Bob London and Peter Baumann discuss how strategic narratives must reach frontline employees to matter. They cite Best Buy's turnaround, where staff needed to understand why customers should choose them. At ActiveNav, every role from sales to engineers must see their work as part of a larger mission, not just invoicing or data migration.
Chapters
I was reading in the Wall Street Journal an article about the gentleman Hubert Joly, who joined Best Buy in 2012 at the height of the Best Buy will never survive Amazon, you know, mania. And he did some of the things you would expect. He went around and walked the floors of the stores and listened, but he got some interesting feedback and prodding from the blue shirts, they're called, the people who work in the stores. And one of them was, when customers ask us why they should buy from us, uh, we don't really know. His, his recognition quickly was obviously, if the employees don't know, customers will never know why we're different and better. And so this same idea applies in the strategic narrative and the vision, which is to say that it becomes shelfware unless people embrace it inside the company and can internalize it But what's clear from that article and other work I've done, and I think in your example, people want to know. Yeah. And they want to be given, not handed a message to read, but they want to be given something that feels like a higher order impact. And when they do get that and it clicks, it really does put people on the same page, not because they're uttering it every 5 seconds and wearing the, the, the swag but because they feel like everyone's, as you've put it, everyone's rowing in the same direction kind of thing. But the point remains, customers will never understand why a company's value proposition is unique unless the team can articulate it. Unless you're GEICO or Nike and you have half a billion dollars a year to spend to tell the world directly what, you know, what to think. It seems like the employees are becoming engaged in this effort to pick it up. And internalize it.
100%, Bob London. You can dissect every role and function in any business, but in our software business, where it's the sales guy at the front and trying to bring the customer on with the vision, the excitement of this, and don't worry about your short-term project of you've got some M&A activity and you need to separate the data and you need to remove the toxic. That's just now. Think think big. Think about the next 50 M&A data separations, migration, you know, the bringing in of new assets. That's where Zero Dark Data comes in. All of those things come to play. If you're someone in finance, invoicing and accounts payable, accounts receivable, you know, why are you doing that every day? What's— you know, you're just doing a job, you're just churning bits of paper. But if you're doing it because you believe that you're on a journey and even your customers are there and that's why they're going on this journey with you and that's why you're processing, it's empowering. Yeah, I don't overstate it, but it is still empowering. Imagine not having that. Oh my gosh, the drudgery of the day versus having it. And then, and then finally, in our business, the guys writing the code, you know, they're, they're not at the coalface talking to customers every day, right? They're literally locked away, and particularly in COVID, and just writing lines of code. We want them to write the smartest, the best code. We want them to be thinking differently. We want them to be thinking about what the end goal is that the customer's trying to get to as they write that line of code. And that's where this becomes such a valuable asset to, to the business.
