As originally published by Denise Lee Yohn on Linkedin. 

Have you ever read a book and thought, “Dang, I should have written that”?! Or maybe the book so resonates with you that you highlight practically every word of it (thus rendering your highlights useless)? For me, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture by Ben Horowitz is one of those books.

Examining the philosophies and practices of some unlikely leaders (such as Genghis Kahn and a Detroit prison gang leader) as well as those from the business world (including Uber, McDonald’s, and Slack), Horowitz provides exceptional insights on organizational culture — how it works, how to build or change yours, and the elements of a good one. He should know – as the founder of a start-up that he grew and eventually sold to HP for $1.6 billion and as the co-founder and partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz that’s backed Facebook, Google, Airbnb, and many other tech giants, Horowitz has helped create some of the most successful companies of our time.

The premise of What You Do Is Who You Are explains so well why I believe that your external identity (brand) and internal workings (culture) must be integrated and aligned. Horowitz’s particular take on culture and culture-building point to the productivity and sustainability that leaders create in their businesses when they ensure there is no gap between what they – as people and as organizations – say and what they do.

Some of the book’s best bits (and my thoughts on the topics in italics) are below — and check out this slideshow of my top 10 quotes from the book.

What is culture

Horowitz:

• Culture isn’t a magical set of rules that makes everyone behave the way you’d like. It’s a system of behaviors that you hope most people will follow, most of the time.
• Your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there.
• It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake. 
• That’s the nature of culture. It’s not a single decision—it’s a code that manifests itself as a vast set of actions taken over time.

Every organization has a culture – whether or not it’s the one you want is up to you. Your desired culture doesn’t just happen. You must intentionally and deliberately cultivate it. If you don’t, your people will create their own cultures, work from their own values, and act in ways that may or may not produce the results you want.

Your culture must be unique

Horowitz:

• …No one culture is right for everyone. Indeed, no single virtue makes universal sense. Your company’s culture should be an idiosyncratic expression of your personality, beliefs, and strategy—and it should keep evolving as your company grows and conditions change.
• While you can draw inspiration from other cultures, don’t try to adapt another organization’s ways. For your culture to be vibrant and sustainable, it must come from the blood, from the soul.
• Some ways of thinking about a virtue’s effectiveness: Is your virtue actionable? Does your virtue distinguish your culture? Not every virtue will be unique to your company, but if every other business in your field does the same thing, there is probably no need to emphasize it.

One problem with trying to copy another company’s culture is that what’s feasible for other organizations may not be for yours (not everyone can afford to treat employees like partners and offer them stock options like Starbucks does). Another problem is that what fuels one company’s success may completely backfire at another (imagine if Ritz-Carlton employees decided to joke around with their customers like Southwest Airlines’ do.) In fact, it’s ridiculous to try to imitate someone else’s brand – and it’s just as ridiculous to try to copy another company’s culture.

Getting to your desired culture

Horowitz:

• The first step in getting the culture you want is knowing what you want. It sounds obvious and it is; it sounds easy, but it’s not. With seemingly infinite possibilities to choose from, how do you design a culture that gives your organization the advantages it needs, creates an environment you are proud of, and that—most importantly—can actually be implemented?
• Identifying the culture you want is hard: you have to figure out not only where your company is trying to go, but the road it should take to get there.
• Culture begins with deciding what you value most. Then you must help everyone in your organization practice behaviors that reflect those virtues.
• Pick the virtues that will help your company accomplish its mission.
• The most important aspects of an organization’s performance—quality, design, security, fiscal discipline, customer care—are all culturally driven.

Every organization requires a specific culture to reach its goals and achieve its vision. If you want to become more innovative, for example, then your culture must encourage risk-taking, experimentation, and curiosity. Or, if you’ve set your sights on being a style leader, then you need to infuse your culture with design, discernment, and creativity. You need clarity about the brand identity and performance you desire and the kind of organizational culture that will enable you to achieve those targets.  (My free online Brand-Culture Assessment Tool can help you get that clarity.)

How to initiate culture-building

Horowitz:

• To get [your people] to be who you want, you will first need to see them for who they are.
• Cultural design is a way to program the actions of an organization, but, like computer programs, every culture has bugs. And cultures are significantly more difficult to debug than programs.
• To change a culture, you can’t just give lip service to what you want. Your people must feel the urgency of it.
• It’s also critical that leaders emphasize the “why” behind their values every chance they get, because the “why” is what gets remembered. The “what” is just another item in a giant stack of things you are supposed to do.
• So a gigantic portion of your cultural success will be determined by what gets rewarded at your company. Every time an employee is recognized or rewarded for pushing the company forward, the culture strengthens.

Start culture-building by assessing your culture as it actually is. Do a culture audit and identify the core values that are currently in play in your organization every day—not necessarily the values that are stated in your company’s mission statement.  Compare those values to the ones you’ve determined you need to reach your goals. Then make the case to everyone how the organization needs to change and why. 

Translate core values into behaviors

Horowitz:

• Culture is an abstract set of principles that lives—or dies—by the concrete decisions the people in your organization make. As a leader, this gap between theory and practice poses huge challenges.
• The reason so many efforts to establish “corporate values” are basically worthless is that they emphasize beliefs instead of actions. Culturally, what you believe means nearly nothing. What you do is who you are.
• If a company expects its people to behave ethically without giving them detailed instructions on what that behavior looks like and how to pursue it, the company will fall far short no matter whom it hires.
• The failure to enforce good conduct often brings modern companies to their knees.

Your organizational culture is largely shaped by its purpose and core values so you need to clearly articulate both. But don’t assume that employees will understand what your core values mean or that everyone will interpret the same value into the same behavior. It’s critical that you establish the desired behaviors or behavioral norms associated with your values so employees know what your values look like in action. In doing so, you are not micro-managing employees – you are setting them up for success.

Culture isn’t static

• Culture is not like a mission statement; you can’t just set it up and have it last forever.
• Culture is about actions. If the actions aren’t working, it’s time to get some new ones.
• Whether your company is a startup or a hundred years old, designing your culture is always relevant. Cultures, like the organizations that create them, must evolve to meet new challenges.
• Culture is weird like that. Because it’s a consequence of actions rather than beliefs, it almost never ends up exactly as you intend it. This is why it’s not a “set it and forget it” endeavor. You must constantly examine and reshape your culture or it won’t be your culture at all.

Culture-building isn’t a one-time initiative or a goal you include in your annual plan one year and remove it the next.  It’s an ongoing effort that involves making big strategic decisions in planning sessions and sweating the small stuff every day — attending to it when everything seems to be running smoothly and when everything seems to be crumbling around you. You’ll need to be patient, focused, relentless, and disciplined. It’s a journey, not a destination.

If there’s anything that marketers have learned, it’s that social media isn’t going anywhere and it will continuously evolve in our lifetimes. Over the last ten years, Instagram was born, Vine had come and gone, Facebook may have interfered with American politics, and professionals are now TikToking. Social media’s growth and seamless assimilation into our lives has brought forth a new era of word-of-mouth marketing, with influencers being a driving force in what people are talking about today. Research has shown that a large percentage of young people favor the opinions of influencers over their own friends, and with this shift in dogma comes a projected $15B in spend in influencer marketing by 2022.  

According to Mediakix, 80% of marketers say influencer marketing works, and certain studies have found that when done right, it can rake in an ROI of $6.50 for every $1 spent.

“It all sounds too good to be true…”

And you may have a point there. Let it be known that influencer marketing isn’t a science. Oftentimes we see influencer campaigns met with skepticism because the cringe-worthy blunders are just so unforgettable- like Mike Bloomberg’s campaign bust, Kim Kardashian’s Diclegis promo that violated FDA standards and the tale of an influencer with over 2 million followers that struggled to sell just a few dozen shirts. 

But these failures shouldn’t deter marketers from investing in an influencer campaign, and like many marketers will tell you, knowing what not to do is just as important as knowing what to do. There are valuable insights we can draw from these failures, what did they do wrong?

They lacked brand alignment, authenticity & opted for impression quantity over quality.

Micro-influencers have the ability to reach an audience far more targeted and tailored to your brand’s values than any instagram celebrity could. These influencers with under 10k followers can reach a specific locale, age demographic, and any combination of lifestyle affinities. Their opinions are trusted because they’re real people with jobs and families- which also means they probably won’t kill off your campaign in a distasteful publicity stunt. Build a network of these micro-influencers, and your brand can rival the reach of any macro-influencer at a tiny fraction of the cost and nearly double the engagement. 

If you’re investing a portion of your marketing budget on a single post, you’re essentially given one shot at success. Comparable to print, soon enough your instagram post will be buried in new content and forgotten like old news. Not to say that nano and macro influencers can’t make waves in your brand awareness campaign- but what’s the ROI? How much of that spend is really driving conversions? The notion that anyone that follows Kim Kardashian may be a potential customer is unrealistic, and it chalks up a significant portion of your reach as wasted ad spend. Morning sickness drugmaker Diclegis spent upwards of $250k to reach any woman in a single post with Kim Kardashian, when they should have invested in reaching the everywoman, or more specifically… pregnant women. Their poor decision in choosing an influencer was not only met with an FDA warning, but their target audience was left to feel ostracized and dubious over the drugmaker’s claims.

Daniel Schotland, CEO at Linqia says, “With 92% of consumers trusting influencer marketing over traditional advertising, brands will adopt the former as an ‘always-on’ strategy and rely more on machine learning, which is increasingly vital in determining which influencers and content will resonate best for a specific audience.”

We couldn’t agree more with this “always-on” approach, and this strategy is one of the key reasons why Glossier became a billion-dollar industry unicorn in just a few years. Glossier identified that their best advocate was their customer, so they provided their network of micro-influencer “Glossier Gals” with a kick-back on each sale attributed to their recommendation. This built trust around the brand, developed an endless cycle of user-generated-content, and created a community centered around the brand with tweets, memes and makeup tutorials going viral.

Influencer marketing can seem like uncharted territory for many, but as long as you stay true to your brand, there isn’t much reason to fear. When creating an influencer campaign, just ask yourself these three questions:

Does this person align with my brand? 

Is this authentic to my customer?

Does this serve quality over quantity?

Digital Marketing Innovation Starts Here

Digital Transformation involves ongoing exploration by today’s leaders, and our best advice is to not trek the journey alone. Our Digital Marketing Transformation Assembly coming this August in Denver is set to be an inspiring event featuring top C-Suite executives from Fortune 500 companies.

We know what you’re thinking…

This isn’t Your Run-of-the-Mill Conference or Summit.

Our Founders, like many C-Suite executives today, became disillusioned by the slew of marketing conferences, summits and events on the market today that promised “world class networking” opportunities with leading industry decision-makers. In reality, they found that these events had antiquated discussion topics presented in an impersonal format, and quite frankly, it seemed like just about anyone could attend the event.

What Makes a Millennium Assembly Different? 

We’re dedicated to creating the greatest think tank of today’s executives from some of the most prominent companies today. Our invite-only events consist of 55 carefully selected leaders holding C-Suite, EVP, and SVP positions from Fortune 500 companies.

These attendees are provided the opportunity to intimately connect in workshops & roundtables with fewer than 25 people, with interactive networking opportunities at our cocktail hour and Gala Keynote Dinner and personalized 1:1 meetings. This is an experience like no other, all taking place at some of the most beautiful hotel and resort venues in the country.

We’re serious about executive education. Our Assembly Agendas are data-driven and curated from our industry-expert Advisory Board, a group of 26 industry movers and shakers with a proven record of digitally transforming organizations from the ground-up. The prevailing topics and trends discussed at this assembly will cover the most poignant challenges affecting leaders today.

The Millennium Alliance’s goal is to change the way leaders look at executive education, and you won’t find this level of content, discussion, and networking anywhere else. We’re on the journey to digitally transform the marketing industry with you.

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As originally posted on KelloggInsight by The Millennium Alliance Thought Leader, Nicholas Caffentzis.

Delivering a distinctive customer experience starts with a focus on customer needs and wants, as well as an anticipation of problems customers may not even know they have. That focus is difficult enough with individual customers, each with their own desires or problems.

But this calculus is even tougher when the customer isn’t an individual, but another business. What happens when your customer-experience focus has to account for a complex ecosystem with multiple stakeholders who often have competing concerns?

“While B2B business leaders say customer experience is a top priority, most organizations lack the feedback tools, metrics, and processes to deliver a differentiated experience,” says Nick Caffentzis, a former chief marketing officer of GE Healthcare Digital, a business unit of GE that sells software and services to hospitals.

For businesses that provide software or new technologies that have yet to be proven in the market, the task of trying to convince buyers to get on board gets even more complex.

Based on his decades in marketing and product management, Caffentzis, a senior fellow and adjunct professor in Kellogg’s Markets and Customers initiative, offers four keys to help B2B tech companies improve customer experiences and outcomes.

Start with Your Customers’ Most Critical Issues

Product development in B2B raises the perennial chicken-or-egg question: should you develop a product that you think solves a problem and then find an industry application for it, or should you identify your customers’ most critical issues and develop products to help them solve those issues?

Caffentzis recently surveyed marketing and product leaders from twenty businesses in the medical-technology industry about their new product launches.

These B2B companies, which sell devices, software, services, and consulting to hospital systems and healthcare providers, found that when they developed a tool and then sought an application for it with their customers, those customers were less likely to adopt that technology—and were slower to adopt it if they did.

Complicating this is the fact that buying groups in most organizations have expanded beyond the product or service users to include financial and operational decision makers. In some cases, new stakeholders who have never been involved in the purchase process are being asked to weigh in, often with competing priorities about the buying decision.

What Caffentzis and his colleagues found is that B2B companies are generally most successful when they gain an understanding of a specific customers’ most pressing issues and needs from the outset, determine that the problem is important enough that the customer will commit to a solution, and from there design solutions that will gain consensus across the customer’s buying group.

For example, a software company that sells to the oncology market worked with its customer to identify their most critical issue. Initially, the customer thought they needed to improve the efficiency of the dosimetrist who ensures the proper radiation dosage, which would save them about $40,000 per year. As the software company’s team probed further into the customer’s process, they identified a bigger problem— that the company was not able to to re-plan patients’ treatments—which was costing the them more than $300,000 per year.

“It’s listening for what they say and don’t say their problem is,” Caffentzis says. “Pay attention to why your customers say they haven’t been able to solve a particular problem. Have your team watch people across their organization work to really understand their workflow and what they are trying to get done.”

“Pay attention to why your customers say they haven’t been able to solve a particular problem.”

This process should include gathering input from all the key stakeholders in your customer’s organization. It also includes sharing this information throughout your own organization.

Make Customer Outcomes Your Focus

Designing for a customer’s needs is a first step in making B2B products that satisfy customers. But ultimately you need to convince a client—with all of its various stakeholders—that the solution they implement is effective. This will be critical for your company as you look to build broader awareness in the marketplace, generate new leads to grow your business, and arm your sales team with a differentiated value proposition.

The key is to ensure that you and your customers can quantify specifically how your product is delivering value for them. This may seem simple, but in the survey Caffentzis conducted, very few companies indicated that they incorporate customer-success metrics as part of their product-development and commercial-launch processes. Instead, most simply measure whether they are hitting their own sales forecasts or margin targets.

“We were really surprised at how many companies overlooked this step,” Caffentzis says. “You really have to understand your clients’ processes and how things improve for them, as opposed to taking an attitude of, ‘I sold you a widget. It’s up to you to see how that widget works for you.’”

Caffentzis recommends involving the client when deciding which metrics should determine success—a process that should ideally begin before your new product is even up and running.

“You’ve got to take the time to create a baseline—if it doesn’t exist—and collect and organize the data on what’s going on now,” he says. “Then you have to work to get agreement with the client on what data to collect to establish the key metrics going forward. One benefit of these discussions is that it helps align all the key stakeholders around the problem being solved and how they will be satisfied.”

Caffentzis cautions that this process can be especially involved and time-consuming—it can take six months or more—for more complex customer organizations. However, once it is completed, the data help in creating compelling content to support awareness, pipeline generation, and sales enablement to drive new business.

For example, as part of its commercial process, Salesforce measures and shares with its clients how effectively those clients are using its platform. These analytics are built into the Salesforce platform, so that Salesforce representatives have them at their fingertips even before customers ask. Armed with these data, Salesforce can make proactive recommendations to help its clients use the system more effectively.

“Salesforce can literally go into its own platform and see both what its customers are doing and how Salesforce is doing,” Caffentzis says. “They have built the telemetry where they can see how often the salespeople from a company have logged into the system over a given time.”

Prioritizing measurability also serves clients who are looking to pay for new technologies as an ongoing service rather than as an upfront capital expenditure. Billing for a technology by use—or as it generates results—helps those clients align costs with outcomes and minimize risk. But rolling those technologies out as services requires accurate analytics so that both companies can assess the risks.

Focus on People, Processes, and Technology

So you have delivered the product to your client and have even agreed on how its performance will be evaluated. It is not time to celebrate yet. These days, B2B customers are looking for vendors to take a more proactive role in driving both adoption and implementation.

“One common way B2B companies fall short in delivering a great experience is by failing to help sort through the unanticipated changes that accompany the new solution,” Caffentzis says.

Caffentzis highlights as an example a health system that bought a GE Healthcare digital X-Ray system.

“One of their executives told me that the technology was working great and they could image patients faster than they did before,” says Caffentzis. “But they weren’t able to take advantage of that increased speed because of their processes.”

So GE Healthcare worked closely with them to identify necessary changes in their scheduling process, reorganize the department’s workflow, and provide training on the new equipment and new processes.

Don’t Forget to Look in the Mirror

But for B2B tech companies, helping clients get the most out of new technology requires significant resources on their end, too—both in infrastructure and in training. So as they develop a process for helping their clients, they shouldn’t forget to do the same for their own organization.

Caffentzis’s survey found that B2B companies are underinvesting in the tools and processes needed to capture customer usage information. They are also failing to establish processes to consistently gather customer feedback.

Once systems are in place to gather and store data, companies need to enable multiple users to readily access those data, all while providing their own teams with the analytic skills to interpret the data to help improve the customer experience.

Caffentzis explains that Salesforce, for example, has been able to deliver strong customer experiences because it built the infrastructure to gather and access the right data to help its customers, and, through training and hiring, developed the analytic capacity to put those data to use for its customers and Salesforce itself.

“B2B companies need to invest in systems to gather and store data and then analyze it to provide actionable insights for their customers. This is the final step in helping customers achieve successful outcomes and delivering a differentiated customer experience.”