no other trucking company had imagined. They decided to move beyond the competition, challenging embedded practices that historically had plagued the logistics industry, and in doing so became a trusted partner to their clients—capable of reducing costs, freeing up resources, and lowering carbon emissions in the process.1
Angela Ahrendts and her team at Burberry matter to the legacy of the 160-year-old brand they helped to resurrect by leaning into the digital disruption that threatened the viability of not just the Burberry brand, but retail as we know it. She and her team committed to reinventing the brand, the shopping experience, and the customer base in an ambitious and bold way. The result? Customers are back, investors are back, the brand is set up for the next 160 years—and retail has a new shining beacon for thriving in an omni-channel, digital world.
The work you, your team, and your company choose to do on a daily basis matters. It matters to the people you serve because of the problems you solve, and it matters for your own sense of pride, progress, and achievement. People want to buy from companies that matter. People want to work for companies that matter. People want our communities to be filled with organizations and people that matter.
This book is about building companies that matter—companies that create more value, that move beyond the competition, and as a result become the obvious choice in their markets. It’s also about teams that matter, and doing work that matters to you. The observations and lessons we have provided here work at any level for people who want to matter more through the work they do.
You will meet big companies, small companies, B2B companies, and B2C companies. You will even meet a spy agency along the way. And you will meet some exceptional individuals. We will dissect the journeys the individuals inside these organizations took as they sought to escape the morale-crushing cycle of commoditization to become the obvious choice for their customers, their most talented employees, and the investors and communities they serve.
This has been our obsession here at Karrikins Group (formerly ChangeLabs). We have spent more than fifteen years studying what it takes to matter, and working alongside companies striving to matter—to create more value, move beyond the competition, and as a result become the obvious choice. We have observed companies that succeeded, and also some that failed. We have learned from all of them, and we felt it was important to share those lessons. This book is the result of our realization that we needed to codify what it took to become the obvious choice. We wanted to map the journey of those who succeeded and offer it to you, here in these pages.
So we embarked on a research study, designed to uncover and document the practices of successful companies that have become the obvious choice—those that matter most in their industry. More than thirty companies, representing more than fifteen countries, hundreds of interviews, thousands of transcribed pages, years of analyses, and tens of thousands of words written to try to describe what we learned have led us to one strikingly simple, consistent, and powerful insight: To become the obvious choice, to be a company that matters, you need to consistently create outcomes that are valued more than those of your competitors and that are not easily replicated. As the definition of value evolves in the marketplace over time, you also must sustain your ability to perpetually create new and valued outcomes that are beyond what your competition is capable of doing. Period.
Sounds simple, right? But perpetually creating new and valued outcomes is clearly an accomplishment that only a select group of companies are able to achieve. How are some companies able to be the obvious choice in their markets year after year? We realized the “what,” “where,” and “how” questions about providing value were riddles worth solving. We pushed our analysis to answer these three questions, believing this would be the most useful to us and to your journey:
1. What does it take to create more value?
2. Where do you find the opportunities to create more value?
3. How do you build the capability to deliver more value, year after year?
These three questions formed the basis of our continued research. The answers form the premise of this book.
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO CREATE MORE VALUE?
Jeff Moore set out to transform the way Lakeside did business, moving from a highly commoditized, super-low-margin operation to the obvious choice for innovative consumer goods companies in Canada. He knew the only way to get there was to solve more complex problems and to create more valued outcomes than his competitors. Doing that meant solving the most important problems his clients have—high freight costs—in a way others in the market couldn’t easily replicate.
That is what we mean by value: If you don’t want to be commoditized and you want to become the obvious choice, you need to create solutions to the complex problems that are most important for your customer, those that few others are capable of solving. In theory, that’s pretty straightforward. In practice, definitely not.
In Jeff’s case, the only real way to do that was through using single-source logistics management models, challenging entrenched industry practice, and creating efficiency and optimization opportunities along the way. This is complex work. It takes vision, intellect, effective processes and systems, and commitment to do it at scale. If you have those things, the complexity is a good thing; it is where the opportunity to differentiate comes from. Defining and solving complex problems that have economically significant outcomes attached is very hard work. It is not easily replicated, but the scarcity of scalable solutions is why it is valued.
That is what we mean by value: If you don’t want to be commoditized and you want to become the obvious choice, you need to create solutions to the complex problems that are most important for your customer, those that few others are capable of solving.
Jeff’s willingness to commit to navigating this complexity is what has made his company, Lakeside, the obvious choice for his customers. You’re going to hear a lot more about how they did that in Chapter 4. For now, we shift our attention to understanding how to identify the most complex and important problems—those where we can find the opportunity to create more value for your customers’ lives (as well as for your employees, your communities, and others in your industry).
WHERE DO YOU FIND THE OPPORTUNITIES TO CREATE MORE VALUE?
When Angela Ahrendts took the reins as CEO of Burberry, the brand was in decline. The trench coat was no longer cool, their brand was associated with an older, less influential demographic, and their traditional strategy was being undermined by powerful online channels capable of selling the same products they sold in store, for some 25 percent less. In short, they were being disrupted.
Like most retailers, Burberry had been determined to hide from the disruption, hold on to legacy business models, and hope that the threat would pass. Not Angela. Under her leadership, Burberry would move toward the disruption and stand right at its edge, where the old brick-and-mortar world met the new digital world. Her vision was to build an omni-channel brand and business model capable of serving customers where they were, not where Burberry had historically wanted them to be.2
We would suggest that she walked right up to what we call the edge of disruption, and looked out toward a future where retail for Burberry was reimagined. What single-source freight models were to Lakeside, an omni-channel consumer experience was to Burberry.
We have found in our work and our research that the opportunities to create the most value are found at the edge of disruption—at the intersection of old and new, where the profits, reach, and reputation of your past enable
