Name the Change You're Making
Choosing words to shift the minds of customers, teams, and you
Welcome back to The Workaround. I’m Bob 👋
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I’m here to make you think, smile, and discover a shortcut to success or a trap to avoid.
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Businesses spend nearly $1 trillion each year on advertising their brands, taglines, and other handfuls of words in hopes that their customers remember something pleasant about them when it’s time to buy.
Words are portable thoughts, after all. And the more memorable the words, the more likely the thoughts are to spread and stick.
While advertising has been a well-known tool for millennia, very few leaders similarly understand the power of their words within their businesses.
By carefully crafting and promoting the words that communicate your strategic choices and areas of focus among employees, you can lead thousands of them to harmonize in ways that drive remarkable success.
A Year Ends…
It’s time for another creative agency story. Since the “product” of agencies is human services, and creatives in particular are a challenging group of cats to herd, I don’t think there’s another type of business where team alignment matters more.
My fellow executive partners and I felt this big time in late 2004 as we experienced the best and worst of agency life…
We were a digital shop working with enterprise brands, so we benefited from the flow of investment into this new segment. Our clients had multi-million-dollar budgets to spend with us. All we needed to do was hang onto them and keep hiring.
Hiring wasn’t too hard. Our hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, had a large market for agency talent, thanks to businesses built to serve companies like Procter & Gamble and Kroger.
Agency employees are also used to moving around in their careers. Business is up at one place, while layoffs are happening elsewhere. People move to the agency that’s growing and convince their friends to follow them.
We were the up-and-coming player in town, so we got a lot of attention in the community. Plus, we offered digital projects that creatives knew were where the future lay.
The problem was that we were hiring people from agencies that didn’t operate the way we did.
My business partners and I didn’t come from the agency world. And we were shocked to see that many agency owners and their employees treated their clients as enemies. It seemed to be a mentality leftover from the old “Mad Men” days when talent was rare, creatives were worshipped, and clients “got in the way of their art.”
Don’t believe me? Here’s an example:
One of the oldest and largest agencies in town, NSL, once held an all-employee offsite in which they towed in an old car, painted “Clients” on its side, and gave everyone the chance to hit it with a sledgehammer.1
The Year Of…
Our business was booming as we reached the end of 2004, but our clients were complaining.
Our biggest single client, which accounted for over $2 million of our $10 million in revenue, put us on probation. Think of it as a 90-day PIP. You know how those usually turn out…
Other clients were signaling their desire to trade up to sexier agencies in New York, San Francisco, or L.A. As they added zeros to the ends of their digital budgets, they wondered if a little fish in Cincinnati was up to the task of taking their business into the great beyond.
Strategically, my partners and I saw a clear business opportunity: if we could just hold onto our current clients, we would grow incredibly fast as the digital waters rose. But how could we get over 100 employees—most of whom joined the firm in the past year—to buy in? How could we break them of the bad habits they developed at their previous employers?
We chose to pull all employees together for an offsite. Our CEO, Jay, laid out the business opportunity and challenge. Then he told that story about the car-smashing agency, where quite a few of our newer employees once worked. He said we were going to do the opposite: We would hug our clients.
He designated 2005 the Year of Hugging Our Clients.
Over the course of that day together, we discussed what this meant, how to get there, and situations where we did and did not practice the kind of care for our clients that would help us retain and grow with them.
And throughout the year, we kept “Hugging the Client” top of mind. We told stories of how people uniquely practiced this, depending on who they were and what the clients needed.
Naming the change and keeping it top of mind got us all on the same page. Over the course of the year, we got out of trouble on key accounts and began a torrid pace of growth, reaching over $40 million in revenue five years later. In the process, we won awards for company culture and creative work, and engineered a successful sale to one of those big holding companies.
Branding Your Change
Take a step back, and you might recognize this leadership tool in other places that have undergone massive changes.
In 1995, Bill Gates sent a now-famous internal memo titled “The Internet Tidal Wave.” He declared the internet “the most important single development” since the PC and reframed Microsoft around it almost overnight.
Mark Zuckerberg has done this a few times at Meta: First in 2012 when he declared “The Year of Mobile” and insisted on mobile-first design in every product discussion. Then, in 2023, he declared “The Year of Efficiency” to pull his organization toward disciplined evolution (after over-hiring)
Scott Belsky shares a few other examples in his book about building, The Messy Middle:
“Pinterest’s “Year of Going Global,‘” pushed every team across the company to reprioritize efforts to internationalize the business, or Uber’s “Year of the Driver,” which they rolled out when they realized they had fallen behind on developing tools and better policies for drivers on their platform. Other times it is a statement or edgy visual that sticks in people’s minds and becomes ammunition against old and stodgy thinking.”
This kind of internal strategic and culture branding can go way beyond “The Year of…” Amazon still uses the phrase “Day 1” as a shorthand for its operating philosophy. If you’ve seen a sales leader talk about their “Big Rocks” for the year, then you’ve seen this approach in action.
Take a further step back, and you’ll see how those who wish to make changes in society more broadly use branding to carve out space in our minds. Take this example about how “Designated Driver” was born and saved lives:
The term designated driver was invented by the Harvard Alcohol Project as a public health initiative and then seeded into popular television shows like Cheers and L.A. Law. Seeing characters put a name to a particular behavior created a new conceptual category in the viewer. If you accepted the term and used it, then it created dissonance with the urge to drink and drive. Why would there be a word for a person who drives his friends around while they drink if it’s perfectly okay to drink and drive? To resolve the dissonance, the existing model had to be updated—people who drink do not drive. According to the Project, after introducing the term to the public in 1988, alcohol-related fatalities dropped by 24 percent in four years, an extremely rapid shift in attitudes. Today, most Americans say they’ve served as the designated driver at least once in their lives.”—How Minds Change
Naming the change you want to make in an organization—or the entire world—is the first step toward actually making it happen.
How to Change Your Mind
This naming model can also help us make changes in the universe between our ears.
We are all working in some respect to improve our minds. We want to worry less, be more present, listen better, and curtail distractions. These are all jumbles of thought. But when we start naming them—like Ego, Voices, Shadows, and Traumas—we gain a little separation and can put them in their place.
Research shows that just receiving a psychological diagnosis can bring relief, even before any treatment through discussion or drugs. When we see everything in our minds as an object or process rather than “me,” we can ladder up and deal with it more easily.
If I break my arm, it doesn’t mean “I” am broken; it just means I need to take steps to heal my arm. If my mind keeps overreacting to bad news, it doesn’t mean “I” am broken; it just means I have a thought pattern that’s off-kilter. We go to the ER for the arm, and perhaps a therapist for the mind.
Or we can name the change we want to make in ourselves. “Overreacting to bad news” is a personal one that I’ve been working on. A few months ago, I learned that the legendary actor Michael Caine was taught to “Use the Difficulty.” It’s all about reframing the problems that arise in life by finding a way to get value from them—say, as a life lesson, an opportunity to develop new skills, or a challenge to step out of our comfort zones.
I took this and made my own version: Use Everything.
“Use Everything” is a mini-mantra that I am training myself to remember when “bad news” arrives. I started with a sticky note with the phrase on my desk, then I got faster and faster at remembering to think of this mantra when problems arose. Today, it’s mostly what I think of before I think of anything negative. It’s become kind of a game now to what positive spin comes forward first.
One of my most common reactions is to think about how to turn my screw-ups into a post that others can learn from. “Oh, great! I’ve got my next post topic!”
Nobody taught us in school that we could reprogram ourselves. But it’s true, and we all can do this! As evidence, here’s a note I got from a friend who read one of my early posts about Ego:2
“You exposed me to the concept that my ego was blocking me. I see that as one of many traps that would have prevented my startup from ever materializing. Thank you for that and for putting a name to it for me. It makes the game easier to play when you know and can name what you are up against.”
Ultimately, the game of business is easy to win once we learn to play the game of reprogramming our minds. The prize? A life well lived.
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I’m a co-founder of Fleet, a holding company for services businesses. We invest in leaders ready to start their own companies (we also do some M&A). If you’ve ever thought about starting your own professional service business but need financial or other support, hit that schedule link above. ^^^
The agency, Northlich, was started in 1949 and eventually closed in 2019.
Yes, I’m sharing something that might look like my own ego inflation, but I think it’s mostly me trying to bring the point home :)
i love this post! for some reason the notion that "designate driver" was a term that was invented sort of blew my mind, but of course someone came up with it, and that must be responsible for thousands of lives saved
When you mentioned the fact that some agency's were treating their clients like the enemy and then announced you had a story to illustrate I was curious what it would be, since your stories are always so on point. But the example of the car being smashed by employees of the agency to take out their frustration with their own clients was over the top as a graphic illustration of your point. You so such a good job with the stories you weave from your experience into your educating.