Forward Momentum for Politicians

Voters want real, authentic, relatable and trustworthy individuals. This election season, we’re giving politicians who want to capture the hearts and minds of their constituents an edge over their competitors by employing the playbook that propelled Silicon Valley juggernauts like Netflix, Uber and products like the iPod to market domination.

Here at Forward Momentum, we help brands become market leaders. We help them win big. Our clients are usually startups or long-established companies. Last year we adapted our framework to work for individuals, too. This makes sense for any brand that’s built around a person — keynote speakers, athletes, actors, musicians, streamers, realtors and… politicians!

Introducing: Run as You Are

A strong democracy is supported by a multitude of voices that represent the will of the people. But in fast-changing times like these, it’s crucial for voters to select the candidate that reflects their choices on currently known issues but who is also most likely to represent their needs and wishes on future issues. In other words: voters have to make a bet and trust the candidate to have their best interest in mind and to strike the right kinds of compromises.

For that, they have to know who the candidate is.

Since we’re in a position to help we have decided that we should. It’s the right thing to do. We’re not a political consultancy, and that’s the whole point: there are plenty of those. Voters don’t want politicians who change their minds with the latest polls, or who “stand for everything” (which just means they stand for nothing). Voters want real, authentic, relatable and trustworthy individuals. Totally different than your normal politician. That’s what we excel in with companies and products, and if you’re running for office, we can do the same for you: We’ll help you run as you are. Real. Convincing. Relatable. Totally different than the rest.

We augment the capabilities of political campaign teams for a brief project period and can provide ongoing guidance if desired. If you’re working for someone who is running for state or national office (or the equivalent in your country), or if you’re thinking about a run yourself, head on over to run-as-you-are.com or get in touch below. Let’s talk!

What is Organizational Culture?

In this article, we will explain the steps to creating organizational culture and we’ll walk you through how category design can help you identify and frame the key component of your corporate culture in the first place. 

Often referred to as company culture or corporate culture, organizational culture does not have one singular definition, though Wikipedia makes an attempt. (Note: it’s a terribly dry read.)

A simple way to think about organizational culture is as the collection of rituals and values that bond the members of an organization. It’s closely linked to purpose, which is the reason your organization exists. Culture is the glue that keeps your employees or team members pulling in the same direction, especially when faced with curve balls or challenges. Culture impacts why employees want to get up and go to work in the morning. And why someone might want to join your company in the first place.

Components of Organizational Culture

You can break down the components of organizational culture roughly into these three parts:

1. Incentives

You, the leadership team, can directly influence the culture in your organization by incentivizing or disincentivizing certain behavior. These include things like

• financial rewards, such as salaries and bonuses

• non-monetary rewards like recognition (awards), status (titles), and promotions 

• sanctions, for example, when policies are not followed or targets are not met

2. Leadership Behavior

The way you and your fellow executives behave is absolutely critical. You’re setting examples every day in the way you carry yourself, the way you interact with those around you, the way you speak, and yes, even the way you dress. All of these add up to form a whole.

But perhaps the most important aspect of leadership behavior as it influences company culture is how you hold yourself, and each other, accountable. 

Whatever you do and how you do it rubs off on the rest of the organization. If you cut corners, so will your employees. On the flip side, if you own your mistakes, so will they. (We suggest you aim to lead by example.)

3. Shared Values

A shared understanding of the values that drive us, the things we agree on and that motivate us is essential to establishing or shaping organizational culture. In other words, culture is a manifestation of meaning.

It helps to write down these values, and many companies attempt to do that with their Vision/Mission statements. Unfortunately, most of them suck! (This is not your fault; this is difficult to distill.) They’re usually full of empty words and meaningless corporate speak. If people can’t get excited while reading them, can’t look at them and think “yes, that!” then these mission statements do not serve their purpose of articulating the shared “why” of an organization. 

As humans, once we understand and agree on these shared values we shape our behavior accordingly, and we also show new team members the ropes. Agreement and consistent behavior create culture.

Adding it all up

So here’s the basic formula:

shared values + leadership behavior + incentives = culture

Pretty straightforward, right? 

Why Organizational Culture matters

Culture matters because it helps your employees pull in the same direction when faced with unexpected challenges or day-to-day, in-the-moment choices. 

That’s because strategy is prescriptive (and tactics even more so), whereas culture gives you a blueprint for what “doing the right thing” means in your organization. This allows your team members to execute successfully even when no prescriptive steps exist. It gives them a framework for creative problem-solving within the shared values and in support of the purpose of the organization.

(That’s why “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” as the well-known management consultant Peter Drucker once said.)

How Category Design helps your Culture

Forward Momentum uses category creation to turn our clients into market leaders, sometimes at launch and often during a rebrand or pivot. One component of category design is the understanding and articulation of organizational culture in their Point of View (POV).

When we go into an organization we begin with fact-finding interviews and those learnings inform our later workshops and discussions. But along the way we always craft an organization’s POV. It’s a document that outlines all the shared values, motivations, and the goals that motivate the client, its leaders and the team members. 

We even go a step further and paint a picture of how we envision the world in success, when our client’s product is used by its customers and improving their lives or work.

It’s a highly interactive process with a few rounds of revisions to get it just right – but it’s without fail one of the things our clients end up loving the most about working with us (aside from the commercial results, of course). 

POVs can even form the basis of fundamental whole-company strategy reviews.

It also helps with hiring and retention: a well-crafted POV not only contains the shared values that form the basis for an organization’s culture but it also gives a hopeful vision of the future. In short, it articulates why a current employee wants to get up and go to work in the morning. Why the things they do at work matter. And why a prospective employee might want to join this company in the first place.

Want to talk?

We’d love to discuss your challenges and see if parts of our framework can help you solve your current challenges around organizational culture. We won’t waste your time (promised!) so let’s find out if we are the right fit!

10 Common Mistakes when Rebranding

A successful rebranding should make your company or product stand out and dominate your markets. It should make you a beacon of your industry.

But many companies that set out to rebrand themselves or their flagship products end up falling woefully short of their own or their investors’ expectations. And even when their own expectations are met these companies may have, by all accounts, squandered the opportunity to more significantly improve their internal culture and their overall commercial results.

When this happens, it’s often attributable to one or more of these common and avoidable mistakes:

Not thinking big enough

1. “It’s just a design change.”

2. “I don’t like the color of our logo anymore.”

3. “Let's just update the website.”

Probably the top culprit in missed opportunities is seeing rebranding as merely a visual or a design exercise. Maybe someone on the internal project team also suggests a clever new tagline.

4. Not knowing what your product really does or stand for

5. Not knowing what your customer thinks your product is

Our typical client engagements include significant research portions and one crucial line of inquiry always focuses on the product, what it is, what it does, what else it could do and how customers use it. In other words, we conduct a 360 degree review of our client’s offering to fully understand its potential. Most failed rebranding exercises we have found do not even attempt this, often because it doesn’t occur to the teams that they should ask such questions.

Going it alone and getting lost

6. Not asking for help

Nobody knows everything. Good leaders know this, of course. But what they often fail to appreciate is the immense value of outside counsel. Just like you shouldn’t exclude your internal stakeholders you shouldn’t rely solely on them. They’re steeped in your company culture and often can’t see the forest for the trees or are limited by reporting lines and your existing incentives. Bringing in external help provides guidance, accountability and multiplies your internal knowledge by that of the outside team, increasing your success chances exponentially. It also speeds things up and helps to deliver on deadline.

7. too many cooks in the kitchen

Someone in our network recently told us about an internal rebranding exercise in a company they know that started with a team of about ten and increased to more than 25 people over the course of half a year. The result did not make any lasting impact within their own teams, with their customers and with the market: the effort fizzled out.

8. Changing course at the last minute

Rebranding requires time to be successful. Messages have to be repeated and sink in, culture needs to adjust, products might have to adjust, too. Messaging and roll-outs have to be planned and prepared. Making last-minute knee-jerk changes is pure poison for this. It’s the safest way to lose all the momentum you might have had in your project and to get lost along the way.

Stopping too soon

9. Forgetting to win the hearts and minds of your employees

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” We all know this line, but how does it apply here? Simple: a rebranding requires everyone in the company to pull in one new direction. To speak with one voice, appropriate and natural for their position and personality. If you don’t first win the hearts and minds of your own employees they can’t translate the new brand strategy to your customers. The result? You don’t win the hearts and minds of your customers. And if you haven’t yet heard, customers don’t buy specs anymore. Even in B2B settings, a buying decision is ultimately an emotional one.

10. Not having a communications strategy

Your rebranding project isn’t finished until the world has heard about it. Launching that redesigned website from the top of this list is not enough. These kinds of projects fail on execution when you don’t prepare a messaging and communications strategy. This includes PR, marketing and advertising as appropriate for your particular product and market environment. You need to tell the world, in a way that it will hear it.

In short:

• Think Big

• Get Help

• See it through

  …and then reap the rewards.

Growing your business as a Category Champion like Uber

Uber. Clearly a Category Champion, chosen by its customers every day. A company that designed, introduced and owned a new global market category by relentlessly focusing on the service the customer wants.

The work to become a Category Champion starts with relentless focus. Focus on the problem only you can solve that your customers didn't yet know they had. Focus is often the single biggest topic we work on with our clients and in our experience here at Forward Momentum it's also the earliest indicator of likely success or potential failure of Category Design projects.

But once you're past those initial stages and you're ruling your market category, where do you turn for growth?

Uber just announced an expansion, allowing UK customers to book planes, trains and buses in the app, starting this summer. Some pundits talk about Uber moving to become a so-called "super-app" (like WeChat or Alipay that integrate countless mini-apps under one roof). Maybe. Maybe not.

But what Uber is doing is a text-book example of a grown Category Champion expanding their business by returning to its core focus with a more expansive view.

When Uber launched, it was hated by cabbies (because it brought competition and forced them to adjust to customer expectations), now embraced by cabbies to bring in additional rides (e.g. in New York City). First loved by customers for the convenience and safety it introduced, then temporarily abandoned by some for erosion of trust in their executives, business practices and for their price hikes. In the pandemic, Uber pivoted to food delivery and supported immunization efforts, gaining back a lot of customer goodwill but also hurting its brand by often doubling the price of a simple meal with a laundry list of often shady-sounding fees.

So the return to passenger transportation is a smart move by Uber. It’s what their customers chose them for in the first place: simplifying transportation. And while these new verticals might seem ancillary to Uber’s original market, they’re not! Uber’s data tells them how many of its rides are moving people to and from airports, train and bus stations. It follows then as a logical next step to close the gap between those two rides.

From a customer perspective, Uber now simplifies the entire door-to-door trip, not just the cab ride. What’s not to love?

In addition to the economic benefits for Uber, and the elimination of hassle from a customer’s life, there’s even a potential climate benefit. A good portion of long individual car trips are taken to avoid the hassle of dealing with public options. A truly seamless experience in public door-to-door mobility can shift that portion of individual car traffic towards more climate friendly alternatives.

Meanwhile, Uber's partners will be forced to contend with giving up some control in favor of their (mutual) customers' experience and their publicly stated climate goals. I foresee a lot of moaning and nitpicking, especially in Europe, where every country operates their own small train networks. But passengers don’t care — they just want stuff to work seamlessly and they will choose the most convenient, reasonably priced option. Just think back to record labels and Apple’s iTunes Store. The same will happen here.

Done right, this move will cement Uber's status as the Category Champion of this space. I’m curious to see what the summer in the UK brings!

What critics missed in Zuckerberg’s Meta keynote? A perfect Lightning Strike.

I'm currently looking out the window of a plane 30,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean. I fly a lot, and yet the view from up above never ceases to amaze me. With the right music in your headphones I find the vastness is perfect to just... think.

Which brings me to a few thoughts I have about Mark Zuckerberg's recent keynote in which he announced the rebranding of his company to Meta, and focused everyone's attention on what he called the metaverse.

A lot has been written about the metaverse, what it is, what it isn't, what it might be, and mostly how people feel about the uncertainty and newness of it all (spoiler alert: most feel uncomfortable in some way).

A perfect Lightning Strike

I'm not going to add to that part of the conversation today. What is much more interesting is something that aligns closely with our work here at Forward Momentum: Zuckerberg's near-perfect execution of a Lightning Strike, or the public announcement and staking of your claim in a new category. This is critical in the world of Category Design, a discipline focused on the mindful creation and development of new market categories.

Now, you may think that Meta merely adopted the term "metaverse," much in the way it was described in the 1992 science-fiction novel Snow Crash, where humans interact via avatars in a 3D virtual space that resembles the real world. But I see a lot more here.

Zuckerberg presented his company’s vision for a virtual space in which you can socialize, work and play. Your avatar can reflect your personality and you can interact with others who are not physically near you. Technologists might consider this merely a very complete articulation or logical next step of what the inventors of the internet itself and science fiction work such as the movie Avatar or even Star Trek already envisioned. Or an evolution of existing games such as Roblox or Second Life. That may all well be true.

Articulating a complete vision

But from a business and societal perspective, Zuckerberg did what no one else had, up to this point: He pulled this all together and laid it out in one coherent vision. Importantly, he was the right person for the job — it had to be someone with the means and power to actually push this vision forward. Meta has been building some portions of what he described for the past few years, and you can experience it today. And you won't be surprised to hear that the Chinese companies Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent have been heavily invested in this area, as well. Meta's Oculus VR headsets and similar hardware are simply early iterations of how users will ultimately interact with each other. Meanwhile, 5G networks are not just faster data pipes but also deliver computing power at the edge of the network, which will be helpful once you're wearing a lightweight (and probably underpowered) pair of AR glasses in public.

Remember when the release of the iPhone made everyone rebuild existing things but "on mobile?"
It's safe to say we'll see a lot of activity of the same kind "in metaverse."

True, the translation of existing paradigms into a new environment or onto a new technology in and of itself is boring — or at least not headline material — even if it might produce revenue, which is necessary to fund true R&D. Only when artists, technologists and crazy thinkers begin to imagine and even push the possibilities of a new technology do we get truly transformational work. That’s when it gets exciting!

Transformational change requires a wide landscape of actors

Transformational work takes time. It also takes trials and failures. So it's necessary to make as many people as possible think about this before it fully exists. That’s where the perfectly executed Lightning Strike comes into play. I believe Zuckerberg when he says he doesn't want to build the metaverse but for the metaverse.

The ecosystem of many players who can all offer their visions, their additions to the metaverse, and crucially, price their products and services independently is what will make this a real market category with a striving landscape of actors. Nike, for example, just acquired a company that makes virtual shoes for the metaverse.

By devoting almost their entire annual keynote to this topic, and by devoting significant resources to artist's renderings, example implementations, visualizations of what such a metaverse might look and feel like, they made it tangible (no pun intended). They gave people something to react to. To project their own thoughts onto, to think “hell, no!” or "yes, that!” or “yes, but with a few tweaks."

Even the doubters and haters are providing a very relevant part to the global discourse. 

In other words: everyone's talking about it. And when you talk about the metaverse, you immediately think about Meta, the company.

That's a perfectly executed Lightning Strike, right there.