Outraged cereal-lovers unite!

General Mills recently announced it was reversing a promise to take artificial colors and flavors out of their cereals. They were reverting back to the original recipe and the more familiar, brightly colored Trix would be on store shelves in October 2017.

Wait what happened? Two years ago, the company thought they were doing the right thing for customers and sales when they changed their recipe.  Their intent was to keep up with the times and changing consumer preferences for healthier, more natural foods.

However, it didn't quite work out the way they'd hoped. While there was a bump in sales, the new and "improved" version was drab and lacked that delicious chemical flavor. Nostalgic, long-time loyal customers were furious and let them know via social media.

Here are some of the funnier tweets I saw on the topic.

All of this pressure added up and prompted General Mills to change their mind. We were never allowed to have "sugar cereals" growing up and I'm still upset about it. Not only did I miss out then, I'm missing out on the opportunity to be outraged now. I'm trying to imagine how these people feel and had the thought-- what if they changed Reese's Peanut Butter Cups?! Ugh, the horror!

Anyway, this was fun.  Silly Rabbit! You thought Trix were for kids? Nope. They're apparently for grown-ups who don't want to let go.

Rain, rain

As I was headed to bed last night and picking up all those random things that get scattered around the house as soon as the kids come home, I noticed that my sunglasses had been in exactly this same spot for... weeks?

Now, I love rainy days.  Really love them but enough is enough already. Here in DC, I think we're on day 45 of straight rain and even Noah is over it.

Aside from the weather, it has been a great week.  You?  I worked with a new client and their leadership team to get more clarity on their roles and responsibilities. The experience was great and just underscored to me that periodic maintenance in any relationship is critical. This was an incredibly smart and dedicated group that had become too comfortable swimming in each others' lanes-- the downside of organizational collaboration that I described in this previous post.

What worked for them was going through a relatively straightforward role and responsibilities exercise. We started with draft role statements and included sample questions that each function is responsible for answering. For example, "why should customers buy our product?" would be answered by marketing and communications. "What is different about our product?" would be answered by the Product owner.

This approach worked because it was both general enough to encompass a range of activities and specific enough that each lead could imagine themselves responding to the questions.

So today, I have a bunch of maintenance and "to dos" to knock out before we head into the weekend... and a couple more days of rain.

move right

When we win a new consulting job there is excitement and movement. The win justifies the research, writing, thought, and collaboration work invested. That’s exciting. The hunt is over and it paid off this time. 

There is also movement- a state of being our business model depends on.  Without much seasonality to the sales cycle, we need a reason for things to happen. Wins mean new project assignments and elevated responsibilities that are certainly good for the victors. The vacancies left create a trickle-down effect that is generally good for everyone else.

Without the swirl and churn of a periodic win, the business feels stagnant—even as billable hours flow and profits earned.

So we go in search of more wins. Because of the limits on discretionary spending and the finite nature of most budgets, we push beyond the clients serve today to find a client we’re not yet serving. In and of itself, this pursuit isn’t wrong but in practice it is distracting. 

Between wins, there is a better way to create movement. Instead of bouncing to the next RFP, we can dig in—really dig in—on the issue we were hired to solve. While fulfilling the client’s need, we can find the others working this issue (wherever they might be), start conversations, do the primary research, explore, talk to, test out, and refine the solutions. 

Every win should mean fulfilling the commitment to the client AND making a contribution to the community.

Shake it off

Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

Taylor Swift was in town this week. According to the dozens of Facebook posts I saw, everyone who is anyone (with daughters) but me knew this and they were all at the show. Of course, my girls are too little now to go to a concert like this but it made me look forward to bopping and gushing along side of them over future pop stars.

All in all, it was a good week.  How about you?  

I made progress on a couple of big client assignments, hit "save and send" on series I'm writing on management consulting for another publication (more on that to come), and tried a bunch of simple, new recipes with all of this summer produce.

One big downer midweek was receiving some scathing, poke-in-the-eye feedback on a piece of writing I'm doing for a client. The piece itself is a nothing special little memo on an uncontroversial topic communicating a deadline far in the future. So at first I wasn't sure why it got any attention-- positive or negative-- at all. Who would really care so much that they'd take the time to write a page of comments in an email, then (as if totally exasperated) dramatically suggest a complete re-do in their closing line?

The feedback came a bit out of left field from someone not directly involved in the project. As I tend to do, I first took it personally and got defensive. Check. I felt picked on. After all, what did he know? It was fine.

It took a day or so to calm down and 4 times reading through the comments (which stung less with each reading) before I could effectively process them. In the end, I decided that, while the tone was harsh, some comments were fair so I worked them in. Actually, I would have had to do this step anyway because that's what's they're paying me to do.

Taking a little advice from Ms. Swift, I'm going to shake it off. With that, the week is almost done.  Have a great weekend!