THINK DIFFERENTLY

Nestlé Purina had a mission - "Passionately feeding the nation's pets", and a vision - "Better to Best". The aim was to persuade 250 employees to take a broad vision handed down from the executive team and translate this into living values supporting the company’s mission. This challenge was to create an event to make the audience think differently by agreeing a set of values that summed up the way they wanted to work to enable them to achieve the goal of being the number one pet food company in the UK.

We felt the conference had to grab attention, get everyone involved, ensure all-round contribution, and encourage different thinking. To get the employees to think differently our creative concept focused on the employees themselves; the set and the lunch area had large black and white portrait prints of Nestlé Purina employees with their pets and we filmed them talking about what passion means in terms of pet ownership and working for Nestlé Purina. These vox pops brought to life peoples’ thoughts and perceptions about the mission and the company. To achieve the goal of short listing and selecting the values, we suggested bringing in a professional facilitator with wide experience in the field of change management. The audience working in groups of seven worked through a number of exercises to select the top five values that they felt reflected the way they wanted to work and behave. Guest speaker Sean Fitzpatrick, former record-breaking All Black captain then illustrated the importance of thinking differently as being a big part of a winning team.

The event as a whole altered the way Nestlé Purina people thought about their business world, and gave them a very fresh and relevant set of values that helped the audience think differently about how they worked.