Demand_Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It

by Adrian Slywotzky

  At Lotus in the early 1990s, June Rokoff led the development of version 3.0 of Lotus 1-2-3, the legendary spreadsheet program that was the first “killer app,” transforming the personal computer from a cool kid’s toy into a must-have purchase for any business. Rokoff was knowledgeable about feeds, speeds, product features, and technological twists and turns. But she wasn’t obsessed with these things. Instead she was obsessed with the fuzzy but critical organizational questions, such as, “Do I have the right people, in the right numbers, organized into the right teams?” “Are they aiming at the right targets—not just in general, but specifically?” and “Are my people getting the recognition they deserve as well as the (pointed and forceful) feedback they need?”

  Most of us take a fingers-crossed approach to the organizational equation, tackling issues as they arise and hoping for the best. June Rokoff was the opposite, looking under rocks to find problems and address them. Over months of anguished struggle, the task force she assembled to tackle the troubled but crucially important Version 3.0 project grew to three hundred people. She ordered endless quantities of pizza, stayed and worked with her programming teams through the night, and when everybody got sick of pizza she instituted “guest chef” nights at which company executives, including CEO Jim Manzi, had to come and cook a gourmet dinner for the entire team. Rokoff rewarded project breakthroughs with personalized recognition—handshakes from the top brass, posters honoring individual accomplishments, even a rock video she commissioned starring the entire team. Thanks to Rokoff’s prodding, hand-holding, cajoling, and encouragement, Version 3.0 was completed ahead of a seemingly impossible schedule—and it saved the company.

  Rokoff’s colleagues at Lotus and admirers from throughout the industry gave her affectionate nicknames ranging from “The Iron Lady” to “St. June,” but none of these monikers accurately captured the complex blend of toughness and understanding that made her unique. Rokoff listened to people—not just with her ears, but with her heart and her gut. She had a genuine interest in those around her, which is a quality you can’t fake and which often prompts people to respond with amazing feats of creativity.

  It’s critical to emotionalize the product. Rokoff emotionalized the process as well.

  6. Sixth, we’ve found that masters of launch maintain an artful balance between confidence and fear. Think of what is arguably the most famous statue in the world—Michelangelo’s David in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence. It depicts a beautiful male nude in the prime of his youth. It is, of course, also the classic depiction of an underdog—the inexperienced David, armed only with a slingshot, about to challenge the heavily armored Goliath, the giant Philistine warrior.

  The statue reveals Michelangelo’s insight into the drama of the confrontation between David and Goliath. When you enter the gallery, your first view is a side view. From this perspective, the larger-than-life-size David exudes total confidence, bordering on arrogance. But as you walk to the right, you gradually confront David face to face. Now you see that his eyes are turned upward, to a point in space about forty feet above where you are standing. He’s gazing, of course, at the unseen adversary—Goliath. And you see in David’s eyes a look of total, abject fear.

  Contrast that with the genetically coded optimism that many people carry over to business from the world of sports. (You might think of it as the “You Gotta Believe!” approach to leadership.) Confidence is important, but fear is critical. Fear helps you to fully develop the imagination of disaster—at a time when you can actually do something about it. Fear gets the adrenaline pumping and forces you to double down on every element to ensure survival—and success.

  7. Finally, launch masters remember the reality that a successful launch is rarely a one-day or even one-month affair. They think in terms of series, not event—a series of assaults on the indifference of the market. Do you recognize the following lines of poetry?

  To be or not to be, aye, there’s the point

  To die, to sleep; is that all? Aye, all.

  No, to sleep, to dream, aye, marry, there it goes,

  For in that dream of death, when we awake,

  And borne before an everlasting judge,

  From whence no passenger ever returned,

  The undiscovered country, at whose sight

  The happy smile, and the accursed damned.…

  Your reaction might be, “Well, some of the phrases are vaguely familiar. But there’s something wrong with most of them. In fact, it just sounds goofy—a bad excuse for poetry.”

  And you’d be right. Because what you just read is Version 1.0 of what theater-lovers often call the greatest speech in any play ever written. You’re more familiar with Version 3.0:

  To be, or not to be: that is the question:

  Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

  The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

  Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

  And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

  No more; and by a sleep to say we end

  The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

  That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation

  Devoutly to be wish’d.…

  This is the immortal soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Hamlet that has mesmerized generations of theater-goers. By contrast, Version 1.0 was just awful. (It comes from the early edition of the play known to scholars as the First Quarto, sometimes referred to—understandably—as “the bad quarto.”) But it was a start.

  The first version of your product is likely to be no better than Shakespeare’s. Practically all great products are built on a foundation of failure. Fortunately, you can use the same technique Shakespeare used to unlock his own genius: revision—relentless, repeated revision.

  The first version of the Prius produced results that were underwhelming. Only the second version succeeded in capturing the public’s imagination. Something similar is true of the Kindle, where version 2.0 achieved a much greater marketplace breakthrough than version 1.0. And consider how the sequence of Apple iPod models released in the ten years after the product’s original launch in 2001 gradually captured every corner of the market, from high end to low end.

  The seven modes of thinking we’ve dissected above are just a sampling of the “how to think” DNA found in any great demand-creating organization. If you’re an aspiring demand creator, think about your own experience and your own team. Consider the dimensions above and locate yourself somewhere on the evolutionary scale for each. Is your mental DNA closer to business as usual? Has it mutated to resemble that of the launch master? Or is it somewhere in the middle? Perform this analysis point by point. Do you like what you see?

  But there’s an even simpler way to check your organization’s readiness to mount the kind of launch that makes demand creation possible. Answer these four questions:

  How strong is the leader?

  How strong is the team?

  How strong is the resourcing?

  How strong is the fear?

  The better the answers, the better your odds of success.

  A GENERATION AGO, when the demographic, technological, social, and economic cards were stacked quite differently, we could live with a world in which most people understood very little about the daunting challenges of a project launch and even less about how to meet them. Today, with much of the economy struggling for traction and demand flagging, we can’t afford the mind-boggling waste of failed projects any longer. We need to spark demand much more effectively, and that includes taking the steps necessary to raise our project success rate from 10–20 percent closer to 60–80 percent. Hard to do? Absolutely. Doable? Without question.

  As we’ve seen, the 20-to-80 shift starts with changing the way we think and the questions we ask. It requires fully understanding the customer hassle map and being able to identify all the backstory elements that must be in place if we hope to improve that map and make the lives of customers appreciably better. It continues with
having a process for business and organizational design that’s as disciplined as the ones that the most innovative companies already have for product design. It includes driving accelerated evolution through internal competition, practicing creative frugality with every product element that’s not crucially important, and investing the extra time and resources required to turn your good-enough product into a got-to-have-it product, with the intense emotional appeal required to turn fence-sitters into customers.

  Above all, it requires a kind of mental, emotional, and spiritual toughness that is very different from our business-as-usual energy levels. Recall how Toyota used the Apollo moon mission as a reference point for their own low-percentage project. The winning spirit of launch is exemplified in the title of NASA manager Gene Kranz’s book, Failure Is Not an Option, as well as in the story it tells.

  You remember Gene Kranz from the movie Apollo 13, where he was depicted by actor Ed Harris. Kranz was the director of the Houston space center who played a critical role in saving the three astronauts who were nearly marooned in lunar space aboard their crippled spacecraft. He made crucial decisions regarding the timing of rocket firings, the management of scarce energy resources, and the seat-of-the-pants repair of the damaged air filtration system. All these decisions were made under intense pressure; any one of them, if mismanaged, could have been fatal both to the astronauts and to NASA’s long-term scientific mission.

  The heroism Kranz displayed in that situation wasn’t physical heroism, military heroism, or political heroism, but organizational heroism, which is arguably every bit as important but which often gets short shrift. Compounded of tenacity, imagination, shrewd judgment, self-awareness, and sheer willpower, it’s a form of heroism that’s desperately needed today and that is in especially short supply in most failed launch attempts.

  Thanks to Ron Howard’s award-winning movie, the Apollo 13 mission will probably always be viewed as NASA’s finest hour. But people within the space agency know something most civilians don’t—that Gene Kranz’s legacy to NASA was cemented years before Apollo 13. The day after the tragic launchpad fire in January 1967 that killed three astronauts and almost derailed the space program, Kranz gave a speech to the assembled staff at the space center that has since become legendary. Known as “Kranz’s Dictum,” it set forth the standards of discipline, professionalism, and thoroughness that would become the North Star for NASA’s future efforts at space exploration:

  Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life.

  Not one of us stood up and said, “Dammit, stop!” I don’t know what [Floyd L.] Thompson’s committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready!

  We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.

  From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: “Tough” and “Competent.”

  Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for.

  Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect.

  When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write “Tough and Competent” on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by [Virgil] Grissom, [Edward] White, and [Roger] Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.

  Sending a human being to the moon and returning him safely to earth was an incredibly difficult challenge. The odds of success were dismal. The same is true of many of the project launches we participate in. In most cases, thankfully, human lives aren’t at stake. But the success of our companies or nonprofit organizations and the livelihoods of thousands of people often are. Those stakes are far from trivial.

  So the next time we are working feverishly on the launch of any project, perhaps we should stop to remember Gene Kranz’s words. Perhaps we shouldn’t allow ourselves to get caught up mindlessly in the process to the point where, someday, we may find ourselves looking back and remembering, We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle.

  We don’t need to work that way. We don’t need to roll the dice and hope for a miracle. Instead we can cultivate the courage to figure out the real odds—and to do what it takes to change them.

  8.

  Portfolio

  “Nobody Knows Anything”

  IF ENGINEERING ONE successful launch is like winning a bet against long odds, achieving a series of such successes is like picking the winning number at roulette—not once, not twice, but over and over again. No wonder many people are convinced that it simply can’t be done.

  Screenwriter William Goldman, after decades observing how box-office winners and losers are created in Hollywood, summed up this belief in his famous dictum, “Nobody knows anything.” Judging strictly by the numbers, Goldman’s Law seems inarguable—not just in the movie business, but in any activity. No one is capable of consistently predicting which products will create demand, still less of producing a string of such products, year in and year out.

  Almost no one, that is.

  In December 1998, John Lasseter, the creative director of Pixar Animation Studios, returned to California after an extended trip with his family to Asia. The trip had served a dual purpose: It gave Lasseter an opportunity to spend some much-needed time with his wife and kids, while he also participated in the triumphal international press tour promoting Pixar’s second movie, A Bug’s Life.

  At the time, Pixar was exuding a growing sense of confidence. Its first feature, Toy Story, had been a huge hit, generating both critical acclaim and an enormous flow of box-office demand. Now A Bug’s Life was off to an equally impressive start. Two feature films—two major hits. Not a bad start for a fledgling company that was trying to ride a new, unproven technology—computer-generated animation—to success in an industry where “nobody knows anything.” Lasseter and his colleagues were beginning to suspect that maybe—just maybe—they were capable of turning out hit movies, not just occasionally, but on a regular basis.

  But when Lasseter returned to his office in Emeryville, his mood changed.

  One of the first things he did was to watch the reels containing Pixar’s new work in progress, Toy Story 2. And as the scenes unfolded, he experienced a growing sense of dismay. “I felt like the wind had just been knocked out of me,” Lasseter later recalled. The new movie simply wasn’t very good. All the familiar, beloved characters from the original Toy Story were there—Woody, Buzz Lightyear, Mr. Potato Head, and the rest. But the excitement was missing. By comparison with Pixar’s first two hits, Toy Story 2 felt predictable, uninspired, even a little boring.

  Hollywood veterans will tell you that sequels virtually always fall short of the originals. But for John Lasseter, and for his colleagues at Pixar, a team of talented and ambitious artists eager to reshape the world of animation, releasing Toy Story 2 in anything like its current form wouldn’t be just a disappointment—it would be a devastating setback.

  Pixar’s business partners at Disney—the venerable studio that had practically invented feature-length animation way back in the 1
930s—were less worried than Lasseter. Colleague Tom Schumacher remembers one of the Disney executives watching the early reels of Toy Story 2 and remarking offhandedly, “Well, it’s okay.” Having lived through decades of film history, including both triumphs and fiascos, the management of Disney didn’t believe that releasing one less-than-brilliant movie would be disastrous. But Lasseter considered that casual “It’s okay” a crushing indictment.

  Yet fixing the problem would be far from simple. The scheduled release was just nine months away. Promotional campaigns had been mapped out, toys were being manufactured, the revenues had already been written into company budgets. Disney made it clear that canceling the picture, or even delaying it significantly, was not an option.

  The standard fallback position at most studios would have been to repackage the picture as a direct-to-video release—a low-risk, low-expectations strategy commonly used for sequels in the animation arena (for example, Disney’s own Return of Jafar, a direct-to-video sequel to Aladdin). But Lasseter firmly rejected that idea. He’d attracted dozens of the best young creative talents in movies, software, computer graphics, music, and other fields by establishing an implausibly high standard of excellence for everything Pixar did. Creating a second-tier standard for selected projects and relegating some of his brightest performers to laboring under it would depress morale, fracture the unity of the team, and unleash a wave of jealousy and political infighting. Lasseter wasn’t about to let that happen.