You can only act strategically, day in, day out, if you know your company's strategy. Here are five things that happen when you really do know it.

1. you know when to say 'no.'
2. you get better support from your colleagues--they are trying to achieve the same things
3. you can wing it with confidence--the strategy is your safety net
4. you can focus on doing the right things rather than just doing things right
5. you can act with more autonomy because you know where others are going, and autonomy is motivating

It's quite possible you'll lose your job as CEO if you are unable to persuasively communicate your company's strategy. Léo Apotheker, the recently fired CEO of Hewlett-Packard, has just learned this lesson.

Mr Apotheker was appointed CEO of HP in October 2010 less then a year before he was let go. Before HP, Apotheker was CEO of SAP at the end of a 20 year career with the German software giant. He left SAP under a cloud and in a memo SAP issued to its employees on his departure he said, "My communication towards you was not always optimal." This should have rung some alarm bells. 1

After about 5 months in the job (March 2011) Mr Apotheker announced the company strategy. They were going to expand into the cloud business, build out its software business, open up an app store and reinvest in R&D. The aim was to lift profit margins. They would move into business analytics. He promised to take a conservative approach suggesting there wouldn't be the massive company purchases like the Compaq or EDS buy outs HP had done in the past. 2

In August 2011 Mr Apotheker announces that HP will purchase British software company Autonomy for just over $10 billion and that he is considering selling the PC business.

In September 2011 Mr Apotheker is replaced with eBay's celebrity CEO Meg Whitman. The HP stock price during Mr Apotheker reign falls from $46 to $25.

Of course this is a high level telling of a CEO's demise which has many more twists and turns including the fanfare announcement of a new tablet to rival the iPad that was eventually withdrawn from sale only weeks after its launch. The important points to note in terms of communicating a strategy are these:

• Massive changes in mind are going to hurt you. Mr Apotheker suggested they weren't going on a spending spree then announces its third biggest purchase. Our Prime Minister in Australia, Julia Gillard, is suffering a similar fate. On election she promised not to introduce a tax on carbon. As of last week the Parliament has voted in a tax on Carbon (something I support by the way) and she has been crucified for it.
• A good strategy means something is going to change. That means there will be people who are strong supporters of the old way of doing things. The misunderstood Machiavelli put it this way, "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." Telling everyone you might sell your PC business only creates uncertainty. IBM pursued the same strategy of selling their PC business to the Chinese company Lenovo. IBM, however, sold the PC division before announcing it to the world. Sometimes its better to rip the band-aid off quickly.

The effectiveness of HP strategic story Mr Apotheker told (and there was a good chance he didn't actually tell a story) comes from not just what's in the story, its believability and novelty, but also how it is told and whether it becomes a story worth listening to, remembering, retelling and acting upon. Add to this the importance of consistency. From all accounts Mr Apotheker failed at each step. Now let's see how Meg Whitman fairs.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/09/business/09nocera.html
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/technology/15hewlett.htm

Steve Jobs introduced iCloud at Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference in June 2011 . iCloud is Apple’s ‘next big thing’. After explaining the iCloud concept, Steve says, “Now, you might ask ‘why should I believe them – they’re the ones that brought me MobileMe?’” The audience laughs uproariously. Everyone in the audience knows that MobileMe is pretty much the opposite of Apple’s reputation for user-friendliness. It just doesn’t work. Steve continues. “It wasn’t our finest hour. Let me just say that. But we’ve learned a lot.”

Acknowledging an uncomfortable truth goes a long way to removing its power. If everyone knows the story, ignoring it increases it power. Tackling these anti-stories (the stories in your organisation that work against your strategy) is vital.

But there is a downside of 'running down' MobileMe. There are many people in apple who have invested a lot of their energy and enthusiasm into MobileMe and hearing this public admission is probably uncomfortable or even painful for them. For this reason, most organisational communication overlooks the negatives and avoids risking upsetting anyone. The resultant messages have a 'pollyanna' feel to them that undermine their credibility.

We are working with many organisations to develop their strategic stories and find one of our key roles is helping them find and maintain the courage to say the tough things. Kevin and I are writing a paper on this at the moment reflecting on the lessons of our projects in the past few years. We'll blog about it when we finish.

How do you get your people to think about what the future could be, in a way that inspires them and starts to spark action, but also takes into account the simple fact that the future is unpredictable?

I was reminded of this challenge, yet again, last week.

We were working with a client on developing a session for a two day leadership conference focussing on bringing their strategy to life. As we were throwing round ideas on the types of things we could do, someone suggested an exercise that involved the participants spending time writing a magazine article about how things are for that organisation in 5 years time.

This triggered a recollection when we did a similar thing when I was working in the UK for the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). I was involved in planning and running a series of workshops for the management population of my division, working with American management guru Noel Tichy to bring his concept of " cycle of leadership to life. These were 2 day courses, and we ended up running them for nearly 5000 leaders, over a two year period in 2006 and 2007.

On day two there was an exercise where everyone had to draft a magazine article, for the leading business magazine The Economist, with these instructions:

You are assigned to write a cover story for the Economist - dated September 21st, 2012. The story is about the dramatic transformation of RBS, and how through your leadership and outstanding execution, RBS is achieving unprecedented success. The article should be written as if it were 2012 and should discuss the challenges RBS has overcome, how that was done and what the business now looks like.

Now to understand the rest of this story you need to know that RBS during that time was one of the biggest and most successful companies in the world. In 2005 it announced a profit of $A10.27bn, up 14% from the year before, and in
2006 the profit increased another 16% to $A13.69bn. By 2007 the profit stood at a very impressive A$15.33bn and the share price stood at $A8.94.

It was held up as a major success story in the UK corporate world, and its Chief Executive, Sir Fred Goodwin, who had been knighted in 2004, was a darling of Wall Street and the city in London. The feeling was that we could do no wrong, the business would just keep growing and growing, and become even more and more successful.

People spend an hour crafting these beautiful magazine articles talking about RBS and its success five years in the future. They then worked in three's sharing each other stories, before three or four of the best ones were shared with the whole group. I remember they talked about things like how RBS now had 500,000 staff (up from its 120,000 at the time), that its market share has gone through the roof (i.e. its share of the credit card market was now 80%, up from 20%), that the world's most innovative companies came to RBS to learn how to do it, and that its profit had just hit A$30bn a year.

At the time I thought the exercise was very useful. It created energy in the room, made people feel good about themselves and the organisation and all of what was mentioned seemed realistic and achievable.

On the 19 January 2009, RBS announced a loss of AS41.65bn, the biggest ever annual loss in UK corporate history. On that same day the British Government increased its holding in the bank to 70%, and the share price stood at less than 14 cents. Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs, businesses within the RBS Group were sold and Sir Fred resigned, he was vilified by the British press, and his house was even attacked by angry protestors.

There is no way in 2006 or 2007 that we could see this downfall happening. It was completely realistic to think of continued success and global domination. The exercise seemed to do exactly what Tichy had wanted it to do, and people were still talking about months after the events. But every single prediction that 5000 people made about the future proved to be wrong.

How do you get your people to think about the future, and what it could be, but which also takes into account its unpredictability? How do you manage and deal with that paradox? Was the exercise we did at RBS 'wrong', or did it achieve what it wanted, if its purpose was to get people excited about RBS' future, and reinforced to them why they wanted to be there. Is it more of an engagement technique than a strategic visioning exercise?

I would really like to hear your views on exercises like this and your experiences of dealing with the challenge of trying to envisage a rapidly changing, unpredictable future and the value in doing so.

Click to see larger version 800x600

My engineering friends would say it like this...good intentions are a necessary but insufficient condition for success.

In my working life I have only ever met a handful of people who deliberately set out to humiliate, disempower, demotivate or otherwise disengage staff. Yet these are exactly the effects that many managers/leaders have. How can this be?

The answer, of course, is the 'knowing-doing gap'. Its the difference between what we intend as a result of actions and the impact that we have on people. But, can managers really be so lacking in self-awareness?

Apparently the answer is yes! In this article (registration required to access it) Lucy Kellaway from the London Financial Times describes an 18-month survey asking CEOs to list their 3 worst features. A staggering 97% list weaknesses that are really strengths, like 'I'm too trusting and accessible'. Lucy's conclusion is that the three worst traits of chief executives are a lack of self-knowledge, a lack of self-knowledge and a quite extraordinary willingness to give themselves the benefit of the doubt.

The Economist recently published this story:

So, step 1 needs to focus on getting leaders to acknowledge their faults and to focus on their impacts rather than their intentions. This is the first objective in our leadership programs. We expose participants to an equal number of positive and negative examples around engagement and the impact of manager behaviour. Participants are asked to identify what they think are the best examples and the ones that are worst. We also ask them to identify any examples where, as a manager, they have done this themselves or something like it. They identify these anecdotes by placing a blue dot on them.

The results are spectacularly conclusive. Over 75% of the blue dots are placed on the positive examples. Another way of saying this is that the participating managers consider themselves nearly four times more likely to generate positive experiences than negative ones. If this assessment were accurate it would probably be a pretty good place to work and employee engagement would be high. Unfortunately, in all four cases, employee engagement was moderate at best (between 40% and 60% of staff being ‘engaged’).

Our next step is to show these leaders a tag cloud (produced using Wordle) of the tags for all the examples collected in their organisation. A tag cloud of the aggregated data is shown below.

As the tag cloud shows, on average staff relate four times as many negative experiences as they do positive ones. This is almost the inverse of the managers' self-assessment. For many leaders this comes as a revelation - they need to change their behaviour for staff engagement to improve. They need to look past their intentions and focus on the impact they are having in the workplace.

The data has been collected from over 250 leaders from four large organisations between 2008 and 2011.

We have been using narrative approaches for many years to help organisations with employee engagement. This 4 minute youtube video gives some insights into some of the things we've notice working in this field and some examples of behaviours that can build or undermine engagement. In 2009, we also posted a detailed description of how narrative can be applied to this challenge.

This story was told the other day by General David Petraeus (The head of all international forces in Afghanistan) just before a press conference illustrating the meaning of true importance.

HT to Victoria Ward. Source: The Guardian

This is just one of many example Barrie Cassidy gives of Kevin Rudd being, as Professor Robert Sutton calls, a bosshole: someone who leaves followers disrespected, emotionally damaged and de-energized. Cassidy paints a dismal portrait of Rudd as someone who is primarily concerned for himself, someone who seeks the limelight and someone who is obsessed with trying to control everything that might impact his image. According to Cassidy the dislike for Rudd among his colleagues was so great that when the challenge came to overthrow him as prime minister the numbers flowed to Gillard so quickly and overwhelmingly in her support there wasn't even a need for a vote.

I'm really hoping that Kevin Rudd's behaviour detailed in this book is an exception in politics because we can't expect our country to be governed effectively if our prime minister intimidates his staff and ministerial colleagues to the point where no one is willing to disagree or debate the issues which are going to affect millions of Australian's lives. It seams to me that outrageous bosshole behaviour is diminishing rapidly in our corporations I'm pleased to say. In most cases (I wish I could say in all cases) bosses are held to account. That's not to say we can't slow down our efforts to call appalling behaviour. I just hope this book helps those people in politics to realise it's time to dial back the arrogance and direct their power to making a difference for their constituents.

I read this book in two days, which is unusual for me. I found the stories gripping. It's an easy read. The first two-thirds chronicle the period leading up to the 2010 election from the point where Malcolm Turnbull's loses the opposition leadership and the role Godwin Gretch. Then the rise of Tony Abbot at the new opposition leader and his shaky start. But the majority of part 1 of The Party Thieves is focussed on Kevin Rudd. His 2007 election win, his temper and bad behaviour, Julia's rise, and the dismissal. The last third is a diary of the 2010 election interspersed with recollections from Barrie about his days as Bob Hawke's press secretary.

I suspect this book is going to create a lot of controversy. Highly recommend it.

Have you ever had this happen to you? I was chatting with a senior leader asking him about their organisational values. "Yeh, sure, we have a set of values. Let me see, where did I put the annual report?" He then ferreted around his office to find the list of values.

There are some things we should have in our head (and in our heart and gut) while others are better just written down. We need these things in our head because, and you've heard this many times before, the world continues to be more complex and unpredictable. So everyday we are faced with new and unpredictable situations where decisions are needed. We wont have time to re-plan. So we will have to rely on the things in our head (our mental models, beliefs, attitudes,values) to do good things for yourself and the company. Here are four things to have in your head:

Values - we know what's really valued in an organisation by the actions people take; especially those people with power. So lists of values such as integrity, transparency, professionalism are worthless if people can't see them lived and when they are transgressed consequences happen. Now you can do nothing and just hope your values support your business, but that's a high-risk strategy. As Gary Hamel once said: "Every organization is "values-driven." The only question is, what values are in the driver's seat?"

Direction - you should really understand your strategic direction otherwise how do you decide what to say "no" to. But don't be fooled into thinking that because you know your strategy the future is crystal clear like a large painted target on the side of a barn. A useful strategic direction is less like a bulls-eye target to be hit and more like a range of desirable destinations to be discovered (on my diagram the destinations lie on the dotted line arc between the two arrows). Strategic stories are useful because they provide context, explain why and show a range of possibilities and avoid the target metaphor.

Identity - Are we local or are we global? Are we a services business or a product business? Are we more like a rolls royce or more like a mini? Knowing the business identity and the identity of your part of the business and how that compliments other identities, helps you connect and complement others inside and beyond the boundaries of the enterprise.

Purpose - I was lucky enough to have the following coincidence. One afternoon I met with the CEO of an insurance company and asked what the purpose of his business. He thought about it for a while and said, "you know what, we are here to sell insurance." Really? Does that get your people out of bed in the morning so they can make a difference? I don't think so. The very next day I happened to have another meeting with a second CEO of an insurance company and I asked the same question. The CEO shot back at me, "we help Australians build a privately funded safety net." Now, that seemed more interesting. It's true that some businesses have an obvious purpose where people really feel they are making a difference to other people's lives. But whatever you enterprise it's important that your purpose inspires your people to make a difference. At Anecdote our purpose is to help bring humanity back to organisations.

I mentioned at the beginning of the post that there are some things that are best written down. Following on from the ideas of David Allen and his Getting Things Done approach, projects and tasks are best written down in a trusted system so you can get these things out of your head and stop them from cluttering your mind.

Are you tired of reading blog posts? For a change how about just listening about storytelling? Makes sense really.

I recorded this podcast for a group of executives in New York and thought you might also enjoy it. It describes why I think storytelling is an important leadership skills, why stories have impact, provides a couple of tips on becoming a better storyteller, describes what we mean by strategic stories and shows how story work can be much more than merely telling tales.

Here's the link to the audio file.

What if a single warrior could have the knowledge of thousands?

Two weeks ago I gave an after dinner speech to the Australian Army Knowledge Management conference. Just before the speech I was introduced to the guy that has responsibility for running the Battle Command Knowledge System, which hosts CompanyCommand along with fifty other forums, Colonel Charles (Chuck) Burnett. I was a bit taken aback as I had a copy of CompanyCommand in my hand and was intending to use it as an example during the talk.

I was fortunate to spend some time talking with Colonel Burnett the next morning and he was very generous with his time. I was particularly interested to hear that one of his greatest challenges is continually justifying the value of the forums like CompanyCommand to his chain of command. Not that having to justify the value of a community of practice is a new thing; its just that having to justify the value of one of the most visible CoP success stories in the world seemed remarkable.

To tackle this, he conducted a survey last year to collect examples of how the communities of practice were making a difference. There were 2500 responses; problems overcome, mistakes avoided, money saved ... lives saved. The collected stories are now a key part of communicating the value of the CoPs (we have previously blogged about this technique here and here).

I will finish this post with a quote from the CompanyCommand book:

It became clear to me...that CompanyCommand.com was not about the website. Rather it was about a community of professionals sharing and learning in a fast-paced dynamic operational context; the technology simply enabled the process. In fact, the more I thought about and observed the...forum, the more I realised that the core technology of the forum was the people and the conversations, not the computer.

Now, I just need to wangle an invitation to the US Army KM conference in October this year ☺

Every company wants to tell a compelling story that conveys the essence of what they're about. If it's a success their customers and employees will know where they have come from and where they are going and what makes them unique and worthwhile. And with this knowledge they become attracted to what they are offering. Stories are great for answering the question, 'why?' Why are we investing in this equipment? Why are we hiring these type of people? Why are we spending so much time with our new employees? Why? Why? Why?

I've a treat for you (thanks @vivmcw for the link). A superb example of an company telling a series of stories to explain what makes them tick. But before you feast your eyes on some terrific storytelling keep the following in mind: while it can be important to share your company story to a mass audience with the artistry only a Madison Avenue ad firm can deliver, it's more important your leaders can tell your organisation's story, without notes, to everyone they work with. And from my experience helping executive teams craft and tell their strategic story, the process of working it out is as important as telling the strategic story.

Did you enjoy that? What I really enjoyed was how the narrator (company founder Kihachiro Onitsuka--or perhaps an actor playing him) recounted a series of anecdotes describing key events in the history of ASICS so that we inferred a bunch of things that are not actually said explicitly in the video. For example I felt that ASICS was continually innovating, that they had a long a proud history, they invested in state of the art technology, and they were willing to destroy the past to create the future.

Can your leaders tell your strategic story?

It's interesting how we often don't make a comment when someone provides a great service day in, day out but we really notice when someone recovers well when the chips are down.

So if you are anywhere near Coburg and need printing services I highly recommend Kelvin's Kwik Kopy shop. Here is his address and contact details.

Kwik Kopy Printing Centre Coburg

Kelvin Minerds

583 Sydney Road, Coburg, VIC 3058

Phone (03) 9354 5822

Anecdote helps you harness the natural power of stories to bring your strategy to life. We help you tell your strategic story and then engage your employees in the strategic process so everyone has a hand in creating it. The result is a strategy everyone understands in concrete, specific terms where the level of commitment to its achievement is vastly increased.

We help our clients be more effective and resilient through developing their capabilities to work collaboratively, in teams, in communities of people with shared interest and expertise, and across diverse networks.

Contact Us

NB: For our regular readers you might be wondering why we are explaining what we do in a blog post. We just wanted to make sure people could find our services around making strategies stick and our four speciality areas.

On a recent trip to Canberra I was lining up to board the plane. Behind me was a young family. Their young son, probably four or five, was quizzing his dad.

The boy said: "Why are we in the line?"

"Because we are getting on the plane," his dad replied.

"Why are we getting on the plane?"

"Because we are visiting Grandma in Canberra.," says dad.

"Why are we visiting Grandma?"

"Because we love Grandma and she likes us to visit."

Our urge to know 'why' is deeply embedded in our psyche. From an early age we want to know the reason things happen. It helps us predict what might happen in the future and makes us feel safe.

The desire to know why doesn't diminish with age. If a CEO announces that the company is shifting direction to concentrate on customer service, everyone in the company will want to know why.

And if they haven't been told the story of how the shift came about, they will create their own story.

Imagine two colleagues chatting after the CEO announcement to focus on customer service.

"After all these years banging on about innovation, now it's customer service. What's that about?" says Paul

"Well, I heard the new chairman is a zealot for customer service and at his last position there was a dramatic improvement when they focussed on their customers. He must have twisted the CEO's arm," says David

"Good to know the CEO can think for himself," Paul chuckles rolling his eyes.

If leaders don't tell the story that explains important decisions then employees will use the best information they have to create their own story. At best this only confuses everyone and stalls action. At worse the new direction is actively undermined by the competing stories.

You might be thinking, "so do the senior leaders simply spin a story that's serves their purpose?" You could try but employees are too smart to believe a porky pie. It's in everyone's interest for the leaders to tell what really happen to prompt the change. There are two things someone hearing the story will ask themselves before they will really listen to what's being said: is it relevant? and, is it plausible? Fail these two tests and you may as well be telling the stationery cupboard. With something as important as a new strategic direction it's vital that all the leaders want and can tell this story.

We call this type of story a strategic story and we've been having fun helping some interesting companies find and tell their strategic story.

In my hands is a corporate strategy. It’s a glossy six-page document designed for every employee to memorise and enact. There are seven themes each with three sub-themes. There are also seven values. All the information is presented as dot points well set out with lots of white space for easy reading. Sadly this strategy is unlikely to stick. Perversely, it could even cause the exact opposite behaviour the leaders desire. Here are three reasons for my statement.

1. It’s hard to remember a set of ideas without an organising schema. Neuroscientist John Medina reminds us that we need to get the overall gist of something before we can attend to the details. Watch this video for an example of what he means.

One way to provide the overall context for a strategy is to create a strategic story that places the company’s directions within a schema. That way people get the gist of the strategy and can then attach more and more meaning.

2. Too many things on our mind diminishes our willpower. Implementing a strategy requires willpower and as a recent Wall Street Journal article describes it only takes a moderate cognitive load before we succumb to temptation. In my opening example here are at least 28 things to remember about the corporate strategy which will definitely overload our ability to remember it but more importantly it could be sapping our will to stay the new strategic course.

In applying this idea we would be better off introducing parts of the strategy over time so people can concentrate on one or two changes at a time, perhaps over a 90 day period, before introducing the next part.

3. We remember what we see. In a corollary to the aphorism, 'we remember was we feel,' it is also true that we much more likely to recognise and recall something when we can see it. As John Medina puts it, “The phenomenon is so pervasive, it has been given its own name: the pictorial superiority effect.”

This idea immediately gets us thinking of the splendid pictures we can include with our strategies, those striking images that conjure the essence of what our company is all about. This is the standard approach but there are two other types of images you should consider back-of-the-napkin drawings and the images created by stories.

Dan Roam has created a business from helping people sketch out their thinking, back-of-a-napkin style. In his book with the unsurprising title, The Back of the Napkin, Roam illustrates the power of a simple diagram to share an idea. If you can’t sketch it on a napkin, forget it, it’s too complicated. So ensure everyone can tell your company’s strategic story with the aid of some simple sketches.

Effective stories paint pictures for us as well. When someone recounts a compelling story we visualise what’s happening. And because we are playing out the action in our mind’s eye the story becomes memorable for us. If we tell the story a number of times it becomes embedding in what we know. As the story researcher Roger Schank said, “To tell a story is to remember.”

This morning, Shawn and I compared recent airline lounge experiences. Mine went a like this

One could argue that the Qantas staff member was being consistent (fair, equal) in her application of the rules. A good thing you might say, except that a very frequent traveller left with the resolve to travel VirginBlue in the future. In Shawn's case, the staff exercised some autonomy, weighed up the situation and decided to be flexible, whilst still making it clear that it was 'against the rules'. Which is the better example of customer service? It reminds me of my time in the Air Force where our mantra was "Rules are for the guidance of the wise and for the blind obedience of fools'.

This article gives an overview of a new book by Jason Jennings, 'Hit the Ground Running' about the secrets of winning CEOs. He didn't find the most successful CEOs any smarter; they were 'smart enough'. This similar to Gladwell's view in his latest book 'Outliers'. Jennings describes these successful leaders:

what differentiates them from their peers is their authenticity, humility, their determination to never make a decision without contemplating it’s long term consequences and their genuine affection for their workers, customers, vendors and suppliers and shareholders...these leaders are incredible listeners who never tire of asking questions.

The author rails against conventional business wisdom, the Gerry Maguire style "show me the money" approach that brought us the GFC and many corporate and leadership disasters. The book has 10 'rules' for successful leaders, a few of which are listed:

1. Practice the golden rule in everything you do - you will reap exactly what you sow
2. Gain the belief of everyone around you instead of demanding of expecting respect.
3. Ask everyone around for help; don’t pretend to have all the answers or the plan. Remember what happened to Carly Fiorina at HP. On her first day she announced to the company that she had the plan and strategy for HP. Everyone felt left out, came to hate her and her regal ways and during her reign she halved the companies value.
4. Work ruthlessly to simplify everything instead of making it more complicated.
5. Make sure that everyone in the company knows the strategy and their role in its achievement.
6. Cultivate a fierce sense of urgency in everyone because either things aren’t going well and you need to fix them fast or things are going well but the world (and your circumstances) are going to change and you need to be ready.

Why do so many leaders and organisations behave counter to these concepts? They all seem pretty logical. For me, its a good example of the 'knowing-doing' gap: we know this stuff is important but we just don't do it.

It sounds like organisations that apply the rules above would be pretty good places to work. Shawn and I are fortunate in that our narrative insight approaches are about bringing the 'rules' above to life in organisations. As a result we get to work in some pretty good organisations on projects that make a difference. Pretty cool huh?

Is there a movement toward meaningful and worthwhile work? Are people increasingly interested in pursuing work that contributes to a more equitable, just, sustainable and inclusive world? Do people increasingly want work that makes the most of their talents? A job they are proud of?

Its certainly getting a push from Gen X and Gen Y concerns about sustainability and purpose, but the trend seems much broader. The rise of thinking in areas such as Appreciative Inquiry, social responsibility, positive psychology, workplace happiness and complexity together with a raft of applications for narrative (both storytelling and narrative insight / storylistening) are other indicators.

A sizeable UK study in January 2008 suggested that "over three quarters of working people in the UK are concerned that the job they do should be worthwhile and almost half hanker after a job that is more worthwhile than the one they have at the moment." The table below from this study shows how key aspects of worthwhile work vary across age groups.

Another indicator of the rise of worthwhile work is the emergence of organisations such as EthicalJobs that connects people who are looking for worthwhile work with employers who offer jobs that make a difference. I like that these guys promote their brand image like this..."our office runs on 100% Green Power, we drink 100% FairTrade tea and coffee, and we use only bikes, feet & public transport to get around" They recently published survey results suggesting that there is a movement towards worthwhile work with many people prepared to take a decent pay cut to get such jobs.

For me there is one other key aspect of worthwhile work - being valued. This is an area where managers have an incredible influence of the extent to which people consider their work as being worthwhile. Why do we have workplaces that cause my sister to start crying while we are cleaning up after dinner on Friday night when she explains how her boss treats her like dirt.

Managers need to be mindful that a key part of their role is to build engagement and to create more interactions like this one...

My brand new manager (a young up-and-comer) rang me on Friday afternoon as I was driving home. He said "I'm just ringing to let you know how much I value what you do. You regularly top the sales results and have been doing that for years. I wanted to make sure you knew that what you do is noticed and how much it is appreciated. Have a great weekend." I had to pull over to the side of the road. In the past eleven years, through three previous managers, no-one had ever said anything like that to me before. I started crying...

There is a trend toward worthwhile work. And there are huge advantages for all of us in accelerating and broadening its uptake.

I am working on a project requiring a major organisational transformation. On Monday, the division's chief heads off to Canberra to get a mandate to make the change from head office. One of his biggest concerns is head office continuously second-guessing him as he leads the organisation through the change process. He recognises that in complex situations there are no correct answers and there are likely to be many different opinions about what should be done, and head office has a habit of trying to micro-manage things.

I suggested using a story to demonstrate how head office second guessing might be fatal to the change process. This story from a BBC program 'The Human Mind' came to mind:

Relating the story to being second-guessed by head office might go like this. "Imagine if head office were there at that fire. There was no evidence that anything unusual was happening, the team were arguing against the chief (they wanted to stay and fight the fire) and they were making good progress. Chances are that head office would have overruled the fire chief and told him to keep fighting the fire, and the entire team would have been killed. And the head office decision would have been perfectly rational and the whole thing written off as a tragic accident."

Thanks to all my Twitter friends who helped me refine this article. It was a fun process that reinforces for me the strength of social computing approaches for collaboration.

The main purpose of this whitepaper is to introduce senior leaders to the idea of business storytelling and demonstrate its importance, especially in the increasingly complex and unpredictable world we live in. It also provides some approaches to how you find and recount your experiences in a business context.

I encourage you to send a copy to your CEO, or better still your CFO and CIO, and help them realise that people only remember what they feel and despite the painful sounding name, people don't feel bullet points.

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to Story Week so far. Continuing with our theme of "leadership", today we are featuring a story from Dr Fiona Wood, who was recognised as "Australian of the Year" for her work after the Bali Bombings. And we'd still like to hear your ideas for Friday's story.

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/talkingheads/txt/s1711934.htm

Day 2 of Story Week is here. Yesterday we had a video with a big Story. Today we have a snippet, a small story of a day-to-day interaction in a workplace. Our theme for the week is leadership, so look at the story in this light. Think how you would feel in the same circumstances. And of course, please pass this on to your networks and encourage them to join the fun. The more, the merrier. N.B. We have yet to finalise a story for Friday - is there a video of a story on the theme of leadership (preferably involving a woman) that you'd like to suggest?

The Story Week is here! Over the next 5 days, we'll be offering you 5 stories - some momentous, some more low-key - and we're inviting you to tell us what you think of them. After you have viewed, read or heard the story, we'd like you to fill out the form below and maybe tell us a story of your own. We will be publishing (under a creative commons license) the aggregate results from this little experiment and also some of the stories that you tell us. So without further ado...

Last year I wrote about how the skill to apologize will become even more valuable as the world get even more complex and speedy. Things will go wrong.

Well it looks like some books are being published on the topic. Here's what Tom Peters has discovered.

In What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful, Marshall Goldsmith proclaims: "I regard apologizing as the most magical, healing, restorative gesture human beings can make. It is the centerpiece of my work with executives who want to get better."

All I can add is:

Amen!

I believe that skill at Apologizing is nothing short of a "strategic competence"!

"Strategic competence"? Absolutely! Customers lost for want of a timely and sincere "I'm sorry. My fault" number in the billions, from restaurant diners to aircraft engine purchasers.

And now there's an entire book on the topic arriving May 1, Effective Apology: Mending Fences, Building Bridges, and Restoring Trust, by John Kador.

Read a whole book on the topic?

Yes!

Damn it!

Stra-te-gic-com-pe-tence!

In addition to being an excellent "how to" guide, the book also captures hard evidence. For example, with a new policy on apologies, Toro, the lawn mower folks, reduced the average cost of a claim from $115,000 in 1991 to $35,000 in 2008—and the company hasn't been to trial since 1994. The VA hospital in Lexington, Massachusetts, developed an astonishing approach to apologizing for errors (forthcoming—even when no patient request or claim was made). In 2000, the overall mean VA system malpractice settlement was $413,000. The Lexington VA hospital settlement # was $36,000—and there were far fewer per patient claims to begin with.

The authors of Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath, point out that there are three story plots we humans dearly love:

• the creativity plot where the protagonist solves one or more puzzles through shear ingenuity, persistence and always with a dash of dumb luck. The DaVinci Code is an example.
• the connection plot where people come together from different walks of life: different race, class, affluence, nationality, power. This week Sheen and I re-watched the movie Notting Hill which is definitely an example of a connection plot: famous celebrity connects with impoverished book store owner.
• the challenge plot where the protagonist faces a daunting challenge, everyone is sceptical whether is can be done, and especially by our hero, but in the end she triumphs. You might not have heard of Susan Boyle but this video is a classic example of a challenge plot told in 7 minutes.

Now you might be thinking, "how does all this relate to stories in a business context?"

Successful leaders are people who are able to change the minds, feelings and ultimately the actions of people who follow their lead. And stories play a fundamental role in helping people change their minds. Don't just take my word for it. Howard Gardner, the Harvard psychologist and author of Changing Minds wrote: "The principle vehicle of leadership is the story: The leader affects individual behavior, thought, and feelings through the stories that he and she tells."

So to succeed as a leader it's important to build your repertoire of stories but you don't want to recount just any story. You want to be mindful of the things that happen in your life that others will find interesting, inspiring and meaningful and by knowing these three plot types you can be on the lookout for these experiences. Let me finish with another quote from Gardner: "One of the most powerful weapons in the possession of leader-storytellers is the lives that they lead. To the extent that leaders embody the stories that they tell, the leaders' examples will increase in power."

Gardner, H. (1999). "The vehicle and the vehicles of leadership." American Behavioral Scientist 42(6): 1009-1023.

In 1993, as the co-founder of photographic library startup, I travelled to Los Angeles to check out one of America’s largest commercial photographic collections. Remarkably they were well under way converting their film stock to Kodak PhotoCD, a proprietary digital format launched the year before. We were impressed with Eastman Kodak because it looked like they were taking digital photography seriously. The shift to digital was really happening. It was an exciting time. So we began to furiously scan our 100,000 images. At the time it seemed that Kodak was riding the digital wave. They were a digital camera pioneer building the first digital camera in 1975. This 110 year old manufacturing giant, however, missed the digital boat. Their share price today is less that what it was for them in the 1950s. So why did Eastman Kodak falter? Why did it take them so long to really adopt a digital approach to their products and services? What held them back?

Perhaps Kodak reached their goals in the early ‘90s and was struggling to set new ones. Kodak was the predominant force in the photographic industry. It had succeeded through its many advances in chemical processing and manufacturing streamlining. At the same time it was more than aware of the new digital technologies yet profits were coming from its established business lines. In the minds of their leaders they knew how to succeed. They had done it for so long. So don’t fix what’s not broken.

We see this ‘I know what’s right’ mentality in our leadership programs. Just last week Mark was running a leadership program in Sydney and the most senior person in the room approached Mark and said, “I really just wanted to come to see what the troops were learning and keep an eye on things.” He had been with the company for 20 years and believed he’d seen everything and didn’t need to learn anything new. He told himself a story along the following lines: “I’ve been in the business for 20 years now and I have seen it at its best and its worst and I have survived and thrived. So I pretty much know what I’m doing and that it works.”

Our stories, collectively and individually, have a profound affect on what we believe is possible. Therefore the challenge for leaders is to both understand the stories affecting individuals and groups and then know how to define and tell (ideally through wide participation) new stories that set the direction for the company. But that’s not all. The greatest challenge is to help people hear, remember and believe where the company is headed and then inspire people to act in line with that belief.

Whether the leadership team at Kodak had seen the need to redirect towards a digital future in time is hard to say. But even if there was a resolve to go digital, were the leaders equipped with the skills to create the new stories and have them stick in a meaningful way?

Aligning everyone’s actions to the company’s strategy is equivalent of finding the corporate Shangri-la. It can be done. Take IBM’s turnaround for example.

This post is the beginning of a series I have planned that looks at why storytelling is a vital leadership skill. Some of the topics I will cover include how stories are memorable, how they show commitment, how they inspire people to take action, how they reduce anxiety, how they share lessons, how they convey values and how they change minds.

References

Gerstner, L. V. (2002). Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround. New York, Harper Collins.

Turner, T. (2008). Call Me Ted: The Autobiograhy of the Extraordinary Business Leader and Founder of CNN. London, Sphere.

A while back I created a sketchcast of how I explain the Cynefin Framework and it became a popular sketch. Unfortunately Sketchcast went out of business and I lost my sketch so last night I recreated it and popped it up on YouTube.

To paraphrase Annette Simmons, "People wont listen to you until they know who you are and what you want." And one of the best ways to introduce yourself and answer these two questions is to tell a story that reveals something about your character and experience.

The challenge for many people, however, is to find and tell a story that doesn't sound like you are just blowing your own trumpet. One approach is to take the spotlight off yourself and make someone else the lead. You can then play the supporting role.

When I introduce myself to a new audience I often tell the story of how I got started in storytelling by meeting Dave Snowden. Dave is a world leader in knowledge management and narrative techniques and is an impressive speaker and storyteller.

At this point you might want to have a look at this video where I tell the story of how I met Dave. After you've watched the video, and before you read on, please jot down what you inferred about me after hearing the story and pop your answer in the comments. This will help illustrate a key point to this approach.

For those of you that didn't watch the video, here's the basic plot. Dave comes to Canberra and presents at a seminar I organise. He captivates the audience for the whole day with stories and new ways of seeing the world. I'm so taken with the performance that I resolve to do similar work one day and that night write a story and send it to Dave. He admonishes me for missing the whole point of his work, which is to help organisations make sense of their own stories, not to craft stories. We become friends and I join to lead his research centre on complexity in Australia and New Zealand. Then I leave IBM to set up Anecdote in 2004.

So Dave is front and centre in this story. He is the star but I play a significant supporting role.

When I ask the participants of our storytelling for business leaders workshops (which I'm giving in London in June) about what they infer about me after hearing this story (I tell the story at the beginning of the day and ask for their feedback in the afternoon), they say the following:

• you are passionate about storytelling
• you are willing to take risks
• you have large organisation experience
• you've worked for a highly respected company
• you are confident to share your mistakes
• you are experienced in storytelling

I never get the sense that they think I'm a poser (mind you, that might not be saying). To the contrary, it feels like we make a connection quickly and the workshop is off to a good start.

So think about those times when you'd lent a helping hand, where you'd help create the conditions for others to succeed, and tell these stories to introduce yourself and build rapport. These stories speak volumes about who you are, what drives you and they reveal your character; the pre-requisites for trusting collaborations.

Yesterday I popped out for a meeting at the National Australia Bank. They have a new CEO, Cameron Clyne, and last week he announced a restructure that has substantially flattened the organisation. While the restructure has been the topic of lots of conversations and stories inside and outside the bank, Cameron has done two other things that has got employees talking.

Now these stories might not be 100% factual. But as story guru Robert McKee points out, "What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens." These are the stories some staff are telling about the new CEO and they view his actions as exciting and energising. In their mind a wonderful change is going on.

Then something interesting happened in the meeting. The person I was talking to said it was incredibly difficult to gain direct access to the CEO. That he had a coterie of minders that he brought from New Zealand with him that intercept any approach. And that this is how it should be because he is an incredibly busy man with tremendous responsibilities.

It's interesting that the positive stories created by the meeting room and bubble change seemed to create a positive aura over other activities involving the CEO.

A lesson for leaders is that in addition to be able to find and tell your own stories, it's also important to do things that create positive stories in the organisation. Be remarkable so people remark on your behaviour. But also listen to what stories you create and what people infer from them.