On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs, the legendary boss of Apple computers, addressed the students of Stanford University: “I am honored to be with you at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.”1
The first story was the Bildungsroman of Apple’s founder: the story of a poor kid who was left to his own devices and who, more or less by accident, enrolled in a typography course (it was thanks to this training that the Mac became the first personal computer to have a bitmap font). The second was a story of love and loss: the legend of how the first Macintosh was created in his parents’ garage and then, over the next ten years, the success story of Apple and Jobs’ meeting with his future wife, with whom he would start a family. But, no sooner had he won than he was the hero excluded from his own success. He had to leave the company he had founded. The third is a story of death and resurrection: Steve Jobs miraculously survived a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. At the end of his story, the hero recovers his health and wins back the company he founded and which he will lead to new success.
Steve Jobs ended his short story with the advice he had read in a children’s magazine as a boy: “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” There was, of course, nothing spontaneous about this performance. When he told his stories, Apple’s boss was conforming to the norms established by story-telling’s intrusion into the spheres of management ten years earlier. That is a different story, and it is one worth telling.
It is a story for our times. It is an edifying story, with the stars of the new economy in the leading roles: Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and many others, directors of the World Bank, IBM, Xerox, and the gurus who preach “capitalism with soul.”2 It is a true story that tells us of “lean” multinationals that turned away from production to develop daring screenplays that made their shares soar on the Stock Exchanges, of international organizations on which the health of millions of people in Africa depends, and whose directors sometimes have difficulty communicating from one office to another. It is a story that tells of “battles with organizational monsters” in glass towers in New York, where hyper-motivated managers try to persuade their colleagues to accept “daring transformations” and to transform profoundly their perception of both themselves and their company. They are, explains French management consultant Dominique Christian, “stories of miraculous strategic virtuosity and heroic turnarounds … Stories of the heroes and heroines who make success possible.”3 They are stories that celebrate the “knowing firm” whose object is no longer just to produce commodities, but to share knowledge, to circulate information, and to manage emotions.
This is also the story of the invention of storytelling management. This new school of management emerged in the United States in the 1990s, and it recommends bringing storytellers and griots into companies. There are many new lessons to be learned: thinking, acting, networking, managing distance, forming nomadic teams, mastering the information overload, adapting to the speed of real-time business… There are innovations that lead to “e-transformations”4 and stubborn prejudices that cost companies millions of dollars. PowerPoint presentations, checklists, and boring arguments have had their day. Make way for storytelling!
According to Steve Denning, a former World Bank director and now one of the new management’s most active gurus, it is easy to explain the success of storytelling in the mid 1990s: “The origin of my interest in organizational storytelling was simple: nothing else worked.”5
What is the common factor linking the explosion that destroyed the Challenger space shuttle, the crisis at the New York Times, and the financial scandals at Enron, Tyco Electronics, WorldCom, and Health-South? According to the Concours Group and Vitalsmarts, a group of consultants specializing in crisis management, these organizations, which experienced serious difficulties in 2003, were all part of the same “culture of silence.” According to Vitalsmart’s President Joseph Grenny, all these failures could have been avoided if these organizations had paid attention to one crucial attribute of their cultures: “the way in which they manage crucial conversations.”6
Another study by the same group of consultants, published in February 2007 and entitled Silence Falls, hammers home the same point. Some 1,000 directors from 40 or so companies were surveyed, and the study looked at 2,200 industrial projects in sectors as diverse as the pharmaceutical industry, financial and banking services, government agencies, and consumer products. It reached the surprising conclusion that “organizational silence” is the cause of 80 percent of failed business programs and projects.7
“Is silence killing your company?” asked Harvard Professor of Leadership Leslie A. Perlow in March 2003, after spending some time immersed in the world of start-ups, the mutant companies that expanded so rapidly thanks to the Internet explosion.8 It all began when Netscape was floated on the Stock Exchange in 1995 and lasted until the dotcoms collapsed from April 2000 onwards. Perlow spent nineteen months in a start-up founded by three students and studied it as though she was “an anthropologist studying a foreign culture.” She was able to observe the company’s life cycle, from its successful launch—after a few months, its value was estimated at $125 million—until its final bankruptcy. According to her, the reasons for the failure of so many start-ups were not purely financial or the result of the sudden bursting of a speculative bubble related to computer technology and telecommunications. The reasons also had to be sought in the silence of their directors, their inability to communicate with partners, in the things that were left unsaid and in unresolved conflicts: “Our research shows that silence is not only ubiquitous and expected in organizations but extremely costly to both the firm and the individual,”9 and that its effects can range from simple misunderstandings to the bankruptcy of the organizations concerned.
In companies that made a cult of communications and whose essential task was to facilitate the exchange of information on the Internet, collaborators at all levels of the hierarchy proved to be incapable of communicating with one another, of dealing with disagreement, and of handling conflict. A worrying “silence” was undermining the dotcoms from within. It was the stock-market spiral that that swept them away, but there was also an internal spiral. Following the German sociologist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, Perlow described it as a “spiral of silence”:
Silence is associated with many virtues: modesty, respect for others, prudence, decorum. Thanks to deeply ingrained rules of etiquette, people silence themselves to avoid embarrassment, confrontation, and other perceived dangers. The social virtues of silence are reinforced by our survival instincts … The need for quiet submission is exaggerated by today’s difficult economy where millions of people have lost their jobs and many more worry that they might.10
Extending her study to other sectors, she concluded that silencing conflicts was a universal problem in companies, whatever their size or form, and that employees had great difficulty in identifying this dangerous syndrome before it had disastrous effects. “Our interviews with senior executives and employees ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 corporations reveal that silence can exact a high psychological price on individuals, generating feelings of humiliation, pernicious anger, resentment, and the like, that, if unexpressed, contaminate every interaction, shut down curiosity and undermine productivity.” Along the way, she found that everyone had a story to tell at every level of the organizations’ hierarchies.
Why is neo-management interested in what workers have to say? Could they have discovered that silence at work is a new source of waste, like slack periods, absenteeism, and sabotage? Do these worries concern all categories of wage-earners and all sectors of activity? The history of this odd couple—silence and work—needs to be written. The silence of the craftsman concentrating on his task is deliberate and sovereign. Silence can be enforced by the disciplines imposed by a foreman or by the noise of machinery. The silence of factories and workshops can block the expression of complaints and demands, and the transmission of skills. There is a link between fear and silence.
Bernard Girard, who has written a history of management theories, reminds us that, as early as the eighteenth century, Mandeville had noted that the silence of the British, as opposed to the noise made by the French, gave the British workforce a competitive advantage: “The silence that reigns in English factories and the way they do business, promptly and keeping their appointments, impresses all visitors.”11 The way the factories were organized was based on a military model. The military schools, which had been turned into industrial schools run by former officers, introduced military discipline into the world of production: their pupils wore uniforms, were recruited into battalions that drilled in the factory yard, were woken by the sound of drums and were forced to be silent in the workshops … At the end of the century, we will see them again in Henri Fayol’s projects.
On visiting an English factory in 1859, Louis Reybaud noted: “Two things strike one more than anything else: the small number of people employed and the silence that reigns.”12 Forty years earlier, Charles Dupin wrote: “When one enters these establishments, one is struck by the general order they exhibit. The workers are busily active, almost always in silence.”13 Without retracing the history of management here,14 we will simply recall that silence at work became the rule when the factory emerged: many different labor forces were brought together in the same place and subjected to a very hierarchical discipline in which verbal exchanges inside the factory were strictly controlled.
The same interdiction applied to the women who worked in shops and offices. In 1898, one sales assistant told La Fronde newspaper:
This is our lot: we must accept wages that are not enough to live on, and keep silent; we have to stand, which becomes unbearable after a few hours, and keep silent. After an exhausting day, we must stay awake when and how our masters wish us to remain awake, and keep silent. We must put up with the improper remarks of passers-by, the crude suggestions of our bosses, and keep silent. When we are ill, we must put on a pleasant face and keep silent. We must keep silent, keep silent if we do not want to be dismissed.
Le Père Peinard, for its part, commented: “There poor women could not be more silent if you sewed their lips up.”15
“In the cigarette factories of about 1870,” writes Marie-Victoire Louis, women workers did not have the right to speak or smile. The same applied in the Galeries Lafayette in 1914, when they were also forbidden to address each other with the familiar tu. In the Parlerie in Périgueux in 1925, there was a complete ban on talking, and also on singing: “The women have to work all day long in an absolute silence that is broken only by the noise of the objects they need to perform their tasks.”
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault traces how the silence of workers spread from military schools to industrial schools, from barracks to workshops and factories, from armies to prisons. It spread throughout the disciplinary society like a lava flow. Foucault lists its instruments and techniques, but also its rites and codes: the internal regulations of workshops, barracks, and schools, which codified the right to speech, ritualized its written or oral forms, and authorized or banned its expression. This enforced silence is a basic element of the early management theories of Ford and Fayol. It spreads to the Fordist factory. In the twentieth century, the speech of workers, which was described as chatter or gossip, was seen as a distraction, a relaxation of discipline or even a form of passive “resistance”: workers who talked were suspected of plotting stoppages and strikes. Work on the assembly line reduces the workplace to silence; the noise of the machines replaces the talk of the workers. In direct contrast, strikes and factory occupations were, throughout the twentieth century, identified with speech, and any return to work was seen as a return to compulsory silence.
From the Industrial Revolution onwards, silence was one of the arsenal of measures that gave managers control over their labor force. And the same silence still reigns in many places. In the outsourced workshops of Indonesia, China, and Brazil, as in the factories of the developed countries, on assembly lines and in sweatshops, workers’ ability to speak is still subject to a discretionary power. And not only there: as we have seen, silence also reigns in start-ups and dotcoms, in the offices of insurance companies and in boards of directors, behind the screens of Silicon Valley’s computer firms and in the glass towers of financial giants like Enron and WorldCom, where pension funds build up and evaporate.
“Don’t Keep Quiet: Tell Stories”
But does this silence always have the same meaning? Of course not. Ever since the 1990s, management theorists have been forced to deal with the question of what they call “organizational silence” or “systematic silence.” As Elizabeth Wolfe Morrison and Frances J. Milliken explain:
We argue that there are powerful forces in many organizations that cause widespread withholding of information about potential problems or issues by employees. We refer to this collective-level phenomenon as “organizational silence.” In our model we identify contextual variables that create conditions conducive to silence and explore the collective sense-making dynamic that can create the shared perception that speaking up is unwise. We also discuss some of the negative consequences of systemic silence, especially for organizations’ ability to change and develop in the context of pluralism.16
When Enron collapsed in 2003, the world of management had to explain, to its great embarrassment, that one of the new economy’s flagships was nothing more than a mirage or a financial fiction: this bankruptcy showed that silence could lead to phenomena of collective blindness. Within the space of a few months, millions of retired people lost everything they had. The company’s directors were indicted for having lied to their employees and shareholders. According to Californian academic David Boje, “Enron made the narrative bluff that Washington politicians and Wall Street analysts would not be able to distinguish between fiction and reality.”17
Hence, in contrast, the new virtues that are attributed to those who break the silence. In 2002, three women were named as Time magazine’s “personalities of the year.” Their exploits were described as “whistle-blowing.” All three had chosen to break the law of silence that reigned in their organization. Cynthia Cooper, vice-president of WorldCom, had pointed out to her board of directors that the irregularities in its accounts amounted to $4 billion. Enron’s vice-president Sherron Watkins had alerted her CEO Ken Lay shortly before the company went bankrupt. FBI agent Colleen Rowley had handed her superiors a file on Zachariah Moussaoui who, before 9/11, had denounced the inadequacies of the American secret services in an eleven-page report.18
Why are company employees being asked to break the silence, when they have been forced to remain silent for so long? How are they be convinced that what was once a proof of loyalty and discipline has now become an obstacle to change and innovation? Does this hold out the promise of a new social democracy? Whatever the reason, there has been a complete reversal: according to the neo-management gurus, employees should not be forced to keep silent. On the contrary, they should be encouraged to break the silence, to speak out, and to tell their stories. Whatever their age, competence, skills, and responsibilities, they all have “a story to tell.” And the organization is interested in those stories.
Management theorists’ change of attitude with respect to silence within organizations began in the 1980s. As early as 1984, James March and Gujme Sevon had recognized the merits of gossip. In a co-authored study of storytelling techniques in business, Nicole Giroux describes gossip as a form of narration that conveys information. According to this view, this elementary way of swapping stories “helps to maintain the system by communicating its rules and values and by disseminating the organization’s traditions and history.”19 The educational virtues of storytelling have also been identified in a study of the “memorable messages” retained by newcomers to the company. As Nicole Giroux explains, the power of narration lies in its ability to capture “complex experiences” that combine the senses, reason, emotions, and the imagination into a dense résumé that can be reconstructed on the basis of any part of it.20
Between 1987 and 1990, the industrialist anthropologist Julian Orr carried out a series of studies of the workers responsible for repairing photocopiers at Xerox. Theirs was a small world of technical documentation, machines, and technicians who could mobilize phenomena and explain them in complex words, but there were also repairmen and maintenance staff, who did not have those skills. Orr demonstrated that swapping stories was central to the diagnostic process. In this world, the process of collective narration gradually led to a shared diagnosis of the situation.
When it comes to storytelling management, David Boje is, however, the precursor with his 1991 study of storytelling performance in an office-supply firm. The analysis of 12 hours of taped interviews allowed him to identify eleven scenarios. Boje found that the narrative activity of a group or organization does not take the form of structured narratives that are passed on by narrators to passive listeners. People tell their stories in fragments and are constantly interrupted by colleagues who add elements drawn from their own experience. The outcome is a collective form of narration. It is polyphonic but it is also discontinuous and made up of interwoven fragments, of histories that are talked about and swapped. They can sometimes be contradictory, but the company becomes a storytelling organization whose stories can be listened to, regulated, and, of course, controlled. Silent firms like Enron or WorldCom are contrasted with the symmetrical model of a firm that is talkative and voluble, and that tells stories.21
Management Theorists and the “Narrative Turn”
As Thierry Boudès, who teaches at the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce explains, “the ‘narrative turn’ of the 1990s came about because management researchers made the simple discovery that companies are microcosms in which lots of stories are produced and circulated.”22 The canteen, for example, is the classic site for this spontaneous production of narrative. But narration is also a central part of a company’s activity, from reports on visits to clients to recruitment interviews (after all, a CV is simply a form of autobiographical story). “Storytelling management” is nothing more than attempt to control the way these stories evolve.
Rather than putting up with the flow of the stories that are anarchically produced within the company, storytelling management attempts to exploit and control it by introducing systematized forms of in-house communications and management based upon the telling of anecdotes. According to Boudès, “Storytelling is also a form of action. Narratives circulate within companies at least as easily as electrons, and they are a valuable way of transmitting experience. It is not by accident that we speak of ‘success stories’. Swapping stories is one way of making a worldview intelligible and, therefore, sharing it. A story is not a servile photograph of an external reality; it helps to structure that reality.”23
In the early 1990s, Steve Denning was tasked by the World Bank with improving the circulation and sharing of knowledge and information. The World Bank’s missions are at once financial and advisory: it has to finance development projects, but it also has to circulate good ideas and transfer knowledge and experience. Several internal reports (1988, 1989, 1993, and 1995) had stressed the need to define a policy and procedures to control the management of information. They all came to the same conclusion: the information system no longer met the organization’s needs. The information stored in its silos seemed inaccessible to most employees. Steve Denning sent out memo after memo and organized conference after conference, but they met with general indifference. He found that rational arguments no longer made any impact on its staff and that traditional communications methods—memos, conferences, Power-Point presentations, checklists, etc.—were ineffective, even though the volume and flow of information was constantly increasing and circulating faster than ever.
It was at this point that a colleague told him about a nurse in a small town 370 miles from the capital of Zambia who had been looking for information on how to treat malaria and found what she needed on the website of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. The story revealed what now seems obvious: thanks to the Internet, knowledge and skills can be transmitted from an American laboratory to a nurse in a rural area on the other side of the world. But what worried Denning was that the World Bank, which had a mission to transfer knowledge, had played no role in this story. The story was simple, and easily told: it illustrated both the problem and the solution, and could very easily be transmitted to any organization.
Denning decided to include the “Zambian story” in his arsenal of arguments. To his great surprise, it spread throughout the whole organization. His Zambian story made it possible to change the image of the World Bank, which had often been criticized for its inefficiency. If the organization was capable of arranging knowledge transfers from rich countries to poor countries, its actions would no longer be seen as purely financial, and it would take on the features of the nurse who had to resolve a public health issue.
Steve Denning left the World Bank at the end of the 1990s. Convinced that he had found a communications method that could revolutionize companies, he became one of the storytelling management movement’s most active “gurus.” His Zambian story has become a classic in storytelling training sessions. He has told it thousands of times. Rejecting the over-rational traditional managerial approach, which he describes as “Napoleonic,” he advocates a Tolstoyian approach, which is the only technique that can take account of the “richness and complexity of living” and of establishing “connections between things.” He has published several books in which he refers to Roland Barthes’ narratology, but he is also quite happy to make up animal fables like the story of “Squirrel Inc.” Every year, the company loses 50 percent of its store of nuts because its leadership is not based upon storytelling.24
“I’ve always had a thing about campfires, never liked ghost stories, or singing Blowing in the Wind,” Lucy Kellaway wrote in the eminently serious Financial Times on May 10, 2004; “But the juxtaposition of ‘camp-fire’ and ‘corporate’ is truly terrifying.”25 The FT writer’s irony was directed at Evelyn Clark’s book Around the Corporate Campfire.26 Clark is a professional on the new “storytellers” circuit and recommends the use of storytelling in management. Her website, which boasts a logo showing a flute player charming a snake, tells visitors that “Evelyn Clark, the Corporate Storyteller” helps organizations to “develop red-hot and value-based stories that spread like wild fire and propel [managers] towards their vision.”
Kellaway comments: “The thought that anyone who writes so badly could be let loose on a story is alarming, especially if the stories they are after are ‘red-hot’ and ‘value-based’.” Her article, entitled “Once Upon A Time, We Had Managers, Not Storytellers,” is very much the exception within the extensive hagiographic literature on the use of storytelling in company management. A simple Internet search carried out in June 2007 gave some idea of the extent of the craze: Google found 20.2 million mentions of storytelling, and 719,000 of digital storytelling.
Storytelling management (STM) has in fact been a huge success; it has been adopted by major companies like Disney, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Adobe, IBM, and Microsoft. It regularly makes the headlines of the Harvard Business Review, The Economist and the Wall Street Journal, and it has won over the managers of Fortune’s top 500 firms. There are bestsellers, articles, blogs, and websites devoted to it. Storytelling festivals began to be held all over the United States in the wake of the legendary National Storytelling Festival, first held in Jonesborough, Tennessee in 1972. Their audiences grow larger by the year and are very diverse, including laid-back hippies, yuppies, therapists, lawyers, video-game designers, and managers, all drawn to the powers ascribed to their likeable and bearded storytelling bards, who were once content to travel around like folk singers as they told the stories they had dashed off in a hurry.
Benedikt Benenati was one of the first to introduce storytelling management in France when he worked at Danone in 2003. As the weekly business magazine Stratégies reported in 2005: “A good story can be told in thirty seconds in the lift,” Benedikt Benenati tells us. But first you have to loosen tongues. “It is not easy to overcome inhibitions in a very decentralized group that employs 80,000 people.” In order to bring about this little revolution, he organizes “good ideas” fairs for managers, in which storytellers show what they have come up with. “For two hours, PowerPoint presentations are banned to encourage a return to simple, direct communications between people,” he congratulates himself, before going on to talk about the video clips in which everyone tells the story of their ideas. Danone went one step further and published little collections of nice stories, complete with photos. We learn, for example, how Manuela Borella, the Spanish director of the Danao brand (a mixture of milk and fruit produced by a Danone subsidiary) increased her sales by 98 percent thanks to the advertising concept developed by her Saudi counterpart Omar Alsuleimani. The story of how a pair of twins were reconciled by Danone was another big hit in Spain. “These nice stories prove to everyone that swapping good ideas allows the group to make a good profit,” comments Benenati in terms of approval.27
According to IBM France’s head of internal communications Evelyne Gilbert, her company has developed the same interest in storytelling. In 2004, explains Stratégies:
Four or five stories from salaried employees were posted on the Intranet to mark the company’s ninetieth birthday. “Everyone looked back at their life at IBM. A retired lady in Nantes even described how she had had to quickly hide strategic documents during the Second World War. An excellent way of immersing new recruits in the company’s culture,” boasted Evelyne Gilbert, who has a network of local correspondents whose job it is to bring her stories from the field. IBM’s Intranet devotes two sections to storytelling. One talks about teams’ fruitful experiments. The other traces the exemplary career of a company employee. The professional storyteller’s keywords are “personalize” and “contextualize.” IBM’s managers have to tell stories to get their employees to accept the thousands of job losses in Europe recently announced by the company.28
This tacit knowledge circulates within the company in volatile forms: around the coffee machines and in the canteen, in corridors and stairways. The storytelling project boils down to a general story about life at work. The story becomes a management issue: coordination, interaction, sharing practices, getting ready for changes, sackings, innovations. Everyone is required to describe their experiences and to feed the story-machine that records, classifies, and formats their stories.
Chatter, stories, gossip, and rumors have acquired a new status. They are now seen as a vector for experiences and knowledge. A whole body of informal historical knowledge that has been shaped by experience can be crystallized, and so can the hitherto unrecognized forms of “tacit” knowledge without which the organization would be unable to function. The weekly Jeune Afrique gave an idyllic account of the process in 2006: “When applied in such different circumstances as handling major changes, mergers between companies, outsourcing and even sackings, storytelling allows ideas to evolve rapidly, mobilizes and motivates staff and does away with psychological blocks and tensions within a group.”29
The FT’s Lucy Kellaway admits: “When I first came across the corporate storytelling craze about six or seven years ago, I thought it was a joke … I was quite wrong. Since then this craze has grown and grown. There turns out to be a huge industry of people with ‘storyteller’ or, worse, ‘storyteller practitioner’ written on their business cards, who make a living helping executives with their stories.”30
The Magical Fables of Capitalism’s Gurus
“Question: what do shamrocks, symphony orchestras, gazelles, federations, astronauts, atoms and molecules, schools of sharks, virtual networks, white-water rafting, jazz bands, diamonds and ant colonies have in common? Answer: Not much. But all of them have been invoked to describe the properties of a new organizational model that is replacing top-down bureaucratic machines.”31 The opening lines of Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s 1997 bestseller are interesting on more than one count. These words from the former editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review, who is now a famous management guru, make it possible to date the emergence of a new form of management to the 1990s; the book locates the issues at the heart of the change experienced by the big companies that had to transform themselves as a result of the globalization of their markets. And it provides a good definition of the discursive style used by the management gurus.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s list is indeed surprising. It is a totally chaotic muddle of species and activities, animals and associations, structures and networks, and turns its back on the rational order that had until then prevailed in the discourse of company directors. It is reminiscent of the Chinese encyclopedia cited by Jorge Luis Borges, in which it is written that “animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from along way off look like flies.”
Michel Foucault was very fond of this text, and cites it in the preface to his The Order of Things.32 It both made him laugh and puzzled him. It made him laugh because it is quite impossible to understand this collection of unrelated things. And it puzzled him because its heteroclite vertigo defies reason and has a destructive effect on language itself, unlike utopias, which “although they have no real locality afford consolation [and] run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula.”33 What to say then of such a power to dissolve language when it attacks precisely that dimension of the fabula?
According to storytelling guru Steve Denning, the stories that are useful to business can be put into categories that are almost as absurd (though he does not share Borges’ sense of humor): (a) stories to share knowledge, (b) stories that ignite action, (c) stories about what might happen in the future, (d) stories based on satire and taming the grapevine, (e) springboard stories, sparking the future through a story about the past, (f) stories that communicate who we are—people, (g) stories that communicate who we are—brands, (h) stories that transmit values, (i) stories that bridge the knowing–doing gap, (j) stories that embody tacit knowledge.
Dave Snowden, former director of IBM’s Institute of Management and director of the Cyenfin Center for Organizational Complexity, has also attempted to identify the archetypes specific to company stories. Taking his inspiration from the Russian semiologist Vladimir Propp, who collected Russian folk tales in order to establish a set of structural functions specific to the folk tale,34 he established a list of useful stories and effective fables. For anyone who has read Propp, the results are hair-raising. His list includes “the story of a market where everything is on sale, except honor,” “the fable of the sweet little bear cubs who were transformed into battle-hardened warriors because of the dirty tricks played on them by their competitors,” and the parable of “the jazz band in which everything always had to be reinvented.” Then there is the metaphor of “the paths that were not chosen—what would have happened if you hadn’t made this choice as opposed to another,” and the story showing how “successes can be turned into failures, and failures into successes that no one recognizes,” and the one that describes how “things happened differently by telling one person’s story as though it was something that happened to someone else.” There is the plot that “transforms competitors into friends, friends into competitors, heroes into bastards and bastards into heroes.” There is also the legend of the company that succeeded, “despite the organized chaos,” and of “the tension between the slave-drivers and the charismatic managers,” and of “the squabbles between the teams that were like hostile tribes, each believing itself to be more important than the rest”; and not forgetting the “Marseillaise joke: everyone has to tell a story even more outrageous than that told by the last person.”35
The irruption of storytelling gurus into a business world famed for its cult of efficiency and pragmatism—that justifies its actions by appealing to supposedly natural laws (the market, profit), that is characterized by its aggressive tautologies (“business is business”), and that respects only the law of economic performance—is symptomatic of an underlying phenomenon, which might be described as the business world’s regression into the world of fables and fictions. The rise of storytelling in business is in any case inseparable from the “management guru” phenomenon. The term is recent and, according to David Greatbatch and Timothy Clark’s book on how the gurus perform,36 was first used to describe management consultants in an article in the Sunday Times in 1983; it coincides with the emergence of the phenomenon in the United States.
The term has become commonplace in the West, and its Indian origins—the Sanskrit word guru, which English has borrowed from Punjabi and Hindi, means “spiritual master”—have taken on a magical dimension that refers, more or less consciously, to Africa’s griots. In Africa, the term “griot” refers not to a job or even a vocation, but to a social function. It is traditionally reserved for activities that develop on the fringes of accepted beliefs and knowledge, or in the field left vacant by medical or religious orders. Its efficacy—real or otherwise—has to do with the charisma of someone who is described as a griot, his gifts and prowess being manifested in a sort of self-revelation that is passed on by rumors or legends: unexplained cures, reconciliations between clans, and mediations between parties in conflict. In Mali, griots are described as djéli, which is Bambara for “blood of society.” The djéli is a “bond doctor”: his task is to reconcile, to sew up wounds by telling stories, which may be either true or fictional. Some griots are also journalists or mediators in strikes.
“We cannot consider the djéli outside our cultural context,” explains Bakary Soumano, the djéli chief in the Bamako region of Mali. “We live in a hierarchical society that is divided into clans, but are descended from a common ancestor.” The clans must sustain relations of solidarity, and the djéli’s role is to promote that solidarity. In order to do so, he begins by evoking the genealogy of the individuals in dispute and by reminding them of what united their clans in the past.37
The misunderstanding implicit in the appearance of the concept of “management gurus” in the America of the 1980s is therefore a good illustration of the slippage from a set of management tools and techniques that were to a greater or lesser extent inspired by the human sciences (social psychology, rhetoric, and linguistics), to practices that are legitimized by magical thought, and then storytelling. Denning writes: “When I saw how easily round-edged stories could slide into our minds, I found myself wondering whether our brains might not be hardwired to absorb stories.”38
Gurus, Purveyors of Managerial Fashion
According to the British researchers Greatbatch and Clark:
Most of the leading management gurus are American. Given this situation it is possible that certain features of American society support the development of management gurus and guru theory. These could include the focus of a dream, an idealized sense of possibility, the assumption that individuals are adaptable to a dynamic and changing future, and the relatively poor performance of American organizations in the face of (mainly) Japanese and south-east Asian competition, especially in the 1980s.39
The main reason for the craze lies in the crisis that hit American companies at the end of the 1980s, when they were faced with competition from Japan and the Asian “dragons,” and had to rethink the management techniques bound up with the old Fordist model.
Andrej Huczynski, a management specialist at the University of Glasgow, identifies three types of gurus: “academics,” “consultants,” and “manager heroes.”40 Academic gurus like Charles Handy, Gary Hamel, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Michael Porter, and Peter Senge are products of a few famous business schools (London, Harvard, Sloan, Stanford, etc.). The “consultants” group is made up of independent advisers, writers, and commentators such as Peter Drucker, Michael Hammer, and Tom Peters. As for manager heroes like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, their guru status has to do with their brilliant success in business. According to Huczynski, those management consultants who are regarded as gurus and who are famous for their performance and successful interventions represent only a tiny minority within their profession. They are included in lists established on the basis of different criteria (sales of bestsellers, the size of the companies they advise, the cost and number of their interventions).
The sales of the books they have published since the 1980s are indeed an astonishing publishing phenomenon. In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman, 1982), The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Covez, 1989), When Giants Learn to Dance (Kanter, 1989), The Fifth Discipline (Senge, 1990), and Re-Engineering the Corporation (Hammer and Champy, 1993), have sold several hundred thousand, if not millions, of copies. Such success is such an integral part of the gurus’ strategy of conquest and self-legitimation that some authors (like Michael Hammer and James Champy41) have gone so far as to manipulate the New York Times’ bestseller lists by getting people to buy multiple copies of their books from the stores that are used to establish the rankings.
The gurus’ tours of the international lecture circuit are also an element in the reputation they enjoy in the eyes of their audience of managers. A good guru can earn several million dollars a year. In the 1980s, Tom Peters took part in 150 seminars a year and charged $60,000 for each appearance; during the first decade of the new century, he has restricted his appearance to 50 seminars a year and charges $70,000 to $90,000 for a half-day seminar. Gary Hamel, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Michael Hammer, and Peter Senge charge the same. Tom Peters is rumored to earn $6 million a year for his appearances. It has been estimated that there are fifty or so global superstars for a worldwide market of just under $1 billion a year.42
The gurus are purveyors of managerial fashion. The popularity of their ideas comes and goes and has a life cycle of “invention” (when the idea is created), “dissemination” (when the idea is brought to the notice of a target audience), “support” (when the idea is accepted), and “disenchantment” (when negative evaluations and frustrations begin to emerge), at which point the idea either fades or is abandoned. According to Greatbatch and Clark, “a plethora of empirical studies have examined the diffusion patterns of fashionable guru-led discourses within the print media. Using citation analysis the number of references to a particular idea in a sequence of years are counted and plotted in order to identify the life-cycle of a fashionable management idea.”43
These studies demonstrate that the time-gap between the appearance of a new managerial schema and its peak of popularity decreased considerably from 14.8 years in the period 1950–70 to 7.5 years in the 1980s, and 2.6 years in the 1990s. These ideas are created and spread by a network of consultant companies, business schools, and publishers, who are themselves in competition with one another. Their success with their managerial audience depends upon “the dissemination of ideas and techniques to the managerial audience.”44
Many authors describe management gurus as expert persuaders who try to format their audience by means of effective speeches, and some even compare their oratorical powers to those of evangelical preachers.45 But it took the work of Greatbatch and Clark (2005) to give us an accurate idea of how the storytelling gurus perform. Their study, which is based on tape and video recordings, reveals the purely rhetorical nature of the gurus’ interventions (hence the book’s subtitle “Why We Believe What Management Gurus Tell Us”):
Tom Peters perhaps comes closest to the evangelical style … Peters often adopts an aggressive and hectoring tone. He peppers his lectures with colloquialisms, profanities and hyperbole, uses exaggerated facial expressions and gestures, volume and pitch as he regales his audiences… He keeps audience members under constant surveillance, and is fond of gazing at individual audience members for prolonged periods of time, especially as he delivers key messages. Indeed, he is known to prefer what is termed the “cocktail” arrangement (round tables with 10–15 people seated on each) for the auditoria in which he speaks. In this arrangement there is no stage and so he is free to roam the room and maintain direct contact with individual members of the audience. It is perhaps therefore not surprising that members of his audiences often look decidedly uncomfortable as Peters adopts a hectoring/aggressive style and looks directly at them, searching out the gaze of individual audience members.46
Peter Senge also interacts with his audience, but rarely gazes at individual audience members for prolonged periods of time; he “uses a more elevated, academic style of speaking, and frequently quotes other academics and philosophers, such as Kant and Searle.”47
The gurus’ stories last from twenty seconds to four minutes. The vast majority (87 percent) of their themes relate to daily life and to everyday activities that are, a priori, unlikely to fire their listeners’ enthusiasm: eating in a restaurant, booking a hotel room, traveling, filling up the car with gas, driving, going to a management conference, and so on.48
As early as 1998, Clark and Salaman identified the three factors that determine the success of the gurus’ performance.49 They apparently have the effect of reducing psychological tension in managers who are confronted with a world that seems unstable, chaotic, and increasingly uncertain. They capture the spirit of the times and resonate with their audience’s vague expectations. But the main reason for the gurus’ success with managers has to do with the narrative form of their performances and their use of stories that inevitably celebrate management’s merits and heroism. A guru does not have to convince his audience or offer any proof. His only authority comes from a set of practices that supposedly has beneficial results because he possesses some mysterious knowledge, a wisdom that cannot be communicated, or simply because his words put his audience under a spell. It derives, in other words, from his ability to conjure up at any given moment the desired emotions or opinions by using determinate narrative sequences.
“People don’t want more information,” writes Annette Simmons, who wrote one of the bestselling books on storytelling. “They are up to their eyeballs in information. They want faith—faith in you, in your goals, your success, in the story you tell. It is faith that moves mountains, not facts. Facts do not give birth to faith. Faith needs a story to sustain it—a meaningful story that inspires belief in you and renews hope that your ideas indeed offer what you promise.”50
Hence the importance of practices of self-legitimation and self-validation: the guru is his performance. He is the source of his useful stories and their mysterious effects; he is a concentrate of his narrative competence. He is both the agent and the mediator, the transmitter and the message. He must convince you that all is in order, and in keeping with common sense and the laws of nature. He is not teaching you a technique, but transmitting a proverbial wisdom that cultivates popular common sense, appeals to the laws of nature, and evokes a mythical order.
The function of the fables and their morals, of the useful stories and efficacious fictions, is to supply legitimacy. Governments have always been able to exploit belles lettres, and literature rarely escapes the function of legitimizing power, be it political, military, or even judicial. In his analysis of the Dominici murder case, which attracted huge publicity in France in the 1950s, Roland Barthes detects a disturbing and corrupting alliance between the legal system and literature; he condemns this alliance because it confuses genres by putting the story of an event on the same level as an accusation brought against a human being: “Justice and literature have made an alliance. They have exchanged their old techniques, thus revealing their basic identity and compromising each other barefacedly.”51
Storytelling management forges a similar alliance between literature and management. The good company manager owes it to himself to be an “extraordinary storyteller” with a dazzling talent. Rather than producing a balance sheet, performance indicators, or figures for operating profits or losses, he should tell his colleagues and employees stories. According to Robert McKee, a famous Hollywood screenwriter who, within the space of ten years, became a storytelling management guru, “Motivating people to reach the organization’s stated goals is a big part of a CEO’s job … To do that, he or she must engage their emotions, and the key to their hearts is a story.”52
Management therefore often puts on the mask of fiction and tells philosophical tales, fables about animals, or children’s stories. A rash of essays sing the praises of the new alliance between business and literature. Real literature, fictional company. The great novels of the past are read in an attempt to resolve in-house communications problems or to shed light on the staff’s “irrational” reactions. Paul Corrigan’s bestselling Shakespeare on Management, for example, suggests that we should reread Shakespeare’s tragedies to find leadership models and practical lessons in human resources management.53
Similarly, Robert A. Brawer goes back to the classics of American and English literature.54 The famous reply of Herman Melville’s Bartleby—“I would prefer not to”—is apparently an expression of resistance to routine and the established conventions of the workplace. David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988) demonstrates the absurdity of divorcing the human sciences from business. Dos Passos’ The Big Money (1936) looks at how the American dream is embodied in different individuals’ stories, from Henry Ford’s to that of an anonymous tramp, from an idealist’s to that of an opportunist. The novel apparently illustrates the conflict between personal values and the organizations’ materialist culture. Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon (1903) shows that a real leader must have the virtue of moral integrity, while The Canterbury Tales are a brilliant illustration of fourteenth-century mercantilism (being a merchant’s son, Chaucer was well aware that the law of the market rules the world). William Gaddis’ J.R. (1975) foresees the irruption of company advertising into public schools, while David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (1985) demonstrates that a talented salesman can persuade us to buy things we neither need nor want in a perfect illustration of the new marketing, which regards selling as a theatrical performance and consumption as an exchange of experiences.
In similar vein, the volume Myths, Stories, and Organizations—edited by Gabriel Yiannis, one of organizational storytelling’s master thinkers—reveals the renewed interest in the narrative approach to organizations: “Organizations are now regarded as possessing certain folkloristic and even mythological qualities such as proverbs, recipes, rituals, ceremonies, style, and legends … Undoubtedly, they possess certain characters, such as heroes, fools, tricksters, and so forth, as well as plot elements such as accidents, deceptions, mistakes, punishments, coincidences, and conflicts, which can also be found in ancient myths.”55 Each chapter in the book takes as its starting point a legend, story, or fable and explores its contemporary significance in a world of globalization and hyperconsumption. The Odyssey is reread and revised for organizational purposes, and becomes a world of heroes and heroines, gods and goddesses, ghosts and monsters. Some chapters deal with the question of leadership in the face of terrorism, the position of women within the organization, the construction of identity, and the management of emotions. All these stories tell how the heroes of our times are building a new world.
As we shall see, this is a new world in which fiction penetrates business to such an extent that it gradually shapes a “new economy” with some very strange rules.