Book excerpt: The Winning Culture | A case for sticky messaging in all organisations, everywhere

"Cultural change needs two catalysts – an unambiguous shift in the mindset of the leadership and a few initial successes." (Representational image: This is Engineering via Pexels)

Concurrently with the effort to align processes, procedures, rewards, punishments, norms, traditions and symbolic gestures, another stratagem needs attention – messaging. What is the organization trying to reinforce, shed or change? This must be conveyed to the rank and file at every opportunity and through various mediums. Wise leaders often begin their addresses by mentioning the cultural elements that are being promoted. In 1983, when Bob Galvin set up the first-ever Competitive Intelligence Group within Motorola, he realized that the enterprise might sputter along at best without a supportive culture. He began to publicly endorse this group, telling whoever was listening that its mandate was to be ‘sufficiently annoying’ in search of facts ‘beyond the headlights’.

Pan Macmillan India; 304 pages; Rs 499.

The messaging must also be concise and memorable. Clunky statements that attempt to be all things to all employees can never secure attention, much less recall.

Rajeev Bakshi, a former MD of Cadbury, believes that businesses – indeed all organizations, including the armed forces and political parties – undergo continual change. This happens because business imperatives demand or the leadership pivots to a different thought process and strategy. To enjoy even a modicum of success, the culture – the collective behaviour of the system, how individuals and teams react to a particular stimulus – must be aligned to that change. Or mediocrity – even failure – will surely be written in the stars.

Rajeev joined Cadbury in 1992 as a director. He had been inducted after a successful stint at Lakmé. These were the years when the winds of liberalization began to break the Licence Raj’s cobwebs. In the preceding years, Cadbury had struggled. Its products – biscuits, ice creams and chocolates – were punching below their weight. Part of the reason was the company’s culture that flowed from the mindset of the management. Cadbury’s leadership had been forced to adopt a defensive business strategy; the lack of freedom to import machines to improve production and its parent organization’s apathy to field financial resources in a closed economy were examples of what fuelled that thinking. ‘I was wet behind the ears, even a bit immature,’ Rajeev told me. ‘But I had been mandated to bring about a major change of direction, especially in marketing. We needed a giant leap.’

In devising a strategy for that leap, Rajeev discovered a facet central to creating the culture: the management’s perception regarding the heart of the business. He found that at Cadbury, the belief that permeated across the board was that ‘manufacturing’ was the crux. You could hardly blame them for it – the core competency of most top-rung leaders was manufacturing. That wasn’t exclusive to Cadbury. Securing a licence and manufacturing were the only mountains to climb during the closed economy. Marketing was but a blip on most radars.

As you may well know by now, cultural change needs two catalysts – an unambiguous shift in the mindset of the leadership and a few initial successes. The rank and file must see it working for the company and its future self-interests before the nascent culture embeds itself.

‘This is what separates boys from men. Leaders have to be at the forefront of change. Only then will the boys follow,’ Rajeev believes. For culture to sink into the fabric, leaders must display a consistency of actions – a lesson we have repeatedly seen in the Army.

The narrative needs powerful messaging. Not the rambling and jargon-filled bullet points that adorn the walls of many a company – and, I daresay, are seldom even glanced at – but a sharp, easy-to-comprehend message that rings bells of motivation in the employees’ minds. It is often a slogan but is pregnant with the crux of the company’s business purpose.

When Rajeev became the MD, his slogan to everyone was ‘a Cadbury in every pocket’. It wasn’t a marketing tagline meant for the rest of the world. It was a clarion call to the rank and file to bring about a shift in their mindsets – and culture. Its five-word simplicity created a visual image: ‘We must become the leader, we must grow, we must be universally desired.’

Slogans. Names. Symbols. The results can be dramatic when these are crafted with care to cloak a powerful message with overt simplicity. Shireesh Sahai learnt this lesson in the early part of his fifteen years with GE Healthcare. ‘When you have a goal, rather than laying down revenue targets or profit or cost reduction and so on, give it a name that evokes an image of what is to be achieved.

Giving an endeavour a name or concise slogan burns it into the team’s memory; an inspiring phrase can spur people to put in a more significant effort.

That is what ‘a Cadbury in every pocket’ did. It told the company that the goal was not manufacturing but creating a huge market. The chocolate it made was not merely to be produced or manufactured but desired, a simple message that strove to shift the cultural focus from manufacturing to marketing and business development.

Over the ages, the Army has mastered the stratagem of simple messages that have created a powerful cultural imprint. An expression that has entered the DNA of every soldier is ‘ek goli, ek dushman’ (one bullet, one enemy)—it underscores the culture of weapon proficiency and training.

Messaging matters. And reinforcing it from every platform matters equally.

But a culture nudged into shape by messaging can only be sustained when two other requirements are met: the consistency of the example set by leaders and training aligned with those messages.

We have already spoken about how leaders set personal examples in the Army. Cadets aspiring to be officers are trained far harder than other soldiers. During drills, they themselves go through every hardship a soldier is expected to endure. They must set far higher professional proficiency, conduct and behaviour standards than the men they command. Units wherein there is dissonance between what the leaders profess and what they are seen doing invariably perform poorly in both war and peace.

Then, of course, the Army’s unique focus on training does not stop after recruitment and pre-commissioning regimens; it gathers momentum. There are the daily physical drills, individual training exercise ‘cycles’, firing on the range, specialist courses in training establishments, cadres designed to prepare soldiers for promotions, an exercise called battle inoculation to put soldiers through ‘live’ firing, collective ‘battle exercises’, sand model discussions, wargames to validate plans and a great deal of academic instruction as well.

Intensive training certainly spurs professional competence. But when the curriculum is thoughtfully designed, it also strengthens the prevalent culture.

We see this manifested in IndiGo’s on-time performance.

Excerpt published from The Winning Culture: Lessons from Indian Army to Transform Your Business by Major General Neeraj Bali with permission from Pan Macmillan India.