Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback (15 page)

I articulated this notion of “Performance with Purpose” for PepsiCo. Now performance is what PepsiCo is known for, that’s what drives the company. But performance alone is not going to carry us into the future. I always say to our people, we operate with a license from society, which means we cannot add costs to society. We have to make sure that we help society. We are big enough to be a little country ourselves, so we have a duty. And the three things that we absolutely have to do are: One, we are committed to transforming our portfolio to have a balance of treats and healthy eats. Second, we want to be environmentally a very responsible entity, whether it’s water usage, energy usage, or packaging waste. And third, we want to make sure every person who comes to PepsiCo not just has a living, but can make a life.

—
INDRA NOOYI, CEO OF PEPSICO

A good vision invites people to be part of something bigger than themselves; it gives them a noble cause to participate in. The Starbucks vision statement, for example, isn’t anything as obvious as “to make great coffee”; it’s “to inspire and nurture the human spirit, one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.” The Walt Disney Company aspires, simply and profoundly, “to make people happy.” Our own vision at Yum! Brands has evolved since that letter I wrote in 1998. Now it’s to be “the defining global company that feeds the world.” These are things that pretty much anyone can feel passionate about.

A lot of big companies, even the best of them, have stumbled in this area. Bill Weldon, CEO
of Johnson & Johnson, once told me that his company had a tagline that they put on just about everything: “The world’s most diversified healthcare company.” It may have been true and it may be pretty impressive, but Weldon said: “To me, that’s not emotional. You need something emotive that people can relate to. So a few years ago, we sat down and we wrote what we call a caring statement, which basically says, ‘We care for the world one person at a time.’ And that resonates.” They tested it with employees, customers, doctors, and healthcare providers, and it resonated with every group.

Google:
To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Walmart:
To give ordinary folks the chance to buy the same things as rich people.

The Walt Disney Company:
To make people happy.

Starbucks:
To inspire and nurture the human spirit, one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.

P&G:
We will provide branded products and services of superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world’s customers, now and for generations to come.

Yum! Brands:
To be the defining global company that feeds the world.

Words on a page are just that. You need to be careful that the words you choose to explain your goal and communicate your vision capture the attention of your target audience and inspire them to act.

One night I was watching a
60 Minutes
segment featuring Jack
Welch. He was talking about the need to get an organization pumped up about what really mattered. He believed quality was critical to his company, GE, but he didn’t just say to his people, “Quality is important.” He said he literally “went nuts” about quality, communicating its importance in everything the company did, from advertising to determining bonuses.

This got me thinking about one goal that was set early in our company, which was to improve customer satisfaction. Everyone can understand something like that, but I didn’t think we’d made enough progress at getting our people to listen and respond to the voice of the customer. So that very night I decided to change the way we talked about it to give it more emphasis. “Customer focus” became “customer mania,” and I started talking about the need to
go crazy
over understanding the needs of our customers and making them happy.

I quickly found that customer mania got everyone’s attention. It elicited a reaction. It didn’t sound like every other company out there that talks about the need to be focused on customers. It seriously and dramatically elevated the importance of the idea behind it. And now we have a much more customer-focused organization, one that measures its people on their ability to be customer maniacs.

To give another example, when Randall Stephenson became CEO of AT&T in 2007, he wanted to cause a shift in thinking within the organization. The company had always been grounded in their wireline business, but that was the past and he wanted people to be looking toward the future. And the future was wireless, because “that’s where the growth was,” he told me. So he summed up the new strategy in just two very memorable, very powerful words: “Mobilize everything.” It was impossible not to get the message from that.

As the leader, you need to think carefully about the words you choose. Use the tool that follows to help you think through how best to impart your vision. Remember, it’s not just the content of what you say, it’s also how you say it that matters.

I want to emphasize that you don’t have to be a CEO to put these principles and tools into action. These concepts don’t apply just to grand vision statements for large companies. They work on every level. When considering the goal you want to meet or the initiative you’re tying to
accomplish, ask yourself, What effect will making this happen have on people?

Everything comes back to people. Saving money improves quality of life. Improving customer service scores makes for a more enjoyable day for those who experience good service … maybe even causing them to pass on those good feelings to someone else. If an administrative assistant can significantly cut down on the use of paper, that can bring down the cost of doing business, which can keep the cost of products low for the consumer (not to mention the positive impact on the environment).

In our company, we ask: What are you doing in your piece of Yum! to help make us the defining global company that feeds the world? People answer with their own visions, depending on what they do. Brian Goldstein, one of our leading Taco Bell operators, has a vision for each of his restaurants “to be the best quick-service restaurant on the block.” And Jonathan Blum, our chief public affairs officer, came up with a vision statement for our World Hunger Relief effort that dovetails perfectly with that of the organization, which is “to give every employee, company and franchisee the opportunity to help leave the world better than we found it by truly making an impact on this global crisis.” Now that’s a noble cause that everyone can relate to.

You need people to take your vision and make it their own in order to cascade the message. After all, you can’t expect to always be around to repeat it. Noel Tichy, a professor at the University of Michigan business school, called this having a “teachable point of view.” As a leader, you need to describe your goal in clear, simple, and impactful terms to your team members so that they can make that vision relevant to their own functions and teach it to their own people. The most successful messages are communicated this way, and that’s one of the reasons why we’ve had Tichy participate in our Leadership Development Council at Yum! and emphasized his idea of leaders as teachers up and down our organization. We even use the word
coach
in place of
boss
to reinforce the concept. I often challenge people to come up with an elevator speech for their “teachable point of view,”
because if you can’t communicate why your goal is important in quick and convincing terms in the time it takes for an elevator ride, then how can you expect anyone else to be able to carry your message?

Setting forth a bold and convincing vision actually inspires people to make it their own. You may not be in a position where you can set a vision as big or as broad as the examples I cited from Google or Starbucks, but you can still set a vision for your Big Goal much as Brian Goldstein did. He thought about what would appeal to his target audience—the employees in his restaurant—and he gave them something to shoot for that they could be proud to achieve.

Simple doesn’t mean your vision isn’t powerful or even far-reaching. It means that it’s easy to understand and easy to communicate to others. If it sounds as though a consultant wrote it, redo it.

As Tom Ryan, the recently retired chairman and CEO of CVS/Caremark, once explained to me, “To get a message out, it needs to be simple and it needs to be straightforward … I think one of the jobs of a leader is to simplify the complex. And I don’t mean simple from a concept standpoint. I mean simple from the standpoint of ‘I can remember it.’”

Not long ago, Ryan’s company came up with a new mission, which was “to find easy and effective solutions for our customers,” because the health care business tends to be complicated, and people’s lives are already complicated enough. But with 220,000 people in his organization, 45 percent of whom are part time, and a lot of movement in and out, he worried whether his message was getting through. Did people get it?

Then one day he walked into the cafeteria and saw a group of employees sitting at a table just outside the door. He had noticed that this same group of people sat at this same table every single day to have lunch. So he walked over to them and asked them why they always chose to eat in the same spot. Without missing a beat, one of them replied with a smile, “Because it’s easy and effective, Tom. It’s easy and effective.” Ryan was thrilled. “I said to myself, ‘It’s working! People are getting it.’”

Self-reflection