Frank van den Driest talks with Angela Ahrendts, former chief executive of Burberry and former senior vice president of retail and online at Apple, about her journey from a small town in Indiana to leading some of the most significant companies in the world.
The conversation covers the values she grew up with, how understanding a company’s past is essential to plotting its future, and why she believes the CMO can be the critical player in the C-suite as businesses move toward all their stakeholders.
Key findings
- She cut investor time to twice a year and made the meetings start with a film, on the reasoning that the numbers are only the outcome of a strategy and investors never ask about culture or the leadership team.
- Her stated position with investors was that the company was playing the long game, not a quarter-by-quarter game, against an articulated five-year strategy.
- The Apple stores gained what she calls software: by the time she left they were teaching 80,000 classes a week, and in the first year taught 3.5 million children the basics of coding.
- At Burberry one percent of profits went into the company foundation, alongside five soft strategies that she credits with enabling the hard ones.
- Her view of the biggest blocker to long-term value creation is short-term reporting, with the onus also falling on boards.
Look backward before you look forward
Her stated approach to working with creative and visionary people begins with listening, and with a rule she repeats: you have to look backwards before you can ever look forward.
At Burberry that meant homework on the company’s own history in its 150th anniversary year. Why the founder started it, when the famous check was created and what it was for, all the way up to the present, before asking the current creative director for his vision and taking a hundred executives offsite to ask what the purpose is.
The answer they arrived at was a custodial one: the company had been around 150 years, and their job over the next ten was to keep the institution strong and relevant so it could last another 150. She says that lifted everyone and united them around something bigger.
She applied the same method at Apple, studying why Steve Jobs created retail in the first place, why nobody was paid commission, and the instruction that the job was to educate customers and enrich lives. The question that followed was how to create an experience that continues to do that, and how to measure qualitative things nobody had tried to measure before.
The software of the store
Her diagnosis of the stores was that the hardware and design were great but there was no software in them: no intentional experience beyond the Genius Bar, so the store was a place to buy something you could buy cheaper and faster online.
The answer was classes connected to what people were already doing on their devices. Photography classes built on the camera, music classes built on the software the company already owned. Each channel got a distinct purpose: the website as the best two-dimensional experience for deep learning, the physical store as three-dimensional human connection and inspiration, and the app as the most immersive experience using new technology.
The design was crowdsourced from staff. Within six months they asked every employee worldwide what they felt the company should be doing more of in their community, gathered thousands of answers, sent them back out to be sharpened, and edited them down to eight things that shaped the new in-store experience.
Communicating with humans
Rather than accept the twice-yearly investor meeting as a numbers exercise, she made investors watch a three-minute video before any conversation about the numbers, showing what the company was doing around the world set to its own music.
Her own team resisted at first and asked why they were doing it. The investor reaction changed their minds, and her point is that investors are not reading a 300-page annual report to see everything that happened. The videos were then reused for 11,000 employees, who shared them with family and friends, so material made for one stakeholder turned out to be relevant to all of them.
The same instinct carried into internal communication. A weekly video to 11,000 people at Burberry, three thoughts in three minutes or less, shot on a phone. At Apple, told to send an email to 55,000 people translated into 30 languages, she refused and did video instead, which she says built the connection so that people in stores felt they knew her.
She traces the willingness to do that to a harder moment. In 2008, facing the need to cut fifty million pounds over three or four months, she called the top hundred together, got teary, said she had never done this before, and set one rule: nothing consumer-facing gets cut. Her lesson is that being vulnerable made the team lean in further.
What she wants from marketing
She describes herself as a marketer at heart who was never a CMO, and defines the marketing job as connecting the dots between the history, the purpose, the customer and the culture. The CMO, she says, sits right in the center of that.
Her instruction to marketers is to leave their lane. She does not much like the word marketing, and would rather describe the job as building a lifelong relationship with every stakeholder, internal culture and communication included.
From that follows her strongest claim. If CMOs broaden their thinking and treat their job as building a relationship with each stakeholder, the future chief executives will be the world’s greatest CMOs, because it is about humanizing, connecting and building relationships, and the CMO should be able to do that better than anyone in the company.
The qualifier is real balance. Right brain and left brain, instinct and innovation and empathy combined with operational and financial expertise. Her observation about why most chief executives do not work the way she did is that most of them come from finance or operations rather than marketing or merchandising, and that is their comfort zone.
On governance she notes that the environmental agenda has traction and clear marching orders, while the social element is still not clearly defined. Her question to companies is what they are actually contributing there, financially or in human capital, and her stated hope is for a day when there is a people and impact statement rather than only a profit and loss statement.
On leadership style she rejects the either-or. You lead from the front and you empower others, because everyone wants to know where the company is going and why, and then you step out of the way. She argues companies need to be flatter, and describes turning the organization upside down so staff shape the strategy and inside out so it does more for communities.
Scope and limitations
This is one leader’s account, given in conversation and, as the document states, edited and condensed for easier reading. The company figures she cites are her own recollection rather than reported results.
Source
This page summarises Humanizing Growth Series: Angela Ahrendts & Frank van den Driest in conversation, by Frank van den Driest, Angela Ahrendts, November 2021.