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The echoes of this great marble hall always bring me back to college. I’m sitting in the Philadelphia 30th Street Station, awaiting my Amtrak train to take me home, circled by ornate pillars and homeward-bound revelries on a Friday afternoon.

I was here to speak to a room full of “customer experience officers” from places like Comcast/NBC and GE. But it is this morning’s breakfast with Campbell Soup’s head of talent & learning that was most compelling.

What she laid out for me was a multi-dimensional formula for unlocking intrapreneurship in your organization.

Iris Nafshi left Microsoft (where she headed up leadership development for a114,000-person company) to lead Campbell Soup’s talent & learning, in part because the company is at a promising point of inflection. Like many forward-thinking organizations, Campbell Soup is opening up, shifting from a hierarchy of operators toward a community of innovators.

Iris saw that their approach to leadership development focused on teaching general leadership topics like building trust that, while important, were not aligned to the company’s future. They were asking for intrapreneurial behavior but were offering general management skills that did not explicitly reinforce the values and behaviors that would enable intrapreneurship.

She helped the company think through their core values. Like so many organizations, Campbell Soup had admirable but undifferentiated values. You know the ones: character, competence, courage & teamwork. Such values are important but are not much different from those your competition aspires to. They are like building a car with four wheels and a windshield. Yes, we want those things, but they are just table stakes.

So Campbell Soup rethought their core values and settled on four, which illustrate brilliantly what I think core values should be:

  • Do right and be real
  • Seek the power of different
  • Dare to disrupt
  • Own it like a founder

The first value speaks to a growing awareness of companies, which I pointed out in my last book, that there is strategic power in pursuing an approach that benefits society. As Campbell Soup starts living this value we will see more and more fresh, sustainable ingredients in their products and practices. The second speaks to being strategic (think “different is better than better”). The third reinforces the challenge to come up with disruptive – “4th Option” – ideas. And the fourth value directly addresses the mindset of successful intrapreneurs, that they feel and act like owners of the company. This mindset helps them spot opportunities to improve the company and gives them the motivation to push for those opportunities even if the system puts roadblocks in front of them.

These values directly address most of the cultural attributes that research shows correlate with innovative organizations.

But here’s the thing: focusing only on culture rarely changes culture. You need to simultaneously work on two other factors: structures and people. Put the innovative people under organizational structures that encourage innovation and wrap them in a culture that reinforces innovation and guess what you get? Innovation!

But leave out just one of these three ingredients – people, structure, culture – and you risk reverting back to the boring, uninspired behavior you are seeking to leave behind.

So Iris attacked the structure and people dimensions. As for structure, she decided to completely halt their training program. This naturally triggered some discontent, but Iris had a plan.

She started reconstructing the curriculum, with an eye to using the new structure to create the right kinds of behaviors. She made sure that every course that was offered supported one of Campbell Soup’s new core values. “Dare to disrupt” could be reinforced by programs on innovative thinking. “Own it like a founder” might be supported by strategy. If a course didn’t fit a value, it would not be offered.

By implementing a structure that focuses on building people with skills who support the culture, you put the trinity of forces together: structure, people, and culture. THAT is how you achieve lasting change.

  • What do you want your organization to be?
  • Are your people, structure, and culture aligned to that future?
  • If not, what must you change?
Leverage
Point
“8Ps” of StrategyOpportunity
for Disruption
Recommended Leverage Points
Position- The farmers, individual and corporate, that you are targeting.

- The need of the agricultural industry that you seek to fill.
3- What technologies do you control that can help you tap into market
segments that you previously thought unreachable?

- What are the potential business alliances you could think about with key players in the segment to serve your customers with integrated solutions? (Serving customers with more integrated solutions example: serving farmers with fertilizers, crop protection and other).
Product- The products you offer, and the characteristics that affect their value to customers.

- The technology you develop for producing those products.
8- What moves are your organization taking to implement Big Data and analytics to your operations? What IoT and blockchain applications can you use?

- What tools and technology could you utilize or develop to improve food quality, traceability, and
production?

- How can you develop a more sustainable production model to accommodate constraints on arable
land?

- What is the future business model needed to serve new differentiated products to your customers?
Promotion- How you connect with farmers and consumers across a variety of locations and industries.
- How to make consumers, producers, and other stakeholders aware of your products and services.
8- How are you connecting your product with individual and corporate farms who could utilize it?
- How could you anticipate market and customer needs to make customers interested in accessing your differentiated products?
PriceHow consumers and other members of the agricultural supply chain pay for access to agricultural products.7- What elements of value comprise your pricing? How do each of those elements satisfy the varying needs of your customers?
Placement- How food products reach consumers. How the technologies, data, and services reach stakeholders in the supply chain.9- What new paths might exist for helping consumers access the food they desire?
- How are you adapting your operations and supply chain to accommodate consumers’ desire for proximity to the food they eat?
- How could you anticipate customer expectation to make products more
accessible to customers/agile supply chain?
- Have you considered urbanization as a part of your growth strategy?
Physical
Experience
- How your food satisfies the needs and desires of your customer.
- How the services you provide to agribusiness fulfill their needs.
9- Where does your food rate on a taste, appearance, and freshness
scale?
- Could the services you provide to companies and farms in the agriculture industry be expanded to meet more needs?
- What senses does your food affect besides hunger? How does your
customer extract value from your food in addition to consumption?
Processes- Guiding your food production operations in a manner cognizant of social pressure.8- How can you manage the supply chain differently to improve traceability and reduce waste?
- How can you innovate systems in production, processing, storing, shipping, retailing, etc.?
- What are new capabilities to increase sustainability (impact on the environment, or ESG) components?
People- The choices you make regarding hiring, organizing, and incentivizing your people and your culture.- How are you leveraging the agricultural experience of your staff bottom-up to achieve your vision?
- How do you anticipate new organizational capabilities needed to perform your future strategy (innovation, exponential technologies needed, agile customer relationship, innovative supply chain)?
- How do you manage your talents to assure suitable development with exposure in the agrifood main challenges/allowing a more sustainable view of the opportunities/cross-sectors?
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