Embrace What Makes Your Brand Weird With Nick Liddell

When Kristian Brugts joined Ocado in 2008, the business was a loss-making, online-only supermarket. He describes what the people he met in his first interview were like, driven but insane, which intrigued him enough to return for a second round interview with the director of retail. Instead, he found himself sitting in a room with founders Tim Steiner and Jason Gissing, who must have liked him: two hours later they called to offer him a job.

It’s not the most organised or orthodox introduction to a business, but it set the tone for what was to follow: while the business has since transformed into a retail technology powerhouse with a turnover of £1.6 billion, it has retained the same weird mix of insanity, informality and impatience that attracted him to the company in the first place. Brugts is Ocado’s Group Head of Brand and it’s his job to make sure that as the business grows it doesn’t lose its weirdness. And this matters in at least three important respects.

Hard-wire weirdness into your business

Firstly, weirdness is hard-wired into Ocado’s approach to recruiting and developing its 12,000 people. The assumption is that people will inevitably grow out of the role they were recruited for, so competency-based interviewing is out of the window. For example, Ocado delivery drivers aren’t recruited based on whether or not they can drive:

“What we tend to do is employ ‘people people’ and teach them to drive, rather than employ drivers and teach them to be ‘people people’, because that human interaction is the main interaction we have with our customers as a business and you can’t teach it. It’s actually easier to teach people to not crash a van than to smile at customers and be nice.”

The outcome of this recruitment approach is a hire-great-people-and-get-out-of-their-way mentality that results in a great deal of freedom for people to make decisions. This means the business can operate in a self-induced and seemingly permanent state of resource constraint: lack of time, budget and people aren’t seen as limiting factors to making things possible – they are considered part of what makes working at Ocado fun, unpredictable and exciting. The consequence is a high degree of personal autonomy and organisational trust.

Balance the professionals with pirates

Secondly, Ocado’s embracing of weirdness means it can embrace an extreme diversity of people, with the unique set of skills required to create a business that combines the enthusiasm of an amateur with the pragmatism of a professional. Ocado can simultaneously be regimented and chaotic, experimental and reliable, entrepreneurial and authoritative. It does so by maintaining a healthy balance of pirates and professionals. Each has a distinct role to play and each group compensates for the other’s flaws. The professionals help the pirates to look less amateurish, while the pirates inject enough weird and crazy into the business to take the professionals to places they wouldn’t have been able to imagine…

… All of which leads us to the third important aspect of Ocado’s weirdness: that it gives the company an ability to see the world differently to its competitors, safe in the knowledge that there is a group of people who can confidently turn crazy ideas into profitable business models:

“We’re still at the cutting edge. Nobody’s done what we’ve done before. So, there’s still a little bit of trial and error. There is still the excitement there. You don’t know what the next thing is going to be. We are working on R&D for these technology pieces furiously, years in advance, and we don’t know what they are. We just know they’re going on. We were purely an online supermarket 10 years ago. Five years ago, we were an online supermarket on the brink of extinction. Now, we’re a technology thought leader… We may be doing something else in the future, which is fantastic. It is exciting to come in every day.”

Embrace what your flaws are

By its own admission, Ocado is a weird place. It’s got a weird name and it employs some weird people. But it’s this weirdness that makes the business so valuable. Ten years ago, Ocado was in competition with the likes of M&S and Wm Morrison; today these rivals have become partners because its ability to see the world differently has steered the business into areas where there are few direct competitors. Ocado has been able to see opportunities others don’t and grow in directions others can’t.

So how do you embrace what makes your own brand weird? Start by being honest about your organisation’s flaws. Discuss them. Write them down. And then work through the potentially positive implications of each flaw; not every cloud will have a silver lining but the chances are that hidden inside one of your flaws a potential superpower is hiding. The more honest you are about your flaws, the more obvious this is likely to be. Challenge yourself to go beyond what’s comfortable and allow your values and beliefs to evolve as a result.

By Nick Liddell, Director of Consulting, The Clearing, and co-author of Wild Thinking

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