Positive Power of Principled Profit
Volume 3, Number 10—June, 2006

Positive Power Spotlight: MidAmerican Energy

David Batstone, author of Saving the Corporate Soul, tells the remarkable story in his March 14 WAG newsletter , http://www.rightreality.com of David Sokol, CEO of a company called CalEnergy, who was so disgusted with the way he was supposed to finagle reports to please market analysts that he actually yanked the company from the market and took it private.

Sokol had been astounded when, after the Indonesian government pulled the plug on several large projects affecting a number of US companies, his was the only one that reported the problem honestly--and his company's numbers dived while the others continued to thrive, using inaccurate numbers that didn't reflect these fallen contracts. A year later, he was told that he wasn't announcing enough deals, even though his company had all the work it could handle.

But for Sokol, "deal velocity" for its own sake was not a value. This courageous man had had enough. In 1999, he gathered a small group of investors, including Warren Buffett (his first venture into utilities) as well as the president of CalEnergy. Reinventing the company as privately held MidAmerican Energy turned out to be not only courageous, but smart: the company's revenues leapt to $4.1 billion.

And a quick visit to the company's website http://midamericanenergy.com shows that market manipulations are not its only ethical concern. This is one energy company that clearly has a vision of the future, and how to get there. Prominent links from the home page include safety, energy efficiency, environmental efforts, wind power (in which the company is apparently a significant player), and economic development.

Bravo, Mr. Sokol!

Another Recommended Book: "Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?" by Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Lisa T. Davis

I've been a fan of the Eisenbergs for about eight or ten years, ever since Jeffrey started posting to the ISales Discussion List (now gone, unfortunately). All of their books are worthwhile. My spouse, Dina Friedman, uses "Persuasive Online Copywriting" to teach her business students at UMass. I've recommended "Call to Action" to quite a few folks. Their latest, with long-time collaborator Lisa T. Davis, has the intriguing title, "Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?"

While their previous work has focused especially on online persuasion, this book includes food for thought in both the virtual and physical marketing processes. Among my favorite points:
* Demographics are not nearly enough. They describe two women who live in the same New York apartment building, are within a few months in age, work in similar jobs--but have completely different motivations, and therefore need to approached very differently to engage in a buying pattern.
* When presenting a marketing message to people that you don't know and who don't know you, you need to reach them where they are in the buying process: the triggers that will draw a positive response from someone just beginning to gather information will be very different from the triggers for someone who has done extensive research, selected a brand and model, and wants to move forward. You want to "be there" for both of these folks, as well as everyone on the continuum between them.
* But it's not only demographics--it's also personality type: Approach a Methodical the same way you'd approach a Spontaneous, and you're almost guaranteed to fall flat on your face. But what's exciting for us marketing junkies is that it's not all that hard to craft selling copy that has trigger points for all four major personality types (the other two are Humanistic and Competitive).
* Companies as well as individuals have a psychographic profile, and even a relevant finding using the Myers-Briggs assessment tool (you probably took it in college).

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