in each upcoming year. His 2014 focus words are:
Lifestyle — I’m using this to cover my fitness/health efforts, my financial health, my choices in how I spend my time. It’s a big one covering much more than the word usually covers.
Monchu — The network is everything. I’m committed to doing even more for the people I serve in 2014. This is a huge focus for me, my business, my speeches, my pursuits. Oh wait, maybe you don’t know what the word Monchu means. “Monchu” is an Okinawan word that means “one family” or sometimes “extended family” or sometimes “the family we choose.”
Black — As in “get in the black.” I don’t mean my finances (though I’ll be working on financial strengthening this coming year), but also my life choices, my ability to build the marketplace to achieve what I can help it accomplish. I mean to invest in my world and grow my capabilities. The general feeling when I say this word in my own head is “all is right with the world.” That’s the goal.
You can read more about Chris’s words strategy at http://touchthebook.com/3words.
Chris’s words centre on his personal growth.
Your organization could adopt the same approach and clarify your overall outcomes with three simple words. These act like mantras across your firm, focusing your teams on the human impact of your business. Should you decide to employ this idea, be sure you have a clear understanding of how you’ll measure growth toward these word themes.
For instance, if one word is listen, determine metrics for ensuring your organization is picking up the subtleties of conversation around and throughout your business, using social media monitoring tools, proactive surveying, informal employee town hall meetings, and conversations — formal and informal — wherever they may occur.
Dan Heath, coauthor of several books including Made to Stick, demonstrates the danger of creating mission statements by committee in the FastCompany video How to Write a Mission Statement That Doesn’t Suck.”[2] In it, Dan walks through an example of a great mission statement employees can understand and get behind becoming increasingly meaningless as a committee softens word choice and each participant makes sure his or her own purpose is cemented into the corporate mission.
Former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki laments the amount of his life wasted in mission-setting meetings with dozens of senior leaders. He offers a compelling alternative: a mantra.
A mantra is three or four words long. Tops. Its purpose is to help employees truly understand why the organization exists.
If I were the CEO of Wendy’s, I would establish a corporate mantra of “healthy fast food.” End of story.
Some other examples of corporate mantras:
Federal Express: “Peace of mind”
Nike: “Authentic athletic performance”
Target: “Democratize design”
Mary Kay: “Enriching women’s lives”
Dan Pontefract, author of Flat Army: Creating a Connected and Engaged Organization and head of the Telus department overseeing cultural change in the organization, agrees. “When you are going through an organizational change, your organization needs a mantra and I think you as an individual need one.”
“At Telus, we adopted the mantra “Culture is our competitive advantage.”
It must be working. In the summer of 2007, employee engagement at Telus was 53 percent. Today, it is 83 percent.
Disclosure
But it’s not enough to decide on and communicate these additional KPIs and ultra-short mission statements. For progress toward your organization’s outcomes to be clearly understood by people in the trenches, you need to make sure evidence of progress is clear.
Vancouver digital marketing firm 6S Marketing uses computer screens in its office, displaying real-time metrics like sales targets and public social media mentions to team members. They use salesforce-based software called Hoopla, which “jazzes up” metrics as a kind of running game — including a top-sales-performer scoreboard, complete with virtual awards and a gong sound that plays when a sale is closed. (See touchthebook.com/hoopla for more information on how 6S uses this system.)
Of course, disclosure doesn’t need to have such a highly ratcheted-up cool factor. Something as simple as an internal magazine (physical or digital) that highlights progress toward metrics can suffice. Don’t limit this information to your senior executives and shareholders; sharing it with your people will help increase morale and prove that progress is being made toward clear goals.
Uniqueness
Too many organizations rely on the same customer service responses, the same benefits programs, and the same procedures. There’s nothing wrong with studying and using best practices in your business. Still, to become a more human organization you need to stand above the crowd in all aspects of your business.
In their 1990 book Creating the Service Culture: Strategies for Canadian Business, authors Stanley A. Brown, Marvin B. Martenfeld, and Allan Gould suggest that, at some point, all business offerings will become essentially homogeneous. When that happens, they hypothesize success will be defined less by a product or service itself and more by the experience of the buyer and end-user. Product similarities are the subject of many a patent lawsuit these days. Like in Hollywood, where a studio’s gamble on a penguin movie spawns an entire genre of penguin movies, tech titans and start-ups that launch innovative products spawn entire categories — blue oceans which quickly become bloody red waters of competition.
When innovation winds down, revenues dry up.
Perhaps this explains the emergence of companies with a mission to collect patents and protect them through lawsuits.
Product innovation takes a lot of capital investment. It takes research, development, user interface considerations, quality assurance testing, creative marketing efforts, and is subject to safety standards and other regulatory restrictions. It’s a complex process. And, because these stages have been widely accepted for many years, they’re largely relied upon as the proven process.
The original Star Wars movie was acclaimed for its groundbreaking special effects. But it wasn’t a blockbuster hit because director George Lucas invested heavily in developing new special effects technology to tell his story. As Danny Brown, coauthor of Influence Marketing, pointed out in his TEDxOttawa talk,[3] Star Wars was the highest-grossing film for six years because it was a human-relatable story of overcoming the odds set in gritty conditions, “a long time ago in a galaxy far away,” and was released at a time when the sci-fi genre was about the pristine technology of the future. The prequel, released twenty-two years later, was a marvel of special effects technology with an extremely weak story by comparison; all tech, no TOUCH.
Being human should be natural to all of us. After all, we are human. However, we’re often conditioned to suppress our emotions and present a brave, optimistic, and successful face. We’re often taught failure is not an option. For some reason, apologies have become synonymous with admitting negligence (apologies are covered in more detail in the chapter about leadership).
Dealing with suffering is neither unique nor unusual. The death of a parent is unavoidable. However, we
