At some point – in the long-forgotten past – I must have subscribed to Cosmopolitan magazine. I haven’t paid for the subscription in years, but the magazine continues to arrive each month – at every address I move to – complete with its blush-worthy coverlines and endless articles on how to be sexier, skinnier and otherwise happily scantily clad.
This is the content that I – and its 3 million monthly readers – have come to expect from that brand.
It’s not the kind of content just any brand could or should pull off.
Say, for example, the brand 66 million of us turn to for health advice: WebMD. We turn there to get plain-spoken explanations of diseases we’ve never heard of, advice on how to care for sprained ankles and sniffly noses, and – admit it – occasionally self diagnoses.
But, WebMD’s recent email campaigns haven’t been quite so healthy. No more wellness programs and seasonal flu avoiders; today, it’s sharing a new kind of advice:
I wonder if WebMD’s brand can survive this shift? Will consumers and healthcare providers be willing to dig through the wellness-lite content to get to the trusted health resources? Or will they move to a brand as serious as WebMD once was? QuantiaMD is one location betting on the latter. Today, they provide expert opinions by and for healthcare providers, but they’re set to open a consumer space soon.
I’ll be watching for more serious destinations to follow. When it comes to their health, people are looking for two things:
To understand the experiences and decisions of people like them
To have an expert’s view into what to expect
Neither of those can come from a watered-down brand where serious health is mired in salacious coverlines.
I saw Pink speak at an Innovation Summit last week. He was telling a story about how forgetting carrots and sticks (and just about everything else we think we know about motivation) can create radically more productive and inspired workforces. The story went something like this -
The yearly turnover at call centers in nearly 100%. It’s a dreary job. You’re on the phone, you get a call, it’s typically a complaint. You hear the question or complaint, and you type key strokes and you get a script. It’s routine and rule-based. You’re almost always “housed” in a windowless room. When one call is finished, another automatically comes in. You’re judged by how quickly you complete the calls and how few calls back. Job satisfaction is abysmal. And, from my own experience on the other end of that 800-line, I’d say customer experience isn’t so great either.
And yet there’s a company called Zappos that does things differently. They say to their call center employees—no script, no timing of calls, no monitoring calls. Solve the problem anyway you want, just get it done. Take action; be creative. It’s almost heresy in the call center world. And yet Zappos has among the best customer service ratings of any company in America – one that actually rivals the Four Seasons. And, it’s an online shoe company (not a five-star hotel!)
The stories do make sense. Right-brained, creative people aren’t motivated by carrots and sticks. They’re motivated by these three new ideas: autonomy, mastery and purpose. (Read more about those on another Pink post on WYDiQ)
But, how? That led me to ask Pink: Wait a minute, this all makes sense when you’re talking about a company that was founded with these values. My company has it in their DNA. But, how do you change a carrot-and-stick company? How, for example, would you introduce these ideas into a sales culture that was built on the carrots of commission?
Let’s talk about a company that actually did that, he said. A sales organization that got rid of commissions: Red Gate Software, a firm based in Cambridge that makes development tools for programmers.
They established a commission structure. The sales reps figured out how to game that system by pushing sales into the time period most advantageous for them, by underselling one month to show a bigger gain the following month, and so on. All the natural human response.
So, the management made the commissions more complex. The sales reps figured it out again. They made it more complex… you get the idea. Eventually, both the management team and the sales force seemed more focused on the compensation system than on making great software and selling it to customers who needed it.
Neil Davidson, one of the founders, approached his sales team with the bizarre idea of getting rid fo sales commissions altogether and simply paying people a healthy flat salary. The response surprised him. The salespeople thought the move was a good one, but that other salespeople wouldn’t.
Pink said, Davidson explained it to Tom [not his real name] who said, “It sounds like a really good idea. But James would never like it. Remove the commission and he’ll leave.” James said, “Sounds great. But it will never work with Tom.”
Not only were commissioned sales not leading to better performance, it wasn’t even the arrangement salespeople themselves preferred.
In the absence of commissions, Red Gate’s total sales have increased. And while two salespeople left the company – uncomfortable with the new regime – most stayed and are thriving – including our heroes Tom and James.
Out of this story, Pink drew three big pieces of advice for change management:
Challenge the assumptions of the orthodoxy (You don’t know what people really think until you ask)
Know that other people are more like us than we think (We’re all motivated by surprisingly similar things)
Start small (A little more about this last one:)
Pink talked about how Atlassian dedicated 20% of employee time to innovation projects – just working on what you want to work on. And, in doing so, created great new opportunities and products.
But 99% of companies shouldn’t go there, he said – it’s too risky, too expensive.
Instead, start small.
Do 10%. That’s an afternoon. Who among us hasn’t squandered an afternoon?
And don’t do it with everyone. Choose one department. And don’t do it forever. Just try 3 months.
But, do try it. Because the routine way most of America has been working is about to come to an end. (Read more about that on Advergirl in The India problem.)
At TED, Pink explained this new science of motivation:
That got me thinking about lasting solutions to our distractions.
Most people who split their focus in meetings aren’t disinterested or bored or otherwise unengaged. They’re time starved, overwhelmed by both mounting to-do lists and packed calendars. They’re trying to fit a little doing into a day packed with planning.
How can we use culture and technology to make space for people to do both better?
I love the recent ad our creative team ran in MedAdNews. It’s a get-out-of-meeting free card when you really need to focus on another task. An on-demand study hall for the time starved:
But, we probably need some lasting ideas, too. Like:
Calendar rules for critical mass: What if your calendar could save you a little time for doing by blocking out the remainder of your day when you reach, say, 70% of your time committed to meetings?
Meetings on the 15. Could we plan for checking in and catching up by ending meetings on the hour and starting the next ones at quarter past?
No internal email days. What can we learn from companies that have set one day a week to slow down correspondence? Could we be more in touch by being less immediate?
Download discipline. What if fewer people were required in any one meeting because we were better at reporting the outcomes and sharing the discussion (before and after)?
Team covenants. What if we really read the status reports and backgrounders and proposals that were sent our way and didn’t need to use collaboration time to go over the basics? What if each team made agreements about what they’d do together and what they’d commit to doing on their own?
Off to a meeting. And, leaving the cell phone at my desk. (For now!)
Brand Liberators is all about what it takes to propel brands to the next level. It’s where our team at GSW Worldwide talks about how agencies and brand managers overcome obstacles to think big and bring break-through ideas to life.
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