Why having a Mission is critical to transform your organization.

Disclaimer: I don't mean a bullshit-nobody-cares-about mission, I mean a true mission you deeply believe in. More on this below.

More and more people want to learn about what we are doing in Start Up Pampers and how they can reapply this to their company, business unit or organization; ranging from other P&G business units, creative agencies, media agencies, to other FMCG companies.

It’s not surprising at all since all of these industries are being disrupted by new players (how many Direct-To-Consumer are entering any given business right now?), different industry players (like consulting agencies getting into advertising leveraging the power of data), retailers leveraging their distribution and user data, and new technologies like voice -well, and Internet, which is still 'new technology' for many legacy companies :/

While we are still not where we want to, we’ve made amazing progress in transforming ourselves into a StartUp like organization seeking to disrupt our own business. Some of the traits that distinguish our team are:

• Relentless focus on growth (TRUE growth… not 5%, 30% - 50% growth);
• A healthy aversion for processes and bureaucracy (no, we are not making many friends);
• Embracing a ‘done is better than perfect’ mentality: do, fail, learn, improve;
• Constant experimentationviaweekly or bi weekly sprints (be that on UX, creatives, media buying, conversion incentives, etc);
• DOING vs talking and powerpointing.

But let me tell you, it’s not easy, not at all. Because while many people say they either do or want to do this, most of them don’t actually want to go through the cost of acting this way. Because it involves a lot more risk taking and personal accountability -there is no hiding behind the process or the approver.

It takes acknowledging there is a lot you don’t know and you better learn fast, because we do need to retool ourselves into T-Shaped growth teams. It takes tolerance to failure and seeing that the reward needs to be placed on doing, improving and doing better vs. a perfectly crafted thing (that no one cares about).

It also involves showing other people what they do is not suited for what we are trying to achieve, so we need to go passed them… including many of those who, at the their very core, don’t believe in what we are doing. In our case, those who don’t believe we need to become a content marketing fueled, data based business.

‘The naysayers’, those who think we’d better keep doing ‘the proven model’.

Here’s where the MISSION plays a fundamental role. Because you need to endure all of that.

You need to keep going when you try something and it doesn’t work. And then you try again, and it still didn’t work. But you know it’s there, you know it’s possible, and you are just about to breakthrough. Keep believing.

You need to keep going when you are making good progress but are still very far from your ambition -if you don’t have a huge gap vs. where you want to be, it’s not a big enough goal worth fighting for.

You need to keep going when people tell you it’s not worth it, and they won’t support it. Even more, they just don’t care, don’t have it in their radar to even leverage it.

You need to keep going when you get deprioritized over and over again in favor of other short term, more pressing priorities. Because if you are in a transformation, most probably you still belong the small part of the puzzle, even though it will be the biggest one when you hit traction... or competition crashes you.

So at StartUp Pampers we know, live and breath our mission. We talk about it every week, discuss how each of us is contributing to the team’s big mission -and never let individual goals go against it. We iterate and refine the mission.

And we say ‘ignore the noise, believe in the mission’, because it’s the only option. So...

Ignore the noise. Believe in the mission. Get it done.