Dave Smith

How to Institutionalize Inspiration in Your Company

 

I had a mentor years ago, Anita Roddick who founded the Body Shop. We were at an airport at Heathrow, and she said, "Andy, never forget that words create the world." And when you're thinking about words and language around these highly qualitative things, they serve as emotional levers for people to engage with and activate. On the mood side, we proposed the idea of a Chief Mood Officer. It's very actionable, and it's very directive, in terms of appointing somebody to this position.

On the momentum side, one thing we've instituted is the Inspiration Policy. We have human resource policies, profit policies, efficiency policies, safety policies... Why can't we have an inspiration policy? Just the language alone sets people back. It's a policy: It's been mandated and directed upon you as an associate to make inspiration a part of your day-to-day activities.

What's fascinating is the inspiration idea inside of the innovation idea has this multiplier effect, and this very elegant duality. Inspiration is that thing that services innovation, which is what companies are looking for: Innovation, change, growth around market, share of market, product services and market penetration. It has this nice elegant duality of servicing both the culture and the market outcomes.

Do you believe that every company should institutionalize some of these policies, or only the companies that have trouble with innovating?

I really do believe, at some level, everybody should [institutionalize these policies]. Over the course of 20 years, if I were to landscape my clients around the topic of innovation and the inherent qualities of inspiration, I often see them as two ends of the continuum.

One end is the highly quantitative financial services, insurances, or regulated industry, and the other end of the continuum is the most qualitative, imaginative, creative and brand-centric categories in the business industry. Those qualitative and imaginative—and most quantitative and most scientific—are in need of some level of this. Those companies on the left-brained side are in need of it, and they know that they need to complement themselves with this more qualitative side. And those on the qualitative side, on the other end of the spectrum in the right brain, know they have to be better at it everyday.

The "look at more stuff and think about it harder" philosophy really does service companies that are in dire need of it, and those companies that want to stay continually better at arriving at change and growth through inspiration. What's interesting about the Five M's is that you get to use it as a diagnostic. Not does LAMSTAIH help drive transformation at companies, but they can also use the 5 M's as a gauge in driving inspiration and innovation in their business. You can dial one up or dial one down based on the focus and energy of the company's needs. It's really dependent on time and space in the company.

Your book is filled with many interesting stories and anecdotes. Would you mind sharing your favorite?

We were in Napa Valley with a client who was a software company growing at record speed, with 12 to 15 top executives in seven figures in income, growing at a rate that was almost incomprehensible, like so many of these digital companies in that time and space. There was an amazing issue of finding engagement and level of camaraderie amongst them: There was this competitive, fiery thing that was tearing the culture apart while they were on this growth streak, which was the ironic thing.

What we wanted them to do was to step back and look at more and think about it harder. One of the things we did was we took them through a EUKs—Experience, Understand and Knowledge experiences—a two-day "look at more" tour taking them around Napa Valley, Silicon Valley, and San Francisco.

One of the stops was at Bob Cannard's organic farm; Cannard provides organic foods to all the greatest restaurants in Napa and down in the Bay Area, including Per Se, the Thomas Keller restaurant. Per Se is known for his great mushrooms, and one of the things that this organic farmer grew was Thomas Keller's mushrooms. So as we walked upon the mushroom field we saw what was not a pristine and perfectly organized field, but was a bushwacked, hay infested, rusted tractors, and topography with bumps and graduation all the way through it. Not anything what you expect all these beautiful mushrooms to be coming out of.

One of the executives asked Bob, "Wait, let me get this straight: You make arguably the best mushrooms in the world in that field, and it looks like anything less than a field that would net out that kind of product." And Cannard said, "You really need to step back and realize that you're looking at alternating rows of weeds and a rows of plants, because if I had a row of plants and a row of plants, although your intuition would tell you that you're looking for efficiency and effectiveness and teasing all that you can out of the model, you would suffocate yourself to death. You need to step back and realize that you have weeds to give yourself a deep breath, so you won't strangle your model to death."

It was an amazing observation that these executives got to walk away with in this jaw-dropping kind of moment. As a group of individuals and as an organization, there was no weeds. They were squeezing out all that there was in terms of sustainability by virtue of being too tight and too rigorous in their day-to-day effectiveness.

If there's one message that you want readers to take away from the book, what would that be?

I think that the world has fundamentally changed and business has fundamentally changed. And by virtue of business having such a strong directive and influence on people, directly and indirectly, that people have changed. There is, in fact, a bit of a human energy crisis right now inside of the organizations, the biggest and the brightest around the world.

There's a real role for inspiration at a business discipline level, and also a personal, passionate level. Look at More is the opportunity to explore the idea of how inspiration can serve as the fuel, and as that discipline for driving more innovation and growth and change within your company, and looking at the input of inspiration—and the model of the Five M's—in service of growth and change. What you were hoping to create is not always your outcome.

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