Last year we started noticing the rise of storytelling in marketing. In 2013, storytelling is more than a buzzword; it’s become part and parcel of doing good business. At our company, storytelling simply is our business. But what we’re starting to do more is showing our clients how powerful narratives can be in their organizations, their teams and their families.
In the December 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review, John T. Seaman Jr., partner at the Winthrop Group, and David Smith, a founding director of Winthrop, describe how you can use “Your Company’s History as a Leadership Tool“:
“…communicating the history of the enterprise can instill a sense of identity and purpose and suggest the goals that will resonate. In its most familiar form, as a narrative about the past, history is a rich explanatory tool with which executives can make a case for change and motivate people to overcome challenges. Taken to a higher level, it also serves as a potent problem-solving tool, one that offers pragmatic insights, valid generalizations, and meaningful perspectives—a way through management fads and the noise of the moment to what really matters. For a leader, then, the challenge is to find in an organization’s history its usable past.
In this comprehensive article, Seaman and Smith examine how heavy hitters IBM, Kraft and Coca-Cola used their decades of history to ease their staff through big transitions. To ease a potentially prickly integration with Cadbury, Kraft used the parallel histories of the two companies to build bonds between employees.
If 2012 was the year of storytelling to customers and fans, this year, more companies will be using storytelling in-house to empower and engage employees.
Our tips:
- Know which kind of story to tell.
- When illustrating your company values, show, don’t tell.
- Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable — exposing your failures and moments of weakness lend your story authenticity.
- Lose the jargon. Engage your audience with a conversational tone.
How have you used storytelling to lead?
{ The HBR article can be previewed online, or you can purchase the full article from the magazine website }
Sometimes you fall in love with a client before you even work with them. That happened to our Creative Director and I when we met with Mark Deasy and Samantha D’Uva at MSA headquarters in Pittsburgh, site of the world’s leading manufacturer of safety products designed to protect people throughout the world.
With a mandate to keep people safe from harm, you might expect people to be just a little nicer than the average $1-billion company.
These folks welcomed us with such grace, hospitality and charm, I knew we had to do their 100th anniversary book. Not only does the company have an amazing and rich history, but they are smart and fun. I worked hard on the proposal and then I crossed my fingers…and my toes.
I am excited to announce that we are underway with their book. MSA is a global company with a legendary corporate culture – the average employee tenure is 30 years! As our talented team incubates this story and it begins to take shape, I know it is one that will inspire as much as it will entertain.
I was in San Francisco last week meeting with California Casualty, a dynamic insurance company coming up on its 100th anniversary and considering hiring us to produce their company history book.
I spent some time in Haight-Ashbury, a district known for being at the centre of the hippie movement in the 1960s. If you’re looking hard for it, the neighbourhood still has a subversive undertone but it’s buried fairly deep underneath an awkward collision of tacky tourist traps and mainstream brands like Ben & Jerry’s.
The same can be true of a company’s brand. We work regularly with companies that are approaching 100 years old, and even older, and I have had several candid conversations wtih CEOs who believe they are still perceived the way they were 25 or 50 years ago.
Heritage and tradition are extremely valuable assets, and they can translate to fierce customer loyalty, but only if the company is still true to its roots. The challenge for all of these leaders of venerable organizations is how to take advantage of modern efficiencies while preserving the merit of the past.
A client asked me recently: should a company stay true to its roots…or evolve? It’s a question that is being answered every day by employees and customers – all he has to do is ask: Who are we now?
“History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.” – Sir Stephen Spender
I met with Chad Pulley today, the Senior Manager of Brand and Creative Services at Black & Veatch, a global engineering company based in Kansas City. They are coming up on their 100th anniversary in 2015 and are interested in having a book written about the company’s remarkable history.
This is a company that solves the most complex infrastructure challenges in the world, but that’s not what impressed me the most about them. What won me over was when Chad told me that their CEO widely refers to himself as a “steward of company history.”
He gets it.
He understands that what he does today is tomorrow’s history, but that history doesn’t disappear. It continues to affect and shape the future, and it deserves to be documented so that future generations of employees understand how the company came to be what it is. Stewardship is management, yet not all management is stewardship. Clearly, this is a leader with a heightened sense of responsibility and duty – his employees in over 110 offices worldwide are the luckier for it.
We are starting work next month on an exciting new book for Agnico-Eagle Mines, a gold producer with mines in Canada, Mexico, Finland and the US. After I met with CEO Sean Boyd and Chairman Jim Nasso, Jim sent me a newsletter put out by their team in Baker Lake in the Nunavut territory of Northern Canada. To give you a sense of how far north it is, it got to minus 55 degrees celcius there this winter!
Company newsletters are often used to disseminate information, but Harvard Business School recent research shows that the majority of employees don’t learn well by reading information in newsletters, based on how much they retained two weeks after reading the material. However, when newsletters include stories designed to impart company values, employees absorb the material remarkably well and are able to repeat the stories in great detail two months later.
The story in Agnico-Eagle’s Baker Lake newsletter that caught my attention was about a young man named Vince in his late twenties who came to work for the company as a Night Watchman but has since been promoted to Driller Operator. He talks about how exciting it is to set goals and see them fulfilled, and the pride he has in being able to buy food for himself and his parents. It may sound like a simple story, but in a province where the suicide rate for men is 40 times the national average, Agnico-Eagle’s Baker Lake mine is a lifeline for men like Vince.
Two key company values at Agnico-Eagle are employing local people in all their operations, and providing opportunities for their employees to grow and develop inside the company. The story about Vince perfectly captures these values, in a simple yet memorable way.
One of my favourite clients, Frank Giustra, is one of the founders behind Streetohome, a foundation that brings together people from all sectors of Vancouver – business, non-profits, government, and citizens – to find and implement real solutions to the problems of homelessness in our city.
Today, the foundation announced that business leaders are hoping to raise $26.5 million to build permanent supportive housing in Vancouver. Frank donated $5 million of his own money to launch the campaign.
This is a story where the ending was written first. As our former Premier Mike Harcourt said: “There’s a real chance that Vancouver could be one of the first cities in North America to abolish homelessness.”
It reminds me of the galvanizing effect of John F. Kennedy’s famous speech: “We choose to go to the moon…because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.” You can read the whole speech here.
The next time you tell your company’s story, try telling the ending first. See what effect it has on your employees. My guess is you will find them so excited by the promise of that future, thay they will be enthusiastic to help you get there.
We got the exciting news yesterday that we have been awarded the contract to write, design and publish the 150th anniversary book for Trinity College School, a private school in Port Hope, Ontario.
The school won me over as soon as I read their mission statement: “Develop habits of the heart and mind for a life of purpose and service.” Imagine a world where every child is supported to do just that.
We have a policy at Echo Memoirs we call “Delight the Client.” We ensure that on every project, we take the time to truly delight each client by getting to know their unique tastes and doing something that shows we’ve really listened. It might be as simple as hearing that a client’s eleven-year-old daughter has just announced that she’s vegetarian, so we buy them an introduction-to-vegetarianism cookbook. Small, but it shows we are paying attention, and trust me, our clients really do get delighted. One client recently knit a hat for my son, and we did a book for her over eight years ago. Now, that’s a happy customer.
But back to Trinity College School. Before we even signed the contract, I found that it was me being delighted at every turn. This is a culture that evidently believes in delighting everyone they come into contact with, not just their clients, which in their case are the parents of their students, and alumni.
For example, the headmaster, Stuart Grainger, took the time to congratulate me on the success of my company. And the volunteer committee chair, Maria Phipps, is contagiously enthusiastic and gracious.
We’re thrilled to be invited to tell the Trinity story, and look forward to finding creative ways to delight them. For now, I’m grateful to them already for the reminder to make delighting everyone a habit of the heart.
I am delighted to share that one of our recent clients, Farallon Mining, has been offered $409 million in a friendly takeover bid by Nyrstar, a leading global mining company based in Switzerland.
Farallon’s CEO, Dick Whittington, emailed me yesterday to say: “The book played an integral part in the whole process as it allowed Nyrstar to understand – and appreciate – our dynamic, value-driven, culture…always a key consideration to any takeover. They had certainly all read it before making their offer. Thanks again for making us a great book!”
We delivered 500 books to Farallon on July 23rd and they received the takeover offer on November 15th. Not a bad return on the investment in their story, wouldn’t you say?
A 1942 piece of Superman comic book cover art went up for auction today in a thriving collectibles market where old superheroes can trade for more than $1 million.
The cover art comes direct from the collection of Jerry Robinson, now 88, a member of the original Batman team and the creator of the Joker. Back in the 1940s, most original comic art was destroyed by engravers hours after the printing presses finished their run. Robinson is one of the few artists from that time who had the foresight to save his work.
It’s not likely that your company’s old letterhead will ever fetch you a big sum at auction, but I guarantee that if you keep these artifacts and organize them properly, generations of employees and managers down the road will be glad you did. I’ve lost count of the number of times a client has been working with us on an anniversary book for their company and lamented that a previous owner or CEO hadn’t kept more records from the company’s past.
My advice for companies is to set up one filing cabinet drawer called “History In the Making” and assign the job of “Company Historian” to maintaining it. It shouldn’t take more than three hours per month. This person should have good instincts for what to keep and what to recycle. A moving “thank you” card from a customer is a keeper while notes from a staff meeting are not. Incidentally, the Company Historian should also be tasked with snapping photos at every company milestone, from Christmas parties to strategic retreats to AGMs (here’s a great link on how to organize digital photos).
So, in the filing cabinet, set up one folder for photos and one for letters, memos, etc. Write a quick caption of who/when/where on the back of each photo before it is placed in the cabinet (in a pen that won’t rub ink off onto the other photos). Store the CDs of digital photos with the printed photos (CDs labelled by year and event). At the end of each year, all of the files in the cabinet go into a banker’s box (labelled by year – ie. Company History 2010). You may be able to fit more than one year’s worth of memories in a box, in which case just write the new year on the box (ie. Company History 2008, 2009, 2010).
As for the Superman comic, it provokes an interesting side question: are you a superhero in your company? Most superheroes are motivated with a profound sense of responsibility to serve people with no expectation of being in the spotlight for their good work. Does this describe you as a leader? If you had a boss like this, would you be more or less motivated to work hard?
We were invited last year to help the Pacific National Exhibition (PNE) create a book to commemorate their 100-year anniversary. As a Vancouverite by birth, this was a serious honour. The PNE is a non-profit organization that serves the city in many ways, one of which is to host an annual 17-day fair, which was once the second largest in the world after the New York State Fair.
Basically, if you grew up or spent any significant time in Vancouver, you have a story about the PNE. It’s like very few other insitutions in its fan base. People really, really love the PNE.
Our task was to gather the best and most emotionally evocative anecdotes about the PNE over the past century and weave those stories with over 1,200 images sources from countless archives. It was a huge project for us – both in scope and profile – and with the PNE ordering 5,000 copies and selling them this year at the Fair, we knew we had to deliver something truly outstanding.
When Shelley Frost, the PNE’s VP of Marketing, received the book, here is what she wrote to us: “I wanted to let you know that we just cracked the first carton and unwrapped our very first 100th Anniversary Commemorative book. It is absolutely spectacular and surpasses our expectations in its grandeur. Stunning, elegant, vibrant and colourfully fun…just what we wanted. Thank you all for being so talented and great to work with. We couldn’t be happier that we put this project in your hands.”
Did I mention how great the PNE team was to work with? They were insightful, gracious and fun. And our team at Echo – Beverly, Lindsay, Kate, Heather, John and Norm – pulled out all the stops to make it fantastic and get it done on time.
The pièce de resistance? Michael Bublé wrote the foreword. How cool is that?
