Closer to most private boards in size: Alternative Apparel, a founder-led apparel company with sales then under $100 million. The founder, an engineer at heart, cared about the product: the fabric, the cut, the hand of the material, the way it felt to the touch. He had brought his leadership team and his whole staff into one room to talk about the company’s future, and he opened with the product. His people saw something else, and had been holding it back. The people buying were no longer buying a shirt. They were buying the experience of wearing it.
I asked him to leave the founder’s chair for a few minutes and sit in two others, first as a customer walking into a store, then as a buyer at wholesale. Then I asked the room whether the quality of the material was what their customers cared about most. The answer was no, and once one person had said it, the nodding around the room gave everyone else the permission to speak.
What followed was the real conversation: whether the hand of the fabric, the thing he was proudest of, mattered most to the retailers who wrote the big orders, or to the person who would wear the shirt, from whom all of the demand came. It was not the making of the shirt. It was the wearing of it. He understood that the business belonged to its customers, not to him. The company reorganized around the wearer; it grew, and was later sold. The work ran at a board’s altitude; the board itself was not in the room.