What’s Your Story?
This is the story of how to be the best manager/leader/entrepreneur you can be in today’s fragmented, overloaded, chaotic, volatile world.
You are an individual. As unique as a snowflake.
You are also a brand. You stand for something. You believe in something. Everything you do is anchored in what you believe and stand for. Which means your brand is kick-ass, as special as you!
Or it isn’t. Which means your personal brand is sometimes unclear, unfocused, or confusing to others. You’re undercutting your own perceived value. For most of us, this is our reality.
Advertising great Lee Clow has said: “Everything a brand does is an ad.” In this context: Everything you do, achieve, say, share, fight for, and put out into the world, is part of your brand — an ad for what you stand for and why you’re so special.
There Are Only Seven Universal Stories
Rob Schwartz, CEO of TBWA/Chiat/Day NY recently gave a great presentation at Yale on the Seven Stories That Rule the World. (Which he based on the book by Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots.)
There are seven archetypal kinds of stories. Yours is one of the seven. For each kind of story, I’ll post Schwartz’s insights first, followed by specific career and leadership insights.
Which Story Is Yours?
Overcoming the Monster Story
A crusade to overcome an enemy, a competitor, a wrong in life, an unnecessary hardship.
Or to conquer existing injustices. Basically: David in the world of Goliath (e.g., 1980s Apple,
1990s Amazon, T-Mobile,
Paypal, Square.)
Career/Leadership Branding
If this is your career story, you are always David in David v. Goliath. You’re a scrappy disruptor and breakthrough innovator, or a thought leader who has a very unique point of view.
This is an awesome brand story for creative types, disruptive techies, entrepreneurs, and C-suite execs. (e.g., early Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Caterina Fake, Travis Kalanick, Michael Bloomberg). Everything you do is driven by your optimistic vision of the world: That something is broken or needs to be reimagined, and you are the right hero with a great vision for fixing it.
If this is your career story, you will never be happy as someone else’s employee. You must be able to guide and lead the crusade. Being this story’s architect ensures that every career step you take will get you closer to achieving your vision.
Quest Story
Champion other people’s quests — making them the hero.
(e.g., Nike, Under Armour,
Virgin Group)
Or hell-bent on your own quest. (e.g., Tesla, Yayoi Kusama, Beyonce, Adele. Great film examples are: Star Wars,
Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones.)
Career/Leadership Branding
If this is your career story, your vision is you. You can never turn it off. You can easily switch jobs, projects, products, media or businesses, and still be true to you—because those are just different ways of you expressing yourself. Elon Musk has one overall vision and is employing it in different ways to reinvent the auto industry (Telsa), space exploration (SpaceX), and the energy industry (Powerwall and Gigafactory). Other leaders whose story is rooted in a Quest: Aung San Suu Kyi, Justin Trudeau, Jaha Dukureah, Sundar Pichai.
Again: If this is your career story, you will never be happy as someone else’s employee. Your vision for the world and your own way of achieving it is your quest. Your life, your career, your businesses are you on a quest.
Voyage and Return
Visit/experience another world,
return home changed.
(e.g., Airbnb’s story is Voyage and Return for the 21st century. Most every Disney hero —
from Snow White to Dory and every hero in between — follows this story arc. Disney is also buying other companies whose brands are about Voyage and Return journeys: Pixar, Marvel, Lucas Film.)
Career/Leadership Branding
If this is your career story , this is most likely a supportive story, not your main one. (Unless you are a motivational speaker.) Something to help those around you understand your vision and see why your passions run so deep.
Leadership guru Warren Bennis called these stories in your life Crucibles of Leadership — moments that put you through some kind of personal trial or experience which transformed how you think, changed your priorities, and influenced what you do. For Steve Jobs, it was his father’s craftsmanship attention to detail, and his experiences with design. For Muhammed Ali, it was his conversion to Islam. For Intel’s Andy Grove, it was surviving Nazi-occupied Hungary and his bout with cancer. For me, it was the night my mom died and the hospital left her alone, away from us, for 40 minutes. Forty minutes I will never get back.
If Voyage and Return is a crucial part of your career story:
• Go deep. Be introspective. Journal. Work hard to understand it, and how it affected you, and be able to communicate that to others.
• Be willing to share the parts of your story when you were most vulnerable.
Your story of vulnerability, discovery, and personal change will inspire and help others with their struggles. It will be an essential part of how and why you do what you do.
Rags to Riches Story
An ordinary person,
dismissed by everyone,
suddenly steps to the center
of the stage, and is revealed
to be someone quite exceptional. (e.g., Rocky, any Dickens story, Forrest Gump, Cinderella.
One leader’s example is
Guy Laliberté, founder of
Cirque du Soleil.)
Career/Leadership Branding
If this is part of your personal story, like Voyage/Return, it is a secondary story — shared only occasionally.
More important is your ability to harness your Rags-to-Riches passion in service of others. Helping them in their journey, with their experiences. Be the relentless Customer-as-Hero advocate. (Or whichever stakeholder your projects focus on — patient, employee, citizen, protégé, colleague, etc.) Harness the passion behind your own Rocky story to be a persistent advocate for the people who need advocacy. Be dogged. Never back down. Even when senior execs tell you to chill. Those Rocky’s out there need you fighting for them!
Design Thinking has formalized this approach. Everything begins with empathy for individuals and groups. If you’re not yet schooled in DT, get there fast! IDEO provides a cheap online course. Approaches like IDEO’s will help you channel your advocacy passions in ways that most companies can leverage.
Rebirth Story
Transformation.
Only when the right moment
and the perfect hero arrives
can liberation take place.
(e.g., Red Bull, Weight Watchers, Oprah: Their brand promise of is one of personal transformation. Modern Christianity is a rebirth story.)
Career/Leadership Branding
If this is your career story, you are passionately focused on unleashing individual empowerment, freeing others to be their best. This can be seen in the current tidal wave of apps coming from techies and startups: Health wearables; productivity tools; lifestyle tools; DIY apps. And in other tidal waves: Leadership and career coaches, as well as branding coaches in social media.
Your biggest career and business challenge will be that just about everybody on the planet is selling this rebirth story! …“Use our product/service to be a better you!!”… You must find a way to stand out above everyone else as the go-to expert.
To do that, go inward. Do deep introspection, journaling, and ask for coaching help on: What makes you, you? Think of this as pre-work for how you will build your specialness into whatever you bring to the marketplace.
Beyond your product, service or skills, you need to find what makes your rebirth story unique, based on what you bring to the project. (For tips on doing this, download free how-to addendum to my book, Future Strong.)
Lin-Manuel Miranda did this in creating the runaway hit, Hamilton. He is telling Hamilton’s story, but to do it in a way that no one else could have, he drew upon his own story: “What I recognized in Hamilton, which connected me to the genre of hip-hop and the hip-hop culture, was his relentlessness. I recognize that relentlessness in people I know. Not only in my father who came here at the age of 18 to get his education and never went back home, just like Hamilton, but also so many immigrant stories I know, and friends I know who come here from another country. They know they have to work twice as hard to get half as far.”
Tragedy and Comedy Stories
Tragedy: A hero’s slide into darkness often resulting
in his demise. (e.g., Darth Vader, Titanic, Black Swan, insurance company products/services.)
Comedy: Using comedy
as a way to reveal the brand’s virtues.
(e.g., Pepsi, Old Spice, Geico, Snickers, Doritos.)
Career/Leadership Branding
Let’s face it: Most businesses/leaders hate tragedy/problems stories. They want fixes, not problems! However, every leader must hear about problems/burning platforms/lessons-learned a lot faster than they do now, in ways that are a lot easier to understand and address. If you can help with that, you have an amazing future ahead of you!
Especially in the coming era of analytics and IoT, leaders and companies desperately need analysts, data visualizers, storytellers, synthesizers, and simplifiers who will help them see and sort through oncoming challenges before it’s too late. For experts with skills in these areas, check out the TED talks of Al Gore, Hans Rosling, Ann Milgram, Aaron Koblin, Jake Barton.
As for comedy: Everybody wants to have fun and be engaged in whatever they do. If your personal story revolves around fun: every project, every company, every team needs you!
But the future of work will demand more of you than just playfulness and spreading joy. Businesses need joy that also helps achieve results. Study people who can do that, like comedy writers such as Tina Fey, Seth MacFarlane, and Judd Apatow. They know how to make us think and feel deeply and understand bigger issues…while we giggle. Your challenge: Take us deeper into human experiences with your skills. Help us understand more of the depth and urgency within other people’s stories.
The Big So What?
Your story is your brand.
So…
• Figure out which of the seven archetype stories best matches yours.
• Examine how true you are
to that story every day,
in every action,
in every meeting, in every post.
• Be honest about any gaps, inconsistencies in your story.
• Work to fix them right away… Those are your personal brand challenges.
I’ll use my own story stumbles as an example: My brand story is a mix of the first two… Primarily, I’m on a quest to make the world safe for great work by hacking corporate and leadership stupidity. And I help companies simplify the complexity monster: I make work simpler and easier.
Guess which one companies will pay for? Yup. Making work simpler. Yet my real passion — the story I prefer to be known for — is hacking workarounds, breaking rules, and creating Ahas for others so they see how they could make things be better for themselves.
So initially there were disconnects in my story, resulting in stunted sales growth. It took me a couple years to figure out how to resolve that disconnect. (Lead with selling simplicity, but always build introspective Ahas into every gig, so they realize for themselves what needs to be hacked, changed, and disrupted.)
If you’re like most people, you too have some inconsistencies in your story. Even the best brands wrestle with this. Rob Schwartz showed how a half-dozen of 30 top brands are currently struggling to re-find their story.
Your story is your personal brand.
How you wish others to see you, see the value that you contribute.
So… What’s your story?
Is it as strong, and consistent, and as true to you as it needs to be?
> > > >
— by Bill Jensen
…who heard the same story you did as a kid: “When I was your age, I walked to and from school, uphill both ways…in the snow, in cardboard shoes….You have no idea how easy you’ve got it.”
#NewWaytoWork #FutureOfWork
Jensen Site, Twitter, FB, LinkedIn
Bill’s latest book, Future Strong, is about the five deeply personal choices each of us must make to be ready for all the disruptive tomorrows heading our way.
