Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback (3 page)

Prior to this study, Taco Bell had launched two new products that had been duds in the test market: a quesadilla and a grilled stuffed burrito. We’d introduced them simply by advertising them in descriptive terms, saying Taco Bell now had a new quesadilla and a new larger, grilled burrito. Both products, however, also happened to be very easy to eat on the go because the grilling process sealed the ingredients together in their tortilla wrappers. So we took those same two products and repositioned them as portable and easy to eat. We signed up Jeff Bezos from Amazon as our celebrity spokesperson and advertised the quesadilla as the hottest new “handheld” on the market, a takeoff on the new technology craze that was so appealing to our young target audience. Then we relaunched our Grilled Stuft Burrito as the “heavy-duty portable” with some really funny advertising. And guess what happened? The same
two products that had failed before now generated double-digit same-store sales growth. By repositioning them in the
context of how our customers were thinking and presenting them as a solution to their major problem with our brand, these products were now a huge success.

We then built on this formula for success by creating our Crunchwrap as the ideal portable product. The ingredients were sealed within an octagonal soft tortilla. Our advertising had customers claim that the Crunchwrap was “Good to Go,” and we used a wavelike hand movement that helped the phrase go viral and become part of the vernacular. More important, the Crunchwrap was named “product of the year” by
Nation’s Restaurant
News
and resulted in tremendous same-store sales growth. Again, by focusing on portability, we created a winner. It was a home-run insight that turned Taco Bell around.

What we did at Taco Bell is what I call reframing. You don’t just talk about what you’re offering people; you make sure your brand or product is positioned in a way that is relevant to whomever you’re trying to influence. This kind of insight-driven thinking works in all kinds of situations. Snickers achieved dramatic growth when it tapped into the consumer mind-set that candy bars are not good for you and started touting their brand as “The Snack that Satisfies.” Swatch did something similar when, instead of positioning themselves as simply another watch brand, they realized that consumers wanted to use their watches as clothing accessories. Swatch started offering a wide variety of watch-bands, and soon their products became a fashion statement. After the people at Kellogg’s Corn Flakes realized that customers had become so enamored with the plethora of new cereal products that they had
forgotten about their classic brand, they rejuvenated sales by challenging people to “Taste it for the first time.” Pampers revitalized its image and sales by shifting focus from a brand that stood for dryness, which any diaper brand could have claimed, to one that appealed to mothers by emphasizing how much the company cared about the development of their babies. And if you’re as old as I am, you may remember how Oldsmobile successfully countered its stodgy image by talking about its new model as “Not your father’s Oldsmobile.” You get the idea. Knowing how people are thinking gives you the insight you need to reframe your product in a way that gets people on your side.

The great news for you as a leader is that this insight-driven approach doesn’t work just with customers; it’s the right first step in any leadership situation. For example, Jim Stengel, now a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, told me how he started off his new position as global marketing officer for P&G in 2001 by getting inside the heads of the people he was meant to lead. The company was not in good shape at that time, so he hired a couple of professors to find out why and what effect that was having on the people who worked there.

“We spent time talking to P&G people all around the world,” Stengel explained to me. “We wanted to understand what was on their minds, what their pain points were, what winning would look like to them. We used the same techniques we use for brand research on the people within our organization. And what I found was, they weren’t spending their time doing what they loved doing. They had lost their sense of purpose. They wanted to win so badly, but we just weren’t.”

Stengel started addressing those concerns one by one, and the effort had a real impact. For example, there had been a tradition at P&G whereby people would move to a new position about once every eighteen months. The practice wasn’t very popular because it meant people had little time to get comfortable in their roles. Nonetheless, no one wanted to complain about it because it might seem that they weren’t team players or didn’t want to get ahead. But Stengel agreed that it wasn’t the best way to utilize people’s abilities, so he reframed the issue, stating publicly that he was going to keep people in their jobs longer in order for them to better develop their expertise. He also wanted to bring back a spirit of fun and creativity to the workplace, so he did things like take a group to the Cannes International Advertising Festival to show that he believed creativity was important. It was only after
Stengel started to solve the problems that people were having and to change their perceptions about their work environment that things started to turn around financially as well.

Because I know it works, I believe it’s absolutely imperative that you use an insight-driven approach like this, and believe me, I use it every
single time I need to take people with me. As I’ve been writing this book, for example, I’ve also been preparing for our annual, end-of-year investors meeting in New York, where we go through the financial state of the company and present our future outlook for tomorrow and beyond. I’ve been the CEO of Yum! Brands for over ten years now, and I’m proud to say they’ve been really good years for the company. Our stock has consistently outperformed the market, and it was up over 40 percent going into this meeting. But talking about the past isn’t all that compelling for investors; in fact, they think of past results as yesterday’s newspaper. What investors want to know is whether we can keep the momentum going. Will we have
another good year? Where will we be ten years from now? Have we run out of gas, or can we continue to grow? My challenge then became, how can we reframe our message, our performance, and our potential to investors in a way that addresses, head-on, how they’re thinking at that moment? As you’ll see in a few pages, that’s exactly what we did. Getting inside the head of those you need is your starting place for taking people with you.

The first job of a successful leader is to have an idea of where you want to lead people. I start off my Taking People with You program with a straightforward question:
What’s the single biggest thing you can imagine that will grow your business or change your life?

I said it was a straightforward question; I didn’t say it was an easy one. The answer that you come up with is what I call a Big Goal, by which I mean something more than just small improvements or modest growth. It’s not very bold to do just marginally better than the year before.

Setting the right goal is the key to achieving success, and leaders often fall short in this area by not aiming high enough. None of us wants to fail, for a whole host of reasons (job preservation being among the top ones), so we tend to be cautious about how high we set our
sights. But the truth of the matter is, shooting for just good enough rather than for greatness will not inspire the people around you. It also means you’ll never get a chance to find out what you and the people you lead are truly capable of. And that’s a shame, for your business, for your people, and for yourself.

So when you answer that question, take a moment to ask yourself: Am I thinking big enough? Use the following tool to help you think through your Big Goal and determine if you should be setting the bar a bit higher.

Can you achieve your Big Goal all by yourself? The answer is no. So
who do you need to affect, influence, or take with you to be successful?

The answer to this second key question will establish the target audience for your goal. It may include your boss, your coworkers, people on your team, people from other departments whose help you’ll need, or even people from outside your organization, such as shareholders, vendors, customers, or business partners. One of the biggest mistakes leaders make in this area is not thinking through
all
the people they have to lead to get where they want to go. You must do this in the same focused way that a marketer does when trying to identify potential customers.

The following People Map exercise will help you think through whom you need to reach to accomplish your Big Goal. We will come back to this map later in the book to make sure you’ve thought through everyone you need to take with you.

As you think about what you want to accomplish, identify the people you need to bring with you to achieve your Big Goal.

1. Using the map below, write your Big Goal in the center circle.
   
2. Identify the groups of people you need to bring with you to achieve your Big Goal, such as your team, stakeholders, customers, etc. Think broadly: Are other functions involved? Other companies? Other industries? Have you considered everyone you need to bring with you? Have you looked up, down, and sideways across the organization?
   
3. Where appropriate, write the names of specific people within each group that you need to bring with you.