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Emotions are data.
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This article was first published on the Graziadio Business Review blog through Pepperdine University on April 2, 2021.
As someone who has spent many years in the c-suite and been at the helm or at the table for high-stakes decisions related to mergers and acquisition, technology investments, market adoption, and cultural transformation, I have a different perspective.
Decisions, like invention, are 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. And most of that work happens after the decision is made. As a mentor of mine, Balaji Krishnamurthy from ThinkShift, shared with me, you can strive to make the right decision and then you have to work to make the decision right. Good intentions and even good decision science isn’t enough. You have to make decisions work.
As I have reflected on my experience, interviewed dozens of business leaders, and deeply researched the topic of business decision making and implementation for my upcoming book (expected in August from New Degree Press), I am struck by a few common threads that tie well-made decisions to the creation of well-made companies.
Decisions Have a Context
In your organization today, thousands of decisions are being made by leaders at all levels of the organization. It is true that high-impact decisions that require significant capital investment or human resources have multiple input streams that converge into a choice. My experience and research shows that input and convergence is aided greatly by talented employees, great access to relevant data (both supporting and disconfirming), and a culture of customer-obsession. Without these things, decisions will likely underperform, no matter how much analysis went into them.
When Quaker decided to buy Snapple for $1.7 billion, it intended to repeat the success they previously had with their acquisition of Gatorade years earlier. But it was a series of missteps with the channel structure and brand that lead to the $1.4 billion loss when they sold it to Triarc Beverages for a paltry $300 million. Three years later, Triarc sold it to Cadbury Schweppes for about $1 billion. The difference, according to experts, were factors like alignment of culture, corporate temperament, and the ability of the organization to listen to its customers.[1] In other words, decisions made after the acquisition could have turned the tide.
Decisions Are a Starting Line
Decisions are often seen as the finish line of a host of data-driven analysis, but they are in fact, the starting line for a whole host of follow-on decisions, investments, and actions. If making a choice is an act of convergence, immediately the tasks diverge, into multiple workstreams, across multiple groups, functions, levels, and geographies to make the decision right. If you were to add up the human hours that went into making major decisions with all the work that went into the implementation, it would be a miniscule fraction. Executive time, commissioned research, investment banker fees, and the like are nothing compared to the cost of implementing brand changes, moving factories, investing in new technology, finding synergies in the organization, or implementing a transformational strategy. Yet, leaders often spend more time thinking about what goes into the decision than what might come out of it.
I have been involved in several mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures in my career. In many cases, my role was to create the internal and external communication plans that told the world about the change. I have been a part of planning efforts lasting a few weeks and others lasting a few hours. And I can tell you that thinking through second order consequences and reviewing draft communications with the subject matter experts who were privy to the deal takes time, but is worth it. Leaders shouldn’t cheat themselves out of results by not setting themselves up in the starting blocks. If they fall in exhaustion over the finish line of making a choice, they will not succeed in the race that begins at the moment the choice is made.
Decision Processes Matter More than Decisions
Most decisions are not like picking lottery numbers or finding the answer to a math problem. Josh Stump is a business litigator and the President of Buckley Law in Portland, Oregon. He advises his clients that sometimes making choices is like following the GPS in their car. They come to a fork in the road and can turn left or right. At that moment, there might be an optimal choice, based on the data that is available at the time. To the right might be an accident that is slowing traffic or to the left might be construction. However, no matter the choice, the savvy driver can navigate (perhaps with some expert help) to their destination either way.
The same is true in most business decisions. The process by which directions are set, teams are aligned with great communication, truth is sought out, and teams are engaged in implementation makes all the difference. Even when decisions are reversed and businesses pivot to new strategies, they are doing so with the benefit of hindsight and what they learned.
References
[1] https://hbr.org/2002/01/how-snapple-got-its-juice-back
Proud to have been able to share some of my experience with Gina Riley for the March issue of Authoritii5.0 Magazine. Read the article here.
A few months ago I got the chance to chat with Christine Crandell about how to balance strategy and tactics. See the full episode here.
"It ain't what you know that gets you into trouble," Mark Twain supposedly wrote. "It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
One of the concepts that I am focusing on in my book is the importance of not believing everything you think. Making and implementing decisions of impact relies on being open to different ideas, perspectives, and disconfirming arguments or data. If all goes well, you might learn something.
If all goes wrong, you definitely will! What do you think?
See www.wellmadedecisions.com.
August here I come!
A hilarious anecdote from a 3 year old puts it all in perspective. I only have four things left to do for my book. Well, depending on how you count.
Curious about what I am doing over on www.wellmadedecisions.com? Learn more about what it means in this little video.
I’ve been thinking about gratitude. As many of you know, I am a thank you note writer. I have always done hand-written thank you notes. Since my elementary school days, I thanked friends for coming to my birthday party. And in recent years when I have thanked customers for their business, colleagues for their generous referrals or introductions, and press for covering our company or brands. I even love the Tonight Show bit with Jimmy Fallon where he writes comical thank you notes.
This became more and more rare as time went on and email dominated written communications. I am sure some thought it old-fashioned (like something their grandmother would insist upon while criticizing their penmanship) or a quirky gimmick of a marketer (and perhaps were too nice to tell me). In any case, it was a differentiator. I would often get a thank you email to thank me for my thank you note!
Today, we are in the midst of a pandemic and increasingly people are working from home or other private places, sometimes temporary locations in the homes of extended family. We are, everyday peeking into the private spaces and lives of our colleagues and customers with the miracle that is video conferencing.
And now the work mailing addresses on company websites are not reliable ways to reach individuals who might not be back into the office for months (and might not think about checking their mail slot at all). And even when I know someone’s home address, I feel like it is a particular act of intimacy to send something to someone’s home.
So, I find myself writing emails. Or, regrettably, thanking people verbally on the phone, and not following up as I should or know to do with an email or other gesture afterwards.
So, what do you think I should do?
Move to email like everyone else, but be very diligent about doing it in a timely manner? Should I write out a note, snap a photo and include it in an email (I have done this before when things have come back undeliverable, but never sure if it is appreciated or just weird)? Should I do some sort of social shout-out instead thanking people for being so awesome? Should I get over my reservations and continue (or resume) writing thank you notes? Should I come up with some other signature show of gratitude (eg, like emailing them that I am making a donation in their name or something)?
I am open to ideas and your thoughts on whether COVID is accelerating the slow death of hand-written thank you card and what we should do about it. I posted this out on LinkedIn as well and will do a recap post here in a few weeks with all the best suggestions.
A recent LinkedIn post by a fellow marketing exec, Jo Ann Herold, got me thinking about the best advice I have ever received.
I have been blessed with many wise mentors, coaches, and peers from whom I have learned. It is hard to pick just one piece of advice. That said, one did stand out.
Ask more questions
Maybe like you, I am a time-starved, experienced, and opinionated person who makes their living solving problems, anticipating problems, and rallying others to do the same. So, I am quick with answers. But I have learned (or am learning, to be more accurate) that more is accomplished with questions. Through questioning, root cause can really be established, customer needs can be fully understood, the talent of team members can be brought to bear, and alignment occurs more naturally. Asking “why?” five times is the staple of lean thinking and there is magic in asking questions. As a communicator-at-heart, my tendency to tell or sell can get in my way. I know I am not alone.
The other reason that asking questions is powerful is that there are more things to know than I will ever know. Others have forgotten more about subjects that I don’t know anything about. The pace of innovation, information sharing, and interconnections between us is growing so fast that the only skill or knowledge that any of us can hold for any length of time is the ability to learn and be curious.
I have a sticker on my laptop that says “Ask More Questions” (which my son picked up for me at an Alpha class he attended and thought I would like). It is a good reminder that I could heed more often.
The actor Gwyneth Paltrow starred in a 1998 romantic comedy-drama Sliding Doors. In it, two storylines about one character, Helen, diverge separated by whether or not she made it to the train on the time one day. In one plot line, she catches her boyfriend doing bad and strikes out on a whole new path, with new gumption and new haircut. In the other, Helen is mugged, spends time in a hospital, and has a rash of other unfortunate events. It is a thought-provoking movie and it is entertaining because we see both scenarios playing out together in parallel. Of course, Helen is only living one life at a time and can’t see what the other alternatives look like. It is only at the end that we realize that a good outcome would be possible via either path she took.
In the movie, the two story lines are separated by chance, but they stem from the question “do I get on this train or not?” I know many of us sometimes wish we could watch the Sliding Doors version of our own decisions in the same way. Which path would lead to successful outcomes and what path would lead to heartache, disappointment, or failure? If we could see it play out on the big screen, we could make the right choice.
Ruth Chang is a philosopher. She is a professor and chair of jurisprudence at the University of Oxford. She is known for her research on the “incommensurability of values and on practical reason and normativity.” In other words, she is an expert in making hard choices between options that are difficult or impossible to measure objectively. In her TEDSalon talk a few years ago, she spoke more about how to compare the incomparable. Her advice reminded me of Sliding Doors in three ways.
1. We want to know how the story ends, but instead we only get to see how it starts
The audience of Sliding Doors gets a rare benefit of knowing what the outcome of two different choices played out. Dr. Chang says in her talk that she wished “God or Netflix would send me a DVD of my two possible future careers,” in her example, so she would have chosen wisely between philosophy and law. Sadly, this is not an option we have in real life. Comparing Helen’s scenarios side-by-side allows the movie audience to clearly know the better, easier, more direct path to happiness. But Helen only sees the start of her story and as it plays out day by day. If she had been more honest with herself at the start she probably would have ditched the do-nothing boyfriend on her own (train or no train) and started off into her best new life. Facing the truth and doing an honest assessment of where you are starting is important.
2. Some choices can’t be weighed on a pro or con list
Dr. Chang proposes that “hard choices are not hard because of us or our ignorance; they’re hard because there no best option.” You can’t put a number on values like beauty, kindness, joy, and justice (although we try). They can’t be measured in length, mass, and weight. She continues, “As post-Enlightenment creatures, we tend to assume that scientific thinking holds the key to everything of importance in our world, but the world of value is different from the world of science.” They are hard to characterize simply into pros and cons. They go deeper and require more self-reflection and consideration, not of the external circumstances and opportunities, but of what is important to you.
3. No matter the choice, you choose you
In the movie, Helen was a smart, capable person. In both scenarios. The better outcome wasn’t a function of her intelligence. Because this American romantic comedy stayed true to the genre, in the end of the movie, she had the promise of the best outcome in either scenario. The only thing consistent about the two scenarios was Helen. This is true of the choices we make as well. Because the true outcome is unknown and unwritten, any choice you make is a bet on yourself, in many ways. You should reflect on whether on whether one choice or another will be more true to your values, easier to execute (important that we acknowledge that, because if we are honest it factors in more than we think), or more fulfilling in some way (or which might be more fun). In Dr. Chang’s career dilemma, she made the choice that brought her sliding doors back together. She earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School and a D.Phil. from University of Oxford, is a practicing philosopher, and chair of the jurisprudence at her university according to her website. In the end, it seems she bet on herself and found ways (plural) to bring her interests and talents together in a unique way.
Business decisions often work in the same way. Being self-reflective and facing the truths of your circumstance, being stubborn on your values, and betting on yourself and your team to find a way (or many ways) is the only way you have to achieve the best outcomes.
Originally appeared on the Well Made Decisions blog.
I have started working on a book about well made decisions. And every book deserves a website and a blog, which you can find at www.wellmadedecisions.com. You know I am deeply curious about leadership, communication, strategy, and innovation and all the other building blocks and contexts in which decisions occur. I look forward to sharing insights with you on my other blog and will cross-populate ideas when I think they are relevant more broadly.
I was recently reintroduced to a great definition of branding (thanks, Lisa). The best-selling author Seth Godin wrote “a brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a customer or client’s decision to choose one product or service over another.” This provides a bit of a framework that one can use to evaluate the strength of your brand, how you think about your brand building activities, and how you track and measure success of your business.
Expectations: the standard to which your brand is measured
Expectations can take many forms and can come from multiple directions. They can be set when a customer or potential customers sees your advertisements, hears a warranty claim, or is told about a product or service by a trusted colleague or friend. Sometimes expectations are set by competitors or by those performing services in other industries that raise customer requirements. Managing expectations is a key contributor to all successes. The dynamics of expectations exist in personal relationships and shows in company stock prices. The same holds true for companies wishing to build a brand. Understanding the expectations and requirements of the customer is critical. As Clayton Christensen said in his “theory of jobs to be done”:
When we buy a product, we essentially "hire" it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, the next time we're confronted with the same problem, we hire the product again. If it does a crummy job, we "fire" it and we look for an alternative.
The evaluation of the product as being well-suited for the job or “crummy” can be expressed as the ratio of how well the product actually performed as compared to how well it was expected to perform.
When I helped grow the desktop monitor business back in the early days of flat panels, we offered an industry-leading 3-year warranty with 2-day advanced replacement. Something we eventually named the “Customer First” warranty. Unheard of in the industry, but it immediately built trust for an unknown brand in a new category of product that few had purchased yet. It contributed to a fast growing and sustainable business. Sometimes, as the authors Eddie Yoon and Christopher Lochhead propose, “first mover advantage” goes not to the original innovator or even the company first to market, but to the one who understands their customer best and creates the category.
So, ask yourself how well do you know the expectations of your customers? What is the problem they are trying to solve? How well do you solve it (in their evaluation, not yours)? Who in your industry “owns” the standard for expectations for your product or service? Who is setting the standard for quality, delivery, and performance that are now table stakes in your industry? What can you do to set customer expectations higher in a place where you are better suited to deliver than others? How can you fashion a warranty or service pledge that sets the bar? How do you measure customer satisfaction and is it truly capturing the expectations of your customers? Are there some unfulfilled expectations in your category, or in other industries, that you could uniquely address for your customers?
Memories: the impressions your brand leaves behind
Memories of your brand are centered in the customer experience. User experience (UX), often manifested in user interfaces (UI), or the larger field of customer experience (CX) has been of growing interest to companies and is seen as a key differentiator to those who do it well. But memories are experiences reflected upon. The American philosopher and educational reformer, John Dewey, once said, “we do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.” Experiences must be harvested for insights for true learning or change to occur. Memories of brand interactions is what builds your brand and shared memories build your reputation.
Because memories are not facts, you can frame how people remember. When online retailing start, the idea of returning a product through the mail was a hassle. Companies thought of returns as a necessary evil of doing business. Then came disrupters. Nordstrom is said to have allowed a return of tires (even though they don’t sell tires). Zappos, the online footwear retailer bought by Amazon, likes to say they were a “customer service company that happened to sell shoes” and offered free returns from the start. This was deemed genius. They created a customer by making it possible to comfortably buying a personal product like shoes over the internet. Even though some people would buy two sizes to send back one, most still viewed returns as something to avoid. Returns were still reverse logistics. Today, there are companies like StitchFix (personalized styling) and Warby Parker (prescription eyewear) that rely on returns as an expected part of their business model. This reframing, enabled by data, is where business model innovation lies.
What do you do to measure the experience that people have with your product or services? Is there anything negative in their perception that might be reframed to solve a customer pain point? What is their experience with you before they use your product or service in the sales or marketing processes of your company? What is their experience after they use the product as they seek out service, support, or higher utilization? How do your customers describe their interactions with your brand after the fact, when they are recommending you to a friend, or warning a friend never to use your product? Where did they experience frustration or a feeling of success? What emotions are associated with your product or service? How to you measure the weight of a memory?
Stories: how your brand lives forever
Stories are powerful. The stories brands tell about themselves, or more importantly about their customers, can have a meaningful impact. Brands build trust by talking about their history of innovation or featuring case studies from other respected brands. But even more powerful is the role that your brand plays in the stories of your customer. A customer holding a Starbucks cup is not telling the a story about a coffee grower or roaster. It might be part of a larger narrative where a person is hard-working, prosperous, and deserving of a personalized reward like a tall, double, non-fat, caramel latte. Wearing Nike shoes might not just support their arches on the track, but reflect their belief in personal achievement or social justice. The old adage “no one gets fired for buying an IBM,” spoke to the trust that the brand built among corporations. It was the story individuals would tell about themselves when they, too, bought an IBM and were part of the club of insiders who knew best.
You might think you are in the business of synthesizing chemicals, renting hotel rooms, or decorating cupcakes, but to your customers, your brand might very well be a prop or a setting of their own unfolding story. Your product might compete with other categories in fulfilling the emotional needs of your customers. Does expertly navigating through the city with Waze have the same emotional payback as getting unique access to a concert because you hold a premium Mastercard account? Is your service contract helping your customer qualify for a promotion? Your product could not just be something they use or something they do, but it reflects on who they are. This is where contextual insights are so important.
What do customers do immediately before and after using your product or service? How does their choice of brand affect their self-worth or the perceptions of others? What other products or offering might fulfill the same emotional job as your product, but in another category and what can you learn from them? What emotions arise when customers tell others about your brand? Where else do these emotions show up? What else can your customer do because they are using your product or service? Do you need to add new kinds of research, like ethnographic studies, to your toolbox to contextualize your customer’s buying journey for new insights?
Relationships: how your brand becomes personal
Relationships are important in all industries and business categories. Sometimes the relationship is with a person: the account manager whom they consult with and trust, the executive who they admire, or with the counter clerk who knows that they like extra cream cheese on their bagel. Some leaders, of companies big and small, are the manifestation of their brand (or perhaps their companies are the manifestations of their personalities). These human relationships are influenced by corporate culture, the language and customs of your social environment, and the mechanisms of conversations and human interaction. And for the purposes of branding, relationships can be defined broadly at all the critical touchpoints.
A family favorite movie from my childhood was “The Music Man.” In it, the little town of Gary, Indiana waits with bated breath as the Wells Fargo wagon approaches. It carries important necessities. And, more perhaps more importantly, it contains the mystery and delight of wonders of far-off lands. Raisins from Fresno, grapefruit from Tampa, and salmon from Seattle. Even a canon for the courtyard square. As was moistly sung by a young Ron Howard, in that wagon “could be somethin’ special just for me.” I don’t remember them mentioning the name of the Wells Fargo wagon driver. The relationship was with the promise of the wagon (the same wagon, you will note, is still featured prominently in the Wells Fargo bank logo). The relationships that business-to-business sellers have with their customers can be so valuable that in mergers or acquisitions the key sales relationships are measured and secured with special stay-on incentives. In other industries, the relationships are more fungible and often scaled to objects or interfaces. The relationship with the brown uniform of a UPS driver or the highly-trained manners of a Chick-fil-A employee.
So, ask how would your customers describe the relationship they have with your employees? What other aspects of your business or touchpoints do customers think about in relational terms? Where, how, and with “whom” do they have conversations, make requests, or receive services? Who or what do they trust with their credit card number or identity? How do they invest in the relationship with your physical product or software tool? How do you measure engagement and loyalty? How do they engage with your brand communications, events, or other points of contact? How would you value or prioritize these relationships as they contribute to loyalty or customer lifetime value?
Customer Decision: the ultimate test
These dimensions of a brand are not mutually exclusive, of course. The relationship someone has with a software app is informed by the user experience, what they have come to expect, and makes memories that can be shared. In the combination is brand preference and loyalty.
For the famed musical, Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda penned the following lyrics:
Let me tell you what I wish I’d known
When I was young and dreamed of glory
You have no control
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.
The same is true of your brand. You can decide which research and development projects you fund, what metrics you measure, and how you lead your organization, but you don’t get decide if your product or service achieves the glory you wished for it. You don’t get to decide how customers adopt or engage with your brand. Although you try, you don’t even control how people talk about you where it matters most. All those decisions are squarely in the hands of your customers. They are the ones making memories and telling stories. All you can do is to make it easier for them to craft good ones.
This article originally appeared on LinkedIn.
Photo by Vitalis Hirschmann on Unsplash @hirschmann_photography.
I do a lot of interviewing. Not only have I been building out a team of my own, but I am also a “bar raiser” at Amazon which means that I participate in many interviews in an effort to maintain a high hiring bar for roles all over the company. I have interviewed candidates senior and junior roles ranging from software developers to economists from marketers to security guards. I get to ask candidates about the decisions that they have made and the outcomes of those decisions. This has sharpened my focus on decision making as a leadership skill.
Early in your career, when you are new to a role, or in some process-oriented positions, your job is to execute on decisions made by others. You run the plays, follow instructions, and earn the trust of the organization, your colleagues, and your manager.
As you develop your scope and influence, you are called to make decisions. Others seek you out for answers and advice. You look at the data and determine the ruling. You umpire. You judge. Your opinion becomes the recommendation. If you make good decisions, you get to make more decisions, faster and with greater complexity and risk. More people are impacted. More dollars are at stake. More is riding on you getting it right.
That broadening scope of decision impact is fairly well understood. When interviewing, I try to assess the kind of autonomy and responsibility a person had in their previous roles by learning about the decisions that they made (or didn’t). Decision making authority can be codified in things like spending authority. At leading companies, cultural fit is determined by how the candidate made decisions, who they involved (or not), and how they learned from mistakes (or didn’t). Making decisions is a litmus test of organizational seniority.
However, scope and impact of decisions aren’t the only measures of leadership. The most impactful leaders don’t just make decisions, they create the moment of decision. They don’t just answer questions brought to them, they ask new questions. If you consider the business leaders who have lasting impact outside of their individual teams, business, or industry they have in common that they created disruption. That disruption is caused not by answering the questions in front of them, but by anticipating tomorrow’s questions or forcing the answers to questions that no one else is considering. If you wait until there is an obvious fork in the road, it may not matter which path you take. Truth is you are too late and you have lost the race. Why? Because someone else created the fork in the road. They were the first to divert from the path to create something new. Truth is, if you are at a fork where the options are clear, you are a follower.
Most forks in the road don’t start as high-stakes decisions, thankfully. When done best, they are small experiments, pilots, or proofs of concepts. Small ventures, building upon each other in layers of learning, until a road is paved. By the time others come to fork in the road, the stakes are higher. This is what defensible differentiation is all about. Making the fork in the road more costly for the next traveler. Followers are faced with high-stakes decisions. “Should we abandon their existing legacy business to pursue something that would maintain their competitiveness in the future because we can’t afford to do both?” they must ask. Often they are forced to partner with frenemies to lower the stakes, which can be a sound approach when it is clear that there is a front-runner and it isn’t you. But how much better would it be to have created the fork in the road? To disrupt yourself. The annuls of business history are littered with companies with dominant positions in their space, the bigger market share, the most loyal customers, and with the best minds in the business…who got left at a turn.
This is true of the movement of whole organizations and down at the team level as well. Managers make decisions within the boxes on the organization chart or within the confines of the business charter. Leaders work in the blanks between the boxes and can see possibilities. The leadership pioneer Peter Drucker once said that “the most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.” Or perhaps not asking questions at all or after the answer is obvious.
As you think about your work, your short-term goals, and long-term ambitions consider your decision. : the decisions you are asked to make and what decisions you can truly make proactively. May you have the boldness to make your own forks in the road.
Jeff Hilimire and his marketing agency, Dragon Army, knows something about change. The firm had already earned the distinction of the fastest growing agency in Atlanta for the years 2016-2018, when Jeff and his management team considered acquiring two new agencies, at the same time. Watchword, a branding firm founded by Rachelle Kuramoto, and Atlanta web design agency Sideways8, led by Adam Walker, were established and well-respected when they joined forces with Dragon Army earlier this year. The three of them talk about how they maintained cultural alignment and customer-centricity amidst change.
Weave a Culture that Works
The first and last thing to consider in a merger or acquisition is company culture and this one benefited from familiarity and respect. “The three of us had gotten to know one another over a number of years collaborating on client and philanthropic efforts,” said Kuramoto. “Our values and respect for one another have formed the connective tissue during this process.” This was illustrated in their integration process and in the results to date. “We started by making sure the leaders at the top of each organization fit the company culture,” recalled Walker. Once that was established, then leadership teams and all of the employee base was considered. “In the end, it was an amazing fit all around and the merging of the companies has been very smooth,” he said. But smooth integration after a merger comes with a lot of work.
Finding the initial common ground required a look at the company values and leadership styles. Hilimire speaks often about PVTV, which stands for Purpose, Vision, Tenets, and Values, a series of guiding principles and guardrails that he outlines in his recent business fable book “The 5-Day Turnaround.” Hilimire describes two of Dragon Army’s values as “team first” and “think positively.” These combine to create a powerful recipe for positive change management when team members are “able to accept the changes, see the path forward, and encourage other teammates to see the way through in a productive way.” Regularly pointing employees back to the PVTV “continues to guide us and shepherd us through the transition,” Hilimire notes. They serve to “remind people how to behave and work together.”
Kuramoto said that they “spent a lot of time ahead of the acquisition giving people a chance to know each other” in order to begin the endeavor with strong relationships, even with people who were remote. Making choices about what to do next was made clearer with leadership alignment. Kuramoto said they “put a lot of rigor into when, how, and why we meet at leadership, and much of that time has been focused on prioritizing, setting objectives, and staying on track.”
Take Away:
Spend time on the purpose and values of the company. When adopted at all levels and across all locations they will help to do the work of alignment.
Practice Change
Walker noted that the leadership style and structure across all three companies had not been overly hierarchical which helped prepare the organizations for change. “We embrace a node leadership structure with coaches leading teams of people.” The teams are dynamic allowing them to “flex and bend, but also scale, as needed.” Kuramoto noted that paying attention to each other during the merger and now in operating mode requires some regular practices. “As an expanded team, we do many things to attune to one another as people, from a weekly huddle during which we discuss every important detail and allow for questions to highly agile processes. From Slack channels like #nodumbquestions to regular team round tables dedicating to articulating what’s making people happy, challenged, and available to one another.” Walker credited the regular team check-ins as being critical. “Also, creating documents outlining any struggles and our plans to fix has helped a lot,” he added. “Just having issues written out where people can really see and understand them builds a lot of momentum towards fixing them.” Kuramoto noted that having things documented also helps not having to answer questions multiple times and helped integrate their remote workforce with their physical one. “We’ve had lots of conversations and learned what to put in writing to make everyone feel secure and empowered.”
Take Away:
Have communication mechanisms in place that will scale. Write things down. Create documents for problem solving and communication, as a form of inclusion to remote employees.
Create New Opportunities | Minimize New Distractions
The strategy behind the merger was to provide a greater capability to serve a larger customer base. “We brought together agencies that worked with small to mid-sized companies and agencies that worked with larger companies,” Walker observed. “This enabled us to work on projects small and large while also dramatically expanding our service offering.”
However, in times of change, the focus can shift internally and away from maintaining momentum on new business. To minimize this distraction, the team implemented road shows to clients, “introducing them to the new team members and talking with them about the changes, specifically focus on how the changes would positive affect them,” Hilimire said. Kuramoto added that “once the deal is done, the number of details involved in the M&A transaction is monumental. As a leader in the organization, you’re accustomed to putting the lion’s share of attention to client service excellence, team members, and growth.” So things like integrating timekeeping software platforms, making sure roles across the company are similarly defined, or aligning internal communications, although critical, can consume the leadership capacity. “Operational to-do lists can’t distract from those customer priorities,” Kuramoto noted, “so it made for a few weeks of long days.”
Reflecting on lessons learned, Hilimire noted that he would have focused more on ensuring growth without disruption. “Growth is important for many reasons, and can be the lifeblood of an agency,” he explained. Kuramoto added that Dragon Army is committed to grow through relationships and that the “whole leadership team, led by Adam in his specific growth role, helps to nurture new and organic growth through relationship-based activities like board work, networking, speaking, and supporting endeavors and causes that are important to our partners.” This helps ensure growth is on the top of the agenda.
Take Away:
Never take your eye off the company’s growth engine. Know your levers for growth and keep management attention there.
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This article was originally published on Forbes.com.
The headlines were intriguing. “Jeff Bezos bans PowerPoint.” “Amazon eliminates presentations.” You’ve seen them, too. Before I joined Amazon, friends had told me about the company’s writing culture and how PowerPoint presentations, nearly ubiquitous in corporations I have worked for, were not used for decision making or strategic planning. Instead, press release style documents and Word files are the center point of discussions. As a writer myself, I was interested in how it would work. Did meetings really begin with a time of silent reading? Did it hurt collaboration and brainstorming? Did it slow things down or speed things up?
After calibrating to this new approach these past months, I can tell you that I will never go back. I firmly believe that this element of the culture is a critical contributor to Amazon’s success. Here is what I have learned.
Writing is clarifying: At Amazon, we write press releases. Not to announce products after they are done (although that sometimes happens). No, we write press releases before development begins. When the program or initiative is in the idea stage. Working backwards from what customers would care about, we start with the “why” and write what we call a PR/FAQ (press release plus frequently asked question style appendix). We write to clarify the value proposition. We write to position the offering. We write to coalesce all the ideas into a cohesive statement. Before we invest further time and energy, we make sure it is something we will be proud of and that will make a difference for customers. To clarify, these "press releases" are internal, confidential documents that inform the project throughout.
Brevity is strategy: Mark Twain once said “If I had more time, I would write a shorter letter.” Anyone who has written before knows that writing (or saying) a lot of words quickly. But if you have to write concisely and clearly for an audience – especially one not necessarily familiar with all the nuances and details of the topic - it forces you to prioritize, to get to the point, and to make every word count. This curation is the essence of strategy. What are you going to do and what are you not going to do begins with what do you want to say and what do you not want to say.
Documents are invitations: In corporate cultures that heavily rely on PowerPoint, decisions favor the charismatic. The great presenter, who can excite the audience and think on their feet, can dominate strategy conversations. In contrast, when a document has to stand on its own merit, ideas can come from anywhere. TheWhether it is a one-page press release or a 6 page strategy document, with all graphs and charts in the appendix, documents provide a platform, an invitation, for everyone to contribute.
Reading is inclusion: In a typical “read” meeting, the participants spend the first 20 minutes of a 60 minute meeting reading a prepared document and then they discuss. The agenda is simply stated “are there comments or feedback that anyone wants to share?” I have found this approach allows the introverted and analyticals of the group to bring their thinking forward. It allows those who read and process quickly to review their notes to identify the highest priority feedback before the discussion begins. Everyone on the read can fully participate. In my experience, this leads to much richer feedback, getting to the heart of the issues faster, and is a better use of everyone’s time as no one is tempted to just read you PowerPoint slides.
Clarity accelerates: As I have written about before, ambiguity kills organizations slowly and clarity speeds things up. When you can get to richer and more meaningful feedback on key strategic issues faster, as I have seen with the document process, you can speed up your whole organization to make better decisions faster. This has a huge impact across the organization and can lead to breakthroughs for customers and real competitive advantages.
I am sure this approach has its critics. It certainly requires learning (and unlearning) of past practices. It requires calibration to get everyone reliant upon it. It uses different muscles than PowerPoint presentations and forces everyone in the company to be a better writer. It is a big change (as I am reminded every time I onboard a new employee into the company). My initial curiosity has been replaced by conviction. When it doubt, write. You may find, as I have, that a press release is always a good idea!
This article was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.
Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash