Brand and Brand Builders

Brand gurus and marketing geniuses have defined brand comprehensively, leaving little scope for ambiguity or confusion for a postulant like me. Everyone is a consumer, we buy articles from sources we consider authentic within the reach of our presence and also in the grasp of our financial means. Every interaction with the product or service either creates a new impression in our minds or emboldens the perception built in the past: this applies to both good and bad experiences alike. You are not going to win the adulation of people by saying that consumers of our age live on an overdose of information, they have passage to reviews: real consumer feedback, success stories and matching products, all within the reach of a few taps. Someone determined to find out the positives or the negatives of your brand will succeed with trifling effort. The world has yet not seen a product that hasn’t failed, we are also yet to come across a brand that doesn’t make poor choices, from the perspective of its customers; yet we consider some brands better than the other. One can talk about the appeal of a product/service, its usability, price, availability etc to establish the brand and its identity, but it is not something that I’d like to explore in this article. What I’m trying to, and let me admit, audaciously superficially, the underlying reasons; or should we say what builds the character of the brand? Proof of the pudding lies in eating it; the brand is nothing more than the sum total of its user's perception, so if customers are a carrier of the brand, it’s true ambassadors, who are the brand builders? Who gives the brand character flesh and blood and brings it alive? No prizes for guessing, it is employees like you and I. Brands are built by what you and I do on our work desk and elsewhere in our work hours. Apple is not a person, Hyatt is not a singular object, the virgin airline is not lifelessly flying these are a result of real people working day in and day out. 

Desires, apprehensions, fears, motivation, commitment and conviction of employees manifest itself in the shape of a product and service that end consumer experiences and pays for. It is a misnomer that only great brands sell, there is a market for absolute garbage too. Everything retails, real measure of success of a brand is how popular or let say dominant it gets in the medium to long term : one quick test could be to figure out if its customers are willing to pay a ‘premium’, if so, you’ve done things right, at least those which matter the most to the customer. If the price tag is the only hook that you have on your customers, be rest assured, you will soon run out of business. Someone with a will just a tad bit better than yours to work on ‘features’ and the efficiency to keep the costs in check matching your levels of control, will suck your customer leaving you dry and unhappy. Therefore single most important objective for you should be to create a brand that is liked by your customers not only by the price tag at which you sell but also something else, something perhaps much more important than price itself. Let me quickly bring the Apple example here, for a quarter of the cost of a full spec iPhone you can buy a OnePlus which is as much a phone like the iPhone if not better, but customer stick to the iPhone knowing fully well that they are paying exorbitantly for a set of features which are not unique because iPhone is much more than a phone, in the Apple ecosystem, it does many things well without failing, which the cheaper Android counterpart can’t simply deliver. Apple has managed to create a phone which is more than a phone for its customers.

And that precisely should be the objective of the brand .. you have to be ‘more’ than what you must be in the most minimal sense. Lowest common denominators do not create history .. don’t aspire to be them. That truly in my view is what a brand should be, let’s turn our attention to the brand makers, the creators of the brand, the employee you and I. Or what should people in the leadership team do to help shape the character of the organisation to deliver a brand, below three things come to my mind ( that has a hell lot to learn on this subject and everything else)

1. Find that one thing you wish to be.
2. Be willing to sacrifice everything for that one thing
3. When you achieve that one thing ..look for the next big thing,

Let’s go over these individually and briefly.

1. Find that one thing you wish to be: A ton of researchers have proven it beyond reasonable doubt that it is utterly foolish to even fantasise being multiple things, it is just not wise. On the contrary, if you can be one thing and really good at that, you’ve made your mark. But it is easier said than done. In an organisation there are hundreds if not thousands of things that happen, every number mean something to someone; in choosing one, are we saying that we have to ignore the rest? Well, not quite, the ‘one thing’ philosophy says to choose one thing that makes most business sense to you. And you do not have to be austere in choosing what you wish to be. Let’s say choosing to be a 1 billion dollar company is a good target and so is getting high with 98% customer satisfaction. Both are brilliant targets to go after, please understand, everything that you would do, well, in one way or the other tie into everything, but by choosing one thing you basically, channelise energies in a certain direction of your choosing. So for instance, let’s say you are an ITES ( BPM, BPO, contact centre.. choose the phrase that you like) company and you had to choose a target, what should you choose? You can aim at a certain gross margin and say I wish to end this year at 23%, or you can give yourself a people target, saying I have to become a 40K people strong organisation or simply say that I will be on the number one spot on the partner scorecard for all my clients. Choosing to be on the number one in all client scorecard is a wise goal to elect, let me tell you why. Being number one the scorecard means you have not only met but also exceeded performance expectations substantially, in doing so you’ve given your customer a very strong reason to stay with you, one even stronger than your rate of billing. And to be number one, you’ll have to have the best talent onboard, a culture that retains skills, effective performance management, stringent cost control, satisfied set of employees etc. So to achieve that one thing you’ll end up doing all the right things. Choosing an indirect sensible goal will get you better results than a direct cost or number goal.
2. Be willing to sacrifice everything for that one thing: Temptation and temporary setbacks will set you off course. Distraction is everywhere, scattered so brilliantly that you’ll find it at every turn, even when you are not looking for it. You will need to resist the urge to do over midway. Remember shifting the goal post in a running match leave not only the players but also the spectators confused and confusion we can all agree doesn’t end in anything positive. Let’s take an example, let’s say the one thing that you had to choose happens to be ‘being the most preferred employer’ and in order to do that you’ve started reviewing your policies with the intent to make them lucrative and particularly employee friendly; what does that mean in the short term? Providing better couch and a better sofa, we know, comes at a cost higher than the ordinary. So it will mean that you’ll have to spend a little more, in bettering the benefits of the employees, giving the physical and the IT infra a facelift. This is real money and will go out of the limited reserve that you’d have built with years of frugality and conscious corner cutting, what you need to do is conduct a cost-benefit analysis. You do not have to hire a consultant for it, look at the cost of attrition (the opportunity you lose for not having people), cost of rehire, wastage caused by learning curve (new people take longer to do things, if the experienced lot took 5 minutes per task the new employee would start with 10.. you are losing money on every transaction), higher the churn more distant BAU gets, cost of chaos is 15% on an overall basis, per the research conducted by Harvard. Critical talent leaving robs you of your competitive advantage. So now that you have a view .. of what you should look at, do your numbers how is the cost of reform placed against the cost of ongoing leakages? Analysis done right will tell you that even with the additional cost of reform you’ll end up adding anything between 5 to 8% to your margins in the medium to long term alongside creating a strong, motivated, engaged organisation that you’ll be proud of. Remember when going gets tough it is the character of the organisation that comes to rescue.

On to our last item

1. When you achieve that one thing ..look for the next big thing: Goal setting is of paramount importance and must be done extremely carefully: intellect is put to use here. Fine minds create a meaningful plan; all organisations have all three kinds of people.
   1. Fire Fighters: These folks shine at transactions, they like moving from one problem to another, they are so used to fighting the fire that a period of peace makes them uncomfortable. They are the first line of defence.
   2. Sailors: The old and loyal guard, a very important section of people, scars that they carry hide many ugly struggles that the organisation had to go through. These are good people, with a desire to remain there. Their field of vision is wider than the firefighters and are generally calmer in their personas, they do not react easily, but when they do they do it with all the might. They have everything going for them except for one critical item, their exposure. Thanks to their long tenure in the same organisation their story of growth become the story of the organisation and so if the organisation is not the best yet, their acumen is also not top notch. These good souls become close, their visions get tunnelled mostly limited by past.
   3. Think Tank: This is a crazy lot, and perhaps the most valuable one. These are people with razor-sharp intellect, the best education, superb background, fearless outlook and they crave revolution. They are addicts for change, they keep struggling and propelling to better the environment for themselves and for the rest. This lot is seldom satisfied; for them, the road to success is always under construction and quite literally. They are courageous to the point of being impractical, they set for themselves inhuman targets and are mostly full of passion. Erudition, oratory & taste for fine things in life are their characteristics. They are persistent to the point of appearing nagging. They are dissatisfied with slow progress but never disappointed and end up being the agent for change.

wrt. the percentage, you need 60% of your staff to be firefighters, about 30% as sailors and 10% think tank. It won’t harm to have more think tanks but the problem is that there are not very many ‘good’ people and retaining this talent pool is not easy at all. You have to be wary of the sailor group; with tenure what also grows is complacency you gotta keep them in check otherwise, they will make their disability, limitation of the organisation; attrition in this group is desirable. Think tanks are not good for anything else, they can only be part of strategy and direction setting, so use all of them, have at least a few firefighters in the group and make sure you keep sailors out of the ground tasked with finding the next big thing for your organisation, it has to be one thing.

Lifting the victory title takes the pain of the practice away in the very moment; so keep running these and other thought experiments that you find fitting to your taste and your business. Wishing you well! 

Empathy & Organisations!

I won’t hold it against you if you accord less than warm reception when I go on to mention ‘empathy and organization’ in the same breath. For far too long, virtues, in general, have been getting a solid beating from their flashy cousin ‘numbers’ ( to do with top & bottom line, performance & other tangible titbits). It is only natural to get lured into thinking that ‘numbers’ along matter and everything else is not worthy of our attention .. such abrasive attitude surprisingly even attracts applauds in boardrooms across the world, today. There is no denying the fact that such talks have a tendency of sounding aggressive .. so much so that even wisest sometime forget to pause to look for substance beneath the claim. We greet it as it hits us .. warm and loud and move on with a happy and satisfied feeling. What happens after however is not always desirable and we know that for a fact, don’t we? Targets get missed, deliveries do get delayed and prospects shut doors .. real world failures.

I do not wish to say that numbers aren't important, they indeed are ; unless you are making the money that you need to run your affairs you won't be able to sustain .. this write up is towards highlighting that foundational layer that comes handy in creating a base on which you can lay plans for the future firmly .. of growth, relevance, and of sustenance. 

Before you go on any further : I need to mention this that I’m very much for numbers and have been driving those for most of my life; as a student .. grades and as a professional organisational ’mandates’ and at the risk of sounding boastful, would say that have done a damn good job at creating spectacular results, some of which are standing benchmarks in my area of work. What I’m here to discuss however is what I have uncovered in my own mad and sometimes even mindless perusal of numbers and how it has deeply affected the way I operate. It is my duty to mention that my way is not essentially the ‘best’ way. It is merely a statement of the way that has worked surprisingly well for me.

Our work routine invariably revolves around three things;

1) Where am I?

2) Where should I have been?

3) How do I get ahead from wherever I’m?

These apply to everyone in equal measure; you could be an individual contributor, a beginner, team managers, someone in the mid-management rank or an executive from the higher office - all that you do can be categorized in these three statements, broadly though. Let’s take a pause here and think .. what are organizations really? At its core, it is a group of people, larger the size more heterogeneous the mix, coming together to fulfill what is a 'common goal'. That goal can be expressed in monitory terms: “Have to become a trillion dollar company” or can have relative connotation: “We must be the biggest and the largest in our area” etc. I personally like the later more.. because it doesn't have a ceiling, not even in the short term. 

How are these goals going to get accomplished? The science part of it gets addressed rather easily, see what is working, what is not .. validate by data, research action, build prototypes, refine and regulate .. implement, observe and rework. Keep repeating the sequence & the cycles for so long as you discover the set of activities that meet your effort capacity and give you what is your desired output, at the cost that you can bear and in the time that your customers would happily give you.  What is difficult to achieve is that ‘art’ of problem-solving. There, let me come back to that statement that I made a while ago; organization are essentially a group of people and thus human emotions play a part, seminal in nature. And therefore it is only vital for leaders like us invest in it. Remember, you’ll need great people by your side to weather storms of a bad market, poor economy, upset client and cyclic poor performance that will keep showing up every once in a while.

Because we’re talking about organizational symmetry & set up; let us look at what could be a measure of success; a number .. we all need it.

Attrition could be one

Employee satisfaction another 

I don’t think I need to make a case here to say that an engaged and happy workforce almost always outperforms those who are dissatisfied or plain unhappy. Happiness can't be bought by throwing stacks of cash .. you can be paying handsomely, providing your employees with shiniest of the offices or most efficient of the infra but they could still be disengaged, unhappy, disturbed and even disgusted. A good way of testing if that is the case is seeing if problems keep resurfacing, check for clients expressing repeated discomfort, check for how much people actually care about the issue at hand. Do people take responsibility for errors easily or keep explaining how it is not to do with them but everyone else on the planet? If these tests come positive .. you have a problem which you wanna solve.

Happiness is created by trading in the currency of intent. Bad results are often overlooked if ‘intent’ somehow proves itself to be good & intact. From an organization, it is critical that ‘intent’ is always voiced out loud and clear. Over-communication here is not entirely undesirable. And that brings me to the word with which title of this blog begins “Empathy”.

All of us have at least once watched tightrope walk being performed by artists in circus .. when they walk on that rope, the onlookers feel sweat in their palm, wide open eyes get glued to the point where the rope meets the feet of the walker, heart begins to race faster than usual and we almost unknowingly start praying that he ends up on the other side of the rope without falling off and when he does it; we clap in cheer and feel happy as though, we conducted the gymnastic ourselves - This feeling is "empathy"!

When you not only understand other’s feeling but also feel it yourself; you connect at a level which is deep and meaningful. From it comes the resolve to act and then the delivery gets magically aligned to the purpose and from there on it is a function of time that one puts on the issues, that determines success. Solutions only keep getting better. Think of it yourself .. if you were to bet your life on someone; who would you choose? Someone who empathizes with you completely and honestly or those who understand your problem but do not quite care as much for its impact on you? 9/10 people will choose the one with empathy .. the 10th person, well .. let’s empathize with him and let him be.

In all organizations, people essentially solve for their customers and in the process work towards making their organization/entity richer, more prosperous, known and respected and there if employees were to not care deeply about the thing/issue they are solving for or feel for it as much, the effort that they will put will always be inadequate and that will sadly reflect in the results visible to the customers/ clients/ employees/ stakeholders ....everyone. The surest way of delivering great results is building empathy with the problem and those affected by it. Superficialities do not count here. These are four important things to do.

Understanding: Not just the issue but also the plight of those who are impacted by it.

Passion: for solving it and solving it for real

Honesty: Being open and candid about stating facts and laying out plans.

Communication: Let people know about the cause, the effect and also the remedy. 

Given the obvious benefits, it is wise to build an organization that believes in the need to be empathetic and practices it at all times. Remember empathy won’t insulate you from failures or losses or delays but if implemented well, it will surely reduce such possibilities greatly and should they still occur you'll have a group of people who are committed to the cause greater than ever and from it will stem awesome things like collaboration, cooperation, accountability, and sensitivity . Treatment will not be merely symptomatic but one that eliminates the root cause. Whenever the undesirable happens you will have a whole organization ready to understand, care and solve for it with utmost honesty and commitment.

On that note, allow me to offer my best wishes to you on this friendship day.

See you in the next one.

Is being nice beyond business?

The human race has made significant progress since it came into being. We’re no longer naked creatures chasing animals barefoot with the hope of satisfying pangs of hunger. We're evolved and now have greater goals to go after, we’ve put man on the moon, many machines made by us circle celestial objects we still know very little about, we however still chase, not animals, but humans for quicker food deliveries sometimes and on other occasions one another for nothing of value.

We’ve not only devised language and formalized dialects but have also quite extensively defined the design of civility and organized most of our relations and contacts. We’re born under medical supervision, sent to institutions to gather education & know-how, we fall in love .. marry the person in fan fare and start another circle of life with our partner.

All of us want to succeed at everything that we do, we wish to gain, to accumulate, to rise above the rest, be known, be valued and above all, have all that we want right within our comfortable reach.

If this were to be told in fewer word, perhaps, saying that we wish to be profitable always won’t be an unfair representation. 

All of that is very good.

But have we in the process become a little less human? Have we forgotten to believe that passim isn't necessarily deep; nor optimism shallow? Have we become so insecure that we care way too much about things that don’t really matter that much? 

Have we lost the need to be in constant awareness of how short life is & how little we ultimately lose from risking everything?  

Let’s not forget, what the world now is .. is nearly a pale shadow of what it could be one day.. we are still at the beginning of history, in that sense. It is upon us to make that a reality - it doesn’t require much of an effort beyond the ask of being virtuous. 

It is perhaps easier for me to lecture on history, Indian independence, and even world history to a certain extent but "being nice" isn't really something that I have read but I deeply feel and care about, the need to be "nice" - so sharing.

I think, to be good, we really need to as step one shed the load of insecurity that we carry with us, by doing so the unpleasantness that it creates will on its own disappear making room for much desired "goodness".

To make it happen all of us would need our own little toolkits - below is mine. Disclaimer: May or may not work for you :)  

Resilience - The art of keeping going even when things are going dark, accepting reverse as normal refusing to frightened others with one's own fear, remembering that human nature, in the end, is reassuringly tough.     

Empathy - The capacity to connect imaginative with the sufferings and unique experiences of another person, the courage to become someone else and the desire to help.

Sacrifice - The ability to give up on something dear for the sake of others with a smile.

Politeness- It is going beyond having good manners and being nice it is the conscious desire to not hurt anyone on purpose.

Humour - The ability to see the funny side of situations of all kinds. It is integral to wisdom, it is our ability to softly locate the gap between what is and what should have been. Like many other human emotions, humor also springs from disappointment but only when optimally & creatively channeled.   

And at last, would mention Forgiveness and Most important- HOPE for a better tomorrow.

Those of you who know me would have heard this many a times from me .. let me repeat it here as well - being nice costs nothing.

On that note .. time for me to leave .. see you on another side.