Imagine you are in a room with a single lamp. The room is dark. You flip on the lamp. Nothing happens. You immediately think the bulb is blown. But then you fumble around in the dark and see that the lamp is not plugged in. So you plug it into the wall.
That’s Glue.
The wall socket has the power you need. The lamp has the light you want. But the plug and cord form the glue that aligns the power with the light. Now you can see how to get some work done. That’s how Glue works. It is the connection, the bond and the concentrated action of plugging into the power source.
Nothing in business is seamlessly connected or aligned perfectly. It doesn’t matter how many corporate fairytales have been told about seamless integration. It just ain’t so. If you have run a business longer than 20 minutes, you know it. That’s why you have to proactively pay attention to it and adjust to it. It’s a daily aligning to fend off the un-aligning that naturally happens.
It’s a lot like this: If you want to take down a massive building, just cut an 18-inch square hole in the roof and walk away. Water and nature will take the building down faster than you can imagine. Every farmer with a barn knows this. Unfortunately, not every CEO knows it. You have to inspect the roof every day. Aligning and Gluing is not a one-time thing.
To align things in business, you have to have seriously powerful Glue to hold them together. To connect your wants to your results, you have to use Glue. To have a branding message that connects with consumers, it takes Glue. To get sales to work with distribution, you better get some sticky stuff. If customer service is going to actually do what that name says, it will take Glue. If you are going to spend money on advertising, and you don’t have the Glue that links that communication to your company’s truth, you are wasting your money.
Glue can take many forms, but the function is always the same: Glue is sticky. And if you want success, you will have to Glue things every day and be flexible. If you think Glue is a one-time-never-have-to-do-it-again business proposition, you will fail. Glue is not a fish. It is learning to fish. Glue is like breathing or eating. You have to do it daily to survive.
Much has been said about sticky communications. Malcolm Gladwell talked about “stickiness” in “The Tipping Point.” His ideas, no doubt, inspired the sticky conversation. Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart talk about “What Sticks” in their book of that same name, explaining why most advertising fails and how to guarantee yours succeeds. Chip and Dan Heath talk about it in their book “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.”
These are all good books, and I highly recommend them. But stickiness is the result of Glue. The goal is to make your company and your message sticky, to be sure. But to do that, you need Glue. And it isn’t just for communications and advertising anymore. Glue is something you must have to do any corporate function from branding to HR to accounting to why a customer decides to choose you over your competitor. You need it to make your entire company sticky, not just your communications.
So where is the Glue?
Glue is in your truth, your reason for being. It is in your vision. Glue is a commitment to your brand that goes beyond talking. You can tell people about your vision, but it’s better to show them. Then, when they hear you talking about it, they believe you. Vision without works is dead. So Glue has to be in your operations as well.
Steve Jobs isn’t just a visionary. He’s a brilliant communicator and a genius at operations. The Apple Store is a textbook example of success in the face of retail predictions of failure, because Jobs runs it like a visionary operations guru.
A fallacy in business is that visionaries start companies and then it takes hard-nosed operations people to run it once the visionaries light the fire. Really? What business school taught you that? Maybe they are the ones that everyone is ignoring.
As we all are beginning to realize, you can go to business school, or you can go into business. The New York Times recently featured a story about how some of the most successful business minds are opting out of business school. They don’t have the time. Besides, they’re getting that MBA on the front lines and making six figures to do it. Not everyone is alike, but when upward of 40 percent of college classes are taught online, it’s not hard to smell where the wind is blowing. Your future university just may be Google U. But that is another Glue story in itself (mark my word, while the University of Phoenix may have front-loaded the online university trend, someone will soon be here to backload the entire experience).
So often, consultants tout Target and Starbucks and Nike and Apple as these visionary success stories. But the truth is, your company can be just as successful if you do what those visionary companies do: Use Glue every day.