Badass Brand Books #1: Culture built my brand
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The first in a series of book summaries where I cover the key points of brand books I think are pretty badass. Welcome to Badass Brand Books! The BBBs! This book by Mark Miller and Ted Vaughn gives us a great insight into how do we infuse brand into the culture of an organization. A fantastic book filled with numerous stories and great tips on how to really bring a brand aligned culture to life. There are six layers of culture that I go through from this book:
Principles
Architecture
Rituals
Lore
Vocabulary
Artifacts
Full transcript
The central thesis for this book is that culture is really powerful and it's invisible. And so it can either help drive performance in the organization, building your brand, or it could totally derail all your brand efforts, eat your brand. They define culture as an organization's internal environment. And one of the quotes I found in the book by Edgard Schein is that culture is to a group, what personality or character is to a person. I find this conversation very similar and congruent with the experiences I've had helping to build brands. When talking about culture, it was typically either the last to be mentioned or really confined to developing a set of values and behaviors. It never really pulled through to the rest of what we could do for the organization, really infuse brand into every aspect of their culture. So what I really love about this book is that Ted and Mark give us very cool stories that help illustrate the six different layers of how brand can be infused into culture. And I'll go through every one of them.
ONE: PRINCIPLES
Principles are behavior based values to guide people on how to act, behave and make decisions. An interesting statistic from the book was that only about 27% of employees strongly believe in their organization's values. And I would say most of them don't even remember it. And when you scour the internet and look at websites of values that companies put out and they're typically pretty, blah, they're the same old words like integrity, accountability, maybe teamwork. I think this section could help us really dive into how do we create principles that resonate and how do you actually use them to communicate both internally and externally so that all the employees understand what they need to do to act and to behave in, in congruency to the culture of the company in this chapter, there are four main ideas that I think are really important when we talk about principles.
So the first one is modeling and they bring up the story of how you can actually show your values, not just tell it and put it up on a wall, but how do you show it. A story about Patagonia, since 1983, their principle was to really put people front and center and they actually subsidize and have onsite childcare at every one of their locations. And so because of that, all the parents, or at least close to a hundred percent of parents that take their maternity or opportunity leave, return. And so that's really an example of, of modeling and showing your values and principles, instead of just writing it down and putting up a poster.
The second thing here that Ted and mark mentioned is this idea of accountability. And so to have principle means something you have to use it to hire, but also to fire, you gotta to hold people accountable to the principles that you set out.
The third is to really externalize it. And so one of the really good examples here, which I love even before Mark and Ted mentioned in their book is REI’s Opt-out campaign. That's when they close all their stores on Black Friday to really demonstrate a core piece of their principles, which is to enjoy the outdoors.
The last but not least idea I think is important here, is to reward your employees, to demonstrate these principles day in and day out. It doesn't have to be something big. It doesn't have to be something expensive, but the mere gesture of continuing to reward and help people understand what are the principles they really need to adhere to can build a very strong culture.
TWO: ARCHITECTURE
It is defined as the organizational systems and structures designed to reflect your brand and support your employees to deliver on its promise. Now, this really goes deep into what are some of the things that the company and organization can do to help its employees you their best and really reflect all the things that the brand wants to reflect. There are, again, four different ideas here.
And the first one is about the performance of your employees. How do you develop systems and structures so that they can perform? And a great story that Ted and Mark tells is of their own agency, where they develop a system whereby every time somebody uses their company card to buy something, they get a SMS text that immediately prompts them to send a photo of the receipt. And then it's done think about that as a system to help remove mundane activities that doesn't add value or use your employee's time to the best in the best way.
The second idea here is people operations. So think about from a people from an HR perspective, whether it's from a recruitment standpoint, whether it's from an interviewing standpoint, onboarding performance management, if you can infuse the brand into every step of the people operations process, that really helps people to not just come to the company or come to the organization, but also stay and feel that they belong.
The third piece is budgeting. So this is really about tracking and understanding where the organization spends time on, not just money, resources, but also time. Where are you spending your money? And time can give you big clues about what the organization stands for and what they really focus on.
Last, but not least is decision making. It's a really important part of the company. As we know, it really determines where the future is and where the company goes. And so a story day tell is about Kodak. Its ultimate demise was really decision making about innovations or ideas. They want nothing to do with film. Even though they were pioneers and, and very innovative, well, they actually in the 1980s developed a digital camera. So one of the first companies to do so, but along the way, they lost that edge. And really the decision making process was not used for being an innovative company.
THREE: RITUALS
Rituals are repeated experiential activities that reinforce what's most important in your organization and create a sense of joy and renewed energy around your brand. One of the marquee stories in this section is one that I really love, and it talks about jet propulsion labs. A NASA entity. It's a 2.5 billion federally funded organization. And let me read quickly to you what they do at this annual pumpkin carving contest. So at the annual pumpkin carving contest one year, a team of rocket scientists created an Apollo Lunar Jack’o, Lander. It emitted faux smoke as audio voiceover from the actual Apollo lunar landing play played in perfect timing with the pumpkin’s careful descent, and another team entered a pumpkin that faked the moon landing in front of a green screen, in a mock film studio. Wow. I mean, it, they go all out and this is, this is a ritual that they hold very dear to their hearts, and everybody talks about it.
It's much anticipated, but I think the secret here is that they're not forced to do it. It's not mandatory. So when you think about rituals, Ted and Mark really talk about two distinct types of rituals. One is top down, which the leadership sort of think about what would be a ritual for the organization or bottoms up much like the JPL pumpkin carving contest ritual, where it's really formed by the employees themselves. Ted and Mark gave us a few ideas about what types of rituals can be a part of the company's culture. It could be internal, it could be culture, building events, team, building events, much like the pumpkin carving contest, or it could be onboarding experiences. So in Google, they mentioned that new hires are often called Nooglers. And so they're brought through their own experiences of, of what it means to live out the Google brand.
But one of the key things for us to remember as they talk about in this chapter is that rituals can't be mandatory. It can't be routine. It can't be something that people have to do. So when an executive or a leader says, Hey, at the beginning of every meeting we're gonna share a story about why change is important or why, why our personal values line up with the company values that becomes a routine. And much often when that happens, it's not really a ritual. It doesn't really give energy and joy to the employees. It becomes a checkbox you have to tick. So that's something really important to remember.
FOUR: LORE
Lore is defined as the canon of stories that circulate within your organization and reflect the most positive, negative, and even mundane ways your people experience your culture. It's important to understand that every organization has its lore and a question might be, how do stories become lore? Now, Ted and mark helps us understand this by saying stories can't turn into lore simply because the executives repeat it again and again and again, it doesn't work that way. Only when these anecdotes reflect their experiences of the brand and the culture they get repeated. And so it doesn't make sense for an organization to come up with these anecdotes and come up with these stories and simply just repeat them over time. It's really about gathering the experiences of these employees and turn them into stories to be repeated. The authors gave us a few examples of the types of lore that can circulate within an organization.
And the first one is brand elevating lore. And this one, they talked about a story of Pixar, where at Pixar, there was an employee in the early days where he found this small passage way. And with the company's principles of exploration and discovery, well, he crept on in, he crept through this passageway on his hands and knees. And at the end of it came into a secret room, a small room that housed the central air conditioning units and valves. And what he did was he gathered a bunch of colleagues and turned it into a speakeasy. So that lore really became this idea of exploration and discovery. And not only was it circulated internally, it was also circulated externally. So Steve jobs, and some other people like Buzz Aldrin because of hearing that story, came and had a look and found the speak easy themselves.
The next type of lore is origin stories. And so we all know origin stories can be very strong talks about where the company comes from. And especially if it's in the importance with the, the, the principles that in which the company was built.
A third is corporate and operational lore. And sometimes these stories get circulated, not because it's very emotional or visionary. It's really about very specific operational mundane tasks or even failures that get circulated.
The last one is prophetic lore, and this is really about the vision where you're trying to go, right? A story that circulates, because it is a very impactful vision about the future that employees will on to continue to talk about.
FIVE: VOCABULARY
It’s the lexicon of clearly defined words and phrases, helping your employees understand what's important in your brand and how to drive it forward. A story that the authors mentioned here to bring to light of how to use vocabulary as part of the culture and brand is at Netflix. Now, when Netflix moved from a business model of DVDs to streaming, they kept a separate brand called Qwickster, and it was a failure and they recognized that. But one of the most important things that they learned from that was they really had to instill a principle in the company whereby it's not just about failing, it's about learning from it, but it's also about gathering input at the beginning of any venture that might be contrary. So they introduce vocabulary of sun shining failure and farming for descent. And these specific words, help employees to understand that that's a very crucial part of their culture and their mode of operation, and built into their way of working.
The next story that the authors used was from Ray Dalio. He's the CEO of Bridgewater investment management company. For, for those of you who don't know, he wrote a book called principles and their organization is really all about continuing to learn. Learning is such an important principle in the company. They really pride themselves in gathering data, lots of data, and really learning from it. And so the vocabulary that they use is pain plus reflection equals progress, pain, plus reflection equals progress. So again, this idea of really going through pain, which is failing, which is being in, in uncomfortable situations, but when you reflect you move forward and you can be better. So these are specific examples of how vocabulary in an organization can really help to pin down and put a final point on the types of principles and the type of culture that you want built at the organization.
SIX: ARTIFACTS
It is defined as tangible objects at the surface level of your culture, helping your people engage and feel a sense of ownership in the brand. Artifacts are cool. Artifacts are physical manifestations of the culture. And so when, when culture is something that's invisible, it's something that's implicit. Having artifacts can really bring a sense of realness to something that's already there. The authors gave us some examples of artifacts that we could use to really help exemplify the culture.
And first one is spatial art artifacts and spatial artifacts are really any sort of physical manifestations in the office. It could be installations, it could be sculptures really anything kind of bring that to life. I remember for me back in the day when I worked at a company, there was a big patent sculpture. So it illustrated the number of patents that a company had over the years, but it also helped exemplify the innovation and the engineering culture that the company really hung his hat on.
The second is operational artifacts. And, and an example here they gave was the IBM design thinking guide a really a pocket guide that's given to the employees to help them think about how to use design in their daily activities.
The third one here are inclusive artifacts. So think of it as anniversary pins or things that you can give out to help people feel included into the group.
The fourth here is high engagement artifacts. And the example they gave here was for REI, they have a big board of all the different employees with their favorite outdoor activities. It doesn't have to be super expensive or very elaborate. I think the authors really wanted to push the point here where anything simple works, anything simple is actually more organic, but then the key of it is to make it real, make it tangible.
There you have it, the six layers of culture infused with your brand.
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