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Bill Taylor introduced the storytellers for this session. He began briefly be mentioning the concept of Vuja De (the opposite of deja vu), or looking at an area that you know well and seeing it with fresh eyes and using that to re-imagine what’s possible. That was introduction to Tony Hsieh and Zappos whose warehouse holds 4 million pairs of shoes. He made the point that what differentiates companies now in consumer products today is the emotional connection to your customer.
Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com
Tony talked about the wow factor of getting your shoes overnight. It makes word of mouth the number one driver of growth, because they have something to talk about.
The customer loyalty team is their call center. They put their 800 number everywhere, and they don’t have scripts. They don’t up-sell, and they will direct a customer to another website if they don’t have a shoe in stock. It’s not a one-time transaction, they want to build a lifetime of business.
The number one priority is company culture (not customer service, that comes naturally). They want employees who want to come into work everyday. Brand and culture are synonymous. With the internet, companies are becoming more transparent because a company is ultimately people and people have more outlets to communicate. Companies are struggling with not being in control of their brand because they aren’t in control of their culture. You don’t need a procedure for every customer question, they coach their call center employees to be themselves.
On how they hire for culture, there are two kinds of interviews, they do the standard interviews, fit, experience, etc. Then, the HR department does a completely separate culture interview. They will also fire for culture. Everyone, absolutely everyone at corporate headquarter, goes through the same 4 week training the call center folks receive and then they take calls for 2 weeks, and then a week in the packing and shipping plant. Yes, hiring for cultrue will mean shortages in positions, but in the long term it makes the company so much stronger.
They have a culture book, written by submissions by employees and organized by department. Lastly, he talked about core values. He said they aren’t really core unless you’re willing to hire and fire based on those core values. In that sense, it might be better to have less lofty core values that you can really commit to instead of just sounding good in a press release.
David Yaun, Vice President, Corporate Communications, IBM Corporation
David talked about building a culture of innovation at IBM. Innovation, rather than technology became a core value that didn’t yet reflect the company as it was.
They built the Global Innovation Outlook: a couple of times a year they get a bunch of people to have a free-flowing brainstorming session around a big issue like healthcare or education. They realized their approach to innovation had to change because they realized it was more collaborative and more open and more inter-disciplinary. They formally opened up their business forecasting sessions to the public, they are available on the website through blogs, videos, etc. and anyone is free to act on those ideas.
According to Dave, the culture of innovation comes down to, “If you’re comfortable in your job, you’re doing it wrong.”
When they first launched, they got buy-in at the top, but hit other roadblocks like: “We Already Do This”, “What You’re Doing Is Very Dangerous”, “We can’t talk about societal issues – we’re IBM!”, “I forbid you from talking to my customers”, and “If you must go ahead with this folly, my job will be to prevent you from embarrassing the Chairman” — The top exec gave them permission to ignore all this, and they used the negative feedback as fuel.
The project was a success. They get to influence policy both externally and internally. They invest in pilots and new projects as a results. They create thought leadership around issues. For example: they did a study on the implications of people who play role-playing games and how that correlates with an ability to collaborate online with a huge group of people (there are some serious parallels).
The power of the bottoms-up, collaborative ideas are starting to pay off, even in a short period of time. And if he had one piece of advice it’s not to let what it says on your business card define what you do. The people who create the changes are the ones who think in terms of what’s possible.
Deborah Brooks, Co-founder of The Michael J. Fox Foundation
On Disruptive Philanthropy. There is no one in charge of diseases, globally. There are 30,000 diseases but only treatments for 10,000 of them. The foundation changed the process on how to decide what to fund by hiring their own PhDs to have their own point of view. One of the byproducts has been to educate researchers about how they make the decision on what to fund by increasing communication between research and industry. They use a portfolio strategy to invest in treatments that might work. The two exciting things in Parkinson’s are in trials now, but there are still real challenges like delivery and dosage. It is also notable that the foundation has used some money to invest in projects that are about to go into clinical trials to make them more robust. They are really looking at the whole process of drug development to smooth the channel from discover to drug store.
