Abstract
Machiavelli (trans. 1950) asserted that leaders “make the best of circumstances in their actions, and, although constrained by necessity to a certain course, make it appear as if done from their own liberality” (p. 243). This may not be the first published recognition that stories can be useful to managers, but the advice continues to resonate. Some 500 years later, Gabriel (1988) reconstructed Machiavelli’s advice this way: It is now widely agreed that stories create, sustain, fashion and test meanings in and out of organizations. They are part of a sense-making process which can be researched in situ, without the burdensome requirement of social science research—the need to establish the validity of claims, the fact behind allegations, the truth behind the tales. For as it has been widely argued, the truth of a story does not lie in the facts, but in the meaning. If people believe a story, if the story has a grip over them, whether events that it describes actually happened or not is irrelevant. (p. 85)
Two years later, Henry (2000) wrote about 83 separate workplace narratives over 7 years. Placing storytelling among other strategic management tools, Henry cited reengineering guru Thomas Davenport, who claimed that “information technology is relatively unimportant” when good writers can tell good stories (p. 89).
As her title indicates, Forman’s book follows in this tradition, describing the strategic, organizational, and cultural value that stories hold within organizations. Forman’s work more overtly blends storytelling with leadership. The book works through case studies from Shering–Plough (S-P), FedEx, and Philips and is sourced from interviews with public affairs, marketing, corporate affairs, and external relations executives. As a whole, the book celebrates storytelling as a managerial tool useful for change management, corporate branding, and employee motivation and recognition.
What can we expect from a new book about storytelling in business? Henry (2000) presented his stories as activities of personal and professional negotiation within and apart from managerial influence. He argued that stories mediated status, aspirations, limitations, discordances, and refusals for both employees and leaders. Boje (2001) took a slightly different approach to storytelling, noting that most of the discourse appearing in organizations did not occur as formal stories but instead as shards of anecdotes, phrases, fragments, and silences. Building on Czarniawska’s accounts (1997, 1998), Boje proposed the enticing concept of an “antenarrative,” using the polysemy of ante to infer both “preceding” and “a wager.” The antenarrative is a folkloric wager that a discursive fragment will gain traction, insert a wedge into existing stabilized forms, and introduce a new potentially disruptive narrative. Boje offered a linguistically insightful examination of organizational change and stability, a model to help us examine how an organization’s cultures could be transformed linguistically through discursive fragments, clips, and preformed stories that weave together to challenge or displace a legacy story.
Boje’s (2011) Web site provides an extensive review of scholarship, brand-name business case studies (Nike and Disney), and consulting based on the principle that “stories can shape the culture of organizations” (Kaye, 1996, p. 63, cited by Boje, 2011). Boyce (1995, 1996), who also articulated organizational cultures as stories, figures prominently here as well. She showed how dissonance within the organization was constructed in competing metaphors and myths told by stakeholders within and outside the organization. Boyce’s work echoes Dutton and Dukerich’s (1991) fascinating study from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which used the concepts of identity and image to describe stories “activating” interpretations of and adaptation within a firm. Identity refers to the inside stories that organizational members use to create what is enduring or distinct about their organization. Image refers to what outsiders use to build their concepts of the same. As Dutton and Dukerich put it, “an organization’s identity and image are critical constructs for understanding the relationship between actions and interpretations of an issue over time” (p. 520). Deterioration of either the identity or the image triggers a necessity for strategic change or realignment. Perhaps more interesting, activists and reformers can create or use the tension between identity and image as strategic leverage as they build their own stories about the firm.
Goodall (1994) turned the concept of organizations as stories into organizations as mysteries, casting himself as the gumshoe organizational detective in six engaging corporate mysteries. Casting the multitude of organizational stories, or, in Boje’s (2007) terms, antenarratives, as puzzle pieces in a suspenseful detective mystery presents texts as actions. Stories can enact multiple simultaneous purposes within a corporation. For example, Winsor (1996, 2007) showed how stories often enculturate young professionals into new careers and how those professionals then use the same texts as stories to regulate each other’s actions, enabling collaboration and temporal agreement. Like Goodall in his detective mysteries, Spinuzzi (2003, 2008) has taught us how to forensically trace genres, texts, stories, post-it notes, trouble tickets, and other fragments as components of activity systems. Such textual archaeology links stories to accountability, agency, and the networks of action that connect and disassociate communities and individuals. Aggregated, entangled, and rerouted, these components provide added levels of granularity and nuance to the organization-cum-mystery novel.
Machiavelli’s initial insight was prescient—leaders still use stories to strategically manage their ethos within organizations. But the past four decades of modern scholarship on storytelling in business have written a much more robust story about storytelling. Stories organically emerge. They are constituted by and constitute disputed and temporal cultural, managerial, and personal formations. They persist and are distributed in fragmented, dynamic, partial, and competing forms and actions. They present inconsistent and temporal aggregations of an organization, aggregations with and without “C-suite” approval. They are mysteries, guides, puzzles, and partial visions of day-to-day activities.
These rich, complex, multilayered practices of organizational storytelling elaborated over the past decades are unfortunately largely absent from Forman’s book. Fully immersed in her subject, Forman never thoroughly steps back from her epideictic account to assess the stories she is being told or the rhetorical exigence of her subject matter.
The book’s subtitle, The Authentic and Fluent Organization, gives it away. Forman relies heavily on an assumed and artificial distinction between authentic (“credible, realistic, tangible, and intended to be truthful,” p. 22) stories and stories that are “from the dark side,” “dishonest,” and “empty” (p. 29). Gabriel’s (1988) quite useful and productive finding (“if people believe a story”) is unfortunately turned into an ethical proposition. The troubling concepts of multiple, competing stories in competition; stories constructing temporal and disputed meaning; newly aggregated fragments displacing fixed identities; people using stories to displace management narratives; or stories as strategic wedges between identity and image remain absent. Multiple voices are permitted and encouraged but need to be managed and adroitly guided into “specific topics the organization wants to see communicated; for instance, strategy, culture, or branding” (p. 27).
While Forman is right in claiming that stories for business “have a practical purpose,” which she claims is to gain trust, inform, persuade, and inspire (p. 23), the book does not seem to acknowledge the retrospective circularity of such claims or its own inconsistencies in argument. Concepts such as authenticity are slippery and best evaluated in retrospect and even then remain problematic: What public relations executive would admit to not being authentic? Yet Forman places the notion as a cornerstone for invention—except when an executive is composing an autobiography, “for which heartfelt conviction and fidelity to feelings can trump accuracy for detail” (p. 26). It is hard to know how to take such apparent trust and goodwill for business leadership, especially after a decade of financial scandals, mortgage fraud, the occupy movement, political and economic policies formed by transparent self-interest, and an inconvenient inkling that business storytelling simply is not, nor has ever been, designed to be credible. Perhaps it is designed to sell an image, a career, or a product. Perhaps we need to reread Machiavelli.
“Authentic storytelling about an organization is data-based storytelling,” the book offers (p. 25). “Tell the truth” (p. 24), “give scrupulous attention to accuracy of the story’s details” (p. 25), it claims, because “telling a story about the exception without honest disclosure is dishonest” (p. 29). But the tension between supposed honesty or integrity and the corporate narrative continually nudges Forman into uncomfortable places. In cases in which an individual’s self-expression conflicts with the corporate mission, Forman suggests adhering to a set of “guidelines for storytelling” that ensure that such individual expression is normed into supporting topics like strategy, culture, or branding (p. 27). She advocates “the stories of customers and their experience with the company” (p. 25) as an example of facts that storytellers could use but cautions against cherry-picking or ignoring competing stories. Yet it is all right to embellish a pharmaceutical product information description with a story about a single cancer survivor, construct a FedEx manager with greater credibility by telling a story about his growing up in a rapidly growing Asia, or recast a story about lighting with supportive data on urban crime and city festivals (p. 26). So long as the construction is “true,” we are good to go.
The trouble here is that the legitimacy and value of Forman’s stories are grounded in the presumption of something “real” outside of the story. An authentic story will transmit a truth—something apart from and before the story. This apartness entitles status as true and authentic. Bypassing four decades of research, Forman states her case, “A storyteller lacking authority based on some combination of expertise, experience track record, and formal position, or presenting a sloppily conceived or delivered story, doesn’t have a chance of changing the attitudes and behavior of an audience” (p. 46).
Arguing that an authentic story needs to engage the emotions and the intellect, Forman writes that when a story begins, we may experience a kind of psychological sea change as we shift attention to the universe depicted in the story, its setting, characters, and conflicts, exercising what the poet Coleridge called a “willing suspension of disbelief” as we become immersed in the story world and picture it in our imagination. If we’re listening to a story, we’re likely to be caught up in the voice and presence of the storyteller and the emotional mood created through the performance. Moreover, while alert and present to the speaker and to the story world constructed, we may notice that the constructed story world evokes concrete images and triggers emotionally rich memories, episodes in our own life that resemble or differ from the constructed story world. In sum, our hearts and minds are fully engaged. (p. 33)
For Forman, authenticity is established only if the story evoked is actual or “true” (p. 24). Otherwise the process is deceitful. Thus, a story is cast as nothing more than a conduit for the external (the authentic), with no value apart from its ability to transmit this authenticity. What Forman is proposing here is a subtle yet unavoidable return to the simplicity of Shannon and Weaver’s sender–receiver model that has long subordinated language as expendable and inferior to other cognitive activities. Stories are denied their generative potential. Their role is simply to make leadership decisions more palatable. In writing about focus groups used at Philips, Forman lists the relevant questions used to evaluate a branding story, “Is the message understood?” tops the list, followed by “Is the message relevant in a lighting context?” and “What does the story mean?” Later, Forman offers that “an organization as a whole may have a story, but individual employees still need to own that story in their own terms” (p. 188). Where another researcher would question what type of organization is being assembled in the interplay of dominant and marginal stories, Forman wants to ensure that the key ideas transmitted in the organization’s story are being effectively retransmitted by the employee’s story. Her startling comment that nonauthentic stories are “mere rhetoric” (p. 188) seems itself inauthentic because it constructs a false linguistic duality and masks the crucial work that language accomplishes within social systems.
Epistemological consistency aside, a skeptical reader could more practically ask, Why would an authentic story require a willing suspension of disbelief? More to the point, do we want customers, employees, shareholders, advocates, or regulators suspending belief, even momentarily? As I write this, the New York Times is reporting that Toyota arrived at a $1.2 billion settlement of a lawsuit claiming that the car company “misled investigators and the public about a sudden-acceleration defect” (Joachim & Apuzzo, 2014). And authorities are investigating the claim that General Motors (GM), for the past decade, has misled authorities about known vehicle defects (Vlasic & Protess, 2014). Forman’s analysis would place Toyota and GM’s recent stories with other “deceitful” practices that she decries: Enron and Bernie Madoff receive special treatment here (pp. 30, 76).
Yet a case study of S-P is surprisingly mute on these issues. Forman glowingly presents the stories told by then-new S–P CEO Fred Hassan as examples of how stories influence strategic planning and leadership. Hassan took over at S-P in 2003 with an imperative to turn around the failing company. As Forman tells the story, Hassan’s turnaround narrative was presented in five “chapters: stabilize, repair, turn around, build the base, and break out” (p. 56). “Above all,” Forman concludes from the S-P case, “stories can help a company achieve the specific business objective of articulating and getting buy-in for its strategy” (p. 52).
If, as Forman attests, Hassan’s stories were “authentic,” how do we interpret a surprise narrative turn when, in 2009, S-P agreed to be purchased by Merck despite Hassan having “dismissed talk of being acquired”? (Rockoff, 2009). Forman is scathing in her treatment of Enron’s storytelling, calling it a “shared delusional fantasy,” yet what else can we, in retrospect, call Hassan’s narrative, given that the newly combined Merck shed 17,000 jobs when it took over S-P in 2009 and is estimated to have shed 30,000 jobs between 2009 and 2011—10,000 more than were lost at Enron? (Todd & Dazio, 2011; Walter, 2011). In 2013, the company announced that it was closing plants in Ireland and New Jersey, planning to further cut its workforce by 20% by 2015.
After just 6 years at S-P, Hassan walked away with $189,352,324 in severance, including a $98 million pension (Hodgson & Ruel, 2012). Forman provides a footnote explaining that her account takes a “‘preintegration’ perspective” (p. 249). Acknowledging that such a perspective exists seems to be exactly the task that her larger book denies. Hindsight is of course the book reviewer’s privilege. Yet in retrospect, this particular story composes a cautionary tale about promoting too strongly the agenda of one’s informants when perhaps other stories may be less conspicuous but far more generative.
One can argue that Forman’s book was never intended as an anthropological or critical investigation into organizational storytelling. The book may not even be about storytelling so much as it is about performance: instructing managers and those aspiring to management positions how to perform on the job. As such, the book seems designed for the business mass market. If Weber (1946) was correct, and science can be narrated as a vocation and, by association, a business, we must self-reflexively acknowledge the staying power of a good story in our own science. Here Forman does not disappoint. Like a good rhetorical event, the book has constructed and reiterated a familiar story about rhetoric, an assemblage relational and persuasive to a particular business audience. Within that story, the book offers readers some useful advice for improving their delivery, including more compelling visuals and emotional references, and crafting motivational documents, speeches, and presentations, all the while decrying the dishonesty of rhetoric.
Such books can, of course, attract an enormous audience and do considerable work toward popularizing and disseminating often difficult and dusty academic prose into attractive and inspiring reads. Is such a book needed or appropriate for business readers who lack storytelling abilities? It is unfortunate but probably true that such a market may never be ready for an authentic book about business storytelling. But until such a market exists, for my money, I will reread and recommend The Prince.