The ideal candidate will bring a strategic mindset, a passion for the emerging trends of social business, and at least three years direct experience leading brand and communication strategy projects. They will build positive and productive engagement teams, adapting project processes, while maintaining our core methodology, and upholding our values-driven approach.

View the full job description here.

The ideal candidate will bring a strategic mindset, a passion for the emerging trends of social business, and at least three years direct experience leading brand and communication strategy projects. They will build positive and productive engagement teams, adapting project processes, while maintaining our core methodology, and upholding our values-driven approach.

View the full job description here.

As Canadians wake up tomorrow and as their elected officials get to work in Ottawa and across the country, those who supported the parties of the centre and left will surely be casting about for reasons: How did the voter turnout remain so low? Why did youth not turn up in the massive numbers pre-election ‘vote mobs’ suggested? How did Liberals fall so far? How did the NDP rise so fast?

They say hindsight is 20/20. So with these new, clear glasses, can the change makers look back on the last five weeks, and understand where they went wrong? From my perspective, there are three vital lessons for movement-builders to learn:

1. To win a national election, a party must win the whole nation. Certainly, the dense populations around Canada’s major metropolitan areas can deliver many seats. However, millions of votes are cast in the rural heartland of this vast country. No party can understand and adopt the perspective of Canada’s population while looking only at our cities. Yet, many of the voter turnout campaigns of the left and centre focused only in metropolitan areas. They failed to reach out to rural voters, effectively ignoring a massive portion of the country.
2. The medium may be the message, but it’s not the whole story. Campaigns conducted on Twitter and Facebook can disperse quickly, but they neither reach the breadth of Canada’s people, nor affect the change or engagement their leaders would seek. Some generations still receive their news in print. Some watch only their local news broadcasts. The capacity to move a nation is dependent upon a capacity to reach into the living rooms, coffee shops, hearts and minds of Canadians across the country. This is the domain of the machinery of national political parties. No grass roots campaign in new media can deliver that reach—at least not without a coincident, coordinated program of mass media outreach, and on the ground appeals.
3. Leadership counts. And it counts for far more than digital activists or new age strategists might be willing to admit. As a brand strategist, I also would like to believe that a well-framed story can move mountains! But the fact is that people are drawn to self-assured and inspiring leaders. Leaders rally people around a consistent message. And leaders share with people an image of a better version of themselves. Yet Canada’s centre and left-leaning parties dithered on their stories, shifted their strategies mid-stream, and framed their stories only in opposition to the party that came out on top. Without standing for something, they could not distinguish themselves as leaders, they could not inspire followers, and they could not convince the electorate to lend their support.

As a new day dawns tomorrow, and a new government (and potentially a whole new era) begins in Canada, strategists, advisors and social media activists will reflect on the work they’ve done and the goals they failed to reach during the 2011 campaign. As they reflect on those lessons, and consider what’s next, only two things seems certain: They’re disappointed and frustrated with this election. And they’ll do better next time….

Octopus Strategies is named in the ‘Knowledge Champions’ category, along with Japan’s Panasonic Design Centre Europe and America’s LinkedIn. Octopus was selected for its strong track record supporting charities and NGOs, including Everyclick and Sentebale, a charity founded by Prince Harry.

Octopus launched their London office early in 2009—during the most challenging economic period in decades for the UK. The firm diligently focused on its core expertise, a pioneering model of brand and communication strategy that unites values driven leadership, compelling communications, and authentic customer- and donor-journeys.

“We certainly picked a challenging time to launch,” confirmed Mike Rowlands, Octopus’s founder and Vancouver, Canada-based President. “But when opportunity calls, smart companies move quickly. We certainly did, and we’re grateful Think London has noticed, and highlighted our early successes in this way.”

“We’re very grateful to be included among Think London’s list of the companies they deem most likely to grow and flourish in the global economy,” said Erin Barrett, Octopus’s UK Managing Partner. “It’s a wonderful recognition of the remarkable work we’ve been privileged to undertake for some of the UK’s most impressive charities and social ventures.”

Octopus Strategies has rapidly established a significant footprint, working with some of the UK’s high profile organizations. Everyclick, an award-winning fundraising technology company, retained Octopus to help launch Give as you Live™. This new product potentially will help UK charities raise over a billion pounds in 2011—without asking Britons to donate or spend a penny more. The product relies on the massive system of commissions paid by online retailers, diverting a portion of those sums to users’ charity of choice.

Prince Harry’s Sentebale also retained the firm to help launch in the US market in advance of Prince Harry’s first official American visit. In partnership with Veuve Clicquot, Sentebale raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for AIDS orphans in Lesotho.

About Octopus Strategies

You know your mission. We’ll tell your story. Octopus Strategies unites passion and pragmatism to build the visionary brands of the 21st century. Through brand, communication and fundraising strategy, we help leaders of businesses, charities and social enterprises to catalyze change, accelerate progress and build a better world.

About Think London

As London’s official foreign direct investment agency, Think London has been at the heart of international business in London for nearly two decades. Since its founding in 1994, it has helped companies from more than 40 countries to set up and thrive in London.

Scheduled to run in parallel to the 2011 Skoll World Forum, at which Mike will represent Octopus, OxfordJam is a three-day event that aims to nurture social enterprise and social finance around the world. OxfordJam’s ‘Expert One-to-Ones‘ sessions are hosted by recognized experts in diverse fields, and provide opportunities for attendees of both Skoll and OxfordJam to seek perspective, advice and insights that support their work and missions.

Social entrepreneurs and others will have a unique opportunity to ask specific questions and receive valuable advice on topics including brand strategy, communication strategy, corporate social responsibility, and to hear insights from Octopus Strategies work with a along and diverse list of social ventures, NGOs and for-profit enterprises.

If you’re attending Skoll or OxfordJam, connect with Mike via either website.

Their consensus, not surprisingly, was that ‘eco-efficiency,’ as they call it, will be the “biggest economic ‘game-changer’ for organizations in the next 20 years.”

They outline three specific essentials that leaders will need to pursue:

1. Deliver highly efficient “‘green’ infrastructures,” that overlay digital intelligence atop of physical infrastructure.
2. Promote resource efficiency and reduce social impact.
3. Embrace open standards for better infrastructure, water and transportation management.

In our work consulting to mission-driven and responsible organizations, we’ve learned that these points from IBM’s report summary are but the beginning of the work needed to adapt to the Sustainability Imperative. Or more accurately, they’re just the front edge of the opportunities.

It is more valuable to focus on implementing positive social impact than it is on simply reducing the negative. Organizations like the members of our new client TheChange.com are building thriving businesses that also deliver positive, enduring environmental and social value.

It is essential to rethink the nature of new physical infrastructure, as much as it is to develop and deploy the digital intelligence that can monitor existing infrastructure. Buildings, for example, are responsible for more carbon output than any other category of emitter. While organizations like Vancouver’s Pulse Energy monitor their output and empower owners and managers to improve their impact, designers of new buildings must think about the impact of a project that will exist 50, 100 or even more years from now.

And open standards are revolutionizing an incredible array of social, environmental and technological realms of our work and lives. Open government is springing new business ideas and new efficiencies in our communities; open data is helping innovators and entrepreneurs to build business opportunities that reach around the world in a fraction of the time it used to take companies to build global brands; and open communication is changing fundamentally the way our world interacts—with news from Thailand reaching overseas in mere moments.

“Outperformers in the near future will be those that will adapt a proactive and holistic approach,” says IBM. We couldn’t agree more. The challenge for organizations and their leaders today is that “the near future” is incredibly close. And with the transparency of instant global communication, there’s no space for hedging bets or balancing profit vs. benefit. The leaders are defining models and practices that are inherently sustainable.

Downloads:

The IBM Institute for Business Value report. (PDF 1.4MB)

The Executive Summary. (PDF 736KB)

Citing various case studies, From WalMart to Warren Buffett, they argue that “a vast number of firms are starting to realize that if they want to hire the best people, they will have to stand for something more than profit maximization.”

Purpose beyond profit. It’s a concept we’ve been exploring and espousing for years. And we think Bishop and Green are spot on in their assertion that most companies are less greedy than the headline-grabbers, and more responsible than they’re given credit for being.