In order to increase the efficiency and the speed of change and in order to promote energy, dialogues and constructive conversations, he takes a pen and a piece of paper and writes (probably he is using his laptop, but the effect is the same).
He who marks a piece of paper with his thoughts, wants to mark reality.He writes with constancy and enthusiasm, with the desire to influence, in order to solicit, admonish, alert, accompany and reveal things. He strongly believes in company communication and also thinks that, also in a highly technological company, you cannot mobilize vivacity, participation and commitment without an open and continuous dialogue with the people that make up the company. He considers communication central in organizational life in order to visualize events, understand concepts and capture your heart and brain at the same time.
Furthermore, he is convinced about the deep transformative capacity that stories reveal when dealing with key issues the managerial action is faced with. He understands the role of narration in contemporary society and realizes how it is possible to increase the efficiency of communicating and sharing behaviours, attitudes and languages, by emphasizing stories, images, cultural references of all kinds.
Maybe despite his far too many appointments, he also has had a chance to hear about “Storytelling in Organizations" and its famous gurus (from J. Seely Brown in the USA and G. Fairtlough and B. Heinzen as regards the British approach). However, he volunteers to stand up and be a forerunner.
He wants to be both a promoter and a guinea pig of an unconventional and open way of communicating in a company which is doubtlessly traditional. Being a manager and a storyteller of the 21st century, he enters the difficult territory of communication, which is full of traps, in order to stimulate the company transformation, with all the inherent risks. He has the advantage of loving film, music, comics and literature and has also worked in the mass media business.
During the years he is managing the company, he elaborates (and stimulates the collegial construction of) a style made of metaphors, personification, small/great myths, that supply an imaginary comment of the events: an important admonishment, a reflection on the way to take, an interpretation of the reasons for certain facts. Everything is done with provocative, innovative and sometimes amazing style.
The value of the company experience, the ancient respect for people´s work and for daily toil, the adhesion to important and serious values of freedom of thought and respect for everybody are the parts that are required to bring forth a company in good times and in bad times, through unusual paths and with a strong identity connotation.
To recreate the atmosphere and the key issues of a wide range changing process is the challenge of this volume, in which the cultural development of the company is read directly and without filters through the narration given by its chairperson. A collection of interventions and texts selected in the House Organ, since they have the impact of a real experience and at the same time represent a "case" we can refer to and make use of as a platform.
It is also a narration, definitely not a history in the strict sense of the word, but in any case it is a testimony in which the way of telling a story is absolutely substantial in relation to that which is said. Furthermore, leadership is also a narration, like Pier Luigi Celli says: ”I believe that a good story is worth more than a hundred theories, on condition that the story is credible”.
In fact, a very particular language is developed, a language that is recognizable for the people who participate in the adventure. It is a language in which the words often show the effort to capture metaphors that are suitable for interpreting the moment and give it a meaning, without worrying too much about the source, but rather using (or robbing) freely the patrimony of references that is spread out in contemporary imagination.
A famous phrase or a blasphemous quotation season everything with a juxtaposition the meaning of which originates from a free interpretation of the reader. The style is always creative, provocative, strong and "heretic" if necessary.
A modern language is created, in which the combination of concepts and the synchronous presentation of heterogeneous reasons and arguments may be catalysers of individual intuition. It is an expressive level which is very attentive towards the spirit of time, without being academic at all, truly close to practice and how people talk and "feel".
Managerial problems and difficulties in managing the company are represented through the help of … microbes, children, fragments of films, songs, anecdotes regarding historical characters or comic book heroes. The rhythm is that of web surfing with the speed of multiple references that form a net which appears to be discontinuous but aimed at sustaining the creation of a particular story and its narration.
Why not document these conversations and analyse them afterwards to collect implications, reading all interconnections, putting them under the looking-glass of practical management experience, maybe with a critical and irreverent spirit, based upon action and on the wish to give room to intelligent thinking and accomplishment, rather than settling with managerial obligations?
The ideas in this volume are concentrated on various themes that are definitely key issues for companies today:how an organization should keep fit,
how to make things happen,
how to make talent flourish and develop,
how to generate innovation at all time,
how to create good and productive situations,
how to develop and show character,
how to develop a recognizable and attractive identity, how to centralize people in our daily actions,
how to motivate individuals apart from using economic incentives, how to make the team work.
Combining in an original and post-modern way elements from different worlds and experiences, texts are exposed in the natural evolution of time. The contributions are articulated, not without a sense of humour, in chapters that have headlines dealing with the Great Themes of humanity. They contain allusions, shivers, emphasized facts, both individual and universal, that we have to deal with a thousand times but which we seldom stop to reflect on:
We are dealing with Great Issues that companies struggle with constantly in order to keep up with the competition on the market and with innovation. Questions like: Do we have ideas for the future? What can make us do even more? What face do we show our clients? Do we really need talents in our organizations?
Issues with which intelligent minds within international management work constantly, filling our bookshelves with books. But they are dealt with from the viewpoint of people living out in the field, attacking (and sometimes being attacked) with the issues every day, with the awareness that they must continue to steer the company without getting lost in the multiplicity of solicitations, in order to guarantee results and focused action.
Objects are those of symbolic tools, products that we use daily or elements of the past that still today are an interesting mental basis for our ideas: a bunch of keys (that open numerous possibilities), the pillars of Hercules (that imponderable border that is do difficult to pass), etc.
Objects and symbols that force us to do something about the problem, to collect implicit connections that our productive imagination establishes between something external and a conceptual representation, in a creative way.
This part includes a great number of characters, some mythological, some not, the action of which short-circuit company matters and allow the exploration of some contradictions that the company has to face: characters that we may meet in corridors, in our colleagues, or even in ourselves.
How many times do we feel like Sisyphus, forced to organizational absurdities with apparent fatigue (or actually incongruous), how many times have we criticized the present Superman, who excluded us from participation with all his good intentions.
It is important to stop at certain words that are no crumbles, but that constitute the material of which the bread that feed us every day is made: Alibi, Ambition, Change, ... A personal glossary that is barely outlined. This is only the beginning of the company vocabulary. On the way, other terms may be added.
What do these words mean to us as we decline them in the collective action of the organization? When is it that we use them erroneously or manipulate them in order to be right with all means? This is just a starting point, an idea to make people explain the meaning they attribute to things.
So many important issues, an explicit, transparent and involving way of generating an interest and keeping the dialogue with people vivid, activating talent, keeping in mind the fact that being an entrepreneur basically involves a continuous conversation, and communicating means an exchange of ideas to reach a shared meaning.
In the technical era in which reflecting on “people” issues is looked upon with diffidence, it appears not only necessary but even inevitable for organizations to try and give a "meaning" to their activities (as Andrea Vitullo recently stated following his master Umberto Galimberti). Do we yet again want to prove through this experimental text that companies have a soul in the organizational adventure that so many of us are involved in? Do we wish to invite our souls to the conversation table?
Beppe Carrella keeps the book “The Heart Aroused : Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America” by David Whyte on his bookshelf, but has he read it? Or, as often happens, maybe he bought it hoping to have time to take a glance at it between meetings, but then forgetting to consult it? However, the mere fact that he keeps the book there also means something.
“Organizations have a desperate need of powers that historically speaking were associated to poetic imagination, not only to find their way through the present turbulence of change, but also since poetry requires that you report something to human society, that is, it requires responsibility and roots also in changes”.
(D. Whyte)
Anthropologist, Executive Consultant and Coach
Reeffeerrencceess:
Pier Luigi Celli, “Narrare la leadership”, 2007
Stephen Denning, “The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders inspire action through narrative”, 2007
Psiche e techne. “L'uomo nell'età della tecnica”, 1999
John Seely Brown, Stephen Denning, Katalina Groh, Laurence Prusak “Storytelling in Organizations: Why Storytelling Is Transforming 21st Century Organizations and Management”, 2004
Annette Simmons, “The Story Factor, Inspiration, Influence and Persuasion through the Art of Storytelling”, 2006Andrea Vitullo, “Leadership Riflessive”, 2007
“The Heart Aroused : Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America” by David Whyte”, 1996
