A while back I talked about using icons to teach what you stand for. How about just saying it out loud to everyone who’ll listen?

Say it Loud, Say it Proud

That’s what sandwich makers Pret a Manger do. In the very small seating area of their Piccadilly store where I took this picture the other day, every wall had at least one board like these, each telling the story of Pret’s passion for food. You probably can’t read the words under the pictures so here’s the text from the top left board:

Pot Pourri — Made from delicate muslin material, our tea bags are fashioned into little purse-like pyramids, filled with organic whole leaves, hand picked in the Tea Gardens of Sri Lanka.

Ask a Pret team member to show you one — we think the Calming Camomile is particularly beautiful. A lucky coincidence really — what they’re designed to do (and do extremely well) is make a cracking cup of tea.

And it’s labelled Passion Fact No.72. The other two boards in the picture are about in-store baking and looking after basil leaves. I saw more, and I know they’ve been at it for years.

The message? Pret stands for quality, freshness, and care.

Commitment + Transparency = Accountability

Here’s the question … are all those little pictures aimed at the consumer, the staff or the management?

Visible commitments like these play well with customers who like to know what they’re getting, but transparency is even more powerful for the staff and management. With such a public commitment to quality, can anyone inside the company — whether a sandwich maker, food buyer or senior executive — be in any doubt about what’s expected of them every day? About choosing quality over price? About decisions over storage, or packaging, or recruitment or any other operational detail?

This isn’t about top down management. It’s about accountability.

Public declarations make everyone responsible, not only for living up to the commitment itself but to call out inappropriate behaviours too. Seeing this on the wall, what team member wouldn’t argue against reducing quality to save a penny a tea bag?

We don’t all deal in freshness or food, but we can all make our intentions clear, and ask everyone around to help us live up to them.

What boards would you hang on the wall? What else can you do to make your commitments transparent and to hold each other accountable for living up to them?

Every organisation has a story

Every organisation has a story. Why it was started, who were the founders, the first product, key characters and occasions along the way, adversities overcome, game changing meetings. Every day adds a few more paragraphs. But when you’re involved in the tale, it’s easy to get buried in day-to-day detail and lose the thread.

Highlighting and celebrating iconic stories that stand for your spirit brings everyone together and teaches them how to act — who hasn’t learned the importance of resourcefulness, determination and creativity through Edison’s famous story of 1,000s of failures on the way to incandescent success.

Some of the sharpest stories are wrapped around a tangible icon.

The worlds most famous waistcoat

For instance, the picture above is of the worlds most famous waistcoat, worn by Gene Kranz throughout the failed Apollo 13 Moon mission in 1970. The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, in Washington DC, displays it with this explanation:

Eugene F. “Gene” Kranz, Chief of NASA’s Flight Control Division, wore this suit vest during Apollo 13, the third planned lunar landing mission. While the spacecraft was going to the Moon, an explosion occurred in its service module. Mission Control aborted the Moon landing and worked with the ground support team of astronauts, technical experts, and aerospace contractors to solve several key problems and to bring the crew back safely.

As the leader of Mission Control’s “white team,” Kranz wore a different white suit vest for each mission from Gemini 9 in 1966 through Apollo 17 in 1972. He wore plain vests, like this one, during the missions; he reserved fancier versions for celebrating mission completions. All were hand sewn by his wife.

Although Kranz’s trademark vests were well known at the time, his portrayal by actor Ed Harris in the blockbuster 1995 film Apollo 13 made this particular vest iconic.

As was the custom in Mission Control, “white” was retired from flight team colors after Kranz’s retirement.

Gift of Eugene F. Kranz Family

My favourite scene in Ron Howard’s movie is a meeting called to work out how to keep Apollo 13′s crew alive and return them safely to earth. Kranz lays out the problem with a picture and asks the room for ideas. Everyone starts talking at once, opinions are flying, each person shouting over the other.

Kranz stands in the middle of all this chaos wearing his pure white waistcoat like a beacon of order, discipline and possibility. He keeps bringing the team back to the problem, pushing for answers, being decisive and demanding in turn. This “failure is not an option” scene happened for real and is a model of teamwork and leadership under pressure.

Icons are shorthand

Everything I know about the spirit of NASA is symbolised by that white waistcoat. Hearing the story, even the rawest of recruits can’t fail to learn the keys to success: high motivation, discipline, goal orientation, whatever-it-takes attitude, trust in the team, collaboration, demanding leadership.

Whilst not every team is playing for the same stakes as Apollo 13′s Mission Control, and few leaders are blessed with Kranz’s feeling for symbols or occasion, with a little bit of thought every company can find its icons.

What are yours?

You can hang them in reception, name company awards after them, tell the stories at all-hands events, use them to induct new staff.

An old waistcoat may not be the most common example, but stories wrapped around iconic visual aids are the quickest and most effective way of getting everybody pointed in the same direction and acting together.

What about you?

What icons does, or could, your company use? What have you seen other companies using?

Or, is this wrong headed, pandering to yesterday when it’s only today that matters?

A little bit lost in Maryland this summer, my family and I came across Glen Echo Park, a once popular destination that’s seen hard times and is on the way back through the involvement of a dedicated not-for-profit tribe of volunteers.

Most of our visit was spent at the carousel where I was smitten with Smarty Jones. Mmmh, mmh that’s a handsome looking horse – if I’d have been riding I’d have taken Smarty for a trot for sure.

But for the whole time we were at the park, not one child rode Smarty.

What’s wrong?

Why don’t some customers buy your product? If it’s anything like Smarty, it’s great: accessible, goes up and down, has all the features, stands out in a crowd, it’s super-shiny for goodness sakes.

So why does the turkey get a ride whilst good ol’ Smarty puts on a brave face?

It’s the kind of question I get asked all the time. “We have a great product, but there something wrong. What is it?”

Whilst every product has it’s own story, the tale is put together the same way every time — and anyone can do it.

Ask your customers

Act like a consultant and ask your customers. You’ll learn more from what goes wrong than what goes right so make sure to ask non-customers who’ve made an active choice not to buy, and actual-customers who’ve bought but have stopped using. Get out of the building and ask the people who know. Visit, lunch, interview, test, survey — whatever it takes to get the information you need.

Speak to enough customers to see patterns; some will point to lack of priority or urgency, others may point to weaknesses in your product or your proposition. Assume nothing, test everything. When you’re pretty sure you know what’s going on, it’s time to act on what you’ve found.

What are you going to do about it?

There are three layers where you might need to fix things inside the building:

• Message problems are easiest and cheapest to solve. Get together with your sales and marketing team and change your presentations, messaging, communications. Use A/B testing to see what changes work best — especially if you’re web based and have a lot of passing trade.
• Go-to-market problems are more strategic and will probably force a new look at your market, features, distribution, pricing and positioning choices. Everything in this layer is connected so be suspicious of anything that looks like a silver bullet.
• A weak or ill defined core proposition means a fundamental rethink and the discomfort of living with your current product whilst working back through first principles.

After two interviews (my own children, 40% of the carousel kids that day) it was pretty easy to work out Smarty’s problem. Too much competition and a very small market. Strategic problems with no answer in sight means old Jones could be racing to retirement.

What about you? Can you change priorities and raise urgency or do you have to go a little deeper?

Image copyright: David Smith

Bringing a new product to market is an act of will. Just getting to the start line takes a heap of effort, sacrifice, and dedication to the cause. Maybe it should be an Olympic sport. An endurance challenge that requires entrants to master three disciplines:

1. Get the product ready for the market

2. Get the company ready for the product

3. Get the market ready for the product

Less new product development, more new product triathlon.

This site isn’t concerned with number three (that’s more the domain of the marketing communications industry and specialists in launch codes) so let’s look at the first two.

1. Get the product ready for the market.

This is most often filed under new product development, strategic marketing, or sometimes business development. Whatever the job title, sorting out market and product is a pretty good use of time – most of which is spent answering questions and making choices.

Some market questions
What market is the product for?
What problems do they have?
How big is that market?
What do they need our product or service to do for them?
How much pain are they in at the moment?
What would their life be like with our product?
How much is that worth to them?
What are their alternatives?

Which all helps when thinking about product questions
What is our proposition?
What features are in, and which are out?
What services must be part of the package?
What else do they need to get the value out of this product?
Who can help?
What colour should it be?
What about the name, the design, the price, the launch?
What about the price?
Did I mention the price?

Whether you’re a product or service business, questions like these fall into the “what’s in the box and who is it for” category and they form the foundation to the day-to-day work that follows, including actually building the product itself. With good reason too, a miss here can damage the product, restrict the market, or push your new baby to early retirement.

Now build the thing
If it’s a version change, a new edition, or any other kind of thing that’s almost exactly like all the other things you sell then it’s possible that this is enough. Just drop the new product into one of the product shaped holes that are normal for your company and, after a short recovery, you’re ready for the next event.

But, and just for emphasis, it’s a big BUT, some products are game changers. Not just in the market (which is nice), but in the company too (which you should expect and plan for), which brings us to the second discipline of the new product triathlon.

2. Get the company ready for the product

If you’re entering a new market, have a completely new new product, or have been missing a few targets recently, it’s worth looking at stage two. Questions here tend to range from significant to fundamental and some of them are likely to throw “the way we do things around here” into the air.

Some questions about what we do around here
Does this fit with our existing business model?
How can each department contribute to the success of this product?
Do we have the manpower to fully support this thing?
Do we have the expertise?

Some questions about how we do things around here
How does this change the way we sell and how we incentivise our sales team?
Where is the best place, or most convenient place for them to buy this stuff?
Is our “usual” channel the right channel?
Can our internal support functions cope?
How does this impact the rest of our business?
Can we deal with the demand that we’re expecting?
Where can we find the right kind of staff to pull this thing off?

Dealing with the answers helps to make the back end bomb proof and can be the difference between skippiness and misery for customers, shareholders and staff.

How to get ready for market

Getting ready to market a product means making sure you have a product the market wants and the company to deliver it. Put the time in, deal with reality and then put all your effort and creativity into stage three, get the market ready for the product.

In Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki suggests:

A remarkable name for your organisation, product, or service is like pornography: It’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Coming up with a good name is easier than creating a product or service, but you wouldn’t think so based on the atrocities out there.

So the challenge is set.

Looking for a name myself, I came across the fantastic wikipaedia – list of company name etymologies – that walks through 440 (on the day I looked) company name stories.

Here’s how they break down (allowing that some names made it into more than one category):

• 149 – based on founder names (like Adidas)
• 142 – portmanteau words or initials (like Amoco)
• 76 – based on location (like 3M)
• 62 – clever names (like 3Com)
• 31 – quirky names (like Blaupunkt)
• 27 – language based names (like Akamai)

Three caveats: the source is wiki-selected, so not cleverly chosen to be representative of all names; my categorisation isn’t scientific (or probably repeatable, even by me); there’s no suggestion that these names are particularly good, although most are extremely well known.

However, three things strike me about the results:

1. With all the creativity that founders show to get their new business out of the traps, fully one third have fallen back on the names they were given by their parents. Does this mean that naming is unimportant or difficult? That founders are vain? That the search for clever is overwhelmed by the need for a working title?
2. Location – Pacific this, Brazilian that, Stanford the other. Is this a cheap form of marketing (we’re from the same place as you) or again, is it expediency?
3. 34% come from letters a-e.

I find it comforting to know that others find naming difficult, and liberating that some of the most well known companies have changed their name along the way, some more than once.

Names are important, no more than that. A great name is inspiring, but finding one shouldn’t get in the way of building a great company. I’ve spent too many hours fretting in meeting rooms, coffee shops, offices, (and bed) often to the detriment of Getting Things Done. Not smart.

The alternative might be to get someone else to do it. A little outside perspective is always useful but take care with companies offering naming at a fee. Salon covered this a few years ago (which you can find here) – sadly they’ve deleted the main copy, this link leads to the for-printer version.

This isn’t intended as a second instalment in a series on the history of computing, any more than Don’t Waiver was yesterday, but as an introduction to running a business based on beliefs. How did Watson pull off $5 billion gambles? Page 5 of his 1963 book, from which this post takes its title, gives a clue:

I firmly believe that any organization, in order to survive and achieve success, must have a sound set of beliefs on which it premises all its policies and actions.

Next, I believe that the most important single factor in corporate success is faithful adherence to those beliefs.

And finally, I believe that if any organization is to meet the challenges of a changing world, it must be prepared to change everything about itself except those beliefs as it moves through corporate life.

In other words, the basic philosophy, spirit, and drive of an organization have far more to do with its relative achievements than do technological or economic resources, organizational structure, innovation, and timing. All these things weigh heavily in success. But they are, I think, transcended by how strongly the people in the organization believe in its basic precepts and how faithfully they carry them out.

Watson’s sound set of beliefs formed the deepest of IBMs layers, providing the foundation for everything that happened at IBM under his watch.

I just searched Amazon for “business books” and found 156,947 results. One of them is Watsons, (which you can find here) – recommended reading for anyone in the pursuit of skippiness.
Photo credit – US Department of State, via Wikipaedia.

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning”

he wasn’t talking about naming a new power generating company. But he could have been.

Naming a product of company isn’t something most (any?) of us do every day, so in some ways it helpful to know that even Twain struggled to come up with the right word. That knowledge may be power but it doesn’t make naming any easier.

People who do naming for a living find this stuff difficult too, and in reality they’re not much better at it than you or me. They may be good at checking for meaning in 72 different languages but these are the same guys who came up with Consignia (definitely worth a trip to this BBC report – Nine letters that spelled fiasco, don’t worry, I’ll wait), and Transco (for gas, now replaced by the National Grid).

Is it worth the effort anyway? After all, it’s extremely unlikely that the only thing someone knows about your business is the name. They’ll probably know a little about what you do, they’ll associate you with your category, where and how they came across you, maybe a tag line or a recommendation or two. With all that wrapped around someone’s brain, how important is the name anyway? Extremely. Seth Godin recently suggested naming everything, and came up with baxter as his own contribution.

Your name is the anchor point for all those firing neurones. A good name will stick, will stand for something and will make all of your other marketing efforts just a little bit easier. A slow factor that controls the quick.

The English language is rich – the name is out there. So how do you come up with the right word? There is no guaranteed method but here are some guidelines, so you know the right name when you see it.

So, accepting that this is going to be tough, what are the guidelines?

• Short – if you use more than three syllables everyone, including you, will shorten in anyway. International Business Machines is IBM to all of us, British Telecommunications PLC is know as British Telecom is known as BT.
• Early in the alphabet – you never know, maybe all you other marketing efforts have left a potential customer above the water line and she’s looking in a directory. Push your name above the fold with an A-to-G name. BTW – nobody likes AAAA Anything.
• Spell-able – a friend told me about flikr long before I saw the word in print, to find the site I had to ask for a link. Numbers are difficult, do you spell onetwothree or 123?
• Simple – by which I mean don’t try to be clever, try to avoid having to start sentences with “It comes from the greek for …”
• Obvious – names that capture what you do can be very strong but are difficult to pull off. Mule Bar (energy bars) is good.

Google is a great name that works on every level.

Missing the mark on any one dimension is ok, but compromise too many and your name will be weak or bland.

So what’s wrong with Bland? Tick, tick, tick, tick, ooops. Unless … maybe, just maybe, there’s an un-fashion company waiting in the wings. (I just checked, www.bland.com is a holding page – watch that space.)