The Hidden Brand

The company exists to create value for someone. This sounds obvious until you try to specify who that someone is. Shareholders, certainly, but the legal requirement to maximise shareholder value does not specify the time horizon, and short-term and long-term shareholder interests often diverge. Customers, employees, communities, the future: the stakeholder question has no universally agreed answer. It was one of those ordinary moments that carried an extraordinary weight. It was the sentence they would remember when the story was retold.

The relationship between a company and its customers is a relationship of trust, whether or not the parties to it think of it that way. Customers trust that the product will do what it claims to do, that the company will stand behind it, that the personal information they share will be protected. This trust, once lost, is extremely difficult to rebuild. It felt more important later, when they looked back on it from a different life. It made the rest of the day seem different than it had before.

The hardest management problems are not technical. Technical problems have solutions that can be found and implemented. The hard problems are adaptive: they require changes in values, beliefs, behaviours, and structures among people who have legitimate reasons for not wanting to change. The detail was small, but it changed how they listened to the days that followed. It made the ordinary feel less ordinary.

Culture is not a soft consideration in business. It is what determines how decisions are made when no one is watching, how conflicts are resolved when the stakes are high, whether people do the right thing when doing the wrong thing would be easier. Culture can enable strategy; it can also defeat it. It was one of those ordinary moments that carried an extraordinary weight. It was the sort of memory that returned without warning.

The organisation described in this chapter no longer exists in its original form. This is not unusual. What is unusual is for any human creation to persist unchanged. It was the sort of detail that quietly changed everything. That small detail held more meaning than they could say.