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Portfolio Penguin is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published 2015
Copyright © Michael Hayman and Nick Giles, 2015
The moral right of the authors has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-241-97079-9
Introduction
1 Mission
2 Campaigning
3 Momentum
4 Becoming a Campaigner
5 Conviction
6 Culture
7 Collaboration
8 Story
9 The Communicator-in-Chief
10 Failure
11 Growth
Conclusion: The Times They Are A-Changin’
Acknowledgements
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‘Technology is fundamentally changing the way people live, work and travel, and a new generation of innovative companies has emerged in recent years. In Mission, Michael Hayman and Nick Giles pinpoint the importance of social purpose to the entrepreneurs and businesses who are transforming societies around the world. It is mission that makes successful businesses stand out, and this book shows how companies are able to define, build and communicate their purpose in order to prosper’
Joe Gebbia, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Airbnb
‘Mission shows how purpose has become essential to today’s business leaders. Capitalism can best flourish if based on new, ethical and socially motivated foundations and this book shows why purpose-driven businesses are winning out, and acting as a force for good in society’
John Mackey, founder, Whole Foods
‘Mission makes a compelling case for purpose as the defining ingredient of today’s most successful businesses that are able to move from “ideation” to “global scale”. In the battle for talent, it is a central commercial purpose that sorts the great from the good. Any business that wants to stand out in today’s crowded market needs to ask themselves what they are really trying to achieve and why their company matters. This book shows you how mission is a critical tool for leaders serious about scaling their business into a global player’
Sherry Coutu, Non-executive Director, London Stock Exchange
‘The grasp of the reality that every business should be a force for good in offering solutions to society’s challenges is a fault line between our current different generations. This book will help its readers see with clarity what the future of successful business already looks like.
This book clearly sets out why those businesses built on profits and social purpose will win as they attract engaged customers, employees and investors, and are born from twenty-first century, values-led, entrepreneurs’
Paul Lindley, founder, Ella’s Kitchen
‘It is obvious to me that we need to support those who are going to create wealth for our nation and to do this we need to encourage new entrepreneurs and deliver the conditions in which, young people especially, can attain the skills, education and experiences that will stand them in good stead should they choose to become enterprising and entrepreneurial. Quite apart from the basics and supporting start-up companies, we need to really get behind those companies that show real promise and begin to grow fast. A concentration of effort in support of these companies, and especially the people who are behind them, is the best way that we can create the big global companies that are needed to create the wealth that the UK needs to be prosperous. In Mission, Michael Hayman and Nick Giles show very clearly why standout companies are increasingly defined by purpose and the ambition to effect positive change.
‘It is very clear to me that a new generation of young companies is emerging that, with the correct conditions created in this country by everyone standing up to support them in their entrepreneurial endeavours, are going to be the job creators and wealth creators this country needs. This book is an apt appreciation of the business culture that is developing and has developed in the UK over recent years, one in which I have seen its authors play an important role in cultivating’
HRH The Duke of York, KG
In today’s business world, mission matters.
It gives you the purpose to succeed in our unstable, fast-changing and challenging environment. A changing world where it has been said that two thirds of the companies that will make up the S&P 500 stock market index in a decade’s time have yet to be created.
Consider the words of Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime leader. ‘The empires of the future are the empires of the mind,’ he said in 1943. Over seven decades on, that prophecy is being fulfilled in a commercial sense, because today’s business world has become a battleground: for attention, preference and ideas. A battle for the mind in which companies must seek purpose as well as profit.
In this attention economy, breaking through is everything: the ability to connect with the consumer, the employee and the shareholder.
Central to mission is the rise of a new commercial currency: belief. It is a bond of trust with the consumer and marketplace that transcends the cynicism that so many have towards brand messages and advertising.
At its most potent, a driving mission defines and differentiates you. It brings to life an activist mentality and it marks out the most exciting and successful businesses of today. And with it comes the promise of a rare business gift – momentum. This is the force to build businesses, to move markets, to mobilize and motivate. To drive progress. Make no mistake, it is business leaders with a mission and a big idea who can really change the world. Take Airbnb, the rental marketplace changing how we think about our homes; Uber, transforming transportation; and Google, finding new ways to understand the world.
These are innovative, breakthrough companies, which share the vital asset of mission. Google, famously, was defined in its early years ‘to organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful’. Uber defines its mission to be ‘transportation as reliable as running water, everywere and for everyone.’ Airbnb simply states that it wants to allow its users to ‘belong anywhere’.
Through mission, ideas are translated into a practical purpose that drives a company forward. It lends a clarity and directness to the everyday operations of a business, through what advertising legends the Saatchi brothers once described as the ‘brutal simplicity of thought’.
Mission provides the basis for the belief that a business must inspire in those who work for, invest in or buy from it: the bonds of trust that are harder than ever to forge in a crowded and cynical marketplace. It is that shared and common belief which is at the heart of the businesses we will explore in this book.
What we have observed is that these companies have mission in their commercial DNA. But the intention alone is not enough. To break through, mission must be intertwined with the zeal of a new class of capitalist, the campaigner.
Campaigners are the innovators, motivators and disruptors of the business world, whose pursuit of profit is enhanced by a driving and fundamental mission. People with the singular ambition to make a difference, who are changing the way we live and work.
Business campaigners move beyond the realm of mere ambition, turning mission into a market reality that changes people’s lives. There is something of the political campaigner in many of them. They have mastered the art of narrative and storytelling to turn their cause into something that brings supporters and advocates in its wake. The companies they create are underpinned by a culture that develops and sustains the original mission, binding employees and customers alike to the cause.
Campaigners weave narratives that imagine and move towards a better world. Their offer is a fundamentally optimistic counterpoint to the cynicism and crisis that fills news bulletins on a daily basis. They are creators, merchants and communicators of ideas.
They are at their roots optimists. Leaders whose inspiration from mission is matched by determined action; often gifted communicators who can turn an idea into a tangible reality; conveners who build a following, an enfranchised tribe of the hopeful to sustain and grow the vision. They are an emerging generation of commercial champions, and this book is dedicated to exploring their world.
Commercial campaigners break through, because the value and growth potential of business is increasingly determined by future promise and the successful marriage of profit and purpose.
One study estimated that 80 per cent of the value of S&P 500 companies in 2010 was made up of intangible assets: intellectual property, identity, reputation and brand, where products and services once ruled. It is an environment where the ability to explain your proposition is paramount, your narrative matters and the best story wins.
Campaigners get this. Great companies must inspire confidence but there is an equal need to evoke strong feelings. Feeling is an asset that is easily dismissed by the cynical. Yet it is the key to belief and it is belief that leads to action, which is at the heart of change. And from supermarkets to stock markets, feeling is what mints the increasingly vital currency of belief.
That matters more than ever, because we live in an unprecedentedly uncertain world, bombarded by information from all around us. In the words of Juan Enriquez, the former CEO of Mexico City’s Urban Development Corporation: ‘Today a street stall in Mumbai can access more information, maps, statistics, academic papers, price trends, future markets and data than a US president could only a few decades ago.’
It is an arena that is made for the mission-driven campaigner, those with simplicity and purity of purpose, clarity of vision and an unquenchable determination to deliver.
Product alone will not get you noticed in this age of attention drought. If you want to stand out you need to stand for something. To thirst for change. To campaign for attention and support.
The argument of Mission is that the environment for business has changed and that the traits of successful companies have had to evolve in turn. The world is moving at a faster pace than ever before; consumers are information rich but time poor; the marketplace is harsher and more demanding. It’s a world where the hazy complexities of modernity lead to a fog of uncertainty. Where today’s success story can be trashed in moments; where the scrutiny of a 24-hour media has been enhanced by the rapid rise of Twitter.
Faced by these conditions, companies must campaign to get noticed and stay ahead: to achieve profit through distilling and manifesting purpose.
We have observed three underlying traits shared by businesses that are thriving in this new world:
More than ever before, great companies must be mission-based, and to make an impact in an impatient and cynical marketplace they must embrace the determined, optimistic outlook of the campaigner. You can measure their success through their momentum: speed of progress and growth relative to the market.
Through the purity of their mission, the strength of their ideas and the power of their storytelling, campaigners win the battle for attention, competing in markets of the mind.
Campaigning is a movement that is changing the fundamentals of how business operates, disrupting convention, creating explosive growth and new sources of capital. From the business campaigners we have met, worked alongside and interviewed for this book, we have identified three new commercial markets that are redefining business and bringing huge success to their creators:
Carers: Companies that want to change people’s lives for the better, embracing consumers and the honest dialogue that many others fear;
Sharers: Companies that bring people together, taking advantage of the unparalleled networks that the Internet has created, changing the way we consume goods and services;
Darers: Companies that refuse to take no for an answer and who thrive on tackling the impossible at every turn, harnessing the growing power of technology to achieve the unthinkable.
We founded our business, Seven Hills, in the teeth of the recession at the beginning of 2010. And as the effects of the most damaging downturn since the 1930s begin to recede, the lesson we draw is this: the best in business are often defined by their sense of mission, a purpose that underpins the ability to make profit. It is because of this that they break through.
In the last five years we have observed and worked alongside entrepreneurs and growth companies on both sides of the Atlantic, in sectors ranging from big data to baby food. What we have learned we have also sought to practise: a campaigning approach in everything we do.
It has been, and continues to be, an extraordinary journey. It has provided us with a crow’s nest view of the nation’s high-growth firms and their quest for success. And it has helped us with a singular mission. To be the defining campaigning company.
What we have also learned in that time is that the campaigning mentality is one that goes well beyond how a business presents itself. It is born out of a defining sense of mission and belief, delivered with the intensity of the activist, and it provides the precious gift of market momentum.
We have worked with campaigners at the top of their game. In our first year, we were able to author a report led by Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson and work with founding Dragons’ Den panellist Peter Jones. Since then, we have worked alongside inspiring founders who include Paul Lindley of Ella’s Kitchen; David Richards of WANdisco; Phil Libin of Evernote; and Cobra Beer’s Lord Bilimoria.
We co-founded StartUp Britain, a national campaign launched by the Prime Minister and fully supported by the Government, which has been at the heart of record levels of UK business creation; and have pioneered many of the most successful enterprise campaigns in Britain in the last five years.
These experiences have given us insight into what makes this thriving generation of campaigning individuals and businesses tick, what makes them different, and why they are prospering in a commercial environment that has laid low so many traditional businesses and institutions.
In Mission, we will tell the stories both of the companies we have worked with in the past five years and other business leaders who we interviewed for this book. They include Lord Rose, the former chief executive of Marks & Spencer; Joe Gebbia, founder of Airbnb; John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods; Sarah Wood, co-founder of Unruly; Dido Harding, CEO of TalkTalk; and Sir Terry Leahy, former CEO of Tesco.
What commercial campaigners stand for, how they do business, and what they hope to achieve has big implications for us all. This book is dedicated to identifying, exploring and sharing their arts.
Mission is for anyone with the entrepreneurial spirit, and for those who want to know how to unleash it. The embodiments of campaigning in business may be the founders and leaders of highly successful companies, but the lessons from that success can be learned and implemented in many different arenas, from aspirant entrepreneurs to corporate executives. This book seeks to inspire those who want to inject fresh energy and purpose into their working lives.
Based on the insights of those who have been there and done it, it is a guide for launching and growing a business or making a difference in your corporate job: realizing the potential for your business and career to break through, through mission, the campaigning way.
Mission is about being the best. Like any opportunity, the only real question is, are you going to take it?