Mavericks at Work: Why the most original minds in business win. William Taylor
lighten-and-enlighten experiences, a unique combination of laughter and learning that gives everyone a chance to shine. People will laugh and feel and connect, but at the same time they are going to be getting smarter. That was our disruptive idea.”
The language of “lighten and enlighten” and “shine”—reflecting a genuine sense of mission and a feel for the interplay between seriousness of purpose and flat-out fun—infuses every aspect of how Cranium operates. Life here just sounds different from life at most companies. Executives have job titles that make perfect sense to their colleagues, but not to many other people. Whit Alexander is Cranium’s “Chief Noodler.” The business card of Jack Lawrence, the company’s CFO, identifies him as “Professor Profit.” Catherine Fisher Carr, the person responsible for the content of the games, has the title “Keeper of the Flame.” Customers aren’t just customers, they’re Craniacs—game players who share the passion and values that animate the company that makes the game. “I get e-mails from customers that say, ‘Proud to be a Craniac,’ ‘I am a Craniac,’” says Richard Tait. “This really is a movement.”
Even hard-core business operations are described in unusual ways. Scattered around Cranium headquarters are “Pulse” stations—fun, colorful, visual representations of key financial indicators, including sell-through numbers at retailers, operating profits, and on-time delivery of products. These stations (which measure the “pulse” of the company) are updated regularly and keep everyone posted on the guts of Cranium’s business results. Meanwhile, the watchwords of the product development process are “Gather-Grow-Glow.” Gather—which friends or family members are expected to play the game? Glow—what are the moments of success and celebration (of “shine”) that the game is meant to unleash? Grow—what are the players going to learn from the game?
To outsiders, Cranium’s offbeat titles and homegrown vocabulary may sound forced, hokey, even off-putting. But for Richard Tait this vocabulary is vital to the company’s business strategy and operating success. “Every great company has a distinctive culture,” Tait says, “and every culture has a language, a shared sense of values. We’ve established a culture in the company that is impregnable. We defend it, we rally around it, we refine it. And as part of that culture, there is a vocabulary. Everyone you meet at Cranium can talk to you about lighten and enlighten, about shine, and about what it means to bring that into people’s lives.”
Everyone you meet at Cranium can also talk about CHIFF, perhaps the centerpiece of the company’s strategic vocabulary. CHIFF stands for Clever, High-quality, Innovative, Friendly, and Fun. The acronym is meant to explain the games’ personality and performance—how they should look, how they should be built, and how the product brochure should read. In fact, if you spend any amount of time at Cranium headquarters, you can’t help but chafe under the relentless drumbeat of CHIFF. Do the company’s new TV ads feel CHIFF? Do the latest changes to the Web site look CHIFF? Are the instructions for the newest game CHIFF enough?
The company has a senior executive, Jill Waller, whose title is actually “CHIFF Champion.” Her job is to make sure that the product development process stays true to this crucial element of Cranium’s vocabulary. Waller’s CHIFF checklist involves a detailed methodology that shapes everything from how to vet ideas for new games (a process called “the Cranium Cuisinart”) to how to make detailed production plans (“the Manufacturing Mindmeld”) to how to revise games once they’re in the market (“Operation Big Ears”). “Everyone knows what a game has to be like, what the experience of playing it has to be like,” Waller says. “Everything we do has to be CHIFF.”
Some readers may be rolling their eyes at the colorful language spoken at Cranium. This is, after all, a young, offbeat (albeit phenomenally successful) company that is literally in the business of fun and games. But time and again, as we immersed ourselves in companies with original, break-the-mold business strategies, we discovered an only-spoken-here strategic language, a vocabulary of competition designed to capture what the company stood for and how its people worked together to advance its agenda.
Go back to Austin, Texas, and Roy Spence’s ad agency, a creative place to be sure, but a hard-nosed competitor as well, one whose clients include some of the world’s most powerful companies and best-known advertisers. As we’ve seen, Spence believes that his agency’s purpose-based strategy is distinctive enough that his bustling firm, with annual billings of $1.5 billion, needs an executive with the title “Chief Purposologist.” (She is, in some respects, GSD&M’s version of Cranium’s “CHIFF Champion.”)
But that title is just a tiny part of the agency’s strategic vocabulary, and that vocabulary is what keeps new generations of employees connected to the 35-year-old agency’s original and unwavering purpose. Spence’s colleagues have gathered a collection of “Royisms” that they believe define how GSD&M operates—the genetic code for the agency’s competitive spirit. “We are curious and restless—a safe haven for misfits that somehow fit here,” reads one. “We like who we are. We like people who like us. When people come in to change our core culture, the body rejects them,” reads another. “We are not like the big boys, and we don’t want to be,” reads a third. “We must never play by their rules—it’s a trap.”
Expressive language, to be sure. But where GSD&M’s business vocabulary most comes to life is in the design and personality of the agency’s headquarters building. If what you think shapes how you talk, the logic goes, then where you work should reflect how you think as well. Spence and his colleagues are true believers when it comes to the power of disruptive business ideas, and their beliefs are evident the moment you arrive at the GSD&M offices. The strikingly original facility, called Idea City, has become a defining landmark of the Austin business scene and a source of fascination among business commentators around the world. Nothing about the place is standard-issue office building. The three-story, 137,600-square-foot headquarters is overflowing with offbeat art and wild decor. There’s also a movie theater, a classic diner, and a bookstore.
But the most telling aspect of Idea City is that it is actually organized as a city—on the theory that the energy, diversity, and barely controlled chaos of urban environments produce the most exciting ideas. The complex is divided into districts, each of which has its own personality. There’s the Financial District, where the agency’s business types congregate. There’s Greenwich Village, where the agency’s creative types work. Each major client gets its own neighborhood, sort of an immersion zone for the company’s products, personality, and purpose. There are War Rooms, Hot Shops, Idea Teams—ways of describing how and where people work that are unique to GSD&M.
In the middle of it all is the Rotunda, the town square through which the 540 residents of Idea City pass on a daily basis. (Company wags call it the Roytunda, an homage to their silver-tongued president.) And on the floor of the Rotunda, written in concrete, are the values that animate the agency: community, winning, restlessness, freedom and responsibility, curiosity, integrity. These words appear in plenty of other places at GSD&M headquarters as well—the building is overflowing with visual reminders of what makes the agency tick.
Some people wear their hearts on their sleeve. Why does GSD&M carve its values into the floor? “It sounds hokey, but it’s not,” explains Spence. “People understand that these values are not temporary. They are literally etched in the concrete of the town square. Those values are the common drivers of our purpose. People want to work at companies that know what they stand for. Everybody at this company knows what we stand for.”
WHAT IT MEANS TO SUCCEED—BUILDING THE FUTURE BY REBUILDING AN INDUSTRY
It’s a long way from Austin, Texas, to Redwood City, California, and there’s a vast gulf separating the freewheeling spirit of the ad business from the backbreaking demands of the construction business. But when you walk into the offices of DPR Construction, Inc., and visit with cofounder and president Doug Woods, it feels like you’ve traveled 1,800 miles to arrive at another Idea City—and another company that speaks its own language.
Doug Woods doesn’t sound like a nail-pounding, lunch pail–toting construction boss. But he’s