I’ve written before about multiple stakeholders, so I was pleased to hear what Brian Chesky shared about who he considers to be the stakeholders of Airbnb.
Yes, shareholders. But also employees (who also hold equity), visitors, hosts, suppliers, partners and the communities they operate in.
What particularly struck me was the way Chesky has designed in consideration for each set of stakeholders into the way the business works.
Here are his recommended first steps for setting up in business:
I love this! It means that a business is a system for making and keeping promises – to all its stakeholders.
Sometimes, its impossible to keep all your stakeholders happy, as Airbnb found right at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. But it seems that for Airbnb, knowing the promises they’ve pledged to keep has helped them to do the right things, in the right way, as far as they can.
And in the long run, this is what keeps the public wanting you to exist.
*Freeman, R. & Reed, Dl. (1983). Stockholders and Stakeholders: A New Perspective on Corporate Governance. California Management Review. 25. 10.2307/41165018.
These two episodes of Eric Ries’s podcast Out of the Crisis are rapidly turning into the theme for this week. Brian Chesky just keeps coming up with gems.
Today’s is this:
“The best thing you can do for shareholders is for the public to want your company to exist.”
How many businesses, enterprises, organisations, large or small, have you supported during lockdown, because you want them to exist?
Here’s a more challenging, perhaps painful question:
How many people are supporting your business, because they want it to exist?
Whatever the answer is, the next questions to ask, are:
Why is that?
What can you do about it?
and hopefully,
How can you thank them?
PS Hofpfisterei is a bakery chain founded in 1331.
I’ve just finished reading this book, the first of 3 I ordered after hearing Margaret Heffernan on the radio last … Read More “Wilful Blindness”
One benefit of this pause we’re in is more time to think about our businesses than usual.
Which makes books like the one I recommended yesterday particularly good reads, if reading is your thing.
Today’s book is “This is Marketing” by Seth Godin. I recommend it because unlike any other marketing book I’ve come across, it makes you think hard about what marketing is really for.
We usually start our marketing thinking from the wrong side of the relationship: How much do I need to sell? Who can I sell it to? How can I get to that is quickly and easily as possible?
This book challenges you to think from the other side: Who do you want to serve? What do they want? What do they really want? Can you offer that? How can you do that best for them? How does the word spread when you get it right?
The result is a business that may be very hard to get started, but which in the long run creates more, better, more appropriate value.
More, better, more appropriate value is just what we all need going forwards.
This is the book to help you create it.
If, like me, your business-to-business offering feels a discretionary spend at the best of times, you’re probably thinking “Where will I fit in after this is all over?”
The answer? Wherever, whenever and however the people you serve are going to need what you can do for them.
The only way to find out where this will be is to step outside the bubble of your own concerns and put yourself in their shoes.
Not their shoes now, but their shoes down the line, when the urgent crisis is over, the extent of the damage better known, the time when the people you serve will be asking themselves the question “Where will I fit in after this is all over?”
For the right people, what you offer will never be a discretionary spend.
And we only find the right people with deep and deliberate empathy.
A mushroom is a metaphor for a short-lived momentary thing, that springs up quickly and dies just as quickly.
Yet this mushroom behaviour is deceptive, because the mushroom is founded on something much bigger and more durable. A mycelium.
A mycelium is a wonderful thing. It connects each and every mushroom within its network to every other, across space and time. They share a common genesis, even through they may pop up in very different habitats.
What’s more, each mushroom (if not picked early) throws out spores, also invisible, that spreads the network even further, until you have something like the mycelium in Nevada that covers over 800 hectares of ground, and is over 2,000 years old.
Not a bad model for a movement, or for a business that aspires to become a movement.
Be more mycelium.
It’s easier to do than you think.
Huge thanks to the open food network UK for letting me borrow their metaphor.
Like many large organisations, the NHS has a Director of Customer Experience.
As if Customer Experience is somehow separate from Service Delivery. As if they aren’t two sides of the same coin.
Now, I might be wrong, but this feels like a bit of a bolt-on. Like the customer might actually the last person to be thought of in the whole mechanism.
In any business, what the customer experiences is your Service Delivery. Design that intentionally around what will truly serve and delight your customer. Then make sure it happens consistently and you can’t go far wrong.
That way you won’t need an expensive Director to convince people you are doing it.
I’ve never seen Anthropologie, the retail chain, advertise. They don’t waste their time, money or energy putting themselves in front of people who aren’t interested in what they have to offer.
Instead they have identified very clearly who it is they want to attract into their stores, then created stores that are magnetic to that kind of person. You either walk past an Anthropologie store, or you walk in. And if you walk in, it’s very likely that you’ll buy something.
It goes even deeper though. Anthropologie’s promise is to send their clients out of the store looking and feeling fabulous. And they are prepared to forego short-term sales to achieve this.
When I was at business school we were told the story of one store that sacked their ‘best’ salesperson. The salesperson was great at selling, but at the expense of sending the customer home with clothing that didn’t make them look and feel great.
For the people Anthropologie serves, Anthropologie’s aim is become part of who they are. Nothing less will do. They wait patiently for the right people to find them, then keep their promise to them religiously. The result is a growing community of enthusiasts.
That’s not magic, that’s dedication.
Professor Richard Murphy has sparked controversy (again) this morning with his AccountingWEB article: Do you recognise your own accounts?
In it he suggests that companies of all sizes consider their published accounts as part of their marketing, and own them in the same way they would any other part of their marketing collateral.
I agree. Your promise isn’t just superficial fluff, it’s the essence of who you are and the change you seek to make in the world. It should be reflected in everything you do, even the parts many people don’t see.
How you do one thing is how you do everything. Dissonance undermines trust.
My friend Mary Jane Copps (aka The Phone Lady) sent out a brilliant tip for delighting prospects today. It got me thinking again about self-service.
When supermarkets first arrived, housewives were delighted. No more queueing at counters to be served, you could just pick and choose whatever you wanted from the shelves of one shop and check out. They could work to their own timetable. They were empowered.
The same is true of many online services. I can renew my passport, book train journeys, order print, buy tyres, whenever I want to. I’m no longer tied to someone else’s schedule – in some cases not even for physical delivery. I’m empowered in ways that I never dreamt of as a child.
There is however, one place where self-service really doesn’t work well, and that’s when things go wrong – when I make a mistake, or something doesn’t arrive on time, or I’m not sure what to type.
Cycling through frequently asked questions that aren’t my question, or being directed to a forum that shows hundreds of others with the same (un-addressed) problem is disempowering, and disenchanting. I want to follow my own schedule – I need help now. Forcing me to spend the first 60 seconds of a call to the helpline listening to instructions to visit the website is disrespectful.
Of course self-service reduces costs for the provider. If you make it obvious that’s the only reason for it, you’ll disgust your customer.
On the other hand, if you make sure it enables them to follow their own schedule in every scenario, you’ll delight them.