Executive Yak

I recently had roundtable meetings with senior Marketing and HR executives to discuss what is happening with employee communications in their respective organizations. Though I came away with some interesting tidbits and best practices (shared below), the one thing that stood out the most for me was a general lack of strategic direction. The Marketing group in particular discussed at the end of the meeting how the energy level around this topic stood in marked contrast to the meetings we had in prior months on “marketing ROI and lead generation,” topics which sparked lively debate....

Suzanne Elshult, http://executiveyak.com Executive Yak, sponsors live round tables for senior marketing and human resources executives in the Seattle area and offers executive / professional coaching and virtual learning opportunities for leaders, business owners, consultants and coaches committed to growth and high performance. The last several years I have picked a “personal annual focus” as a way to go below the surface and explore new territory for myself. Last year my focus was on “social media.” I immersed myself: got on Twitter, developed two blogs and became an avid user of Facebook....

The other day one of my long-term members of the HR Executive Forum brought The College Success Foundation to my attention, and I asked her to put together a guest blog post to share what she knows about this great organization. Suzanne Elshult, HRNow The College Success Foundation is a great resource for finding talented, diverse employees to fill openings at your organization. CSF is seeking to partner with organizations to place their graduates. This is not a recruiting firm. Their primary mission is to provide support to low income students to attend college and to reach their full potential...

 Suzanne Elshult, http://executiveyak.com Executive Yak, sponsors live round tables for senior marketing and human resources executives in the Seattle area and offers executive / professional coaching and virtual learning opportunities for leaders, business owners, consultants and coaches committed to growth and high performance. Rod Brooks, CMO with PEMCO is a long-term member of the MER Roundtable and occasional guest writer of my ExecutiveYak blog. Please help support the families of the fallen officers by forwarding this blogpost link to your network: http://executiveyak.com/?p=331  Hi...

On the one hand, both marketing and sales functions want the same thing—transactions that produce the revenue and the profits that satisfy the requirements for the viability of the business. However, they go about achieving that in different ways. In a company large enough to have both functions, the marketing people are not making daily sales calls and the salespeople are not developing branding campaigns. The tactics are obviously different despite the fact that the final objective is the same. What is evident, moreover, is that the tactics used by the marketing function in a business-to-business...

Suzanne Elshult, http://executiveyak.com Executive Yak, sponsors live round tables for senior marketing and human resources executives in the Seattle area and offers executive / professional coaching and virtual learning opportunities for leaders, business owners, consultants and coaches committed to growth and high performance. I had a provocative discussion on healthcare reform with some 25 top HR executives in the Seattle area last week. Any doubts I had silently harbored  about how meaningful this roundtable would be, evaporated almost instantly  as the group started interacting in a meaningful...

Suzanne Elshult sponsors live round tables for senior marketing and human resources executives and offers executive / professional coaching and virtual learning opportunities for leaders, business owners, consultants and coaches committed to growth and high performance. In my last post we explored how HR can help Marketing. In this post, the  third of four in a series on Internal Branding, the focus is on how Marketing can help HR. Here are some ideas brainstormed in my joint Marketing/HR Executive Roundtable  a few weeks ago: Bring creative expertise to internal branding Provide writing...

Suzanne Elshult sponsors live round tables for senior marketing and human resources executives and offers executive / professional coaching and virtual learning opportunities for leaders, business owners, consultants and coaches committed to growth and high performance. It  is not always easy to know where marketing ends and where HR starts and vice versa. For HR and marketing executives to not run into each other takes a commitment to coordinate, communicate and collaborate. The bottomline question is: what is good for the company, not what is good for HR or Marketing. The main focus for executives...

Suzanne Elshult, http://executiveyak.com Executive Yak, sponsors live round tables for senior marketing and human resources executives in the Seattle area and offers executive / professional coaching and virtual learning opportunities for leaders, business owners, consultants and coaches committed to growth and high performance. As the healthcare reform debate rages on in Washington, HR executives are having to manage the fallout from an increasingly antagonistic environment. Some businesses are openly taking a position and engaging their employees as advocates. Others are staying neutral and...

Suzanne Elshult sponsors live round tables for senior marketing and human resources executives and offers executive / professional coaching and virtual learning opportunities for leaders, business owners, consultants and coaches committed to growth and high performance. What happens when you put 50 high-powered HR and Marketing Executives in one room for three hours to explore: 1. How can Marketing help HR? 2. How can HR help Marketing? 3. What are the Implications of social media for internal branding? These are the questions we posed to the Seattle HR Executive Forum and Marketing Executive Roundtable...