Read Online Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback by David Novak - Free Book Online
Authors: David Novak
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think, “Who the heck would want to deal with that guy first thing in the morning? He’s scaring people!”
The thing was, Taco Bell’s new breakfast products were scaring people too. After a highly disappointing test run (thirty days of advertising and people were only trickling into the restaurants), the team had to figure out what was going wrong. The answer? Customers didn’t want a lot of “zesty” in the morning. They weren’t looking for a rock ’n’ roll breakfast. They wanted to ease into their days with minimal excitement, and Taco Bell was offering the exact opposite of that.
The frustrating part was that Taco Bell had tested breakfast once before and come to a similar conclusion. What’s more, KFC in the United Kingdom had also tried to launch a new breakfast menu and encountered a similar problem: They developed a “hungry man” breakfast concept that was more in tune with KFC’s full sit-down meal image than it was with what customers wanted for breakfast, which was something light and portable. But somehow the Yum! organization didn’t share information well enough to learn from these past experiences. We didn’t look hard enough at what had worked for our competitors in the breakfast category and what hadn’t worked for us in prior attempts. Wedidn’t listen hard enough to our customers who were telling us, pretty consistently, what they wanted. So Taco Bell basically had to start all over again when it came to breakfast and rethink its
concept to broaden the appeal. Now, instead of excitement for breakfast, we have partnered with well-known and approachable brands like Seattle’s Best Coffee, Johnsonville Sausage, Quaker, and Cinnabon. And instead of focusing on spicy ingredients, we’ve appealed to customers by offering them value with our “Why Pay More for Breakfast!” campaign. This time around, we’re having much more success, and so is KFC, now that we’ve modified our products based on these lessons.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DO?
When faced with trying to accomplish a Big Goal, one of the most daunting questions is: Where do I start? “Standing on the shoulders of giants” is another way of saying you don’t have to start from scratch and you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. In business, we sometimes get too caught up in the idea that we need to be different, that we need to innovate. Of course we need to distinguish ourselves from our competition, but that does not mean we can’t borrow good ideas, make them our own, and do an even better job of executing them. When we first spun off from PepsiCo, we had a tremendous opportunity. When my daughter, Ashley, was young and she made a mistake, she used to look at me and ask, “Dad, can I have a do-over?” That’s where we were as a company. The restaurant businesses had been struggling, which was a major reason why PepsiCo leaders thought they’d do better if they
spun us off. But in my mind, that gave us the opportunity for what I characterized as a “gigantic do-over.”
To take advantage of our unique position of being a brand-new public company made up of well-established brands, we went out and did a best-practice tour of some of the most successful companies around at the time in order to take inspiration from them and borrow any good ideas we could find.
We visited seven companies in all—GE, Walmart, Home Depot,Southwest Airlines, Target, Coke, and UPS—and then came back and crystallized what we’d learned into five things that we called our Dynasty Drivers, because these were the things that we believed would make us an enduringly great company:
A culture where everyone makes a difference:
We saw this at Southwest, where they believed in “people first,” and at Walmart, where we saw a big sign posted in one of their stores for all employees to see: T ODAY’S STOCK PRICE IS ___. T OMORROW’S IS UP TO YOU.
Customer and sales mania:
Home Depot was really a leader in this area. They had this concept of doing
The thing was, Taco Bell’s new breakfast products were scaring people too. After a highly disappointing test run (thirty days of advertising and people were only trickling into the restaurants), the team had to figure out what was going wrong. The answer? Customers didn’t want a lot of “zesty” in the morning. They weren’t looking for a rock ’n’ roll breakfast. They wanted to ease into their days with minimal excitement, and Taco Bell was offering the exact opposite of that.
The frustrating part was that Taco Bell had tested breakfast once before and come to a similar conclusion. What’s more, KFC in the United Kingdom had also tried to launch a new breakfast menu and encountered a similar problem: They developed a “hungry man” breakfast concept that was more in tune with KFC’s full sit-down meal image than it was with what customers wanted for breakfast, which was something light and portable. But somehow the Yum! organization didn’t share information well enough to learn from these past experiences. We didn’t look hard enough at what had worked for our competitors in the breakfast category and what hadn’t worked for us in prior attempts. Wedidn’t listen hard enough to our customers who were telling us, pretty consistently, what they wanted. So Taco Bell basically had to start all over again when it came to breakfast and rethink its
concept to broaden the appeal. Now, instead of excitement for breakfast, we have partnered with well-known and approachable brands like Seattle’s Best Coffee, Johnsonville Sausage, Quaker, and Cinnabon. And instead of focusing on spicy ingredients, we’ve appealed to customers by offering them value with our “Why Pay More for Breakfast!” campaign. This time around, we’re having much more success, and so is KFC, now that we’ve modified our products based on these lessons.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DO?
When faced with trying to accomplish a Big Goal, one of the most daunting questions is: Where do I start? “Standing on the shoulders of giants” is another way of saying you don’t have to start from scratch and you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. In business, we sometimes get too caught up in the idea that we need to be different, that we need to innovate. Of course we need to distinguish ourselves from our competition, but that does not mean we can’t borrow good ideas, make them our own, and do an even better job of executing them. When we first spun off from PepsiCo, we had a tremendous opportunity. When my daughter, Ashley, was young and she made a mistake, she used to look at me and ask, “Dad, can I have a do-over?” That’s where we were as a company. The restaurant businesses had been struggling, which was a major reason why PepsiCo leaders thought they’d do better if they
spun us off. But in my mind, that gave us the opportunity for what I characterized as a “gigantic do-over.”
To take advantage of our unique position of being a brand-new public company made up of well-established brands, we went out and did a best-practice tour of some of the most successful companies around at the time in order to take inspiration from them and borrow any good ideas we could find.
We visited seven companies in all—GE, Walmart, Home Depot,Southwest Airlines, Target, Coke, and UPS—and then came back and crystallized what we’d learned into five things that we called our Dynasty Drivers, because these were the things that we believed would make us an enduringly great company:
A culture where everyone makes a difference:
We saw this at Southwest, where they believed in “people first,” and at Walmart, where we saw a big sign posted in one of their stores for all employees to see: T ODAY’S STOCK PRICE IS ___. T OMORROW’S IS UP TO YOU.
Customer and sales mania:
Home Depot was really a leader in this area. They had this concept of doing
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