Can Your Entire Strategy Fit on a T-Shirt?

I own at least 20 t-shirts from my last company, Flywheel, a technology company here in Omaha that I joined in 2016. They say things that make sense to very few people: “MFBFT,” “SHIP IT,” “DON’T BRING STEVE.” As it turns out, there was more to those shirts than I ever gave them credit for.

When I joined Flywheel, I thought I had a lot to say. I wrote a lot of really long documents. I made matrixed strategies and org designs and crowded slides and complex operational plans and overengineered frameworks.

And our Chief Product Officer? He made a t-shirt.

I watched as over and over, he galvanized teams around a strategy, a product, an idea, a marketing campaign, an overhaul of an organization. He did it quickly, clearly, and without all of the spreadsheets and plans and charts that I was dragging along behind me. I watched as he narrowed in on the true heart of the matter, and then laser-focused the message to something so small it would fit on a t-shirt.

• A robot on a green t-shirt created an entirely new line of business.
• The color blue launched our first enterprise sales program.
• And the words “ship it” created a united, velocity-driven engineering and product team that took the company to a new level.

I asked him about this strategy once at the corner of our after-work bar and he said:

“If you can print it on a t-shirt, you can explain it to literally anyone.”

The importance of storytelling and simplicity was the lesson there. That the solution, no matter how brilliant, was only as good as the team you could rally to achieve it. That a repeatable, wearable, visually stunning word or phrase could drive more success than any complex document ever could.

Clarity creates Buy-in. Buy-In creates collaboration. Collaboration with smart people brings the ideas that actually take the work to the next level.