What's Your Recipe for Success?

Here’s a good story from Ian Harris of RockstarComms in London:

In 1952 Colonel Sanders ran his own restaurant in Corbin, Kentucky. It was doing well, but one day he heard about plans for a new highway that would bypass the town of Corbin.

Seeing that his business was about to evaporate, he sold the restaurant and began driving around the United States, trying to license his chicken recipe to restaurant owners.

The Colonel would walk into a restaurant, and issue a challenge to the owner: "I bet my chicken recipe is better than yours."

He'd propose a cook-off, and if the owner liked his chicken recipe, he'd franchise it to them at 5 cents per chicken.

The Colonel visited over 1,000 restaurants. Each one turned him down. He didn't have one successful deal.

Then one day, a bar owner tried his chicken and explained to him: "Look, I'm trying to sell beer, not chicken. You need to make this saltier so customers will get thirsty and buy beer!"

The bar owner grabbed some salt, and took another bite. "THAT'S more like it" he said. "Just add salt to this recipe, and I'll take it!"

The Colonel took a bite himself. It tasted terrible! But that was because he'd been on a salt-free diet for 30 years. His tastes were obviously different to everyone else's.

The Colonel wasn't stupid. Although he didn't like salt, it was better than starving - and so began the Colonel's enormously successful Kentucky Fried Chicken legacy.

At one time, if you bought a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken, it said on the side: "When Colonel Sanders added the 11^th spice, he instantly knew it was the best chicken he'd ever had."

Of course they didn't tell you what spice it was.

There are three lessons you can take from this:
1) Colonel Sanders could have visited 1,000 MORE restaurant owners, driven his car into the ground, and still had nothing to show for it, had he not been willing to change his recipe.
2) Although the recipe he so passionately believed in was the best recipe for his taste buds, it was NOT the recipe that his customers really wanted. Without a recipe that the customers wanted, no amount of effort or persistence would make it work.
3) The “magic ingredient” was ordinary table salt.

I’d say there are a few more good lessons:

1. We need to keep our minds open to change. Consider the possibility that sometimes change for the sake of change is a good thing, but change for the sake of improvement is always good.
2. For innovation and new product development to drive the company into the future, the company has to make sure new products are what the customer really wants – not just what we think they want. Our focus on customer feedback should drive our efforts.
3. Sometimes the answers are right in front of us. Let’s be willing to get feedback, provide feedback and engage in constructive conflict. Conflict isn’t a bad thing unless it’s threatening. We should be willing to disagree with one another – constructive conflict should be stimulating, not threatening.

Unlike KFC, where protecting the secret of the ingredients is part of the culture, transparency and a culture of open communication are key ingredients for growth and success.