Subject: Corporate Storytelling

JL: In your consultant practice, you are using storytelling in the context of professional presentations. How are you communicating the idea of storytelling to executives?

DA: Corporations generally hire multimedia production companies and agencies to create their brand message stories. Many of theses stories address the audience with a "voice of god" narrator that provides a high overview, integrated with fancy music and graphics. These presentations often don't resonate with the audience. I have recently been working on a project with PricewaterhouseCoopers who sees digital storytelling as both a means to help top executives more effectively communicate as well as a way for all employees to communicate their brand message. In consulting with a vice president I suggested, "You are a storyteller. You are not a presenter." Recognizing this difference, he began to reframe his messages as stories.

JL: What kinds of stories?

DA: Well, I suggested these are the kinds of stories you tell people at dinner, at lunch, at business meetings, cocktails. You tell a lot of wonderful anecdotal stories all around what you are doing, why you are interested in it, and why you are involved. But those stories rarely are shared with your employees. What we are trying to do with PricewaterhouseCoopers and with Coca-Cola, is to take a mixture of these well-produced little modules–which I call story segments–that can be produced in a somewhat more traditional manner, and intersperse those with these live segments where our presenters, our storytellers, ground them in their own point of view and their own personal stories. Every time you come out of one of these higher-level pieces you come right back to why this person is doing what he is doing and why she is standing there.

JL: Let's talk a little bit about your experiences with Coca-Cola. I mean how does Dana Atchley, digital storyteller, get hired by Coca-Cola? DA: There was no way a couple of years ago that I could have gone and knocked on Coca-Cola's door and said, "I am a digital storyteller and you should be interested in this." They would have just said, "What are you talking about? Get out of here!" The fact is that somebody at Coca-Cola, who was in a position to make a decision, saw me perform. They saw it in a different venue, a museum [in Atlanta, as Dana was touring with Next Exit]. He later called me and said, "It was a choice between you and Aida, and I decided to see as much of your show as possible and then go see Aida. I saw something there, the possibility that what you were doing could be helpful for working with one of our top executives." I was asked to help the president of Coca-Cola person become more of a storyteller or, as I perceived it, less "buttoned up." Some CEOs are good storytellers, and the CEO is generally considered to the "guardian of the brand," the spokesperson. Some speak well and some are terrified. Mr. Ivester [then president, now CEO of Coca-Cola] had been a chief financial officer. Now was in a position where he was having to deal with the brand story and he was presenting material that people were writing for him–"Ok, here's your script"–with somebody else putting together the presentational elements, a PowerPoint presentation. All of a sudden, the person from Coca-Cola's (who had seen Next Exit) lightbulb went on: "Mr. Ivester's got some interesting personal stories, and if he could combine those with brand stories, this could work. And if he could see what you were doing, he would get it." And he did. The story I tell about this experience is a good one. Three years ago was no way I could have conceived of doing what I am doing now. You do what you believe in, what your heart tells you, and all of a sudden opportunity opens up. Mr. Ivester didn't really react to my show. There were fourteen people in a room, and he was eight feet in front of me, and he just sat there. He might have smiled once or twice but not enough to get anything back. And, of course, how were the other people reacting? They were reacting the way he way he was reacting. After the show he did not come up and say, "That was interesting"–which is always scary–or "I like that" or just leave. He says, "What does Coca-Cola mean to you?" That was his first comment to me. It was like a hold-up, I mean, I really felt like he stuck a gun at me, and that if I didn't answer right, I was going to get a bullet in the gut. And I told a couple of stories. And I know the person who brought me down there was thinking, "Do I still have a job?" And then Mr. Ivester said, "You know that story you told about the little girl in the second grade? [Dana's first experience with romantic pining.]

Well I've got one like that, only I married her." I knew I had connected, and he left the room. My contact came back and said, "Well Mr. Ivester thinks you have had a troubled life but said, 'Let's do something with this guy.'" As I look back on it and tell this story over and over again in corporate or presentation environments, the thing that strikes me most about the story was that question, "What does Coca-Cola mean to you?" Because that is the key question in a corporation that you need to know as the CEO, as an employee, as a marketing person, as an assistant. You need to understand how consumers will answer that question. Because if you take the sum total of those responses about what Coca-Cola–or substitute any other brand–means to you, you will begin to understand what the brand means. The power of that brand, not as it's been defined by the agencies and marketing group, but as it is really defined, by what it means to people. And how you find out is by asking that question, of yourself and other people. It was a hold-up, but it was a hell of a good question. So I work with that all the time. I think you can also ask that question on a personal basis. We ask people in the digital storytelling workshop, "Why are you telling this story?" If we answer that question, and answer it honestly, we'll get to a core value of what we are doing, and it will certainly help to define what we are doing.

JL: You could also build these brand stories by asking the consumer what the brand means to them.

DA: Of course, that is what we did with Coca-Cola at the World of Coca-Cola in Las Vegas. As a service company, PricewaterhouseCoopers doesn't have those kinds of consumers, so where they get their stories is going to be different. They define their brand as "People, Worlds, and Knowledge." Well "worlds" is a kind of slippery one and "knowledge" I am beginning to get a handle on through people like Bob Johansen [of the Institute for the Future] and Lin Knapp [Chief Information Officer for PricewaterhouseCoopers]. "People" was a much more intriguing one. I don't know if I showed you this gorgeous book by a company called Interbrand out of Amsterdam. They really got the people issue. You look at these images and stories, and you say, "Wow, look at these people. These are amazing people." And then you look and notice they also happen to be somebody's personal assistant or a director of this or that at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

JL: I think the important point is that the concept of brand cannot always develop from the top down. People, either as employees or consumers, may invest in brand identity values that you never intended, and allowing their stories to trickle up to the top is what expands and truly defines the brand.

DA: But you have to encourage people to be storytellers, starting with the executives, and then spreading out across the company, because then people will get permission to be storytellers. Part of what Next Exit offers as a larger idea, and I am absolutely clear on this, is what Apple Computer used to call the "excellent design example". People go, "Oh, I get it, I can see what digital technology can do." Secondly, it gives people permission to tell their own story. Those are two very important things: an excellent example and permission. That is, in fact, what people like Mr. Dauphinais at PricewaterhouseCoopers have to do: give an excellent design example, and then without saying so overtly, give people the sense that they have a story as well. Make them think, "I have good one, and maybe you would like to hear it." Well, obviously, if you have 2,000 people at the meeting you can't hear every one, but if you use the Intranet you can do that.

JL: Do you have any speculation about the future direction of this work?

DA: Well, I have never been much of a speculator, I am much more of a doer. That's why it just boggles the mind that I am working with organizations like the Institute for the Future that spends so much of their time speculating and trying to plan the future. I figure the future grows from the present. In deciding in 1998 to begin working on Next Exit everything I have done since has grown from that action. Otherwise I would still be shooting computer training tapes. The past seven years we have seen some incredible advances: relatively cheap computers and software and a new medium of distribution. I think the computer as a device for storytelling coupled with easier software for telling your stories and the Internet as a disintermediated distribution device are everything we could have dreamed.

Back to "Next Exit"
Back to "How We Met"