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USE STORYTELLING TO EXPLAIN YOUR COMPANY’S PURPOSE

The idea of “purpose” has swept the corporate world. Encouraged by evangelists like Simon Sinek, myriad firms like Nike, Adidas, Pepsi, and Coca-Cola are devoting real time and attention to explaining why they do. The idea of purpose was central to a book I co-authored.

But activating purpose is impossible without storytelling, at both the corporate and individual levels. As I’ve written previously, while purpose is essential to a strong corporate culture, it is often activated and reinforced through narrative. Individuals must learn to connect their drives to the organization’s purpose and to articulate their story to others.

This is hard for most business leaders. Great leaders are often humble and reticent to speak about themselves. This impulse is admirable, but it falls short of what’s needed to inspire people to join in the purpose of an organization. And many businesspeople feel more comfortable with waterfall charts and P&Ls than with telling their own stories. Only narrative can do that. Storytelling is a skill that leaders can — and should — hone.

I learned this lesson, most acutely, from Marshall Ganz, who teaches what he calls “public narrative” at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Ganz argues that for people to inspire others with the mission of their organization or cause, they must first link that mission to their own motivations, and then connect it through story to those of the people they are hoping to persuade. Ganz has developed a simple framework for those hoping to develop a narrative approach to their purpose-driven organizations: “Self, Us, Now.”

To create a public narrative for your own organization, start with “self.” This is perhaps the most difficult part for many businesspeople because it involves focusing on real events in one’s own life and explaining how these incidents established the values that will later link to the values of the organization.

An excellent example of this is Steve Jobs’s address to the Stanford graduating class in 2005. The address was largely a deeply personal reflection on Jobs’s personal history — his working-class upbringing, his dropping out of college. Perhaps more importantly, however, he spoke about how his love of calligraphy instilled with him a love of design that would later guide his work at Apple, and how his cancer diagnosis reinforced in him a deep desire to live passionately and authentically — as if each day were his last. It’s beautiful storytelling, and it gives you a glimpse into who Jobs was, what he valued, and how that would later guide his work at Apple and elsewhere. What’s compelling about Jobs’s address is that it seems authentic and raw. A great story of self has to be a real story of self. Finding that story may require a leader to reflect deeply on her past and motivations, and communicate them honestly — even those parts that are embarrassing or imperfect.

The next step, “us,” aims to connect these values with broader shared values of the audience — clients or employees, for example. In this step, you weave your own personal narrative into the narratives of others through shared values, experiences, hopes, and aspirations. In doing so you create a common narrative for the group or organization. In literature, a well-known example of this (one that Ganz often highlights in class) is the St. Crispin’s Day speech from William Shakespeare’s Henry V. In it, King Henry, attempting to motivate an English army demoralized by their lack of strength, calls on his troops to be a “band of brothers” fighting valiantly together for each other, their country, and the values they share.

While it’s miles away from the battlefield of Agincourt, Burt’s Bees is a good example of how a business has applied this technique. They feature the story of their founder, Burt Shavitz, on their website, and use a separate section to document how the story of Burt and his partner Roxanne became “our story,” the story of the company and its clients. Before his death, Burt himself was a company spokesperson for years beyond his operational involvement. A great “story of us” establishes a community, its values, and how they came to be.

Finally, the close is what Ganz calls the “now” — an urgent call to action for those who wish to share the purpose of a group or an organization. Consider St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. The organization’s purpose is “Finding Cures. Saving Children,” and their site is filled with the stories of the kids they serve. Their call to action – often, simply to give financially — is simple, direct, and compelling in their videos and materials.

Kickstarter, similarly, has an impactful way of asking people to join its team. That narrative starts by having its founder tell the story of the company (the “self”). Their website includes pictures and short descriptions of each and every company employee (“the us”). Finally, the narrative culminates its “now” call to action with a careers page asking: “Love Kickstarter? You’ll fit right in.” These stories are most powerful when they are individually authentic, build to a collective narrative and values, and then seal the deal by asking the person reading, watching, or listening to join in.

Storytelling can be awkward and unfamiliar to many professionals, particularly if you’re sharing personal experiences. Yet the motivation for this storytelling is not self-aggrandizement, but to create a purpose and culture that others can share. Purpose is what builds real passion, motivation, and buy-in for the stakeholders of any organization. And it can be articulated by leaders who’ve learned to tell their stories and the stories of the organizations, people, and causes they serve.

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(This article was originally published in the Harvard Business Review, by John Coleman, that reserves all the rights. To read the original article please visit here.)

WHY AI WILL SHIFT DECISION MAKING FROM THE C-SUITE TO THE FRONT LINE

Hardly a day goes by without the announcement of an incredible new frontier in Artificial Intelligence (AI). From fintech to edtech, what was once fantastically improbable is now a commercial reality. There is no question that big data and AI will bring about important advances in the realm of management, especially as it relates to being able to make better-informed decisions. But certain types of decisions — particularly those related to strategy, innovation and marketing — will likely continue to require a human being who can take a holistic view and make a qualitative judgment based on a personal consideration of the context and facts. In fact, to date, there is no AI technology that is fully able to factor in the emotional, human, and political context needed to automate decisions.

For example, consider the healthcare industry, where AI is having a huge impact. Even if AI can support a doctor in making a diagnosis and suggesting medical treatments for a cancer patient, only the doctor herself would be able to factor in the overall health condition and emotional context of the patient (and of the patient’s family) in order to decide whether to proceed with, say, surgery vs. chemotherapy. Most of what we do in healthcare is not simply about making a diagnosis, but working with patients to find an appropriate treatment that factors in a more holistic and empathic view of the patient’s circumstances.

AI technologies can provide managers and employees with accurate data and predictions at their fingertips to support and enable the right decisions in a timely way. But even if an AI system gives an employee super-powered intelligence, it won’t be enough to make a timely decision if the company’s internal bureaucracy requires time-consuming pre-authorization from senior managers before acting on the decision. To extract real value from AI, employees at all levels of the organization need to be empowered to make final decisions aided by AI, and act on them. In short, there needs to be a democratization of judgment-based decision-making power.

Much that’s been written about the decision-making impacts of big data and AI has tended to emphasize the importance of having centralized teams staffed with plenty of data scientists. This implies that companies with more data scientists have a better chance of generating business impact. My own experience as a consultant, supported by recent research, indicates a different view: firms that hire an army of data scientists do not always generate better bottom-line value. Rather, it is the democratization of access to AI tools and decision-making power among managers and employees which creates more tangible value.

Consider Internet platform companies such as Airbnb, where data is at the core of their business model. Airbnb believes that every employee should have access to its data platform to make informed decisions. This applies to all parts of the organization from marketing and business development to HR. For example, employees can monitor in real time how many of its hosts use the company’s professional photography services and in which location, with emerging trends, patterns, and predictions.

Data access is key, but it’s not enough. Employees also need to be given the skills to use and interpret data and tools. For Airbnb, it would not be possible to have a data scientist in every room, and the fast internationalization of the company makes the situation even more challenging. Airbnb launched a Data University, which is split into three levels, with a curriculum of more than 30 modules. The goal is to build the knowledge and skillset for all employees to utilize and interpret data and tools. This enables employees to act swiftly on innovation opportunities. For example, product managers are learning to write their own SQL code and interpret their own experiments about whether to launch a new product feature in a certain city. The result: since launching the program in late 2016, more than 2,000 employees were trained, and the weekly active users (WAU) of the internal platform — a proxy of how “data informed” the organization is — rose from 30% to 45%.

Another case is Unilever. Orchestrated by the company’s newly created “Insights Engine”, the company introduced a number of AI-driven systems and tools that are accessible to all of its global marketers. The availability of real-time, frequent, data-driven consumer insights has generated even more need for distributed decision-making by the company’s marketers at all levels within the organization. One tool they use is People World, an AI platform able to mine thousands of consumer research documents and social media data. The platform is able to answer natural language questions that marketers may ask on a specific area. This addresses the classic problem “If only Unilever knew what Unilever knows,” helping to remove silos, increasing trust in “one consolidated source of truth,” and dramatically reducing the time needed to make informed decisions.

Over the last decade, the costs and time associated with organizing data and running analyses has dropped dramatically. But in many companies, AI use is still highly centralized. Corporate AI units often develop dashboards for senior executives which are used by them exclusively. AI democratization remains limited. But, by using AI to increase the effectiveness of the decisions employees are making, the need to control and centralize decisions essentially evaporates. Best practices show how democratization can bring about quicker and better distributed decisions, making companies more agile and responsive to market changes and opportunities.(This article was originally published in the Harvard Business Review, by John Coleman, that reserves all the rights. To read the original article please visit here.)

Now, imagine that the snow is the business environment, and the new car is your team. Whenever something happens in a business environment that you can’t control, and your team doesn’t adapt as quickly as you would like them to, you are considering if you have the team you need?