Name:  Microsoft, Living The Brand.

Description:

Microsoft, like all other organizations needs to be continuously evolving, changing and improving, to maintain and gain market position and competitive advantage.

There are many changes happening across many parts of Microsoft’s incredibly diverse and large organization.

It’s easy to see how strategic and tactical execution across these many parts may not be aligned and may even be conflicting.

The consequence of this is that the organization can become chaotic, confused and inconsistent. It becomes a challenging place to work and a challenging partner and supplier to work with.

The implications are that the organization loses ground in the market-place to competitors seeming to be getting it more ‘right’.

Living The Brand (LTB) is an educational workshop for all Microsoft employees, that allows participants to dialog and share stories, and promotes a true understanding of the organization’s greater direction and messaging.

It highlights effective ways of working and behaving: enabling alignment and consistency across the global business.

LTB has been formatted to run over varying time scales (1 – 3.5hrs) in conferences, meetings, exchanges and briefings.

Objective(s):

o    To ensure a common, baseline knowledge of Microsoft’s vision, mission and brand values.

o    To support employees in understanding this in the context of their everyday lives.

o    To enable and empower employees to be great Microsoft Ambassadors and ‘story-tellers’ in all customer and partner interactions.

Scale:

o    Roll-out of Living The Brand to all full time employees and new starters in Microsoft EMEA, members of the CPE community in the Asia Pacific region and all Global Services new starters on the Microsoft Corp (US) induction program.

Measurement:

o    Tied in to MS poll

o    Employee opinion survey

o    Evaluated through internal readiness systems