brand as business bit:  Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM from 2002-2012, stepped down from his post on Sunday.  I’ve been an admirer for years.

The New York Times ran a great piece about Palmisano’s impact on the venerable company, including increasing its stock market value to $217BB, making it more nimble and innovative, and focusing its thinking with a four question framework:

• “Why would someone spend their money with you — so what is unique about you?”
• “Why would somebody work for you?”
• “Why would society allow you to operate in their defined geography — their country?”
• “And why would somebody invest their money with you?”

You know that show, “How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying?”  Well last week I had the pleasure of hearing Bob Goff speak and his talk could have been entitled, “How to Succeed in Business BY Really Trying.”  His message was about moving beyond thinking about things and doing them.

Bob’s address was to college and graduate students as part of University of San Diego’s Thriving in Business series and arranged by Faith@Work.  Although it was intended to help those who are trying to figure out career and calling, I came away inspired by Bob’s message personally – and I wanted to pass along his exhortations because so much of what he shared applies to the business world at large.

Bob opened with the thought that we all have long lists of things we are “able to do;” but the list of what we are “made to do” is much shorter.  As aspiring professionals (or those, ahem, experiencing a midlife crisis), it makes sense to ask, “What are the things God made me to do?”

Likewise, for companies, it makes sense to examine what the company’s creators – the founders — made the company to do.  What purpose did they want the company to fulfill?  What did they design the organization to do well?  What were they hoping to create? A quick audit of some of the world’s most admired brands – Apple, Starbucks, Nike – illustrates this point well.  All of these companies are doing what their founders made them to do.

Bob went further to say, “When you love, you do.”  Passion compels action.  People, and companies, thrive when they pursue their passions.

Bob also talked about how we all don’t want to live a typical life – we want to be extraordinary.  We should all have “Be awesome!” as our mission, he declared.

But being awesome isn’t about broadcasting how awesome you are – it’s about actually doing awesome things.  We shouldn’t wear hoodies emblazoned with messages of how awesome we are, Bob explained – “be awesome” should instead be written on our undershirts so we can sneak a peek every once awhile and remind ourselves of our mission.  He calls this “being secretly incredible.” (see Bob’s article on this topic – believe me, it’s worth the click.)

This totally applies to business.  It’s well-known that chest-pounding ads, one-way conversations in social media, and self-serving PR are offensive to consumers – and yet, so many businesses still spend millions of dollars to do these things, strutting around flashing messages about their awesomeness.  Instead, companies should focus on being awesome.  The recognition and rewards are sure to follow.

Moreover, “be awesome” should be every companies’ internal rallying cry.  Don’t settle, don’t run a typical business, don’t try to be like everyone else – be different and celebrate that uniqueness.

My favorite quote of Bob’s talk was, “If a door is shut, go up and wiggle it a little – don’t assume it’s locked.”  Too often as people, and as businesses, we take “no” too easily.  We accept barriers (e.g., an established market leader, a well-known category norm, rejection from a prospect) instead of trying to breakthrough them.  A little experimentation and perseverance go a long way.

Above all, Bob’s main point was to do stuff – to not just think about doing stuff, but to take some risks, be committed, and get out there.  It’s good advice coming from someone who knows.

Bob’s day job is being a lawyer and he’s also a professor.  But his pursuit of doing stuff led him to start Restore International, a non-profit which was established “to address the atrocities and injustices committed against children.”

His latest efforts have been focused on Roderick, an 8 year old Ugandan boy who recently had his genitalia cut off by a local witch doctor and was left to die in a field. As a result of some extraordinary developments, Bob was able to successfully argue in Ugandan court for Roderick and he got the witch doctor imprisoned.  And now, thanks to the generosity of many folks, Roderick is in San Diego undergoing surgery to reverse the physical damage he’s suffered.

With this backdrop, Bob’s exhortations take on even more meaning and importance.  As people, what are we doing to pursue our passions?  As businesses, are we doing what we were made to do?  As communities, what barriers do we need to breakthrough in order to be awesome?

Culture is quite the hot topic in business these days.  The adage “Culture eats strategy for lunch” has been acknowledged for ages, but it seems the importance of culture is being emphasized now more than ever.

Perhaps it’s because people think questionable business ethics are to blame for the recent economic collapses around the world.  Or perhaps corporate belt-tightening has led to lean workforces which challenge leaders to figure out how to motivate and retain them.  Or perhaps business is experiencing a spiritual awakening of sorts as Baby Boomer leaders reach the age where meaning becomes more important than money and as Millennials join the workforce with expectations of responsibility and significance for themselves and their companies.

Whatever the reason, business leaders are now inundated with exhortations to focus on the culture of their organizations.  The New York Times bestsellers list is filled with books on the topic:  Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, and Start with Why – the latter written by Simon Sinek who explains, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

Pundits like Seth Godin, Jim Collins, and Rosabeth Moss Kanter has amassed huge followers with perspectives on culture – the latter recently writing, “In organizations that I call ‘supercorps’ — companies that are innovative, profitable, and responsible — widespread dialogue about the interpretation and application of values enhances accountability, collaboration, and initiative.”

With such emphasis on culture, people might conclude that it should be a company’s #1 priority – but they would be wrong.  Culture is not enough.

Please don’t misunderstand me.  I am a huge believer in the importance of purpose, values, principles, and beliefs to organizations.  A vital, vibrant culture unifies, aligns, focuses, motivates, and propels.  But it is not enough to produce a profitable business.  Culture must be linked to, and pursued with the same rigor and vigor as, the customer experience.

The contrast between Netflix and Zappos makes the point.  People have held both companies in high regard for their emphasis on culture.

Back a few years ago articles like “Other Companies Should Have To Read This Internal Netflix Presentation” and “Netflix Does It Right” outlined the company’s cultural practices — like not having a vacation policy (employees are encouraged to take the time they need) and offering employees high salaries instead of bonuses so they can decide how they want to spend the money.

The culture at Zappos has also been esteemed as evidenced by the piece in Booz Allen’s strategy+business publication, “At Zappos, Culture Pays.”   The popularity of the company’s approach has led to many keynote addresses and interviews by CEO Tony Hsieh, tours of their headquarters by executives from around the world, and subscription-based content available through the Zappos Insights website.

While both companies have remarkable cultures, though, they differ in the integration of their cultures and the customer experience.  The culture at Netflix seems a separate endeavor from customer experience, while at Zappos the two are closely and clearly linked.

Netflix’s “Reference Guide on Our Freedom & Responsibility Culture” reads like a human resources piece.  Its first page declares, “Culture is How a Firm Operates” and asks “What practices give Netflix the best chance of continuous success for many generations of technology and people?”

In outlining the company’s values, the document explains, “We Particularly Value in our Colleagues these Nine Behaviors and Skills…” including:

• Judgment – “You think strategically, and can articulate what you are, and are not, trying to do.”
• Communication – “You listen well, instead of reacting fast, so you can better understand.”
• Innovation – “You re-conceptualize issues to discover practical solutions to hard problems.”

At first blush, these are indeed admirable qualities to seek in employees and to embrace as company values.  But if you consider what it takes to make a successful business, they seem too internally-focused and almost academic – especially when compared to Zappos’ Family Core Values.

Zappos’ website explains the company has 10 core values “from which we develop our culture, our brand, and our business strategies.”

• Number one is “Deliver WOW Through Service.”    “To WOW,” the company states, “you must differentiate yourself, which means doing something a little unconventional and innovative…We are not an average company, our service is not average, and we don’t want our people to be average. We expect every employee to deliver WOW.”
• The link between Zappos’ culture and customer experience is also explained in its value “Create Fun And A Little Weirdness.”  “We want the company to have a unique and memorable personality…One of the side effects of encouraging weirdness is that it encourages people to think outside the box and be more innovative.”
• “Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication” is another value the company embraces internally and externally.  “We value strong relationships in all areas: with managers, direct reports, customers (internal and external), vendors, business partners, team members, and co-workers…It’s important to always act with integrity in your relationships, to be compassionate, friendly, loyal, and to make sure that you do the right thing and treat your relationships well.”

At Zappos the connection between culture and customer experience fuels the business.  It may be that Netflix also applies its values externally, but the connection isn’t obvious.  And that can make all the difference.

In fact, the absence of that explicit link may be part of what caused the company’s recent debacle.  I haven’t analyzed the situation closely enough to know this for sure, but I suspect if CEO Reed Hastings had applied the values listed above (i.e., clear articulation of intent, careful listening, practical solutions) to consumers and the customer experience — not only employees — the separation of the company’s streaming and rental businesses of Qwikster might have been executed and accepted differently.

It doesn’t make sense for a company to develop purpose or values to inspire and engage employees if those aren’t inextricably linked with how the company inspires and engages its customers.  Without the alignment and integration of culture and customer experience, at best you end up with employees who are well-meaning but don’t produce the right results.  At worst, you confuse employees as well as customers and cause both groups to question your integrity.

In a future post I’ll introduce tools and approaches that successful companies have used to prescribe optimal customer experiences, but for now let me end with some of the remarkable results Zappos has achieved by integrating culture and customer experience:

• sales growth from $0 to $1BB in less than 10 years
• a rich acquisition by Amazon
• hundreds of thousands of loyal customers who pay price premiums and promote the brand
• employees who express their commitment to the company with comments like, “In one word, Zappos Culture is AMAZING!…Zappos makes us WANT to come to work.  Every day is something different…I am proud to say that I work for this company and cannot wait to see what the future holds for us.”

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I’m guessing most of you don’t frequently have the opportunity to tell your CEO to go take a crap, but that’s essentially what I did last year – and ever since, we’ve had a fruitful and rewarding relationship.

This, of course, requires some explanation.  The background is that my partner (Shawn Parr of Bulldog Drummond) and I had been engaged to kick off a brand revitalization effort for a restaurant chain.  As is the case with many of my clients, the challenge was less about setting the right brand strategy and more about engaging all stakeholders to execute it with excellence in the customer experience.  We decided to start with a worksession for the executive leadership team – our goal was to help them take an honest assessment of their brand execution in the customer experience.

For most of the worksessions I lead, I assign pre-work for the participants.  Sometimes it’s reading briefing materials, other times it’s doing research on competitive brands or consumer trends.  The value is the participants come to the session more focused and primed for discussion.

For this worksession, the pre-work assignment was to do some restaurant visits. But there was a catch: we gave them specific instructions to follow — including visiting the same location at various times of the day/night (to help them assess the consistency of the customer experience), to taking a friend along and asking him/her to complete an assessment (to help them see things they might miss), and to going to the bathroom and sitting on the toilet (to get the full experience of using the facilities, not just looking at them).  We believed this last step – essentially telling the CEO (and the rest of the executive team) to take a crap — would be a real eye opener — and indeed it was!

The participants came to the worksession armed with stories and pictures (part of the assignment) revealing how poor the customer experience was.  The CEO reported learning so much from the exercise because her m.o. was usually to go through the drive-thru, rarely going inside the dining room and never going to the restroom, much less sitting on the toilet.

It was uncomfortable for the executive team to give their sobering reports from the restaurant visits, but their collective frustration served as the foundation for the rest of the worksession.  The exercise aligned them with a common understanding of the customer experience problems and united them with a commitment to develop solutions.

Since then, we’ve been on a journey of developing a brand strategy that’s more focused and executable, and engaging the rest of the organization with the vision and their roles in delivering the brand throughout the entire customer experience.  The company is well on its way to regaining brand equity and its key business indicators have been improving.

It’s been a terrific engagement — and it all started with a simple exercise:  go sit on the toilet.  It’s amazing how much the details of the customer experience get overlooked.  Other eye-opening assignments I’ve given include:

• For an e-retailer, order a product online and get it delivered to your home.  Most executives buy – or are given — their company’s products in the office and then take them home with them to try out. Many are surprised to see what their product and packaging looks like after getting shipped from the warehouse, taking a cross-country ride through the USPS, and getting dumped on a doorstep.
• For a restaurant brand, order the items with the lowest sales mix.  Most executives try the newest products on the menu and have their favorites they always order.  But sampling some of the least popular menu items gives a sense of what a product is like when the ingredients have been sitting around for awhile and the chef or crew don’t have the proficiency that comes from making and serving the product frequently.
• For a services company, make a complaint.  Corporate executives set and review service procedures and some might occasionally listen in on service calls, but there’s nothing like dialing up that 800 number themselves.  A CEO learns a lot from enduring the hold time (a 60-second wait time doesn’t sound that bad until you have to sit there listening to bad hold music), to trying to converse with a live representative (who may or may not have the skills, tools, authority, or inclination to fix the problem), to seeing how the complaint is (or isn’t) resolved.

There are plenty of other ways to illuminate a company’s opportunities to improve the customer experience – and some CEOs might not respond as graciously to explicit instructions on bathroom usage.  But I always try to work in a way to personally and deliberately engage in the customer experience the people responsible for making changes to it.

(This post is part of the Bathroom  Blogfest, a fun series of posts from a community of bloggers organized Christine B. Whittemore, chief simplifier of Simple Marketing Now. This is my first year participating in the series and I’m so excited to hear the different perspectives on this important aspect of customer experience.  Below is the list of all the other posts – happy reading!)

Jason Fried, CEO of 37signals, knows a thing or two about small business.  His company has been developing apps for small businesses for seven years.  But it’s how he runs his own company that reveals his keen insight for how to be a successful small business.

I had the pleasure of hearing Jason talk as part of a Chicago Ideas Week lab (I was in the Second City for a speaking engagement and wanted to participate in what was billed as an “ecosystem of innovation, exploration, and intellectual recreation.”)  For nearly two hours, Jason generously took questions from our group of 30, riffing on topics ranging from his book REWORK to his personal background to Chicago’s tech scene.

What stood out the most to me were his thoughtful and enlightened perspectives on running a small business.  So with many thanks to Jason, here’s his list of advice for entrepreneurs:

1. Grow as slowly as you can – It seems counterintuitive that slowing down actually fuels growth, but Jason explained that growing slowly allows you to make sure you have the right people.  “When you expand quickly, it’s very difficult to maintain culture.  That’s the problem with a lot of start-ups that are VC-backed and have a lot of funding:  the money is used to hire people.  And if you hire too quickly and you’re not careful about who you hire, you end up in a situation where people aren’t acclimated because there’s too many people too fast.”

Moreover, growing slowly allows you to personally foster your culture.  Jason explained, “You’re going to have influence on each person you hire. And let’s say you hire 10 people a month, you’re only going to have 10% influence on each individual person.  If you only hire one or two people a month, you can spend a lot of time with those people and get them to understand what you’re trying to do and then they in turn can spread the culture. But if everyone’s only getting a tiny bit of culture, they can’t spread that – they have to hang on to that, there’s not enough to go around.  So that’s one of the advantages of hiring slowly.”

2. Hire carefully – A corollary to the first principle is to hire slowly.  Be selective; hire for culture fit as much as for skills and experience; and evaluate real work during the selection process.

“We don’t look at resumes,” Jason explained.  “I don’t really care what someone says they did somewhere else because it’s very hard to verify that stuff.  We give people actual work to do for us and we pay them for it.  For example, when we’re hiring a designer, we’ll give them a project to do, it takes them one week, we give them $1500, and we say, ‘Here’s a problem, how would you solve it?’  If it’s a programmer, we usually look at their open source contributions.  For customer service people, we have them write sample responses.”  That way, you get to evaluate what they actually can do vs. what they say they can.

3. Drive culture by example – Further on culture…I’ve previously written that culture is one of a business leader’s most important responsibilities.  Jason talked about his approach: “You need to lead by example. Culture isn’t something that you create through words.  It’s all about actions, about consistent actions.  It doesn’t really matter what you say the culture is — it’s about how you live, how you work together, how you treat people.”

4. Motivate people with the work – Different people are motivated by different things – for some, it’s the money; for others, it’s the variety of projects; for others, it’s the ability to impact something substantially.    As Jason explained,   “You just have to try to get to know everybody and then put them on the types of things that motivate them.”  But he added, “At the end of the day, you have to motivate people by giving them interesting things to do and work on products they believe in.”

5. Have a point of view – When asked about how he’s developed and promoted 37Signals’ uniqueness, Jason answered, “I don’t think enough companies have a point a view that’s obvious.  Mostly because they’re afraid or they let lawyers determine what the company is, how they speak, what they do, how they act — that’s going to dilute any sort of edge.”

“So for us [our POV] is:  let’s be honest about who we are, what we believe in, and let’s share those opinions and be open about it — because it’s going to turn off certain people and turn on others, and the ones it turns on are going to be really loyal, they’re going to be the ones behind you, who will fight for you. And the ones you turn off, you don’t want anyway because they’re not the kind of people you want to do business with.  By being clear about what you believe in, you’re going to attract the right kind of employee, the right kind of customer, the right kind of media coverage, a bunch of things that are going to work really well for you.”

6. Don’t think about marketing – Jason got the Lab attendees’ attention early on when he stated not to waste money on PR.  Later he went even further when he discouraged people from developing elaborate marketing plans.

To explain, he offered the following insight:  “We don’t ever really think of marketing as a department or as an idea.  Marketing is everything that you do.  It’s how you speak to your customers, how quickly you get back to your customers, it’s the quality of your product, it’s the word on the button, it’s the thank you email, it’s the cancellation email, it’s the refund policy, all that stuff is marketing.  Just do the right thing and make good things.”

7. Solve real problems – “Simple tools that people use” is how Jason described 37Signals’ product strategy.  But usefulness isn’t just an attribute of its products – it’s one of the core values of the company.

Jason recommended entrepreneurs focus on “solving a real problem, not an imaginary problem.”   “Everything is a problem,” he explained, but you should ask yourself, “Is it a real problem that people are going to pay for, that advertisers are going to want to deal with?  Is this thing worth paying for or am I just making something cool (which is OK if you know that’s what you’re dealing with.)”  Ultimately, usefulness is the litmus test for whether you have a business, or just a hobby.

8. Be a good editor — A stumbling block for many tech start-ups, Jason believes, is wasting time on things that don’t really matter.

“You’ve got to know what not to waste time on.  Raising money is a good example.  A lot of entrepreneurs spend a lot of time raising money when they don’t really need to. [There are a lot of things] people put a lot of energy and time into when they should be focused purely on their product – making it really damn good and working with really great people, caring about the people you work with and the people you want to hire, the people you want to surround yourself with.  You’ve just got to figure out what’s really important…You can spend a lot of time on stuff that’s cool to have but not central to have and then you miss the essential stuff but the cool stuff doesn’t matter.  It’s a matter of being a really good editor.”

9. Put yourself on the line – If you have the opportunity to actually build a product vs. only provide services, do it, recommends Jason.  He explained that people who only give advice to other people don’t ever have responsibility for what actually gets done.  (Yes, I realize he’s talking about people like me!)  By actually making a product, he says, “You get to see whether your ideas are any good.”  Putting yourself out there is risky, but it’s the only way to know the truth.

10. Think principles, not plans – This list of principles ends with a principle about principles because that’s how Jason responded when he was asked about what the future holds for 37Signals.  He referenced a quote about the problem with goals which says that goals are limiting because they’re made for the person you are when you set them, not the person you’re going to be.  He also realizes he wants to be able to consider new ideas as they arise – he doesn’t want them to be stuck on an inflexible path.  So, he explained, he doesn’t spend too much time thinking about the future because having guiding principles is more useful than specific plans.

Although this advice speaks to leaders of small businesses, it’s clear Jason and his colleagues don’t intend for 37 Signals to stay small forever.  Growing the company’s business, as well as its influence on the industry and people’s lives in general, is very much their ambition.  Based on what Jason shared, I have every confidence – and even more hope – they will succeed.

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(The following is the first in a two-part blog-exchange on brand decision-making.  It is written by Joel Rubinson, the President and Founder of Rubinson Partners, Inc., a marketing and research consultancy, and former Chief Research Officer at The ARF.  Having met Joel years ago, I find he always inspires and challenges me with his insights and provocative thinking — this post is no exception.  My perspective on facts vs. guts will appear on his blog next week — stay tuned.)

What color is your brand decision-making?

Edward de Bono is a leader in creative thinking processes who authored a book on the Six Thinking Hats.  Two of the hats are:
• Information: (White) – considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?
• Emotions (Red) – instinctive gut reaction or statements of emotional feeling

I find that organizations tend to be made up of people who are either white hat or red hat and they often do not work well with each other. Consumer insights and sensory researchers are generally white hat while the brand and customer marketing teams and designers are red hat (“my instincts got me here”). Media researchers are often analytics-driven white hat folks while creatives and agency planners are usually red hat. Brand and innovation teams often prefer to create an innovation initiative based on their instincts or consultants they work with who are rooted in careful ethnographic study of 12 people delaying the dreaded moment of the researcher conducting the concept or ad copy test.  Not a good dynamic.

Well, I’d like to propose a different model.

Consider that 80% of new products fail, 50% of ad campaigns never show sales lift, yet researchers test things at the 90% confidence level.  I mean, huh??  Obviously marketing is game of hunches but if we can ground those hunches in facts, we’re onto something.

We need to use the past but not be shackled by it.  The media world which managers rely on to bring their brand communications to consumers is evolving way too fast.  If you wait for hard evidence on something like leveraging advertising possibilities in smart mobility you will be last in.  You need some creative leaps.

So the model I propose is that we think in terms of belief repositories that are fueled by hard evidence but that these beliefs can lead marketing teams to make investments where no experiment or marketing mix model has yet been run.  Very Bayesian and actually, I believe this is how marketing teams need to think anyway.  If the insights team is going to have an impact they need to embrace this model.  Prove a new belief or disprove an old one but let marketers still act on their instincts based on these beliefs.

Here’s an example of how this works.  Many believe that Facebook is a place where a marketer can build engagement for their brand because what can be more enduring than getting someone to friend your brand on Facebook?  BFF, right?  Well actually, I have gotten some ahas by showing marketers that digital engagement marketing is really about getting people to spend time with your brand and then showing that this does NOT occur in Facebook.  For brands I looked at, mostly, less that 1% of fans revisit the brand page in a given month, meaning that mostly, brand friending gives the marketer a broadcast channel for updates.  On the other hand, people spend lots of time when they visit your website (usually in the 3-10 minute range per visit).  A case I looked at is Starbucks.  From the data I’ve seen, Starbucks has more than 10 times the fans on Facebook as it has visitors to its website, yet those website visits generate 10 times the number of minutes that people spend with the brand.  A new belief about building brand engagement is born in this way, rooted in evidence.

Marketing decision making is about taking actions whose consequences live in the unknowable future. The belief repository system calls for hard evidence (e.g. study the data on time with brand) that changes the beliefs (e.g. owned media is where I build customer engagement) and then you make marketing decisions from there.

Last week one of my clients kicked off the journey to operationalize its brand with a fantastic Leadership Meeting! I thought I’d share what the meeting entailed in an effort to pull back the curtain on how I help companies operationalize their brands to grow their businesses.

Let me set the stage a bit. I’ll call the company “M” to honor our confidentiality agreement.

Earlier this year, M, a $350MM B2B company and a pioneer in its industry, introduced a new brand platform. Another firm had taken M through the standard brand research and strategy process to develop the new platform and had developed a new visual identity to express it. But then the creative firm’s engagement ended and M was left with a new brand identity, but very little else to substantiate the new platform.

The CEO, Executive Leadership Team, and the head of marketing wanted so much more. They knew they needed to integrate their new brand into the company’s culture and customer experience, in order to realize the brand’s full potential and to achieve their corporate vision and mission. And that’s what led them to me.

We’re in the midst of planning a comprehensive, multi-year plan to operationalize M’s brand. Our first step was to get the top leaders of the organization aligned and engaged with the new platform. So we turned their annual Leadership Meeting, a gathering of the company’s top 250 leaders, into an immersive brand experience.

Here’s how the day unfolded:

- CEO Kick-off – The CEO started the day with a review of the company’s financial performance and an update on the corporate strategy — and then he re-introduced the new brand platform. Although many of the attendees had participated in the conference where it was first launched earlier in the year, very little had been done with it since then, so we needed to refresh everyone on the content. Plus, we had simplified the platform and integrated it with the company’s core values in order to make it clearer and give it more traction.

(That last point is significant — I’ve found that most brand platforms require some refinement after their initial launch. As more people get exposed to the new brand and as the organization begins to work through its implications, the need for some fine-tuning usually arises.

That’s why I usually advise my clients to first launch a new platform internally as a working strategy, and to solicit feedback from key stakeholders that can be incorporated and addressed before it’s finalized and fully launched externally. That way, from the beginning the emphasis is on the brand as a management strategy to focus, engage, and grow the organization vs. simply a marketing message to communicate externally.)

- Keynote – I delivered the keynote address which covered the why, what, and how of operationalizing their brand. Starting with my cheeky video, “What Can Brands Learn from Lady Gaga?,” through to a quiz replete with some friendly competition and prizes about how brands create value, followed by examples of brands ranging from Apple to Zappos to IBM and GE as well as an introduction to some proven tools and approaches, and ending with a challenge to consider what business M is really in – my goal was to get participants to think differently about the company, about the brand, and about their role in interpreting and reinforcing it.

- Interactive Exercise #1: Models of Success – We had assigned pre-work to everyone, instructing them to research one of 6 companies we wanted to learn best practices from. They were asked to note:

• In a word or phrase, what does the company want its brand to stand for?
• What are the company’s defining brand values (beliefs, ideals, principles) and attributes (descriptors, characteristics)?
• What does the company do to bring those values and attributes to life? Look for specific practices, policies, programs, etc.

In cross-functional small groups, the participants shared the insights they gleaned from their research and identified the ideas they thought might be applicable to M. As each group reported out the highlights of their discussion, it was clear participants had been inspired and challenged by these Models of Success.

- Interactive Exercise #2: How Are We Doing? — The goal of this session was to raise everyone’s awareness of the gaps in operationalizing the brand at M. The participants completed a brief survey on how the brand is currently used and perceived and then shared their opinions in cross-functional small groups.

When it came time to report out to the large group, we showed the combined results of everyone’s surveys and several small groups were selected to share the “why’s” behind their survey ratings. People learned where there was agreement on how the company was doing and where there were disparate opinions.

(The side benefits of this exercise are that we can compare the internal results to external surveys and also have a baseline for measuring our progress in the future.)

- Breakthrough Sessions – Participants spent the majority of the afternoon split into different rooms by SBU and we asked functional groups to work together to identify how they can align their work and culture with the brand.

They considered specific questions on how they could deliver on each aspect of the new brand platform and the resulting discussions were rich and rousing. We also challenged each group to commit to one thing they would start doing now to align with the brand and one thing they would stop doing, since we wanted them to walk away from the day with tangible steps they would take right away.

After comparing notes within their SBU rooms, the entire group reconvened to hear some of their peers’ “start” and “stop” commitments. The heads of each SBU talked about what their groups had learned and shared — it was clear they had been impressed by both the quantity and the quality of the opportunities that had been identified.

- Roadmap for Change – To wrap up the day, we presented the overall brand operationalization plan which includes undertaking several strategic initiatives, incorporating the brand into 2012 objective setting and performance planning, deploying a communications and engagement plan for the rest of the organization, and more.

The CEO shared the personal commitments he and the Executive Team members had made to align with the new platform and asked each participant to make one of their own. As the group made their way to cocktails, the lively discussions about the new M brand platform continued.

The results? Even though it’s only been a few days since the meeting, we’ve already gotten really positive feedback and several folks indicated this was the best Leadership Meeting they had been too. I was encouraged to see that everyone remained engaged throughout the 9-hour day and the quality of the small group discussions I monitored was excellent.

I’m working on a synthesis of the meeting to capture what we covered and the key outcomes. The working groups’ ideas and start/stop commitments, as well as the participants’ personal commitments, will be socialized through the company’s intranet and tracked via accountability mechanisms. And then, the real work begins!

As I told everyone in my keynote, this is the beginning of a long-term journey for M:

“The scale and scope of change needed isn’t going to happen in one day – but it all starts right here, right now with you.  You have the opportunity and the responsibility to lead and coach The M Way.

Thousands of men followed William Wallace faithfully into battle because he had the courage to lead them. Leaders are role models – people are watching you – your employees, your peers, and your bosses – and they’re all going to be looking to see whether or not you are going to get on board with the future of M.

By communicating your convictions you inspire people; by acting on them you demonstrate best practices; and by teaching others, you enable them to be successful.”

I can’t wait to see how the journey unfolds!

I just read Andy Stefanovich‘s book, Look at More Stuff:  A Proven Approach to Innovation, Growth, and Change, and had to share some of the best bits with you: