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Title: Bill Taylor’s Keynote Address on Learning in a Changing World
 
Thank you fabulous Carmen. You know normally I hate being the last presenter in aday-long session like this, but I really thank you
—and maybe you’ve saved the worst 
for last 
—I don’t know, but thank you so much. I’ve been able to listen in on the day
and take notes. What positive energy and terrific presentations.
So, what I thought I would do is put the ideas and stories you’ve heard today in abroader context. Let’s talk about th
e workplace, the marketplace, the relationshipbetween the two. How what you care about as a company both shapes and isshaped by what your people care about as individuals. So here goes it.Let me start with the big picture. We are living today through the age of disruption.
You can’t do big things anymore, if you’re content with doing things a little bit better
than everybody else or a little bit differently from how you did them in the past. Inan era of hyper-competition and nonstop reinvention, the only way to stand out from the crowd is to stand for something special. Originality really has become theacid-
test, the strategy. The term I like to use is “strategy as advocacy”. Winningorganizations today don’t just sell competitive products an
d services. They standfor important ideas. Ideas that are meant to shape the competitive landscape of their field. Ideas are meant to re-shape the sense of what is possible for customers,for employees, for investors.For so long
—
for decades
—we’ve l
ived in a world where the strong take from the
weak. If you’ve got the biggest offices, the most established brands, the deepest 
pockets, you won almost by default. That world is over. Today, the smart take fromthe strong. The most successful organiza
tions don’t just out 
-compete their rivals,they aim to redefine the terms of competition by embracing one-of-a-kind ideas in a
world filled with “me too” thinking. Now it’s hard to do
! Which is why so feworganizations ever really break from the pack and do something remarkable.
It’s funny I was sitting here today, thinking about a recent time I was the closingspeaker of an event very different than today. It was a gather of CEO’s form
community banks from across the country. This was honestly the most depressed
group of people I’ve ever met in my life. It was just endless complaints: “Financialmarkets are terrible”, “Competition is brutal”, “Our customers are just so fickle”.They were all desperate. It was “Who can we blame for the mess we are in?”
Then right before I spoke, this market research group guru got up to speak. He wasa wonderful, provocative guy. And he actually answered them quite directly. Hesaid if you are looking for someone to blame your problems on, look in the mirrorand blame yourselves. He told the following story.He said for twenty-five years he sent his researchers into the field. They just visited
bank branches all across the country. They were “mystery shoppers”. I know many
of you use them in your companies. They go into a bank and the employees think 
 
they are customers. And they open a savings account, start a checking account,apply for a loan, whatever. And they rate providers. Are they knowledgable? Dothey smile? Whatever. For 25 years, he had these people. And on everyone of their
visits, they’d walk around the branch, they’d look at employees at every level, tapthem on the shoulder and say “Hey—I’ve got a quick question for you. I’m thinking
of becoming a customer of this bank. Why should I do business with you as opposedto the other bank we can see right across the street? Or the third bank that we know
is right around the corner on the next block?” Or any other block in NYC. Why
should they do business with you as opposed to the competition?More than two thirds of the time, he reported, front-line people had no good answer
to that question. Either they’d run away and hide because they are afraid to say thewrong thing and get in trouble with their boss, or in his words they’d make
something up on the fly that sounds good but bears no resemblance to what the
bank is actually doing. Now I’m kind of looking around the auditorium, wonderingwhat the reaction would be. The CEO’s weren’t all that surprised. “Sounds about right.”
I was completely flabberghasted. How can any organization expect to out-compete
its rivals if its own people can’t explain clearly, simply, convincingly why it’s betterthan its rivals and why it’s better than it’s better been in its history. And that I
would submit to you, as much as the rough economy and technology change, that is
the real problem with so many established organizations today. It’s a huge
opportunity for leaders, innovators, change agents who can see things with fresheyes. So think about it.What if this researcher sent his people to walk the halls of your company? And they
walk up to people in HR or finance and RD, tap them on the shoulder and said “What really makes this company special? What’s unique and exciting about how they do
thin
gs?” Would they all have something clear and compelling to say? Would they all
say the same thing? Is there a shared mindset like we heard about at Excel? Is there
a shared mindset about what’s going on? Would what they said be dramatically
different from what people at your top two or three competitors said?What do you promise that nobody else can promise? What do you deliver that 
nobody else can deliver? Here’s the method in a nutshell: It’s not good enoughanymore to be “pretty good” at everyt 
hing
—as an organization or individial. You’vegot to figure out “How do we become the most of something? The most exclusive?The most affordable? The most elegant? The most simple?” Every answer is gonna
be different but for so long, so many of us got comfortable operating in the middle of 
the road. That’s what felt safe and secure. That’s in theory where all the customerswere… the great middle class.
 But today, with so much change, so much pressure. So many new ways to do just about everything, the middle of the road has become the road to nowhere. What areyou the most of in your field? And how do you become even more of that? Now I
 
don’t want to make this a banking seminar, but I’ve got to tell you
, it can go the otherway too.One of the g
reat leaders I met at this same conference that I’ve gotten to know very
well is a guy named Ray Davis. He runs a bank in the Pacific Northwest calledUmp
qua Bank. It’s one of the great success stories of 
retail banking in America thelast 15 years. Over 15 years ago, there were six branches in Portland. It was a plain,vanilla, community bank. He said that over fifteen years ago, he and his colleagues
said “There are over 10,000 banks in the United States. If we do business the same
way the other 9,999 do, why are we going to be any better? Why are we going to
grow any faster?”They sat down fifteen years ago and they said “What would it look like if we re
-thought and re-imagined what the experience of visiting a bank could be like? What if we created a retail experience that appealed to all five human senses? Sight. What could a bank look like? So if any of you go and see
—
and by the way they now havetwo hundred branches up and down the west coast of the United States. You walk into an Umpqua bank and it looks like a Starbucks on steroids. Beautiful wood,beautiful furniture, pillars. Each branch has someone who goes out and works withartists in the local community, and they contribute their paintings, their sculptures,their prints. They display them at the bank, they put them up for sale so it works forboth. And so each bank kind of looks like a little art museum.
Sound. What should a bank sound like? This is the only bank I know that’s got it’sown record label. You don’t walk into an Umpqua branch and hear music. They
go
—it’s the Pacific Northwest—
they go to grunge, indie bands, whatever the casemay be. They
get them to send their MP3’s, and they play local music in theirbranches. And each branch has a kiosk and if you’re a local customer who’s like“Whoa I really like that tune,” you hit a button, the kiosk remembers, and at the end
of the year they press
physical CD’s called “Umpqua’s Greatest Hits” and they sell
them in the branch.What should a bank smell like? We are in New York City
—
the center of the financial
implosion. In New York and Boston where I’m from, it’s the smell of fear. It’s
perspiration and aggravation and people are worried. At Umpqua in the Pacific
Northwest, it’s the smell of coffee. At every single branch, the tellers are also trained
as baristas! There are cappuccino machines around the counter and Umpquaactually sells its own one-
pound bags of Umpqua blend coffee. It’s “fair
-
trade” andorganic and all that kind of stuff. They’re really proud of it.What’s a bank taste like?
Every transaction at the bank ends with a nice littlespecial-made box of Godiva chocolate. Now, this is great. They grew like
gangbusters and finally they said “You know what? We’ve got these beautifulfacilities, great music, great coffee. We close at five o’clock like everybody else. But why should we padlock the doors?” So once the bank close
s for business as a bank,it reopens as a community center. And these places host book clubs and chambers
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