Listening to History vs. Histrionics

Oral histories—extended interviews that capture the “you are there” feel of an executive’s career —enrich an organization’s bank of heritage assets to be leveraged in support of corporate transformation, change management, and a host of other goals. Capturing foundational stories that exemplify corporate values and “hero” stories, including lessons learned from setbacks, before they are lost to time, retirements, and changing circumstances, is an upfront investment that will pay off for decades to come.

Not always an easy sell during hard times, to be sure. But I have been pleasantly surprised, and grateful, that an increasing number of clients “get it” about oral histories as they look ahead to their next budget cycle. Here’s to a chatty 2011, and more clients leveraging their swelling banks of heritage assets.

Oral histories can also help bring to light important trends in a company’s history that might have been obscured over the years as messaging focuses, as it always seems to do, on immediate issues. This point was driven home for me recently as I was driving home from conducting a two-hour oral history with a retired executive who had been with a client for more than thirty years.

The company’s—and its industry’s—default point of view on regulation is that it has hobbled growth and innovation. No surprise there. But as we discussed the issue in depth and in the context of corporate growth and innovation over decades, a more complex picture developed. The industry probably would not have survived, let alone prospered, without protective regulations during its formative decades. And the technological breakthroughs that are driving top-line growth today for the client and the industry were essentially perfected, after a few setbacks, in the 1990s, a period of relatively tight regulation.

“I think you could say that we have benefited as much from regulation as we have been hurt by it,” the retiree reflected. Then he added with a smile, “But I am not saying that is a consensus view,” at the company.

I was thinking about that conversation while listening to NPR’s All Things Considered on the car radio. The Washington Post’s business columnist Steven Pearlstein was being interviewed about the implications of the fact that U.S. business is sitting on a record $1.8 trillion in cash, while much of the public is desperate for credit and jobs.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce cites pro-regulation Washington as a major reason business is hesitant to spend. Pearlstein had a different take. Complaining about regulation is a rationalization, he argued. Companies focused so intently on cutting over the past 18 months that too often they didn’t emphasize innovation. So with not enough in the new product pipeline, they are blaming Washington for their slow-growth woes.

Thirty years from now, will your executives’ corporate oral histories focus on that boffo job they did fighting regulation in Washington? Possibly. But for the dynamic corporate leaders, it is more likely that their corporate hero stories and the values that are reinforced over time are likely to focus on innovation and risk taking, not regulatory rear-guard actions.

Bringing Story Structure to Life

When we work with people on finding and crafting their best stories, we use story structure to help us A) find the best material and then B) shape that material. Oftentimes when we're introducing the basic elements of story structure, we get asked, “So what do these key moments in a story look like?” Text and verbal descriptions are compelling. But nothing is quite as compelling as a visual.

So, I've been using a dynamic technique for introducing and teaching the core elements of story structure. I call it Storyboarding. At seminars and workshops, I’ll ask the participants to do some prep work beforehand. I ask them to read Christopher Vogler’s famous memo on classical story structure being used in movies, so that they will have at least a basic familiarity with the key beats of a story. And I give them a homework assignment.

Here is the assignment I recently gave to participants in a Story Structure workshop:

• By reading one or two news articles online, familiarize yourself with the story of the pirate seizure of Captain Phillips from the Maersk Alabama. This story is currently being made into a movie.

• Think about how you would tell the story.

• Start to identify some key beats of the story, using story structure. A good introduction to story structure can be found in the famous memo by Christopher Vogler. (I provide a copy of the memo.)

• The task is to pick an important element of the story—whether it’s heeding the call, the point of no return, commitment, danger, returning home, etc.— and Storyboard that scene or moment. (I provide a Storyboard as a visual aid.)

At the workshop, we project the Storyboards one at a time onto a large screen, so that we can start to see which material from the real event people chose as key moments in the story they’d craft. And the key word there is “see.” Because of the Storyboards, we can actually “see” the story take shape, see what people are thinking as they start to organize raw material into compelling narratives. The secret is in having people seek to identify the elements from the real-world events that they believe serve core dramatic functions. It allows them to focus on the craft of “picking the best moments.”

What's interesting, of course, is that one person's idea of which part of the Maersk Alabama story should be the “Ordinary World” or “Heeding the Call” is quite different from another’s. This spawns interesting discussion. And we can see where making the right choices can make the difference between a good story and a great one. If you misidentify a moment, and try to shoehorn a lesser beat into a certain part of the story's structure, try to make it play a role it's not fit for, you can weaken the ability of your story to connect with audiences.

There is a surprising outcome to this process, when one does it dynamically with a group. In the end, what you end up with is an almost entirely story-boarded project, simply by threading each individual's storyboard together into a collective storyline. The participants have, unwittingly, collaborated on crafting a story, even though they thought they were just dealing with one small moment.


These video clips, below, are from a recent workshop using the Maersk Alabama story as the basis. In these segments, we were dealing with one part of the story, what Vogler calls the “Ordinary World”:

“THE ORDINARY WORLD. The hero, uneasy, uncomfortable or unaware, is introduced sympathetically so the audience can identify with the situation or dilemma. The hero is shown against a background of environment, heredity, and personal history. Some kind of polarity in the hero’s life is pulling in different directions and causing stress.”

BP: Beyond Core Values

When BP’s “Beyond Petroleum” image campaign was running full throttle a few years ago, I remember cornering a company lawyer. What was wrong with being a petroleum company, and being the best one they could be?

He shrugged. Oil was so 20th century; the company’s C-suite was focused on a future increasingly powered by alternative energy sources. Hadn’t BP’s ad agency found plenty of fresh-faced millennials to address the camera and say they expected no less of the corporate sector? Didn’t I read Tom Friedman?

BP wasn’t getting out of oil, but there was a clear sense within the company that the core business was pretty much on auto pilot. Careers were being made elsewhere, said the lawyer, who was relocating his family to keep his job.

We all know what happened next, starting with a string of serious safety and environmental failures in plants in the United States over the past few years, and ending, at least for now we hope, a mile down in the Gulf of Mexico.

Leadership in the commodity and processing industries—inherently dangerous and dirty businesses—is all about safe and efficient exploration and production that meets or exceeds environmental standards. The right thing to do, of course, but also the only way to stay ahead of the pack by avoiding regulatory pitfalls. And, yes, making a profit. Auto pilots need not apply.

It is also about pride. The best in these businesses have safety and innovation baked into their corporate cultures and values. They would no more go “beyond” them and think such core values could be taken for granted than they would walk around a drilling site without wearing a hardhat.

As a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and more recently as a writer and consultant for The History Factory, I have been continually impressed with the pride the best operators in these industries take in their work, be they Dow Chemical truck drivers in Midland, Michigan, or Saudi Aramco geologists in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Working with Saudi Aramco over the past few years on a history of the oil company and the development of modern-day Saudi Arabia brought that point home. I was struck with what a central role the clean-up of the mammoth 1991 oil spill in the Arabian Gulf that occurred during the First Gulf War plays in Saudi Aramco’s corporate culture.

Company and government officials and employees rallied in an all-out effort to contain and recover the oil—and not just to protect their own production facilities and massive water desalinization plants. There was a clear sense of obligation: This was their business, even though it was Kuwait’s oil, not theirs. And this was their region. And this was their reputation at stake, as the Gulf’s largest producer and holder of proven oil reserves.

Failure was not an option. They put one of their fastest-rising executives in charge of the project, and the CEO was intimately involved in the decision making. They had the training, though certainly not on a scale matching the record-setting spill, and they had the resources, calling upon an international consortium that had just completed containment training in the area and included BP among its members.

There were setbacks, of course, but eventually they recovered nearly 1 million barrels of oil from the Gulf. The experience engendered a new level of environmental consciousness in the company culture, without anyone fooling themselves that they weren’t working for an oil company.

No one should be ready to write the last chapter on BP just yet. Beneath the tattered reputation is a company with a storied history in the birth of the Mideast oil industry, the success of the British Navy—featuring a cameo appearance by a young Winston Churchill no less—and the development of historic oil fields on Alaska’s North Slope and in the North Sea. Here’s hoping that once the oil disaster in the Gulf is contained, and a full review has occurred, BP will be able to drill down and reconnect with the core values that made it great.

Rethinking Mentors and History

I recently became engrossed in the many obituaries of H. Edward Roberts, founder of Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS), who died April 1. Roberts invented the MITS Altair 8800 in the mid-1970s, often characterized as the world’s first personal computer.

It wasn’t so much that Roberts beat both Apple and IBM to the punch with his pioneering PC that interested me. Nor was it the fact that he walked away from the industry he helped create to spend three decades as a country doctor in Georgia. (A colorful man, no doubt). What struck me was the fact that both Bill Gates and Paul Allen—whose company, Microsoft, was based on the programming language product they wrote for the Altair 8800—so quickly and publicly acknowledged Roberts as their mentor.

The New York Times obituary provided detail of Gates’ reconciliation with Dr. Roberts in the final months of his life, including Gates’ visit to Roberts’ bedside in Georgia eight days before he passed away. In a joint statement on Bill Gates’ Web site, Gates and Allen said, “Ed was willing to take a chance on us—two young guys interested in computers long before they were commonplace—and we have always been grateful to him.” That’s some pretty powerful stuff.

After thirty-one years as a business historian, I’m embarrassed to admit how little attention I’ve given to the impact of mentors and mentoring in shaping the course of my clients’ histories. Not that I haven’t witnessed great examples of guidance throughout the years. I once conducted a series of oral histories that included two succeeding CEOs, whose tenure spanned almost thirty years of the organization’s greatest growth and profitability. Each CEO described a point in his career when, frustrated with his progress, he very seriously considered leaving the company. In each case, a respected senior member of the leadership team approached the CEO—almost magically, each recalled—and provided the personal encouragement he needed to stay the course. I don’t think either of the CEOs ever shared this story with the other. And I’m fairly sure no one else in the organization knows about the unsung hero who I believe fundamentally impacted the course of the company’s history.

Why don’t people know this story? Why doesn’t every corporate history book have a chapter on great mentors in the organization’s history? Moving forward, I plan to incorporate questions about the influence of a mentor in each oral history I conduct. After all, how can organizations celebrate great mentors in the workplace if no one knows who these individuals are?

Fortunately for the IT industry, Bill Gates and Paul Allen have set the record historical straight.

A Toast, and an Ear, for Living History

I found living history on the pages of the New York Times recently. The story of Joe Binder, a parking lot attendant on historic Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, caught my attention, and I couldn’t help but want to blog about it. Binder turned 100 last Thursday, and the neighborhood spent the weekend toasting its very own legend.

Perhaps I’m partial to Binder’s story because I have my own New York native, 97-year-old Jewish grandfather, whom I can’t wait to celebrate with when he turns 100. And maybe because I’ve spent so much time with my grandfather, I’ve realized the value of listening to what he has to say. You can learn a lot about history from someone who has lived it—the colorful details you won’t find in textbooks. From gambling on World War II army ships headed back from the Pacific to doling out liquor licenses to New York eateries, my grandfather has lived an American life, the kind you want to read about in history class.

I bet Joe Binder has some great stories. Maybe from his days in the navy, maybe from his time on Arthur Avenue, which has been home to Italian immigrants and their families for generations. Maybe he shares them when he sits back with a blackberry brandy at Pasquale’s Rigoletto after work. I hope he does, and I hope people are listening, because their lives will be richer for it.

From time to time at The History Factory, we have the opportunity to conduct an oral history with an elderly person: a five-star general, a free-spirited, 90-year-old philanthropist. These interviewees offer more than just business history; they provide historical perspective. They have thoughts and opinions that stretch through many years and many different experiences, which are invaluable to the corporate memory.

It’s essential to remember those elder, integral members of your organization when thinking about preserving company heritage, through oral history or some other means. Even if they retired years ago, reach out to them and ask them to share—their memories are filled with the history you want to know. You likely won’t it find elsewhere, and the life of your organization will be richer for it.

Welcome, "Collector in Chief"

The New York Times reports that the National Archives has hired a new “Collector in Chief” to oversee the nation’s heritage. David S. Ferriero previously held positions at both the MIT and Duke University libraries, and served as the Andrew W. Mellon director of the New York Public Libraries. Ferriero had no plans to leave New York, but the White House convinced him that “his talents dovetailed with the administration’s goals for the archivist’s job.”

Ferriero believes that each time his career has transitioned, it has “always been that I could make a difference.” This time, the difference likely comes from his stance on managing an archives, which he views similarly to managing a library. “When you cut to the quick . . . it’s the same: collecting, protecting, and encouraging the use of records and information.” Encouraging use means making information available, and for an administration that has pledged transparency, that mindset seems paramount to the job.

Archiving, like most things these days, has been taken over by the digital revolution. And while Ferriero notes that there are challenges to digital record keeping, it does help with ease of use, as it allows for online accessibility. Ferriero, in fact, believes that anything that can be digitized should be put online, thus contributing to his end goal, which is “to ensure that we have the user at the center of our thinking—historians, genealogists, open government folks. What can we do to make their lives easier?”

The History Factory couldn’t agree more. In 2009 the company launched LuminArc, a Web-delivered digital archive system compatible with advanced Web 2.0 standards for interconnectivity and interactivity. Realizing our clients could get considerably more use out of their archives if they were able to access the material from anywhere and at any time, we created a system that not only offers this option, but also constantly updates, so information is accurate and timely.

Just like the government, companies that make their archives accessible and encourage its use, can create transparency, and trust, within the organization.

Dead Livelihoods

I’m smitten with imagery lately. Perhaps it’s our work on Adobe Photoshop’s 20th anniversary, but these days I’m hitting the Google image search like an all-you-can-eat buffet, and find myself clicking on those image-centric links I might ordinarily ignore. If it’s true a picture says a thousand words, and our ADD culture is increasingly moving away from the sanctity of the written word, imagery may soon be (if it’s not already) our primary means of communication.

As a business historian, I couldn’t help but dig NPR’s recent photo essay, “The Jobs of Yesteryear: Obsolete Occupations.” Complete with gorgeous black and white photos as well as audio narrations from a generation that remembers when these professions were as commonplace as today’s software engineer, the gallery takes us through antiquated roles of yore.

Many of the jobs, of course, were a product of pre-automated and pre-technological industries. In the absence of radios and iPods, “lectors” might be hired to read newspapers to workers in a cigar factory. Before machinery, “pinsetters” manually reset the pyramids at the ends of bowling lanes. “Icemen” and “Milkmen” delivered by refrigerated car what we now find on demand in our freezers and corner stores.

Most interesting to our work with Photoshop is the now endangered role of “Typesetter” featured in the NPR gallery. Both founders of Adobe Systems—John Warnock and Chuck Geschke—came from a lineage of typesetters and color engravers, which may in part explain Adobe’s visionary role in catalyzing the desktop publishing revolution.


But what stirs us about the gallery is not what’s depicted, but what’s not depicted. Because just as many of these professions and industries could not survive the advent of industrialization and computer automation, I can’t help but wonder: Which of today’s jobs and industries will one day succumb to change?

The study of history, in business or otherwise, is the story of change. Twenty years ago, Adobe’s founders saw the writing on the wall and placed themselves at the epicenter of the digital renaissance. Like Adobe, other industries, companies, and individual workers who can foresee change and either prepare for it or co-create the evolution themselves will always have a leg up on those who never see it coming.