The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age

Prerequisites

To repeat an earlier statement, your organization will already champion the Balanced Scorecard or similar business performance management approach. While the Six Influence Flows stand alone to do with as you wish, to kick start your own rethink, the Influence Scorecard demands the same organizational discipline that was required to implement Kaplan and Norton’s strategy maps and Balanced Scorecard in the first place, and demanded by its continued operation. If your organization doesn’t employ the Balanced Scorecard but has similar processes, you will have to decide whether the degree of similarity and robustness is sufficient to warrant adapting the Influence Scorecard to meld appropriately. If your organization doesn’t operate anything like the Balanced Scorecard, then it will need to explore this opportunity first.

Those organizations that are first to adopt the Influence Scorecard will typically emphasize a process strategy (seeking competitive advantage from operational excellence) and a customer-centricity (seeking competitive advantage from being better at placing the customer at the heart of the business). While the latter, seemingly, de-emphasizes the other stakeholder groups that are counter to our framework, I take it to be a good omen that the team running the organization in question gets this sort of thing.