$8 billion a year, leads Netflix to employ thousands of not-yet-
famous professionals from the world of cinema. For many of
them, as promising as it might seem, the collaboration with Net-
flix often gives rise to tough financial negotiations.
The platform has attained such power that it can dictate its
own conditions. Netflix doesn’t disclose the number of down-
loads of its series. With no precise knowledge of the audience,
artists have to accept a limited royalty deal, one that is most often
disconnected from any actual viewer figures. Now Netflix could
argue that it permits hundreds of directors and actors to work
on films that, without its support, would probably never see the
light of day. This is also true.
As for its employees, they come to realize that Netflix’s cul-
ture, which initially appears so attractive, is in reality not so
kind and relaxed. On the contrary, it is so performance-driven
that it has become inflexible. For instance, managers are fre-
quently required to apply the “keeper test.”10 They have to ask
themselves, “If one of my people were to leave for a similar job
in a peer company, would I fight hard to keep her or him at
Netflix?”11 If the answer is no, an employee’s fate is sealed; that
person will be fired. People whose talents no longer fit, how-
ever much they may have contributed, are asked to leave. The
rule at Netflix is that “adequate performance gets a generous
severance package.”12
No one knows this better than McCord. After 14 years as
the head of human resources, she was let go in 2012. Despite
being considered by many observers as one of the greatest inno-
vators in her field, her skills were no longer integral to Netflix.
The rules and principles she helped to create led to her eviction;
proof that preserving a culture can carry a high cost.
Chapter 12
The DisrupTion Company
ON CORPORATE CULTURE COMPONENTS
AND DISRUPTION
i would like to conclude Part III with a corporate culture I know
well, that of my own organization, TBWA. This might appear
somewhat presumptuous. Whatever its impact and its weight in
the business world, my company is more modest than many oth-
ers that are covered in this book. In a chapter dedicated to cor-
porate culture, how can I not describe the one I know best, the
one I live daily?
The Harvard Business Review identified what it has called “the
six components of corporate culture,”1 vision, values, practices,
people, narrative, and place. I will attempt to describe TBWA’s
culture in line with these six themes.
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Vision, Values, practices
The first element is vision. At TBWA, we define ourselves as
The Disruption® Company. Those not familiar with TBWA’s
history and with its role in shaping the word disruption might be
a bit surprised. They should know, however, that using the word
disruption in a business context originated with our agency. We
were also the first to give the term a positive connotation.
Many might consider disruption to have become an overused,
even somewhat generic concept. But as I stated previously, what
makes a vision great is not so much its originality as its authen-
ticity. TBWA has been cultivating this vision for almost 30 years.
Every day we must try to live up to the high expectations we
have set with regard to our company’s positioning. To do so, we
must think disruptively, create disruptively, and act disruptively
in everything we do. We must try to avoid anything that leads to
linear or incremental growth. We seek disruption.
Consider now values. Annual reports are full of the values
companies espouse. From one company to another, we fre-
quently come across the same words peppered throughout their
documents such as integrity, adaptability, frugality, responsibility,
accountability, competency, sustainability, flexibility, utility, and
transparency without forgetting innovative spirit and sense of leadership. These values are not original, but what matters is how
present they are in the heart of a company.
TBWA’s culture also relies on a set of values. They are
described in three words that are in themselves not necessarily
distinctive: creativity, curiosity, and diversity.
Of our three values, creativity comes first. Every single day
we are looking for ideas that are fresh, smart, and simple. Fresh
because so few ideas manage to emerge from the immense noise
of global communication. Most have become inaudible, invisible.
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Smart because we should never underestimate our audience. No
one ever complains about an ad being too smart. Simple because,
as our Apple campaigns have always demonstrated, the simpler,
the more impactful.
Ideas do not come out of nowhere. They come from an
understanding of the cultures we live in and of the audiences with
whom we are talking. This is why curiosity is our second value.
We want and expect our people to have hungry minds. And we
do a lot to help feed them. For instance, every day of the week,
we produce a different three-minute video describing particular
micro-trends and what’s becoming important in emerging crowd
cultures. This provides great food for thought. The goal is to
help our people find ideas that, as our chief executive officer,
Troy Ruhanen, says, “locate and involve brands in modern
culture.”
Our third value is diversity. “Embrace diversity, it will hug
you back,”2 believes John Hunt, our worldwide creative director.
While gender diversity is important to us, at TBWA diversity
goes far beyond the executive positions occupied by women.
In our organization, six of our largest offices—Los Angeles,
New York, Toronto, Shanghai, London, and Paris—are man-
aged by women. While having a diverse staff at all levels of an
organization is important, we also take diversity to mean open-
ness to others. We see the value in cultural blending. Each of
our local offices is endowed with its own strong local character,
and this enriches our work. It’s no coincidence that our Los
Angeles office was chosen by Steve Jobs and our Johannesburg
office by Nelson Mandela. We know that none of us individually
is better than all of us together. Troy Ruhanen said some time
ago, “I need Paris to come into New York. I need Turkey to
come into China. I need L.A. to come into Australia. That’s how
we’ve got to work.”
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This leads us to our own business practices. The Harvard
Business Review identified practices as one of the six components
that form company cultures. The Disruption Days we conduct
with our clients are the most concrete manifestations of our cul-
ture. Each of these events brings together around 30 people, half
from the client
side, and half from the agency. Over one or two
days, they follow a precise sequence of activities based on a series
of rigorous exercises. Our network has 270 agencies around the
world and each one has held at least five Disruption Days per
year, meaning we will have organized at least 10,000 of these
events so far. We estimate that more than 100,000 of our clients’
employees have participated in them, from China to Brazil, from
South Africa to Finland. It would be difficult to imagine a prac-
tice going further in bringing a company’s culture to life.
people, Story, place
People means talent. Agencies are among those kinds of com-
panies that are not protected by patents and cannot lay claim
to the exclusivity of a given service or product. The value they
create comes from the work they do every day, and that depends
on the sum of the talents they are able to bring together. In our
company we look to recruit people with a real entrepreneurial
spirit, doers with a taste for all things artistic. These are people
for whom music, exhibitions, and street art hold no secrets, and
who are versed in crowd cultures. Our employees feel at home
in an environment built entirely around creative processes and
people. And, because we expect each member of our collective,
no matter their level of seniority, to have a real influence on the
agency, we ask just a single question in our regular evaluations,
“What is your impact on our business?” Anything else seems su-
perfluous.
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Moving on, the fifth element is narrative. The Harvard
Business Review says, “Any organization has a unique history, a
unique story. And the ability to unearth that history and craft it
into a narrative is a core element of culture creation.”3 TBWA
has its own history, which has shaped the company into what it
has become. To fully appreciate this, it’s worth considering that
of all the mergers that have taken place in the world, across all
industries, the vast majority has actually destroyed value. The
advertising industry is certainly no exception. It’s a cemetery of
mergers. Our network is an exception.
Why? Because of our culture. Our company was built by
bringing together local agencies recognized for a high level of
creativity in their own markets. The reason these partnerships
have worked is that the agencies involved all claimed very similar
cultures to begin with. Indeed, they all voluntarily adopted the
Disruption methodology, even though it came from an agency,
at the time BDDP, which was one of the last to join the TBWA
network. From one country to another, our agencies have all
remained very different, each with its own distinct local person-
ality. But the common language that bonds them, the Disruption
methodology, brings a real cohesion to the collective that they
make up and forges the strong cultural backbone of our company.
The Harvard Business Review proposes a sixth and final ele-
ment that it calls place, which could also be described as interior
architecture. We want the way our agencies look to reflect who we
are. Many of our offices have interesting designs, one of the best-
known being our former office in Los Angeles, the so-called Bin-
oculars Building,” conceived by Frank Gehry. In all our agencies
around the world, we favor open spaces with impromptu meet-
ing places that facilitate chance encounters. Office design should
encourage such serendipitous collisions.
I would like to expand on this notion of place, of space. The
philosopher Emil Cioran once said, “One does not inhabit a
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country; one inhabits a language.”4 Language is indeed our
common home. Bill Taylor, editor and founder of Fast Company
magazine, wrote in Mavericks at Work, “Because they think about
their business differently, maverick organizations almost always
talk about their business differently. They devise a strategic
vocabulary that distinguishes them from their rivals.”5
At TBWA, we have adopted words that we are alone in
employing. Our thought process is founded on a unique road-
map of convention, disruption, and vision. Every day, we talk
about things like Disruption Live, Backslash, No Format, Tiger
Academy, Sea Legs, Take the Lead, Media Arts Lab, Cultural
Edges, Disruption Lab, and other terms that we use in our own
particular way. Our shared vocabulary is the most eloquent
reflection of our culture.
This is what I wanted to say about the culture of the company
I belong to. This culture is not inherently better than another;
it’s just different. And it’s pervasive, something we at TBWA
share. Our culture drives everything—and it has made us The
Disruption Company.
the Disruption Methodology
On May 1, 1992, I published a full-page ad in the Wall Street
Journal, Le Figaro, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung with a single word—DISRUPTION—as the title, which appeared in
heavy type across five columns. The term disruption was hence
employed in a business context for the first time ever. Since then,
the word has been misused for anything and everything—and it’s
even been denigrated.
When we created the Disruption® methodology in 1991, we
gave the word a precise and positive meaning, contrary to those
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who later used it to describe reversals, upheavals, and even
destruction. Our goal is to help companies grow, to conceive dis-
ruptive ideas and strategies, and to develop disruptive business
models that will help them achieve what Troy Ruhanen calls “a
larger share of the future.”
For us, Disruption is an upstream concept, whereas for oth-
ers, it is only a means of observation, a grid to read events that
have already occurred downstream. Others notice that a disrup-
tion has taken place, but we try to imagine and create disruption
from the outset, pushing it upstream.
The method often leads us to re-examine a brand’s strategy,
and sometimes even a company’s. It helps us become what all
agencies strive to be: “growth consultants.” But there are two
particularities. First, unlike the big consulting firms, we imagine
futures for the brands we work with that go beyond extrapola-
tions of the past and comparative analysis. We are consultants
who use imagination. Second, we actually make stuff. We create
things. This not a minor detail. Making things is at the heart
of all true transformation. The way a strategy is brought to life
often reveals its true power.
To return to the concept of corporate culture in general,
I would like to stress again that any manager that allows his
company’s culture to become diluted is depriving himself of an
incomparable asset. This is what Richard Branson meant when
he said, “No matter how visionary, brilliant, and far-reaching a
&nb
sp; leader’s strategy might be, it can all come undone if it is not fully
supported by a strong and spirited corporate culture.”6
Or as Lou Gerstner, IBM’s former CEO, stated: “Culture
isn’t just one aspect of the game—it is the game.”7
PART
FOUR
DISRUPTIVE BRAND
BUILDING
John Smale was chief executive officer of Procter & Gamble
from 1981 to 1990. I saw him in his Cincinnati office just a
few days before he retired. I was curious to know what he felt had
most changed in the discipline of marketing during his career.
He said that, for him, it was the very concept of the brand; what
changed was the idea of what a brand is and what it can become.
To explain, he told me that just a few weeks previously, a recom-
mendation had been made to him to launch a toothbrush under
the Crest brand. He had accepted it without hesitation. What’s
interesting is what he said next. As a young brand manager, he
had made the same recommendation decades before and it was
vigorously rejected. Such an idea collided with the absolute
dogma that reigned at the time: Product and brand were insep-
arable. One brand, one product. One product, one brand. It was
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unthinkable to risk diluting the image of the established product,
in this case Crest toothpaste, by introducing a line extension. It
was simply prohibited.
It was a coincidence that just before he left, Smale was led to
take a decision opposite to that taken by his management a few
months after he joined the company. Between the start of his
career and his retirement, Procter & Gamble’s very rigid con-
cept of the brand had profoundly and definitely evolved.
This anecdote is more eloquent than it might at first appear.
It highlights the distance traveled in our understanding of what
constitutes the contours of a brand. When John Smale started at
P&G, the brand was nothing more than a name. You had to give
a product a name to identify it. Brand values were simply reflec-
tions of the product’s attributes. Ivory was a pure brand, like the
soap that bares its name.
But launching a new brand is expensive. So, for reasons of
cost-efficiency, marketers around the world began to group
products together and launch them under an existing brand
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