Tell the Story in Everything You Do

Once an organization (or an individual or team) understands their purpose and what their story is, that story informs everything they do.

We talked about the ‘holistic’ mindset in Principle 1: Develop a Performance Mindset. The big picture informs the detail and the detail delivers the big picture. Once we understand the purpose, the shape of our performance, there are things that will serve that purpose and things that will not. Some things work, some don’t.

Successful companies understand their purpose and their narrative; these tell them who they are, what they do and what they don’t do.

Often, it is the story of an organization’s founding that creates the original purpose and narrative. Setting up any successful organization, after all, is a heroic task, beset by risk and danger. The story of how and why those risks were taken and those threats overcome comes to define the organization itself.

The inventor James Dyson is the founder of the British engineering company that designs and manufactures high-end household appliances – vacuum cleaners, hair driers, fans and heaters – as well as business products such as washroom hand driers and office lighting.

Dyson founded the company, which is still most famous for The Dyson, its original dual-cyclone vacuum cleaner, in 1991. As a young inventor, he had come to believe – probably unreasonably – that the world needed a better kind of vacuum cleaner. His ‘bagless’ cyclonic technology did away with the need for paper bags to collect dust, which inevitably clog over time and cause the device to lose power and efficiency.

Dyson’s story is a heroic quest: a refusal to compromise, a drive to overcome apparently insuperable obstacles, and success achieved through cunning, strength and perseverance (a bit like The Odyssey).

His epic story now supplies the company with its narrative, and Dyson Ltd tells the story in everything they do.

Dyson studied design at the Royal College of Art in London. His first commercial invention was the Ballbarrow – a wheelbarrow that used a ball instead of a wheel.

The idea for a new kind of vacuum cleaner came from a visit to a sawmill, where a cyclonic separator was used to take sawdust out of the air. Dyson thought that the technology could be used on a smaller scale to power a vacuum cleaner, separating out dust without needing to filter air through bags.

Dyson spent nearly five years developing his new machine, famously producing 5,126 prototypes before achieving success with the 5,127th attempt. He and his wife lived off her earnings as an art teacher, grew their own vegetables and ran up debt.

As Dyson told Wired:

There are countless times an inventor can give up on an idea. By the time I made my 15th prototype, my third child was born. By 2,627, my wife and I were really counting our pennies. By 3,727, my wife was giving art lessons for some extra cash. These were tough times, but each failure brought me closer to solving the problem. It wasn’t the final prototype that made the struggle worth it. The process bore the

fruit. I just kept at it.³⁴

Dyson says that long-distance running at school helped teach him the importance of perseverance.

As he told Forbes:

I wanted to give up almost every day. But one of the things I did when I was young was long distance running […] And I was quite good at it, not because I was physically good, but because I had more determination. I learned determination from it. In long distance running, you go through a pain barrier. The same thing happens in research and development projects, or in starting any business. There’s a terrible moment when failure is staring you in the face. And actually if you

persevere a bit longer you’ll start to climb out of it.³⁵

Dyson found it hard to persuade existing vacuum cleaner manufacturers to license his new design because they were reluctant to disrupt the current business model, which made money from the sale of bags and filters – much as razor companies make money from the sale of blades.

He eventually found a licensee in Japan, where the new cleaner became something of a status symbol and won a design award, and then another licensee in America, which Dyson described as “a disaster”.³⁶

He and his wife mortgaged their family home to set up a factory in Wiltshire. Dyson’s premium-priced machines were advertised with the slogan, ‘Say Goodbye to the Bag’, and became the UK’s fastest-selling vacuum cleaner ever. The competition introduced rival cleaners using similar technology. In 1999, Dyson took the mighty Hoover corporation to court for patent infringement relating to Hoover’s own cyclonic range of cleaners, and he won. By 2002, with the introduction of new models, the Dyson company had won a leading share of the UK market. That same year, Dyson created a foundation to support education in design and engineering.³⁷

In 2017, Dyson Ltd reported annual sales of £2.5 billion and employed 8,500 people worldwide. Dyson devotes time and money to inspiring and enabling the next generation of design engineers. The same year saw the launch of the Dyson Institute of Technology, where students pay no tuition fees and are paid a salary, working alongside Dyson engineers on live projects.

The company is currently working on a new electric vehicle.

James Dyson’s story is the ‘founding myth’ of the Dyson company. This has become ‘the story’ of the Dyson company because it is a very good story and because it says all the right things about the organization. It highlights constant innovation, the relentless search for perfection, a refusal to compromise and an obsession with engineering excellence.

Most successful companies have a good founding myth. The very fact that the organization has survived represents a titanic struggle against overwhelming odds (most new companies fail, often in their first year) and demonstrates the great vision and tenacity of the founders.

These founding myths can come to define the very essence – the soul – of an organization. When this happens, it can be a wonderful thing, underpinning the success of an organization’s entire performance.

Something of Henry Ford’s heroic achievement in bringing the new-fangled automobile to the masses at the start of the 20th century still resonates in our perception of today’s Ford Motor Company.

Something of the legend of the California garage where Bob Hewlett and Dave Packard set up their fledgling electronics business is still attached to Hewlett-Packard.

Something of Sam Walton’s drive to offer goods as cheaply as possible and sell them in high volumes still clings to every Walmart.

The US outdoor clothing company Patagonia has its own, very impressive founding myth. But it chooses to tell a different story.

The founding myth is this: Yvon Chouinard started life as a kind of mountaineering, falconeering, surfing, kayaking, fly-fishing hippie. He seems to have spent most of his early life camping out, living off less than a dollar a day and supplementing his diet with ground squirrels, having fun and generally not giving a shit about pursuing a conventional career.

Now, according to Forbes, he is a billionaire.³⁸

Chouinard’s love of climbing California’s cliffs, canyons and mountains led him to start a one-man business in the late 1950s.

When you climb – unless you are an astonishingly brave ‘free solo’ climber, and use no gear to protect yourself against a fall – you need to anchor yourself to the rock face with a rope. To anchor their ropes, climbers use pitons: flat metal spikes with an ‘eye’ at the end to attach your rope to. You drive the piton into a crevice in the rock face and fasten your rope to the piton.

Old-fashioned, soft iron pitons moulded into the crack they were hammered into, making them difficult to remove and reuse. They were typically left in the rock face.

Chouinard didn’t like the fact that this spoiled the rock face, changing it from its natural state, so he devised his own reusable pitons, made from hard chrome-molybdenum. They could be hammered out of the rock after a climb and reused. He began making them with a forge and anvil he bought from a junkyard. Chouinard could make two of his pitons an hour, and they sold for $1.50 each. He was in business!

Chouinard went on to become the biggest manufacturer of mountaineering equipment in the US. Then he decided that even reusable pitons were too damaging to the rock face, leaving it degraded for future climbers. He stopped manufacturing pitons – a huge business risk – and started making aluminium chocks, also known as ‘nuts’. These were designed to wedge into a tapering crack in the rock, leaving the natural rock face unaltered.

Chouinard also moved into outdoor clothing. With the growing success of his clothing business, and following a product-liability lawsuit that dramatically increased his insurance costs, he put his equipment company into liquidation.

Chouinard’s partner, Peter Metcalfe, bought the assets of Chouinard Equipment and launched the successful Black Diamond climbing equipment line. Chouinard kept on with his Lost Arrow/Patagonia clothing brand, which would, in time, make him a wealthy man.

Patagonia Clothing does tell the story of Yves Chouinard’s rise from squirrel-eating mountaineer/surfer hippie to billionaire – but only as a backstory.

The story they choose to tell is this:

OUR CORE VALUES

Build the best product; cause no unnecessary harm; use business to

protect nature; not bound by convention

Patagonia, Inc. website

That’s a good ‘purpose’.

In fact, that’s a great purpose. It commits the company to many things.

Over the years, because of that purpose, Patagonia has taken difficult business decisions to drop suppliers who fall short of their standards on sustainability and animal welfare.

The company gives whichever is greater of 1% of sales or 10% of net profit to environmental causes.

It describes itself as an ‘activist’ company, and advocates for environmental protection, fair trade and employee rights. The company is currently suing President Donald Trump and other US government officials over plans to remove national monument status from protected public lands in the American West.

Patagonia’s ‘purpose’ is to “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to protect nature and not be bound by convention”.

This is how the company unpacks this purpose into a story, through a compelling narrative:

OUR REASON FOR BEING

Patagonia grew out of a small company that made tools for climbers. Alpinism remains at the heart of a worldwide business that still makes clothes for climbing – as well as for skiing, snowboarding, surfing, fly fishing, paddling and trail running. These are all silent sports. None require a motor; none deliver the cheers of a crowd. In each sport, reward comes in the form of hard-won grace and

moments of connection between us and nature.

Our values reflect those of a business started by a band of climbers and surfers, and the minimalist style they promoted. The approach we take towards product design demonstrates a bias for simplicity

and utility.

For us at Patagonia, a love of wild and beautiful places demands participation in the fight to save them, and to help reverse the steep decline in the overall environmental health of our planet. We donate our time, services and at least 1% of our sales to hundreds of grassroots environmental groups all over the world who work to help

reverse the tide.

We know that our business activity – from lighting stores to dyeing shirts – creates pollution as a by-product. So, we work steadily to reduce those harms. We use recycled polyester in many of our clothes

and only organic, rather than pesticide-intensive, cotton.

Staying true to our core values during 30-plus years in business has helped us create a company we’re proud to run and work for. And our focus on making the best products possible has brought us success

in the marketplace.

Patagonia, Inc. website

Deciding on your true purpose – your ‘why’ rather than your ‘what’ – is the single most important task for anyone aspiring to be a great leader.

Once you understand your true purpose, you can begin to tell your story.

Get together with your team as a real ensemble and rehearse the story. (See Principle 5: Rehearse Creatively for useful advice on how to unleash the creativity of a group of people faced with a creative challenge.)

Get experts to help you: advertising agencies, brand consultants. Develop the best story you possibly can – the one that will most engage with your audience.

Once your organization understands its own story, tell it in everything you do.

Your audiences need to understand and remember your story so well that it is in the back of their minds in every encounter with you. It adds flavour to their dealings with you. It also underpins their expectations of you. If you deviate from the story or fail to be true to it, they will recognize this and they may not forgive you.

Patagonia has changed its business arrangements on several occasions because its consumers have said, with justification: ‘This isn’t being true to your story’.

WeTransfer earns the trust of its creative community by keeping their interface with their audience clean, simple and visually stimulating. It reinforces this by offering a constant supply of fresh and inspiring stories about other artists and creatives and their work, for the service’s audience to explore if they choose. It makes 30% of its advertising freely available to creatives to promote their services.

Volkswagen lost the trust of its audience when it deviated from its story about engineering excellence by installing ‘defeat devices’ to cheat on government emissions regulations, rather than rising to the challenge by finding a genuine engineering solution.

An organization’s story is the emotional link between the organization and its audience. A false note breaks the spell, and the magic is over.

Remember to create your own, personal narrative: be the hero of your own story.

Most people’s lives have an interesting narrative arc, but it’s easy to get lost in the detail. So much happens to us that we get bogged down. We did this, then this, then this – the traditional ‘CV’ format forces us into listing many aspects of our lives that are, in effect, distractions.

Step back a bit. Put on your editor’s hat. Think of the core strands in your life history – the things that have really driven your life and your career.

There will be a strong story in there somewhere. Use it.

Teams within the organization also need their own story. Individual teams need to explain how they fit into the big picture, how they contribute to the organization’s purpose (its ‘why?’) and the challenges and obstacles they have to overcome to deliver on their objectives.

Teams that understand their own ‘why?’ and know their narrative are teams that are well on the way to becoming genuine ensembles.

If we only know ‘what’ we do, it’s difficult to create a compelling story. ‘We do this and this and this …’ It’s boring.

When we know our ‘why?’, on the other hand, it’s impossible not to tell a story: “For us at Patagonia, a love of wild and beautiful places demands participation in the fight to save them.”

We know why we do what we do, and we can tell you the story …

These are useful questions to ask yourself:

Does our organization understand its purpose?

Can we explain how and why we came to have our purpose and why

it means so much to us?

Can we unpack our purpose into a satisfying narrative?

Is our story compelling, inspiring and true?

Have we communicated our purpose and our story to our audiences?

Does the audience love our purpose and our story, or do we need to

find a more compelling way of telling it?

Have we found our followers – the people who believe what we believe?

Can you quickly tell the story of your own life and career? Does it have a satisfying shape and a narrative arc? Are you clearly the hero

of this story?

Does your immediate team know its own story? Do they celebrate it

in everything they do?

Listening to stories helps us make sense of the world. It makes things memorable and cuts through the clutter because we can relate and engage with these stories; they have a meaning.

The actor Mark Rylance talked to The Stage magazine about how the business of telling stories on stage helps keep him grounded:

I’m addicted to theatre. I haven’t been acting in July and August, and I was wired and feeling anxious by the end of August.

It’s amazing how much the sense of telling a story with a begin-

ning, middle and end helps me to relax.

I find that the mass of stories that one is subjected to living one’s

life is otherwise overwhelming.³⁹