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The Journey Behind Genuine Value: The John Deere Journey

One of America's oldest and most revered companies publishes an award-winning corporate history book.

By John Gerstner

Genuine Value: The John Deere Journey is the 286-page, 4-pound coffee-table book that was birthed over an 18-month gestation period. Looking back, I would have to say this was truly one of - if not the -- crowning corporate communication project of my career. (And this is not to denigrate any of the other things I've enjoyed doing ... from launching and editing JD Journal, John Deere's 29-year-old corporate magazine, to building an internal communications program from scratch, to helping launch John Deere's Website and intranet). Genuine Value simply put everything I thought I had already learned to a wonderfully engrossing, extended and intense test. Birthing a book is exhilarating, scary, exciting, tedious, fun and painful. Strange, but I now find myself relating very well with pregnant women.

Believing that the corporate history book genre is a very powerful and underutilized branding and culture-building tool, I have tried to gather together this pamphlet of experiences and observations for anyone who may have the good fortune (or bad, depending on how it goes) to manage a similar corporate book project.

Breaking out of the mold can be transforming
There are as many approaches to corporate history books as there are corporations. Our daunting first questions were: How do you capture the essence of a company like John Deere (5th oldest publicly-traded company in America, $13 billion sales, 45,000 employees, dozens of different businesses)? And how do you do it in a way that would interest not only employees, retirees and dealers, but a much broader audience including college customers, students, investors and the general public? We knew the definitive Deere history book had already been done by Prof. Wayne Broehl, a Dartmouth College historian, who wrote the now out-of-print 870-page tome titled John Deere's Company (Doubleday 1984). We certainly didn't want to re-invent this perfectly cast wheel.

We settled on the coffee-table format because we wanted a book that would boldly illuminate aspects of the company difficult to capture in words. We knew the amazingly large and well-organized John Deere Archives contained a treasure of wonderful images, many never-published. By pairing these with lean text, we thought we might entice our internal and external audiences for the book to see this venerable old American icon company in a new light.

Creativity brings life to a blank sheet of paper
Like so many projects, the good news was that we started with a blank sheet of paper. The bad news was we had to decide not only what would go on the paper, but also every other variable including the type of paper the book would be printed on. (We settled on a high-quality uncoated stock to match the tone and style of John Deere.)

So we started brainstorming and doodling, perhaps not unlike how noted industrial designer, Henry Dreyfuss rendered sketches for the first styled John Deere tractors in 1937. At that time, industrial design was common for cars but a radical new idea for farm machinery. The goals we set for the book now strike me as both brash and naive:

* Enhance the corporate identity and image of John Deere
* Attract new customers and future employees
* Capture the essence (heart and soul) of the company
* Celebrate and honor the company's unique heritage, products, culture, spirit, employees, dealers, customers, goals and vision
* Be more than a simple chronicle of the company's history - establish the impact Deere has had on agriculture, manufacturing and world history
* Set a new publishing and marketing standard for corporate history books in the areas of quality, potential audience and impact
* Attract enough media attention for the book to get it marketed through national book chains and online retailers. There is no more serious job than passing on values
We prototyped four different concepts for the book. All were interesting in their own way, but idea #4 -- to focus the book on values -- resonated like a hammer striking a steel plow. The idea was that the values Mr. John Deere lived by are still alive in the company today, and that has made all the difference.

Indeed, Deere's history is filled with great value stories. For example, during the height of the U.S. Great Depression of the 1930s, the Deere & Company board of directors decided to carry, as long as necessary, thousands of farm customers who were hopelessly behind on their farm machinery debts. Eventually nearly 100 percent of all these past-due debts were paid, and the company still enjoys an amazing amount of customer loyalty due to that single humanitarian decision.

And so for a while, the book project became a values project. We set out to answer the question that Collins and Porrass (authors of Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies) say all visionary companies must answer: "What do we actually value deep down to our toes?" After an exhaustive review of policy and vision statements, speeches, bulletins, videos, etc., we had gleaned a list of 37 values that best expressed the John Deere way of operating. With a series of employee focus groups, we trimmed the list to 19, and then with the help of some top executives, to the final four: Quality, Innovation, Integrity and Commitment. Finally, we could start engineering the book.

There is no linear path to quality
Regarding the quality of any printed piece, I can only say that you achieve it like a mountain climber conquers Mt. Everest. You attack the mountain one step at a time; you sometimes reach too broadly, you fall into crevices, you curse the mountain, but you never lose sight of your original vision: the peak. And you learn every day that you're only as good as the team you are climbing with.

Persevere. Persevere. Persevere.
Gaining the trust and support of top management for a project that stretched the company's staid image was one of the more challenging and rewarding aspects of Genuine Value. Fortunately, for this project the stars were perfectly aligned. My boss, Curt Linke, Corporate Communications VP, had the courage to allow some of our most creative (or should I say off-the-wall?) spreads see the light of day in offices larger than his. Hans Becherer, and in later stages, our current CEO, Bob Lane, were not only generously supportive; they also contributed very valuable feedback and ideas that helped us reach an even broader vision for the book.

I took the first stab at writing the titles for each spread of the value chapters. They were intended to speak to the graphics on the page, but also to impart some wisdom about work, success and life in general. In one particularly long meeting, we struggled to find just the right words to go with a wonderful 1930s fall field scene of a farmer plowing the last of a large field. Finally, Curt said the words that seemed to match both the picture and the stage we were in with the book: "Persevere. Persevere. Persevere." Commitment never quits
We soon realized the journey behind The John Deere Journey was really only about half over when the shrink-wrapped hard-cover books starting shipping out of the Graphic Arts Center bindery in Portland, Oregon. Sensitive to the other cost-containment measures the company was taking in 2000, we decided to sell the book rather than give it away, as many corporations do. This meant that the book team immediately had to launch and manage a not-so-small international book business.

Oh the book business! What a wonderfully mystifying, and in many ways eccentric business that we knew virtually nothing about. Fortunately, the book trade seems to contain a high percentage of extremely nice people who generously shared their wisdom and pointed us toward possible paths. If you ever get a chance to attend the annual Chicago Book Expo, don't miss it.

In an amazing blur of several months we did everything we could to get the word out to our internal audiences. We staged a press conference at Deere headquarters where Hans Becherer presented signed copies of the book to the oldest living retiree (97 years old) and newest employee listed in the names section of the book. We launched an e-commerce website (www.genuinevalue.com). We lined up an order-fulfillment company to take and ship Internet, mail and phone orders. We created a direct mail marketing piece for employees, dealers and suppliers worldwide (translated into six languages). We designed an order-form envelope for inserting into internal magazines. To encourage dealers to retail the book, we created a complete book marketing kit that included a counter-top display, a poster, brochure, and book marketing tips. And to keep the book in front of employees, we published a series of Genuine Value Tidbits on our intranet, and reprinted images from the book on the back cover of JD Journal magazine.

The last step was to find a publisher (Motorbooks) to handle external marketing of the book for the 2001 Christmas season. And I've started doing newspaper, magazine, radio and TV interviews, about two-dozen so far.

Every customer is crucial
Speaking from experience, most corporate communication projects are simply created and "thrown over the wall." Too often, there's no time or budget to measure how the piece impacts your audience. Because Genuine Value is being marketed (employees, retirees, dealers and suppliers can buy the book at cost), we have weekly sales reports to show how the book is doing. It is both amazing and gratifying to report that we have sold nearly 35,000 copies of the book to date, and we're just beginning to tap external sales and look at public relations opportunities.

The book has started to be deployed in many unique ways to extend the John Deere brand, and win new customers and employees. One division purchased 800 books to give to their most-prized customers as a loyalty-building tool. Recruiting is using the book to help land new hires and build a bond with student interns. Potential partners and customers in new developing markets such as India and the Ukraine are learning about the scope of John Deere through the book. John Deere employees in China opted to be given the book instead of their traditional service award gifts. And dealers are coming up with novel marketing incentive programs that use the book (i.e., buy or service a machine, get a book). Can a corporate history book sell machinery? Hmmm.

There's nothing quite like birthing a book to send you into postpartum reflection. You hold up your baby (in my case, 4-pounds, 286-pages), and scrutinize it to make sure it has no flaws. After 18 hard months of labor, I wanted our newborn to embody the words of its great grandfather, John Deere, who said: "I will never put my name on a product that does not have in it the best that is in me." I wanted Genuine Value to truly beam with Quality, Innovation, Integrity, and Commitment.

Looking back and ahead: Change is constant, but values are enduring. These are the only words on the last spread of the values section of the book. In my reflective mode, I began mulling these words in the context of my career - 32 years of constant change and challenge - all within the same company.

Perhaps in a very roundabout way, in summing up John Deere's journey, I have summed up my own.

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Editor's Note: Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in The Journal of Internal Communication Management, July 2001.

John Gerstner is now Manager, Corporate Environmental & Safety Communications at Deere & Co. He can be reached at gerstnerjohnj@johndeere.com. Genuine Value won the 2001 Independent Publisher Book Award for Best Coffee Table Book, received two IABC Gold Quill Awards, an Advertising Club of America Addy Award for packaging, plus several graphic design and printing awards. The book can be ordered at www.genuinevalue.com or by calling 1-800-455-1174.