatory and legal requests
Manages potential risk and value through easily defining lexicon policies to flag incoming content
Seamlessly integrates with Smarsh Enterprise Archive, Digital Safe Archive, third-party archives or a data lake of your choice with industry-leading security features
“We are delighted to receive the Teams EIA Certification from Microsoft,” said Goutam Nadella, Chief Product Officer at Smarsh. “It is a clear vote of confidence in the Smarsh Enterprise Capture and Archiving solution. I am incredibly excited about our collaboration with Microsoft in enabling regulated companies to stay ahead of the curve and ensure compliant use of tools such as Microsoft Teams.”
“Smarsh worked closely with Microsoft during the development period of the Teams Export APIs” said Yaron Hezroni, Principal Group Product Manager for Teams Ecosystem, Microsoft. “Now, more than ever, it’s vital that companies leverage their communications data as a strategic asset. The Teams Export APIs enable businesses to ingest their Microsoft Teams data to their archive with high fidelity and through a single endpoint. This ensures customers can meet their compliance requirements to keep the business running while protecting data and other company assets.”
The Smarsh Capture integration with Teams Export APIs meets Microsoft’s certification requirements and enables all customers, including large enterprises, looking for a compliance solution, to use the Smarsh solution in their rollout of Teams to their entire organization. The solution provides cloud-to-cloud capture and on-premise capture enabling organizations to modernize their ability to capture multiple communications and collaboration channels quickly to achieve compliance and reduce the overall total cost of ownership. Currently, Smarsh enables over 1 million users with the Teams Export APIs, for regional and global banks throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.
About Smarsh:
Smarsh enables companies to transform oversight into foresight by surfacing business-critical signals in more than 100 digital communications channels. Regulated organizations of all sizes rely upon the Smarsh portfolio of cloud-native digital communications capture, retention, and oversight solutions to help them identify regulatory and reputational risks within their communications data before those risks become fines or headlines.
Smarsh serves a global client base spanning the top banks in North America, Europe, and Asia, along with leading brokerage firms, insurers, and registered investment advisors and U.S. state and local government agencies. To discover more about the future of communications capture, archiving and oversight, visit www.smarsh.com.
Smarsh Enables Enterprise Organizations to Unlock More Compliance Capabilities for Zoom Meetings
With Smarsh Capture, large organizations can now capture data from 10x more Zoom users
PORTLAND, Ore., (April 4, 2021) – Smarsh®, enabling organizations to manage the risk and uncover the value within their communications data, today announced new capabilities for its Capture solution for Zoom. Developed in collaboration with Zoom Video Communications, Inc., the new offering enables enterprise organizations, who need to comply with financial industry compliance regulations, to unlock the expanded capabilities of Zoom Meetings at the largest scale possible.
With this release, Smarsh enables customers to capture content up to 250,000 Zoom Meeting users. Now, enterprises can support compliance at an even greater scale as employees remain more distributed and digitally connected than ever before. The Smarsh Capture solution captures over 80+ channels natively using APIs to send data to Smarsh archiving platforms or any external archive, third-party application, or data lake.
“Companies everywhere are working tirelessly to create workplaces that meet the unique demands of the modern hybrid enterprise,” said Gary Sorrentino, Global Deputy CIO at Zoom. “They need to enable their employees to communicate and collaborate at scale and from anywhere — without sacrificing security and compliance. We’re proud of our ever-expanding collaboration with Smarsh, and the real value we offer together to customers around the world.”
Workstream collaboration tools, such as Zoom, are essential to any organization. In 2022, 31% of all workers worldwide will be remote or hybrid, with the majority of workers in the U.S. and U.K. working remotely according to Gartner.* With more workers operating from all over the world and outside of a controlled office environment, organizations who need to comply with regulatory requirements are vulnerable to risk with communications occurring across various different channels. In order to ensure all communications are accounted for, organizations need to scale their oversight. And, with this expanded oversight, large organizations can enable compliance with regulations that require this content to be captured and monitored.
“With the workforce becoming increasingly hybrid and using more communication channels, Enterprise organizations are more at risk than ever before,” said Goutam Nadella, Smarsh Chief Product Officer. “Smarsh works with many of the largest global banks and financial firms to provide a scalable and secure solution to supervise their Zoom communications. Our future-proof solution enables these organizations and their employees to be productive in this age of hybrid work while staying compliant.”
As a seven-time Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader, Smarsh brings 20+ years of experience of solving the most complex digital communications problems for more than 6,500 organizations worldwide. It delivers world-class, enterprise-scale solutions in key use case areas including combating financial crime, enabling intelligent e-discovery, empowering organizations to meet their compliance obligations, better protecting intellectual property, monitoring for sexual harassment and other bad behaviors, and enabling compliant remote work.
Additional Resources:
Register and join Zoom Global Deputy CIO Gary Sorrentino and other industry experts for an engaging webinar titled “Managing Hybrid Work Platforms to Reduce Business Risk” on April 6, 2022, at 1 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
Learn more about Smarsh solutions for Zoom, and get an overview of our unique features and benefits.
Visit the Zoom App Marketplace for details about Smarsh Cloud Capture and Smarsh On-Premise Capture app integrations for Zoom Meetings, Phone, and Chat.
*Gartner “Forecast: Unified Communications, Worldwide, 2018-2025, 2Q21” by Megan Fernandez, Daniel O’Connell, Tom Eagle, and Brian Doherty. June 24, 2021.
About Smarsh
Smarsh enables companies to transform oversight into foresight by surfacing business-critical signals in more than 80 digital communications channels. Regulated organizations of all sizes rely upon the Smarsh portfolio of cloud-native digital communications capture, retention, and oversight solutions to help them identify regulatory and reputational risks within their communications data before those risks become fines or headlines.
Smarsh serves a global client base spanning the top banks in North America, Europe, and Asia, along with leading brokerage firms, insurers, and registered investment advisors and U.S. state and local government agencies. To discover more about the future of communications capture, archiving and oversight, visit www.smarsh.com.
Blog Samples
Getting to Growth: Why Stories Matter
February 9, 2020
“The Strategic Piece” series looks at the hidden issues and topics that can challenge a business, add value, or point to a leading indicator that’s a story about a new customer behavior, trend, or market shift that’s developing and could impact the way we do business in the future.
In Part 2 of “The Strategic Piece” on leading indicators, also known as stories that haven’t been validated as facts, could dramatically shift elements of your business, and change assumptions you’re taking for granted about your business. We’ll discuss benefits as insights for growth, why it matters more than just scaling a company, and how one company is navigating this. Read Part I where we discuss why caring about stories matter just as much as a focus on lagging and current indicators.
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Growth, Not Scale
Business Growth_Photo Credit: Canva.
Nod your head if you’ve listened to a podcast, watched a TV business program, or heard a CEO on a radio interview talk about the desire to scale their company. In business-speak we understand he or she wants to grow their company to a distinctive, relative size, extent or degree.[1] If you fall into that category – wonderful. Yet, I think we often equate scale with growing a company because many of us use it as a yardstick for measuring success.
Newsflash – not every CEO wants to scale their company. You can be successful without scaling your company.
What everyone should focus on instead is growth – regardless of whether you want to scale your business – and, especially if you want to remain the same size company or want to build a sustainable business.
What’s the difference? It’s how we define growth.
Growth
The definition of grow we’re familiar with is “to increase, expand.”[2] Growth “is a stage in the process of growing.”[3]
We’re accustomed to discussions and actions that focus our attention on growth – looking at our lagging indicators such as ROI (Return on Investment) or EBITDA (Expense Before Income Tax Depreciation and Amortization) which memorializes our past success. We evaluate our current indicators like cash flow of current products on a weekly basis to validate we’re on track to drive enough revenue from the products for continued success.
What we are missing is a focus on stories, which are leading indicators that provide a window into the future. These stories could significantly change the way your business operates. This is where the definition of grow is important.[4]
“To promote the development of; to pass into a condition – become.”
Growth has usually meant expanding the company footprint into another market, deepening relationships with current customers, or acquiring new customers. What it also means is the development or creating new skills internally that allows the company to grow.
Insight Stories
Follow-Me-Home. Photo Credit: Canva.
Intuit, known for Quicken and QuickBooks, personal financial and small business accounting software solutions, respectively, incorporates the stories as a critical roadmap for their growth strategy. Thirty-seven years ago, Intuit started off with Quicken software. When they talked with customers, they learned customers were using the personal software at work. It didn’t make sense why they were balancing their checkbook at work. To discover the reason why, Intuit instituted a “follow-me-home” program with their customers.
What the insightful stories told them was customers were using their software as a workaround to solve another problem – to run their business. It also opened their eyes to another opportunity. This led Intuit to develop QuickBooks.
As the company grew during the 1990s, it’s focus changed. Less time spent on understanding the customer and more time fixing product bugs. They acquired a tax prep company and were almost acquired by Microsoft. The failure of the Microsoft acquisition and later direct competition from
Smartphone and Apps. Photo Credit: Canva.
Microsoft in the personal financial software space motivated Intuit to cannibalize their DOS-based applications and deliver them as web-based solutions.
Yet, when the smartphone was developed in 2007, Intuit recognized in 2012 the average small business used between 16 to 22 apps and they had only developed three apps. While the CEO recognized the need for change, the management team wasn’t on board. They didn’t see mobile apps as the path to pursue because they couldn’t see how to monetize mobile. Intuit went back to basics.
He required the management team to reach out to executives at companies that had figured out how to do it. Based on those conversations, the management team was on board, creating over 1,400 apps and developed what some call an Intuit ecosystem for customers, accountants, and app developers. They
Cloud Computing. Photo Credit: Canva.
also decided to make the move to cloud-based computing and move all of their software products to this platform, cannibalizing their current product line.
In 2017, Intuit dove in to deeply understand the new stories around such topics as data analytics, AI, and
machine learning. What they’ve learned has led to incorporating AI into all of their products to eliminate repetitive tasks and identifying mistakes that cost money and patterns amongst the billions of transactions. New products have been developed to help small businesses hold on to their money until it’s distributed on payday and to stand up a new line of business called QuickBooks Capital. This business line provides access to capital for small businesses that normally wouldn’t qualify.
Intuit’s willingness to embrace change and focus on stories paid-off. In 2012, they had revenue of $3.8B.
AI. Photo Credit: Canva.
By 2019, their revenue was $6.8B. For the decade, their stock price was up 850%, achieving double-digit growth every year since 2017. That wasn’t by accident. Attention to insight stories has contributed to their growth engine.
If you’re grappling with how to grow your business and you’re ready to pivot, take the Growth Assessment and let’s talk.
In Part 3 of “The Strategic Piece,” we’ll share how you can embed stories into your business.
Aretha Franklin: What We In Business Could Learn From Her
August 19, 2018
What does excellence look like?
I saw it when I attended the rehearsal for a presidential inaugural gala. Watching Aretha Franklin consider everything from the sound, the lighting, down to where she needed to stand on stage. She was exacting and collaborative. When she ran through a song she had sung a thousand times before, the passion shone from the beginning, middle, to the end. It sounded the way I remembered it as three generations of my family listened to her on the radio during the summers spent at my grandmother’s house.
Throughout her 61-year career, Franklin made it look easy. However, excellence is often expected, and, over time, taken for granted because we’re used to seeing the result. Excellence doesn’t just happen. It’s the work Franklin did behind the scenes where her excellence was born, tested, and refined. There is much we can learn and apply in business by exploring her excellence.
Observing the best in their fields. Her mother, Barbara Siggers Franklin, was an accomplished piano player and vocalist, and her father, Rev. C.L. Franklin, a minister. Their interests laid the foundation on which Franklin, who learned to play the piano by ear at the age of 10, built her career.[1] She also observed the top musicians such as gospel singers Mahalia Jackson, Clara Ward, and Rev. James Cleveland; jazz pianists and composers Oscar Peterson and Duke Ellington who visited her family home.[2] Her exposure to different genres, singing styles, and compositions was a wonderful training ground for experimentation.
Growing up with friends like Smokey Robinson and Diana Ross, Franklin and her friends benefited from the exchange of ideas, the support and the encouragement of each other as they developed their unique musical styles. As a result, each of them reached the pinnacle of their careers with number one hits, global success, and musical awards.
In business, having a community that supports each other, sharpens their talents, and pushes each to rise to the occasion is critical to helping companies, as well as an industry, develop. The challenge for companies today is to make sure you’re finding your clients that will value your services or products. That requires understanding your customer at a deeper level. Franklin understood her audience and delivered. She knew which type of music would appeal to a specific generation and which wouldn’t.[3] Continued experimentation and knowing when to pivot is critical because vibrancy and creativity are what can keep an industry on its toes.
Knowing when to pivot contributed to her longevity. Franklin had multiple pivots throughout her career. She signed her first contract for a gospel album at age 14. By age 18, she left gospel music to sing secular music and signed with Columbia Records. By 25, she was crowned the “Queen of Soul.”
That same year, Franklin signed with Atlantic Records to achieve her goal of commercial hits, not just awards. The years 1967 through 1979 are considered the prime of her career, with hits like “Natural Woman,” “Chain of Fools,” and the release of the best-selling gospel album, “Amazing Grace,” in 1971 selling 2 million albums.[4]
The music scene, starting in 1973, through the 1980s, changed from R&B to Disco and Rock. Her music mentor left the company by the end of 1975 and her last top 40 hit was Something He Can Feel,” in 1976.[5] She found a way into those spaces to remain relevant. She moved to Arista in 1980 where she had a hit album “Jump to It.” Part of her strategy throughout the rest of her career required partnering with younger artists such as George Michael, Lauren Hill, and John Legend. The key was finding the right artist to marry her skills with to expand her audience. In other cases, it’s thinking out of the box and branching into acting. Franklin appeared in hit the hit movie “The Blues Brothers,” one of seven she appeared in overall, which expanded her audience.
Often when companies have been successful, we don’t necessarily think the revenue will end. We’re focused on digging deeper into the space we occupy and finding new ways to optimize the revenue, the technology, and the experience. For a time that strategy works, and then it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, we’re worried about how we’re going to survive because the investment made in the infrastructure and skills have become obstacles to change. Companies wanting to thrive must be willing to pivot because embracing new trends and finding new markets and customers are what will separate you from competitors. That requires experimenting and building a risk capability muscle. Part of Franklin’s foundation for being able to pivot was her willingness to continuously learn.
Continuous Learner. Can you imagine you’ve had 40 plus years of career success, won numerous awards, and now you’re back in school learning the basics of classical piano? Franklin did just that by studying piano at Juilliard.[6] She did it again, when she started her label Aretha Records. It allowed her to write and produce her own compositions. [7] It also meant learning the business side and how to distribute her music over the internet.
Continuous learning is critical to longevity. Embracing insights from new ideas and experiences are what stimulates creativity, new solutions, and may require new business models. It’s what helps determine which issues matter and which to avoid as you navigate your way through disruptions. Franklin used her knowledge of different music genres, a deep knowledge of music listeners of different generations, and experiences – what to keep and what to shape in the music – as she covered the songs of the Beatles, such as “The Long and Winding Road.[8] It’s also what allowed her to become a part of new communities.
She embraced citizenship at multiple levels. As a music industry leader, Franklin viewed mentorship as a two-way street. Mentored by those that came before her, she was mentored by contemporaries such as James Brown, who taught her to make sure received her payment for performing before she performed. And, she mentored younger singers such as John Legend and Jennifer Hudson on career management.
Her citizenship transcended generations and interests outside of music. Dr. Martin Luther King was a frequent visitor at her father’s home when he was in Detroit. Her father and his church backed the Civil Rights Movement. Franklin supported the civil rights movement by singing at events, including his funeral. Forty years later, Franklin sang at President Obama’s Inauguration. She extended her interests to understanding economics by reading Alan Greenspan’s book, “The Age of Turbulence” or asking friend, Michael Eric Dyson, about topics such as archaeology and politics.[9],[10] Franklin’s support included local charities, churches, and organizations in Detroit by giving her time, money, and services, as well as international charities such as the Elton John Aids Foundation.
Giving back to the industry, individuals, a movement, or a charity, is about finding something greater than yourself to believe and support. Millennials and Gen Z are increasing expecting businesses to be citizens of the local, national, or international community and engage in corporate social responsibility. No longer is it just the pay or the benefits. Where a company stands on an issue or engages in a community may very much dictate whether they are willing to work for a company.
Excellence is often easy to spot. As Harvey Mason Jr., a producer who had worked with Franklin on several albums noted, “I went into all my sessions with Aretha trying to see if I could make the best singer in the world sound even better.”[11]
The strategy and work necessary to achieve it and maintain it is a lifetime of work. It requires a willingness to know what you don’t know and find people and ways to fill the gaps that will raise you to a higher level of success and life well lived.
Aretha Franklin leaves a wealth of knowledge, experiences, and success for us to learn from.
Rest in peace Ms. Franklin and thank you for the journey of a lifetime.
[1] Aretha Franklin, Wikipedia.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Beckerman, Jim, “Aretha Franklin Talks to The Record: Archive,” The Bergan Record, August 17, 2018.
[4] Ad ibid.
[5] Kahn, Ashley, “Jerry Wexler: The Man Who Invented Rhythm & Blues,” Rolling Stone, August 15, 2008.
[6] Remnick, Dave, “Soul Survivor: The Revival and Hidden Treasure of Aretha Franklin,” The New Yorker, April 4, 2016.
[7] Pareles, John, “The Queen of Soul Takes Control,” The New York Times, November 4, 2007.
[8] Sheffield, Rob, “Why Nobody Sang the Beatles Like Aretha,” Rolling Stone, August 16, 2018.
[9] Pareles, John, “The Queen of Soul Takes Control,” The New York Times, November 4, 2007.
[10] King, Noel and Ana Lucia Murillo,“The Voice of the Century: Michael Eric Dyson Looks Back on Aretha Franklin’s Life,” NPR, August 17, 2018.
[11] Hinds, Julie, “Aretha Franklin Biopic: ‘Aretha was Adamant That it Be Jennifer (Hudson)’ Playing Her,” The Detroit Free Press, August 17, 2018.
Aretha Franklin featured photo: Photo Credit: Tej Bharat.
The first half of the year has flown by quickly. Smarsh Capture now supports more than 100 channels, empowering Smarsh customers to better handle the impact of hybrid and remote work. At the same time, newly announced social media and collaboration solutions are enabling financial services firms to quickly respond to policies, procedures, and reporting requirements — key focuses of U.S. and EU regulatory bodies.
Major shifts in digital communications
According to Putnam, social media usage continues to grow in the financial services industry with 81% of financial advisors using it to engage or onboard their customers. However, at our recent SmarshCONNECT event, firms indicated that even with the increased regulator focus on social media and collaboration tools used for virtual work, many don't plan to lock down or expand their policies prohibiting the use of these channels. Why?
The pandemic was the tipping point, forcing companies to fully embrace digital communications across the organization. The benefits achieved included increased efficiency, productivity, and responsiveness to customers using social media platforms like YouTube or Reddit, collaboration tools like RingCentral, and messaging solutions like WhatsApp.
Employees and customers are dictating communication methods and where work takes place. The millennial and Gen Z customers and employees view social, messaging, and video as an integral part of how they communicate in their personal and professional lives. Customers and employees expect companies to embrace this technology.
Firms recognize that it's imperative to embrace new communication channels to remain vibrant and relevant and to retain employees in a tight hiring market.
Changing regulator priorities
It’s clear that the popularity of social media channels, end-to-end encrypted messaging, and unified communications tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Vidyard is increasing. Engagement across these tools can come at a high price for companies or individuals that fail to capture, monitor, supervise or surveil these communications.
An insurance company was fined $4.75M for not supervising social media and trading activities of their employees
The SEC fined a global financial services firm $200M for not capturing their WhatsApp mobile communications, violating SEC rules 17(a) for storage of content, 17a-(4)(b)(4), ease of accessibility to supply the records, and 17a-4(j) for not promptly furnishing the records to regulators
A former investment banker was fined $37K pounds for deleting WhatsApp communications, violating the UK Financial Conduct Authority's (FCA) Market Watch 66 Act, which regulates collection of communications by investment bankers
New marketing rule
Even a firm’s chief marketing officer (CMO) and chief compliance officer (CCO) have to answer to the new SEC Advertising Rule (206(4)-1) for Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs). It replaces the existing advertising and cash solicitation rules and updates the rule to reflect the advancement of advertising technologies.
Using the latest social media channels is critical to raising a financial services firm’s visibility. These types of public communications are viewed as advertising and promotion, which fall under FINRA Rule 2210(b)(4)(A) and Rule 2210(c)(6), requiring retail and institutional firms to adhere to the recordkeeping requirements of SEC Rule 17a-4(b). FINRA also requires spot checks — periodic requests to selected groups of broker-dealers to submit communications that aren’t normally subject to the filing requirements — for review. (Guidance for the UK can be found in the Perimeter Guidance Manual from the FCA.)
The benefit vs. risk and cost analysis of non-compliance is no longer in firms’ favor. Regulators in 2022 are focused on social media, hybrid work communications tools, and updating their regulations for modern digital communications.
Check out the new channels Smarsh Capture supports and learn how to better protect your organization:
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Build A Customer Growth Engine
Customers are at the heart of every company's success.
Do you have a proven formula for expanding business with existing customers and gaining traction in new markets?
We call this process the Customer Growth Engine.
Pivoting Strategies has developed a methodology that can take your company to the next level in growing your customer base.
What are you trying to do?
Attract prospects
Retain existing customers
Enter a new market effectively
Become a better brand storyteller
Every company has strategic challenges. The questions you don't ask can impact your ability to effectively align your business with the customer's needs and drive revenue.
Attend the Build a Customer Growth Engine Workshop
Join us on May 8, 2019, from 9 am to 1 pm at Office Evolution Tysons, for a powerful half-day workshop where you'll:
Gain insights into what your customers and prospects want, need, and as well as the type of experiences they look for from you.
Uncover how your customers make decisions when determining which solutions to consider and purchase.
Learn how to prioritize opportunities and select the one(s) worth pursuing.
Develop a detailed persona you can use to market your products to represent your customer or prospect.
Invest in the future of your company. Your investment in this half-day workshop will:
Jumpstart your personalized customer growth engine journey.
Introduce you to a process with step-by-step instructions for how to diagnose your "hidden customer vantage point."
Provide you with tools and diagnostic exercises you can continually leverage in your company. These tools and diagnostics provide insights and ah-has into how you need to operate differently in gaining new customers.
Plus, everyone who attends will walk away with a copy of the Customer Growth Engine Workbook - including the roadmap you create in the session that defines your company's customer growth engine formula.
The workbook you create during the workshop can become the secret sauce for developing your marketing strategy - the roadmap for your marketing - and the customer growth engine in your business.
What the Heck Do You Know About Your Client
May 9, 2018, from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 pm
Lunch and Learn: "What the Heck Do You Know About Your Customer?"
Asking the right questions is becoming more important than having the right answer. How often as a business executive have you become so absorbed in the day-to-day that we miss opportunities to be curious and wear the "Customer Badge" to generate new revenue streams?
What You Wish You Knew?
It depends on how you ask the question.
What does the customer want that you never thought of before?
What is the customer you’re serving today thinking about the future?
How did the customer get past you? And, when did this happen?
What We’ll Cover:
What makes it hard to ask the right questions to understand what your customer wants?
Case Studies on the benefits of asking the right questions.
How to ask the right questions.
American Chemical Society’s Green Chemistry Institute Demand Generation email for the 2020 Green Chemistry & Engineering (GC&E) Virtual Conference
Subject: Register Now! Make the Most of GC&E Fridays and the GC&E Virtual Conference
Preheader: Keynote Speakers Scheduled; Join Over 3,000 Conference Participants and Counting!
Register now and make the most of your attendance at the 24th Annual Green Chemistry & Engineering (GC&E) Virtual Conference, June 15-19. Brought to you by the American Chemical Society’s Green Chemistry Institute®, your complementary registration gives you an all-access pass to the virtual event and GC&E Fridays. For those interested in advancing sustainable science and solutions to global sustainability challenges, this is one event you don’t want to miss! Connect and network with over 3,000 participants.
GC&E Fridays Begin May 29
The live pre-conference webinars will begin next Friday. During the technical sessions, top researchers will present their novel research that advances green and sustainable chemistry, followed by interactive discussions with attendees. Note the different start times for each of the following sessions:
One you have registered for the conference, for security purposes, please register through GotoWebinar to attend the live webinar and to ask questions.
See the complete list of GC&E Fridays presenters and register now to add to your calendar.
Keynote Speakers
Each day of the virtual conference begins at 11 a.m. with a different keynote speaker who will explore our event theme, “Systems-Inspired Design,” through a different lens. The topics the chemistry and engineering thought leaders discuss will include:
40+ Technical Symposia Sessions
Map out your schedule. Choose from over 40+ technical symposia sessions to attend and engage in live discussions with speakers. Topics will include:
Design of Sustainable Feedstocks Driving Greener Design
Synthesis and Synthetic Route Design Green Chemistry Design
Around the World
Education and Design Thinking Plastics Design
Product Design Manufacturing and Design
Green Chemistry Challenge Awards Winners GC&E Poster Session
Check out the complete list of technical symposia sessions.
Poster Sessions: Monday Through Thursday
Attend the virtual poster sessions to explore the latest research and participate in Q&A sessions with the presenters. At the same time, visit the exhibitor hall where you can enjoy exhibitor presentations and engage with a variety of companies about their products and solutions.
Networking Sessions
With over 3,000 participants from 84 countries, you can connect to expand your network and reconnect with colleagues during the Network Breaks. Then join us for the #gcande Twitter Virtual Happy Hour where you can recap the day, meet new colleagues and discuss the most interesting thing you’ve learned. See the daily schedule-at-a-glance.
GC&E Virtual Conference Sponsors & Exhibitors
A very Big thank you to our current sponsors and exhibitors!
The virtual conference gives sponsors and exhibitors unique opportunities to gain visibility and connect with the global green chemistry and engineering community. Contact us to inquire about opportunities to sponsor and exhibit.
American Chemical Society’s Green Chemistry Institute Demand Generation email for the 2021 Green Chemistry & Engineering (GC&E) Call for Symposia
Subject: Closing Soon: 25th Annual Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference Call for Symposia
Preheader: GC&E Conference Co-Chairs Announced; Proposals Due October 9, 2020
The 25th Annual Green Chemistry & Engineering (GC&E) Conference Call for Symposia is now open. Brought to you by the American Chemical Society’s Green Chemistry Institute® (ACS GCI), the conference will be held June 14-16, 2021. The Call for Symposia is your opportunity to shape the technical sessions to be considered for next year’s conference. Proposals are due October 9, 2020, at 5 p.m. EDT (GMT-4).
2021 Conference Theme
The conference theme is Sustainable Production to Advance the Circular Economy. Linked directly to U.N. Sustainable Development Goal 12, Responsible Consumption and Production, the theme reflects the role of chemistry and engineering in creating a closed-loop economy for a sustainable future. The Committee is looking for proposals spanning the breadth and depth of green and sustainable chemistry and engineering.
Symposia Proposal Submission
Click on Call for Symposia to see a list of potential symposia topics that will be considered for the 2021 conference. You can also download an example of a successful proposal. Please be mindful of the GC&E Diversity, Inclusion & Respect guidelines in organizing your symposia.
Please submit your symposia proposal to gci@acs.org with the subject line “2021 GC&E Symposia Proposal” by October 9, 2020, at 5 p.m. EDT (GMT-4). All symposia submissions will be reviewed by the Conference Organizing Committee and applicants will be notified of decisions by December 18, 2020. If you have questions, please contact us at the email address above.
We’re looking forward to receiving your proposals as we create an exciting event and we convene a diverse scientific community to advance green chemistry and engineering research, education and sustainable technologies.
Stay safe and healthy!
The ACS Green Chemistry Institute ®
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Don’t keep this free virtual conference a secret! More chemists are looking for new ways to address complex challenges and innovate at a fundamental level to achieve sustainability objectives. Systems-inspired design is a critical pathway for advancing science through green chemistry and engineering. Learn how green chemistry can enable you to stay on the cutting-edge.
Stay Safe and Healthy!
The ACS Green Chemistry Institute®
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