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Humans are wired to connect through storytelling. Our universal inclination toward stories fulfills multiple roles in society. First, stories provide pragmatic information that helps humans adapt from generation to generation. And secondly, they provide moral instruction and serve as a source of meaning and social cohesion that binds people together.
In today’s corporate context, stories still matter. Humans are an emotional species and respond to meaningful stories more so than to rational arguments backed by spreadsheets. To motivate employees, companies need to think of their strategy and purpose in terms of a story.
The power of story at IBM
In 2006, then-CEO Sal Palmisano led IBM on a quest of discovery. The company was mired in the hardware industry, selling PCs, laptops, and servers, and was engaged in a race to the bottom. Other competitors, such as Dell, Acer, Asus, and Lenovo, were consistently lowering prices and IBM faced something of an existential crisis.
Palmisano turned to the work of Professor Adam Brandenburger for direction. Brandenburger had introduced the idea of an animating idea — a synthesis of a company’s core strategy expressed in the form of a story.
When advising senior leaders on developing their strategies, Brandenburger suggests that they answer two related questions:
– Why does the world need this company?
– What would be different if the company didn’t exist?
Palmisano posed the two questions to the entire company. In what IBM called a Values Jam, they posted the two questions on the company intranet for anyone in the company to address.
What IBM learned from its employees was that, as a hardware company, the world didn’t necessarily need IBM. Numerous lower-cost options existed that were relatively undifferentiated. In a commoditized market, their absence wouldn’t be much noticed.
The Values Jam initiated a slow but profound transformation of IBM from being primarily a hardware manufacturer into an enterprise software company focused on cloud computing. Over a decade or so, it evolved into a mission critical cloud software company that handles infrastructures and grids for large organizations, municipalities, and nation states.
Today, if IBM conducted a Values Jam, those answers would be different. If IBM ceased to exist, many people’s lives would be adversely affected. IBM’s current vision statement isn’t something that other pure hardware companies can claim: “IBMers believe in progress — that the application of intelligence, reason, and science can improve business, society, and the human condition.”
One powerful knock-on effect of IBM’s animating idea is its ability to attract top scientists and engineers, many with PhDs, who want to do important work. Through its Watson AI applications, IBM sits at the cutting edge of technological innovation, which attracts some of the world’s top talent. The company story resonates and motivates.
Saving the Earth: The Patagonia story
Few companies are as idealistic as Patagonia. The outdoor equipment and clothing manufacturer’s guiding purpose is to Save Our Home Planet. In the case of Patagonia, these are not hollow words.
The company makes numerous tangible commitments to the environment, and to its employees, that make Patagonia’s animating idea a through line of the employee experience.
– They read job applications from the bottom-up to learn about applicants’ hobbies and environmental passions before assessing their hard skills
– They encourage customers to not buy clothes they don’t need, and have clothing repair and recycling services
– After one year of full-time employment, they sponsor (full pay) employees to go on sabbatical to volunteer on an environmental project somewhere in the world
– They routinely sue companies and the government over environmentally damaging policies and practices
– They bail out and pay all legal costs of employees who are arrested during non-violent environmental protests
– They give generously to environmental charities, and recently the entire ownership of the company was placed in an environmental trust for the long term
Patagonia isn’t for everyone. But both its customers and employees believe in the story. It has been consistently profitable since its founding, and during the pandemic it didn’t fire a single employee, even in its retail locations when all the stores were closed for months.
Cultivate your why
Companies as different as IBM and Patagonia use the power of story to align their people around shared values and collective effort. Here are three simple things that companies can do to find and commit to a fresh animating idea:
1. Host a Values Jam with the entire company. Listen to employees and customers. Take them seriously, and craft your animating idea around what you learn from them.
2. Enlist input from the whole leadership team. The CEO doesn’t always have the answers. Empower other members of the senior team to help craft the story.
3. Incorporate the why of the story into the everyday. From recruiting to onboarding and training to performance evaluations to meetings, tie everyday activities to the company’s animating idea.
4. Translate goals into stories. Leaders and managers need to be adept at translating tactical and operational goals into narratives that resonate with their employees on an emotional level.
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Drew Jones, PhD, is an anthropologist, former business school professor, and practicing management consultant. He is a founding partner of Experient, a workplace culture and strategy consultancy. Over the past 20 years he has worked on culture, leadership, and workplace design projects with clients throughout the US, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. He is published widely in academic management journals and magazines, and has published three previous books on design thinking and innovation, coworking, and activity-based working (ABW). His new book is Open Culture Handbook: Five Questions to Drive Engagement and Innovation (Amplify Publishing, Oct. 3, 2023). Learn more at DrewJones.co.