A Tale of Two Languages

My father told me a story about going on a site visit as a child with his father, a consulting engineer in Nebraska. My grandfather was a straight-and-narrow strict moralist, who among other things never swore. But when he left my dad in the car one day to go speak to a job foreman, my dad was shocked to hear the cuss words that came out of his father's mouth.

As he got back in the car for the drive home, both were silent for a while, until my grandfather spoke. "Sometimes you've just got to speak to people in language they understand," he said. He never swore again (I imagine), but my dad never forgot it, and I guess I didn't either.

Fast-forward. My client was a 900-location retail? variety store chain I'll call JTX (think Ben Franklin, though it wasn't them). The chain had very little brand identity, and we were hired to fix it. The problem was so bad that when we recruited focus groups from store customers, when asked the last time they had visited JTX, several said it had been years (it had been days).

The chain was a survivor, because in the absence of a brand image, every store manager created their own type. They survived, but at the cost of low profitability and non-existent customer awareness and branding.

One possible solution was some form of segmentation or grouping into like types – we identified three, each of which could be streamlined, commercialized and given some form of customer-relevant identity.

The problem: every time we raised the idea, someone would say, "Well, that's all well and good, but what about store #537 (or #423, or whatever)?" And everyone would stroke their chin and agree, "Yup, that won't work." And I'd go back and try to rejigger the segmentation design. They just couldn't grasp the concept of categories rather than instances. Forests, trees...

One day my father's story came to mind, and it occurred to me to ask the CFO, our client, whether the store P&Ls could be aggregated. The chain was basically run on weekly store-level income statements, reviewed by all levels of management; they were the lingua franca of operations.

We aggregated each store into one of the three segments (I summarily dismissed the half-dozen like store #537 that seemed to cause cognitive dissonance), and produced a composite P&L. The results were nothing short of striking.

One segment was massively profitable, one was a complete dog, and one was unremarkable. The most profitable segment was the one most people had suggested was problematic due to high theft and shrinkage problems. But the numbers told the story, and the client organization quickly accepted that they were in (at least) two distinct businesses, which needed to be managed them differently.

The solution was at least as old as my grandfather. I just had to rediscover it for myself. Sometimes you just have to speak to people in the language they understand.

Quick Wisdom Quip: Don't talk consultant jargon, MBA jargon, Wall Street jargon, your jargon. Use the common language of the other person.

Practical Tip: Find someone in the client organization who can serve as "translator" for your great ideas.