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INTRODUCTION

“The purpose of life . . . It is to be useful, to be honorable.It is to be compassionate. It is to matter, to have it makesome difference that you have lived.”

—Leo Rosten

DOES YOUR COMPANY REALLY MATTER? Has it moved beyond the commoditized and substitutable solutions readily available in the market, and created more value for its customers, communities, investors, and employees? It could!

Is your team focused on doing the work that really matters? Are team members solving the most difficult challenges your internal and external customers face, and going above and beyond to create more value for your organization? They could!

What about you? Does your work matter? Are you just working hard, or are you focusing on the hard work that moves the needle in the areas your team most needs, generating more value for them and for your organization than if you just stuck to the basics? You could!

Just ask Doug Woods, Jeff Moore, and Angela Ahrendts. In their own ways, in their own industries, each has taken on work that matters. The world is different because of the challenges their companies have solved for their customers, their partners, and their employees.

Doug Woods and his team at DPR Construction matter because they build great things. Their relentless pursuit of powerful and effective ways to collaborate in the construction process has changed their clients and partners forever. The construction industry is evolving because of their leadership.

Jeff Moore and his team at transportation management company Lakeside matter because they had the chutzpah and the vision to be something no other trucking company had imagined. They decided to move beyond the competition, challenging embedded practices that historically had plagued the logistics industry, and in doing so became a trusted partner to their clients—capable of reducing costs, freeing up resources, and lowering carbon emissions in the process.¹

Angela Ahrendts and her team at Burberry matter to the legacy of the 160-year-old brand they helped to resurrect by leaning into the digital disruption that threatened the viability of not just the Burberry brand, but retail as we know it. She and her team committed to reinventing the brand, the shopping experience, and the customer base in an ambitious and bold way. The result? Customers are back, investors are back, the brand is set up for the next 160 years—and retail has a new shining beacon for thriving in an omni-channel, digital world.

The work you, your team, and your company choose to do on a daily basis matters. It matters to the people you serve because of the problems you solve, and it matters for your own sense of pride, progress, and achievement. People want to buy from companies that matter. People want to work for companies that matter. People want our communities to be filled with organizations and people that matter.

This book is about building companies that matter—companies that create more value, that move beyond the competition, and as a result become the obvious choice in their markets. It’s also about teams that matter, and doing work that matters to you. The observations and lessons we have provided here work at any level for people who want to matter more through the work they do.

You will meet big companies, small companies, B2B companies, and B2C companies. You will even meet a spy agency along the way. And you will meet some exceptional individuals. We will dissect the journeys the individuals inside these organizations took as they sought to escape the morale-crushing cycle of commoditization to become the obvious choice for their customers, their most talented employees, and the investors and communities they serve.

This has been our obsession here at Karrikins Group (formerly ChangeLabs). We have spent more than fifteen years studying what it takes to matter, and working alongside companies striving to matter—to create more value, move beyond the competition, and as a result become the obvious choice. We have observed companies that succeeded, and also some that failed. We have learned from all of them, and we felt it was important to share those lessons. This book is the result of our realization that we needed to codify what it took to become the obvious choice. We wanted to map the journey of those who succeeded and offer it to you, here in these pages.

So we embarked on a research study, designed to uncover and document the practices of successful companies that have become the obvious choice—those that matter most in their industry. More than thirty companies, representing more than fifteen countries, hundreds of interviews, thousands of transcribed pages, years of analyses, and tens of thousands of words written to try to describe what we learned have led us to one strikingly simple, consistent, and powerful insight: To become the obvious choice, to be a company that matters, you need to consistently create outcomes that are valued more than those of your competitors and that are not easily replicated. As the definition of value evolves in the marketplace over time, you also must sustain your ability to perpetually create new and valued outcomes that are beyond what your competition is capable of doing. Period.

Sounds simple, right? But perpetually creating new and valued outcomes is clearly an accomplishment that only a select group of companies are able to achieve. How are some companies able to be the obvious choice in their markets year after year? We realized the “what,” “where,” and “how” questions about providing value were riddles worth solving. We pushed our analysis to answer these three questions, believing this would be the most useful to us and to your journey:

1. What does it take to create more value?

2. Where do you find the opportunities to create more value?

3. How do you build the capability to deliver more value, year after year?

These three questions formed the basis of our continued research. The answers form the premise of this book.

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO CREATE MORE VALUE?

Jeff Moore set out to transform the way Lakeside did business, moving from a highly commoditized, super-low-margin operation to the obvious choice for innovative consumer goods companies in Canada. He knew the only way to get there was to solve more complex problems and to create more valued outcomes than his competitors. Doing that meant solving the most important problems his clients have—high freight costs—in a way others in the market couldn’t easily replicate.

That is what we mean by value: If you don’t want to be commoditized and you want to become the obvious choice, you need to create solutions to the complex problems that are most important for your customer, those that few others are capable of solving. In theory, that’s pretty straightforward. In practice, definitely not.

In Jeff’s case, the only real way to do that was through using single-source logistics management models, challenging entrenched industry practice, and creating efficiency and optimization opportunities along the way. This is complex work. It takes vision, intellect, effective processes and systems, and commitment to do it at scale. If you have those things, the complexity is a good thing; it is where the opportunity to differentiate comes from. Defining and solving complex problems that have economically significant outcomes attached is very hard work. It is not easily replicated, but the scarcity of scalable solutions is why it is valued.

That is what we mean by value: If you don’t want to be commoditized and you want to become the obvious choice, you need to create solutions to the complex problems that are most important for your customer, those that few others are capable of solving.

Jeff’s willingness to commit to navigating this complexity is what has made his company, Lakeside, the obvious choice for his customers. You’re going to hear a lot more about how they did that in Chapter 4. For now, we shift our attention to understanding how to identify the most complex and important problems—those where we can find the opportunity to create more value for your customers’ lives (as well as for your employees, your communities, and others in your industry).

WHERE DO YOU FIND THE OPPORTUNITIES TO CREATE MORE VALUE?

When Angela Ahrendts took the reins as CEO of Burberry, the brand was in decline. The trench coat was no longer cool, their brand was associated with an older, less influential demographic, and their traditional strategy was being undermined by powerful online channels capable of selling the same products they sold in store, for some 25 percent less. In short, they were being disrupted.

Like most retailers, Burberry had been determined to hide from the disruption, hold on to legacy business models, and hope that the threat would pass. Not Angela. Under her leadership, Burberry would move toward the disruption and stand right at its edge, where the old brick-and-mortar world met the new digital world. Her vision was to build an omni-channel brand and business model capable of serving customers where they were, not where Burberry had historically wanted them to be.²

We would suggest that she walked right up to what we call the edge of disruption, and looked out toward a future where retail for Burberry was reimagined. What single-source freight models were to Lakeside, an omni-channel consumer experience was to Burberry.

We have found in our work and our research that the opportunities to create the most value are found at the edge of disruption—at the intersection of old and new, where the profits, reach, and reputation of your past enable you to test the models of the future. This is where the most complex problems, with the fewest solutions, are found. Burberry didn’t abandon the traditional store model and go exclusively digital. Instead, it embraced an omni-channel model at the edge of disruption. It harnessed the emerging digital disruption, merged it with its existing business model, and moved confidently into the future armed with the solutions and business models required to thrive in the new world.

The edge of disruption for your organization is that point from which you can see both past and present changes in technology, regulation, customer demand, cost structures, employees, investors, and other variables converging into a larger wave of disruption that threatens the relevance of your existing value proposition and business model. As you project these changes into the future, you can see the erosion that turns your products or services into a commodity business, where you can only compete on price, volume, and a reduced cost structure, all the while burning your people out by asking them to do more with less.

Instead of erosion, you can also see a different future at the edge of disruption—where multiple new challenges for your customers emerge in the complexity that the disruption brings, and therefore where opportunities exist for you to create more value. It is at this intersection of old and new that the chance to differentiate yourself is found. In this book, we will help you define where your edge of disruption is and show you what to do when you get there to become the obvious choice.

So you now know where you want to go—to the edge of disruption, where you can synthesize existing and emerging business models and create more value. And you want to do more than just go there—you want to solve the problems that you find there and exploit the opportunities that arise. You want to use the vantage point of the edge to challenge assumptions and beliefs effectively. You want to create new and differentiated ways of doing business—with products and services that meaningfully change how business gets done.

To do that means figuring out how to get to the edge and stay there, continuously learning and moving as the edge moves. The sneaky little truth about the edge of disruption is this: It doesn’t stay in the same place for too long. You have to learn to perpetually move with it. When you can do that, you will remain the obvious choice for your customers, employees, investors, and communities, year after year—you will be a company that matters to all of the people you serve.

HOW DO YOU BUILD THE CAPABILITY TO DELIVER MORE VALUE, YEAR AFTER YEAR?

When Doug Woods, Peter Nosler, and Ron Davidowski (the D, P, and R of DPR) founded their company in 1990, they knew they wanted it to matter in the construction industry. They wanted to be a force for positive change on multiple fronts.

• First, DPR wanted to change the way clients engaged with their general contractors (GCs). Traditionally, clients and GCs have had notoriously poor relationships, plagued by missed expectations, litigation, and substandard outcomes. DPR wanted to engage with clients in a way that improved the quality of their clients’ experience while also improving on-time and on-budget project delivery.

• Second, DPR wanted to change the way it engaged both its staff and its contractors. In the “Vivid Description” outlined in its core ideology, DPR sets an ambitious goal that “over the next 30 years our people practices will be recognized as being as progressive and influential as Hewlett Packard’s were over the last 50 years.”³

• Finally, DPR wanted to change the communities it served, by building great things with great business partners.

Consider that DPR has grown from a startup in the 1990s to a $3 billion success story, and has become the obvious choice for companies like Facebook and Genentech looking to partner with a GC to “build great things.” At the same time, it has been included on multiple “Best Companies to Work For” lists (including for Millennials),⁴ and has given millions of dollars to charity through its DPR Foundation. We think it is fair to say that DPR matters—to its clients, its employees and contractors, and its communities.

How does it manage to do this, not once, but year over year? By consistently identifying the best opportunities to solve more complex problems and then doing the hard work required to solve them. In DPR’s case, the leadership team members readily acknowledge that they aren’t perfect, but they lean into the complexity of the most technical construction projects and they dedicate themselves to leading the industry in its understanding of innovative new approaches, redefining best practice as they go, with a commitment to delivering more valued outcomes to their clients.

DPR’s leadership team does something that we consistently saw in the companies we studied. To be a company that matters, you need to judge yourself by your impact, not by your intentions. Companies that matter don’t just talk about opportunities to create more value; they do the hard work required to actually convert those opportunities to demonstrate value. When complex problems emerge at the edge of disruption—where the future meets the past—these companies don’t shy away from the challenge, trying to protect a legacy business model. They are willing to take risks to develop and refine a new way forward. And they don’t do it just for themselves.

Companies that matter talk incessantly about legacy and doing the right thing. They are committed to creating value for their clients and for their industry and communities as well. They see it as their role to ensure that everyone—even their competitors— and the community are better today than they were yesterday. Companies that leave their customers, employees, and communities better off by delivering the most valued solutions have an elevated impact.

DPR has an elevated impact because its leaders chose to work differently with their clients, their contractors, and their communities. The founders wanted to challenge how its business worked at the most basic level—the contracting relationship between the buyer of a building and its builder. They had been in the industry long enough to see all the problems with the existing litigious model, and decided to change the game by elevating their impact and redefining the contracting process.

To be a company that matters, you need to judge yourself by your impact, not by your intentions.

That couldn’t happen in isolation. DPR had to have great relationships with people of influence within the right client organizations who had the vision and ability to build great buildings. It had to vest its financial interests with the success of the project, putting more skin in the game and helping to pioneer new ways to partner. And it had to connect well beyond the client, to bring bankers, employees, subcontractors, and even universities along on the journey. When DPR’s founders stood back and looked at the impact they were trying to have, they saw that they needed to influence the entire industry and market, so they built the broad relationships required to do just that.

They needed to have elevated relationships—relationships that gave them influence with people who had the ability to make decisions, partnerships to provide the deep knowledge of the nuances and cultural realities inside their client organizations, and connections to people and ideas required to create solutions to one of the most complex problems in their industry: the contracting relationship itself.

Companies that matter elevate relationships with their customers and throughout their industry. They are the go-to companies when an industry voice is needed, and they have the ability to pull together market-wide conversations to focus on innovation and collaboration. At the same time, companies that matter can support intimate and nuanced discussions with their clients about the client’s strategies, challenges, and future. In other words, through their relationships, they influence, partner, and connect better than anyone else in the industry. Their relationships are part of what enables them to have an elevated impact.

DPR’s edge of disruption these days is its adoption of Integrated Project Delivery and risk-sharing models that are redrawing the lines between client, designer, and general contractor. DPR knows where its edge of disruption is because, like other companies that matter, it chooses intentionally and methodically to define it, learn about it, and then share what it has learned. DPR creates a point of view on emerging disruptions and sees the value that can be delivered to its clients and partners, who in turn seek DPR’s point of view whenever possible. DPR’s team has been able to build a reputation powerful enough to give them access to the most senior decision makers and influencers in its industry. The company’s elevated perspective creates the access and credibility required to support its elevated relationships, which combine to show DPR’s leadership the path to having an elevated impact. And therein lies the map for your journey to become the obvious choice:

• Establish your elevated perspective by defining your edge of disruption and learning and sharing as much as you can about it.

• Use your elevated perspective to build credibility and gain the access you need to develop elevated relationships.

• Go deep with your customers and connect the dots between disruption and opportunity, and you will have the understanding and influence required to have an elevated impact.

• Lean into the complexity required to solve higher-value problems, and answer the call to act in a way worthy of your leadership position.

• Do these things and you will be able to create more value for your customers, move beyond your competition, and as a result, become the obvious choice in your market, year after year. You will matter more.

Whether your clients are internal or external, large or small, local or global, you and your team can all move to do work that matters and build a company that matters. We are not saying it is easy, but it can be done. Join us and explore how you can develop the capabilities required to have an elevated perspective, elevated relationships, and elevated impact, and become the obvious choice. You will be inspired by the examples of others, and rejuvenated by the possibilities that emerge for you, your role, and your business as we progress. Read on!