Mavericks at Work: Why the most original minds in business win. William Taylor
Built to Last, which became one of the best-selling business books of all time. As Collins and Porras examined the success of venerable companies such as Johnson & Johnson, 3M, and Procter & Gamble, they discovered a sense of purpose at each of the companies, a “set of fundamental reasons for a company’s existence beyond just making money.” And this sense of purpose, they added, tends to be timeless and enduring—“a good purpose should serve to guide and inspire the organization for years, perhaps a century or more.”4
Each of the maverick companies you’ll meet in the next two chapters exudes an undeniable sense of purpose. But it’s a sense of purpose that provokes: each company’s strategy tends to be as edgy as it is enduring, as disruptive as it is distinctive, as timely as it is timeless. In an era defined by the business, cultural, and social hangover from the excesses of the nineties boom—a period of Wall Street scandal, CEO misconduct, and unprecedented levels of mistrust between companies and their customers and employees—the most powerful ideas are the ones that set forth an agenda for reform and renewal, the ones that turn a company into a cause.
Roy Spence, cofounder and president of GSD&M, the free-spirited ad agency based in Austin, Texas, is a colorful and charismatic voice on the future of business strategy. Spence has been a guiding force behind some of the most visible brands and high-impact organizations in America, from Wal-Mart to the PGA Tour to the U.S. Air Force. But the client that first put his agency on the map was Southwest Airlines. According to Spence, Southwest’s remarkable climb to industry leadership (it carried more domestic passengers in 2005 than any other airline) is not just about low-cost economics or high-touch service. Ultimately, it’s about the edgy and disruptive sense of mission that drives every aspect of how it does business.5
Southwest has become such a mass-market icon that it’s easy to lose sight of the utter distinctiveness of its approach to the airline business. The company’s direct point-to-point route system avoids the high costs and endless delays of the hub-and-spoke system around which the mainstream industry is built. The company has never offered first-class service or assigned seating or in-flight meals, and it was a late (and reluctant) participant in frequent-flier programs. Southwest’s no-frills approach to interacting with customers keeps fares low and makes for easy-to-understand offerings.
Yet low fares don’t mean sullen service. Quite the opposite: the company’s gate agents, flight attendants, even its pilots, are famous for their flashy smiles, showy personalities, and corny sense of humor. Anyone who has flown Southwest on Halloween, an almost-sacred holiday at the fun-loving airline, and marveled at the costumes worn by everyone from baggage handlers to mechanics, understands that this is an airline that flies on a different kind of fuel from its competitors. Indeed, Southwest may be the most colorful and instructive example ever of the power of strategy as advocacy. This is a company whose distinctive value system, rather than any breakthrough technology or unprecedented business insight, explains its unrivaled success.
GSD&M signed on with Southwest in 1981, back when the ten-year-old airline, cofounded and run by Herb Kelleher, a gutsy, chain-smoking, whiskey-swilling adopted Texan (one of the Lone Star State’s most legendary entrepreneurs was born in New Jersey), was considered a flighty sideshow to the blue-chip companies that ruled the sky. Today, in an industry that hovers on the brink of disaster (the old guard lost a collective $30 billion from 2001 to 2004), Southwest soars alone as a consistent moneymaker and fast-growing enterprise. A few years back, Money celebrated its 30th anniversary by identifying the best-performing stock over the magazine’s three-decade history. The winner wasn’t General Electric, IBM, Merck, or some other revered name. It was Southwest Airlines, a maverick force in one of the least attractive industries in the world. (It does pay to be a maverick. According to Money, a $10,000 investment in Southwest shares in 1972 was worth more than $10.2 million 30 years later.)6
Spence is adamant about the strategic lessons behind his client’s remarkable flight path. Southwest didn’t flourish just because its fares were cheaper than Delta’s or because its service was friendlier than the not-so-friendly skies of United. Southwest flourished because it reimagined what it means to be an airline. Indeed, Spence insists that Southwest isn’t in the airline business. It is, he argues, in the freedom business. Its purpose is to democratize the skies—to make air travel as available and as flexible for average Americans as it has been for the well-to-do.
That unique sense of mission is what drives Southwest’s business strategy, from the cities it serves to the fares it charges right down to whom it hires and promotes. There is, Spence argues, a direct connection between the economics of Southwest’s operating model, the advertising it aims at its customers (“You are now free to move about the country”), and the messages it sends to its 30,000-plus employees (“You are now free to be your best”). Spence explains the connection this way: “Business strategies change. Market positioning changes. But purpose does not change. Everybody at Southwest is a freedom fighter.”
Obviously, all this talk of freedom is in part an exercise in product marketing and employee morale-boosting. But anybody who’s flown Southwest understands that there’s more to the airline’s performance than low costs and high productivity. There is, in fact, a genuine sense of purpose (and a one-of-a-kind sense of humor) that animates the company. Libby Sartain spent 13 years in the People Department at Southwest, the last 6 in charge of the department as its vice president. (We’ll meet her again in chapter 7, where we explore her new agenda as Chief People Yahoo—the senior HR strategist at one of Silicon Valley’s flagship companies.) Sartain is adamant that the advocacy mission that defined Southwest in the marketplace reflected, and was driven by, an equally palpable sense of purpose in the workplace. “We examined the company at the most detailed level,” Sartain explains, “and asked, ‘From the minute you think of working here to the minute you leave, what makes this experience unique? What is it about our workforce that separates us from the competition?’”
In the workplace, employees took up a battle cry designed to connect the company’s disruptive business strategy to daily life inside the organization: “At Southwest, Freedom Begins with Me.” Sartain and her team went so far as to identify the “Eight Freedoms” that defined the working experience at the airline—from “the freedom to learn and grow” to “the freedom to create financial security” to “the freedom to work hard and have fun” to “the freedom to create and innovate”—and she created a traveling “freedom exposition” to recruit employees to the cause behind the company.
Over time, the Eight Freedoms “got to the very core of what the experience of working at Southwest is about,” Sartain says. “The message was, ‘You’re not just loading a bag in the belly of that plane, you’re not just serving cocktails, you’re not just creating a budget or writing software. You are giving people the freedom to fly. It’s your efficiency and ingenuity that allows us to keep offering low fares and keeps our planes in the sky.’”7
What ideas is your company fighting for? What values does your company stand for? What purpose does your company serve? Those are the questions that Roy Spence seeks to answer for every organization with which he works. “Anybody who’s running a business has to figure out the higher calling of that business, its purpose,” he insists. “Purpose is about the difference you’re trying to make—in the marketplace, in the world. If everybody is selling the same thing, what’s the tie-breaker? It’s purpose.”
There’s no doubt that Spence is a master at using clever language to define and position companies in compelling ways. (He’s in the ad business, after all, and his nickname inside the agency is “Reverend Roy.”) Language, as we’ll explore in chapter 2, counts for a lot when it comes to strategy. How you talk about your company speaks volumes about how you think about your business. And ultimately, how you think about your business determines how well it performs.
“Sure,