It is groovy to be cool
When your native language is Romanian, but you work in a corporation where English is the official communication unifier, you get some funny side effects.
Take the word “cool”, for example: in Romania, when someone is cool it means that the person is more or less dead for already a few days. But worldwide, cool means cool — as the Maybot would put it in one of her unforgettable useless soundbites such as “Brexit is Brexit”.
But let’s not deviate, I mostly write about business, let’s stay on such topics: what makes companies cool and what makes them lose their coolness as they get older? To stay cool is important as your company attraction index stays up. We all prefer to work for a cool company, right?
But first, do you remember that moment in your life when the big switch happened? That exact day when your parents stopped being the definition of cool and somebody else took their place? Did you experience such a moment? I know I did, and I cannot imagine how that experience feels to a parent, to be replaced on the hierarchy of coolness by a heavy metal frontman, or by a great basketball player.
And the coolness element varies a lot throughout life, for people and companies alike. How did Apple become cool? How IBM lost its coolness? When will Apple become not cool and will Citroen pick up its vibe again? (randomly chosen companies, don’t freak out).
We will set aside the things nobody can control. Those, by definition, cannot make you cool. They can help, of course. Great looks can make you appear cool, but it is not always that great looking people are the coolest one. And for companies, this is even truer — looks do not always mean cool, or startups would not exist.
So let’s take a look at the things we can control. Let’s decipher together the “cool” riddle.
The first sign that a company is cool is the ability to generate passion, demonstrated by customers and employees aside. I’ll pick on Apple again to prove this point (I have no interests in the company), but if I were an xecutive there and I don’t see queues anymore for people waiting to buy the newest iPhone I’d be very worried. Typically, when passion is gone, coolness is gone too. It is the same for every business sector, the companies that do not generate passion have little visibility, regardless of the fact that they do great products or have spotless services. And this ability to generate passion is even more difficult to do for B2B companies. Believe me, I know that from the company I work for, we do very cool stuff but typically have issues to stir up passion.
The second sign of coolness is attitude. I have a good story here that I would like to share. You do know how people come up with nicknames and codenames about their leaders? Well, I used to work for a company that had a senior CEO — let’s call him for the sake of this story Mr. Smith. And when the guys from the engine room (data center in this case) were stepping out for a smoke and were talking about this guy, they were calling him Mr. Smith. Mister Smith. Not “Uncle WooWoo”, “Helmet Head”, “Bumbler in chief” or whatever nasty names people come up with, but Mister Smith. He is a cool gentleman in everything he says and does, thus the name. Attitude, I tell you. If your company is referred by a nasty nickname, that is not cool.
The third sign of coolness is what the company says it desires. A cool company wants to do cool stuff. Apple wants to make great products. IBM wants to lead in technologies for business. Citroen wants to be a leading car manufacturer (in my humble opinion this is really not cool). Whatever they desire to do, it needs to be cool. But that is not enough to make you cool. You need to get everybody from your company on board (difficult when you have strange internal shortages like not enough paper for printers), get customers to believe you (even more difficult when they get a taste your services and it is not a great experience) and really deliver (tricky for most of the companies with great ideas but poor execution track).
And the same goes for the fourth sign of coolness, beliefs. The true values of a company, the core of its beliefs make a huge difference to me when judging coolness. And it goes internal and external, you cannot have a set of external values and a different one when it comes to internal values — or you’ll be like Facebook. Shiny on outside, a bit dark on the inside. And I am comfortable on this indicator, I work for a company that believes that trust and personal responsibility should drive the relationship with every customer, and it means it. Or, to make use of another example, I like it when Apple says that my data stays mine on their devices.
And last, but not least — you can tell how cool is a company when disaster strikes. Especially when it happens because of the companies. Do they step up and take accountability or will they hire spinners to switch the story so that they protect themselves and their practices? How will they act and talk? Are they able to turn things around for the better or just patch it and move on? And here you have a plethora of uncool companies, that you can pick from almost every sector “good” examples.
So there you have it, as seen by me and kind of in theory. Small things and large ones will gather to make or break the coolness factor of a company. In practice, things are always less easy. I did this as I tried to convince someone what it takes to be cool again and maybe failed a little. And I wanted to take this out of my system, my way.
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And a dynamic graphic from Raphael Saddy to show you a practical side of how company coolness comes and goes:
