This Week in Strategy: Why do the French only eat one egg for breakfast? Because one egg is an oeuf!
Hi Strat Pack,
In honor of Labor Day (workers of the world, unite!) we're doing a pared back version of This Week in Strategy this week. You don't want to read mountains of stuff on the verge of a long weekend and I'm not going to bore you. We'll return to our regularly scheduled program next week!
But I do want to talk about a thing I initially thought was dumb but is actually really cool I hope: Eva Longoria to Direct 'Flamin' Hot' for Fox Searchlight. It's a movie about the invention of Flaming Hot Cheetos. Pretty dumb, right? But bear with me here... The project tells the true story of Richard Montanez, the son of a Mexican immigrant who was a janitor at Frito-Lay when he came up with the idea for Flamin' Hot Cheetos. His creation, inspired by the flavors of his community, revitalized the company and disrupted the food industry, while also creating a pop culture phenomenon that continues to this day.
Oh. That actually sounds really cool and a story worth telling. But man they need to come up with a better lede.
Speaking of data breaches, MoviePass Subscribers’ Card, Debit and Credit Card Information Exposed. The hits just keep coming. Ha-ha. More than 58,000 of its customers’ personal information, including MoviePass card numbers, name, billing information, debit card number and expiration date, and email address were exposed in a breach recently. And in other news MoviePass is apparently still a company that hasn't gone bankrupt yet.
Alright, stop messing around trying to figure out how to sneak your own candy into a movie theater. Let's jump right in.
The one thing to read this week
1) Russell Davies Strategy Advice [Anna Shipman - JFDI]
Last year, [Anna] met the excellent Russell Davies to ask his advice on how to create a strategy. Russell was the Director of Strategy at the Government Digital Service while I was there. He and the internal comms team did an amazing job of making sure we were all aware of what we were doing and why.
When I needed to create the tech strategy for my team at the Financial Times, Russell gave me some really useful advice, and has kindly agreed to let me share that here.
The most important role of a strategy is to tell us what we are not going to do.
The strategy needs to be clear, concise and catchy.
A structure could be something like: 5 things we should do. Three will be obvious, one may be a surprise.
You need all versions of the strategy. The 30-second version, the 30-minute version and the full write-up. And then, the communication: mugs, stickers, posters, etc. Russell said “It will feel like propaganda; but no-one will notice” and this is true – while I was at GDS it did not feel like propaganda to me, it just felt like a really clear communication of what we stood for and what we were doing.
If you don’t have the channels to communicate your strategy, you may need to set them up. For example, if there is no team meeting, set one up – but make the first one about something other than the strategy, and then introduce it later. Russell is definitely a fan of getting everyone together, and even for a tech strategy this should include other disciplines, e.g. product, UX.
Don’t get too hung up on what’s strategy, what’s principles, etc.
Listen to what people say, what they want to do. Russell gave the example of “Make things open: it makes things better”. Listen to what people say they want to do, and sometime when people are talking about it, someone will come up with a catchy phrase in conversation. Use that.
A strategy is a tool to allow you to say “if we do that, then we can’t do this”. Keep talking about it. Later, when something comes up that is against the strategy, people will recognise that and say “oh yes, you’ve been talking about that for years.”
Russell never goes into a quiet room and works out a strategy on his own. When working on strategy, he talks to people and they create it together.
He had a great suggestion of following a roadmap session that we used to do at GDS. Everyone writes down on index cards what should we do this year, and then place them on the floor – close to you if soon, further away if later. Then you all walk the floor together, talk about the cards, dependencies and likelihood of getting all those things done, and as you go you move things around or throw things out. We did this on my team when initially working out our tech strategy, and it was really useful for gathering ideas we hadn’t thought of, and having a discussion that meant we were all on the same page.
(Tom Loosemore ran this type of roadmap session a few times at GDS, and I talked to Tom about the nuts and bolts of how to run it. He said have a smallish group – no more than about 12 – start by outlining the goals, takes about a day. It needs someone very strict to run it: “Really?! Are we really going to do that in the next 3 months?!”. Once you get into the details of actually working out the roadmap for individual products or services, Tom also recommended Jamie Arnold’s Seven questions to build a roadmap.)
When reviewing this post, Russell added something else about communicating strategy: “I once heard a story about Muhammed Ali’s trainer Angelo Dundee. As you can imagine, it was quite hard to tell Ali what to do so Dundee would just wait until Ali did the right thing and then praise it fulsomely. Communicating strategy might be a bit like that. Wait until people say something good about the strategy and then use that. (Where ‘waiting’ means ‘very carefully listening for’)”
2) What is workplace culture? [Campaign Live]
It's not a ping-pong table, Free Pizza Fridays or hot-desking. Culture is the mark a job leaves on people.
If you believe where you work has a good culture and you look around the office and see a dodgem car or a shed as a meeting room – trust me, the good culture was not made by having wacky spaces to talk about something that could have been on an email.
But if you believe where you work has a problem with its culture and a cake has just been wheeled out to soften the blow of the latest round of redundancies – something is going horribly wrong.
Culture is the mark a job leaves on people.
It’s what people say about where they work when they leave at night. And when they leave for other companies.
It’s the way that where they work makes them feel. And the type of person it turns them into.
It’s fostering an environment of inclusivity. And accountability. And transparency. And respect.
It’s consciously avoiding your biases. It’s working hard to make "never" into "normal".
It’s equal pay and equal rights.
It’s being fallible as a business and as individuals. And no matter what level you are, being able to hold your hands up and say "I don’t know" or "I’m sorry" or "That’s not OK".
It’s everybody asking: "How can this be better?"
It’s trust. Trust in each other. Trust in each other’s time. Trust in the intentions of your company. Trust in the people at the top and the people at the bottom.
Ultimately, culture creates itself. And it’s not one size fits all. It’s not tangible. You can’t point at it. It’s amorphous, much like the people who crave it so much. When we foster environments where people feel like they can truly be themselves, where they can express and create and flourish, they begin to imprint. Happy teams ultimately build themselves.
Culture grows from daftness and spontaneity, but you cannot have either without the right foundations first. Foundations built on praise and empathy. Care and compassion. Growth and giving a shit. Culture is how a company communicates, how it treats its employees and what it values. And when that is right, you don’t want to go home. Which is why "culture first" agencies are often the most successful and have the highest employee and client retention rates.
Their culture is built from the very values of what their company stands for. And in 2019, how is it that we are not all operating with as clear a vision as that?
3) Department of Great Work
Nike is displaying plus-size and para-sport mannequins for the first time in its London flagship store [TicToc by Bloomberg]
Ford Brazil removes shoe squeaking from basketball game to showcase its stability control technology [The Drum] Really cool idea. Clever. Not 100% sold on the execution
The Guardian's 1986 'Points of view' advert [YouTube] The award-winning 'Skinhead' commercial was screened in 1986 and features a skinhead who appeared to be wrestling a man's briefcase from his hands. But the camera then cuts and viewers see that he is in fact trying to rescue the man from falling bricks. Especially today, perspective is more important than ever.
Popeyes Has Finally Run Out of Chicken Sandwiches [Grub Street] What a brilliant fucking stunt. Could you imagine ginning up this much passion for your brand: A manager at one Popeyes on the East Coast told Business Insider that customers nearly fought employees after being told the sandwich had sold out.
Hinge kills new mascot in push for users to find love and delete its app [MarketingDive] Delightfully self aware. The brand rolled out its first international brand campaign, amplifying the company's mission to help users fall in love and then delete the app for good, per details shared with Marketing Dive. Agency Red Antler is behind the effort spanning digital and out-of-home (OOH) channels.
Delta Profiles New Yorkers Who Wouldn't Mind Fleeing Their Living Quarters for a Bit [Muse by Clio] Each installment of "Small Stories," devised by Wieden + Kennedy, runs less than a minute, and presents real New Yorkers who live in cramped, awkward quarters. "New York isn't always comfortable," the spots conclude. "Flying out of it is." Yeah, even coach is roomier than some of those places.
As always, the full archive is available here. Was this email forwarded to you? Want to start getting this on a weekly basis? All I need is your email, everything else is optional. Thanks for sticking around as always. See you next week!