How Leaders Can Use The Birthday Principle to Grow Value In 2025

The best companies, leaders, and teams never stop thinking about how to deliver more value to their customers, markets, and employees, for all the reasons you might guess: Markets and competitive landscapes shift, customer and employee demands evolve, and the ways in which we once delivered value also change.

What doesn’t change nearly as quickly inside organizations, even when it should? A Value Playbook. This might include:

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

Value is critical to growth, but it may not be getting the attention it deserves inside your company. We may assume everyone understands how we create value, or we have our value fundamentals on autopilot, where we don’t question our thinking or consider new ideas. In the daily demands of running a business, good companies may rely on a value playbook that is outdated and stale, where even the best efforts of a business or a team may fall flat.

An Innovative Way to Deliver Value: The Birthday Principle

As organizations define opportunities to grow and deliver even more value in 2025, here’s an innovative way to jumpstart the process: The Birthday Principle.

To understand how the Birthday Principle works, think about all of your birthdays that you’ve been lucky enough to celebrate. Which is your favorite, and why? How did you celebrate? What did others do to make it special? Most important, how did their actions make you feel?

Ask these 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 isn’t just a nice memory, but rather, something closer to a life highlight. Consider the comments made by one team of executives about their favorite birthdays:

• I could not believe the effort they went to
• I loved their attention to the little details
• I still remember the birthday speech my father made
• 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 every favorite birthday may be different, here is one common thread they all share: Getting exactly what you want, how you want it. This simple idea, which we call the Birthday Principle, becomes a critical factor when it comes to delivering and experiencing something as exceptionally valuable, and it can be applied anywhere. For any organization that aspires to provide differentiated value for customers, stakeholders, or employees, here are ways to apply this idea:

Understand how your clients define value today.

In order to create and deliver more enterprise value, internally or externally, start by understanding how your important audiences define value now: What exactly do they want, and how do they want it? It may be that you’re relying on an old definition or understanding, because definitions of value can change quickly, and what stakeholders wanted or were willing to pay for a couple of years ago may no longer be the case today. Leaders know that when cost pressures rise, their colleagues and clients want to understand, “Am I getting the value I’m paying for?” “Do we even need this?” For those on the receiving end of those questions, here’s an opportunity to better quantify and articulate the value you provide, based on their current definition, and how that value translates into outcomes that your stakeholders care about.

Apply the Birthday Principle and ask: What exactly do our clients want today, and how do they want it? How does this definition differ from a couple of years ago? How well-positioned are we to deliver on this current definition of value? What will need to change? Use whatever new insights you gather as a jumping off point to update your value playbook, narrative, or strategy.

Identify areas where you aren’t getting the ROI you anticipated.

On paper, the idea of providing a group of stakeholders, customers, or employees with exactly what they want, how they want it, seems entirely impractical, if not impossible. However, consider the case of one financial services company focused on accelerating automation to better manage costs and grow value. The effort required the global adoption of a new set of tools and processes, but nearly two years later, little had changed at the company, with adoption levels remaining low.

Senior leaders expressed frustration about the fact that they hadn’t been engaged or consulted leading up to the changes, and pushed back against new tools and processes they deemed costly to adopt, clunky to implement, and would likely not deliver the promised ROI. For them, the initiative was the equivalent of getting a birthday present they didn’t want, in a way they didn’t want it, and being expected to like it.

If you’ve gotten the wrong birthday present for someone, admit it, and return it.

It would have been easy for the organization to continue to push forward, insist that employees adopt the new approach, and attempt to override the internal resistance. Instead, executives took the unusual step of openly acknowledging that they missed the mark when the created a global plan without enough input from a key internal audience. It was as if they said: “We realize that we got you the wrong birthday present, but let’s return it and get something you actually like.” The message was a breath of fresh air at a company that struggled to admit mistakes, and went a long way toward reengaging a key group of internal stakeholders, who became instrumental in refining the plan to better meet their needs and requirements.

If you’re not sure where you might apply the Birthday Principle to grow value, consider these ideas:

• Understand the struggle and deepen your understanding of what causes pain for your customers, stakeholders, and employees
• Align your metrics with how your customers measure and evaluate value and performance
• Rethink, “If we build it, they will come”
• Update your value story to highlight how you’re providing exactly what they want, how they want it
• Begin to discuss the concept of “creating a birthday experience” and its connection to value for customers, investors, stakeholders, or employees
• Create a value playbook, revisit your value fundamentals, and refine your unique company, product, or service value differentiators

If you’re someone who has a favorite birthday, chances are that you remember it as clearly as the day you experienced it. That’s no accident: Birthdays provide a powerful, lasting example of how it’s possible to experience and deliver exceptional value, and done right, we never forget it. When this becomes the norm for a business, team, or group of leaders, creating value becomes exciting, and growth becomes inevitable.