Superpowers for leaders

What is a SuperCorp?

If you’re imagining a cape-wearing cartoon super hero right now, you’re thinking in the right direction!

A SuperCorp gains special powers because it understands that thinking beyond itself and current markets to find ways to improve society actually contributes to the bottom line. That thinking spurs innovation, profits and growth – a virtuous circle.

A SuperCorp stays ahead of change because its leaders, including managers, professionals and other employees, see further and are given freer rein to identify and participate in projects that build the future. There’s a focus on the greater good. That encourages collaboration throughout the company to resolve controversies and tap the best ideas of the best people.

In a SuperCorp, new media and social networking tools help people self-organize and communicate directly. That can produce important business ideas that top executives might miss. When people in the SuperCorps I’ve researched see a problem that might be far outside narrow company interests but consistent with the company’s values, they spring into action and ride to the rescue _as IBM India did after the tsunami. Can you see the slightly cartoon-like "superhero" analogy?

I spent three years investigating SuperCorps for my book "SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth and Social Good." I worked with researchers to conduct more than 350 interviews in 20 countries, focusing on 15 companies headquartered on five continents. I chose widely admired companies that aspired to high standards. For example, I interviewed U.S. giants like IBM and Procter & Gamble, investigating not only their U.S. operations but also their offices in China, India, Russia, Egypt, Europe and Brazil, among others.

The companies I examined, and others like them, are not perfect. But they aspire to reach high standards and thus strive for self-policing. A growing number of companies want to join this march to the future, realizing that their innovations are their best contributions to society.

Lead your company into the future, using tactics from the SuperCorps.

1. Delve Into the World Around You. SuperCorps are fit to respond to the 21st-century pressures of uncertainty, complexity and diversity and to the need to operate with transparency and responsibility. They redefine corporate social responsibility with the help of leaders who act to make a difference and bring results. These are leaders at all levels, and many are often closer to customers than the C-suite executives.

SuperCorps are not headquarters-centric; their leaders practice "management by flying around," going to the regions to teach values and principles and to bring back ideas. Leaders are good listeners and relationship-makers as well as good systems thinkers. Awareness of social and environmental responsibility is a strong part of the context in which leaders make decisions. These are not "special" areas but part of nearly every business function.

2. Identify Social Needs and New Business Ideas. Unmet needs are opportunities for growth. Some companies see green technologies as the hottest growth market. Others see the future in health-related products and services and in emerging countries, especially among people just entering the middle class. Often, finding new customers means serving society by finding solutions to unresolved social problems.

In India, ICICI Bank had to develop new ways to serve the poor and disadvantaged, or it would not have grown. It created talking ATM machines for the blind (many visually impaired people are in its markets). It also began mobile banking through cell phones, so it could reach new consumers even before installing ATMs – much less building physical banks.

In the United States, IBM advanced its voice recognition technology after a program in which it contributed literacy training to the Philadelphia public schools. The program showed that the standard technology only recognized adult male voices. IBM created software that could recognize children’s high-pitched voices in many accents. This was a social contribution that later became a commercial application.

3. Help the World, and Help Profits. The bottom line is still the bottom line. Are SuperCorps more profitable? Well, all the companies I researched except one out-performed their industries financially during the recession. (The one exception, Cemex, had just made a big acquisition, which saddled it with debt; otherwise its operations were strong.)

A strong sense of purpose and positive values-based culture is associated with prudent risk management – otherwise known as avoiding problems – as well as the ability to sustain customer loyalty and continue to produce innovation. This strategy can be rewarded by investors who see that it is, like research and development, a predictor of future financial performance. In fact, Banco Santander’s Brazil unit went public on Oct. 7, in the world’s largest initial public offering since mid-2008. That brought an $8 billion capital infusion to a bank whose business strategy is guided by social and environmental responsibility. That’s this year’s largest initial public offering in the world, not just Brazil, floated on the Sao Paulo and New York stock exchanges.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter is a world-recognized expert on strategy, innovation and leadership and is the author of 17 books, most recently "Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End."

© 2009 Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate