His master answered, “You wicked and lazy servant. You knew that I reap where I do not sow, and gather where I have not scattered seed: you ought therefore to have put my money with the money changers, and then at my coming I should have received my own money back with interest. Therefore take the thousand gold coins from him, and give it to the man who has ten thousand coins. For to every one that has something, more shall be given, and he shall have more than enough: but from him that has nothing, even the little shall be taken away from him. As for this useless servant, throw him outside into the darkness. There he will cry and gnash his teeth.”37
A parable begins with a narrative imagining—the understanding of a complex of objects, events, actors, and objectives as organized by a story. It then combines story with projection—one story is projected onto another.38 The parable of talents might be projected onto various activities—the effort to be a better person, the investment of money, the education of children, or the launching of a change program in an organization.
A parable affords an infinite number of applications, as different readers or listeners use projection from the base story to imagine a new story in their own contexts. As a result, a parable tends to have great longevity: the parables of the Bible are still going strong, some two thousand years after they were created.
What makes the Bible's parables more memorable than Tyco's simple vignettes is the conflict of different values. Tyco's vignettes explicate a single value. The Bible's parables typically shed light on a conflict of values. How could a master praise his dishonest manager? How could a Samaritan be the hero of a story? What king would take to the streets to invite anyone he could find, good and bad alike, to come to his son's wedding? How could you take the money of the man who had only one thousand gold coins and give it to the man who already had ten thousand gold coins?
Thus, one of Jim Sinegal's stories is a parable that shows how Costco resolves the conflict between two competing values: serving the customer and making a profit. The story, as told to Evelyn Clark in Around the Corporate Campfire, is as follows:
We were selling Calvin Klein jeans for $29.99, and we were selling every pair we could get our hands on. One competitor matched our price, but they had only four or five pairs in each store, and we had 500 or 600 pairs on the shelf. We all of a sudden got our hands on several million pairs of Calvin Klein jeans and we bought them at a very good price. It meant that, within the constraints of our markup, which is limited to 14 percent on any item, we had to sell them for $22.99. That was $7 lower than we had been selling every single pair for.
Of course, we concluded that we could have sold all of them (about four million pairs) for that higher price almost as quickly as we sold them at $22.99, but there was no question that we would mark them at $22.99 because that's our philosophy.
I use that as an example because it would be so tempting for a buyer to go with the higher price for a very quick $28 million in additional profits, but ours didn't. That's an example of how we keep faith with the customer.39
In telling such a parable, Sinegal risks Wall Street's wrath for not maximizing profit in the short run, and that is the point of the story. Sinegal stands by his values, having decided that this is the kind of company Costco is going to be. In doing so, he is following Friedrich Nietzsche's dictum: “Become who you are!”40
Tell the Values Story in a Minimalist Fashion
Although parables have an ancient lineage, they don't follow the principles of traditional storytelling laid down by Aristotle. These stories are typically very simple and one-dimensional, like European folk tales. There are few context-setting details, though the context that is established needs to seem relevant to the listeners.
Like springboard stories, the parables are told in a minimalist fashion—with no character development or attempt to set the scene. The lack of detail makes listeners imagine the details of the story and so involves them actively in the telling.
Tell a Timeless But Believable Story
Stories that transmit values are usually set in some kind of timeless past.
Unlike springboard stories, the parables tend to be imaginary narratives—they're not presented as true stories that purport to have actually happened at a particular time and place. Thus, we learn in the parable of the talents about “a man who went on a journey.” Did the man ever exist? Did he ever go on the journey? It hardly matters. What counts are the values embedded in the story.
The facts of such tales can be hypothetical, but they must be believable:
A colleague who worked for IBM recalled the story he heard about the CEO of IBM who was refused entry into the building because he had forgotten his security badge. The story was told as if it was the current CEO. Later on, he discovered that the CEO in question was Tom Watson in 1936. But as it happened, I heard exactly the same story several decades ago in the World Bank told about Robert McNamara. Which version of the story was true? It hardly matters. If it reflects current practice and belief in the organization, a story conveys the firm's values.
The parable may have either a positive tone as in the parable of the sower (some of whose seeds fell on poor ground but many on good ground where they prospered) or a negative tone as in the parable of the talents. The tone is less important in a parable than in a springboard story, since the aim is not to spark action but to solidify understanding of the values that are expected.
Find Values from Narratives or Narratives from Values
One way of exploring values is to work inductively and start with meaningful narratives and then figure out what the values may be.
People often have difficulty in answering direct questions as to what their values are or how they would rate a certain value on a scale of one to five. When formulated like this, values are abstractions. In reality, nobody walks around with a mental list of values in their mind, which they consult when deciding what to do. Values live in the actions that people engage in and the stories that they tell about those actions to try to make sense of them.
Here are some topics that can be used to prompt stories that reveal values:
Occasions where you faced adversity
Times when two values conflicted
What you find most satisfying in working with your firm
Something that showed you what your organization is really good at
The worst thing that ever happened to you in your organization
How a client or customer was badly treated but it eventually turned out well
Your happiest day at work
Something that your organization is good at but few people know about
Something that showed you what you have to do to get ahead in your organization
Once you have told the story, then analyze it to see what values it reflects. For more, see the template at the end of this chapter.
Tell a Story About Someone You Admire
Asking people to tell stories about themselves is sometimes a little too intimate. One way of overcoming the discomfort is to ask them to share a story about someone who made a difference in their life:
Someone they knew when they were growing up
Someone in the organization who has meant a lot to them
The person they admire most in your organization
The person who is closest to them in the organization
Someone who did better in the organization than anyone expected
Someone who really taught them the ropes at the organization
Here is one such story, by Seth Kahan, author of Getting Change Right:
This is a story that came to mind when you were talking about money and managing money. I didn't have a lot of experience with my family in managing money. But just after I got out of college, I wanted to start a business, and I needed to borrow $500. My parents wouldn't lend it to me. So I went to my Uncle Ben and explained what I was going to do with the money, and he lent me $500. And then the business foundered, and the money was gone. The business
was gone, and I owed Uncle Ben this money.
I didn't call him back. I just kind of severed the relationship. That's how I felt. After about six months of no payment, he called me. I remember he said: “You know, you just don't do this. This is not a way to treat someone who has trusted you. It's okay that you don't have the money. We can work out a way for you to get the money and pay it back over time. But it's not okay to break off the relationship like that.” And that has stayed with me for my whole life, how one manages money, how one deals with people who have trusted you.
From this, the audience can begin to figure out that Seth Kahan is someone who:
Establishes trust, since this is important to him in his relationships
Works things out when they aren't going right
Doesn't break off relationships just because things are difficult
When people tell stories about people they care about, they are revealing what they care about themselves.
Align Structure with Values
The transmission of values happens through both storytelling (capturing the hearts and minds of people and influencing behavior) and structure (establishing rules, regulations, and policies to support and reward innovation). When structure and values compete, structure always wins. It's therefore important to ensure that the organization's values and its formal arrangements are consistent.
Probably most important is the reward system. How much do advancement and compensation depend on bottom-line performance versus the other values? And what happens to top performers who don't live by those values? If promotions go to those who flout the espoused values, then staff get a clear message: the values are mere public relations pabulum and don't reflect the way things are done around here. At a minimum, the firm needs to make sure that the structure doesn't provide disincentives.
The question of providing positive incentives for implementing the company's values is trickier. Basically you want values to be inner driven, simply the way people live. You don't want people to be honest only if they are rewarded for it. But if an organization espouses an instrumental value like innovation and the compensation system rewards outstanding performance by operators who are not innovators, the arrangements will be perceived as a disincentive to innovate. Innovation is unlikely to flourish unless the compensation system is adjusted.41
Having Shared Values Enables People to Work Together
Shared values in an organization create trust. People have confidence that others will do what they say. Trust releases creative, uninhibited, innovative action toward other people. Members of the organization are more open toward others, readier to initiate interactions and enter into enduring relationships. People are released from the necessity of monitoring and controlling every move of others and constantly policing their behavior. Trust provides the basis for being able to work together with others, and it is to this issue that I turn in the next chapter.
A Template for Generating Value Narratives
1. What is the specific value that you would like to communicate: Provide quality service? Maintain our integrity? Honesty and public trust? Customer intimacy? Operational excellence? Innovation and creativity? Something else?
2. Think of another value that might be in tension with it. Profitability? Deadlines? Output targets?
3. Think of an incident where a conflict between two values arose. Describe it briefly.
4. Who is the single protagonist in the story?
5. Is the single protagonist typical of your specific audience? If not, can the story be told from the point of view of such a protagonist?
6. Does the story make clear the importance of your target value?
7. Has the story been stripped of any unnecessary detail?
8. Does the story link to the purpose to be achieved in telling it—communicating the specific value of your organization?
9. Can you show that the story is characteristic of the organization using, for example, statistics, ratings, awards, or something else?
10. Can you show why this story is characteristic of the organization? Is it about history, staffing, or training, for example?
11. Can you show how the story is characteristic of the organization's processes or values, for example?
7
Get Others Working Together
Using Narrative to Get Things Done Collaboratively
“Stories are the language of communities.”
Garfield, Spring, and Cahill1
When you start talking about teamwork in a traditional organization, don't be surprised if you hear a groan. That's because most people have been subjected to large quantities of fake collaboration. Yet working together is essential to organizational effectiveness. So let's go back to basics and review the four major ways in which human beings work together.
Work groups are the traditional subunits in an organization: departments or divisions. They entail people working on the same subject and sometimes in the same space. Each person has a defined responsibility, and each reports to a common supervisor. In many of these organizational subunits, people work alone at jobs that are independent. The work group is the most common form of arrangement, and it exists wherever you find organizations.
Teams are organizational groupings of people who are interdependent, share common goals, coordinate their activities to accomplish these goals, and share responsibility for the performance of the collectivity. There are many different varieties of teams—including ad hoc task forces, project management teams, functional operating teams, cross-functional teams, self-managed teams, and self-defining teams.2 Many work groups are called teams but are teams in name only; they lack some or all of the attributes of a real team, namely, common goal, interdependence, and shared responsibility for performance.
In recent years, the concept of community has emerged in organizations. In its original sense, community meant a group of people in a specific geographical area who lived, worked, played, worshiped, and died together, sometimes over many generations. The word has now been extended to groupings of people who don't live or work in the same place but who share common interests, practices, and values. Thus scientific communities include scientists who may be scattered around the world, but who pursue research on the same subject, write to each other, attend the same conferences, and publish in the same journals. With the emergence of knowledge management, communities of practice have materialized as an essential component of getting knowledge shared across functional boundaries both within and beyond organizations. Technology—e-mail, the Web, videoconferencing—has dramatically expanded the possibilities of low-cost global communication, and hence facilitated the extraordinarily rapid growth of geographically dispersed communities and teams.
Communities are often confused with networks. Networks, however, are collections of people who maintain contact with each other because of a mutually perceived benefit of staying in touch for purposes that may or may not be explicit. Examples include the alumni of a business school or a consulting firm. Most of the groups that interact by way of discussion groups on the Web are networks rather than communities, because there is no web of affect-laden relationships or commitment to shared values. Table 7.1 summarizes the various forms of working relationships.
Table 7.1 Taxonomy of the Ways People Work Together: Work Groups, Teams, Communities, and Networks
While work groups, teams, and communities are conceptually distinct, in practice the modalities also tend to overlap. Thus a work group or a network may also become a community. For instance, in Communities of Practice, Etienne Wenger gives a particularly vivid description of a group of medical claims processors who were formally structured as a work group in an insurance company, who didn't particularly enjoy their work, but who nevertheless were functioning as a community of practice.3 The patterns are not mutually exclusive: many people have jobs in a work group but also participate in various teams, communities, or networks in the same organization.
High-Performance Teams
The Leader's Guide to Storytelling Page 17