How a Company Motto Affects Change
A few carefully-chosen words can improve your business--and your life
Welcome to the latest entry in The Workaround. You’re in good company with thousands of fellow entrepreneurs and innovators!
I’m Bob, your host. My mission here is to share personal, behind-the-scenes stories of the ups and downs of my career leading tech startups and corporate innovation.
I write to make you think, smile, and discover a shortcut to success or a trap to avoid.
Here we go…
Company mottos tend to get a bad rap today. We may think of Google’s “Don’t be evil” or Facebook’s “Move fast and break things.” The former has done a lot of evil lately. The latter officially quashed this motto once it had a billion members and quarterly profit numbers to hit.
Maybe you’re a startup founder with “Create a motto” on a list of 1,000 other important but not urgent to-dos. Or you might be working for a company that has plastered a company motto across its office walls and branded Zoom backgrounds—like so much IRL and virtual wallpaper.
However, a motto can have tremendous value when these words are a natural extension of a focused, motivating business strategy. And it might make your life more joyful. Here’s the proof:
Digital Bridge Building
Back in 2004, I quit my corporate gig to join a group of my friends who were leading a small creative agency in Cincinnati called Bridge Worldwide. They had stumbled into running the business after their startup crashed and its leading investor, this agency, was collapsing. They went from over 100 employees down to 30 but saved the ship and began growing again with a focus on digital marketing. They asked me to join the executive team and become a partner in the firm.
A few months into my tenure, our exec team decided we needed to plot a business strategy. We picked up work rapidly with our largest client, who saw us as the scrappy, cheaper up-and-comer compared with the giant agency networks in NYC and L.A. Our digital sexiness helped us attract key talent from other agencies in town, which was critical to keeping up with demand.
While growth was accelerating, we knew the agency business was highly precarious. We also saw some warning signs on the horizon: Our clients started adding zeroes to their digital budgets, which made them a bit wary of spending with the “local low-cost” company. And those big holding companies desperately wanted in on the digital action. They saw where the future was going and feared losing the dollars. We expected them to come for our business and our talent.
So we trapped ourselves in a conference room for a couple of days and filled whiteboards with analysis and ideas. We even listened to hours of a lecture from Harvard Business Review about what makes a competitive advantage. That’s what you get when you bring a bunch of MBAs into a creative agency…
But our work bore fruit. We recognized that people power agencies—they do the magical creative work, convert client ideas into reality, and drive profitability through efficiency. They carry their skills up the elevator each morning and down each night, and their happiness and motivation have a tremendous impact on the quality of their work and client service.
The only competitive advantage we could hope for in the agency business would come from attracting, retaining, and motivating talent.
But we dug in further. We continued with deep discussions about what motivates and demotivates people. The human mind tends to worry about negatives, so it was no surprise that we focused on the demotivators. Our discussions kept flagging Fear as the critical issue, especially Fear of Change.
But change was constant in our digital agency. We had already seen the rapid evolution from websites to email to banners to search. We started getting questions from clients about blogs and MySpace.
Oh, shit.
Change is the Mindkiller
I’ve got friends who work at a company that lacks an official motto but has an unofficial one: “If you don’t like how things are going now, just wait a bit, and it might improve.” In other words, this company is crazy. Such a motto might help explain why things work the way they do there, but such a world of unbridled change puts everyone on edge.
Most human beings naturally fear change. Change forces us to abandon the safe predictability of the world. Since we naturally assume negative implications—a result of our human programming—we immediately hunker down. We move to protect ourselves and abandon team spirit.
As my friend Pip Coburn says, “I don’t suspect it is so much that we hate change but, rather, we really fear uncertainly, and our egos defend against uncertainly ferociously.”
“The mind sees that it is dangerous, risky to live in a state of impermanency, insecurity, so it builds a wall around itself.”—J. Krishnamurti
In the workplace, change can mean that our skills are no longer required, our friends leave the company, or we’re booted in the next re-org. In the late 2000s, many businesses stressed their employees as they tried to evolve with the rise of digital technology. Disruption isn’t fun when your company is getting disrupted.
In our exec team roundtable, we decided to actively help people adjust to change. But we needed them to do even more: They must embrace and lead the changes we need to make as an agency. We knew the types of work we did for clients would be very different in three years, if not sooner. And we weren’t smart enough on our own to figure out where it would go.
A Few Words Say a Lot
We had many ideas about making our business a great workplace, which we hoped would create a competitive advantage. However, this key issue of threat and opportunity around change compelled us to put it front and center in everything we did. A motto for our company and its culture seemed the best approach.
I’ve always loved a good motto or rallying cry. Maybe it’s in my blood. The clans of Scotland are known for their mottos. My surname, Gilbreath, comes from the Galbraith Clan, whose motto is: “Ab Obice Saevior”—Latin for “Fiercer Because of the Obstruction." I can think of nothing more fitting for my life journey. It also fits with the Navy SEAL motto: “Forged by adversity.”
For our agency, we played with lots of ideas before eventually landing on:
Affecting Change
It’s direct, short, simple, and memorable. And it has a mind-opening meaning. “Affect” means we will initiate the change, not quiver in fear, waiting for it. Change won’t hurt us because we are going to affect change.
It even resonates with one of my favorite Churchill quotes: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” That guy led a lot of change.
Living the Motto
Over the next few weeks, we invited a range of our employees to weigh in on the output of our strategic process and resulting changes—including this motto. Their positive feedback and tweaks gave us the confidence to roll it out at an all-hands offsite. We spent hours walking through the meaning of these two words, offering the transparency of the challenge and giving each person the ownership to make it their own.
In the following months and years, we practiced Affecting Change as our clients and the industry evolved. For example:
We moved from executing website and email updates to developing award-winning big creative ideas.
Added new specialties like UX/UI, Strategy, Project Management, and SEO
Partnered closely with competitive agencies for our clients’ greater good
Shifted from programming in-house to working with clients’ offshore developers
Built dedicated, multi-functional client teams with GM leaders
We used our weekly all-hands and annual offsites to show how change was happening and where we were doing well or needed to improve. In particular, we called out the individuals who epitomized the culture of Affecting Change. (Joe Hovede wrote about this recently, telling stories about Home Depot’s culture.)
Our team began using our motto organically in everyday situations. “Affecting Change” became a toast at happy hours, a rallying cry before a new business pitch, and a client email signoff.
And, yes, we put these words on our office walls. It’s only cheesy if it’s not a meaningful strategic commitment.
Each year, we kept up a strong pace of growth with industry-leading profit, client retention, and employee retention. We grew revenue from $10 million to over $40 million in just six years and managed a successful acquisition by WPP, the largest agency holding company in the world. They couldn’t beat us so they had to buy us.
You Can Take it Personally
I left in 2011, but our agency is still in the same building, serving some of the same clients with several of the same teammates. Almost everything else has changed, though. They’ve had ups and downs, wins and losses, and added new products and services along the way. The agency has even switched its name three or four times.
Whether there or in other ventures, the Bridge Worldwide crew is still Affecting Change in the world. This is immensely fulfilling to me. We succeeded together then, and this core skill in leading change continues to pay dividends in our careers and personal lives.
Even now, I’m still making mottos—especially for myself. Change hasn’t stopped in my life, and I’ve found that a motto's focused, positive self-talk can improve both my major decision-making and everyday living. I’ve got two that keep resonating right now:
Right Here. Right Now. A reminder to be present, to have positive intent going into any situation, to keep my head in the game, and to make time well spent.
Trust the Awesomeness. A message to believe that everything has led to this perfect moment, to let go of the steering wheel a bit, and to know that good things happen when I accept everything.
Now I’ve just got to translate these into Latin for the benefit of future members of the Galbraith clan…
How we might work together…
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BONUS: Cool Content of the Week
A little something I found meaningful. You might agree…
The Spice Podcast from Alon Michael
There’s a running joke that more people host podcasts than listen to them. But I want even more of them. There’s no better way to asynchronously get to know someone than to hear them speak on a topic they are passionate about.
I recently met Alon Michael, a fellow tech leader, and was blown away by his podcast, Spice.
While it’s hard to reinvent the wheel in the podcast game, I love two specific elements of Spice. First, Alon combines multiple books, historical figures, and personal experiences to make particular, practical points.
Second, you can hear how much he truly cares about his topic and helping us learn and improve. When we hopped on Zoom the other day, I asked him his secret to sounding so strong. He told me he pictures himself talking with a specific person while speaking. Alon also reads the same passage ten times and returns to pick the best version.
Alon's passion and professionalism in his podcast already make him 100x better than most. I'm excited to see his latest episode drop in my player each week. He’s worth adding to your list, too.
(btw, did you know that MY posts are available in podcast form? It’s me reading this weekly post. Hit the play button above or subscribe to Apple, Spotify, or whatever. You’ll hear my voice and often an additional Easter Egg or two from my stories.)