Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback by David Novak

Author:David Novak
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781591845911
Publisher: Portfolio Trade
Published: 2013-01-28T14:00:00+00:00

Walmart: To give ordinary folks the chance to buy the same things as rich people.

The Walt Disney Company: To make people happy.

Starbucks: To inspire and nurture the human spirit, one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.

P&G: We will provide branded products and services of superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world’s customers, now and for generations to come.

Yum! Brands: To be the defining global company that feeds the world.

POWER LANGUAGE

Words on a page are just that. You need to be careful that the words you choose to explain your goal and communicate your vision capture the attention of your target audience and inspire them to act.

One night I was watching a 60 Minutes segment featuring Jack Welch. He was talking about the need to get an organization pumped up about what really mattered. He believed quality was critical to his company, GE, but he didn’t just say to his people, “Quality is important.” He said he literally “went nuts” about quality, communicating its importance in everything the company did, from advertising to determining bonuses.

This got me thinking about one goal that was set early in our company, which was to improve customer satisfaction. Everyone can understand something like that, but I didn’t think we’d made enough progress at getting our people to listen and respond to the voice of the customer. So that very night I decided to change the way we talked about it to give it more emphasis. “Customer focus” became “customer mania,” and I started talking about the need to go crazy over understanding the needs of our customers and making them happy.

I quickly found that customer mania got everyone’s attention. It elicited a reaction. It didn’t sound like every other company out there that talks about the need to be focused on customers. It seriously and dramatically elevated the importance of the idea behind it. And now we have a much more customer-focused organization, one that measures its people on their ability to be customer maniacs.

To give another example, when Randall Stephenson became CEO of AT&T in 2007, he wanted to cause a shift in thinking within the organization. The company had always been grounded in their wireline business, but that was the past and he wanted people to be looking toward the future. And the future was wireless, because “that’s where the growth was,” he told me. So he summed up the new strategy in just two very memorable, very powerful words: “Mobilize everything.” It was impossible not to get the message from that.

As the leader, you need to think carefully about the words you choose. Use the tool that follows to help you think through how best to impart your vision. Remember, it’s not just the content of what you say, it’s also how you say it that matters.

TOOL: EMOTIONAL WORD PICTURE

Emotional Word Pictures are formed when you use powerful language to put your goal into words, just as in the quote below.

Download

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