Within this context, theatre is “the event enacted by a specific group of performers; what the performers actually do during production … the manifestation or representation of the drama and/or script.”18 In other words, theatre embodies both the internal work of those who perform the production and the outward representation of that work to the audience—both the function and the form that bring the drama and its script to life.19 Theatre connects the drama and script to customers by staging a performance that engages them as an audience. Once again, we must recognize that in the Experience Economy work is theatre.
Last, according to Schechner, performance is “the whole constellation of events, most of them passing unnoticed, that take place in/among both performers and audience from the time the first spectator enters the field of performance—to the time the last spectator leaves.”20 It is the broadest category, the fullness of events enacted at a specific place and time. As seen in figure 6-2, performance subsumes each of the other dimensions of enactment: theatre, script, and drama. Clearly, the offering is the performance, the economic value businesses create for customers. In equating theatrical performance with business performance, we then have the following result:
All economic offerings—not only experiences but also commodities, goods, and services—are the result of an enterprise's progression from drama through script to the theatre that stages performance. Returning to Schechner: “The drama is the domain of the author, the composer, scenarist, shaman [to which we add strategist and line executive]; the script is the domain of the teacher, guru, master [as well as the manager, supervisor, and team leader]; the theater is the domain of the performers [whether acting in plays or business]; the performance is the domain of the audience [which includes customers who now want experiences].”21
Figure 6-2: Enactment Model
Source: Adapted from Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), 72.
Whether or not your company fully enters the Experience Economy by charging for staged events, no matter what position you have in the company or what your coworkers do, you are a performer. Your work is theatre. Now you must act accordingly.
Did You Say “Act”?
Some people misunderstand acting. They regard movie celebrities as egotistical, flighty, or fake, and Broadway stars as pretentious or worse. Outside the realm of show business, many people associate acting with a showy real estate agent, an irritating infomercial emcee, or a conniving car salesman. Are we really suggesting, then, that you, too, should act? Absolutely. For such misconceptions confuse awful actors and bad acts with acting itself. Acting is the taking of deliberate steps to connect with an audience. To dismiss acting as dishonest or fake relegates you and your employees to bland roles, with little prospect for engaging customers in new and exciting ways.
Aversions to acting may stem from a belief that only that which is completely revealed is completely genuine. But would Barbra Streisand have been more genuine if she had chewed real gum? No. In business terms, Streisand was simply “doing more with less,” efficiently achieving the same output with fewer inputs. The decision to use or not use gum does not raise issues of authentic or inauthentic, fake or real. Rather, such decisions center on whether or not to use a particular prop to effect a particular impression. Nor was Streisand's act less genuine because it occurred before the audience expected her performance to begin. Drawing artificial (dare we say, fake?) boundaries around when work begins, or ends, often kills innovation. If servicing a car, for example, begins only when customers bring in their vehicles, Lexus never would have thought to send employees to customers' homes to retrieve them.
A reluctance to act may also arise from the view that acting means misrepresenting oneself. But acting does not mean pretending to be someone or something else. Think again of those world-famous workers at Pike Place Fish Market. They genuinely are fishmongers, and they absolutely act on their fish market stage. ChartHouse Learning of Burnsville, Minnesota, immortalized these workers in the Fish! video, which illuminates four principles they use to create the Pike Place Fish Market experience—including the signature moment of tossing fish from worker to worker.22 Each of the four principles is an acting technique:
Play: Although it's a serious business, it's also about having fun, with workers as well as customers put on stage for the enjoyment of everyone.
Make their day: The focus is on customers—the audience of the show—and doing everything possible to create wonderful memories within them.
Be there: A variation on famed director and acting teacher Konstantin Stanislavski's dictum to “be present,” this means forgetting about everything else that is going on to be there in the moment.
Choose your attitude: As Aristotle first pointed out, acting is fundamentally about making choices. We all act differently in front of colleagues than with customers; when with our children than with our parents; before friends than with strangers. It is not that we are fake or phony in any of these circumstances; we are simply choosing that part of ourselves to reveal to those we are with.
Acting entails making discoveries within, drawing from a personal reservoir of life experiences and using those experiences to create a new and believable character for the role one has accepted, whether in the performing arts or in business theatre. An actor must behave in a manner thoroughly consistent with that character or run the risk that the audience will disbelieve the act and lose interest in the offering.
The hallmark of bad acting is for actors to constantly remind the audience that they, ahem, are acting. Only when performers are poorly prepared to act do audiences perceive their behavior as pretending. The great Russian actor Michael Chekhov put it this way:
The talented actor reads the play. The nonactor, or spoiled actor, reads the same play. What is the difference between the two kinds of reading? The nonactor reads the play absolutely objectively. The events, happenings, and characters in the play do not stir up his inner life. He understands the plot and follows it as an observer, an outsider. The actor reads the play subjectively. He reads through the play and by doing so he inevitably enjoys his own reaction to the happenings of the play, his own Will, Feelings, and Images. The play and the plot are only pretext for him to display, to experience the riches of his own talent, his own desire to act.23
Chekhov was renowned for his ability to transform himself so as to bring any role alive. He performed “character work” so well that people didn't realize he was acting.
The most thoroughly engaging people also have a sense of their role so keen, an ability to stay in character so perfected, and an effect so pronounced that observers seldom realize that they are constantly onstage. We see such actors in all walks of life: Warren Buffett in industry, Warren Bennis in academia, the late Ronald Reagan in politics, and Bono in charity, to name a few. Everyone, even workers in business, should strive to engage others in this way. Too many workers fail to act, behaving no differently onstage from the way they do in their private lives. They execute their day-to-day responsibilities as mere happenings; their work is lifeless. To engage customers in the Experience Economy, act as if your work depended on it!
Only when you stage work explicitly for [audience = customers] will experiences flourish as the basis for new economic activity. You can begin this staging by examining the activities performed within your enterprise and then designating the workplace as a special place: the performance stage. Deliberately staging an engaging experience requires much more than simply designating such a place, but doing so is an indispensable (and not too difficult) step in that direction. So don't delay. Do it. And then proclaim, This is my stage.
Getting into Character
Now that you have your stage, you are truly an actor. And how well you act depends on how well you prepare to act. In fact, the vast majority of an actor's job is done before he or she ever goes onstage. Preparation takes on many forms, but perhaps the most important is the way you characterize your role, a practice th
at determines the impressions people will form as a result of your work. Proper characterization makes any drama seem natural, believable, spontaneous, and real.
Eric Morris specializes in helping such actors as Jack Nicholson develop their characterizations. Listen to his advice: “For generations, the popular concept and the belief in the theater has been that ‘the actor becomes the character.’ This is taken to mean that the actor assumes or acquires the behavior, idiosyncrasies, thoughts, and impulses of a particular character in a play. But I believe that the reverse is true: the character becomes you! ”24 Exactly. Successful acting, as opposed to pretending, never creates a noticeable gap between the characterization of the role and the actual person playing the role. That is, the character conforms with self—who the worker really is—drawing on the emotional, physical, intellectual, and spiritual uniqueness of the individual playing the role. Morris further explains that “when you absorb the character into your person, all that you are in terms of your unique way of relating to the world, your impulses, thoughts, and responses, will be included in everything he does. It is thus that an actor makes a unique and personal statement through every part he plays.”25
Building character into roles distinguishes the work of staging experiences from that of other business activity. In fact, the absence of such character explains why many service workers seem to operate like automatons. How many times do hotel receptionists greet you in the same, monotonous manner? How many car salespeople use identical pitches? How many fast-food lines put customers through the same old drill? Proper characterization can turn these mundane service activities into memorable performances. Thus a bellhop at a Ritz-Carlton warmly welcoming guests back by name—by reviewing a daily printout of expected new guests and their distinguishing traits (much like a soap opera actor learns new scripts on a daily basis)—makes a remarkable impression. Similarly, a visit to a Lexus dealership offers a refreshingly different experience from the norm, in which salespeople corral customers into a cubicle to haggle over price. Even a soda jerk can create memorable events by characterizing the role. Consider the character we encountered at the refreshment stand at Cedar-Lee Cinema in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, who spun lines like, “Who's next to be refreshed?” His acting was better than that of some of the movie stars on the screen. Guests wanted to wait in his queue.
Actors may deploy a number of theatre techniques to develop ideas on how to fill an onstage role with character. These include journaling (documenting daily events in a diary and then decomposing each event into potential choices for future work), charting (creating a map of the actor's chosen behaviors that overlay the script, line by line, scene by scene), or relationship mapping (creating diagrams that assess the relationship between each onstage character). In each instance, acting flows from role to character; the latter absorbs the former, becoming the basis on which the actor engages the audience.
Turning a role into a character requires careful management of the subtext—that is, everything not in the formal script. Agreed on by the actors in collaboration with the director, who together translate the [script = processes] into real [theatre = work], subtext renders a fullness beyond the surface-level script. The onstage actor completes the performance by using inflections, gestures, and other elements. This includes body language—such as posture, gestures, eye contact, and other expressions (a sales representative's smile sends a powerfully positive message)—props (a cell phone conveys accessibility, while one conspicuously turned off and thrown into a briefcase calls for attention), and costumes—clothing and accessories (a CEO's speech delivered in sandals and khakis conveys a dramatically different message from the same speech delivered in a three-piece suit, but either might be appropriate, depending on the characterization the CEO wants to convey).26
No element proves too small to contribute to the creation of character. Consider the lowly business card. It is one of the most basic props of workplace interactions with customers, and yet it is often treated in a pedestrian fashion, with little consideration as to how it contributes to the development of character. In most cases the only differences in the cards of different individuals working for the same organization are name, title, and telephone number. Certainly the basic design of a card can communicate a general message, but most cards present one standard look for every worker, as if all actors were merely extras in the performance. This approach reflects a Mass Production mindset, placing each person in one and only one box on an organizational chart.
But people play multiple roles in today's changing productions, so they need multiple ways to characterize their performance. We know of a few individuals in large corporations who now carry multiple cards, each representing a different character they play. And we know entrepreneurs who use their PCs to desktop- publish unique cards for each business meeting they conduct. And they do this not to deceive others (as did James Garner's title character in the old TV show The Rockford Files) but to represent the legitimately different roles they play in different situations. (We withhold their identity and that of their companies to preserve the transparent customization approach they use across customers and meetings.)
Names also characterize a role. Actors in most businesses today “play themselves” (not so in show business, where most actors take on the assumed names of their characters). But here, too, change dawns. At the call centers for a major manufacturer of computing equipment, each representative must use a different name. Only the first “Caitlin” or “Chad” hired gets to keep that name. Anyone cast afterward takes on an assumed name. This characterization element allows callers, should they desire, to request the same representative when placing multiple calls into the call center, whether during a single series of ordering or servicing interactions or across multiple, episodic interactions.
Customers value the policy in and of itself, and that allows the same one-to-one relationship to become the basis of service. The most intriguing point, however, lies in how the policy could become a stage for further characterization of the role. No longer cast as interchangeable parts, these phone reps are freed to use the assumed names to express themselves as engaging performers through a unique style of personally selected expressions, routines, and other telephone mannerisms that shape and focus conversation in memorable ways. Great call center actors would find themselves in great demand, from customers and from companies.
Getting into character gives all the workers in an organization a sense of purpose, uniting them in the overall theme of the experience offered to guests. Without such character development, the work yields little opportunity to connect with customers. Perhaps no other company understands this as well as Disney. Each day, cast members—whether portraying cartoon figures, ride attendants, or street sweepers—don their costumes, grab their props, and enter various staged experiences. Each contributes to the portrayal of the place as a haven for family, fun, and fantasy. Cast members keep offstage work offstage and conduct onstage work onstage. Period.
The Project on Disney, a group of observers that takes a dim view of working conditions at Walt Disney World (it titles a chapter on the subject “Working at the Rat”), shares this insight: the paid employees, like the paying guests, “say they know it's not real, that it's not what it appears to be, and then proceed to talk about it as though it were.”27 Bravo. This disposition goes to the very heart of characterizing a role. Stanislavski labeled it the “Magic If.”28 Many acting teachers since have parlayed the notion into a formal acting technique called “as if.” Says one such instructor, Michael Kearns, “Acting as if is a great technique to apply to real life. As obnoxious as it sounds, it's a bit like positive thinking. You're at a party, feeling glum and determined to have a lousy time. Sometimes an adjustment—acting as if you're having the time of your life—will actually alter your mood, allowing you to look at the occasion through a different filter.”29 Onstage service personnel who let it show when they're feeling blue, lacking any “as if” resources to characterize the
ir role, suggest realness only in one sense—real rudeness. There is no room for such behavior in pleasant business experiences. When having a rough day (and we all have them), workers must act as if they are cheerful. When confronted with an ornery buyer (and some truly present difficult challenges), actors should act as if they don't mind. A funny thing then happens on the way to the performance: cheerful service presents the stage for memorable experiences, and insufferable customers often regret their behavior and lighten up.
Trained actors—and any audience—know the difference between roles performed mechanically and those masterfully expressed through characterization. The former exemplifies most service positions today, with customers eager to end their transactions as quickly as possible. (As mentioned previously, managers in service industries know this and expend tremendous energy to reduce the time it takes to serve each customer, thereby promoting a world of poor-service, self-service, and no-service outlets.) But when workers choose appropriate roles and then characterize those roles well, they stage experiences with which guests willingly spend more time. And what induces this willingness? Simple: the way one acts.
Acting with Intention
Stanislavski constantly admonished actors to “cut ninety-five per cent.”30 With this simple slogan, he addressed the frequent tendency among actors to do too much. Stanislavski not only meant that actors performed too many actions but also that they incorporated too much commotion into any given action. (In business, too, many workers, from doctors to auto mechanics, go through excess explanations and histrionics when customers want the simple facts.) Stanislavski wanted to rid theatre of unnecessary gestures, movements, words, and other energies that detract from the main purpose of the activity. He reduced acting to its essential core, so that it clearly communicated the theme (what he called the “super-objective”) of the play. Legend has it that Stanislavski once asked Sergei Rachmaninov the secret of his mastery of the piano, to which the great pianist and composer replied, “Not touching the neighboring key.”31 Stanislavski must have liked the answer, because he held it as a standard for theatre.
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