I’ve caught a bit of grief from a few people for not writing blogs about business or branding. After all, I am in business and that business is branding. So naturally, I should be waxing on about the business of branding, right? 16.347 million others are, why not me? Why am I telling stories about my dog and crazy men in restrooms in Grand Central and possums and noodling? Why don’t I write blogs about branding tips, industry buzz words and topics like “the top five words that will increase your chances of selling more fish hooks” or hamburgers or car insurance or thongs, whatever.
I have a simple premise, and it came from a quote I read years ago. If you want to build a boat, don’t hire people to cut wood, shape fiberglass, make sails or weld rails, even though you may need those things. Inspire people to want to go to sea. They’ll make the most amazing boat you have ever seen. I hijacked the exact quote, but that was the gist. Stories inspire people to do amazing jobs, not job descriptions, employee manuals, mission statements and intranets filled with corpspeak and biz-o-jargon.
In the scared-ass, fear-soaked, turmoil of the current economic maelstrom, timidity causes companies to count this and categorize that and organize ourselves into silos and out of jobs or worse, out of business. We get caught up in the weeds, choke on the details, only see the small picture, and forget why we show up every day. We lose our sense of humor first. Then we lose our best people. Then we lose our customers and our company. The last thing we lose is our souls.
We have so many pointless meetings that we have to stay up all night to get the work done. We do what we’re told instead of what’s right. We don’t inspire anyone, especially ourselves. Fear is not a mission statement. We’ve lost our ability to love and tell a good story. We’ve marginalized our storytelling talents and skills until they are no longer part of the workplace. Now we need PowerPoints just to get a point across, even a stupid one. I sat in a meeting last week where the only thing anyone cared about was what the Powerpoint slide design would look like. The idea was overlooked. The reason for being in business was ignored. The customer was forgotten. What will the PowerPoint slide look like? Make it pink, like the slip we’re all going to get because we forgot why we came to work this morning.
Neanderthals could tell a story around a campfire, but a CEO needs slides and a multimedia presentation just to tell us the company is tanking. No technical wizardry is needed, however, to get the word out about his billion-dollar bonus. That story flows faster than CNN in Bagdad. Why? It’s a story.
Stories are the one thing that separates us from every other species on earth. Stories are what make us human. Before we could write, we told amazing oral Gilgamesh-ian stories around campfires. Yet every day across corporate America, we cut out the stories from our jobs and replace the living proof of our unique humanity with spreadsheets and calculations and formulas and thumb-stabbed bastardizations of our important communications on the little plastic buttons of our cell phones.
The noble story is ostracized from corporate cube farms, replaced by emailed fear, Twittered biz-babble, Facebooked irrelevance. With all of our amazing communication technology, the tools have become more important than what we are supposed to be building. The humble story is vilified in academia in favor of rote memorization, fractured facts and multiple-choice stressfests. But when people get together with friends and family, they need no PowerPoint to tell a story – and everyone knows exactly what the point is.
We want stories and we need them now more than ever. Corporate America is story starved. If I can tell a story about nothing more than a possum in the woods or my dog locked in a mental battle with a family of squirrels, surely America’s companies can tell a great story about the people and products that keep them in business every day. What was the Godfather but a story about a family business?
Stories are about people, even if the only person in the story is the one telling it. If CEO’s and companies and brands don’t learn to tell their great stories, they’ll get to read their last story on the front page of the business section or in red letters on CNN.com or the obits of the Wall Street Journal.
You have a story. Tell it. You may have many stories. Tell them. Just remember, you have to live your story too, because often, your story gets told by the actions of your people who do their jobs so amazingly well, they land a plane, calmly in the Hudson River and methodically and heroically save everyone on board.
That is a story.
