Great Monday //

From the outside: Saffron Consultants

Saffron Consultants is a brand consultancy founded in 2001, with 50-plus employees scattered across offices in London, New York, Madrid, and Mumbai. A client once said, “They’re the perfect combination of charm and brutality.”[1] It was this reputation for candor, and the firm’s design experience, that led us to believe it would be a robust test case for the Get Fired hypothesis.”

Wally Olins is the firm’s Chairman and Co-founder, and few names in branding are held in the same regard. He co-founded the venerable Wolff Olins [2] in 1965 and has overseen hundreds of brand creations and reinventions over five decades. Given his experience, he is uniquely positioned to advise how to realize new, expansive ideas.

For Saffron, the question is not as much about whether they might Get Fired for being too radical – after all, they are often hired to think in unconventional ways. Rather, it’s a question about whether a client has the ability to realize a radical idea and the organizational change that may follow it.

Why is it easier for some organizations to thrive on creativity and change, while others flounder at every attempt? “When you fail to innovate, it’s not because people don’t intellectually recognize the requirement to innovate, but it is because they cannot bring themselves to do the things that are required to make the changes.”

Mr. Olins offers GM as an example of a company that failed to make this leap for decades. “GM talked for 20 years at least about wanting to change. They did not do a thing really to change. Only when they were absolutely at rock bottom, when it was all over for them, did they change.”

To contrast, Olins cites Nokia and Stanford University as organizations that have sustained levels of creativity in their ranks: “They are among the 25 to 35 percent that really innovate very powerfully and very successfully, and once they have that in their bloodstream they don’t stop. But getting it into the bloodstream is difficult.” He cites strong competition, new management, and desperation as primary drivers that can goose new creativity in such organizations.

Mr. Olins offers Orange, the mobile phone concern, as one of the most radical new approaches of the 1990s. When Hutchison Whampoa – Orange’s parent company – decided to establish a mobile network, there was very little to differentiate it from the three substantial competitors already in the market. At a time when mobile phones were seen an elite accessory for the few, the Wolff Olins team suggested the name “Orange” as a way to democratize mobility and enable people from all walks of life to identify with the offer.[3]

The recommendation was very controversial. However, through diligent research and creative exploration the Wolff Olins team helped the client realize the new brand would humanize the offer. He explains that upon their ultimate acceptance of the name, “the company just seized it and drove it and pushed it and made it work remarkably successfully. And with great imagination and zeal and great courage.” The result: the company attracted 7 million people to its service in the first five years. It was a perfect example of how an extreme idea, that initially appeared out-of-bounds, was ultimately proven given the right energy and innovation process.

Saffron is hired to create big, bold brand and design changes for all sorts of companies and countries, and they have done this quite successfully. Olins offered the following ingredients for how the firm maintains a semi-permanent, sustained creativity in the organization:

Share ideas all of the time. “Nobody pays enough attention to communication. Nobody does. I try to, but I know I don’t. And most people don’t. It’s a very, very hard thing to do.” Effective communication is one of the most difficult, and most overlooked, challenges in many organizations. To foster good organizational communication, Olins recommends actively circulating new ideas, avoiding organizational silos, and being transparent about your beliefs.

Follow your instinct. “I’m quite often asked in this business, ‘How did you develop ideas around branding?’ I think you can post-rationalize some things, but a lot of it is instinct.” To make the best of your instincts, be honest with yourself about who you are and what you know. The greater your understanding of an idea, its opportunities and its risks, the more effectively you will be able to use your instinct.

Use the carrot as well as the stick. “You have to be very persuasive and offer carrots, but you also have to say, ‘If you don’t innovate, look what will happen to you.’ ” Everyone has fears and desires. Delivering your ideas with an eye to all the possibilities—negative as well as positive, moderate as well as severe—helps provide a balanced view of the possible impacts of your idea.

Make friends. “People who get the idea and run with it make it go further than you can make it go because not only do they understand what you’ve been saying, but they also understand the organization.” Relationships are central to success on an individual or an organizational level. The more friends you make, the greater your chances of having significant impact.

But how can organizations who haven’t hired a creative agency like Saffron push the boundaries of design and business? We went to Steelcase, a company that has a consistent record of bringing new ideas to market from the inside, to find out what makes it successful.

NEXT: Part 3 – From the Inside: Steelcase

Co-Authored By John Root Stone and Josh Levine. Author Posting. © 2009 The Design Management Institute. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of the Design Management Institute for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Design Management Review, 21:2, . http://dx.doi.org/.