Children think in narrative. Then at some point, unless they are courageous and careful, they stop. In university, and early in their careers, will be judged and rewarded for how fully they can move away from narrative thinking and into a realm of ensuring appropriate stakeholders are engaged in requirement gathering activities.
When we watch a movie or read a book, we return to our childhood selves, if only for ninety minutes at a time. Our imaginations fire and we feel another’s feelings. It is, or should be, equally true in leadership and business.
Think about the last time you heard a speech that inspired, delighted, and challenged you to act — to change in some way. These moments are rare, which is why we will pay dearly for them with our money and our time, but they share one element. The speaker understands something that genuine leaders have understood for centuries: that we all long for a return to those patterns and archetypes of our youth — to stories.
When we first sit down to give twenty minutes to a stranger or a leader, we are no doubt thinking of the work we have left behind, our husbands and wives and children, our lovers, the latest killer virus, that thing we posted on Twitter. The chair is uncomfortable. A woman in front of us is wearing too much perfume and a man behind us makes involuntary snorting sounds.
We would rather be anywhere.
Then the speaker begins. And even though it might be work, to be in that uncomfortable chair in the auditorium, if the speaker understands narrative we are transported. There are facts in the speech, but this information is embedded in a narrative like nuts in a cake. The arguments are knitted through a master story and through anecdotes and examples that prove it, make it emotionally true. We don’t hear the snorty man and we don’t smell the perfumed woman. Instead of random daydreaming we imagine our own anecdotes and examples that prove — or disprove, which is nearly as good — the speaker’s story. That night and the next day we remember the facts, not because they were terribly compelling, as facts in themselves, but because they were wrapped in narrative.
(Christopher Booker, known to some as a frustrating newspaper columnist and to others as an enormously helpful guide into storytelling)
In 1969, a British journalist and author named Christopher Booker went out for lunch with his literary agent and pitched an idea for a book. It would be about the basic plots writers and storytellers have always used, around the world. By the time he finished writing his book, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, the restaurant had been closed for a long time. It was 2003. His little project did not take thirty-four years because he had trouble finding material. The more he looked, the more he found, and as simple as it seemed — there are only seven? — it was enormously complicated. Here was evolutionary biology, psychology, neurology, and all the magic of global literature and religion. As you read the 700-page book, with little academic type, you sense Booker’s growing enthusiasm.
(A bit of the Epic of Gilgamesh at the British Museum)
He begins five thousand years ago, with the Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of the flawed Sumerian king of Uruk. Things are not going terribly well in Uruk. The kingdom “has fallen under the terrible shadow of a great and monstrous evil.”Gilgamesh, the selfish and arrogant king, is an unlikely hero. But there is an armourer in Uruk, and what he makes is quite special. Gilgamesh sets off with his sidekick on a long and dangerous journey into the forest to find and defeat the source of this evil, the monster Humbaba. Is it an easy battle? Of course not. When Gilgamesh loses his sidekick he mourns and understands his own fragility. They taunt one another, he and Humbaba. When it seems the monster is defeated he isn’t, really, and the more human of them — Gilgamesh — takes pity on the beast. But it’s a ruse. Monsters are monstrous! And finally, Gilgamesh kills him. The courageous hero sacrifices and accomplishes something for his people, for the collective. He is humbled by the experience.
And he is a better king of Uruk. The people are transformed through him. The evil shadow is lifted from the kingdom.
Yes, you have heard this story before, thousands of times in thousands of ways. The idea for The Seven Basic Plots really came to Booker in 1962. The first of the James Bond films, Dr. No, was about to launch in London.
… consider the story which launched the series of Bond films that night in 1962. The Western world falls under the shadow of a great and mysterious evil. The source of the threat is traced to a monstrous figure, the mad and deformed scientist Dr. No, who lives half across the world in an underground cavern on a remote island. The hero James Bond goes to the armourer who equips him with special weapons. He sets out on a long, hazardous journey to Dr. No’s distant lair, where he finally comes face to face with the monster. They enjoy a series of taunting exchanges, then embark on a titanic struggle. Against such near-supernatural powers, it seems Bond cannot possibly win. But finally, by a superhuman feat, he manages to kill his monstrous opponent. The shadowy threat has been lifted. The Western world has been saved. Bond can return home triumphant.
The first plot Booker describes is Overcoming the Monster. It is the oldest story we tell and still the most elemental, the simplest and most powerful. David is David because he defeated Goliath on behalf of his people. James Bond is Britishness distilled in a steaming pot of wish-fulfillment. For crime novels and the latest Marvel movie, American political campaigns, professional wrestling, hot wars and cold wars, battles between banks and airlines and technology companies for market dominance, there might be no better way to rouse one community — yours — against another.
Here are all seven of Booker’s plots:
Overcoming the Monster
Rags to Riches
The Quest
Voyage and Return
Comedy
Tragedy
Rebirth
Of course, they aren’t always discreet. They flow into and out of one another, combine and stack. A series of books like The Lord of the Rings is an elegant blend of each of the seven plots. But some individual leaders and some companies find a way to use a Rags to Riches master story, and to curate only Rags to Riches anecdotes that recreate that feeling again and again, which is at the heart of every product and every strategy. Guy Laliberté, the founder of Cirque du Soleil, always managed to seem the street busker with an unconventional new idea. Oprah Winfrey was an underestimated and ignored woman who rose to wealth and power on the strength of her ideas, her hard work, her courage, and her morality. Howard Schultz, of Starbucks, and entrepreneurs like Li Ka-shing and François Pinault, the high school dropout who bought Gucci, found a way to bring “underdog culture” to multi-billion dollar enterprises.
(Mahali Mzuri)
Ever since he was a teenager, Richard Branson has been on a quest to enter industries that he finds frustrating: music, travel, media. And who is more frustrated than the virgin teenager? He had brought glamour, opulence, and an easy-entry mix of fun and sophistication to everything he built. His market wasn’t the diminishing aristocracy: it was the upwardly mobile forever-young types, progressive and freethinking, who were acquiring wealth now and wanted to feel like the aristocrats of today and tomorrow. Even if they aren’t rich, they want to play rich. I was working in Kenya in 2013 and visited a safari lodge Branson had just opened, Mahali Mzuri. There was nothing new about luxury safari lodges in East Africa. They operated more-or-less identically: fancy tents, tasty dinners, drives into the wilderness to look at animals. Yet this safari lodge was the talk of the tourist industry in Kenya. My companions, women working for the Tourism Commission, couldn’t wait to see it.
Why?
The Australian manager of the lodge, Liam Breedveld, knew the Virgin master story perfectly. The status quo, the problem, was obvious: luxury safari trips had fallen behind on what luxury means in the twenty-first century. So Branson hired the greatest “tent architect” in the world to build canvas suites that rivalled the finest hotel rooms in the world, on a bluff overlooking a gorgeous valley. They look like spaceships. One of Branson’s most important rules: there must be a view from the toilet and bathtub. From the toilet and bathtub of the tents you could see elephants drinking from a creek. There was an infinity pool and a spa area, for massages and other treatments, close enough to shout at the same elephants. The lodge had an immaculate kitchen and an award-winning chef, a common area with a stocked bar and Kenyan coffee beans so fine and so fresh that Breedveld had to throw away any leftovers at the end of the day. While this seems wasteful, the lodge was a partnership between Branson and the Maasai, who together restored the land and invited animals back where they belonged; we can hope they ground up the stale coffee and used it for compost. Even the Toyota Landcruisers every safari company in Africa uses to take its guests through the savannah are different at Mahali Mzuri. Breedveld and his brother — who along with Branson had been made honourary Maasai warriors for their commitments to the land and to the culture — had kitted out the trucks to make them the ultimate in speed, springiness, and beauty.
Branson is not in the “disruptive innovation” business. What did he find annoying in the luxury Kenyan safari industry? The local and international companies operating the lodges had become lazy about the luxury part. So, ever the rock and roll star, he turned it up to eleven.
It’s fun to mess around on the Virgin website. While the Virgin “story” is linear, it’s beautifully curated. Virgin knows precisely what to include and, better yet, what to leave out. Each of the anecdotes proves the Branson/Virgin master story. The writers don’t present anything as a stand-alone fact or information. Some bits seem frivolous, like the 1978 entry.
(Necker Island)
A lot happened with Virgin in 1978. At the time, it was becoming a massive company. Branson acquired, sold, succeeded, failed. Yet of all the “That’s so Virgin” stories, they chose to tell this one:
Necker Island
Richard Branson buys Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands for £180,000 — mainly to impress a girl called Joan Templeman. It works and she marries him.
Necker is now part of the Virgin Limited Edition portfolio.
The anecdote comes with a grainy photograph of the island, circa. 1978. While another company might have shown a before-and-after picture, from sandy wilderness to luxury hotel, Virgin didn’t bother with any of that. They might have given us information about the hotel complex: the number of rooms and the size of each, the name of the tour operator selling them. Instead, they went back to “founding mythology,” that Branson-and-Virgin decision to create something unforgettable in an otherwise busy marketplace. Surely there were plenty of hotels in the British Virgin Islands in 1978. Why did he do it? Not to escalate tourism assets in a comprehensive package of strategic investments in a market yet to be disrupted. He created something beautiful in a beautiful place to impress a girl — and you, of course — because, at the time, nothing else was Virgin enough.