This is the first in a series about the contact points that make a company successful. I’m not talking about just branding or marketing success; I’m talking about total success – in sales and operations and customer service and distribution – success in the management offices and the cubes and the janitor’s closet. Most importantly, I’m talking about Gluing your company so tight to customers they become part of you and you become part of them. Yes, Glue.
If you are a CEO, this story is for you especially. If you want to be a CEO, this story is for you. If you could not care less about ever being the CEO, skip the whole thing and surf the 345 trillion other things on the Internet.
Bookstores are filled with management books, how-to books, books by this manager and that CEO, books by the hot new entrepreneur or the tell-all insider tome or a professor who has studied a trend. Some of the books are great and show insight. Many of the books are by consultants, however, who know if they write a book, they will appear to be an expert – and it helps their business. There are probably already enough business books out there, so this treatise will not be in one of them. This is a series of observations and brutal realities of everyday business. This is about Glue.
Unlike a story in a book that is printed and sits on a shelf, this story will change, just like life, just like the economy, just like your business. One day it will recognize a trend. Another day, it will acknowledge a truth or expose a lie. One day this story will be your answer and the next it will be your problem. But it will never be dull because it is about you.
Here’s the gist: We have spent many years studying companies inside and out. We were constantly being given the task of fixing a branding problem. In that repair exercise, we began to dig into why the problems exist to begin with. And we found a constant pattern: Disjointed and misaligned practices with no significant bonds between those practices to hold the company together. This misaligned, unglued conundrum was present in almost every company that had branding issues. And it took many forms.
Sometimes each department or function of a company operates as a separate fiefdom, like feudal entities from the Middle Ages struggling against each other in a political maelstrom. Sometimes the management and employees are like oil and water. We have seen branding and marketing totally disconnected from each other (as strange as that may seem) and fighting with sales, or sales warring with operations or R&D or distribution. If this seems strange to you, walk around your office. You may be surprised.
The dreaded area called customer service (we call it customer experience; too many customers call it “customer disservice) department can get so out of alignment you’d think they were from Mars and the people who buy the product were from Venus.
If you don’t line up your inside with your outside, you will have trouble. If you don’t Glue those two parts together, you will have holy trouble. Remember “Stop, drop and roll?” New assignment: Align and Glue.
Without this aligning bond, cracks form and trouble pours into every crack. You may lose your leadership position. Your brand may get doubled-over by a competitor. Sometimes no one in the company even understands the vision anymore (if there was one to begin with). Maybe the market has left your company in the dustbin of dated tradition. Now and then, things change so fast, you wake up one day and your business has changed to a degree that you don’t recognize the field anymore. Maybe it’s worse than that or maybe it’s a lot simpler.
Sometimes your internal culture is out of alignment with your external message. Sometimes your internal operations are not aligned with your external customers’ changing needs. Sometimes your management is not in line with your people. Sometimes your message is not connected to the conversation. Sometimes your employees don’t even know what the company stands for except for the basic fact of making a product, providing a service or making money (not bad things, but if that’s all your company means to your employees, you will get a good look at a disconnect that can seriously hamstring your future). A disconnected vision-to-action equation can cause downturns in everything from morale to sales to market share to profits – or all of the above.
If your customers and clients aren’t connecting your company with something stickier than a low price, you will eventually get to watch another company with stickier Glue take your customers. Low price is a tactic, not a position. If you want to learn that lesson the hard way (old-school style, not business school style), try it. They’re handing out the MBAs down at Monster.com.
Have you ever sat in a meeting with your managers and rolled this frustrating thought around in your head: “They just don’t get it!”
Don’t lie.
Whatever “it” is, Glue can fix it. All business is connected to success by Glue. It doesn’t mean you can sell inferior products or employ morons. But if you have a good business model, Glue will hold the success to the bottom line.
NOTE: At this point, we want to clarify a confusing point that is being touted out there. A lot of “internal branding” experts will sell you half of the remedy. This is not like internal medicine. Your company is a whole being, not just inside and outside as separate parts. We divide it up that way to make it easier to understand. But our division is more organizational than transformational. Your business and your brand are a whole body, like your body. It’s not a gaggle of unconnected parts to be fixed separately. Your internal is going to affect your external and vice versa. Remember one thing as you read this or listen to “internal branding” people: There is no internal without an external. Glad we cleared that up.
So when you hear us talk about internal and external, we’re always talking about them in relationship to each other, never separate, and that is the difference between the reality of Glue and the fallacy of theoretical internal management practices. Glue is a reality whether you see it, use it or believe in it. Glue isn’t dependent on your belief; it is like the hard, cold reality of profit and loss. It just is.
Another point is sometimes lost on management: Vision without action is death. Like the old Biblical adage, “Faith without works is dead.” Same thing with vision: Once you have built the powerful vehicle, you have to put it in gear and go somewhere.
Stay tuned for the next chapter of Glue.
