[BEST OF] How to Stay Relevant in Business: 3 Tips to Remain Competitive

Signs Your Company Is Falling Behind

Louis: You’re very welcome. It’s clear that the world is changing very rapidly. I’m not going to teach you that specifically not you. And I’m not going to teach the listeners that either. It’s clear that technology is advancing at a pace that is absolutely insane. It’s very difficult to keep up, and I think it’s quite overwhelming for people marketers in particular. So what are the signs in your perspective that the business you’re in, the company you’re in, is starting not to keep up? With the changes that are appearing in

Allen Adamson: today’s world, I think the most important sign is to realize that everyone is becoming your father’s Oldsmobile, as we say in the us becoming more relevant every day. And the biggest mistake consumers make, I mean, business leaders make, founders make, is to assume that everything’s fine and they’ll just keep on doing it. So we did over 100 interviews with 100 companies, large ones, small ones, public, private startups. And by and large, most of the companies, even though they knew they needed to change to stay relevant, failed to successfully change. So even though everyone knows that, gee, the world is changing faster, most companies fail. And one of the number one reasons is realizing that we all live in a TV show called Fraser’s Chair, Marty Crane’s Chair, and we’re all more comfortable with the familiar. And so one of the most important findings we found is that most people need to realize that their starting place is they’re already falling behind because they’re more comfortable with yesterday than tomorrow.

Louis: And that, I think, is a symptom of humankind. Right. And it’s incredibly difficult to fight to go into the uncomfortable place and to do that. So, you know, there’s a good reason why there are so many business coaches out there, marketing coaches out there, and all of those people telling you what you know already, but just reinforcing it so that you can do it yourself. Right?

Allen Adamson: Yeah. Everyone is on, you know, cruise control. You know, they now just. You go into the office, you do what you did yesterday, you open your emails, you check your messages, and most people operate based on yesterday’s frame of reference. And so it’s like, I know I should go to the gym every day, and a lot of people tell me that, but I still don’t go every day. So the same thing happens in business. You just got to realize that, you know, every day you’re slipping further behind, even though. As if when you. As you grow older, you don’t realize it until you look in the mirror one day with fresh eyes.

Louis: Yep. So I wanted to ask you another question and dive straight away into the problem and dive into the solution that you proposed. But I have. I have this question that comes to me, which is you’ve interviewed 100, around 100 companies for this book. By the way, what is the title of the book?

Allen Adamson: Shift Ahead.

Louis: Shift Ahead. And you’ve used your knowledge, your experience, and the knowledge that you gather throughout those 100 interviews. Right, right. And the book is almost like it’s full of all the insight that you Got from those conversations?

Allen Adamson: Yeah, it’s a combination of, here’s what happened to Facebook and here’s the lesson learned. What are the teachable moments? What should you learn from what Facebook went through and what are the type

Louis: of companies that you’ve interviewed? So you mentioned startups and bigger companies. Like what are type of people that you also interviewed.

Allen Adamson: So of course, the traditional. The companies you would expect P and G and General, GE and Facebook and Comcast, and maybe ones you wouldn’t expect. A public library in Connecticut. Who goes to a library anymore? A deli in Manhattan that serves pastrami, yet it’s doing very well. So we tried to look for different types of nonprofits. We looked for different businesses to see if anyone. Because it’s not a surprise to people in technology, when you’re out in Silicon Valley, everyone knows that you’re toast if you’re not moving forward. But we wanted to see what’s happening across other categories as well.

Louis: How did you identify this public library and this deli? Was there a particular reason or was it really random?

Allen Adamson: Yeah, to some extent, somewhat random. I was thinking about libraries and say, if anything’s obsolete, who goes to a library to get a book today? And somebody said, well, you should check out what’s going on at the Greenwich library, because they’ve shifted ahead from a library to a new business model. And we can talk about that later on.

Louis: Okay, so moving back to the actual problem we want to solve today. How to shift ahead, how to keep up with change. If you have to select maybe the top three red flags that a company is seriously in danger of becoming irrelevant, what would it be?

The Tennis vs. Golf Problem: Competitor Focus vs. Customer Focus

Allen Adamson: One of them is they tend to be playing too much tennis and not enough golf. And let me explain what I mean by that. When I was in brand management, I worked at a company called Unilever, and we talked a lot about keeping an eye on the consumer. And I used to sit in their kitchens and talk to them as they made dinner about what soap they were using and why their skin felt differently and what shampoo was good. And so we were very proud of ourselves for really watching the consumer and doing a ton of research. But at lunch, all we talked about and lots of the conversation at all was, did you see what P and G did yesterday? Did you see what Colgate? We became totally fixated on Colgate and Proctor, much more than the consumer. Same when I worked with Pepsi. Pepsi was totally fixated on Coke. The world could be in flames, but they were more interested in what’s going on with Coke in what country than perhaps how people are changing what beverage they’re drinking. And sort of in tennis, I’m bad at both sports, but when I try to do better at tennis, my main objective is to watch the other guy or the other person and try to hit the ball where they’re not. But if you’re always focused on the other person, you get into trouble. Whereas in golf, also bad at that sport. I play with somebody, yes, I want to beat them, but I’m not. My eye is usually not worrying about them. I’m usually worrying about, am I going to hit this ball? What’s the wind, what club do I use? You’re more in touch with reality. One of the big syndromes of people that fail to shift head is they are totally focused on what’s right in front of them, their competition. They must know something we’re not. And, and they stopped to look around. And most disruption, as you know, happens not from your competitor, but from somebody on the side or behind you. You look at what happened in the shaving category to P and G and Gillette, you know, they were totally fixated on shit. But, you know, some millennial in a warehouse came up with Dollar Shave Club, did a video for almost nothing, got a million views overnight, and is close to being able to put Gillette and Schick out of business. Now, he may not get the chance because he collected a huge paycheck from Unilever. So most disruption, as everyone knows, happens from around you, yet most people are only watching the other guy in front of them.

Louis: I love the description, the allegory between tennis and golf. That’s actually a very nice way to put it. I never thought about it this way, but yeah, in golf you need to focus on yourself. You need to focus on the trajectory you want to go. After you look at what’s the market, you look at the things ahead of you and you don’t really give a shit about what the players are doing, because you shouldn’t.

Allen Adamson: I mean, you’re going to lose. You made a bet on a hole, you lose that anyway, but it’s not going to help your game. Whereas in tennis, it does make a difference if you hit the ball right to the other player, you’re going to lose every time. Yeah, so, so, so that’s one. That’s, that’s, that’s one that a lot

Louis: of people would definitely nod their head and agree. Absolutely. If you don’t focus on customer and focus on your competitor, you’re kind of doomed. What would be the second, the second

Golden Handcuffs and Quarterly Thinking

Allen Adamson: one mostly affects companies that are publicly traded where there’s a stock price. And most of those companies, almost all of them have what we found to be what we call golden handcuffs. They always talk about doing what’s right for the long term, but the entire business is driven to doing whatever it takes to make this quarter’s number and take some cost out. And it was rampant across every story, even to the point where we spoke to the folks at Campbell Soup. Campbell Soup is a big US brand. You don’t have to be a marketing genius to know that fewer people are going to a supermarket one versus buying food elsewhere. And fewer, even more, fewer are up a can and opening it up and having soup. But they were sitting there and they’re saying things are pretty good. And they showed us dollar sales volume going up. And of course they showed their management dollar sales volume. And the way they did that, they kept on raising the price of cans of soup. And even though volume was continuing to go down, dollars were going up. So Wall street said, hey, good job, let’s give you guys a bonus. But at a certain point, the pricing, no one’s going to pay $40 for a can of soup anymore and the whole bubble is going to burst. So that’s an extreme case. But almost every, yeah, almost everybody was faced with that sense of driving quarter to quarter. And the big brands that failed, the big poster child for failure is, even though it’s a very old brand is Kodak. You know, they owned photography around the world, they own pictures and they had a profit margin that was phenomenal. They were swimming in money. And so one of the things we found out that I worked with Kodak earlier in my career was did they not see the train coming? Did they just not see the. And to our surprise one, their forecasting people were incredible. They knew the day that the film business would be eclipsed by digital four or five years in advance. So then the question is, if you saw this train coming down, why didn’t he get off the track? And one of the big reasons was the Golden Handcuffs film was so profitable they couldn’t move $50 million from the film business to put it in a break even digital business. And so they had to pay the bonuses to the film salespeople and the chemical people. So they couldn’t make what some people refer to as an asymmetrical bet. They couldn’t move money from one bucket to the other. And that’s a big challenge.

The Arrogance Trap: Learning from BlackBerry’s Downfall

Louis: Yeah, because how can you shift to a new trend that you have identified five years ago and move the juicy profit that you’re making right now to this that you know is not going to be super profitable for now, but make a bet in the future. How can you do that when you only focus on the next quarter and shareholders and leadership.

Allen Adamson: When the research people made this projection, the people, the leadership were into photography. Oh no. Digital cameras. Look at how fuzzy they are. They’ll never get. But the digital people, the research people knew what they were talking about. But management said sort of like electric and self driving cars because oh, that will never happen. Maybe one day. But if you look at the numbers, it’s going to happen sooner than you think. The other one broadly affects lots of organizations, big and small. It doesn’t have to be is arrogance. And probably the poster child for arrogance. We spoke to people who were at black while they were king of the heap and while they ended up out of the business and same sort of questions, you know, you guys owned anyone who was a mover and Shaker had a BlackBerry strapped to their belt like a real nerd. Anyone in business, you know, seen using a phone, it was, you know, and they, you know, you talk to them and they just believe that serious business people would never give up the keyboard. You know, the iPhone was a music player, a toy that too shall pass. And so the number one challenge for the folks inside of BlackBerry were was their belief that they were king of the hill and that somebody making a music player, piece of glass that, you know, when you typed on it, half the times your fingers were too big, didn’t hit the right letters. You know, they said, well that will just remain a niche toy. So arrogance, big or small, was a major challenge.

Louis: I was hoping you’d mention the big data conundrum that leads to absolutely no insights. But maybe you can talk about that a bit as well as a sign.

Allen Adamson: Yeah, part of it is they collect tons of data but no one’s looking at it. And you don’t have a little bit of what I refer to as a Jerry Seinfeld. You ever wonder why that’s happening? Why is that happening? And early in my career it was astounding that some people could look at numbers and say, here’s why and here’s something interesting. And other people just report all the numbers. So I was in a meeting at Unilever and somebody said 28% of people’s bathrooms have white tiles. And I said, why are we collecting that data? It’s up 5%. Great. So they’re no longer and so until somebody clever in the research group says, well, you know why that’s interesting, alan? Is because 95% of people who shop for soap try to match the color of the soap to the color of the tile. So if white tile bathrooms are exploding in the US we better come out with a white colored bar of soap. Otherwise our pink bar won’t be in other words. But you still got to step back and say why do I care about it? And most people collect data and don’t say the so what? Wow.

Louis: So that’s a pretty good introduction to this episode. Now I think listeners are pretty interesting to hear your perspective on how to practically avoid all of those mistakes that you are mentioning and how to practically avoid turning into a company like BlackBerry or Kodak or any of those companies that used to be huge leaders in their field and that lost their way. So how do you do that? And I know it’s going to be difficult perhaps to distill down to that level, but what is the number one, what is the first step to actually stay relevant and keep up with the changes?

Attitude Shift: From Success to Paranoia

Allen Adamson: Well, to just add onto your point, of the hundred companies, there were a hundred ways you could fall behind and become irrelevant. There were very few. Like here are the three things you do to shift. If you only do these three things, there was not a magic potion. There were a few things that one, you had to getting back to tennis, you had to avoid the unforced error. You had to make sure your pizza tasted good, you had to make sure that your product wasn’t killing somebody. There were a lot of ways you could fall behind. But assuming you cover all the things, there were a few things that help companies shift. And the first one where we started about Mardi Green was attitudinal and the companies that tended to stay ahead of the game had a bit of what the famous founder of intel said. Only the paranoid survive. And the companies that are succeeding and shifting ahead had an attitude was just because we were successful yesterday, so what. In fact we spoke to the folks at Marriott who was one of the companies that tended to stay more relevant than many, many other in a hospitality chain, they just bought another U chain. And one of Bill Marriott’s famous thing quotes was success is never final. And so the first one is to realize that just because you have a good quarter or a good year, the only thing for sure is that was yesterday. And you better have an attitude of trying something new. So attitudinal openness or realizing that just because you’re top of the heap. The only thing that means is you’re not going to be top of the heap tomorrow unless you change.

Louis: So what does it mean? Like, from your experience, you’re working with a lot of big brands at the minute and you have mentioned you have worked with many companies in the past as well. So from your experience, what does it take for a company to switch their attitude from thinking they are on top of their game and they don’t have to change anything to thinking, shit, we constantly need to make sure that we move and shake things up.

Building Leadership and Diverse Teams for Change

Allen Adamson: Not surprising leadership. It was a, you know, if the CEO was risk averse and most CEOs are risk averse, you know, they try to, yeah, what could go wrong? How do I not get fired? And anytime you shift ahead, the one thing that’s true is that betting on tomorrow is never a sure bet. Even when you think, oh sure, Apple knows what they’re doing, it’s always a crapshoot. And so you need to have a culture and a leadership that says, all right, we’re going to try this and if you wait till you’re 100% sure, the only thing you’ll be is the number three or number four to market, you’ll lose that way. Because when you’re looking at shifting your business, I think the auto business is perfect. You’re still going to make more money selling gasoline combustion engines, you’re still going to make more money building SUVs and the electric car is not going to be a moneymaker for most manufacturers until the convergence happens and tipping point happens. And by then, if you said, well now I’m going to get into it, forget it, it’s over. I mean, across every category when we’ve seen that happen, if you wait to see what happens tomorrow doesn’t work. The other dimension that marketers any is group think. Everyone yeses everyone to death and everyone firms that hire everyone that went to the same school, that grew up in the same neighborhood, that see the world through one lens tended to more often than not get shifted into the ditch. Companies that tend to stay ahead have a diverse workforce, multiple points of view. Everyone looks at the world differently and don’t have a fixed worldview. And so having an organization that looks at life differently and having a diverse team around you. There’s an old book about the forming of the US government back in the 1700s and it was the a game of rivals, a team of rivals Lincoln headed. And so if you surround yourself with people that see the world just like you and tend to agree with you, that was another massive recipe for it won’t be long until you are irrelevant. So surrounding yourself with people that see the world differently and are comfortable speaking up in a culture that’s comfortable disagreeing and having good debates and good arguments tended to lead to organizations that did well.

Louis: There’s a very good resource about this particular aspect, like sharing your point of view and sharing your feedback, not being afraid to say what you think. Is a book called Radical Candor. I don’t know if you heard of it. Very practical, very interesting on this point of view. So hiring a diverse team seems to be something a bit more practical and actionable.

Allen Adamson: It’s practical, but most companies don’t do it. Every company they recruit from school. So I went to the school. So we’re going to go there. The number, yes, they’re all good schools. And if you go to a good school, you get hire someone who learns how to think and problem solve, not memorize and be wrote. But if you only hire from two universities, you’re going to get myopic thinking.

Louis: Yeah. And you’re going to get white males coming from medium class or middle class or higher. And yeah, then you start losing touch with customers if the customer you’re selling to are not necessarily white males coming from the same background. But I want to come back briefly before we move on to maybe step two or the other segment is the leadership side because I know for a fact a lot of listeners would contact me about this issue. They do struggle to change their leader’s mind when they don’t, when they do shady marketing, when they think that the way they do it is fine. And this really struggle to make to change their mind. So from your perspective, when you come into a business that where you clearly see leadership to be in a position where they don’t change, they don’t like change, they are uncomfortable with all of the stuff you mentioned before. What do you say? How do you convince them to change?

Convincing Risk-Averse Leadership to Change

Allen Adamson: Well, it is difficult on the outside, it’s difficult on the inside. The best strategy is to make tomorrow real in front of them. So when we share research, we don’t say 42% of consumers think you’re irrelevant. We go out and film four or five consumers telling them right to your set, I would never buy your pizza. It tastes bad. It tastes like cardboard. I’m online every day telling my friends, your pizza tastes like cardboard. And so making the number come to life is one dimension. The other is to prototype, to show what the world’s going to look like. Help Them see around the corner, everyone. There are a lot of major companies that hire futurists that will predict what life will be like. And most of them you don’t have to hire a futurist to really figure you can go watch a 50 year old movie 2001 or a star Trek episode. And they got most of what’s going to happen pretty right. They just are off on the when part and when is really important. Most of the big failures have happened when people think the future’s here and they’re ahead of it. I had a great conversation with the senior person at LVMH in the fashion business in Paris and he came out of P and G. The P and G world was all about certainty. And he says what I learned at P and G is really not relevant at lvmh. The skill that’s most relevant at LVMH is I need to think of myself as a surfer and if I’m too far ahead of the trend, the wave’s going to wipe me out. And of course if I miss a trend, I’m dead. And so part of it is feeling that balance as to you need to be slightly ahead of the wave breaking. And it’s much more of a touchy feely game to try to figure out where the world’s going than it is in 2019. People are going to give up their cars and start using scooters.

Louis: So to come back to the first point you made about having actual people telling you what they think of your brand, of your company, of your product, instead of just spreadsheets of numbers is super powerful. We talked about customer research a lot on this show and that really connects and I think that’s huge tip that I would always say as well is Instead of sharing PowerPoint, just even invite a few customers of yours in the office and let them talk and you’ll see it’s going to be much easier. But to your second point, how do you like it’s I get the concept right of the wave and making sure that you surf on the right like at the right moment on it to stay relevant, but yet to test new things. How do you know you’re going too far? How do you know you’re being too conservative?

Allen Adamson: Well, it’s always another thing. We found out the companies that tended to, if they tended to be ahead of the curve all the time, they were better off because then you just have to wait and hopefully you know your time will come. But most companies waited too long and they were too late because they Researched it to death. They analyzed it to death. They got into the classic analysis paralysis. You look at every bankrupt company in the US lately, Toys R Us, we spent a lot of time with the Toys R Us former executives and there was an internal raging debate for years at Toys R Us. Do we try to compete with Amazon and Walmart and try to sell you toys for buy two, get two free or do we try to make a high end toy experience where you go in and say my kid likes this, what do you recommend? And they couldn’t decide. They had research, so they did both. They opened flagship stores in Times Squares and they opened warehouse stores and they failed on both fronts. Same with Barnes and Noble. And so most of the time the analysis paralysis. So you’re better off being early and launching as Apple did in Newton and having four people buy a PDA back 20 years ago, that didn’t work. But a lot of the learning led to the iPhone. Then you are waiting till the iPhone is launched and then doing what Microsoft did in trying to launch a Zoom.

Louis: Yeah, I think that’s what Apple does quite well. And they are the first trillion dollar company ever. And so obviously they’re successful for a reason. I think one thing that they could quite well sometimes is they launch new products to learn obviously to sell. But you can also see that they could do it much better. But they want to just test the concept and they can afford to, they can actually afford to do that. But for a smaller company it will come from like the lean startup type of thinking. Right. It’s like almost creating a team. That’s what Seth Godin shared on this podcast actually. He was saying to innovate and actually come up with new ideas and really be a bit more ahead. You just have a team inside your company that you put in another building and you just let them take risks.

Allen Adamson: Right by far. Otherwise the gravitational pull will pull them back. And the other big thing we were talking about, what else can a company do? You need to make sure you have the right, what we call DNA. Lots of companies try to, like Barnes and Noble tried to get in to make tablets. They came up with a tablet called the Nook, but they were a book retailer. And so by the time they launched a tablet, you know, forget they had no, you know, no skill sets. And lots of companies try to do, try to shift ahead but don’t have the DNA. We had a great conversation with the leaders of Hasbro, a toy company and we said, well, so how did, how did you make Hasbro successful? He said, Well, I came into the company 15 years ago, 10 years ago, he said, but there was a big uproar because I came from a tiny division in Hollywood that was making some bad movies for the company. And when I came to the headquarters, they said, what are you bringing this guy in to lead the company? He only makes crummy movies. He doesn’t know the difference between Monopoly and Risk. Are you crazy? But it turns out that DNA bringing that Hollywood DNA into Hasbro made them successful with every other toy company is still dying off in the toy business. So making sure you have the right skill set inside. And if you want to compete in the new space, don’t assume you can retrain somebody to out Apple. Apple.

Louis: So that’s the first, I would say the first category, like the attitudes, right? Making sure that the leadership understand it. Making sure that you share real data from actual customer in front of you. Making sure that you paint the picture of what tomorrow looks like and starting prototyping. Making sure that you have a team that start innovating that you put outside of the building to avoid the huge gravitational pull that will make them do a Toys R Us and basically not try many things. Making sure you don’t overly analyze and launching stuff. Is it a good summary of this first theme?

Allen Adamson: Yeah, very good. All right, thank you very much. Those are the things you get. You get a B plus. Okay, thanks. But the final piece is that execution matters and companies, as you see, do a few things brilliantly. And lots of companies are still stuck. We had a great conversation with a New York Times journalist, Tom Friedman, and he talked about this notion that average is over and that if you’re average at anything today, somebody will outdo you. And most companies succeeded because they were the first or only and they just do things averagely. And if you are going to get into the market, you’ve got to be really focused. And especially in the new marketing world we live in, which is all driven by word of mouth, right? No one, no one shares ordinary. You don’t go and say, gee, I had an okay flight from London to Paris and they got me roughly on time and they didn’t spill any. You know, you will either share what happens when they fly you to the wrong city or that you get there and then buy. You know, the chef on the plane came out and served you a birthday cake. And so the whole world of average afflicts every company. And if you’re not going to be extraordinary at anything, you’re going to be invisible today.

Louis: And that comes back to one point we made about Apple where, like, they would test stuff, and you made a point that they started this PDA like 20 years ago. They started to sell it, it didn’t really work out. And you mentioned that they learned a lot from it. And by executing quite fast and making a lot of mistakes they were still able to afford. They learned a lot of lessons, and that enabled them for the next iteration to do something better and better and better. So when I started my career, I had this idea in my head that you must work hard to make sure that something is really, really, really good before shipping it out. But in fact, I realized that the only way to actually create something really, really, really good in the future is to start now with something.

Allen Adamson: Continuously improve. Right.

Louis: Something shitty enough to be comfortable with, something shitty enough that people will tell you feedback and share their feedback so you can improve. Because there’s no other way, right? There’s no other way.

Allen Adamson: Yeah. In a world you have to move fast. If you test and test and test and sell, it’s perfect. You’ll be toast.

Louis: And this is how I started the podcast. I mean, you wouldn’t believe the level of the interviews when I started, the quality. That wasn’t that good. Right. But the fact that you just kept going and going and going, that made me a bit better at interviewing people and that the podcast started to be a bit better as well. I mean, that’s a small example, but still, I think it’s relevant. So, okay, attitude. The big shift towards execution versus just over planning, overanalyzing. Now, based on all the conversation you had, based on your experience, what is the kind of the second pillar of shifting ahead? What are the items in there?

Mission-Driven Transformation: Greenwich Library Case Study

Allen Adamson: Well, make sure you have the. Make sure you’re not looking at your business myopically, and that’s a business school world. But every company just making sure you understand why people are going to buy you your service or product and really understanding that. And there’s so many examples. Let me just go back to the Greenwich library thing because it was so fascinating. When I spoke to. I was just expecting people to say, well, people don’t borrow books anymore, so we rent podcasts. But they went out into the community and said, well, the whole mission of the library needs to change. Our purpose needs to change. A lot of people talking about purpose driven marketing, they said, we need to be the hub of Greenwich. Greenwich is a small town out of New York City. And if we were the hub of Greenwich, what would a hub deliver? Well, yes, you could still borrow books But a hub in Greenwich would fuel the startup community. So you’d want to have sort of a wework there so people can come in and use it as office space. A hub of Greenwich would need to be a tech shop. What happens if you have an Apple laptop but a PC? You’re screwed. Most times. You can’t go to the Genius bar. Microsoft’s customer service is awful, so they set up a genius bar in the Greenwich library. But for any technology, you can’t download this. And so what are librarians good at? You can always ask Google, but if you ask Google, you end up with the 500 paid things. And to be good at Google search, you’re still better off getting to someone who really knows how to find a needle in a haystack. So having a librarian work with you to try to find something out accelerates. So they became a different. They set up training classes, everything but borrowing books and as such have become crowded, vibrant. It feels like a startup inside the library, not a sleepy place you go to read a novel.

National Geographic’s Pivot from Magazines to Experiences

Louis: So how do you think they did that? So you mentioned the mission behind it, but we also mentioned the importance of focusing on the right thing, not overdoing. Right. Like you mentioned Toys R Us, where they started to do two things at the same time. And it almost sounds like your library example seems also a bit like this. They did this tech shop. They also did this co working space.

Allen Adamson: But they had a clear laser focus on if you’re going to be the hub of this community and help this community succeed, what’s important to it. And it was about business, it was about technology. They had a clear sense of what their constituents had. Now, Greenwich is probably not the best test case, because once they figured out what they needed to do, they could also fund because it’s an affluent area, they could rebuild the library, they could hire the right people, they could execute it, which was another piece. But, you know, I think that getting to that right definition, we had a great conversation with another brand I grew up loving, which was National Geographic. And they almost didn’t make it because they defined their business. We’re in the magazine business, but no one’s reading magazines like no one’s looking books. And so when they dug into it, what do they stand for? They standed for helping you, you know, understand nature, but maybe not understand, maybe experience it. So one of the first smart things they did was they formed about 10 years ago a partnership with a Swedish cruise line, a tiny cruise line called Lindblad. And so instead of cruises, where you sit on the deck and you drink pina coladas and go to dinner. Lindblatt was about cruising you so you could get off on a glacier in Antarctica and walk with the penguins. And so all of a sudden, those became National Geographic expeditions. And now, instead of reading a magazine, you go with a National Geographic naturalist. You land in Antarctica, you have a National Geographic photographer show you how to take a picture. If you have an slr, he’ll get you the perfect penguin picture. If you have an iPhone, there’s a National Geographic iPhone expert, and they’ll help you actually have a conversation with a penguin. And sure enough, when the people look at your Facebook feed or your Instagram feed, they go, oh, my God, I gotta do that. And so they pivoted from just a, you know, a reporting of what’s going on in Antarctica to saying, you know, experience Antarctica. And of course, they did other things. They realized that why magazines? And so they said, gee, we’ve got great talent like Jane Goodall, who understood, you know, for 40 or 50 years have been studying gorillas in Africa. Let’s make a movie about it. And it came out this year, release in movie theaters. It’s called Jane. So they realized they got out of their critical flaw, which was we’re in the magazine business, so that means we send a reporter out to write a story and take a picture.

Louis: So applying this to Toys Earth as an example, so it seems like what the mistake that Toros errors did was to focusing on two missions, in a sense exactly unrelated to you.

Allen Adamson: Two things you could not combine. You couldn’t be the lowest price option and provide the highest level of expertise.

Louis: So if you’re working with Toys R Us, when they were questioning this, you would probably have said, let’s focus on one core mission, what we believe in as a company, what is our point of view? And let’s execute on this laser focus.

Allen Adamson: And then you have to execute well. So they fail. Most companies fail on two fronts. One, they couldn’t decide, and two, even if they could decide, they didn’t have the right execution. So if you were going to go after the price game at Toys R Us, you know, years ago, you would have said, maybe we should buy Amazon, you know, because we’re never going to win the no matter how big we build a warehouse, we’re never going to win the toy business. So even if you pick the right path, you still got to figure out how to win, and that’s by no means easy.

Louis: So in terms of this second kind of theme, we started to talk about, which is about this mission driven thing. Do you see anything else important that is in there that we haven’t talked about? Anything at all?

Allen Adamson: You need to constantly revisit it. And just because you have a mission doesn’t mean it’s the right one or you should stick to it until you’re out of business. We had a great conversation with the leadership at Conservation International, a global nonprofit. And their mission was to protect endangered ecosystems. And for 30 years they were phenomenally successful at trying to protect. And one day the founders got up and said, we’re on the wrong mission. We can’t build walls around these ecosystems and keep the outside world in. In Africa and Asia we have to work with the local communities and have a symbiotic relationship with the outside because we can’t keep the walls to stop all the poachers. So if we don’t make it economically viable to harvest the coffee beans or to work with the animals, then we’re going to fail. So they changed their mission and made it more symbiotic. Half the board quit. How could you support Starbucks? How could you do this? And. But it’s phenomenally successful because they’ve been more successful in fulfilling their mission, executing it, because it’s more realistic, even though it’s not what the founder originally said when he started the organization.

Louis: And how does one think of a mission in the first place? How do you typically invite companies to find their why? To find why they are even existing it really?

Purpose-Driven Marketing: Authentic vs. Bullshit

Allen Adamson: And I think that’s one of the. We talk about marketing bs. One of the biggest bullshit industries out there is if you’re on the outside, I’m going to tell you your mission for your purpose. If it’s not inside and authentic in who you are, you can, you know, lots of companies go out and say let’s do research and find out what people want. And then we’ll say we do that and they fail 100% of the time because instantly it’s not authentic. Instantly it’s not believable. Instantly they can’t pull it off. So the first thing to do in trying to be purpose driven is to not hire all these high fast talking marketing experts who try to write fancy lines. But to say, do you have a purpose? And if you don’t, don’t make it up. If you’re just in there to make a fast buck, don’t say you want to save mankind because consumers are getting smarter and smarter and will call BS on you. So I would say maybe 25% of companies can possibly say they’re purpose driven and the other 75% are all bullshit.

Louis: How do you deal with that when you are in the 75%, you’re better

Allen Adamson: off not having a purpose and just doing your job than making up a fake purpose and having people find you out. Because authenticity matters with younger consumers. And if people see you saying I want to save the planet and dancing on ads and yet your leadership team is driving big SUVs, don’t forget it. You’ll be found out.

Louis: But it means that for those 75%, do you think that they’ll be able to shift ahead and to keep up with the change?

Allen Adamson: Yeah, I think that if they do many other things. But you don’t have to be purpose driven to shift ahead. You just have to execute and be able to change fast and be a pretty good chameleon. But. But it certainly helps. Especially with the Gen Z and Millennials. People want to know not only what a company makes and what it delivers, but why. And you know, they’re voting as everyone knows, more and more with their credit card than they’re voting at the poll booth.

Louis: My guts tell me it’s just a gut feeling. My guts tell me that more and more this purpose driven style of organization are going to flourish more and more. Because you mentioned the G world and the M world, the millennials and Gen Z. Right.

Allen Adamson: But

Louis: I am part of the millennial category. Even I fucking hate the term because it’s such a broad term.

Allen Adamson: It sounds like you’re just going to hang out and live at your parents house until they throw you out.

Louis: Exactly. But there’s something that I can see happening definitely in the younger generation is the, is the fact that people really give a shit about something bigger than just the product they buy. Right.

Allen Adamson: And they read the fine print, they do the research and they’ve grown up and so much bullshit being thrown at them they have a better nose to smell you’re full of shit or you’re not.

Louis: That’s why everyone hates marketers. Okay, so attitude. The second one is more about the finding your purpose and aligning that with your, with what you offer to the outside world. If you do have a purpose. If not, let’s not try to fake it. What will be kind of the third theme?

Move Fast and Break Things: The Facebook Approach

Allen Adamson: The third theme is pretty obvious one like we started with what a surprise. Move fast. You know, when we did some conversations out at Facebook and Facebook certainly going through its challenges now, you know, on the walls there is move fast and break things. And then when I Was speaking to the team there. They said, well, you know, when we’re on an assignment for Mark, I can I get a hall pass? It’s called a hall, you know, what’s the hall pass? I said, well, I can get out of all the bullshit meetings. I don’t have to go to hr, I don’t have to go to the dental plan meeting. You know, if I’m on a project, I can just close every door and just go into the basement and focus on it and break things along the way. So, you know, when they first bought Instagram, the marketplace looked at Facebook and said, are you crazy paying all that? But they knew already way back then that people were sharing more pictures and words. So you know, they have a lot of headwinds right now. But in general, if you’re going to shift ahead no matter what you do, you have to move faster than you think.

Maintaining Founder’s Mentality at Scale

Louis: And shouldn’t all of the Facebook employees have an old pass, it sounds like to get you done?

Allen Adamson: Yeah, I mean it’s such a big company. Yes. But most companies, you try to get a meeting. So this is another major finding. For companies that don’t shift ahead, most of them have a tomorrow meeting, a futures meeting on Thursday. We’ll discuss tomorrow. So if the future is what we call an agenda item, where they say on Thursday we’re going to talk about what we’re going to do next year, you’re screwed because if Thursday comes, I’m too busy, I’ll go home or something else. Companies that are paranoid every day and every day they’re trying to reinvent tomorrow and don’t leave it for the strategic planning group or the five year plan or three year plan or 90 day plan. Companies that maintain that sense of a startup hunger, one of the things is something called another famous book called the founder’s mentality and your listeners could pick it up. But basically when you work, we talk to lots of founders and founders. You know, my father in law was a founder of a company and he was in the retail, retail shopping business. And on a Saturday or Sunday he would go to retail stores and just wander the mall and talk to me about, look at this chopper here. And so it was so much part of them, they stay close to their customer. They ask people at dinner, they say, what do you think of this? They are constantly paranoid. Is this right? Is this right? And once you lose that hunger for saying what do I have to do to succeed? And the future becomes an agenda item, you are on your way to Shady Farm’s retirement Home.

Louis: But it sounds like you need to be paranoid about your customer, what they think. It sounds like you shouldn’t be paranoid that much about what Coke is doing if you’re Pepsi.

Allen Adamson: Exactly.

Louis: So if I have to summarize the step by step or the kind of the themes that we discussed together on this episode right now, is really focusing that much on your customers that you can’t be relevant. Because if you really are paranoid and talk to them every day and face to face, not only via spreadsheets, you are probably in a better situation than

Allen Adamson: you’re in a better situation. But then you’ve got. Once you see them customers changing, you got to be able to do something about it. And whether it’s changing your offer, not easy, or making sure you have people on your team that have the skill set, if you’re in the book retailing business and you decide you want to sell computer tablets, well, you better hire some people from Silicon Valley and have some geeks in there. You can’t take a book retailer and make them into a tech retailer. Right.

Louis: So understand your people, understand your customer, understand your purpose if you have one. Get shit done, move fast, don’t be afraid to break things literally. And you should be in a better position than most companies out there.

Allen Adamson: You have a 50, 50 chance of shifting a headband. That’s good because execution matters. You can do everything right and still fail. It’s just really hard.

Louis: Right. Alan, you’ve been an absolute pleasure to talk to you and thanks for taking the time to do this step by step with me. I have a few more questions before I let you go that I always ask my guests. What do you think marketers should learn today that will help them in the next 10 years? 20 years, 50 years?

Allen Adamson: Yeah. People only share extraordinary and you better be extraordinary. And extraordinary changes. So everyone just has a check the box mentality. Oh, we have a little, we have social media. We’re doing that, we’re doing a little product sampling. Everyone does a check the box thing. You’re better off doing one thing because average is over and doing it extraordinary. So stay more focused, do less and be better at it. Then try to do everything. A lot of, a lot of marketers do the like. When I watched my earlier in my life when my 7 year old used to play soccer, football for the rest of the world, everyone chased the ball. You know, there were 10 kids around the ball and the whole field was empty. And that’s what’s happened in marketing. Everyone says, oh, we got to be on digital Social. Everyone’s running after and so the rest of the field’s open. You got to zig where everyone else is zagging.

Louis: You have a lot of sports analogy. I love it.

Allen Adamson: Bad ones? No, they’re good.

Louis: Tennis, golf, soccer.

Allen Adamson: Interesting.

Louis: What are the top three resources you would recommend our listeners today? That could be anything. Books, conferences, podcasts.

Allen Adamson: I would say my first is get out of your office. The companies that read too much and just look at everything online and run their life. Just like my kids when they have their nose and their smartphone all day.

Louis: Fucking millennials.

Allen Adamson: They have no clue what’s going on. So get out, travel, talk to people, try to see everything with fresh eyes. Get out of your neighborhood, shop in a different neighborhood, go to a part of the city you’ve never been to. Go talk to people at a train station. You know, get out from behind your desk and start, you know, looking around and living a bit. Not just be totally myopically focused on what you’re doing and answering emails.

Louis: So that’s the number one. Yeah.

Allen Adamson: And I would even broaden that further. I had a, when I came out of business school, I had an interview with a big ad agency and I went through nine interviews and they finally said, now you’re going to meet the chairman. And I sat in his office and he said, so I was ready to talk about market segmentation and all the bullshit I had learned in business school. And he said, so Alan, tell me the last book you read and the last movie you went to and what did you think of it? I, of course, Green Eggs and Ham. He goes, well, tell me about Green Eggs and Ham. And I go, oh, I’m screwed now. And finally after I survived that somehow, I asked him, well, why do you why I’m coming here for a marketing job? Why did you ask me about the last book I read? He goes, we don’t want people who’ve read business books. We want people who are our clients, need people who are in touch with what’s going on in culture. And if you don’t zoom all the way out, you’re not going to see what’s going on. So I don’t want you studying marketing books when you’re here. I want you to be our clients eyes and ears and see what’s going on. So that’s another extension of getting out from behind your desk, but broader than just looking at the Pepsi can, the Coke can, but really seeing what’s going on with seeing how people are living what’s going on. What else is interesting to them because in a world of too much information, more information ain’t gonna help.

Louis: Right? So that’s number two. Very, very strong statement again. And what will be the third resource?

Allen Adamson: Third resource is probably to. And it’s somewhat related to the other. It’s hang out with different people. Again, get out of your bubble. They’re all about getting out of your bubble because it’s the number one thing most people. The elections in the US were people in New York and LA were surprised, but they were in a bubble. They were in Facebook listening to their friends say what was going on. Get different. Get out of your bubble on a friends basis to talk to people that you ordinarily don’t talk to. Try to get diversity into your life. Don’t hang out with your same four friends in your basement saying the world’s crazy and we all have the same purview. Get out and, and diversify your view of the world because the more clarity you have on change happening right in front of your nose, it will likely come not from you, but from your friends. But get different friends too. Don’t just hang out with the same old suspects.

Louis: Well, Alan, as I said, it has been absolute pleasure to talk to you. I learned a lot from you and what I liked the most about our conversation was the amount of examples that you shared, illustrating many points. So thanks for doing that. Thanks for taking the effort to do that. Where can listeners connect with you and learn more from you?

Allen Adamson: You can go to shift ahead book.com and I have lots of my content. I write for Forbes often and up there or Metaforce Co. It’s my consulting firm that drives helping companies shift Ahead in the marketplace once again.

Louis: Again, thank you very much.

Allen Adamson: Pleasure enjoyed it. Have a good day.

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Allen Adamson: 2.

Louis: Select all unread industry email except yours. 3. Delete and don’t think twice.

Allen Adamson: 4.

Louis: Quickly scheme yours. Amy said, Also loving the new content is coming from you. It feels really lovely. Kendall Said, I like your writing a lot. It really resonates. There’s so much bullshit there. It’s good to touch the authentic. And Chloe said, where is the I love this email button? Brilliant.

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