42 10
Sometimes less is more, and as the old adage suggests, it can pay to“Keep It Simple Stupid” – though few people would call Tesco stupid after the success it has had in the last 15 years.
Sir Terry Leahy,3 CEO for much of this period, has attributed a major part of the brand’s success to keeping it simple, with Tesco’s ten-word vision.
In 1997, Sir Terry Leahy and the other directors met. After much discussion, they came up with the ten words that were to shape the future of the business:
“To create value for customers to earn their lifetime loyalty.”
They also came up with two of what they called “values”, to support and communicate to all their employees how they wanted to deliver the vision. Unlike many other organizations, their values weren’t standard single words such as “trusted”, “caring”, “quality” or “innovative”.
Instead, they were sentences. Though they now seem quite generic, these sentences did and do provide guidance on how the organization and its people should act. They represent the stimulus that will drive customers’ reactions to the brand, not just the responses they want to engender.
The two sentences were: “No one tries harder for customers” and “Treat people how we like to be treated”. In the following decades Tesco expanded into Europe and Asia, financial services and telecommunications, but the core purpose, values and strategy didn’t change.
As Leahy said, in a speech nearly a decade later, “The bigger you are, the more important it is that you have a clear vision and a set of values that everyone understands and lives by.”
And the moral is that a clear vision and set of values should be at the core of your brand. Are yours clearly defined and known throughout the organization?
3 Sir Terry Leahy clearly likes the number ten. After stepping down from Tesco he wrote a business book called Management in Ten Words, in which he says he draws on his experience to pinpoint the ten vital attributes that make successful managers and underlie great organizations. Each chapter focuses on a single word (and indeed are the sorts of single words you find used by many of the Fortune 500/FTSE100 firms to describe their values.) They are Truth, Loyalty, Courage, Values, Act, Balance, Simple, Lean, Compete and Trust.