Essentially, then, the street performer constructs his performance text through a process of trial and error, adding, removing, or revising segments of his individual routines in a process of constant, often moment-to-moment revision. Each adjustment is prompted by ideas about what “works” in the show, that is, what entertains an audience and results in the greatest profits. But Vera is not selecting parts at random; rather he is dealing with the performance text as a whole, in which each choice affects the subsequent choices of his act.26
So it is for all street performers cum mass customizers, whether their bare stage be the literal streets of a city or the figurative streets of business theatre.
CHAPTER 8
Now Act Your Part
THE PROSPECT OF ACTING MAY UNDERSTANDABLY bring stage fright to many a worker: improvise? Learn my lines? Match my peer? Lazzi? Oh my! You may feel like James Stockdale, Ross Perot's running mate way back in the 1992 elections, who was qualified to run, perhaps, but certainly unprepared for the vice-presidential debate against Al Gore and Dan Quayle, as he pondered, “Who am I, and why am I here?” Discomfort with the notion of acting, however, does not justify the dismissal of theatre as a useful operating model. This uneasiness only points to how individuals and groups must learn to act differently when staging experiences versus merely providing goods and services.
Sole practitioners—solo acts—know what it means to perform all the roles required in a business. Most enterprises, however, need a multitude of people to perform all the work necessary to generate output. The greater the number of people working for a business, the more likely it is that some organizational model—that is, a set of assumptions, both explicit and implicit, about organizing people's work—influences the way things get done.1 These sets of assumptions, varying with company culture, have existed for years, many of them evolving from a Mass Production mindset that seeks to classify all aspects of work into a single standard of behavior. Some examples come to mind: everyone has a title; bosses conduct performance appraisals, men wear ties to work. Many businesses today challenge these practices, seeking new means to attract, motivate, and retain a high-quality workforce. More and more we now see titleless organizations, 360-degree performance evaluations, and casual attire, all in an effort to rethink the most effective employment of human resources.
Theatre provides a new framework of particular value when one seeks to stage experiences. Embracing the theatre model prevents the misappropriation of old economic paradigms, such as data “mining” and service “factories,” which run the risk of perpetuating work practices out of sync with the competitive demands of today's Experience Economy.2 Performing work as merely the delivery of services (or worse, as the manufacture of goods or the extraction of commodities) simply won't engage [audience = customers] in uniquely memorable ways. There are times when workers, from corporate executives to frontline reps, need a new vocabulary to see and respond to a changing world. Now is such a time.
Taking Stage in the Workplace
Richard Schechner's Enactment Model (shown in figure 6-2) can be amplified for use in our Performance Model shown in figure 8-1, where people move to center stage in any performance of business theatre. They are the cast. Fully applying theatre principles to a business, therefore, begins with casting, the process of selecting actors to play specific roles. The success of any business obviously relies on picking the right people to play various parts. The notion that employee turnover stems from hiring under- or overqualified candidates for jobs often obscures a more fundamental source of employee dissatisfaction and defection: casting misqualified people in roles ill suited to their capabilities in the name of getting the best and the brightest (arguably what Ross Perot did in selecting Stockdale as his running mate). To get the best talent for the role being cast, casting should match individual skills to appropriate roles. To effectively stage its [drama = strategy] a company must have the right [cast = people] to implement that strategy.
Figure 8-1: Performance Model
Formally, a role is the part one or more workers play. It is divided into functional responsibilities to support the acting out of the [script = processes]. Contributing as much to the success of the enterprise's onstage performance are many backstage activities, some of which the cast completes before the performance (designers setting the stage) and some during the live performance (stage managers and crew getting the act together). Although usually associated only with those onstage, the terms actor and role apply equally to all workers and their responsibilities. For this reason, Disney refers to all employees as cast members. When a business views the responsibilities of all those individuals working in it as playing roles, those roles become the means to engage customers in more captivating ways. Without defined [roles = responsibilities], work becomes only another thankless job, done only for the sake of being done.
As discussed in chapter 6, acting well requires thorough characterization of each role. A character represents all the choices made by each worker to depict the role in his [theatre = work]. People take on roles, but they act out characters. As Gillian Drake, part-time theatre director and coach of platform skills for lawyers, says, “In the theater, every single thing that is viewed by the audience is a choice, down to the buttons on a character's costume, how they roll their hair, the props, the lighting; the same is very true in law.”3 The same choices inherent in [characterizations = representations] engage audiences in accounting, banking, catering, dry cleaning, engineering—indeed, in any business.
When players perform their roles with character, the [performance = offering] transcends ordinary services. The individual characterizations, however, must fit within the entire ensemble, which, according to the National Textbook Company's comprehensive Dictionary of Theatre and Drama Terms, is “the type of acting in which a cast works as a team to create a total effect rather than a group of individual performances.”4 The power of characterization lies in the integration of every worker's role into an organized whole. Whether a troupe, a more formal acting company, a production company, or a collection of street performers, this [ensemble = organization] gives individual performers freedom to create their own characters, with the proviso that their characterizations contribute positively to the total effect. In the performing arts, a star turn happens when a member of the cast promotes his or her own interests over those of the overall performance, upstaging a peer. In business, we call it playing politics. Great actors become true stars by gleaning diverse skills, bit by bit, from the many individuals they've worked with (not against) over the years. They observe, listen, and respect their fellow ensemble members and truly seek to promote the performances of each. In the process, they advance their own capabilities and reputation. Consider what everyone asks of those who have brushed with greatness—namely, “What's it like to work with Jack?”
Great character work should exist in all industries, and not only show business. As more and more Service Economy jobs become automated, the focus of human-to-human interaction in business shifts to staging experiences.5 Each role, therefore, must contribute to a unique audience–actor relationship represented in the company's experience offerings. In the end, a company's
This structure constitutes the essence of Experience Economy businesses, with profound implications for both the on- and offstage actors within them. While the full effects of this economic shift on businesses and their workers cannot yet be fully known (the tremendous impact of the Industrial Revolution on people from all walks of life was not fully understood for more than a hundred years), we can discuss the nature of work in the new Experience Economy. In chapter 6 we explain what it means to become an actor; here we describe what it means to be a producer, a director, or one of the various players who supports them (dramaturg, scriptwriter, technician, and stage manager and crews). We also discuss the role of the casting director, who helps producers and directors find the right people to fill all these roles, whether onstage or off.
A Big Rol
e to Fill
In any business, the producers financially back the enterprise, whether it be closely held by private investors, financed by venture capitalists, or managed by executives representing millions of shareholders. Producers determine what the business will produce. Will it be extracted commodities? Commoditized goods and services? Or new experiences? No one else in the organization can answer these questions, for they point to the most basic consideration: what productions do we want to stage? There are no easy answers or cookie-cutter approaches to this question. Producers originate change, because crafting any strategy always entails desiring and envisioning the future. They choose which [audience = customers] they wish to serve and the nature of the [theatre stage = workplace] in which the drama will unfold before a buying public.
Producers inadequately fulfill their roles when they do not define what change their businesses seek to affect through their performance offerings. Unfortunately, we find today countless mission statements riddled with nebulous notions about just what a particular business seeks to accomplish. These are generic visions that could apply to any business; they make a poor substitute for rigorous thinking. Mission statements, strategic plans, and action steps must be grounded in the uniqueness of a business. This isn't a simple question of differentiating the business from its competitors but of discovering the unexamined dimensions of one's corporate self. This self-examination, like that conducted by any individual actor, supplies an organization with a source of renewal ( just as examining the uniqueness of customers is the means to uncovering their unarticulated needs). A producer's vision is meaningful only if the actors called on to execute it understand—viscerally—how the company plans to alter the very nature of the world through its industry. Every activity of the [ensemble = organization] must be performed to advance external change.
Too many companies seem to passively observe their futures, failing to understand that it is their behavior that may be the strongest influence on developments in their industries and the rise and fall of economic eddies that follow. The choices made by real people within a business—and not some law of nature—determine its fate. Good producers make their own future by doing one thing: exploring what leverage points in the economy they can exploit for their own strategic advantage.
The emerging Experience Economy opens up possibilities for new strategies of moving beyond goods and services as the primary source of profits. In the face of rapidly commoditizing goods and services and an increasing number of customers who want experiences, producers must demand that their executives and managers be accountable for answering some key questions:
Recognizing how new experiential elements can be added to increase demand or charge higher prices (or both) for existing goods and services. How can you enhance your present offerings by appealing to the senses? What negative cues can be eliminated, and positive cues added, to better integrate customer impressions into an engaging theme? What could you mass customize and thereby shift up the Progression of Economic Value?
Identifying which goods and services will command higher prices and therefore serve as critical resources for true experience stagers, repositioning one's goods as props and one's services as the stage to support new experience offerings of potential customers. How can the company help other businesses shift up the Progression of Economic Value? Can your things be inged to enhance a customer's experiences? Can services be restaged as platforms for such economic experiences?
Eradicating current practices of providing experiential elements for free merely as a means to sell more goods and services, redefining these elements as explicit experiences that can command a distinct price. What would you have to do differently to charge admission? How would you move current experiences into the sweet spot of the entertainment, educational, escapist, and esthetic realms?
Commoditizing the competition by staging wholly new experience offerings: how would you set the stage via THEME-ing: theming the experience, harmonizing impressions with positive cues, eliminating negative cues, mixing in memorabilia, and engaging all five senses? Which forms of theatre would best portray the experience you wish to create?
These strategic probes point to the mere beginnings of exploration. The bottom line: good producers insist that these questions be convincingly answered before financially backing the full production. That is because the answers define the [drama = strategy] to be staged by the [ensemble = organization].
Leaving a Mark
The role of director involves making the conceptual material of [drama = strategy] become operational reality.6 Those people who fill this position face pressures unparalleled in other roles, because directors have accountability for everything, literally everything, that takes place on this new stage of business theatre. Directing requires coordination of all the players—actors, dramaturgs, scriptwriters, technicians, and stage crews—while securing the producersɲ approval of decisions at key junctures leading up to the performance. And yet it involves much more.
The directing role demands organizational skills: scheduling and conducting auditions (with the help of casting directors), ensuring that technicians meet timelines in the design and construction of sets, selecting appropriate costumes and props, and determining the day-to-day movements, or blocking, of the cast. Directors must help actors prepare through formal rehearsals as well as coaching on the side. They must spend time alone with the [script = processes], developing their own point of view about how best to orchestrate all the activity. And time must be spent with the producers, keeping them apprised of the progress toward fulfillment of the [drama = strategy]. It falls to the director to create a harmonized whole.
To meet all these demands, the role of director has necessarily evolved into an authoritative position. At times, directors must tell people what to do. Enlightened directors, however, do not blindly impose their whims on the rest of the ensemble. Rather, they perfect a rare fusion of collaboration and command. This blend of collaborator and commander is directing. To successfully blend the two into one, directors require certain motivational skills. The resulting mix dictates to actors without having them lose their own sense of discovery in their roles. Characterization emerges through collaboration, while both director and actor maintain distinct, even dogmatic, points of view about the performance.
The director must also exhibit interpretive skills.7 What stage should be set? What actors should be cast? The answers to both questions require interpretation of the strategy into an appropriate set of actions. As the actual offering progresses from idea to implementation, this interpretation manifests itself in a constant stream of decision making during the preparations and rehearsals leading to performance: what to include and exclude from each performance, what to keep in and take out as the drama unfolds, and what work should be done offstage versus onstage. The basis for making these decisions, all along the way, resides in discerning which actions best fit the strategy. Such discernment necessarily puts the director in the world of concepts and principles, the stuff of interpretive action. To leave his mark, the director must learn to fly at thirty thousand feet while managing the details of the performance transpiring on the ground.
Finally, directing requires storytelling skills. Indeed, every director ultimately aims to enact a performance that completely engages the audience in its story. Former Hollywood and now IBM scriptwriter Peter Orton makes the case to the IBM directors he teaches that “stories enhance attention, create anticipation, increase retention. They provide a familiar set of ‘hooks’ that allow us to process the information that we hang on them.”8 As the title of the article in Fast Company quoting Orton puts it, “Every Leader Tells a Story.”
Turning Drama into Performance, Strategy into Offering
To meet their primary obligations—turning drama into performance, strategy into offering—directors look primarily to four roles for support. Each corresponds to one of the four elements (as presented in figure 6-2) that contribute to the staging of an experienc
e for the [audience = customers]:
Dramaturgs assist in creating the [drama = strategy].
Scriptwriters help with developing the [script = processes].
Technicians aid the production of [theatre = work].
Stage crews coordinate the operational elements of the [performance = offering].
Each role, as discussed next, helps the director create a unified performance.
Dramaturgs
The dramaturg advises the director in matters of [drama = strategy]. Theatre arts professors David Kahn and Donna Breed explain: “The dramaturg may act as a sounding board for the director's analysis, pointing out patterns, issues, images, character functions, and other elements that contribute to the play's meaning. Dramaturgs should be skilled in the mechanics of dramatic structure and can be helpful in identifying how the play is constructed and what models might be useful for analysis.”9 In business theatre, internal planning personnel or external strategic consultants may play this role. In either case, the dramaturg researches and analyzes the economic and competitive environment in which the company plans to release its production and then synthesizes the findings for the director. Of critical importance to the dramaturg role is the ability to distinguish which customer phenomena should influence decision making, especially any industry discontinuities—such as the advent of social media or the increasing digitization of experiences—that might be exploited to the company's advantage.
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