Stories

You’ve all heard, no doubt, about the power of stories — including stories in the corporation. Companies of all sizes are calling in storytellers to help loosen up creative powers, to suggest coherent story lines in apparently unconnected data, and simply to make the business environment more human(e).

Aside from grunting and scratching, the story is the most primitive and archaic communication medium, and this may account for its enduring power.

Who can resist the idea of then, and then, and then? Then what happens? It’s the impulse that drives our daily lives, our not knowing what next and yet stepping bravely, or foolishly, forward.

And the impulse that keeps companies going, despite or because of all the rational and scientific management plans that can be devised.

Of course, a business with no plan, no idea, of the next step may be stepping into a bog of its own devising.

Once upon a time there was a company called XYZ that had a brilliant idea and no idea what to do with it. Until the time it was four or five years old, it enjoyed a series of spectacular successes. It was coddled by the market, wooed by investors, and gave back fabulous ROI. Then along came the big bad wolf of recession, tight credit, customer fickleness, and … and … and …

You need us more than we need you

Outrageous, yes, but true. “You need us more than we need you” was the text of a hugger-mugger business card that an account exec carried, and showed to a select few, at a marcomm agency where I used to work.

The card was good for laughs. And soothed our bruised egos, no doubt. The ones that might have been battered about by ungrateful boss and clueless client.

But however outrageous, the card expressed more than a seed of truth.

You need me, just as I need you.

Writers, designers, developers, and AE’s at agencies have talents that aren’t readily duplicated in the corporation:

• The ability to write clearly, cleanly, succinctly, and on message
• The gift of designing a logo, ad, or website that knocks the graphic socks and jocks off the audience
• The genius for patiently and accurately bearing messages back and forth between client management and agency creative, in effect, two halves of the one brain

Sure, you can save money by doing it yourself. The same way a homeowner can save money by patching his own roof.

Chances are, however, you won’t do as good a job as the pro.

And could end up with a leaky roof, or bottom line, for a long, long time.

So when it comes to finding the right words, designing an impressive website, sending the correct message across the sulcae from left brain to right brain, you need us.

Just as your customers need you.

Isn’t it great to be indispensable?

Think outside the box: really outside the box!

Derek Diedreksen's Gypsy Junker invites you to think outside the box!

Well, we’re all so busy thinking outside the box these days — that’s the exhortation, isn’t it? — that we fail to see the box we’re trapped in. The box of cliches, jargon, obscure Latinisms, and boxed-in thinking in general.

Seems like a loony in Massachusetts has set about to right this problem — in a nouveau-Thoreauvian way.

In Walden, Thoreau opined that a man might live with dignity in a house the size of a railroad storage box, the kind he saw beside the tracks at Walden Pond in Concord, Mass, the kind that held RR supplies, I suppose. Thoreau was keeping his tongue in cheek, as usual. He was full of wit and banter about the follies of his fellow man, whose misfortune it was, he asserted, to be trundling down life’s road with his house and all his possessions on his back.

We don’t have to be a follower of Thoreau or know much about him to see that he makes some kind of paradoxical sense at least. (Do you think he’d have many followers on LinkedIn or friends on Facebook, now that it’s the popular thing to do, the boxy kind of thing we seem to seek?) We stress quantity so much, that is, that we forget about quality. Qualify of life, if you will. (Argh, I hate that phrase!) Or quality of time and space to inhabit and explore.

A recent New York Times article shows that Thoreau has a follower and friend in contemporary Stoughton, Massachusetts, a fellow named Derek Diedreksen who is into thinking outside the box. You see, he has been constructing in the back yard of his modest two-bedroom house a series of “micro-shelters” that he calls the Gypsy Junker, the Hickshaw, and the Boxy Lady. Like Thoreau with his cabin, Diedreksen has made his constructions out of materials he’s scavenged or bought on the cheap. Each has cost him less than $200. (In Walden’s first chapter, “Economy,” Thoreau lays out his expenses for boards, nails, mortar, etc. penny by penny.)

Of the Gypsy Junker, the largest of the three structures, Diedreksen says, “Originally, it was going to be a place to brainstorm for my book [about the micro-structures] and my designs. … There’s no better place than inside someplace that is unconventional and bizarre. It helps you think outside the box instead of sitting in some white-walled room.”

So there you have it. If you really want to think outside the box, get thee to a micro-structure if not a nunnery. All that breathing the shallow air of white-walled rooms will do you in. Guaranteed!

Savvy, humble, and willing to commit

This is sad, friends, and true. I’m at an age where I read the obits for pleasure. (Thank God it was them, not me.) And look at the job ads, too, with wonder.

This morning I ran across one that, like so many others, seems to have been written by a robot.

Among other impossibilities, it called for an account executive who was “savvy, humble, and willing to commit.”

Isn’t this like asking for a 40-year-old virgin?

If you’re savvy, friend, you’re not going to be particularly humble.

And if you’re humble, you won’t be cunning and savvy.

That’s the nature of the beast.

But this bit of linguistic legerdemain is pretty common. It’s a bit you can find in all kinds of ads that ask for unique individuals who can think outside the box (including the box of cliches) — and be 100% team players (another cliche).

We need to remind ourselves how humble we must be!

In the world of thinking outside the box, we don’t say we’ll think outside the box.

In the world of team playing, we do. (We say rah! rah! rah!)

So which box do they want — creative thinking or conformity?

And how far are they willing to accommodate really new ideas?

(Rodney King, beaten by the cops, might say, “Why can’t we all just get along?” And those who are beaten and cowed by the bosses might ask the same.)

I’m not making an argument for cat fights and sabotage. Rather, I’m suggesting that real creativity may come at the price of real 100% collaboration not to mention groupthink.

How can we have it both ways?