Story Driven: You don't need to compete when you know who you are

by Bernadette Jiwa

The Meaning Economy has also created a new kind of customer who is drawn to brands that share and enable them to express their values.

We’re moving towards the formulation of a new value equation—one that rewards work that is carried out with heart and rewards businesses that are driven by purpose before profits.

A company’s purpose is sometimes unarticulated or buried deep in the company’s DNA, but it’s still possible to sense and experience it.

We often ignore the things that motivate us to do the great work, things that will, ironically, enable us to expand our reach, attract more customers, be competitive and feel fulfilled.

When we prioritise meaning in our companies and communities, it becomes easier to have authentic conversations with our stakeholders and to be honest with our customers.

Putting contribution before profits is still an underrated...

These businesses don’t simply exist to turn a profit—they are contributing to your community, the wellbeing of their teams and the betterment of the world, sometimes indirectly.

cafés have become inviting workspaces, and twenty-four-hour convenience stores have become places where the homeless can warm up on bitter winter nights. Vinyl record and book stores can be cultural hubs. And conscious-clothing retailers lead cultural shifts.

We are beginning to question more deeply the role that business plays in adding value to our lives, communities and cultures.

We’re seeing a move towards business leaders questioning their responsibility to the world and being more explicit about the reasons their companies should exist and the future they are intent on creating.

Humans are wired to do what feels good, and what feels good to customers right now is to use their choices and purchasing power to support the building of a better tomorrow. That means buying from businesses that are motivated by generosity and contribution, and that have an inclusive view of the economy rather than a selfish one.

McAdams proposes that a person’s identity is formed by integrating life experiences into an internalised, evolving story that provides him or her with a sense of purpose. We make sense of who we are by piecing together stories from our reconstructed past, perceived present and imagined future.

‘In personality psychology, what mainly counts when it comes to the idea of a life story is the narrator’s subjective understanding of how he or she came to be the person he or she is becoming—that is, the person’s narrative identity.’

As business leaders, we’ve learned how to become better technical storytellers, for the purpose of marketing our products and services, by borrowing from what the best writers know about Joseph Campbell’s ‘hero’s journey’. Our customer is seen as someone who needs a guide on a quest.

The story-driven company thrives because its people have a collective narrative identity that gives them a sense of purpose and creates a cohesive culture.

When you know where you came from and where you’re going, decisions become easier.

‘companies are increasingly seeking to align their commercial activities with larger social and cultural values’ because they know it’s good for business.

It also benefits the prosperity of a company (of any size) when its founders, leaders and employees have a sense that they’re contributing to something bigger than themselves.

We humans are wired for connection and contribution. We thrive when we get the opportunity to do both. This is why there is an element of fundamental good in every business backstory. You just have to stop for long enough and retrace your steps to find it.

Your company’s origins and ethos—your intention and aspiration to create an impact on the world and in the lives of the people your business touches—shape your identity and your strategy.

You already have a story; it’s how you choose to interpret and use it that...

The most committed entrepreneurs and successful organisations know how important and powerful understanding their narratives can be.

What drives Elon Musk, for example, is the ability to be useful, to secure a good future for the human race and to create things that make a difference to a large number of people.

What’s at the heart of your story? What’s the reason you got out of bed this morning? It isn’t just to make more money for your boss or the need to sell some average product you made. It’s the deep, often unspoken, desire to change something you care about changing and the belief that it’s possible.

Sometimes we forget why we started, and in doing so we miss the opportunity to harness the power of our unique identity and our story.

We are faced with hundreds of choices every day—decisions sometimes so small we hardly recognise them as conscious choices at all. Will we hit the gym or the snooze button, check Facebook or meditate, eat porridge or an Egg McMuffin?

our underlying beliefs about intelligence, learning and failure can affect our choices, behaviour and performance.

Our choices, as they accumulate over time, strengthen our personal narrative.

We must act in accordance with who we say we are and use our narrative to guide us to become the people who build the kind of organisations we want to exist.

We invest extraordinary sums of money and disproportionate amounts of time in trying to get people to notice us. We’re used to leveraging the power of storytelling commercially to attract attention or gain an advantage over our competitors. We devote tremendous resources to what has been called ‘the war on attention’

This attention-getting strategy not only sells storytelling and our companies short; it also means that we continually have to reinvent ourselves, with bigger and better stories, to stay in the more-eyeballs game.

Companies and ideas fail because of a lack of resonance with the people they seek to serve.

by setting out to find and tell the right story, we lose sight of the real story—the truth about who we are. We mistakenly assume that marketing is about adapting our story according to what most people want to hear.

As a result, we don’t devote enough time and resources to reflecting on how we can resonate with the right people—just as we are. We fail to harness the true potential of our narrative.

The first step to resonating with customers is to stop pretending and have a clear sense of our own identity.

B Corps are ‘for-profit companies certified by the non-profit B Lab to meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency’.

Story As Strategy At its simplest, a strategy is a plan for achieving a goal—a bird’s-eye view of the path that will take us from where we are now to where we want to go.

PURPOSE AND VISION—Where you’re going and why. STRATEGY—How you’re going to get there. TACTICS—What you do along the way.

Alibaba Group in 1999, his company’s purpose was to ‘make it easy to do business anywhere’.

His vision: to ‘build the future infrastructure of commerce’. Ma envisioned being a ‘company that lasts at least 102 years’.

If you want to empower the people who are helping you to build your company, you must have as much clarity as Jack Ma did from the outset about where you’re going and why, in order to get there.

You have to begin by getting clear about why your business exists. The very act of questioning your purpose forces you to dig deeper. It invites you to clarify why you wanted to make that particular promise to those particular people in the first place and to create an action plan to deliver on it.

Clarity of intention is where your story starts. Whether it’s obvious to us or not, the businesses we are loyal to understand what they’re here to do.

When your business or organisation is story driven, its aspirations and strategy are underpinned by a clear philosophy that deepens employee engagement and commitment, creates momentum and drives innovation and customer loyalty, thus leading to a solid plan for achieving success.

Having a story-driven strategy enables you to adapt in times of change because you understand that your story is bigger than the scene that’s playing out in the moment.

1. BACKSTORY: Your journey to now. 2. VALUES: Your guiding beliefs. 3. PURPOSE: Your reason to exist. 4. VISION: Your aspiration for the future. 5. STRATEGY: The alignment of opportunities, plans and behaviour: how you will deliver on your purpose and work towards your aspiration, while staying true to your values.

we overestimate how motivated people are by money and underestimate the role of meaning at work.

Ma’s entrepreneurial superpower is his gift for motivating employees. When his company broke the record for the biggest IPO in history, raising $25 billion in September 2014, Ma said, ‘Today what we got is not money. What we got is trust from the people.’

When a business strives to be ‘the industry leader’, the bottom line gets in the way of putting customers first.

It’s hard to build a product or deliver a service you’re proud of when you are focused on winning.