But there is a problem.
BCI and their agency did a good job of telling people about their new product. The work was quite creative. They were able to explain what was new and special about their latest innovation, and focus groups agreed that the new product was much better than that of the competition. The millions of dollars in media ensured that lots of people would see their advertising and see it often. Their reach and frequency, the measurement commonly used by ad agencies to gauge the number of people exposed to the advertising, was very good. There is no doubt that their message was loud. The problem was, it wasn’t clear. It was all WHATs and HOW and no WHY. Even though people learned what the product did, no one knew what BCI believed. The good news is, it’s not a complete loss; the products will sell as long as the ads are on the air and the promotions remain competitive. It’s an effective strategy, but an expensive way to make money.
What if Martin Luther King had delivered a comprehensive twelve-point plan about achieving civil rights in America, a plan more comprehensive than any other plan for civil rights ever offered? Booming through the speakers that summer’s day in 1963, his message would have been loud. Microphones, like advertising and PR, are fantastic for making sure a message is heard. Like BCI, King’s message would still have reached thousands of people. But his belief would not have been clear.
Volume is reasonably easy to achieve. All it takes is money or stunts. Money can pay to keep a message front and center. And publicity stunts are good at getting on the news. But neither plants seeds of loyalty. Many reading this may remember that Oprah Winfrey once gave away a free car to every member of her studio audience. It happened several years ago, in 2004, and still people refer to the stunt. But how many can recall the model of car she gave away? That’s the problem. It was Pontiac that donated $7 million worth of cars, 276 of their new G6 model, to be exact. And it was Pontiac that saw the stunt as a way to market their new car. Yet although the stunt worked well to reinforce Oprah’s generous nature, something with which we are all familiar, few remember that Pontiac was a part of the event. Worse, the stunt didn’t do anything to reinforce some purpose, cause or belief that Pontiac represents. We had no idea what Pontiac’s WHY was before the stunt, so it’s hard for the publicity stunt to do much more than, well, be a stunt to get some publicity. With no sense of WHY, there is nothing else it’s doing.
For a message to have real impact, to affect behavior and seed loyalty, it needs more than publicity. It needs to publicize some higher purpose, cause or belief to which those with similar values and beliefs can relate. Only then can the message create any lasting mass-market success. For a stunt to appeal to the left side of the curve of the Law of Diffusion, WHY the stunt is being performed, beyond the desire to generate press, must be clear. Though there may be short-term benefits without clarity, loud is nothing more than excessive volume. Or in business vernacular: clutter. And companies wonder why differentiation is such a challenge these days. Have you heard the volume coming from some of them?
In contrast, what would have been the impact of Dr. King’s speech had he not had a microphone and loudspeakers? His vision would have been no less clear. His words would have been no less inspiring. He knew what he believed and he spoke with passion and charisma about that belief. But only the few people with front-row seats would have been inspired by those words. A leader with a cause, whether it be an individual or an organization, must have a megaphone through which to deliver his message. And it must be clear and loud to work. Clarity of purpose, cause or belief is important, but it is equally important that people hear you. For a WHY to have the power to move people it must not only be clear, it must be amplified to reach enough people to tip the scale.
It’s no coincidence that the three-dimensional Golden Circle is a cone. It is, in practice, a megaphone. An organization effectively becomes the vessel through which a person with a clear purpose, cause or belief can speak to the outside world. But for a megaphone to work, clarity must come first. Without a clear message, what will you amplify?
Say It Only If You Believe It
Dr. King used his megaphone to rally throngs of people to follow him in pursuit of social justice. The Wright brothers used their megaphone to rally their local community to help them build the technology that could change the world. Thousands of people heard John F. Kennedy’s belief in service and rallied to put a man on the moon in less than a decade. The ability to excite and inspire people to go out of their way to contribute to something bigger than themselves is not unique to social causes. Any organization is capable of building a megaphone that can achieve a huge impact. In fact, it is one of the defining factors that makes an organization great. Great organizations don’t just drive profits, they lead people, and they change the course of industries and sometimes our lives in the process.
A clear sense of WHY sets expectations. When we don’t know an organization’s WHY, we don’t know what to expect, so we expect the minimum—price, quality, service, features—the commodity stuff. But when we do have a sense for the WHY, we expect more. For those not comfortable being held to a higher standard, I strongly advise against trying to learn your WHY or keeping your Golden Circle in balance. Higher standards are hard to maintain. It requires the discipline to constantly talk about and remind everyone WHY the organization exists in the first place. It requires that everyone in the organization be held accountable to HOW you do things—to your values and guiding principles. And it takes time and effort to ensure that everything you say and do is consistent with your WHY. But for those willing to put in the effort, there are some great advantages.
Richard Branson first built Virgin Records into a multibillion-dollar retail music brand. Then he started a successful record label. Later he started an airline that is today considered one of the premier airlines in the world. He then started a soda brand, wedding-planning company, insurance company and mobile phone service. And the list goes on. Likewise, Apple sells us computers, mobile phones, DVRs and mp3 players, and has replicated their capacity for innovation again and again. The ability of some companies not to just succeed but to repeat their success is due to the loyal followings they command, the throngs of people who root for their success. In the business world, they say Apple is a lifestyle brand. They underestimate Apple’s power. Gucci is a lifestyle brand—Apple changes the course of industries. By any definition these few companies don’t function like corporate entities. They exist as social movements.
Repeating Greatness
Ron Bruder is not a household name, but he is a great leader. In 1985, he stood at a crosswalk with his two daughters waiting for the light to change so they could cross the street. A perfect opportunity, he thought, to teach the young girls a valuable life lesson. He pointed across the street to the red glow of the “Do Not Walk” signal and asked them what they thought that sign meant. “It means we have to stand here,” they replied. “Are you sure?” he asked rhetorically. “How do you know it’s not telling us to run?”
Soft-spoken and almost always wearing a well-tailored three-piece suit when he comes to work, Bruder looks like you would imagine a conservative executive to look like. But don’t assume you know how things work simply based on what you see. Bruder is anything but a stereotype. Though he has enjoyed the trappings of success, he is not motivated by them. They have always been the unintended by-product of his work. Bruder is driven by a clear sense of WHY. He sees a world in which people accept the lives they live and do the things they do not because they have to, but because no one ever showed them an alternative. This is the lesson he was teaching his daughters that day at the crosswalk—there is always another perspective to be considered. That Bruder always starts with WHY has enabled him to achieve great things for himself. But more significantly, it is his ability to share his WHY through the things he does that inspires those around him to do great things for themselves.
Like most of us, the career path Bruder has followed is incidental. But WHY he does things has never changed. Everything Bruder has ever done starts with his WHY, his unyielding belief that if you can simply show someone that an alternative route is possible, it can open the possibility that such a route can be followed. Though the work he is doing today is world-altering, Bruder hasn’t always been in the world peace business. Like many inspiring leaders, he has changed the course of an industry. But Ron Bruder is no one-hit wonder. He has been able to repeat his success and change the course of multiple industries, multiple times.
A senior executive at a large food conglomerate that sold vegetables, canned goods and meats decided to buy a travel agency for his nephew. He asked Bruder, as the chief financial officer of the company at the time, to take a look at the financials of the agency before he went through with the purchase. Seeing an opportunity others didn’t, Bruder decided to join the small travel agency to help lead it. Once there, he saw how all the other travel agencies worked and took an alternative course. Greenwell became the first travel agency on the eastern seaboard to take advantage of new technologies and fully computerize their operations. Not only did they become one of the most successful companies in the region, but after only a year, their business model became a standard for the whole industry. Then Bruder did it again.
A former client of Bruder’s, Sam Rosengarten, was in some dirty businesses—coal, oil and gas; all industries that created brownfields, land that had been contaminated by their operations. Little could be done with brownfields. They were too polluted to develop, and the liability to clean them up was so high that the insurance premiums alone made it too prohibitive to even try. But Bruder doesn’t see challenges the same way as everyone else. Most avoided brownfields because they could only see the cost to clean them up. Bruder focused instead on the actual cleaning. His alternative perspective revealed the perfect solution.
Bruder had already formed his real estate development company, Brookhill, and with eighteen employees, he was doing quite well. Knowing what he needed to do to seize the opportunity, he approached Dames & Moore, one of the largest environmental engineering companies in the world, and shared his new perspective with them. They loved his idea and formed a partnership to pursue it. With an engineering company with 18,000 people on board, the perceived risk was greatly minimized and the insurance companies were happy to offer affordable insurance. With affordable insurance in place, Credit Suisse First Boston offered financing that gave Brookhill the ability to buy, remediate, redevelop and sell almost $200 million worth of former environmentally contaminated properties. Brookhill, so called because Bruder comes from Brooklyn and, as he puts it, “it’s a long, uphill climb to get out of Brooklyn,” was the pioneer of the brownfield redevelopment industry. An industry that thrives to this day. Bruder’s WHY not only steered a path that was good for business, but in the process also helped clean up the environment.
It doesn’t matter WHAT Ron Bruder does. The industries and the challenges are incidental. What never changes is WHY he does things. Bruder knows that, no matter how good an opportunity looks on paper, no matter how smart he is and no matter his track record, he would never be able to achieve anything unless there were others to help him. He knows that success is a team sport. He has a remarkable ability to attract those who believe what he believes. Talented people are drawn to him with one request: “How can I help?” Having defied accepted perspectives and revolutionized more than one industry, Bruder has now set his sights on a bigger challenge: world peace. He founded the Education for Employment Foundation, the megaphone that would help him do it.
The EFE Foundation is making significant headway in helping young men and women in the Middle East to significantly alter the course of their lives and indeed the course of the region. Just has he taught his daughters at the crosswalk that there is always an alternative route, he brings an alternative perspective to the problems in Middle East. Like of all Bruder’s past successes, the EFE Foundation will drive businesses and do tremendous amounts of good in the process. Bruder doesn’t run companies, he leads movements.
All Movements Are Personal
It started on September 11, 2001. Like so many of us, Bruder turned his attention to the Middle East after the attacks to ask why something like that could happen. He understood that if such an event could happen once, it could happen again, and for the lives of his own daughters he wanted to find a way to prevent that.
In the course of trying to figure out what he could do, he made a remarkable discovery that went much deeper than protecting his daughters or even the prevention of terrorism in the United States. In America, he realized, the vast majority of young people wake up in the morning with a feeling that there is opportunity for them in the future. Regardless of the economy, most young boys and girls who grow up in the United States have an inherent sense of optimism that they can achieve something if they want to—to live the American Dream. A young boy growing up in Gaza or a young girl living in Yemen does not wake up every day with the same feeling. Even if they have the desire, the same optimism is not there. It is too easy to point and say that the culture is different. That is not actionable. The real reason is that there is a distinct lack of institutions to give young people in the region a sense of optimism for their future. A college education in Jordan, for example, may offer some social status, but it doesn’t necessarily prepare a young adult for what lies ahead. The education system, in cases like this, perpetuates a systemic cultural pessimism.
Bruder realized the problems we face with terrorism in the West have less to do with what young boys and girls in the Middle East think about America and more to do with what they think about themselves and their own vision of the future. Through the EFE Foundation, Bruder is setting up programs across the Middle East to teach young adults the hard and soft skills that will help them feel like they have opportunity in life. To feel like they can be in control of their own destinies. Bruder is using the EFE Foundation to share his WHY on a global scale—to teach people that there is always an alternative to the path they think they are on.