How Ancient Stories Positively Impact Our Corporate World

There aren’t many things that are truly universal among all human cultures. Tastes vary widely in the ways we choose to be human, but one thing that does appear to be common amongst all humans is the desire to communicate via storytelling. In every culture on earth information is conveyed this way. We tell stories to each other to celebrate births, marriages, and triumphs of many kinds. We also use stories to console each other in times of deep loss, as a way to show that others have gone through difficult times before, and survived them. We raise our children and stay rooted to our cultures through the passing down and repeating of stories. This is a deeply engrained human trait, and this love of story unites us across cultures.

As mythologist Wendy Doniger says, “Putting together words to reproduce events that engage the emotions of the listener is surely a form of art that ranks among the great human experiences.”

A desire to understand this essential aspect of human life is why I myself became a mythologist. I soon came to learn that it is our storytelling nature that compels us to keep our oldest stories around, telling and retelling the tales of our most ancient ancestors.

I also learned that these most ancient stories have a lot to reveal about patterns of human behavior. As it turns out, and I’m sure this will surprise none of you, human nature hasn’t changed much over the past ten thousand years. Over and over in my work I’ve observed that if you were to change the details from a story from any mythic system to make it more modern, you would find situations that feel very familiar in their telling. The skin may change, but the bones remain the same.

These ancient yet modern storytelling patterns exist in all the stories we tell in our lives, which means of course they exist in both our personal and professional lives. Our storytelling tendencies don’t end at the front door of our work places. In fact, I would argue that those patterns of human behavior can play out very strongly in the corporate world, and the tragic thing is that most companies have no sense of how this can play out in their environments. Somehow it feels easier to recognize patterns of story in our personal lives, versus the world of our work lives. This failure to recognize the natural storytelling tendencies of humans can lead to tragic and unintended consequences for companies and organizations the world over.

A few months ago some of you may recall a big story that hit the news, about the bank Wells Fargo. It came out that Wells Fargo had an endemic culture of high pressure sales throughout the entire organization, which unfortunately led to the creation of millions of fake accounts over decades. In the end, not only did the CEO get grilled about the situation multiple times in Congress, but he also lost his job, as did more than five thousand Wells Fargo employees. Not a desirable outcome.

When I first heard the details of the story, it immediately became clear to me that the situation in which Wells Fargo found themselves could have been avoided if the executive office or human resources teams had been aware of the storytelling principles of mythology. I believe the crux of their flawed thinking lies in the following error: they erroneously assumed that, because they didn’t specifically tell the sales associates at their branches to open phony accounts to plump up their sales numbers, that they were safe from having that become the story of the bank. In other words, they explicitly told their sales force to do one thing, follow the law, and implicitly told them to do something else entirely, get their sales numbers up by any means possible. If a story vacuum gets created by a lack of leadership in the executive office, the story will develop around those implicit messages. It is not enough to pass an edict from “on high” and expect everyone at every level to follow it. The story will have a life of its own, and it can be an uncontrollable force if not handled properly. Wells Fargo is painfully in the process of learning this lesson, and, unless you enjoy getting yelled at by Elizabeth Warren, it is vital for the leaders of any organization to understand both the explicit and implicit stories that they are living in their corporate communities, not only to manage their trajectory but to craft them with intention.

Because these stories can be crafted. Wells Fargo did have the power to avoid the situation they found themselves in, had they taken the time to learn the story they were in, and how that story differed from the story they wanted to be in. The power of story is such that it goes far beyond just the day-to-day stories that we tell, from tales told around the dinner table in the evening all the way up to a major marketing campaign orchestrated by a multi-national corporation. There are undercurrents that exist outside the conscious mind, powerful enough to dictate behavior and drive a corporate culture. These undercurrents of story drove the culture at Wells Fargo, and they drive culture in every organization on Earth. Most companies have no idea that there is more to their story than the one that is disseminated out by their executive or marketing teams. These are important questions that no one in corporate America or beyond is asking. “What stories are we telling about ourselves?” What stories are our employees telling about us, that we have no awareness of? What about our customers? Or our competitors? If the executive offices of companies of any size worldwide knew the true answer to these questions, they would have a much deeper and richer understanding of where they stand in the marketplace, how they truly rank, both as a quality employer and as a competitor. This is enormously valuable information that is being left on the table by most companies in America.

Asking questions about your story as an organization can go far beyond the relatively day-to-day functioning of a company, as I’ve just described it. Dealing with employees, customers and competitors is something that every business does every day. Myth and story understanding can take us far beyond the every day as well. What if, for example, a company is in the midst of a major transition? They’ve been bought out, or the executive team has changed, or they’ve just gone through a serious downturn and they’re struggling to “right the ship,” so to speak? Might myth have anything to offer here? These are all times in which the company’s story is changing, practically under the feet of those who work there. These shifting sands can be very dangerous. Luckily for us, humans have been in these situations before, and luckily for us some intrepid souls wrote down the stories of these experiences. Even for something as relatively simple as a major product launch we can use the example of the story of Sisyphus, coming to us from the Greeks. Sisyphus angered Zeus during his lifetime, so after his death his eternal punishment was to roll a huge rock up a hill once a day. There is something very similar between Sisyphus’ punishment and working nights and weekends to get a product launch out on deadline. Sisyphus had one moment each day, when he’d finally gotten the boulder to the top of the mountain, to feel the wind in his hair and pause for a few seconds of rest. Then, the rock rolled back down the hill and he had to start all over again. This is like the moment of the product launch party, where everyone drinks a glass of champagne and feels the wind in their hair before they head back to their office to get started on the next release. As I said earlier, the skin may change, but the bones remain the same.

Our stories shape us, in conscious and unconscious ways, and in both our personal and professional lives. Companies who want a competitive advantage over their field would be wise to dig deeper into understanding their stories, so that they control what story is being told, rather than living in a story that they haven’t chosen. These are powerful forces at work, but they can be guided with wisdom and insight.

Thank you.