Focus on preserving three things: strategic business intent, a strong connection to customers, and a stellar employee experience.
So, you’ve successfully scaled your start-up and you’re growing into a mature company. What, if anything, should you retain from those early days?says the most successful organizations have one thing in common: a soul. “Soul” goes beyond culture, purpose, or even the founder. It’s about having three things: strategic business intent, a strong connection to customers, and a stellar employee experience.
In this episode, you’ll learn how to define the specific problem your company solves – with plenty of real-world examples, like Netflix, Apple, and Warby Parker. You’ll also learn how to bring the voice of customers into your organization and ensure that your employees feel connected to them.from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.
ALISON BEARD: Now, you’ve studied lots of companies through this lens, what were some of the ones that you immediately looked at and thought now there’s a company with a soul, I want to investigate further? RANJAY GULATI: Sure. There are three parts to the story, and this was the hard, the tough nut for me to crack. I think the first part is what I call “business intent”. And an intent is a very loaded word. Intent is not just defining your purpose, but what are the actions through which you’re going to try to achieve your purpose. This is not a vision statement, this is not a mission statement, this is not a strategy statement.
RANJAY GULATI: To me the fascinating thing was first of all, when I would ask many observers, they couldn’t pin it down. When you don’t know what you want to hold on to, it’s hard to hold on to it. The other part that was a little bit disconcerting to me, is there’s almost an acceptance of inevitability that scales means stale. Once we scale, we’re going to go stale.
RANJAY GULATI: I felt that the first part was to call it out and identify it. What is “it” that we want to hold on to? I then tried to document what these companies do, and I think they do it in a disciplined way.
ALISON BEARD: And what about those companies that have made the mistake of not focusing on the pillars, have botched the succession, and they want to go back to having a soul, or even find a new one, how do you go about that?RANJAY GULATI: To salvage, or sometimes, you know, Steve Jobs was just one of them, Howard Schultz came back, Phil Knight came back to Nike.RANJAY GULATI: Yes. And I think that’s the question that we have to ask ourselves, you know? I think it’s on everybody there.
And there’s nothing in that mid-space where we’re trying to articular why do we exist to serve customers of any kind, or what is the problem we are here to solve? So, Netflix could have said we are here to rent DVDs and mail them to people, right? But they defined their intent around trying to change the way entertainment is consumed in the world.
This an even older story, that you know, way back in Italy a bricklayer is laying bricks and somebody says, what are you doing? Are you laying bricks or are you building a cathedral? ALISON BEARD: And what are some specific ways that organizations you’ve studied give their employees when you’re one of 10,000 maybe, that same level of voice and choice that they felt when it was start-up days?
ALISON BEARD: You talk in the article about Warby Parker being an example of a company that almost, you know, went off the rails, was maybe losing some of its engineers’ enthusiasm, and then managed to reel it back. So, tell me a little bit about how they did that. ALISON BEARD: So, how much time should leaders be spending thinking about this, making sure the soul is being preserved, while they’re trying to grow and be better managers, and put in processes and policies? It’s a really tense situation.
RANJAY GULATI: So, I’ve been looking at companies around the world now. And I’d written a previous case also on a company called Micromax that went through many trials and tribulations, and they got caught in this yin and yang between putting in place administrative systems and the soul. And the business intent was defined around a key set of ideas. One was we’re fiduciary to the client, which means we’re not going to trade our own account, you know, we’re always going to have no conflict of interest over there. And we’re going to use technology to understand, quantify, and manage risk.
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