How leaders can use the birthday principle to increase their value in 2025

The best companies, leaders, and teams are constantly thinking about how to deliver more value to their customers, markets, and employees, for every reason you can imagine: markets and competitive landscapes are changing, customer and employee needs are evolving, and the ways to do this The value we once delivered also changes.

What doesn’t change nearly as quickly within organizations, even if it should? A valuable playbook. This could include:

• How our company, our business units and our teams define the unique value they provide
• The processes, systems and capabilities used to deliver this value
• How we create new sources of value and stop what doesn’t work
• How we evaluate progress and measure success

Value is critical to growth, but it may not get the attention it deserves in your company. We may assume that everyone understands how we create value, or we may have our value foundations on autopilot so we don’t question our thinking or consider new ideas. In the day-to-day demands of running a business, good companies may rely on outdated and outdated values ​​that can cause even the best efforts of a company or team to fail.

An innovative way to create added value: the birthday principle

As companies define ways to grow and deliver even more value in 2025, here is an innovative way to jump-start the process: The birthday principle.

To understand how the birthday principle works, think about all the birthdays you’ve had the pleasure of celebrating. Which is your favorite and why? How did you celebrate? What have others done to make it special? And most importantly, how did their actions make you feel?

Ask this birthday question to a group of leaders and you’ll be amazed at how quickly the conversation becomes personal, meaningful and real. It turns out that a favorite birthday is not just a fond memory, but rather something closer to a life highlight. Consider one leadership team’s comments on their favorite birthdays:

• I couldn’t believe the lengths they went to
• I loved her attention to the small details
• I still remember my father’s birthday speech
• I was so touched that all my friends took the time to be there

The Birthday Principle: Exactly what you want, how you want it

While everyone’s favorite birthday may be different, they all have one common denominator: you get exactly what you want, the way you want it. This simple idea, which we call the Birthday Principle, becomes a game-changer in delivering and experiencing something exceptionally valuable, and it can be applied anywhere. For any organization that wants to provide differentiated value for customers, stakeholders or employees, here are ways to implement this idea:

Understand how your customers define value today.

To create and deliver more business value internally or externally, you must first understand how your key audiences now define value: what exactly do they want and how do they want it? You may be relying on an old definition or understanding because definitions of value can change quickly and what stakeholders wanted or were willing to pay a few years ago may no longer be the case today. Managers know that as cost pressures increase, their colleagues and customers want to understand: “Am I getting the value I pay for?” “Do we even need this?” For those receiving these questions, this is an opportunity to ask you Better quantify and articulate the value delivered based on its current definition and how that value translates into outcomes your stakeholders care about.

Apply the birthday principle and ask: What exactly do our customers want today and how do they want it? How is this definition different from a few years ago? How well positioned are we to implement this current definition of value? What needs to change? Use any new insights you gather as a starting point for updating your value playbook, narrative, or strategy.

Identify areas where you are not getting the ROI you expected.

On paper, the idea of ​​giving a group of stakeholders, customers or employees exactly what they want and how they want it seems completely impractical, if not impossible. However, consider the case of a financial services company focused on accelerating automation to better manage costs and increase value. The effort required the global rollout of new tools and processes, but almost two years later little had changed within the company and adoption rates remained low.

Executives expressed frustration that they had not been engaged or consulted in advance of the changes and balked at new tools and processes that they said were costly to launch, cumbersome to implement and unlikely to deliver the promised ROI . For them, the initiative was tantamount to getting a birthday present they didn’t want, in a way they didn’t want, and that they were expected to like.

If you got the wrong birthday present for someone, admit it and give it back.

It would have been easy for the organization to push forward, insist that employees adopt the new approach, and try to overcome internal resistance. Instead, executives took the unusual step of openly admitting that they missed the mark when they created a global plan without receiving sufficient input from a key internal audience. It was as if they were saying, “We realize we gave you the wrong birthday present, but let’s return it and get something you’ll actually like.” The message was a breath of fresh air to a company that was struggling Admitting mistakes was instrumental in re-engaging a key group of internal stakeholders who were instrumental in refining the plan to better meet their needs and requirements.

If you’re not sure where to apply the birthday principle to increase value, consider the following ideas:

• Understand the struggle and deepen your understanding of what causes pain to your customers, stakeholders and employees
• Align your metrics with how your customers measure and evaluate value and performance
• Consider: “If we build it, they will come.”
• Update your value story to highlight how you give them exactly what they want and how they want it
• Start by discussing the concept of “Creating a Birthday Experience” and its value for customers, investors, stakeholders or employees
• Create a value playbook, revisit your value foundations, and refine your unique company, product, or service value differentiators

If you’re the type of person who has a favorite birthday, chances are you remember it as clearly as the day you experienced it. This is no coincidence: birthdays are a powerful and lasting example of how it is possible to experience and deliver exceptional value, and when done right, we never forget it. When this becomes the norm for a company, team, or group of leaders, value creation becomes exciting and growth becomes inevitable.