How One Feeling Can Align an Entire Corporation
Sebastian Schelper argues that CEOs should define one core feeling that guides every employee's decisions, using a simple 3×3 matrix to make it explicit. He shows how BMW, with 100,000 staff, scaled this approach, and warns that investor pressure for growth can dilute the feeling and leave founders without purpose.
Chapters
You can feel sometimes that you are the chief everything officer, and I definitely want you to get out of that role because your true role actually should be the chief experience officer, the one who is in charge to make that choice, to make that choice. How do I want the raving fan to feel? And be clear and be explicit that everyone in your organization knows what is that one feeling. And that's why with the framework from BQ Capital, it's so simple that everyone in your organization will be able to tell the fellow coworker, this is the one feeling that our CEO has chosen. This is the one of almost 5 million feelings. And they're able to tell this everyone. Because it is 3 times making a 3 by 3 choice. So I, you could say if I have people who cannot make a 3 times 3 by 3 choice, they may not be qualified to work for your company.
Exactly.
And if they know that, so they know that feeling, then everyone in your leadership gets freed up. Because when then a worker asks, now should I do this or that? You can just ask, which is amplifying that feeling that we chose, that you know what it is, which one is amplifying that feeling more, A or B? And you can even ask them, say, I don't know. Well, flip a coin.
Does it feel right?
And then they will know, right? Because then it's heads. Oh, you know, actually tails would've been better. Well, then, you know, even though heads came, you know, you want to do now tails. And this is really where the magic happens. This is where you really have the leverage. In the BMW case, it's over 100,000 people where you have the leverage. An organization that has been around for over 100 years, this is an implicit knowledge. This is also given to the new people coming as an implicit, hey, yes, you've been in Ingolstadt with Audi guys, we roll different here. Right? You would expect the same or experience the same if you go from BMW to Mercedes-Benz. They will also tell you—
It's different.
My friend in Stuttgart, we roll different. Being able for your brand that may not have been around 100 years to make this explicit, this is the gift that I'm giving you here. It's a language to make explicit what you already know. Because how does an entrepreneur start? They start with a gut feel. They know this doesn't feel right. And they have a vision how it will feel different when their product or service has become reality. And more often than not, they then become the chief everything officer. Everything has to go over their table because only they know.
It hasn't been articulated.
Correct.
That's really what you specialize in and what you offer to brands, I'd say, is helping them to both identify, articulate, And then execute on whatever feeling is integral to that brand's very DNA.
Yes. And this way, you can eventually achieve more by doing less. How can you have a more direct communication in a very simple way? Because this is also often overlooked, that simple scales, complex doesn't. If you have a strategy paper that is 100 pages, No one will read it. And often it's, oh, it's sort of secret. We cannot share this with anyone because maybe the competitor will see it. It doesn't work. And that's why the PEAK framework and the Energy Cube at its core is so simple, yet so profound that once you made that choice, it can scale because it's so brilliantly simple that everyone in your organization will be able to tell everyone By the way, you tell this internally, you don't tell this externally, because externally, that's the magic. You want everyone externally to feel this consistent, and that everyone in your organization, regardless if it's the person cleaning the bathrooms, they know we're here to have our people feel a certain way, and then they act exactly like— Everyone will become a CEO. Everyone will become a chief experience officer, because as long as I interact with someone who's interacting with our brand, with the product and services, Right, you are a CEO, you are creating an experience.
Often there is that implicit knowing that someone who has built a business, especially with some initial success, they know what they want, they know the emotion they're trying to convey, and they know they're throwing their rock in the water. But the hard part is now, once that impact is made initially, now it has to ripple its way out, and it has to, in that water, make its way not only just from that core rock of the CEO knowing, but it has to come to the C-suite executives, It has to come to the team, the managers, the people on the ground, and everyone in between. And then if it does that successfully, that's going to ripple out even farther to the customers and to people who don't even know about the brand yet. And slowly but surely, that impact is going to bring its way back where it's going to have a strong impact that one small rock can kind of move an entire body of water in its own way.
And then it's really consistently in the same frequency, throwing more rocks, so to say, in it. Right? And not scattering those rocks. And this happens also when you have investors who say, okay, now grow the revenue. Okay, new products. And this can then dilute that ripple, even cancel out a wave. And then you as the founder, you also feel that, right? So, oh, this is not what I really signed up for. This is not really why I started it. The numbers may even look great. You're growing, you're growing the revenue, you may even grow the profit margin, right?
But you feel that you're losing literally So that comes back to legacy, I would say, where that's all about building something that when you have that core and that when you're operating from it, that helps to help you make those decisions where it might be the short-term gain in exchange for the long-term decline of how do you stay at that core in a way that creates something that both grows but also lasts?
Yes. And this is really when you're, okay, am I doing this for the exit, which is then a number? And then the question is, what do I do then after the exit? Where's then the meaning in my life? And often founders who made an exit, they struggle with that, right? They achieved their big 7, 8, whatever figure exit, and then what?
