This Humanizing Growth conversation is with the chief marketing officer of Verizon, several years into the role. The subjects are how a company holds four stakeholders in balance, how a marketing function earns standing across a business, and how diversity work actually starts.
The mechanism that carries most of the weight is measurement. Verizon built a balanced scorecard covering all four stakeholder groups, with agreed metrics, and tied leadership accountability and compensation to it.
Key findings
- Society became a named stakeholder under a new chief executive, joining customers, employees, and shareholders. The stated position is that all four are equally important rather than ranked.
- The scorecard exists because measurement is what moves an organization. Scotti’s formulation is that if you can measure it you can drive change, so the work is getting the measurements and the incentives right.
- The company purpose gave the crisis response its shape. Verizon states its purpose as creating the networks that move the world forward, and Scotti says he had not expected a purpose to be so useful as a source of focus under pressure.
- The diversity work began by asking for numbers. Scotti wrote to the company’s agencies asking what their diversity figures were, offering Verizon’s own in exchange. The numbers that came back were appalling, and the request became a forcing mechanism.
Running the company on a daily agenda
Verizon describes itself as a company that runs toward a crisis, and Scotti says the pandemic was still one nobody had a manual for. The company’s first principle was that this was about action rather than words. It was the first company in the country to run a television commercial stating what it was doing for its customers, its employees, and the groups in society that needed help.
Two management routines were instituted. The chief executive and his eight direct reports met at eight o’clock every day, weekends included, and worked the same agenda each time: employees, customers, shareholders, society.
The second routine was a daily internal broadcast called Up To Speed, running at noon for half an hour. The chief executive appeared on it every day for the first two or three months. It was then published externally on social platforms, so people outside could see how the company was behaving inside.
How a CMO stays aligned
Alignment with the chief executive is run as a discipline rather than a relationship. Scotti meets him every two weeks, opening with two pages: his scorecard and his critical focus areas. They compare that second list against the chief executive’s own, and it now matches around 95%. The purpose he gives for the exercise is eliminating the guessing on both sides.
Alignment upward is not sufficient. Scotti says he has several bosses, meaning he holds himself accountable to the business unit leaders and to the heads of other functions, including human resources on employee communications and the finance chief. The phrase he uses for it is that I am because we are.
He is careful not to romanticize the relationships. Good relations open the door and can still be ineffective. What counts at the end is the outcomes the marketing organization drives for the businesses. His approach to a company where marketing was not yet established was show me rather than tell me: run initiatives that produce results, rather than presenting a deck about what marketing could do in theory.
The trap he names is sequencing. Some leaders spend so long building the capability that the plane never takes off, and others fly a plane that is falling apart. The job is to build it while flying it.
Starting the diversity work without a playbook
Scotti found no playbook for where to begin. His advice is shaped by that. There is no single silver bullet, the whole ecosystem has to be addressed eventually, and the worst move is waiting until everything is figured out before moving at all. Start where you can add value and take the first step.
Verizon started with representation, and the letter to the agencies is what set it moving. The structure that followed is a council with the chief executives of all the company’s agencies, meeting quarterly, where everyone shares their progress.
Being challenged on purpose
Scotti opens the conversation by crediting a device he was given on arrival: a challenger board of other chief marketing officers whose only job was to criticize and critique what he intended to do. He credits it as one of the things that set him up for success.
His personal purpose is connection, and he traces it back to organizing at school in Argentina. It is about bringing people together to do things that need doing, which is also how he describes the collaborations the company built during the crisis.
Scope and limitations
This is a first person account from the executive responsible for the work, given in a live conversation. No outcome data is presented for the scorecard or for the agency diversity program.
The speaker qualifies his own explanation of what worked. He says he has not been able to establish causality for the approach he took. Some of it was instinct, and some of it was being in the right place with the right support.
Source
This page summarises HGS #29: Diego Scotti (CMO, Verizon) about diversity and gender inclusion in marketing, by Marc de Swaan Arons.