Reinforce your mission
Everybody at NETGEAR knows what RINSPERC means. It’s not a competitor or new product. It’s an acronym and a slogan to help reinforce the mission, which is what you have to do after you establish it.
Each letter in the word represents another word that will help move the company toward achieving its mission. The R stands for revenue, the I for innovation, and so on. Every year or two, the management team comes up with a new slogan.
“It has to closely relate to your mission, and it has to closely relate to what you have to achieve for the next 12 months, and then make the slogan a simple word to remember,” Lo says.
The management team forecasts out over a 12- to 24-month time period to see what could happen in that time period, and as a response, what the company should do about it. Then Lo and his team boil it down to eight or nine things that they have to do, and it gets coined into the slogan. That slogan is on the intranet home page, and it’s repeated in every newsletter and quarterly meeting. On top of that, each employee’s annual goals are somehow tied into it.
“Revenue is more pertaining to the salespeople and the operations people,” Lo says. “Innovation is more pertained to the product marketing folks, so different people have different parts of the cascade of corporate objectives.”
Each person’s manager communicates his or her part at the beginning of the year, and every six months, each manager is evaluated. This helps keep people on track to achieving the mission.
On top of a slogan, you simply have to repeat your mission constantly. Lo goes through it in every training meeting, every quarterly meeting and in every weekly product meeting. During these product meetings, he also has questions that he asks of any initiative that people want to pursue, and those questions support the mission.
“Ever
y product is weighed against the same thing — does it make connection to the Internet cheaper, easier, faster? Does it enhance the quality of life for people? Does it serve the ultimate mission of letting Internet service the communications, entertainment, education for people’s lives?” he says. “That’s what we do all the time. If it doesn’t, we’re not going to do it.”
He also asks if the product will add value compared to what is already in the market or bring in a completely new product line to make people’s lives better, among other questions.
“It’s repeated again and again, and when we have all-hands meetings, I’ll pick people and ask people to answer those questions,” he says. “So it’s making sure people get repeatedly reminded.”
Lastly, remember that all of this starts and stops with you. Each year, Lo travels to every employee around the world and meets with them in groups of eight to 10 to explain the mission and its importance and see if they have questions.
“It’s very important to set a tone from the top, and we just have to practice it in every single thing that we do,” Lo says.
