Corporate storytelling can inspire and pass on principles

Published 9:00 pm Sunday, July 4, 2004

Employees at Medtronic Inc. in Redmond judge the quality of the company’s annual meeting not by completing a survey, but by counting how many tear-stained hankies were used in listening to customers praise how the company’s medical equipment saved their lives.

Everybody at FedEx knows about the driver whose truck broke down on the last run of the day and asked the tow truck driver to detour to the destination so he could deliver that final package.

And every employee at Armstrong International knows the story of how a round of golf once cost their CEO $248,000.

These companies are among a select few scattered throughout the corporate landscape that use the art of storytelling as a principal vehicle to share their values, histories and direction to their employees, customers and communities.

Yet the stories are not merely told and passed on. The principles they reflect are enacted consistently by these companies as they conduct their everyday business.

This is just one of several common threads revealed about corporate storytelling in a new book, “Around the Corporate Campfire, How Great Leaders Use Stories To Inspire Success,” (Insight Publishing Co., 2004) by Kirkland-based speaker and consultant Evelyn Clark.

As she researched the book, Clark began to realize that the 15 companies the book features and others that use storytelling do so to imbue in their employees and share to the world that they are distinctively different from most businesses.

“Companies that tell stories about themselves and their people do so to vividly share their core values, what they are truly about as a company,” Clark said.

“The results that these companies achieve – they are consistently successful as businesses – go beyond mere coincidence. I think one major common thread is that they all have great leaders who passionately know the value of committing to the people they employ and their customers.”

Stories are an important vehicle in fusing that connection.

It’s a wonder, for example, why Medtronic goes to the trouble to find and then invite people whose lives were saved or improved by the company’s medical technology to their annual Christmas holiday party when a simple PowerPoint slide show could present the story in bar graphs and bullet points.

“When they tell their stories, that your dedication to producing a quality product gave me a new lease on life, the impact is far greater than issuing a press release proclaiming a 25 percent increase in productivity,” Clark said.

And, when Costco says it’s committed to bring its customers high quality items for the lowest price possible, it backs the promise with several stories, including one of how officers passed on making a windfall profit and, instead, cut the price of a pair of Calvin Klein jeans.

“One business characteristic many people don’t know about Costco is that they limit their mark-up on products to just 14 percent (compared to the normal retail markup of 100 to even 200 percent),” Clark said

“When the Costco buyer found the jeans at a super low price, Costco could have kept the price at $29.95 and pocketed a huge extra profit. But they stayed true to their mark-up policy and lowered the price to $22.95,” Clark said. “They make sure every employee knows that story.”

Southwest Airlines did not become wildly successful more than 30 years ago by come and by golly. The stories most common in the Southwest culture relate to the company’s unusual management-employee teamwork, Clark said.

“One way Southwest became a low-cost airline, was by keeping its costs low,” Clark said. Flight attendants help clean cabins between flights. Southwest pilots, who log more flying hours than counterparts at other airlines, often assist baggage handlers.

“The one thing that’s also common to these companies is that their stories are consistently about people and how they work to further the mission of their companies,” said Clark. “They realize they’d be hard pressed to tell a story of how many more widgets they produced and make it interesting.”

Write Eric Zoeckler at The Herald, P.O. Box 930, Everett, WA 98206 or e-mail mrscribe@aol.com.