Recently, my colleague Robert Richman and I were asked to speak at the DMI Annual Conference in New York. Here we explain how culture is the key to building a design-driven company.

Where to start, then? How should businesses acquire customers—or more accurately—how they shouldn’t.

Yes momentum ensures businesses continue to market in the same way; continue to advertise in the same way; continue to think in the same way. But customers, both B2B and B2C, don’t have that problem—they are nimble and their choices are many.

Not too long ago I posted a video mentioning the freemium business model many internet start-ups have been going towards. “Why give it away?” the old mind might say, but clearly this free dissemination of value is gaining traction. What’s behind this trend and what can you take back to your business?

Two factors are driving the market toward this type of value first business ethos: 1) Customers are hyper-weary and 2) there are many choices. Combine these two and if you are if you are one of those trying to sell, sell, sell! you’ll quickly face declining sales.

To overcome companies have to give it away honestly, ethically and transparently with no strings attached. The effect? You attract people who are interested in you, build trust and open lines of communication.

Businesses must focus not on collecting new customers but building a community. When you demonstrate that your business understands me (the customer) by creating value first I begin, of my own will, to feel an affinity for the brand and will more likely be open to what you have to say, supportive of your message, and an advocate for your service.

From this community emerges your customers. In the freemium world, those are the premium customers (Evernote’s sports a 2% conversion and is very profitable doing it), but the same rule can apply in other situations.

While going after the customer may seem more direct, it’s lasting value is much, much less. Court a community with a value first ethos and you’ll cultivate advocates who will help you grow your bottom line in more ways than one.

As companies look for ways to improve their reputation in an ever more difficult market, executives likely find themselves struggling with one of the most misunderstood, perhaps underutilized business tools around: Brand.

This series of whiteboard sessions explores some of the latest trends we’ve observed and programs we’re working on. it’s meant to help clients and colleagues explore the implications and opportunities of an accelerating market and the emerging tools we’ll need.

Please leave your comments or reach out to me directly—I look forward to hearing your ideas as well, these concepts are evolving and, of course, imperfect.

Josh

As companies look for ways to improve their reputation in an ever more difficult market, executives likely find themselves struggling with one of the most misunderstood, perhaps underutilized business tools around: Brand.

This series of whiteboard sessions explores some of the latest trends we’ve observed and programs we’re working on. it’s meant to help clients and colleagues explore the implications and opportunities of an accelerating market and the emerging tools we’ll need.

Please leave your comments or reach out to me directly—I look forward to hearing your ideas as well, these concepts are evolving and, of course, imperfect.

Josh

Brand, or reputation if you like, is driven as much by a company’s ability to deliver on expectations as it is about making bold promises. While agencies used to set market expectations with external communications like PR and ads, today brands are formed in the minds of the customer by much more.

Between the amount of transparency organizations are legally required to have (through reports that expose quarterly finances, corporate sustainability, and social responsibility) and the tools customers have at their disposal (i.e.,Google, Twitter, and GlassDoor) CMO’s, if not CEO’s are much more likely to be burned at the stake for overpromising and under delivering. A recent example is AOL’S Tim Armstrong, who compared his hefty investment in Patch.com to properties like CNN and Amazon earlier this year. CNBC and others panned his comparison as “…completely inappropriate.” This articleon Business Insider says it well: “You can’t win respect or success by mere inference.”

Clearly Armstrong has some work to do if he’s to build his credibility and Patch’s brand in the market.

Getting ousted for not delivering is an age-old tradition in corporate America, but forward thinking executives looking to benefit from this transparency trend are reconsidering how internal behaviors are more closely linked than ever to external reputations.

I’ve noticed more of our clients starting to consider internal branding as a viable business tool, but the connection between brand internally and externally is still unclear. For example, how do employee onboarding practices and training programs relate to public perception of your company? To help flesh out these connections I’ve put together a model that depicts this cycle of reputation building.

CULTURE GUIDES DECISIONS, DECISIONS INFORM REPUTATION

Culture is the attitudes, values and goals your organization shares. This under appreciated but potentially powerful business tool should be the compass that helps every employee make the best business decisions all day, every day. Culture guides decisions and every one of those decisions influences your reputation in the market.

Will one bad choice destroy your reputation? Probably not, but if employees don’t hold a shared vision for where an organization is going or clearly understand what they are doing to help, you won’t have the critical mass of brand-aligned business decisions that will drive a coherent market presence.

YOUR REPUTATION IS YOUR PROMISE

Whether a customer hears about your company from a colleague, reads a peer review, or searches your site, they are constantly formulating their own opinion. What they’ve heard and seen, good or bad, sets the expectation for what future customers can expect should they choose to do business with you. The sum of all the data they’ve collected whether actively or passively is your brand promise.

Succinctly, your reputation is your brand promise.

Back to culture: It’s now your employee’s job to ensure your company delivers on customer expectations. Be warned, though: ‘Somewhat delivers’ won’t cut it. For the reputation cycle to become a perpetual motion machine for building brand value your company must not only have compelling external communications, but must equip employees with the vision, knowledge, and tools to communicate and deliver on that promise.

We are extremely excited to have established a great partnership with Silicon Valley’s best know brand firm, Liquid. Based in San Jose Liquid has been building great brands for over ten years. They’ve asked me to help their impressive roster of clients create change from the inside out by collaborating on internal brand initiatives. We look forward to many successful projects consulting with Liquid.

You can see more of their award winning work and read about their process at www.liquidagency.com

Here’s to doing great work together—cheers, Liquid!

Create Three Values from Great Monday on Vimeo.

Pre-profit Priority from Great Monday on Vimeo.

Forget value-added, today’s customer demands value first. Whether individual or corporation, they’re too smart to buy just because your Super Bowl ad said so. To get future customers you need to think about your pre-profit priority—building a community.

One Minute Mondays: Why work? from Great Monday on Vimeo.

Pretty much all Josh thinks about is how to help companies live their brand. Working with him, I get to hear a lot of gems and, I started thinking other people should really hear this, too. So (with my limited video skills) we decided to put this monthly video series together.

Enjoy this no-frills look at some of the thinking that goes on here at the office. First up, Josh wonders: Why work?

Do these examples alone prove the Get Fired hypothesis—that process can change perceptions and you’ll have nothing to fear when promoting a far out idea? Two examples do not a statistically significant sample make—however, they do support the hypothesis.

Assembled in one methodology, these concepts can be applied to change risk-averse attitudes and get more new ideas to market. The following “Get Fired framework” is a plan of action based on what we’ve learned to help you succeed in building, vetting, and implementing your biggest, craziest ideas.

1. Gather your ideas

Few true innovations are “ah-ha!” moments. Most are rooted in a state of mind—one that mixes deep knowledge of subject and consistent use of imagination to consider a project in a new way. Ideas beget ideas, and to keep ideas flowing, fresh, and productive, you need to look for them everywhere. Always be collecting ideas—yours and those of others.

2. Choose the winner

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep,” writes Scott Adams in The Dilbert Principle. You’ve collected a lot of ideas, but you need to cull the list and determine which are viable. Apply your filters. Is your organization operationally capable of realizing this idea? Does the concept forward your long-term brand purpose and strategy? Is there a market trend this idea will serve that will help grow the company? These filters are a good start, but go further. Adapt them or create your own based on what you know about your organization.

3. Build your case

Once an idea looks viable, prototype it. Learning comes from doing, but you’ve got to be fast, resource-efficient, and cost-effective. Famed furniture designer Bruce Hannah says, “Mock it up before you fock it up.” We couldn’t agree more. Prototyping is the best way to find out what’s working and what’s not. Test it out. Do you see potential, but realize that your new product or service is not quite ready for prime time? Send it back for revisions and try again.

4. Socialize the idea

At some point in the process, you’ll probably need executive approval. You’ve identified friends throughout the previous steps: brainstormed with them, sought advice from them, asked for support from them. Now it’s time to identify the champions among them who will help sell the idea. With your prototype’s proof-of-concept in hand, you and your fellow believers will be ready to go after executive approval and funding.

5. Land the plane

Congratulations: You’ve got buy-in, approval, and probably even funding. Now you need to choose the right people to bring the idea to market. The makeup of the project team will play two key roles: (a) it will help signal to the organization the importance of the project; and (b) it will lessen or heighten the probability of the success of the idea itself—especially at its current fledgling stage. Fight to pick the team leader who will carry this flame forward. It could be you, a new hire or, perhaps, one of the champions consulted along the way.

Unproven ideas are inherently risky, and the potential fallout of failure can be career-damning. But as we’ve seen at Saffron and Steelcase, there are ways for you and your organization to realize dramatic innovation. By pairing unproven ideas with a well-considered methodology, you can mitigate risk and possibly even deploy those curb-jumping, paradigm-shifting, out-of-the-box innovations that you once thought too dangerous to be possible.

Now it’s your turn to Get Fired.

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/.

From its 1937 creation of a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired desk to its 1996 investment in product design juggernaut IDEO, Furniture-company-turned-workspace-consultant Steelcase has a long history of not only investing in new ideas but successfully bringing them to market.

The latest in this long tradition is a newly formed group called Growth Initiatives, anascent project that focuses on creating, testing, and bringing new innovations to market. The group’s objective is to capture and systematically fund potential revenue streams as they look 5 and 10 years into the future. To accomplish this Growth Initiatives uses a rigorous venture capital-style investing process that grants progressively larger amounts of resources as an idea proves its value. This method mitigates Steelcase’s investment risk and ensures that only the most viable ideas move forward.

We asked Growth Initiatives program lead John Malnor how his team pushes the boundaries of what’s possible to help Steelcase achieve long-term design andfinancial success. His first response focused on the definition of failure; before an organization is able to fully embrace the opportunities provided by new ideas, it’s mandatory to change the definition of “failure” from “not successful” to “not learning.” He explained that everyone inside the organization must understand that it is acceptable for an unproven idea to not make it to market; and the only true failure is not learning from the process.

“You might have 20 different ideas, and only a couple of those might be viable for the long term. Instead of saying, ‘That failed because it didn’t get second-tier investment,’ you archive that idea, because maybe its time hasn’t come. Or you capture what you learn from that first idea and then look for somewhere else to apply it.” Or perhaps the idea just needs some tweaking. Malnor makes the point that even the best concepts go through at least two or three iterations before they’re ready for market testing.

One idea alone has little chance of success, so Malnor and his team try to gather several. “You want to be able to pick through a portfolio of ideas. If you have just one…people get invested and can’t let it go because there are no alternatives.” They become blind to objective evaluation.

Where do all the ideas come from? Customers, investors, trends, the market, the competition—everyone. “We’re always working on building our skill capturing new ideas,” says Malnor. He adds that Steelcase also cultivates employee participation in the process: “We make it easy for them to contribute.” The company intranet features a form developed to encourage anyone to jot down an idea.

What to do with an inbox of ideas? Design a decision-making gauntlet to determine which ones make the cut, says Malnor: “We’ve developed a set of frameworks that we filter concepts through.” The frameworks he’s referring to are questions that weed out weak ideas and reinforce the strong. Examples include: Is the idea a viable business opportunity; and Does the new business concept align with the company’s overarching purpose? “Some ideas have great potential,” Malnor explains, “but if it doesn’t build the long-term value of the brand, we pass.”

Perhaps the most critical framework is whether the new idea aligns with Steelcase’s current focus, which is determined by macro trends like economic environments and technology developments. In the past opportunities have ranged from geographic and product category trends to competitors’ new developments.

If an idea successfully answers these questions it’s promoted to prototyping and receives an initial round of funding to explore its real potential.

The first rule of prototyping: How fast can you learn, how little can you put at risk? When a concept is ready for in-market prototyping, “you need to invest the smallest possible amount to prove the concept,” explains Malnor. If you can figure out how to do rapid in-market prototyping for low cost and quick learning, then you’ll already have those metrics in hand to help prove the business case when you start looking for additional resources.

Malnor offers a few key recommendations for companies that want to emulate this type of methodical innovation. “Trust the talent within your company,” he explains. “Understand what your purpose is, and then build the skills and thick skin it takes to rapidly prototype ideas. You have to be willing to stop investing in many of those ideas—most of them, in fact. The only failures come from not trying new things—or, even worse, not learning from each new concept or venture.”

One early success to come out of Growth Initiatives is Workspring Venture (www.workspring.com), a collaborative business space designed to “inspire and support creative process, productive workshops, and transformative exchange.” An inspiring alternative to hotel conference rooms, workspring is intended to better address a growing trend in business—creative off-sites. No longer within the Steelcase primary offering of furniture, Workspring may have seemed risky to some. But it satisfied all the frameworks Mr. Malnor and team subjected it to, and brought it to market.

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/.