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?

Neatly filed under Foundations,Making Promises
Tags: motivation, Pret, values

Some marketing messages just hit you between the eyes.

I was in Philidelphia’s Reading Terminal Market to discover the delights of the famous philly cheesesteak and the sign in the picture had me straight away.

“Pizza & Cheesesteaks” is the simplest kind of marketing message, relying on the idea that if you want a pizza or a cheesesteak, and you want it now, you should stop wasting your time and buy it here. It’s a straight forward tactic that worked well for the cheesesteak that day and for commodity products any day.

But what if your product is a bit more complicated than fast and cheesy food?

Leading a team that wants to skip to market with a reputation for great products means weaving four simple ideas into every part of your go-to-market thinking. The first two often get lost under the heading of marketing — remember the old saying though, marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department — the second two are pure product development, but all four are built from the ground up.

Simple Description

What is in the box? The idea here is to give your customers a simple way to describe what you have to offer, whether it’s cheesesteak, a micro-blogging platform or a jet engine.

If you’re struggling to work out what you’re selling, listen in to what your existing customers already call it. Don’t worry about trying to differentiate here — the in-the-box question isn’t supposed to turn up a unique answer, but a framing one.

Simple Value

Why would I buy it? If I’m in the market for what you sell AND you come up with a great reason to buy, you have a least half a chance of turning me into a customer.

So what’s the value, what will it do for me? Will you fill that huge sandwich shaped hole in my stomach, connect me to the world in less than a minute, haul an aeroplane full of paying passengers/cargo into the sky at the lowest cost per unit?

Of course, the best marketing messages are stuffed full of differentiated offers and compelling thoughts. Marketing communications people spend their day doing this but they sometimes lose sight of the true value. However persuasive the copy, and however sophisticated the message you have to get across, make sure you don’t obscure the simple description and simple value of what you have to offer.

The point of marketing is to ease a customer’s path to your door — good marketing means I’m more likely to try, and even persist with a product for a while — but the success of the product comes when I incorporate it into my daily life and tell my friends about it. And that means it better be simple to use too.

Simple to Use

Don’t make me work (too hard). Marketing may provide customers but the product lives or dies in the hands of the customer.

Any product that’s difficult to use risks a future covered in dust and destroys almost all chance of positive word-of-mouth. Products should be as intuitive as possible but the creators are usually the worst judges — so get out of the building, talk to customers, test, test, test, and then act on the results.

Simple to Extract the Value

Help me be successful. Ultimately, you have to deliver the value you promise. You’re not selling widgets, you’re selling what the widgets can do for the customer.

Send your customers on an unsupported voyage of discovery and they might get to the promised land but more likely they’ll bob around on rough seas. Build a support network around your customers that helps them get exactly the result they wanted when they dipped into their wallet.

The Ultimate Benefit

Of the four simple things, the ultimate benefit is the value that customers extract. Great products, reputations, and word-of-mouth are all built when customers do things more quickly, more easily, more cheaply, or just better than before.

The ultimate benefit means success for the customer and success for you.

The success of my cheesesteak? My stomach complained but my face was smiling.

Neatly filed under Leading,Making Promises,Skippiness
Tags: customers, marketing

I’ve been lucky to spend the last few years working with people who want to find a better way of building products and companies they can be proud of.

It’s been quite a school yard with hundreds of meetings, workshops, lunches and late night debates.

This manifesto is the result. You can DOWNLOAD IT HERE as a Free PDF.

I’ve tried to sum up how you can use clarity and cohesion to build teams, companies, products and services, and how to get everybody working together for a common cause.

It’s for anyone with the ambition to skip to market. That is, it’s for leaders and managers in start-ups, established companies, charities, not-for-profits and anyone else interested in bringing out the talent, energy and enthusiasm of their people so that together they can do something extraordinary.

A few things you’ll get out of reading it:

• Why customers love some products and some companies
• Where companies go wrong and what to do about it
• A common cause of success or failure of a company
• What organisations actually look like
• The wavelengths-of-change that affect how companies evolve
• A framework for working beneath the surface of your business

Whether you like it and find it helpful or hate it with a passion, please let me know. You can add comments below, send me an email, Tweet me @sn1ck or just put a message in a bottle and hope for the best.

If you do find it useful though, please spread the word in every way you can think of.

DOWNLOAD THE MANIFESTO HERE and don’t forget to skip.

Neatly filed under Skippiness
Tags: clarity, cohesion

If you want the time to do good stuff, stop doing stuff you’ll never do well.

Partly attitude and partly system, here’s a plan for doing good stuff:

Push back

Don’t just say Yes every time something crosses your mind, your desk or your In-box. Giving yourself an easy time when accepting requests (especially from yourself) guarantees a hard and frustrating time under a big ticking clock as you try to deliver.

Avoid arm length to-do lists, missed deadlines and low quality by being honest about schedules, commitments and priorities.

Prioritise your list

I remember an executive saying, seemingly without irony, he had seven number one priorities, (no surprise at the end of the year then). Rank everything that you put on your list.

If you’re working for others or in a team, prioritising is team-work. This is important for skippiness!

Finish what you start

This can mean getting to the finish line (yay!) but sometimes it means stopping what you started before the end because you (and your team) realise it’s a waste of time or it’s just not coming together.

It’s often a close call; there’s a fine line between pushing through adversity and bloody mindedness. Seth Godin wrote a whole (little) book, The Dip, on deciding if or when to quit. There’s a Change This version here.

What about you?

How do you make sure you’re working on the good stuff? How do you push back and help out at the same time?

Neatly filed under Managing
Tags: doing, planning

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?

Neatly filed under Foundations
Tags: icons, NASA