Logistics Management

Dave Schneider

Envision the Vision, Paint the Picture, Tell the Story
January 4, 2008

I remember reading a line about leadership that said “A good leader is not walking up to the tree in the forest and saying ‘wrong tree’, but is climbing the tree, looking out over the trees and saying ‘wrong forest’!” I keep that line in mind as I run into a leader that is counting heads, like the deck chairs on the Titanic. Sure, the details are important, but it is more important to keep a clear sight on the landmark that you have decided is your goal to move to.

I can hear some of you. “Dave, these have been nice stories and all, but when are you getting to the stuff about changing carriers and getting them to do what you want them to do?” If you are asking that question you are missing the point. It does not matter what you want to change, the key to successful change is being able to not only dream up the vision, but being able to sketch it out, and paint it in so that others can see and share in the vision. And in seeing it, they only get part of the story, so you have to tell them the story so they get it.

I was speaking the other day to a colleague about something I did in a “past life” (before I became a supply chain guy I was an “ink stained wretch” working in newspapers and selling advertising). As a very young man I not only survived, but was successful enough in a commission only advertising sales job to save enough money to go back to college for one year off of the savings. In that time I sold advertising in a little “throwaway” newspaper. 

What was successful was not just the advertising that I sold in the paper, it was that I sold ways to increase the foot traffic into the stores that I sold the advertising to. The idea was to put a package of messages that got people to go to the store to get the paper. In the paper there might be a story about the product in the store, and for sure an ad about the product in the store. Maybe from the ad the person who came in looking for the paper would give them the idea to buy the item. Maybe the story would compel them to buy. And maybe they saw it on their own and bought the item.

My pitch was not to sell the store merchant the advertisement. My pitch was to increase sales, by increasing foot traffic, and through multiple messages create the need in the customer to go to this store to get the paper, and perhaps buy some stuff. Yeah, I sold some advertising space, but I also helped the store make more money. I was not a “salesman”, I was a business enhancer.

Switch gears for a moment. Think of the ways that “bright idea” changes are been presented in your company. Are they “sold” by direction, by command? Are they sold as some poorly defined benefit to “the company”? Or are they sold as a way to enhance the lives of the people working in the company?

There was another saying from my journalism days about photographs; “A picture is worth a thousand words, but a photograph with a caption tells the story”. To get people behind the idea they not only need to see the picture, but they need to be able to understand the picture. That is where a caption in the photograph would help “fill in the blanks” about the who, when and why of the action in the photograph.

Changes require some thought in communication. The bigger or complex the change, the more thought of how to communicate the change AND communication about the change is required for success. Simple changes are easy to communicate. Big changes are to, if you think of the big change as a lot of little changes, and a lot of messages about each of the little changes.  How do you eat the elephant? One bite at a time. How to communicate a big change? Lots of messages about the change, consisting of messages about the little changes that lead to the big change.

Finally, if you break the message down into the many little messages, it makes it easy for the team to digest, to think about the messages, and to replay the messages to others and themselves. The smaller messages lets the team take ownership of the idea, and lets them buy into the change. The better the team buys in, the more that changes.

Posted by Dave Schneider on January 4, 2008 | Comments (0)