Blah Blah Blah

by Dan Roam

  Two or three reductions and we’ve got the ideal presentation: only the essentials, boiled down on a small sheet of paper. No need to worry about all the other ideas left behind—we haven’t lost them; they’re just taking the backseat for now. Let’s make sure our audience “gets” the essentials first (and can explain them back to us52) before we start the expansion process again. Now when we get into the nuances, we’ll have everyone’s undivided attention—and if anyone gets lost as we reconstruct the full idea, we just refer back to the essentials to get back on track.

  Coffee Break

  Let’s take the essentials of coffee as an example. More specifically, let’s look at the world of retail coffee sales—and the original specialty coffeehouse in particular. Although the green mermaid of Starbucks now rules the waves, the story of specialty coffee chains in America began back in 1966, when a well-traveled Dutchman opened his first coffeehouse in Berkeley, California. His name was Alfred Peet, and he would change the way the world drinks coffee.

  The son of an Old World coffee roaster in Alkmaar, Holland, Alfred traveled the world as a tea buyer for Lipton before finally settling in San Francisco in the 1950s. Ten years later, dismayed at the poor quality of the coffee available in America, he decided to do something about it. Rekindling his father’s contacts, Alfred began importing the high-altitude coffee beans of Costa Rica, Guatemala, and East Africa, beans that he knew made the most flavorful cup. With his special dark roast, Alfred’s shop became a hit, and before long he had three stores dotted around San Francisco Bay.

  That might have been the full extent of Alfred’s coffee empire had not two of his biggest fans approached him with expansion plans. English teacher Jerry Baldwin and writer Gordon Bowker, neither of whom knew much about business but both of whom loved Peet’s coffee, decided they wanted to open their own coffeehouse one day. Equally inspired by their dedication, Alfred spent hours teaching them the ropes. When their time came, in 1971, Baldwin and Bowker moved to Seattle, set up a commercial contract for coffee beans with Peet’s, and opened their own store. They called it Starbucks.

  Forty years later, Starbucks had more than sixteen thousand stores worldwide. Peet’s had 193.

  In 1971, the original Peet’s had 3 stores and Starbucks had 1. In 2010 it was 193 to 16,000.

  Although Peet’s was the original, Alfred was never interested in growth. His passion was making the best coffee conceivably possible. In that, he was an unquestioned success—his passion is shared today by loyal coffee drinkers everywhere.

  But Peet’s CEO Pat O’Dea knew that his compa R Qs compa ny had to grow. In 2006, having already made the decision to expand and open new stores, O’Dea needed to solve the paradox of quality and growth. O’Dea recognized that Peet’s greatest strength had always been uncompromising quality—something most coffee people considered possible only on a small scale. The challenge for O’Dea and company was how to have both: how to grow without undermining quality and how to find new customers (and make them happy) while keeping existing customers even happier. Now that is a trick.

  Distilling the ROP

  That year, O’Dea and his team embarked on the journey to quality-focused growth. Their goal: to find a way to open new stores and increase retail channels while improving quality along the way. In a way, it was as if Peet’s had to find a way to change nearly everything—while changing virtually nothing. Peet’s wasn’t just on a business trip; it was on a philosophical journey.

  The result was Peet’s Retail Operating Philosophy. The ROP, two years of effort by dozens of people throughout the company, was never going to be easy to nail down. First, as the new model for the coffeehouse side of the business, the ROP had to actually work: It had to lay out a comprehensive, realistic, sustainable, and scalable vision for the bulk of the company. Second, because it served so many masters, the ROP had to open with only the essentials—yet still provide a structure for ready access to thousands of details.

  The path to the ROP went like this. First, the leaders put their foxes to work, collecting all the ideas they could find and making lists that they could share.

  A typical list from the ROP development process: lots and lots of ideas collected and discussed.

  Next, the lists were visually compiled into big pictures—not beautiful images, just basic hummingbird maps53 that pulled ideas together into common clumps and noted the connections between them.

  The same list after a go by the hummingbird. Commonalities, clumps, and connections become visible.

  Then the fox went back to work. “How would I describe that picture?” he asked himself. And he would answer by saying something like:

  Our vision and mission are clear: quality sits above all else. To support that quality while growing, we might think about dividing our business into four primary areas of focus: people, products, brand, and business. And supporting all that from below is a set of common people and business development tools and measures.54

  This process went on for many cycles as linear list met spatial map, each feeding the other with unexpected connections and each unearthing new insights. In the end, the essence of Peet’s Retail Operating Philosophy fit on a napkin—an entirely appropriate presentation device for a company that serves hot beverages.

  Peet’s Coffee and Tea Retail Operating Philosophy. Distilled to only the essentials, it fits comfortably on a napkin.

  Remember the distillation curve? This essentials-only napkin becomes the midpoint presentation tool. People look at the napkin, they talk it through, and they get it. It’s the vivid expression of the big idea.

  The napkin serves as the “essentials only” introduction to the new Retail Operating Philosophy, all the original ideas distilled into one vivid picture.

  Reexpanding the ROP

  But wait—there’s more: After all, you can’t run a company from a napkin. Clear as the essentials are, there remain hundreds of processes, manuals, and supporting materials to put together—not to mention thousands of people who need to use them. Now begins the reconstruction side of the curve. But now that we’ve found the essence of our idea, that’s easy: All we have to do is restore the details. How? Call back in our fox: Hey, fox—now that we’ve seen the essentials, would you mind adding your words to explain and expand on this napkin picture?

  Fox: “I’d be delighted. How about this . . .”

  The expanded napkin. We start the econstruction process by adding words slowly back in, explaining the essentials in more detail.

  From there, we keep expanding, adding layer upon layer to the essentials until we see how they apply to each specific job, role, and task—re-creating whatever materials we need to get the whole message out to the people who need them.

  The fully reexpanded idea: the essentials applied to all materials.

  And now we’ve come full circle: from too many ideas to only the essentials and back. Only this time, all the results have something in common: They are vivid.

  That’s the lesson of “only the essentials”: If we can boil our idea down to its essence, we can introduce it to others in the way they’re most likely to accept—and remember.

  From too many ideas to “only the essence” and back. Only this time, the entire idea is vivid.

  CHAPTER 9

  R Is for Recognizable: Vivid Ideas Look Familiar

  he third stop in our tour of the Vivid FOREST is R, which stands for “recognizable.” Vivid Ideas look familiar. When we first hear a Vivid Idea, we don’t think, “Wait a minute . . . What?” When we first see a Vivid Idea, we think, “Yeah, I know this: I have seen this before.”

  It has long been the domain of psychologists and cognitive scientists to understand how our minds make sense of the world. More recently they have been joined by neurobiologists and behavioral economists who approach with a whole new set of tools. As all these thinkers start to compare notes, many of their answers boil down to a common rule: When faced with something new, we look for the familiar.

>   New things cause us stress. Since we don’t recognize them, we don’t know how to react to them. But once we recognize something familiar in something new, our brains can relax,55 because experience tells us what to do. Vivid Ideas take advantage of this by making new and unexpected ideas recognizable.

  When we can find the familiar in something new, our brains relax—and we can think better.

  Our search for the familiar is a constant process. It’s only by recognizing things around us that we are able to navigate the world at all.56 For example, when we meet someone new, our mind immediately casts about trying to decide whom he or she looks like. For better or worse, our mind is seeking clues as to how to react based on our experiences with similar-looking people.

  When we meet someone new, we immediately compare them with someone we already know.

  The same holds true when we see a new machine: We assume it does the same things as a similar-looking old machine. While this assumption can either help us (familiarity with software standards helps us instantly use a new application) or mislead us (thinking that a horseless carriage is just a carriage without a horse can get us run over), the assumption has value in that it gives us a starting point to learn more.

  When we see a new machine, we assume it is like one we already know.

  And although we’re constantly pulling words from the old to describe the new, our search for the familiar is only tangentially a verbal process. Yes, our fox jumps in, naming names and assigning terms, but his is often a fumbling attempt to define away the stress by nailing it down with familiar words.

  The recognition process is actually more of an instant, all-at-once grab for a visual metaphor, our mind’s attempt to literally answer the question “Where have I seen this before?” As much as our fox would love to take credit, recognizing the familiar in the unfamiliar is our hummingbird’s domain—and that makes this chapter our hummingbird’s favorite. So let’s give our fox a break; it’s our hummingbird’s turn to show off.

  This is our hummingbird’s favorite chapter in the whole book—so our fox can take a break and enjoy the show.

  Pyramid Power

  Our visual mind’s desire to see the familiar in the unfamiliar is so compelling that we find recognizable shapes and visual metaphors in new ideas even when the idea’s creator never suggested them.57

  Among the most frequently used visual metaphors in business and education is the pyramid. Because the image is so familiar and so laden with visual potential, we use the pyramid to describe everything from the sales cycle to project planning to financial management to test scores.

  Used in sales, management, project planning, finance, psychology, and education, the pyramid is among the most recognized of visual metaphors.

  But nowhere is the pyramid more revered than in marketing, where its hierarchy has come to summarize human motivation—in particular psychologist Abraham Maslow’s theories. Born in Brooklyn in 1908, Maslow spent fifty years studying the lives and habits of high-achieving people. The result of his research was a theory he called “The Hierarchy of Needs,” a simple model describing the underlying reasons for why we humans do the things we do.

  In Maslow’s hierarchy, human needs fall into five layers: physiological needs on the bottom (breathing, food, water, sex, sleep), safety needs next (security, employment, money), social needs next (friendship, family, intimacy), followed by esteem needs (confidence, achievement, respect), and capped off by self-actualization needs (morality, creativity, acceptance of facts).

  Based on his hierarchy, Maslow said that the essence of the human condition is a desire to fulfill our highest needs of self-actualization. However, Maslow also said that people can address their higher needs only when their lower needs are being met. It’s easy to see why this model gained such resonance for marketers; Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs provides a clear model for understanding what motivates people to try (and buy) stuff.

  But what Maslow did not say was that there was a pyramid involved.58 In all his works, Maslow never mentioned the word pyramid and never drew one. Yet most any reference to Maslow today contains “Maslow’s Pyramid.” In countless discussions, presentations, and proposals, this immediately recognizable picture of a five-layer pyramid stands in for Maslow’s written hierarchy.

  The Hierarchy of Needs pyramid, the most common representation of Maslow’s thinking (for pretty much everyone except Maslow).

  And that’s the point: Maslow’s greatest idea is essentially a list—and as we know, when we want to make a list vivid, we should draw a map. The map that always gets drawn when someone hears Maslow’s list is the familiar, memorable, and understandable pyramid. We will never know whom to thank for drawing the first Maslow pyramid, but it wasn’t Maslow.59

  Oceans of Opportunity

  Recognition—an idea’s ability to catch our eye and say, “Yes, I am new and different—but don’t worry, you have seen me before”—is often the single critical distinction between an idea that rises to the top and a similar idea that remains unnoticed. Nowhere is this more visible than in the business of business books.

  Every year, about eleven thousand new business books hit the U.S. market. (To make that number vivid, consider that your average chain bookstore displays about twenty thousand titles on its shelves. Half your favorite bookstore filled with nothing but this year’s business books? Yikes.) Of those eleven thousand business books, most will sell fewer than a thousand copies; a few thousand will sell ten thousand copies; a couple hundred “publishing successes” will sell 100,000 copies; and a dozen “blockbusters” will sell a million.

  Put another way:

  Eleven thousand new business books appear every year. About a dozen of those will sell more than one million copies.

  Countless factors contribute to the success of the few. But what’s remarkable is how many of those few have titles that are visually recognizable.

  In 1997, two professors teaching at the INSEAD management school, outside Paris, published an article on business strategy in the Harvard Business Review. In the academic language of the business press, authors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne titled their article “Value Innovation: The Strategic Logic of High Growth.” For readers of the HBR, that back-to-back lineup of five business terms (value + innovation + strategy + logic + growth60) meant something meaty, and the article was well received.

  The Harvard Business School Press was pleased and suggested that its authors might have a successful book on their hands. For the next seven years, Kim and Mauborgne refined their value-innovation concept, testing it in more than 150 company case studies. When done, they had a book that they believed would sell well to the HBR audience.

  The authors could have stayed with their original title and, given their stellar academic reputations and the rigor of their research, would probably have achieved publishing success. But Kim and Mauborgne so believed in their concept that they hoped for a blockbuster. They suspected that a more viscerally compelling title than Value Innovation might help.

  They chose the ocean as a metaphor for their vision. It was a risk. On the surface, an “ocean” has nothing to do with business. But the image is evocatively visual: an ocean is vast, deep, and mysterious—just like the untested markets Kim and Mauborgne explored. And the ocean has always been a symbol of freedom, endless opportunity, and adventure—all catnip to entrepreneurs (who by the way buy lots of books). When they combined this with the solid business term “strategy,” a completely original yet perfectly recognizable idea emerged. Blue Ocean Strategy hit bookshelves in 2005.

  It hit like a tidal wave. Kim and Mauborgne’s ocean instinct was right. Within weeks their book Rht=" air book had achieved bestseller status on every major business book list. Six years after publication, Blue Ocean Strategy is still a top-selling business book, with more than two million copies sold in forty-two languages. (That’s the most foreign editions of any book in HBSP history.)

  There is no question that the authors ha
d a wonderful idea that they researched well and described beautifully. But that’s not what made Blue Ocean Strategy a blockbuster—after all, thousands of new books have wonderful ideas and good writing going for them. It was the book’s title, original yet instantly recognizable, that knocked it off the charts.

  To prove it, let’s make this story even more vivid. (Since this is about big numbers, we’ll add another chart.) Imagine that we wanted to buy just one book on business strategy this year. Let’s say we went online to see what was available. If we looked up the word “strategy” in the business section of the largest online bookstore, we would find 27,413 titles—an impossible number from which to pick just one. If we looked up “value,” we’d find 13,541 titles; “innovation” would give us 9,879. How to choose?