SETTING THE
STAGE FOR SUCCESS

Written By Robb Stevens

Lionel Messi is one of the best and most well-known soccer stars on the planet. He led Argentina to a World Cup win in 2022, and as a midfielder, Messi has been named for a record 7 years as the best in the world. In 2017, Messi signed a lifetime sponsorship agreement with Adidas. As one of the biggest sponsorships deals ever seen in sports, his deal with Adidas is worth a massive $25 million per year which he’ll be paid annually for the rest of his life!

While he may be one of the richest athletes in the world (6th on the list) with some fancy footwear, his shoes do more than just help him score goals. They are a manifestation of former CEO Herbert Hainer’s vision set for the German company in 2001.

When Hainer took over Adidas, the company was losing market share and stumbling on new footwear designs. A less bold CEO in those circumstances would have put the financial clamps on the organization and tried to turn around the profit and loss (P&L) by pushing employees to sell more shoes, clothing, and accessories more efficiently. Hainer was well aware that the financials were vital, but he didn’t lead with them. Instead, he reframed the company’s vision to be all about helping athletes to fulfill their potential. As he describes it:

“The goal wasn’t to be the biggest and the richest, it was to start creating products that help athletes perform better, so the runner can run faster, the tennis player and the soccer player can play better. If we did that and provided good service to our consumers, the financials would follow. All we had to do was help people achieve their personal best, and by doing so we’d also be making the world a better place. I wanted to give the company the belief that this is more than just a revenue game and we are more than just a revenue company.”

Hainer’s vision was backed by action. When investors would punish Adidas for having a lower profit margin than Nike, he’d respond calmly that Adidas’ product development costs were higher because they were going to make the best performance product.

“We will never disappoint an athlete with our product they are wearing,” he said. “If we help them make their dream come true – winning an Olympic gold medal, the French Open, etc…, then we have achieved more than just revenue numbers.”

Yet, as planned, when it came to the numbers, Adidas scored big. By the time Hainer retired fifteen years later, he’d revived the Adidas brand and had seen the company’s market capitalization rise from $3.4 billion to over $30 billion. In so many instances of successful companies, the focus has not been on achieving financial outcomes.

Rather, profits are an outcome of achieving their company’s vision.

The purpose, or the why of the business is the reason we do the thing that makes the profit. A company’s vision is what motivates and inspires employees to do what they do. It would not be particularly inspiring for a business leader to tell employees: “I need you to double net profit,” nor would it inspire employees if their why was “we want to double return to shareholders.”

Then what do people rally behind? A common purpose or vision.

Med One’s vision statement expresses our desire to positively impact lives and communities. Involvement in the healthcare sector gives our company a unique opportunity and responsibility to participate in preserving and improving individual lives.

Our common purpose always goes back to these points:

Over the years, many stories have been shared about Med One Employees and leadership working toward our common purpose. In fact, every company has its stories. Those stories define a company’s mission. They give it a voice and more importantly, a heart. They represent the buy-in of employees and customers alike. The stories that often go untold, bring to mind Albert Einstein’s point that:

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

It is often from the things that cannot be counted that the stories come from and what defines us as a company.

As Bill George, a former CEO of Medtronic described, “Employees want to jump out of bed in the morning to invent something new, produce a high-quality product, or help doctors in an operating room. This holds true whether we’re talking about South Korea, China, Poland, or Argentina. It motivates senior leaders, the woman on the production line, an engineer back at the lab, and the person who will drive through the night halfway across the state of Michigan to deliver a defibrillator so a doctor can start a procedure at seven o’clock the next morning. That’s a true story.”

How does an individual employee make a positive impact on a company’s overall vision? I’ll offer one specific recommendation: Deliberately seek ways to take meaningful initiative in your specific job.

A story I recently heard illustrates the empowering and enlivening impact of taking initiative:

Two employees were once vying for the same promotion at work. One had been at the company for 5 years, while the second one had been there only six-months.

From an experience perspective, the 5-year employee had the clear advantage.

To help make the hiring decision, the hiring manager devised a simple challenge for these two candidates. He brought them in separately and gave them a seemingly simple task. He said:

“I want you to go to the store and buy some oranges. My wife needs them.”

When the 5-year employee returned from the grocery store, the manager asked: “what kind of oranges did you buy?

“I don’t know,” he answered. “You just said to buy oranges, and these are oranges, so here they are.”

“How much did they cost?” the manager asked.

“Well, I’m not sure,” he said. “You gave me $50. Here is your receipt, and here is your change.”

Then it was the 6-month employee’s turn. When he returned from the store, the manager again asked, “What kind of oranges did you buy?”

“Well,” he replied, “the store had many varieties— there were navel oranges, Valencia oranges, blood oranges, tangerines, and many others, and I didn’t know which kind to buy.

But I remembered you said the oranges were for your wife, so I called her. She told me the oranges were for a party and she’d be using them to make fresh orange juice, so I asked the grocer which of all these oranges would make the best orange juice. He said the Valencia orange was full of very sweet juice, so that’s what I bought.

I dropped them by your home on my way back to the office. Your wife was very pleased.”

“How much did they cost?” the manager asked. “Well, that was another problem. I didn’t know exactly how many to buy, so I called your wife again and asked her how many guests she was expecting.

She told me 20, so I then asked the grocer how many oranges it would take to make juice for 20 people, and it was a lot more than I expected, so, I asked the grocer if he could give me a quantity discount, and he did!

These oranges normally cost 75 cents each, but I paid only 50 cents. Here is your change and the receipt.”

The boss smiled and thanked him for his efforts.

Both of these employees were asked to do the same task and they both did what was asked of them, but there’s a clear difference in the way they approached it. Based on that test, which one would you have hired? Which would make the biggest impact on your company’s success?

A culture enriched by proactive employees calls to mind the observations of Late business professor and author Orin Harari said it this way in his book Break from the Pack:

“…the key predictors of corporate success and shareholder value are not the size of a company’s tangible assets, but the size of its intangible assets like its speed in execution and customer care, its culture of constant innovation, and its mobility and agility in capitalizing on fresh, fleeting opportunities. As the Brookings institution found, 80% of shareholder value generated by the S&P 500 can be traced to intangibles. In other words, to predict who’s going to break from the pack, look at who’s got the quickest adaptivity and imagination, not who’s got the biggest numbers on the balance sheet.” (Oren Harari)

Medtronic’s Bill George, shared similar thoughts about his company’s approach to this dynamic under his leadership:

“Our most important metrics weren’t revenues and profits but how many seconds it would take until someone else was helped by a Medtronic product. When I joined the company, it was one hundred seconds. When I left the company, it was seven.”

In my observation, people support what they help create. Employees, in their own ways, help shape any company’s overall vision. When employees continually fall in love with their customers problems and identify ways to solve them with their company’s solutions, that is where relationships and loyalty are created.

A focus on restoring people to full life and health and letting shareholder value creation be an outcome of this vision creates a powerful motivation far beyond making money, but more often than not, like in the Adidas example, when a company vision is realized, strong financial performance is often inevitable.