1: “‘Fail fast’ might work when it comes to software,” Panera Bread founder Ron Shaich writes in his powerful book Know What Matters.
“‘Done is better than perfect’ might be an appropriate mantra for Facebook,” Ron observes.
“When speed-to-market is your priority, minimally viable may be sufficient.
“But if we’re trying to build a lasting brand, to create a relationship with our customers for the long term,” he notes, “crashing into rocks along the way can’t be par for the course.”
What’s a leader’s most valued currency? Credibility.
“Credibility buys us latitude to implement our vision,” he writes. “Repeated missteps will eventually lead to us losing control. . . Each false start erodes the trust of our board, our investors, and our team and hacks away at our credibility.”
The year was 1995. Two years earlier, as CEO of Au Bon Pain, Ron had acquired the St. Louis Bread Company, the restaurant chain that would later become Panera Bread, which he would sell 24 years later for $7.5 billion.
Ron shares that at the apex of Panera’s success, they had thousands of bakery cafes.
“But what we really had was one bakery cafe, done correctly, replicated thousands of times,” he explains. “If we hadn’t gotten that one right—in its essence—we would never have had the opportunity to build thousands.”
Before expanding the concept, Ron and his leadership team were intentional about setting a vision for the future, “a totally new customer experience that would land us in the path of the food industry’s future.”
They began by spending two years conducting a “listening tour” of the West Coast cafe scene. “We loved the thick-cut sandwiches from Cafe Intermezzo. The artisan breads from Terra. The smell of the Honeybear Cafe,” he recalls.
Next, they combined these insights with the broader trends playing out in society—”the pushback against commodification, the drive toward specialty and craft, and the widespread desire for community,” Ron notes.
They worried, however, “that when the time came for others to execute on our vision, on what was so clear to us,” he writes, “much of it would get lost in translation.”
So, the goal was to “capture our vision and communicate it such that thousands (and, soon enough, tens of thousands) of designers, chefs, bakers, vendors, franchisees, and frontline associates, not to mention senior management, can not only get it but make it happen just as we’d imagined it.”
In short? They needed to create alignment.
2: How did they go about doing that? By creating a “Concept Essence.”
Which answers the essential question: “What will make us special in the eyes of our target guest?” Ron writes. How do we hope they will experience us?
“A Concept Essence isn’t a business plan,” he notes. “It doesn’t contain financial projections, market analysis, or sales strategies. All that comes later. . .
“Its purpose is to break down the answers to those questions and communicate them so powerfully that anyone who picks it up and reads it will be able to execute the vision.”
In it, we outline our competitive advantage [hyperlink]. We define what truly matters.
A Concept Essence becomes “the emotional blueprint for how a company is going to go to market and how it intends to compete. . . It illustrates an end-to-end vision of what we deliver to our guests and how.”
It must also capture the brand’s personality.
“Done well,” Ron writes, “it becomes the brand’s primary tool for navigating into the future—the North Star by which we plot our course and keep our course, even when waters are rough.”
Ron recalls: “I did my most creative work on a document that would become the Concept Essence for Panera Bread over Labor Day weekend in 1995 at the St. Louis Bread Company cafe on Halstead Street in Chicago.
“We’d gone through months of rough drafts, but now the document needed to be taken to the next level,” he writes. “Over that weekend, I worked on it for sixteen hours a day, my table piled high with the notes from the observations I’d made out in the field.
“My aim was to crystallize the vision, using my notes as a touchpoint for how my thinking had developed,” Ron explains. “I wanted to distill the concept down to its very essence.
“I labored over every word,” he remembers. “I’d say the words out loud, testing whether they captured what I wanted to convey. . . The process of speaking words aloud forces us to think about the things we’re trying to communicate most deeply. When I finally started to find the right words, I could feel them resonate in my soul.”
Next, he shared the Concept Essence with his trusted inner circle.
“We examined this latest draft of Concept Essence through multiple lenses and from multiple angles,” Ron writes.
“Did it effectively define the concept’s approach to food, design, service, and personality? How would it affect the customer? How would it affect the team members working within it? How operationally achievable was it?
“Most importantly,” he asks, “did our words capture with precision what would make us stand out in the marketplace, where our authority and credibility would be derived?”
Once they had polished it, Ron shared the final Concept Essence broadly within the company.
“All told, we must have spent nine month working on that four-page document,” he writes. “And not a moment of that time was wasted.”
3: A Concept Essence achieves two important goals.
“First,” Ron writes, “it forces the innovator to define the future in vivid and precise terms, turning it around and looking at it from all sides. Doing this rigorously is a necessary test for the opportunity we think we’re seeing.
“It’s one thing to have a glimpse of a need in the marketplace,” he notes. “It’s another thing to construct a persuasive intellectual and emotional vision of how to meet the needs of your target customers.
Second, a Concept Essence serves as a crucial tool to convey the vision to those who will execute it.
It answers the question: “How do you get a group of people to share a vision of something that does not yet exist?” writes Ron.
More tomorrow!
______________________________
Reflection: How clear and compelling is our organization’s own “Concept Essence”—the vision that defines what makes us special in the hearts of those we serve?
Action: Set aside time this week to distill our vision into a short, vivid statement that captures our essence and unites our team around a shared purpose.
What did you think of this post?
