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The works of Dr. Charles Spinosa

Over the last decade, Charles Spinosa has developed a unique market-expansion practice devoted to helping clients develop customer experiences that enable them to enter or increase share in hard-to-penetrate or saturated markets. This marketing practice helps clients develop new service concepts to extend brands, reposition brands, build customer communities, and integrate new media and traditional marketing.

Some of the wide range of clients who have benefited from these service innovations over the years are: RSA, Scottish and Southern Energy, NCR, Digicel, Bank of Ireland, the Hospital for Special Surgery, Iarnrod Eireann, Bewley’s, Citi, Voith-Siemens Hydro, CEMEX, ADP, the Warner Music Group, American Century Funds, Oppenheimer Funds, the San Francisco Chronicle, Celtic Football Club, Bancomer, KSTS-TV part of the Telemundo Group, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, Mashreq Bank, XOMA, and the Inter-American Development Bank. The work with CEMEX has been written up numerous times, most notably by Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in Blue Ocean Strategy and C. K. Prahalad in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

Charles’s publications include, “The Virtues of the Transformational Leader,” Business Strategy Review (Winter 2008); “Communicating with Customers,” Kellogg on Marketing (Wiley 2008); with Don Sull, “Promise-based Management” in the Harvard Business Review(April 2007) and “Using Commitments to Manage Across Units,” in MIT Sloan Management Review (Fall 2005); “Extending Scenario Planning into Transvalutions,” Futures Research Quarterly (Spring 2005); “Developing Productive Customers in Emerging Markets "California Management Review, Summer 2003; “Strategies for Viral Marketing” in Kellogg on Integrated Marketing (Wiley, 2002); “Taking an Expanded View of Customers’ Needs,” Marketing Research (Winter, 2000). Charles introduced his approach to innovation in Disclosing New Worlds (MIT Press, 1997).

Peter Aspen of the Financial Times described Disclosing as: “A brave attempt to reformulate the relationship between democratic rights and economic progress in an age when the triumphalism of technological advance masks an unconfident vision of the future.”

Before entering management consulting, Charles taught English literature at Miami University in Ohio, philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and published widely in both fields. He earned his Ph.D. from U. C. Berkeley.

Do you Believe in Trust at First Sight?

Winning customers' trust is a top prize for brands. And when that trust is lost, it's very difficult to regain. So how can you get ahead of the competition with your trust-building strategy? In an interview with Fraser Allen, Dr. Charles Spinosa offers a fresh perspective, click here to access the PDF version.

I Wish you would Trust Me

Imagine a bank where, if something goes wrong, you can call the Chief Executive – and if he’s not around, he will call you back. Imagine a bank whose employees are given money to spend on random acts of kindness for customers. And imagine a bank that trusts you so much it may even leave you the key to lock up the branch.

Since the financial crisis of 2008, trust in banking has hit bottom and only moved up slightly Here you will also find the 10 essential steps to building customer trust.

Communicating with Customers By Charles Spinosa, David Le Brocquy & Bobby J Calder

The challenge is not just to deploy the tools of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Call Center technology and the like may be useful, even necessary, but they are not sufficient. The challenge is not merely one of handling customer questions and complaints. Nor is it just a matter of the organizational alignment of company functions (Kaplan and Norton, 2006). It is about truly connecting the organization as a whole to the customer. Companies need to project their advertising into the activities of the internal organization.

We believe that companies need to expand their view of communications beyond advertising to customers. A company needs to give equal weight to communicating with customers, click here for more.

First truth beats compassion, authenticity, empathy, vulnerability, empowerment, seeking consensus, and acknowledging and cultivating diversity

Dr. Charles Spinosa from VISION Consulting issues a powerful challenge to modern leadership theory by demonstrating that the role of leaders is not to be therapists but to show us what’s true, read the PDF version here.

Promise-Based Management - The Essence of Execution

Managers have a full set of tools for translating strategy into action. They can redraw their organization charts, redesign their business processes, realign employee incentives, or build sophisticated IT systems to track performance. Nevertheless, critical initiatives stall, and important work goes undone. Emerging business opportunities fall by the wayside or, even worse, into the hands of more agile competitors.

A PDF Harvard Business Review Paper by Donald N. Sull and Charles Spinosa. Read what can be done here.

The Virtues of Transformational Leaders

Great leaders grow extraordinary companies in ways that make their whole industries more highly valued. Consider John D. Rockefeller using vertical integration to stabilize the oil industry, including high-risk exploration. Consider J.P. Morgan transforming banking to bring stability to each of its clients and to markets.

They are a rare breed: transformative leaders earn that heady title by transforming not just companies, but industries. Charles Spinosa, Billy Glennon and Luis Sota believe there are four virtues that such leaders manifest, read more in our PDF here.

Safety, trust, moral confusion, and the revival of the warrior spirit

Let us stop building cloistered businesses and cloistered teams out of prudence, safety, and easy trust. Give those virtues no more than their due in the rough and tumble world where we make a difference. Elevate safety when learning a new skill or conducting a momentous Truth and Reconciliation process; otherwise, keep it inside routines.

Dr. Charles Spinosa from VISION Consulting shows why a cultural obsession with safety is directly at odds with achieving great leadership. As we emerge from COVID-19, we must build without fear, read the PDF version here.

COVID-19, the unnatural acts of managing moods and creating masterpieces instead of the new normal

Since we bring philosophers’ insights to business, we are constantly engaging in an unnatural act. Normally, business insights come from the management schools and the social sciences. Normally, too, people in business shake hands, look directly into each other’s eyes, and get a visceral sense of trust or otherwise. With social distancing, we are all engaged in an unnatural act. Wonderful! While most consultants advise preparing for the new normal, let’s instead take this abnormal moment to turn our businesses into our masterpieces.

Dr. Charles Spinosa from VISION Consulting urges us to turn virtual working to everyone’s advantage by doing what comes unnaturally. Are you ready to create your masterpiece? If so read our PDF version here.

The COVID-19 opportunity of a lifetime: Transform your organization’s culture to create your masterpiece organization (Part 1)

Why your organization’s culture is important, how it works, and what the key building blocks are.

Although COVID-19 is making critical management practices difficult, it also offers organization leaders a golden opportunity. With all the change happening, now is the time to bring your culture into alignment with your style of managing and your strategy. Read more here.

The COVID-19 opportunity of a lifetime: transform your organization’s culture to create your masterpiece organization (Part 2)

We are now ready to look at how to adjust your coming-to-resolution practice to convey a new culture or strengthen your current culture. Note that coming-to-resolution practices are vexed in many companies because academics and consultants have taught leaders that they should achieve a rational consensus. In short, they should lead as Mr. Spock from Star Trek would. Mr. Spock is a fantasy, damaging to those who believe they can be like him. Coming to resolution takes leadership because, for important questions, consensus cannot be achieved.

Dr. Charles Spinosa from VISION Consulting demonstrates how to use the opportunity created by forced virtual working to transform your culture or create a completely new one. Dive into the PDF version here.

Developing Productive Customers in Emerging Markets

Senior managers generally face two different reasons for entering emerging markets. As mainstream markets become saturated and competitive strategies focused on differentiation start running up against limited returns, senior managers find themselves looking at the relatively untouched and sizable emerging markets.

This article by Maria Flores Letelier, Fernando Flores & Charles Spinosa demonstrates that companies can appeal to customers as productive agents who want to build and transform their lives. Offering customers productivity-enhancing systems coupled with culturally appropriate offerings will allow them to charge appropriately and succeed in lower-income, emerging markets, read more here.

UNCONDITIONAL 101

Two transformational CEOs we at VISION have worked with took a huge hit recently. The hit was self-inflicted and, disappointingly, came after they each had done the hard work of developing with their respective senior teams a transformational strategy that could change the competitive game of their two different industries.

Vision requested that two CEOs each spent several weeks with their teams to find what it was about their work that had originally inspired them, what they still loved doing, and what business activity would get them up in the morning to work long hours rebuilding the company. Find out what transpired in our PDF found here.

What Calls for Thinking in Business

For Heidegger, thinking focuses on what is most taken for granted in any domain and in its focus transforms the domain. In business, such thinking develops cultural innovations that change the factors of competition. This chapter introduces Heideggerian thinking for business transformation.

This PDF chapter introduces Heideggerian thinking for business transformation. We look at the concerns managers face in adopting such thinking, explain Heidegger’s two breakthroughs: the turn to practice and the uncovering of radically different understandings of being. Read more here.

What Makes Virtual Work Work?

What has gone wrong? Life in the virtual world is full of distractions.

There are the obvious technological glitches. But as you look at your colleagues on your computer screen, you are also alerted to important emails coming in, movements in the market, headlines from healthcare news briefs, and so forth. You are very likely working from your home, which has not been organized to separate you from your family. Distraction is, truly, at pandemic proportions. If you consider yourself a driven highly focused executive, ask yourself, Have you allowed yourself to check-in on emails or news during a recent virtual meeting? Read more here.

Virtual Leadership and its Discontents

First, with the increasing numbers of virtual meetings and clogged schedules, leaders are called on to be increasingly reactive. Second, in virtual meetings where people are easily distracted, listen to hear only what they expect to hear, and can secretly and easily ignore the video talking head, leaders are called on to perform at new heights of dramatic articulateness. Third, the casualness of yesterday is gone. To exert their moral authority virtually, leaders have to establish that necks are on the line and that something must be done in the meeting, and they need to do that in a mood that makes others want to join in the distress and hard decision-making. These are knotty problems. We will provide our three first-aid remedies. Read more here.

Leadership, creativity, & truth-saying in an age of: Safety--Part 1, Moral Confusion--Part 2, & Building Cloisters rather than Warrior Spirit--Part 3

What is happening to leadership, creativity, and truth-saying in our age which is raising the moral importance of safety both because of COVID-19 and generally.

I’m writing, however, about a deeper problem. As we drink in the new thinking about safety and raise it to a high, life directing moral evaluation (not simply a prudential one), we fall into moral confusion over right and wrong and finally end up timid in business and life. Read more here.

HOW TO FIX MEGAPROJECTS (and all capital projects that matter)

To find out how to avoid spending 6 billion on a Megaproject look no further.

Less than one per cent of megaprojects deliver the promised benefits on time and on budget. We explain why they go wrong, how you can fix them and why the fix works. We also show how these lessons can be applied to all capital projects of scale.

In this PDF we will take you through our proven four-step process for delivering all significant capital projects on time, on budget and with all the promised benefits. Find out how, here.

Does COVID-19 Tear the Poetry from our Souls?

Will we give up on the restaurant culture that has remained with us since ancient Rome’s wine bars and has lasted through plagues far worse than COVID-19. Will Americans no longer be born to run? Will no one want to see April in Paris? Will no one miss the buzz of London and New York? Will all of life get lived in my room? We invite you to identify your own poetic expression of your answers to these questions and then ask if that poetry has left you. Read more here.

Do you Believe in trust at first sight?

Like love at first sight, the idea of trust at first sight is not very fashionable.

But we’ve all experienced a sense of trustworthiness first encounter. It’s not because their reputations preceded them but because trustworthiness from certain people and certain brands at something just clicked. Intellectual fashion dictates that it was a cognitive bias that clicked. Or, perhaps, you like certain behaviors or personality types. These suppositions are simply not right. Though not fashionable, we are still aware of virtues, and we see them in people quickly. Read more here.

'Authenticity' is not about Playing Roles or Managing Appearances

By Charles Spinosa.

Consultants help leaders cultivate a disposition to be true to the full range of human virtues, particularly in the face of their organisations' extinction. Is this useful? Find out here

Strategies for Viral Marketing

By Maria Flores Letelier, Charles Spinosa & Bobby J. Calder.

It has been around forever, but as a marketing strategy, it goes back only about 50 years. How do you sell a line of kitchen containers without advertising and even without distribution? The answer: Have women hold parties and talk about them to their friends. The Tupperware Party strategy was based on a simple premise that is as valid today as it was then. Consumer-to-consumer contacts are powerful! Learn more here.

Coping with Time in Organizations: Insights from Heidegger

Sleeping with our smartphones, we have no time to do the essential thing. Equally bad, when we give up our kiarotic temporal structuring for others, we let essential actions slip. Heidegger admonishes us to embrace our temporality as beings who face existential death, allow the past to speak through us, and repeatedly adjust our ways of being accordingly. We frequently feel those adjustments as inspirations. When we act on them, everything provisional falls away. We do what is essential in our time. Read more here.

Beyond Rational Persuasion: How Leaders Change Moral Norms

We argue that formal leaders, embedded in their practices’ grounding, clarifying, and organizing norms, get captivated by anomalies and respond to them by taking moral risks, which, if practically successful, create a new normative order. Read more here.

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