Winning Ugly is about winning today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. Winning Ugly is not about winning at all costs; it is not winning by cheating or playing fast and loose with the truth. It's about being authentic, transparent, passionate and stripped down to the essentials -- winning naked, if you like. As I say, ugly!
"Winning Ugly" demands new skills and dumps some old ones. It's time to:
FACE THE TRUTH. It might be ugly and it might hurt, but be brave. Pepsi faced the truth about its Tropicana-packaging redesign: People didn't like it. A sales drop of 20% is ugly, but it focuses the mind. Tropicana is back in the surprisingly loved and familiar pack.
ACT FAST AND ACT DECISIVELY. Leave the loose ends dangling and keep moving. John Chambers of Cisco said, "Without exception, all my biggest mistakes occurred because I moved too slowly." This is a man who, after the 2001 dot-com bust, laid off thousands, slashed product lines and transformed the organization. Even if it's ugly, act fast.
REFRAME, REFRAME, REFRAME. Wrench yourself out of the familiar and predictable. OK, our hard-won expertise may look ugly once it's ripped apart, but that's how to see what worked and what didn't. If we don't reframe, consumers will. Starbucks has struggled to escape the "$4 cup of coffee" frame -- even though half the chain's beverages cost less than $3, and one-third cost less than $2.
CONTROL WHAT'S CONTROLLABLE. Refuse to be paralyzed by the unknown. If it's beyond your control, let it go. Walmart attracts three to four tweets a minute, and they're not all compliments. Execs there know they can't control Twitter, so they let it go and use it as a valuable listening post.
MEASURE ONLY WHAT MATTERS. And do it fast. Gaps in your research may feel ugly, but stop feeding what Kim Dedeker of Procter & Gamble calls "the metrics monster."
STICK TOGETHER. Create teams that don't fit into a box in the org plan. It looks ugly, but it can accelerate performance, flexibility, results.
ADOPT THE THREE-DAY RULE: one day to identify the problem, one day to send the solution upstairs for approval and one day to put it into action. It ain't pretty, and it ain't always fun, but it will Win Ugly.
ELIMINATE COST AND WASTE. This is always ugly, but it's an opportunity, too. What you eliminate now has more impact on the bottom line than what you add and certainly more than what you offer as a price reduction. By my calculations, to make up for a 5% price reduction, you need a 19% increase in sales. That's not happening anytime soon.
This is only an excerpt. Read the full article here.
Published in Advertising Age on May 11, 2009
