Why some companies grow faster than others
Three stories for CEOs (and those who want to topple them)

Why do some companies grow 10x, 100x — even 1000x — faster than others?
Today I want to introduce you to the maverick group of outsiders who ripped up the traditional business playbook…and forged the new path to success in the digital age.
People like Brian. An industrial design student who glued 1000 novelty cereal boxes together to get his business off the ground. Better known as Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb.
People like Jeff. A failed physicist who drove across the US to start a business by packing books on his hands and knees. Better known as Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, valued at $474BN.
And people like Angela. A fashion merchandising executive from a sleepy town in Indiana given a near impossible task 3,963 miles from home. Better known as Angela Ahrendts, SVP of Retail at Apple and former CEO of Burberry.
How have these people — and the intelligent leaders like them — achieved implausible feats…whilst 52% of Fortune 500 brands have disappeared since 2000?
How Airbnb designed an 11* travel experience

Airbnb’s seems like the quintessential Silicon Valley tech story. But the company began life as an air mattress on the founder’s floor to pay their rent.
They got a lucky break when their idea to create Presidential candidate cereal to keep the company alive caught the attention of Paul Graham, co-founder of the startup incubator Y-Combinator. Graham convinced the founders, including Brian Chesky, to use a $20,000 investment to meet customers in New York and develop their roadmap based on what they learnt.
Chesky devised a simple but ingenious way to understand what people truly needed, wanted and desired: the 11* experience exercise. Thinking bigger than just booking a room, he asked people to describe what a 1* travel experience looked like, then a 2* and so on up to 11*. It forced people to think beyond the 5* industry-standard to something different and better that Airbnb might deliver.
Not only did customers enjoy being invited to improve the service, but it helped Airbnb set their vision. It helped them test their assumptions. And it helped them design next move.
In Chesky’s words:
“We created this whole end-to-end service design system — every part of the trip. Hotels, Expedia, booking websites, they don’t do that. They typically use financial data to make their own decisions. We make decisions based on people. We try to see things very differently.” — Brian Chesky
How Amazon become “the earth’s most customer-centric company”

After reading a research report projecting annual internet commerce growth at 2,300%, Jeff Bezos created a list of 20 products that could be sold online. He settled on books, quit his Wall Street job and drove from New York to Seattle — writing the business plan in his head along the way.
Bezos set the company up in his garage, which doubled as Amazon’s first storage warehouse. There, he and his small team divided their time between packing books on the concrete floor and rushing across town to get the packages to the delivery company in time.
The hard work paid off. And, after just two months, Amazon had customers in all 50 states in the US and over 45 countries worldwide.
With a name like Amazon, books were inevitably just the beginning. Dozens of new categories soon followed. Then products like Kindle and Alexa, brands like Prime and Fresh and even services like Amazon Web Services. But how can a company so successfully cover such wide terrain?
Here’s their secret:
“We never think of ourselves as tied to any particular technology or skill set. We think of ourselves as tied to our customers. And we’re trying to work backwards from their needs. And we’ll learn whatever skills we need to service our customers.” — Jeff Bezos
How Burberry crafted the ultimate luxury business

You might expect rapid growth from two online businesses. But how about from an 161 year old English clothing company famous for hand weaved cotton trenchcoats?
Angela Ahrendts took over a company in crisis when she became Burberry CEO in July 2006. Brand equity was in perilous decline. The famous Burberry check pattern had become an anti-status symbol. They needed to adapt, or die.
Ahrendts first move was to stem the flow by renegotiating third-party licensing deals globally — the root-cause of the poor quality products flooding the market and eroding their ability charge a premium. Next, she set course on an ambitious digital transformation programme.
As she put it, “We started to reorganise the company. We had a lot of, what I would call, IT people. But we didn’t have a lot of Technology people”. She continued, “We needed to relentlessly target our customer…So we studied our customer and then adapted our strategies in order to be relevant and authentic to this audience”.
To make this happen, Burberry built a ‘Sell’ function comprising digital, marketing, technology architecture and customer insight skills to constantly drive customer experience innovations and revenue. This team sat at a global level because, as Angela put it, “We had regional teams…but we needed to have total control to push through a C-suite level vision”.
The transformation worked. Under Ahrendts tenure, Burberry grew from a £2BN to a £7BN business in less than a decade. And, between July 2006 and May 2014 when she was poached by Apple, Burberry’s stock multiplied 4.49x.
The intelligent leader’s new playbook

You may have seen this image taking over your newsfeed:
It’s a healthy reminder that the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality and Big Data aren’t threatening your business. Your greatest threat is failing to focus on making the lives of your customers easier, more enjoyable and more exciting.
And the stories of Airbnb, Amazon and Burberry are just three of the many. The many intelligent leaders embracing a new playbook to thrive in the digital age: Service Design.
It’s not just the intelligent way to do business today. It might just be the only way.
If you enjoyed this article, you might enjoy Service Design — a new online course to help you design a remarkable business and outsmart your competition. Click here to learn more.
Thomas Cornwall is a serial entrepreneur and Head of Service Design at Rainmaker, where he helps leaders grow businesses intelligently.
