A profound piece of advice - which took me 25 years to realize

It feels like a century ago, when I suggested to a senior executive at LEGO that they might need to fundamentally reconsider their business model. I said: “If plastic were banned and not a single LEGO brick could ever be produced again, what would LEGO do?” This forced management to think beyond the physical toy and enter the digital world.

Over the past several decades, LEGO had enjoyed immense success. However, from one year to the next, online games had disrupted the conventional toy market. LEGO had been left in its most vulnerable situation ever.

In hindsight, the situation was not only severe, but also pretty clear - but LEGO’s management “couldn’t see the forest for the trees.” This was the mid-90s, and they knew full-well that plastic wasn’t about to be banned, everyone loved LEGO, they were still earning money, and their employees’ families were being fed. All things considered, things weren’t that bad - at least, not bad enough to question a business model that was still doing great.

Let’s jump ahead a quarter-century. Recently, I spent some time with the owner of Brand Innovators. They are a highly successful U.S. conference-organizing company. They’d spent nearly seven years developing a sponsorship model, designed to connect brand owners with industry experts. 

Let me pause for a second. Did you notice that I didn’t use a past-tense sentence as I wrote “They are a highly successful company”?

Over the past couple months, the rest of their industry has gone under. In contrast, Brand Innovators has pursued an alternative path that has kept them thriving. As Brand Innovators’ co-founder, Marc B. Sternberg, told me: “South by Southwest collapsed in front of my eyes, leaving us with 80 speakers and no stage. I was kind of paralyzed, with no idea of what to do until my millennial team took over the helm of my company. Normally, I would have controlled every single aspect of my company, but I’d reached a point where I’d given up and just let them run with the ball. This was unheard of, but it re-defined our destiny.”

In just two weeks, the entire company transformed to an online model, redefined the concept of sponsorship, and unexpectedly experienced a tidal wave of quality speakers knocking on their door from all around the world. “The millennials redefined our company,” said Sternberg. “I didn’t.”

Today, despite the global crisis, Brand Innovators is as successful as ever.

While helping companies transform their businesses, I’ve learned this essential insight: The importance of creating a sense of urgency and forcing companies out of their comfort zones. I call it a “90-day intervention.” By this I mean: Question your business model, totally redesign it, and try something truly creative for 90 days. Those of my clients who genuinely buy into this sense of urgency consistently end up with a remarkable success. In contrast, those who sit on the fence, question the approach, doubt the new solutions, and second-guess our crazy ideas … for some reason, they end up with a mediocre outcome.

Ask any anthropologist, and they will tell you the reason why the human species has thrived, coming to dominate every other creature on planet Earth, is because of our ability to adapt. We aren’t the strongest or the fastest, we don’t have big fangs and claws - but our adaptability is so profound that we not only change our behavior from one generation to the next, but we even change our DNA. Compare that with polar bears, which will require ten or more generations to adapt to the consequences of global warming.

Change is in our blood, except when we get too comfortable. Unfortunately, that’s what we’ve (kind of) been during the past decade. Too comfortable.

I fundamentally believe that nothing is so bad that we can’t find some good in it.

There’s always an opportunity, a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

What COVID-19 represents is exactly that. No silly workshop sessions or 90-day simulations are required here. This crisis is written on every wall, door, and panel. I don’t think a single soul will deny it, so use it to your advantage. Give everyone in your organization, from the receptionist to top management, a simple-but-profound task: Rethink your business model. Ask the profound question, as I did some 25 years ago at LEGO. If we need to change everything from the ground up, what industry are we really in? 

Believe me. Today, such a challenge is possible.

Listen to the dreamers in your organization, and if it all makes sense, hand them a mandate to make the change happen. Don’t interfere. Don’t stop them. Don’t micromanage. Let them run with the idea, and I guarantee you’ll be surprised.

You might end up with a new business model, as Brand Innovators did. Perhaps even better, as Marc B. Sternberg told me: “I’d suddenly reenergized my entire team. I gave them trust and a mandate like I’d never given before, and it worked. Suddenly, they were working day-and-night to show me and the world they were right. They’d seen the light. And suddenly, coincidently, I’d redefined our culture to something powerful.”

As Anne Frank once wrote, “How wonderful it is that nobody needs to wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

Well, that moment happens to be now.

For the next 72 hours, I'm giving away my NEW pocketbook, Buyology for a Coronavirus world for FREE! Based on more than 2,000 brainscans of subjects in six countries, Buyology was the first book ever to apply neuroscience to the world of business. Now, 12 years after Buyology’s publication, I've released an exclusive pocketbook on the human impact of the coronavirus.

In the pocketbook, I explore fascinating insights from my neuroscience work and how businesses should navigate the opportunities and pitfalls of this newly transformed landscape to help you prepare for our post-pandemic world. Click here to secure your copy instantly!

Martin Lindstrom is the founder and chairman of Lindstrom Company, the world’s leading brand & culture transformation group, operating across five continents and more than 30 countries. TIME Magazine has named Lindstrom one of the “World’s 100 Most Influential People.” Lindstrom is a high profile speaker and author of 7 New York Times best-selling books. His book Brand Sense was critically acclaimed by The Wall Street Journal as “one of the five best marketing books ever published,” Small Data was praised as “revolutionary” and TIME Magazine wrote this about Buyology: “a breakthrough in branding”. 

Lindstrom’s new book: The Ministry of Common Sense will be available Jan 19th, 2021! Watch this space for exciting pre-order packages and more.