Storytelling

Continuing with Imagine It Forward

Now I’m deep into the years right after the Great Recession, a time when GE nearly caved under during the crisis and had to be saved by first the government and then by Warren Buffet. I think I’m starting to get the first glimmer of why GE later had problems with investors: the crisis laid bare some of the weaknesses in GE. According to the author, half the company was GE Capital and that part of the company had previously been driving the profits.

There it is – GE Capital was the source of healthy earnings, not the industrial businesses. It may be that the industrial businesses can’t ever be as profitable as the juiced up financial side. It seems that during the years after 2008, investors wanted GE to get out of the financial business, if I’m reading the author’s hints correctly, but GE had depended on GE Capital to smooth out their earnings for years, if not decades. So what happens if one gets rid of GE Capital? Can GE juice up the industrial side’s profit margins to the level experienced on the financial side?

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The next stage of her book covers the years 2008 through roughly 2012 where the company tries to build the story of what GE is to remain relevant during those turbulent years. Storycraft is the big theme.

In the last few years the concept of telling stories has become very popular. Brandmaking or building a brand involves some story telling. You tell where you come from, you tell your mission and purpose, you tell your passions, all of it in story form. There’s corporate branding and there’s personal branding, but both contain an element of story telling. Or the common phrase I read a lot: “What is your story?”

When you give presentations or pitches, you are generally supposed to tell stories if you want to engage your audience. You want to capture and hold their interest with a story or a couple of stories. Throw away the bullet points and replace text with compelling visuals.

Advertising and marketing is a form of storytelling. Think about the most famous storytelling of our age: the Apple 1984 ad about the underdog smashing the IBM monopoly on computers. And now, every year SuperBowl gears up for a massive series of storytelling that engages the football fans and becomes part of the watercooler discussions the next day.

Even data analytics is turning to stories. The best data scientists or analysts are those who can weave a story out of the data to create a compelling case for some kind of action. Nothing happens if the audience does not understand the data.

It’s not easy crafting stories out of data; I tried doing so a few times in the 90’s to make the report/budget/forecast a little more interesting but was not too successful. One, I was just too far ahead of the times (it just was not done at the time and too weird) and two, the attempts probably were not all that interesting (although one story actually became interesting by accident – that is a story for another time).

Why are we so interested in stories? Well, for starters, we become engaged in the story if told well. Between just the facts or statistics and an emotional story, stories win every time. We don’t remember facts as well as we remember stories (unless the facts are just so surprising that you just can’t believe them). Two, research appears to show that we make decisions with our emotions rather than logic. This may be an evolutionary holdover from the earliest period of humankind before the brain structures for executive functions and logic became fully formed. Stories engage the emotions. So for data analytics, advertising, presentations or any kind of communication, you need to engage the emotions if you want to capture the attention and to compel some kind of action or response.

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The author in Imagine It Forward started trying to build stories about GE to make GE relevant after its near death in 2008. So there were story telling to convey the value and purpose of GE to the outside world through GE news website, videos and marketing events. But there was also story telling for the internal company to move people towards applying all things digital. When the author was at NBC, she found it very difficult to get people to innovate digitally or accept digital innovations, even though NBC, being a media company, was actually in the midst of turbulent digital change. Even when faced with that threat, NBC still had difficulty acting digitally and accepting the digital (doing blogs or websites, deploying social media, participating in digital platforms).

Now in 2008 she had moved from NBC to GE, the industrial behemoth and that side was not yet facing the digital threat, although she could see it happening in the future. The senior executives had a hard time grasping how digital could impact the industrial businesses or how GE could utilize the digital. In the executives’ mental models, digital was not part of their industry.

And even if people know that change is coming and were convinced of it, it is still hard to swing into action. It may be they don’t know how to get from A to B or they don’t have the skills or can’t learn fast enough. Or maybe it is the deer in the headlight syndrome.

And then there is the shareholder effect: shareholders are short term thinkers and change takes longer than the shareholders like. Change is difficult; change is hard; change involves lots of failures before you get success. Shareholders have no tolerance for the unknown and ambiguity.

Throughout the storycraft section of the book, the author provides some pointers on developing your stories: how to build a “content factory” to tell your story, how to rollout an announcements to generate excitement (“rolling thunder”) or get people involved in digital, and how to do digital storytelling. These were the tools GE used to remain relevant in the fast changing times and to push and pull its employees into the digital world.

To close this post, I will, naturally, quote a story from the book:

A good part of the innovator’s job is to scare people. Tell them what might happen to them if they don’t jump on the train. To instill in my team a fear of inaction during the early days of Healthymagination, I took them to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which I attended every year to keep my thumb on the market. I walked Jean-Michel and the other key members to one of the exhibition halls and pointed.

“What do you see?” I asked.
“Booths and booths of health industry start-ups,” Jean-Michel said.
“And do you know how many booths were here last year?” I asked. “Four.”

By the time I’d finish my sentence, Jean-Michel was dragging his colleagues over to the closest booth.

“Oh my god, there’s somebody here with a heart monitor tethered to a smart phone. That’s so great…” he said. “Wait a minute. That’s going to disrupt our ECG business.”
Imagine It Forward, Beth Comstock, 2018, pp. 253-254, hardcover.