What Does Your Company Do?

It sounds like an easy question.

I’ve asked it of senior executives for years, and almost everyone has an answer. They tell me what they make, the services they provide, the markets they serve and the problems they solve. Usually it’s a pretty good answer.

The problem is that their competitors could probably give me the same one.

So I ask, “How does that make you different from the UN?” That usually gets a laugh. Then we start again, this time looking for what I think of as the Point, the story underneath the description.

I spent 17 years in network television and heard hundreds of pitches. Everyone who came into the room could tell us what their show was about, and that was never the hard part. The hard part was whether there was actually a show there. What was going to happen when somebody sat down at 8:30 on Tuesday night, and would they care enough to come back the next week?

Sometimes we heard a terrific pitch and discovered there wasn’t much of a series behind it. Other times an idea that didn’t sound like much turned into something special once people started working with it. Eventually we had to make the show, and then we got to see what we had.

Later, in government and then at a Big Four firm, I saw the same thing from the other side. The people inside knew so much about what their organizations did that they had stopped noticing how little of it reached anyone outside.

So when a senior executive tells me what their company does, I eventually ask, “What happens when a customer uses your product or service?”

That’s usually when the conversation changes. We stop talking about the company and start talking about the customer. Sometimes the answer comes quickly and sometimes it takes a while, but we usually arrive somewhere quite different from where we started.

Then I ask them to compare that answer with the one they gave me at the beginning. I don’t have to explain the difference. They can hear it.

And then I ask, “If we changed your answer this much in 20 minutes, what would I hear if I asked five people in your organization the same question?”

I’ve come to think that’s the bigger question, because it isn’t enough for a Leader to have a point. You have to find the Point that carries, something other people can understand, make their own and act on when you’re no longer in the room.

Television taught me that long before I knew I was learning it. An idea began in an executive’s office. Then writers got hold of it, producers had opinions, actors had to make it their own, directors interpreted it and editors changed it again. By the time it reached the audience, a lot of people had touched the original idea. Sometimes what came out the other end was exactly what we hoped for, and sometimes it wasn’t. But eventually we got to watch the show. We got playback.

It took me a long time to recognize that Leaders get playback too. It’s happening in what people do when you’re not there, in the decisions they make, in how they talk about the company and, ultimately, in what the customer experiences.

Your organization is playing your leadership back to you every day.

If five people in it answered the question I asked you at the start, would you recognize your own answer?