Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback (7 page)

This kind of pattern thinking, where you look at what’s working for someone else and apply it to your own situation, is one of the best ways to make big things happen for you and your team. Combining the knowledge of others with what you know about your own brand and
industry can lead to results that are more than just incremental improvements; they can help you take a giant leap forward. The whole can actually be greater than the sum of its parts.

Another example of this happened early in my career when I was head of the Frito-Lay account at my ad agency. One day I decided to take my team to the grocery store to look around and get some ideas. That might not come as a surprise, considering the fact that Frito-Lay products are sold in grocery stores all over the country. What was surprising was how much time we spent, not by the snack foods, but in the salad dressing aisle.

The Frito-Lay account included Doritos, which at the time had only one very popular flavor, Nacho Cheese Doritos. But while perusing that salad dressing aisle, we made a discovery: Ranch dressing was far and away the best seller in the category at the time. That gave my team and me an idea: Would ranch dressing work as a chip flavor?

We went to Frito-Lay with the concept, but then it became a matter of how to position the product. So I looked at what had worked for Nacho Cheese Doritos. They had applied a unique image—nacho—to a known quantity—cheese—to make a product that was both exciting and appealing at the same time. So I asked, “How can we do the same thing for our ranch-dressing-flavored tortilla chip? How can we give a bit of uniqueness to the known quantity, which was ranch dressing?” That eventually led to Cool Ranch Doritos, which was not just a hit, it was a megahit. It’s now one of Frito-Lay’s biggest-selling and most profitable products.

This kind of pattern thinking requires that you keep your eyes open and actively seek out new ideas wherever you can find them. And you won’t truly have your eyes open unless you have enough humility to admit that the best ideas aren’t always going to come from you. Sir Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” I love that quote and wholeheartedly agree, but I would go one more: You will see even further if you stand on the giants’ shoulders and take pride in crediting and thanking them for the view.

MIND-SET CHECK

“As the leader, I know the most.” versus

“There is always more to learn, and everyone I meet knows something I don’t.”

This is really a matter of positioning yourself mentally so you don’t miss opportunities simply because of pride or close-mindedness. Most of us have the best of intentions, and we don’t mean to be this way, but every one of us is guilty of dismissing an idea simply because we didn’t think it applied to our business or we didn’t respect the source of the idea enough to fully consider it. The following are some of the things that might be happening in your business because you aren’t as open as you could be to the wisdom of others:

I’m always searching for a certain kind of humility in our most senior leaders, people who don’t think they know it all. … You’re fighting arrogance and bureaucracy every day, and if you have people that act that way, then it’s never good.

—
JEFF IMMELT, CHAIRMAN AND CEO OF GE

You Blow a Big Idea:
The biggest missed opportunity of my career came from dismissing too quickly the wisdom of those around me. When I was working at Pepsi, the biggest new thing in the beverage category was water. Clearly Canadian’s flavored waters were among the hottest new products around. I was sitting in my office one day, thinking about all this, when I came up with an idea that was probably the best idea I’ve ever come up with in my career; at least that’s what I believed at the time.

The idea was to do a clear cola, a clear Pepsi. I called my boss, Roger Enrico, who was the CEO of Pepsi at the time, and he thought it was a pretty good idea too. We did focus groups and took it to test market, and the response was unbelievable. Dan Rather even highlighted the product as the lead story on the
CBS Evening News
after a hugely successful test launch in Colorado.

At this point, I was full steam ahead. I wanted to get the product on the market fast before Coke, or someone else, could rip us off. To add further pressure, I got it in my head that we needed to launch this product nationwide in time for the next Super Bowl, so we could promote it during one of the biggest events of the year.

It came time to get the bottlers involved, and when I presented the idea to the Pepsi-Cola Bottler Association Board, I was so confident, I thought they’d probably stand up and applaud by the end of the meeting. They did like the idea, but they had a concern. “David,” they said, “there’s a problem with this product. It doesn’t taste enough like Pepsi.”

They were right, but I brushed off the concern. It wasn’t supposed to taste exactly like Pepsi. It was supposed to have a lighter cola flavor. It was supposed to appeal to a new demographic.

“Yeah,” they said, “but you’re calling it Crystal Pepsi. If you call it Pepsi, people will expect it to taste like Pepsi. You need to make it taste more like Pepsi.”

Sometimes our best assets can also become our blind spots. When I look back, I now realize I never really listened to the criticism because I figured I was the marketing expert and they just didn’t get it. I went ahead and launched the product anyway. And we did it so fast that we had a small quality control problem. The product tasted great in the lab but it had a bit of an aftertaste in certain markets.

Well, the problems with Crystal Pepsi became sort of legendary.
Saturday Night Live
did a skit in which they poured Crystal Pepsi onto a pile of mashed potatoes, implying that it tasted like gravy.
Time
magazine later did a story on the top one hundred marketing failures of the twentieth century. Crystal Pepsi was in the top ten.

Perhaps the most amazing part of the story is that I didn’t get fired as a result of all this. The reason I didn’t is because we actually made
money on it. Everyone wanted to try it, and it was the first Pepsi product ever launched at a premium price. The bottlers treated it like a novelty product that wouldn’t be around that long, and they were right. What kills me to this day is that I still believe it was a good idea. If I had just listened to the people telling me that the product wasn’t right yet, Crystal Pepsi might still be on store shelves as a big-selling brand. If we had just worked out the problems with the flavor quality in our plants. … If we had just built in a few more notes of Pepsi-Cola flavor. … If I would have just slowed down and not been such a heat-seeking missile …

Who would you want on your team more? The person who develops the half-baked idea that may or may not be a great hit, or the person who’s gone out and found a great idea that’s already worked, and then uses the knowledge they have of the environment in which they’re operating to make the idea even bigger and better?

—
ROGER EATON, CEO OF KFC

It was the biggest missed opportunity of my career, and after that miscue, I never wanted to be left wondering “what if” again.

You’re Late to the Table:
Tom Ryan, recently retired chairman and CEO of CVS-Caremark, openly shares a great story about the importance of learning the difference between listening to be polite and truly listening for information. He thought he had listened when, in the early 1990s, people in his organization wanted to start a program of pharmacy drive-throughs so that customers could pick up their prescriptions without leaving their cars. Two of their competitors had had some success with the concept, but initially Ryan thought it was a terrible idea.

Ryan envisioned traffic jams outside stores. He was concerned that drive-throughs would make customers think of fast-food restaurants rather than pharmacies. He was so sure he was right, he didn’t really hear what his people were telling him about how a lot of their customers had been asking for more speed and convenience. Eventually the success his competitors were having with their drive-throughs changed his mind.
Today 30 percent of CVS prescriptions are picked up at the drive-through, with no loss to front-end sales, and Ryan can’t help but regret that he didn’t get onboard sooner. “I was so wrong, but I had this conviction!” he told me with the kind of humility experience brings.

You Waste Resources:
A few years ago, Taco Bell was looking to get into the breakfast business. Other quick-service brands had done well in this area, and Taco Bell wanted a piece of it.

The concept the company first developed seemed to fit perfectly with the Taco Bell brand. “Breakfast that wakes you up” integrated Mexican-inspired flavors into breakfast products, like the fiesta salsa, zesty sausage, and bacon grilled stuffed burrito. In hindsight, the commercial created to advertise the new breakfast menu perfectly summed up the problem. It featured a scruffy-looking young guy on a subway during a morning commute. He danced around the train, singing to bleary-eyed riders about spicy new breakfast flavors, while backed by a squealing rock guitar. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make you think “breakfast.” Instead it makes you think, “Who the heck would want to deal with that guy first thing in the morning? He’s scaring people!”

The thing was, Taco Bell’s new breakfast products were scaring people too. After a highly disappointing test run (thirty days of advertising and people were only trickling into the restaurants), the team had to figure out what was going wrong. The answer? Customers didn’t want a lot of “zesty” in the morning. They weren’t looking for a rock ’n’ roll breakfast. They wanted to ease into their days with minimal excitement, and Taco Bell was offering the exact opposite of that.

The frustrating part was that Taco Bell had tested breakfast once before and come to a similar conclusion. What’s more, KFC in the United Kingdom had also tried to launch a new breakfast menu and encountered a similar problem: They developed a “hungry man” breakfast concept that was more in tune with KFC’s full sit-down meal image than it was with what customers wanted for breakfast, which was something light and portable. But somehow the Yum! organization didn’t share information well enough to learn from these past experiences. We didn’t look hard enough at what had worked for our competitors in the breakfast category and what hadn’t worked for us in prior attempts. We
didn’t listen hard enough to our customers who were telling us, pretty consistently, what they wanted. So Taco Bell basically had to start all over again when it came to breakfast and rethink its
concept to broaden the appeal. Now, instead of excitement for breakfast, we have partnered with well-known and approachable brands like Seattle’s Best Coffee, Johnsonville Sausage, Quaker, and Cinnabon. And instead of focusing on spicy ingredients, we’ve appealed to customers by offering them value with our “Why Pay More for Breakfast!” campaign. This time around, we’re having much more success, and so is KFC, now that we’ve modified our products based on these lessons.

When faced with trying to accomplish a Big Goal, one of the most daunting questions is: Where do I start? “Standing on the shoulders of giants” is another way of saying you don’t have to start from scratch and you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. In business, we sometimes get too caught up in the idea that we need to be different, that we need to innovate. Of course we need to distinguish ourselves from our competition, but that does not mean we can’t borrow good ideas, make them our own, and do an even better job of executing them. When we first spun off from PepsiCo, we had a tremendous opportunity. When my daughter, Ashley, was young and she made a mistake, she used to look at me and ask, “Dad, can I have a do-over?” That’s where we were as a company. The restaurant businesses had been struggling, which was a major reason why PepsiCo leaders thought they’d do better if they
spun us off. But in my mind, that gave us the opportunity for what I characterized as a “gigantic do-over.”

To take advantage of our unique position of being a brand-new public company made up of well-established brands, we went out and did a best-practice tour of some of the most successful companies around at the time in order to take inspiration from them and borrow any good ideas we could find.

We visited seven companies in all—GE, Walmart, Home Depot,
Southwest Airlines, Target, Coke, and UPS—and then came back and crystallized what we’d learned into five things that we called our Dynasty Drivers, because these were the things that we believed would make us an enduringly great company:

1. A culture where everyone makes a difference:
   We saw this at Southwest, where they believed in “people first,” and at Walmart, where we saw a big sign posted in one of their stores for all employees to see: T
   ODAY’S STOCK PRICE IS ___.
   T
   OMORROW’S IS UP TO YOU.
   
2. Customer and sales mania:
   Home Depot was really a leader in this area. They had this concept of doing “whatever it takes” to build customer loyalty. To encourage accountability, they created an ownership culture, and every employee in their stores wore an apron sporting the message, I
   ’M AN OWNER
   .
   
3. Competitive brand differentiation:
   At Target, leaders talked about the concept of exaggerating the differences. CEO Bob Ulrich told me a story about how their aisles were bigger than the competition’s and every year someone would come in talking about how it would be more cost-effective to make the aisles smaller. To which he would reply, “But then we wouldn’t be Target, we’d be like everyone else.”
   
4. Continuity in people and process:
   At UPS we learned how they put processes and discipline around what mattered most to their business—their drivers. They had developed a whole science of how to make delivering packages easier and more efficient for the driver, from the comfort level of their seats to the height of the step going in and out of the truck. Every detail mattered. And we noticed that all the great companies had CEOs and functional leaders who had worked together for years so they knew their business cold.
   
5. Consistency in results:
   Coke and GE excelled in this area. At GE we learned about what Jack Welch called the “relentless
   drumbeat of performance.” These companies continually measured performance to make sure they were getting the results they wanted.