Author: Nailia Tasseel

Celebrating their impressive member numbers, LinkedIn are asking users to submit their own Linkedin related stories:

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Click one of the faces to find out how Linkedin has changed the lives of its users.

I’m sitting in another meeting with a prospective client, talking about the need to develop their business story, when a familiar question comes up: ‘But we’ve got a clear strategy… here on one sheet of paper… why do we need a story as well?’

For inspiration I recalled Peter Guber’s book ‘Tell to Win’.  Yes it’s a book about storytelling, but it’s written by the ex CEO of Polygram Entertainment and Chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures.  This was the guy who was brought in to run one of the worlds largest entertainment companies, just after it was bought by the Japanese… in an industry that has to bet millions on big deals to survive.  In that position you are not going to succeed by talking about fairies at the bottom of your garden.

Yet Peter talks about big pitches that he lost despite having all the facts and strategy at his fingertips.  He then goes on to give many examples of how he and other successful business-people have used the power of a story to close a deal or turn round an organisation.  In search of the answer to why this is the case, he talks to Robert Rosen, a former dean at UCLA.  ‘Stories put all the key facts into an emotional context,’ Rosen says.  ‘The information in a story doesn’t just sit there as it would in a logical proposition.  Instead, it’s built to create suspense.’  That story says Guber is like a Trojan horse.  It plants change ideas inside peoples’ minds: ‘Thanks to their magical construction, stories emotionally transport the audience so they don’t even realise they’re receiving a hidden message.

What Rosen and Guber are tapping into is the difference between information and persuasion.  A well presented strategic framework can inform people about what they need to do, and for highly motivated senior management that maybe all that is required.  A story however, by engaging people at both a rational and emotional level, is able to challenge and change peoples beliefs and behaviours.

So the question of strategy versus story is really a question of whether you need to inform or persuade.  The answer is probably in the strategy itself.  If it requires change, from the alignment of directors to the behaviours of those on the shop floor, then persuasion is probably the name of the game.

On March 18th 2011, Charlottee Todd sold a dress she’d made whilst at college for £78,000.  It had cost her thirty quid in fabric and by most peoples view was not the next big thing in design.  But the dress had a story.  It was the one that Kate Middleton wore – the one that caught the eye of the future king.

That story probably added 100,000% to the value of that product, and demonstrated once again that people don’t buy products they buy stories.

But if that’s the case how do major brand owners create the stories that people want to buy?  I remember my first job at J Walter Thompson back in the early eighties.  We’d just created Mr Kipling, that country parish priest, and producer of exceedingly good cakes, as a front for a product manufactured in Hull.  Later that decade I was working with Courage on Hofmeister, a German lager that had never been further south than Reading.  It is possible to create a brand story, or enhance one that is already there.  But over the years consumers have become more savvy and cynical, and brand owners should now tread with care.

Another way of looking at this is the idea that a brand is the sum of a million stories – the stories of every interaction that customers make with the product and service you sell.  The sum of these stories creates the promise that the brand offers – not the one that the marketing team has dreamt up, but the real one.  The one that exists in the consumers’ minds.  The one that determines whether they buy the product or not.  In the past these stories have had less power, but now of course there are many mechanisms that can connect them: Trip Advisor, Amazon, Chat rooms, Twitter and Blogs galore. 

So how do you get tens or even hundreds of thousands of employees to deliver consistently great, brand differentiating stories every day, through every interaction with the customer?  The challenge is enormous, and the consequences critical.   Most business start with process and rules.  However these are highly limiting.  Often the stories that matter are the ones where things have gone wrong, or the customer has an unusual challenge.  Almost by definition, these situations sit beyond the process.  What's more if you just run a business by rules, you disempower people, force them to focus their energy on compliance and create demotivation and inefficiency.  The alternative is to build a winning culture based on shared beliefs about the way we do things around here.  With people that are really connected to what the brand is trying to achieve, and feel empowered to create their own story.

What is at the heart of making change happen? If we could narrow it down to a few fundamentals what would we focus our efforts on, or at least aim never to lose sight of?

Sometimes a simple message is the best clarification. Today a quote by Javier Bajer (Munro and Forster) did this for me on the topic of culture change.

The way to change temperature is by opening the window or by turning the heating up or down. You don't 'do' temperature, you do something else and a change in temperature is the outcome. It's the same with culture. You can say 'be more innovative' – but it doesn't just happen. Humans don't change because you tell them to. You need to create an environment to make things happen.

Today it was announced that a number of long-serving officers in the armed forces have been made redundant – notified by email.

Recently my colleague Kate wrote of her brother's experience in finding out whether he still had a job from the armed forces via a website. This impersonal notification will send shivers down the spines HR professionals, so many of whom have had to bear such dim tidings for thousands of employees during the recession.

Sadly, public and private sector redundancies in this new era of austerity are inevitable.  Yet the implications of quick-fire redundancy affect far greater numbers than those made redundant themselves.  In the case of the armed forces, negative PR rages on externally, affecting the public reputation of the organisation.  Internally, plummeting morale and resentment will cost them dearly in productivity, efficiency, respect and performance.  In any organisation, of any size, those left behind often feel guilty that their colleagues have been removed.  The fear factor of 'me next?' – particularly in the private sector – can result in people jumping ship, a costly exercise at any level.

The ramifications of 'how' redundancy is handled, outside the technical process, can make a huge difference to the mood and engagement of a wider workforce, whether an immediate team or indeed – in the armed forces' case – the entire organisation.  Leaders seeking high performance organisations must be prepared to create the most efficient infrastructure possible .  But in shedding jobs, treat people as human beings, with respect and care.  Good leaders will prepare everybody first with an honest story of the forward ambition of the organisation which builds pride and an understanding of the higher purpose as well articulating the need for changes yet to come, so people can understand why it's all happening when it does. And with any contentious email, before hitting 'send', think very carefully about how the rest of the workforce will react.

I was intrigued by David Malone’s documentary on the secret lives of waves (Wednesday 2nd February BBC4).  In it David explored our fascination with what makes our oceans swell and subside, and enables surfers to do their thing.  He revealed that the wave as it travels across the sea is not made of water, but of energy transferred from the ocean winds.  This energy can travel thousands of miles, before the sea runs out of water and the energy is once again transferred to sound, heat and sand shifting.

The concept of an object: a wave, also being a process: the transfer of energy, was then extended to us as human beings.  We too transfer energy from what we eat, drink and breathe, and in turn process it into activity and regenerating ourselves.  Maybe our fascination, David concluded, is not because we are like waves; it is because we are a wave.

At The Storytellers, we have been using the graphic of a wave to illustrate the phases of our programme.  It was developed to illustrate how the story of the journey a business is on, starts at the top of an organisation; with the vision of the senior team, then travels down to connect the people who will make that vision happen.

But, just like David’s ocean wave, maybe the real meaning is about the transfer of energy.  The elite athlete coach Jim Loehr, in his book ‘The Power of Story’ talks passionately about human energy: ‘The most precious resource that we human beings possess’.  It is fundamental to our existence, and we will only produce a finite amount, for a relatively few years.  So how we choose to use it, and the way we apply it, is one of the most important decisions we make.

One of the qualities of great leaders is their ability to transfer their energy for achieving something to others.  To persuade other human beings to channel this precious life source into a common purpose.  And as Jim knows, from working with sports people at the top of their game, that energy, if successfully channelled can achieve extraordinary things.