David Schriber recently wrote a touching reflection on his career at Burton Snowboards, and his relationship with Jake Burton Carpenter. I never met Jake personally, but he had a profound influence on how I approach my work, which in turn continues to indirectly influence all of my clients’ successes.
When I was in business school, I did an organizational design thesis on how to ensure successful innovation in large companies. Throughout my career I had been frustrated by the extent to which companies are disconnected from the markets they serve, and used my time in business school to study examples of how this could be changed.
I wasn’t a snowboarder, but I was consistently struck by how this market was growing; how the communications connected with riders, how the copy and graphics spoke to the people they were serving, and how devoted the brand loyalists were. Everything seemed connected with some sort of invisible glue that was different than how most companies operated. I suspecting something had to be very different organizationally, so my thesis project compared how Burton Snowboards was organized with how a snowboard division of a large ski company was organized.
As a naive student, I started calling the companies I wanted to study, and was fortunate enough to connect with David Schriber who at the time was the VP of Marketing at Burton. David totally understood what I was trying to put my finger on, and shared information and insight that confirmed my suspicions. Something WAS different.
Sparing the gory details, the big ski company unsurprisingly operated their snowboard division like most big companies. They did market research, designed and made the product, promoted it, sold it, etc, all in pretty traditional ways. Burton worked in a way that rewarded everyone – from the product designers, prototypers, marketing folks, promotional riders, and the customers themselves – in such a way that everyone was aligned toward the same goals. David even had me visit the prototype shop, and meet Michael Jager from the external design team. The walls were that porous in terms of getting the right work done.
What fascinated me was that market creation, disruption, and other typical success metrics weren’t the goal. They were the outcome. Of course, they did need these successes to survive and grow as a company, but from my perspective they were not the initial motivations that drove decision-making in the same way that they drive decision-making in most companies. Lesson learned.
My clients are looking to disrupt their markets before someone else disrupts them. Over the years the biggest successes have come when the clients are open to changing how they work so that they integrate with, and serve their markets, rather than sell to them. When we can make these fundamental changes, clients have collectively seen billions of dollars of increased revenue, and avoided wasting time, money and other resources pursuing the wrong direction. The specific approach is different for each client – not everyone could work exactly like Burton, nor should they – yet I channel what I learned every day.
While I never met Jake personally, I doubt he built the company to reinvent a business process. But it’s one of few that consistently works. I’m grateful for the opportunity to have learned it.