3 Ingredients from Ben & Kerry’s – Kerry Thorpe — Transcript

Kerry Thorpe from Ben & Jerry's shares three key ingredients—fun, trusting tension, and failure—that shape their unique workplace culture.

Key Takeaways

Fun is essential in the workplace as it fosters creativity and engagement.
Embracing tension and difficult conversations is crucial for integrating activism and business.
Failure is a valued part of innovation and growth, not something to fear.
Ben & Jerry's culture blends serious activism with a playful and experimental work environment.
Authenticity and deep commitment to social causes elevate the brand and its communications.

Summary

Kerry Thorpe, head of communications at Ben & Jerry's, discusses three core ingredients essential to their working life.
The first ingredient is fun, emphasizing the importance of pursuing fun and playfulness in the workplace to foster creativity and presence.
The second ingredient is trusting the tension, which involves embracing difficult conversations and social justice activism alongside their ice cream business.
Ben & Jerry's actively supports causes like marriage equality, climate justice, and refugee rights, integrating activism into their brand.
The third ingredient is failure, acknowledged through their flavor graveyard that celebrates innovation and learning from unsuccessful attempts.
Failure is seen as a necessary part of creativity and innovation, encouraging risk-taking without aiming for perfection.
The company culture encourages experimentation, deep conversations, and balancing serious professional work with a playful environment.
Kerry shares personal anecdotes about the unique and fun office environment and the hiring process that reflects the company’s values.
The video highlights the importance of aligning business with social impact and maintaining authenticity in communications.
Overall, the talk underscores how these three ingredients contribute to meaningful, impactful, and enjoyable work at Ben & Jerry's.

Chapters

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

Hello everyone. I'm Kerry. I'm head of communications at Ben and Jerry's, and I'm here to talk to you about three ingredients that make up working life at Ben and Jerry's. These three ingredients are not comms techniques. They aren't even techniques, really, but

Speaker A

they're three things that we feel we need to have in place before the work begins. The first of these is fun. Energy is contagious. We know that, and when it comes to a sense of fun, it's not necessarily the having fun

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that's most important. It's the pursuit of fun that matters most. It's surprising how much we all need permission to have fun in the workplace and to see the workplace as a place of play, to be freed up to experiment and to

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explore. It's not that we're not all having very, very serious jobs and that we're not all uber serious professionals. It's that we see the sense of fun as a worthwhile pursuit. It starts before you enter the door. When

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I applied for the role, I was asked to write on the back of an ice cream lid in 100 words why I should be part of the team. I crossed out Jerry and put Kerry, Ben and Kerry's, something that's sadly

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never taken on, and I put a picture of me and my sister eating ice cream smeared all over our faces as children on the back of the ice cream lid. I then said less is more. It landed me an

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interview. When I got to the office, I saw car parking spaces with strange AKAs, things like the Cone Ranger or Derry Poppins. Every piece of signage seemed to be an excuse for fun and for wordplay. I saw dogs running around the office, and

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I saw a sign that said, "Don't forget to take home your three tubs of ice cream a day." The permission to pursue fun daily means that we're all so much more present, and that leads to our best work. It means

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that we are free to create and to dream. The second one is trusting the tension. We're more than just an ice cream company. At Ben & Jerry's, hopefully you've heard that by now. Our co-founders Ben and Jerry are activists,

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and they've stood up for issues that matter to them since the very beginning. Today, that means we take a stand on issues such as marriage equality, climate justice, and refugee rights in order to drive specific change. But it's not always easy to marry chunky

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swirly ice cream with social issues, but that's the point. It shouldn't be. There should be tension. First, we need to learn about the issues we're working on from NGOs, from our own activism managers, and from the movement. We need to have difficult conversations.

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We need to face uncomfortable truths. We need to ask ourselves and each other challenging questions like, how can we drive impact? How can we as a business make a difference? And that comes way before any creative development or comms work.

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When we're ready to dive into social justice topics and to make a difference, we really need to try to find the right way to bring that message to our fans and how to use ice cream as an on-ramp.

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This means attention is a necessary state of being. It elevates the work. It's the important stuff. It's where the risk is, but it's where you'll be most rewarded. It means never being asleep on the job. It means never resting on what you think

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you knew before, and it means having deep, deep conversations with your colleagues and then putting your head ahead above the power of and trusting that you're nearly ready. That word fumble there brings me to my next ingredient nicely,

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which is failure. Creativity without failure is almost impossible, which is why we're pretty transparent about failure at Ben and Jerry's. We have a flavor graveyard in our HQ in Vermont, which if you've ever been there, you'll know is on a mound. We have mini

Speaker A

tombstones for each of the flavors of ours that didn't make it to the marketplace. Each of the mini tombstones has a date on it for the amount of time it lasted, along with a little poem. So something like, here lies Pistachio.

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Why it didn't last, nobody knows. Having a physical embodiment of failure is a reminder to all of us across the company that not everything is going to work out, that we are never going to aim for perfection because perfection doesn't

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exist, that we need to aim for innovation and creativity, that we will sometimes stick our foot in our mouths. We'll create mishaps sometimes, but we'll do it because we thought it stood a chance or because we've been leading it

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or because it was fun or all of those things. This hasn't been my first attempt at this video, which you can probably tell, but I really enjoy trying. Thanks so much for listening.

Topics:Ben & Jerry'sKerry Thorpeworkplace culturefun at workactivismsocial justicefailureinnovationcreativitycorporate values

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the three ingredients Kerry Thorpe highlights for working life at Ben & Jerry's?

The three ingredients are fun, trusting the tension, and failure. These elements foster creativity, activism, and innovation within the company culture.

How does Ben & Jerry's incorporate activism into their business?

Ben & Jerry's takes a stand on social issues like marriage equality, climate justice, and refugee rights, integrating activism into their brand and communications through education and difficult conversations.

What is the flavor graveyard at Ben & Jerry's?

The flavor graveyard is a physical space at their Vermont HQ with tombstones for discontinued ice cream flavors, symbolizing the company's acceptance of failure as part of creativity and innovation.

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