Standardization News

Part 1: The Elevator Speech

You know your participation in standards development is critical to your company, but does your company recognize this? Do you have the support and resources you need? Here's how to develop a quick summary of what you do and what you need that top-level executives will hear and understand.

For years, standards professionals and organizations have extolled the benefits of standards and the value of active participation in standards setting. But when it comes to C-suite executives, these arguments can fall on deaf ears as they sometimes have little direct experience with standards and may not see their critical connection to strategic position.

This gap can keep standards professionals from their company's strategic planning table, limiting their impact and value - and their career paths.

This article, the first of a series on enhancing your role as a standards professional, will help you develop an appeal to your executive's interests with an "elevator speech" - a quick and effective description of:

Future articles will discuss how you can contribute to, and learn from, widely practiced strategic processes and tools; standards negotiation requirements and organizational input that may be needed to guide your participation in standards setting; and approaches to training that will strengthen your skills in standards work.

How Do You Define Your Work?

Let's begin by defining standards. Then we'll briefly review the frequently noted benefits of standardization before recasting them in terms of pressing executive concerns.

First, let's be frank: for non-standards professionals, standards are often preconceived to be boring and appropriately relegated to engineers or lawyers who, for varying reasons, can be spared or assigned to do standards work.

The task of defining standards is not trivial, as the term can refer to everything from codes of ethics to educational grading criteria to technical specifications. At the Center for Technology and Innovation Management at Northwestern University, we use the following definition, which is based on varied sources:

A standard is a documented and industry/market applied agreement containing uniform engineering or technical guidelines to ensure that materials, products, processes, practices and/or services can be consistently produced and used and remain adequate for their purpose within a given context. This includes ensuring safety and enabling required interoperability with other materials, products, processes, etc.

A simpler and more enticing definition might be:

Standards are the agreed-on rules of the competitive game for products, technologies and services. They form the needed bridges from technology to strategy, legacies to innovation, product to market, corporations to their ecosystems and industry to government.

The benefits of standards include:

Participating in setting standards allows a company to promote its strategic agenda and influence standards, but it also enables relationship building, the assessment of competitors' strengths and vulnerabilities, the testing of ideas, and intelligence about evolving technologies and alliances.

In my work and teaching, I stress presenting the value of standards in the context of emerging high priority areas. Thus, another way to consider and discuss standards is with an example such as the modernized electrical grid, or smart grid. Here, standards are critical in:

What Does Your CEO Want to Hear?

While clearly relevant, observations such as these may not address an executive's specific concerns. When asked what keeps them up at night, surveyed CEOs identified the need to:

Issues underlying these concerns include selecting technology paths and keeping up with technological change, positioning for emerging and converging technologies, transitioning from legacy systems, managing risk, and establishing and maintaining agility and robust platforms.

The sidebar (below), "The Contribution of Standards," illustrates the potential contribution that standards can make to alleviating these concerns and suggests how to frame discussion. The standards contribution can be enhanced by improved integration into broader management processes, including input into the use of such planning and analytic tools as roadmapping, scenario planning and others (as will be discussed in Part 2 of this series).

Think about the proper focus, context and timing for discussing standardization with your executive team to maximize their response. The sidebar (below), "Communicating Your Value," suggests appropriate topics for discussion. Executives are likely to be most receptive:

The final aspect of the elevator speech is defining and conveying what you need to do your job effectively.

By presenting standards and your work in terms of your CEO's pressing concerns and high potential organizational targets, and detailing what you need to maximize your value, you can become an integral part of strategic planning. Only then can you achieve the potential of your role.

In the next issue we will dig into how standards work can, and should, be incorporated into common strategic processes and, bridging to the third article, how these processes can, in turn, enhance standards setting.

The Contribution of Standards

Executive Concerns

How Standards Alleviate Concerns

Executive Concerns

How Standards Alleviate Concerns

Communicating Your Value

Standards are most likely to be recognized as critical to your company when:

Your role will be most recognized as critical when:

At Northwestern University for 30 years, Jeffrey Strauss is acting director of the Center for Technology and Innovation Management within the university-wide Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Studies, Global Engagement and Scholarship; he has responsibility for activity involving industry. Strauss spearheads initiatives supported by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop teaching modules and exercises and to conduct industry-academic workshops that enhance attention to standards in business and engineering curricula. Strauss teaches graduate, undergraduate and continuing education courses. He is vice chairman for the Americas in the International Cooperation for Education about Standardization.