Finding the Truth in the Topic | Mark Miller | 496

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you are joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Mark Miller. He is the vice president of high-performance leadership at Chick-fil-A, and he has done some amazingly interesting thing over things Plural over the last 40 years, including his latest, which is a book that he just put out called Culture Rules: The Leader's Guide to Creating the Ultimate Competitive Advantage. So welcome aboard, Mark.

Thank you, Peter Winick. It's great to be with you.

Thank you. So let me, let me sort of dive right in. So you fit in, in my universe of what working with authors, thought leaders, academics, consultants, et cetera, you're in this sort of really interesting category of sort of the embedded thought leader, right? So you are, you know, you're at a big company, a very well-regarded company. You have functional responsibility. It's not like you get paid to sit around all day thinking big thoughts like an academic, right? Yet you've built up this more than a brand, but a, but an ethos, if you will, of thought leadership along the way. So give me a sense of how that came to be? Is it an extension of the day job? Is it an addition to? Just give me a sense of sort of how all that has happened for you.

Well, I think it really started about 25 years ago when we began trying to figure out how to help our leaders grow their capacity. It's like this was a felt need for us. And the very first manifestation of it was we needed a stronger leadership bench. And so I was asked by our executive committee to figure that out, and I put together a team of really smart people. We went to work trying to figure that out, and ultimately Ken Blanchard found out about that work and challenged me that it needed to be a book. And I knew Ken, and I said, Ken, everything looks like a book to you, which is why he sold probably 50 million books. And he said, you don't understand. He said, you guys were trying to articulate what great leaders do at Chick-fil-A. He said, what you've done is you've articulated what great leaders have done throughout history. And it has to be a book. So he persisted. We did a book. I tell people I'm the accidental author because he kind of twisted my arm to do that. And that was my first book. It was called The Secret. And it's now in 25 languages. So it was like, okay, here we go. And then over time, we realized that we could tackle emerging business issues, create a point of view, publish that, which would serve our organization and the world at large. And so Culture Rules, I think, is my 11th project over 25 years, where we try to look just toward the horizon and say, what are those emerging issues? And sometimes we'll be so bold as to look over the horizon and say, hey, we want a point of view on XYZ. We think that will serve our leaders and leaders at large. And a few years ago, we made that decision about the topic of culture. And of course, the pandemic, I think, made that look like a great choice in the rearview mirror because the pressure that COVID put on organizational culture, it exposed both strengths and weaknesses. And I have never had so many leaders want to talk to me about culture. It kind of went to the top of their priority list. And so we're thankful that we've got a point of view on that.

Yeah. So, but so what's interesting about the point of view is that you're not a consultant, an advisor, an academic thinking theoretical great thoughts on culture. I mean, there's a lot of moving parts to your business, right? So this is basically the Chick-fil-A culture, but more importantly, it's sort of what, what can I learn from it? Right?

Well, no, actually not. Okay. With most all of the projects, probably 90% of the projects, we try to start with what is universally true about a topic. Okay. So in the case of Culture Rules, we ended up surveying or interviewing over 6,000 people in 10 countries, leaders and frontline associates. And so we're saying, let's start with what's true. I never want to be the guy that just publishes my personal bias. I want something that I can tell a leader all over the world, this will work. I want something I can tell the church, the school, the hospital, the military, the chicken restaurants. I want to try to write about what is universally true. And so our process for many, many years has been, let's try to start there as, as much as we possibly can.

So in essence, you're, you're not— so let me put it this way, and I've seen several, whether it's culture books, leadership books, whatever, that are the codification of the way we do it here, wherever here might be, right? The GE way, whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? And that's a fine model. Hey, we're known for our leadership excellence, our management excellence, whatever, whatever. Let's share it with the world. You're almost a sort of an embedded research house in a fast food restaurant coming up with great things. Like, how does the business justify that? Right? Because at the end of the day, like, how does that all square? Because that's interesting.

I think it squares because we believe everything rises and falls on leadership.

Right.

And if we can help our leaders grow their capacity, grow their impact, grow their influence, everybody wins. If we can help them better with execution, better with engagement, better with teams, better building a high-performance culture, build better building culture. I agree. And so those are some of the projects we've done over the years. And I would argue there's a huge ROI on each and every one of them.

Well, that's where I was going to go. I would agree with all of those, but most companies, even those that are 5, 10, 20x your size, talk a good game, but they're not investing and really having that embedded thought leadership research and development arm inside. Because again, you didn't codify what we did here. You went out to the world. And I mean, this is classic research class, you know, sort of an academic model. So how does the business measure the impact and the ROI that you're having on it?

Well, let me back up. There is an academic component.

Yes.

But it is filtered extensively through a pragmatic lens and filter. I mean, you made the comment earlier, you know, I have functional responsibilities and have for over 40 years. We're running a business and then trying to help our operators run 3,000 businesses. And so somebody told me recently, and I'm not sure if this is good or bad, I probably shouldn't repeat this, they said that my personal brand is, you are painfully pragmatic. And I said, well, Thank you, I think, right? If leaders can't approach the truth, if leaders can't apply the truth, if it doesn't work, then everybody loses. And so—

I think painfully pragmatic is the highest level of a compliment. Well, I said— I could say to you, Mark, you're painfully academic. I don't need the academic word. That just means you're painful, right?

Well, again, I'm thankful and I kind of wear that proudly because Yes, the stuff has to work. The stuff has to work. And that's on this project. I'll give you just a bit of a tangent here. Culture is big and culture is complicated and culture is hard. You go talk to 6,000 people around the world in 10 countries and you're going to have mountains of data. And then we did all of these interviews with probably 40 or 50 household brands. From around the world. I mean, one-on-one interview. I mean, it was crazy. And we were overwhelmed. And we said, this is not going to help people. And we actually took inspiration from the SEALs, the Navy SEALs. And you may know this, your listeners may know this. A few years back, they wanted to document in writing their mantra. And the first thing they wrote down was shoot, move, communicate. And the SEALs would tell you, that's not all you need to be a SEAL, but that's what you need to live to fight another day. And we then said, okay, let's take all this research and let's look for the equivalent of shoot, move, and communicate, because it's actionable. It's— it provides direction, it provides clarity, and it's not all you need to know, but it'll, it'll help you get through the day. And so that was actually what we tried to do. That's back to that pragmatism. Is this approachable? Is this applicable? And that's kind of been our charge and challenge for 25 years.

If you're enjoying this episode of Thought Leadership Leverage, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. So I want to go back though, because everything that you say I love and makes sense. I would assume if you didn't tell me where you had functional responsibility, I'd say, oh, you're at an HR consulting firm or you're at a big consulting shop. You're at a fast food restaurant. You're at a franchisor of a fast food restaurant serving 3,000+ restaurants. So how, you know, at the end of the year or beginning of the year, whatever budget season is, how do we look at your budget, you know, the budget for all this stuff that you're doing and say, this is a good impact and ROI on the business. Is it about, talent attraction, talent retention? Like, what's— tell me what the levels are in the business.

All of it. It's all of it. It's all of it. It's all of it. It's sales, profits, customer satisfaction, engagement, retention. It's like the budget here. Here's the truth: the budget for this work has not been questioned in 25 years.

See, and that's fantastic because it would be easy to justify inside of an organization like yours. Like, hmm, what's a nice to have and what's a must-have, right? And I'm sure somebody with the green visor is looking at that stuff all the time. If you're trying to save, you know, right, 2 cents a pound on a potato, you're gonna do it, right?

Do you believe that everything rises and falls on leadership? And if you believe that, and we think it's, it's our competitive advantage— we've got a great product, we've got great locations, we've got But, but that local operator and his or her capacity, leadership capacity is our differentiator. It's our competitive advantage. So every dollar we invest to help them grow and improve, there's a huge ROI on that. Huge.

That's phenomenal. So I want to segue a little bit, Mark, to this is not your first rodeo, right?

That's correct.

What has been different for you in the writing? But I would probably more so the marketing of this book than previous ventures you've been involved in, previous, previous books. How's the market changed? How's it stayed the same?

Okay. I believe it's harder than ever to sell books. Now, that could, that could be my imagination.

Only because that's true.

That could be my imagination. I think back on the level of activity that we might have done 10 years ago to promote a book and the return we got. And I say return, the number of books we sold compared to recent years. And it's just, it's just gotten harder. And so this year my team did something that you might tell me I should have done decades ago, but we sat around and said, okay, What have we not done that we ought to try? Because if we do what we've always done, we're going to get what we always got or less. Yep. And so we did what I guess would be classically defined as a pre-launch campaign. So why hadn't you done that before? But, but we've done them before, but never with this level of intensity. And the book made the Wall Street Journal list, came in at number 4. So I'm sitting here going, huh, Okay, will we do that next time? I don't know, but it worked. It at least—

I did get that. I did get an email last week from Matt Holt, your publisher, bragging about—

Okay, good.

I'm proud to see that with sharing the BookScan results. But let's— so I want to stay here a minute because this is important, right? And lots, you know, part of what happens is there are some sort of timeless things that are always true relative to book marketing. And then there are things that come into vogue and go away and things that come into vogue that stay because they work. So this whole pre-launch community ethos, et cetera, it seems to me probably for the last 18, 24 months is kind of a thing and it feels sticky right now. 5 years from now, maybe somebody's listening to this going, Peter, you idiot. But right now it feels like it's got legs. Could you, could you describe for us what it is and how you developed it and deployed it? And obviously we got to that. We got to the punchline of we hit the list. So.

Well, again, it was a multifaceted campaign and I guess the best ones probably are. And we, we recruited about 450 launch team members. We call them culture champions. We sent them all 2 copies of the book. Hard— if they wanted hard copy, they got it. And they got one for themselves and one to give away.

So that giveaway piece is key. So I'm sorry to interrupt you. We've seen versions of this where if you send me a book, like I'm a guy that gets a lot of books sent to him, right? So, sure. Some I read and some I don't because some are not things I would have opted in for. And if I want a book, I'll pay the $20, $30 for whatever. But some of them, what I get are things in advance or early on. But giving me 2, now it's really interesting. There's a psychology to say, geez, wow, I kind of like— I— it's a shame to see a book just sit there idle. To me, that's a crime, right? So who— now all of a sudden my brain's going, whose, whose hands can I give this to that would appreciate it?

Right?

And I'm actually putting some thought cycles into that. So I love that.

Yeah.

The psychology.

And we had done that before years ago. And actually that might be, as I think back, that was probably the book that I had the most Amazon reviews on. Which again to me is kind of a tertiary metric. I know some people think that's the metric. It's like, well, actually, let's look at how many books we sold. But nonetheless, I don't want to minimize it. But when we sent out, you know, 500— well, sent out 1,000 free books, we got more Amazon reviews. And so we asked those folks to do that. We actually set up an incentive for them, gave them their own affiliate link, each one of them. And they got gift cards based on how many books they sold.

We were doing it for the money or were they doing it for the gamification? For the—

well, I, you know, I don't know. I think it was the gamification. If you sell 5 books, we'll give you a Starbucks gift card. You sell 10 books, we'll give you whatever it was. And yeah, again, not everybody took advantage of that. I haven't even seen the final report, but some people sold some books because of that. So again, I think it was The spirit of it was gamification, not compensation, right? Yeah. That was the question.

Yeah.

So, so that was the spirit of it. So we did that. We had a couple of bulk incentives and one is my author friends tell me I'm crazy and you may as well. We told people that if they bought 11 books, I would do a Zoom call with their team for 11 books. For 11 books.

How long is the call?

60 minutes.

Wow. Okay.

Now my deal is, hey, if it works, it's an opportunity to serve those teams.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Meet those people. And so I'm okay with that. Well, I haven't seen the final list. I hope it gets to 100. We may have 100 of those. So that's cool. We also said if you buy 500 books, I'll do a free keynote for you.

Right.

We probably got 8 or 10 of those. So this is all we did. Airport. We're in 20 or 30 airports. So this was a multifaceted— we did, we did ads, various platforms. We even hired an agency that did follow-up calls to the champions to see if they'd gotten their books, if they had any questions, if they knew how the link worked. So we pulled out all the stops we could think, and I probably missed some stuff.

Got it. So I love the experimentation piece cuz, you know, as I'm thinking about, you know, the 11-book piece, you know, mathematically that's illogical, right? Just number of units sold times dollars sold. But there is another, there are other business models here, right? So if you get all these teams that you impact, talk about that cuz there is, it's, it's not just about selling chicken sandwiches, right? In, inside.

Well, and yeah, and you referenced the business model. It's also an opportunity to add value to a lot of teams and organizations. Oh, we did something else too. We did a grant for nonprofits. So we ended up, we've got 50 nonprofits that are going to submit a grant for how they can use the book to improve their culture. And we're giving away some money in 4 separate grants.

So the book is a reference guide, a tool Excellent.

So we're just, we're just trying stuff.

Well, and I think that, that, that's really the point is that, you know, if we were to revisit this conversation in a year, some of these things were great, some of these things not so great, some, some things that you didn't consider popped in well, whatever. You always have to have this mindset of, of, of experimentation when it comes to book marketing. And I also love that you're not just listening to the quote experts because sometimes some of the quote experts, it's kind of the same old, same old. And it's like, you know, this is the way we do it here. And, you know, there's, yeah, this sort of open-mindedness to your approach, I think, is a blessing, if you will.

Oh, by the way, I sent, uh, videos, 3 or 4 videos to the launch team specifically, maybe 5, where I sent them messages, how we're doing, how you doing, Here's where we are. People are on the launch team total, 450, I think.

That's pretty strong because I've, I've heard people or seen people know people trying to get that number to 100, and you basically have a team that gets a little bit of behind-the-scenes look, and you're sharing with them the success, and they're, you know, you're, you're building up a de facto sales.

Oh, I also did 3, 4 webinar— 3 webinars for the public, and I did a webinar just for the culture champions, I think. I think, yeah. Other than that, I can't think of what else we did.

Well, there'll be more to come. Well, this has been fantastic. I appreciate sharing your journey and your experiences and your successes with us, Mark. I appreciate that a lot. Thank you so much.

Great to talk with you.

To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at Peter at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.