Eyes of the Organization

Purely is in the middle of preparing to launch version 3.0 of our primary website by March 1. One of the very exciting and highly intimidating areas of our new site is our Social Media section complete with customer feedback, Blogs (wonder why I have begun this Blog?) and Purely as a company making a commitment to 'transparency.'

Ah, transparency, the 'synergy' of 2010. Many of you who know me well are aware of how I like to poke fun at how used and abused the word synergy was in the late '90's. I see a very similar trend with transparency. Lay it all out there. Open up completely. Show the dirty laundry, etc, etc, etc. Scary consideration isn't it? Well not really!

I remember as a kid growing up, how much I hated that my amazing mother could see straight through my eyes into my soul. Drove me nuts! I remember being questioned by her, trying to make excuses or skate around the truth to no avail and after much angst finally relenting and coming clean, aka transparent. In retrospect I recall that even if coming clean meant paying a price of punishment, the lifting of the burden made the price bearable and most times left me wondering why I made such a big deal of trying to hide the truth.

I am a strong proponent of consumer-driven, groundswells of change and finding ways to respond to this change. The old cliche "get on the bandwagon" has real truth when in the business of consumer products. Can you imagine a company saying today, 'no, we refuse to acknowledge the Internet as a viable tool for communication?" Not a good idea. I think it's fantastic that companies all around the world are buying into the Social Media phenomenon and I am very intrigued with the "commitment to transparency" statements. My hope it that there is real, corporate values driven, company cultural change, organizational purpose adjustments to transparency. At Purely, this has been a long, introspective, exciting, getting real with ourselves process with a result emerging that is the most exciting core value adoption and culture mandating initiative to which we have ever committed.

Here's the bottom line that I truly believe. The eyes of Purely reveal the soul of our organization and there is genuine, organizational-wide commitment to our employees, vendors, trade channels, associations and absolutely our customers that they will like what they see when they look. Mom truly does know best because she likely knows all! Purely has a lot of 'moms.'