#frontierpress

[jasonashlock]

Evaporating eBooks

1000 James Patterson fans. Given 24 hours to read an advance digital copy of his new book. One day later,the books self-destruct, disappearing from Kindles and iPads forever.

The same technology that enables Patterson to pull off a gimmick enables some of our more innovative clients to drive engagement during pre-determined windows, and protect intellectual property from escaping their control.

For trade shows or seminars, pitch meetings or client tours, and even for employee training, evaporating ebooks offer companies an opportunity to deliver exclusive digital content to targeted audiences — and then take it back whenever they want. Now you see it; Now you don’t. Beats the pants off a password-protected PDF.

Sophisticated technology. Straight out of a spy novel and straight into your organization’s marketing toolkit. Want to try it? Let us know.

[engagelive]

We could listen to Jason Ashlock talk all day. As the founder of Frontier Press, the next-generation publishing unit of The Frontier Project, and a former NYC publisher, we're lucky to call Jason a colleague. 

In the early months of the global recession, when the publishing industry was anxious and contracting, Jason launched a literary firm from standing start. In a few years, it had become a known industry force. He packaged books for Hall of Fame athletes and Oscar-winning actors, for Pulitzer nominees and Grammy winners, for indie film stars and fledgling novelists. In the process, he honed his skills in narrative design and product development, and then pivoted to a new mission: break the book out of its ghetto. FrontierPress is how he’s chipping away at the wall.

Frequently speaking at industry conferences, Jason is an open book on stage. Frankly, the way he speaks is intoxicating. In this interview clip, find out what Jason is inspired by at the moment, what's on his playlist, and what he thinks YOU should be paying attention to in 2014.

[engagelive3]

Announcing, Frontier Press. A digital publishing engine that combines narrative intelligence with leading-edge technology to deliver innovative ideas in storytelling packages.

Applicable to every organization that has a story to tell, either internally or externally.

Contact the founding partner of Frontier Press, Jason Ashlock.

- BC

[frontierdispatches]

Along with a few of our cutting-edge clients, Frontier Press is exploring a new frontier in niche publishing: internal corporate magazines. (Read the full story here.) In the coming year, they’ll produce two internal corporate magazines for two very different companies. 

Each magazine has a different intention, but the basics are the same: talk to employees, learn their stories, then share them far and wide.

[frontierdispatches]

Want Better Employee Engagement? Publish a Magazine.

Airline magazines used to be bad—really bad. You’d pick up a copy while sitting on the tarmac, leaf through a couple stories, lose interest immediately, and then shove the whole thing back inside the seat pocket in front of you.

But something is different now. Thumb through a copy of American Way, and you’ll fall into a number of well-written, captivating stories that are surprisingly good. (In a recent issue, for instance: an engrossing profile on Andy Hayler, who’s dined at every three-star Michelin restaurant, plus a nuanced travel piece on the Brazilian city of Manaus, with striking photography of the black-hued Rio Negro and tan-colored Solimoes River converging.)

And it’s not just airlines that are upping their game. Brands across the globe have taken on a new publishing role with gusto—and they’re doing it well. A flour company’s glossy spreads rival that of any other cooking magazine. An energy drink producer reinforces its thrill-seeking, boundary-busting brand with a newsstand-quality magazine. A double punch—the breakdown of traditional magazine channels and the rise of affordable desktop publishing tools—has opened the doors for brands to become publishers, targeting audiences in highly specific ways, positioning their experts as the experts on a given topic, and building immense brand loyalty along the way.

Jason, who heads up Frontier Press, has been at the forefront of this shift from traditional to brand publishing, and he’s gearing up for another major inflection point. Those same approaches that companies have co-opted to build massive crowds of highly engaged, loyal customers? 

They’re now trickling into companies, turning inward toward employees.

“The next evolutionary step in niche publishing is internal corporate magazines,” says Jason. “Your employee base is just as valuable as your customers. They’re your front line, the people making your product or service viable and available in the first place. Tapping into their loyalty and engagement is just as crucial as connecting with your customers.”

COMPETING FOR ATTENTION Until recently, internal corporation communications strategies have been (almost too literally) an inside joke, he says. There might be a clunky intranet that serves as more of an HR tool than anything else. Or a printed newsletter that’s crammed with photos from a recent golf fundraiser, bad fonts, and silly Clip Art.

If you’re not elevating your internal communications, you’re missing a huge opportunity, says Jason. “Many of the companies that Frontier works with have employees in the thousands. That’s an awful lot of people they could be connecting with in a meaningful way.”

Organizations do a lot of things well, he offers, but one of the worst things they do is force employees to subsume their identities to the organization.

“We assume that people become someone different when they step into the workplace, that they walk through a magic veil that automatically transforms them into an employee as they enter the corporate campus every morning,” Jason says. “Then at the end of the day, they pass through the veil once more, become human, go home, and have lives.”

This assumption leads us to believe people consume content—jokes, books, TV shows, internet videos—differently at work than they do at home, and that’s just not true. Their tastes don’t change.

“You can’t forget that you as an employer are also competing for the attention of our employees. If they’re drawn to People or US Weekly in their personal lives, why would they be drawn to your lackluster office publication on a Thursday afternoon?”

If we remember that the end users of our corporate magazines are real people, we’ll start building better platforms—ones that are playful, authentic, and alive.

WHERE THERE ARE PEOPLE, THERE ARE GREAT STORIES “I think the reason so many companies don’t seriously publish for themselves is because they don’t think they have interesting stories to tell. That’s a deep fallacy,” Jason says. “They assume because they work in, say, an industrial commodities business or an EPC company, their work isn’t sexy. They don’t think about their teams, whether it’s procurement or compliance, as interesting.”

But every company is made up of people, and people are drawn to stories about other people. So when you start telling the stories of your people, you’re showing employees that you see them and recognize they are important. That demonstrates something powerful: trust, respect, and, most importantly, care. When employees feel valued, they are more loyal to their company.

Besides fomenting employee loyalty, there’s another major perk to launching an internal company magazine: it sets the stage for more authentic engagement.

“I hear leaders wonder aloud why their entire employee base isn’t excited about their company’s new direction, initiative, or product,” Jason says. “But the truth is, your employees have no idea what initiatives are taking place unless you tell them. Most companies don’t.”

The native stories that companies would think are interesting, he says, tend to percolate near the top of the chain at the leadership or director level, usually in the worlds of research and development or innovation. But that’s maybe 10% of the entire company. The rest of the company is in the dark. By providing your employees with relevant information that will inform their work, says Jason, you’re welcoming your team into your vision and showing them the way forward, which naturally leads to an employee base that is more loyal to your company’s overall purpose.  

This is what publishing, especially internal publishing, can solve, and that’s what we do at Frontier Press. We borrow the best practices from the publishing world and put them to use inside organizations just like yours. We seek out interesting stories—of individuals and teams, passion projects and company-wide initiatives, projects and best practices—collate them in beautiful packages, then share them with your people.

The end product is a surprising, elegant, state-of-the art publication, but what we create isn’t revolutionary. Those best practices already exist. What we do is mobilize our team’s collective expertise around your company, and then transfer our know-how to your team.

“Our mission is to transform corporations into publishers,” Jason says. “At first, that does look like us becoming your guerilla publishing unit. But in the long term, we’ll help you develop the internal ability to do this on your own.”

In the coming year, the Press team will produce two internal corporate magazines for two very different companies. Each magazine has a different intention, but the basics are the same: talk to employees, learn their stories, then share them far and wide. See how we’re making it happen here.

***

If you’re ready to start a conversation about how an internal magazine can work for you, here’s what you need to know now:

> Your Guide // Jason, CEO of Frontier Press > Contact // jason@thefrontierproject.com

[frontierdispatches]

A Real-World Road Map for Organizational Change

We talk a lot about organizational transformation, but what does it look like in practice? And how can impact-hungry leaders like you navigate the rocky landscape of change and drive transformation?

When one of our clients, veteran human resources executive Chris Buhl, took the HR helm in North America for Kuehne + Nagel, a global freight forwarder with 69,000-plus employees in more than 100 countries, he walked in with one big question: How open was the company to the large-scale changes he hoped to lead? He'd mined Glass Door. He'd met with dozens of employees. He'd gotten to know the company and its long history. But still he wondered.

He soon discovered the company was fertile ground for new ideas that could lead to transformation, and three years later, that transformation is visible. But how exactly does that kind of change happen—and stick?

The answer, it turns out, is to start with a big, unexpected move—one we’re exploring in an in-depth case study that breaks down our partner-first process of bringing the most relevant tools and strategies to bear when clients need it most. It’s a case study in one company’s journey to organizational transformation. But it’s also a case study in how, as a portfolio, The Frontier Project makes it happen.

To make our client’s vision a reality, we pulled from across our team, starting with custom workshops and learning programs from Frontier Academy to train and engage. The rest supported what Frontier Academy started: keynotes from Frontier Live to inspire, videos and animation from Frontier Media to share the message of change far and wide, and specially-produced guidebooks from Frontier Press to support new behaviors learned.

And the transformation our client experienced? It speaks for itself. 

If you’re looking for similar transformation and change, start first by diving into the case study here. Then, reach out. We’d love to start a conversation around your organization’s potential.

> Your Guide // Ryan, Frontier Academy Facilitator  > Contact // rmauter@frontieracademy.com

[frontierdispatches]

Storyboarding: How one company flipped onboarding on its head

Imagine this: you’re a booming technology company in the shadow of the nation’s capital, creating remarkable innovations for the private and public sector. Your key challenge isn’t how to do brilliant work; it’s how to find great talent, integrate it quickly, and hold onto it.

Enter Frontier Press. Over a period of four months, Press partnered with a leading technology and engineering firm to reinvent its onboarding process. The magic ingredient for transformation? Story.

This is what we mean. Leveraging recent research on employee engagement and building atop decades of studies devoted to narrative identity, Press instituted a story-driven approach to training, integration and empowerment. All of it in reply to the kinds of questions all companies ask:

Why does it take so long to get new hires performing up to the capabilities their resumes trumpet?

Why is it so hard to get new teams working together quickly?

Why is it so difficult to retain talent?

The answer is almost never linked to what you think it is. Why don’t new hires perform quickly? It’s not because they don’t understand the systems and processes and software. Why don’t new teams gel right off the bat? It’s not because of poor leadership or lack of role definition. Why does talent walk? It’s not because of compensation or benefits.

The answer to these questions is almost always linked to the idea of narrative identity—the idea that we define ourselves, find our purpose, and perform at our highest level when we have a strong set of stories to tell ourselves and each other. We need stories about who we are, why we’re here, and what we’re here for.

So: If want your new hires to integrate faster, perform to their promise, and contribute meaningfully, you have one task: Help them find their stories faster. Here’s how we did it:

Expand the onboarding horizon. Onboarding starts long before an employee shows up at headquarters to get their badge; it starts when they first contract with the company. That’s when their story and the company’s story begin to intersect. So own it. Construct a narrative around their integration that stimulates them from the moment they except the offer by showing them the steps in their journey. Further, full integration doesn’t happen when an employee submits her or his first time sheet; it occurs when they first engage with their team to collaborate to solve a problem. By making that collaboration a plot point in their fledgling story, it can motivate early collective engagement.

Make the first day memorable. Press designed an orientation training that surpasses standard explanation of health benefits and security protocols. Instead, it included a visit from the CEO — during which he told his own story of departing an old job to join this particular company. It invited participants to analyze and share their own backstories — where they came from and why they joined. And it included exercises that required unexpected collaborations among participants (including an unforgettable gamification we’d love for you to ask us about!). By they time new hires left the half-day orientation, they had formed memories with cohorts, they had a game plan for engagement and interaction -- and they had stories to link them to others.

Create a mash-up. When a company hires talent, a very simple transaction has occurred: an individual has chosen to intersect their personal story with a company’s narrative. The company’s job is to acknowledge the independence of the individual’s story, while welcoming it to contribute to the organization’s larger narrative. How do you do this? By modeling: highlighting examples of others who have integrated well. By sharing: welcoming the honest storytelling of new hires who share their integration narratives. And by commissioning: sending new hires on missions to meet various people, capture certain conversations, and engage disparate units. The faster new hires collect evidence that they are part of a larger whole, the sooner they’ll find their place and contribute meaningfully.

We’re months from this effort, and the results are indisputable. New hire feedback has endorsed the approach. Team performance has increased. And manager feedback suggests new employees are slipping into a groove faster than ever.

And it all started with telling more stories.

[frontierdispatches]

Stories we tell

Let’s start with the obvious: Story has long been a great tool among the best marketers to attract customers.

What you might not realize is that the stories you tell inside your organization also have the power to shape your customers’ experience -- and determine whether you retain them or drive them away.

Recently, Frontier Academy began working with a client to create a culture of customer service in their organization. As our week-long program progressed, leaders in the room had an epiphany: When they told stories inside the company, how often were they casting their customers in the role of villain?

Okay, so we rarely go so far as to make our customers the villain – that implies too much intent. But we often make them the maddening antagonist that gets in the way of our happily-ever-after, insisting that they are “too demanding, too unrealistic, too uncommunicative, too... insert your complaint here.” These leaders had come together, determined to improve customer service, only to realize the stories exchanged inside the company were actually priming their people to see the customer as the enemy.

Their real challenge in creating a culture of customer service: they need to recast their stories. Can they help their people connect to a greater purpose by recasting customers as protagonists waging a battle of their own? For the health insurance customer, that battle may be a tough diagnosis from a doctor and concerns about payment for treatment. For an internal customer demanding immediate attention from the IT Help desk, the battle may be one of downward pressure from the boss. And for that small business owner complaining about a delayed delivery of inventory, that battle may be part of a struggle to stay afloat. 

In every case, story becomes the way we remind our people that the complaint on the other end of the phone line or email is coming from an actual human with needs we can all identify with. And more importantly, your team member has the opportunity to play a critical role in creating a great ending for a person who is critical to your business.

So now it’s your turn: Inside your organization, are you telling the right stories about your customers?

- Stevie