Re-Inventing your organisation

Every organisation is under pressure to change as fast as or even faster than the market. Have you ever wondered why some companies achieve exceptional performance while so many others struggle to survive? What do they have in common? And can their winning formula be easily replicated by others? On this note, at a recently concluded session titled, Chief Strategy Officer Summit, Sonal Jhuj, Senior Strategy Director, DDB Mudra, spoke on what makes companies successful in today’s economy, the importance of continuous innovation, why self-disruption is necessary for today’s day and age and more…

"My job as a strategist is to keep an eye on future. World is changing so rapidly and so significantly that if you are not keeping up, you will be forgotten. None of us want to be forgotten"

The only constant is change

I am going to talk about being future ready. I work in an organisation called DDB Mudra. DDB Mudra is an advertising agency which started in Ahmedabad. It grew quickly to be one of the top three advertising agencies in the country. Thirty-plus years later, it is still in the top three. The work that we do is very different from what we had started. We work with a lot of exciting clients, Volkswagen, J&J, Unilever, etc. we get to see a lot of exciting things they are going to bring on the table. My job as a strategist is to keep an eye on the future. The world is changing so rapidly and so significantly that if you are not keeping up with it, you will be forgotten; in the advertising business, every third day there is an article in the newspaper, on websites, which says advertising is dead or advertising agencies are going to die. So the reason why my agency keeps going is… when I started working in 2007, I remember going to my parents’ house there was an elderly lady who asked me what my profession is? I used said that I make TV ads. In 2014, when I went to my parents’ house, the lady asked me, which ads you have created? I might have not seen them. I replied to her, now I work in digital. Now, we target our advertising very specifically. I work for a brand called Clean and Clear. The ads are shown only to teenagers. In 2019, I avoid having such conversations. The job that I do now is so different from the one that I was doing in 2007 it is hard to explain to people.

Media’s environment has completely changed. When I studied at MICA (Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad), the environment that I was prepared for, the kind of training that I got, it did not prepare me for 2019 but it did prepare me for 2007. The point that I am trying to make is, from 2007 to 2019 my job profile has completely changed. But I still am working with the same organisation, with the same discipline. I am still doing strategy with DDB Mudra but today, not even one per cent of what I do is similar to what I did back in 2007. That is a huge shift and that means my clients are doing things extremely different. How do you, therefore, prepare yourself for that kind of future?

If I can leave you with one theme, it is self-disruption. I find the concept of self-disrupt very interesting because disruption is inevitable; I didn’t actively go out looking for something new and said that I wanted to do something new. I am in the same organisation with the very same role and yet the world completely changed around me and I had to keep up with it.

Self-disruption is a concept, which says, someone is going to disrupt your organisation, your business, your client’s business. Why don’t you do that yourself first? Why don’t you find a way to disrupt your industry, what you were doing as an individual in your professional capacity or what is your organisation is about? There are ways to get to self disruption and some of the most successful organisations have stayed on for years, like Novartis, P&G, etc. what they have done successfully is that they have managed to self disrupt even if it came at a great cost to themselves.

Self-disruption

There are a couple of basic principles due to which companies have done well in order to self disrupt. There is a great piano making company called Steinway & Sons. I heard about them when I was reading a book. They require two years to make a grand concert piano. It is made completely made by hand; they have craftsmen, who they train forever. The training and knowledge is passed from generations to generations and then they create these gorgeous pianos.

Yamaha knows nothing about building a piano, has no legacy, Steinway’s grand piano is used in every single concert you feel that you are unbeatable, you are the best out there. But your industry can very easily be disrupted. Yamaha decided to learn to make pianos from Steinway and decided to automate the process, they bought machines, they took 16 years and in those 16 years, they have managed to become 17 times the size of Steinway. Today, a lot of concert players decide to use Yamaha. People don’t use Steinway anymore and that is a big change. This is coming from an organisation, which says, our business is different, you don’t understand it, you don’t get it. Our business is not going to get disrupted saying that Yamaha can do whatever they want to but we always will be number 1 because we do things a certain way.

Certain organisations are much better at self-disrupting, do you remember the brand Moser Baer? I used to love the brand when I was in college. It was fantastic, it suddenly brought DVDs within my reach, movies within my reach; for Rs.49 I would get four movies in one DVD. If you went to a hotel, you would find Moser Baer’s TV there. Moser Baer was everywhere; they were smart because they spotted the opportunity on optical drives, way earlier than others did. They figured out that this is going to be a great opportunity, let me get this to India and they blew up. But the problem is it is not enough to disrupt or to self-disrupt once, you have to constantly battle. Unfortunately, they filed for bankruptcy recently. The brand is forgotten. None of us want to be that kind of organisation.

"I would suggest to go out and find a sociologist, someone who understands where the world is going, someone who understands where society is going, someone who understands culture, it will make a huge difference to where your business is"

Principles of self-disruption

It is not easy to self-disrupt but we can talk about some principles. I am going to talk about four very simple questions. I have read plenty of books, heard a lot of speakers talk about what helps in creating a future-proof strategy? There is not one single thing which people are using but there are four things that the organisational leaders are doing to be future-ready.

The first question is quite interesting for me, I was with a client of mine, they went to ISB for training. It was leadership level training. The ISB professor asked them, what is the company paying you for? Typical answers would be to manage my client’s business, to know better, to grow business etc. The right answer the professor said is, you are paid to think. How much time do you spend in a week to think about what is happening in your business? Are you running a meeting from meeting or are you actively spending time on figuring out what is going to happen the next? What is going to be the next self-disruption?

The biggest thing at DDB Mudra that we do which allows us to create successful strategies for our clients is the answer to this question. To my mind, everyone should have an answer to that question but no one does. What is happening in your industry, where is it going to go 10-15 years from now? As leaders of your organisation, this is the question you should try and answer. A lot of companies have found ways, they either do workshops or they do a different kind of strategy meetings and try to find out where the world is going and that is critical.

I would suggest that if there is just one thing that you should do, after this session, is be friends with sociologist or anthropologist. I know it sounds weird because we are all in business and we want to make connections with people who are in the same line as us, who can teach us something directly to apply in our business. I would suggest to go out and find one sociologist, someone who understands where the world is going, someone who understands where society is going, someone who understands the culture, it will make a huge difference to where your business is.

I work in a strategy department, the way strategy works in DDB Mudra and in almost all advertising agencies is that we have a team that does a lot of consumer research, they go out on street to try to understand what is going on in the world. We meet a lot of people who are on fringes, we purposely don’t meet our typical consumer. What I mean by that is, someone is doing something, which is not yet mainstream. Many years ago, I had met someone who said that her parents live in Bombay and this young girl said that I don’t want to live with them because I want to be closer to my college and she decided to move closer to her college. Back in the day, this was a quite an interesting deviation from what the norm was. We try to retain talent like this who do things differently because they point to a larger shift, which we think is going to happen in the future.

Ten years ago when we were called by the Tatas, we made a presentation about what the future could look like. We told them three things, one is the economy is going to be really big. In hindsight, it sounds the easiest thing to say because you do have companies that allow you to share things. We are still in touch with a lot of sociologists. They are keeping an eye on culture, they are keeping an eye on what is happening in the world around us. What is the next big thing, you are not going to find out because you discovered something in your lab always. It can come from what is happening in the world outside. We told them that English is not going to be the only thing. That time there was no Jio, nobody knew that the internet is going to grow to the extent that it really did. But we could see them through the fringes, there were conversations about people trying to access the web.

I would recommend that you go and meet sociologists. Because that is going to tell you what is going to come in the future. That’s what we as strategists in advertising do. If you want to work in advertising agencies, please ask your strategists what is going to be in future. Where is the world heading is very important thing.

We do a programme in our organisation, which is about figuring out about the coming future. Also, the other thing is to invest in talent. I studied at MICA. MICA was created by the agency that I work for. Back in the day, DDB Mudra created this institute because we wanted to create talent in a certain way-because that is going to create a difference in our future. The idea is you have to think about the people that you want in your business can think about your future. You need to either train them that way or bring in talent from other organisations, bring in sociologists who can help you to think differently.

"Organisations need to be brave, take a chance. Look at Google, Uber, they didn’t have any money, they just got some investors, they had this great idea, they went ahead and did something amazing. Go all out"

The second question people need to ask is, are you focussed on delivery or outcome? This is interesting because I could say that I am in the business of advertising because it is simple to understand. But today the work that we do is not just simple advertising but if I say that the business I am in, the final outcome that I am hoping to deliver, which is, I am in the business of persuading consumers. I am in the business of making a gentleman choose a Volkswagen apart from anything else. It doesn’t matter how I do it. It doesn’t matter whether I do it by showing him a TV ad, a print ad or in person talking to him, so if you focus on the delivery of that you deliver, not as a consultant that does something else but what is it the final outcome that you are hoping to achieve, that makes it a huge difference.

The third thing is, are you stifling innovation? It is easy to say go be an innovator. I would say that the should be, are you actively stifling it? If you are not actively promoting it, you probably stifling it. There may be people in your organisation who have great ideas but maybe you are not able to tap into them because you are constantly travelling, you are not actively thinking how to self-disrupt and how can I possibly innovate.

I will share a story from P&G. They have a product called Ivory. It was doing incredibly well, they advertised it, they became incredibly successful. Everything was going so well, then came the Second World War, they were told don’t actively try to spend money in R&D, don’t waste your sources, America needs your resources, we are going to be very particular about how to increase business. There was an employee who said, I want to see that can I create a synthetic detergent, it was never created before. He went to his boss and explained it to him, the boss said that I like your idea, keep pursuing it but don’t tell anybody. So for a long time, P&G did not want to spend on R&D, that person came up with a winning formula, which resulted in the creation of Tide. It was the first synthetic detergent that could clean grease and other things what we take for granted. This was a huge innovation at that time, the executives at P&G were worried because Ivory was working fine, what is the problem. If you do this, people will stop buying Ivory, which is true, they did but the fact is that they continue to invest in innovation.

The last question is, are you doing enough experimentation? Organisations need to be brave, take a chance. Look at Google, Uber, they didn’t have any money, they just got some investors, they had this great idea, they went ahead and did something amazing. Go all out. The organisations which have been consistently successful in innovation, are the ones that have are experimenting regularly. They have done so much of that. Amazon has experimented and failed many times. You have to experiment in smaller batches and that’s how these companies have actually built their success.