If every company prides itself on being different, and thinks of itself as unique, why then does every organization look the same, sound the same, feel the same?
Patagonia's beliefs are captured by its new mission statement.
Well, maybe not every company: Patagonia, who employs the tagline “we stand for the rivers we stand in,” on their fly-fishing site, recently sold out of t-shirts and shorts where messages and labels loudly suggested that climate change was no longer avoidable and that we all had an obligation in the coming election to take matters into our hands and change the political landscape so that the environment would be respected and protected for the future; the sentiment is brief, but to the point: “vote the assholes out!”. Far from being partisan, this was an attack on “All those politicians who don't believe we should do anything about climate change.” You would think that with the American West burning, and American coasts increasingly submerged, this would no longer need saying, but Patagonia so passionately believes in the looming threat of climate change that they felt a need to take a public stand and speak out on it, nonetheless. They had no choice, this is what they believe in.
Not the proper role of business, you say? At a time when Oracle and WalMart are apparently being asked by the President to play a key role in creating a new and improved version of American history as part of the TikTok deal, consider how much we know about the beliefs of the operators of such key societal influencers: where does Facebook, for example, stand on issues of vital current importance? Who knows? Or Amazon; how about all those months when they were advertising on Breibart, for example? Accident or choice? We don’t know. Were they unaware, misinformed, indifferent or simply greedy? We simply don’t know. The leaders of these organizations are failing us, or maybe deceiving us, by being silent on where they stand on issues that are shaping our future: racism, privacy, climate change, human rights, LGBT inclusion, globalization, and a host of others, all of which are legitimately important business issues that their organizations act on every day. Without revealing their core principles; we don’t even know if Google cares if they “do no evil” any longer, or if “do the right thing” is an adequate substitute, or merely a cop-out? ‘
When you spend so much of your life with an organization, in its ecosystem, so to speak, as an employee, customer or supplier, don’t you deserve to know what they care about, how they see the world, what they believe? Beliefs matter, and ambiguity regarding them confuses employees and suppliers over what they should or should not be doing, and customers about whether or not they want to be associated with such brands. Just this past week, at a virtual conference on organizational transformation that was hosted by Haier, the world’s largest home appliance maker, and a company that I have a consulting relationship with, Professor James F. Moore, who first coined the idea of organizational ecosystems, suggested that it is beliefs that shape the way an organization looks at its customers, suppliers and employees. He used the example of a well-known computer components manufacturer who, in his words, sees the world around it solely in terms of its production function, which is heavily determined by Moore’s Law, and one of the consequences of this is that “people are seen as a part of that production function.” Another company he introduced, sees their employees and partners as having “unlimited capabilities, boundaryless, being infinite” and treats them as such, resulting in the building of an organizational culture and architecture capable of engaging with an ecosystem explicitly predisposed to producing surprises, rather than only limited to cost-reductions. As a result, at a time when the geo-political world is fragmenting, this latter company is “taking a stand for collaboration and cooperation!” I think that this is a big deal, in that employees and partners move in these examples from being seen as little more than fixed costs to being, in James F. Moore’s thoughts, seen as potential contributors: creators, makers and entrepreneurs, who deserve an organization that will fulfill this potential, in the expectation that “they can change the world.” The point is, if you can’t or won’t say what you stand for, what you believe in, how can anyone design an organizational culture to achieve it?
Think about the basic principles that your organization holds dear, as the starting point for creating the culture you should have. If customer centricity is purportedly at the core of your values, you should be able to see explicit architectural choices being made within your organization that make it more likely that you will achieve customer centricity. What about innovation? What’s changed since innovation was added to the list of principles that your company emphasizes in its public pronouncement; who’s seen as being an innovator, and who’s not? Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix, spoke recently of his first start up, Pure Software, which he says he saw “as a big software puzzle... so, every time there was an error, we’d put a process in place to make sure that error didn’t happen..... But what I missed were the cultural effects of that year after year..” In this case, processes were seen as being more important than people, not necessarily the way anyone hoped the organization would be shaped. Culture should reflect beliefs, and it can’t if beliefs are not publicly articulated.
At the same time, there are refreshing success stories such as Blissfield School, a small rural elementary school in Southeastern Michigan, which surprisingly has a STEM lab that is widely renowned, largely because it is built on a different set of beliefs than those that most every other elementary school holds. Blissfield believes that children are born curious and experimenters and then turns that into a key principle in designing a laboratory that makes it easier for them to continue to be curious and experiment, rather than disregarding this natural inclination or making it more difficult. It seems obvious, doesn’t it? But, it only works if you have such principles, if they are public and if you talk about them and invite others in to talk about them. When was the last time that someone asked you “what do you believe? What are your starting assumptions about what we do, why we do it, and how we make it happen?”
In November 2019, after forty-five years of operating with its original mission statement, Patagonia redefined its new version to simply read: ”we’re in business to save our home planet.” No ambiguity here, but it is inspirational and also inclusive enough to recognize that we’re all in this together: employees, suppliers and customers, and that political action is very definitely a part of this if it will help save our home planet. Take a look at their website, and you’ll find that they have a tab entitled “Activism” which speaks to movies that they are making, community action that they support, and those little labels regarding climate-denying politicians, all consistent with their meaning.
What about your organization, and my organization; what do they stand for? What are the beliefs that drive the choices that they make? Are we consciously affiliating ourselves with such choices, or are they so vague and indistinct, or invisible, as to be of no help in our understanding, shaping or leading our own organization? Terry Dean Pepper, formerly Karl Lagerfeld’s vice president of global licensing has recently observed that “purpose is why your brand exists, its aspirational reason for being,” to which I would add that it is in your beliefs where we should discover why we should care what your purpose is.
