How much would you have to pay for having a hectare of land around your company cleaned up? You would need to determine the standards of work and penalties fixed by the contract. Seems simple, but somehow you don’t feel enthusiastic about it. It’s different when you need to organize a venue for playing football with your colleagues: you’re willing to accept the fact you need to pay for the pitch, for getting there, buy an outfit… You treat this kind of effort differently, even though the number of steps you’ll take may be similar.

When you want people to do something, you usually need to pay. Unless this is about an idea – which can become a common goal. Antoine Saint-Exupery, pilot and author of “The Little Prince,” used to say: “If you want to build a ship, teach people to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

The basic element of performance is the knowledge of a greater goal. A goal that is personally meaningful to you. Do people who are not shareholders care about increasing the company’s share in the market? Its results? They do – but only when it has to do with the stability of their jobs.

So it’s the goal – one that is meaningful and connects people. Like in the clean the world project, when we’re all faced with the vision of a clean planet that depends on us and our actions.

The power of fellowship
Ever wondered weather to watch Gabon vs Zambia football game? Would it be an exciting experience? So where lies the magic of a thrilling football match? It’s in the feeling of ‘representation.’ Like in a computer game – you need to believe you are the character fighting with monsters. In the same way you believe during a football game that there is a connection between you and the guys chasing a football around the pitch. The connection is purely abstract: the same colours, emblem, song, common history (e.g. the legendary match at Wembley etc).

So the question is – what’s the connection between us? What cords make our writing resonate with something like an element of identity?

All right, we have a goal and a community, and that’s good enough to praise something. But in order to have a story – you need a stake. Something that you fight for, something that can be lost. Or something you managed to wriggle out of and now you can be proud of it. So many CEOs have wasted so many words that nobody ever bothered to read because there was no conflict and no feeling of fellowship there! A CEO does not fight, has no dreams, no connection with people, no team… A CEO does not take part in the quest. A CEO has processes, principles, he juggles with data and could just as well publish a table in excel. Such a text provides no emotions, because there’s no winning. There’s only a stable growth, stability… And here the story ends, because we know from the start that everybody lived happily ever after.

Each company can play its own match: e.g. vs environmental pollution, struggling not to get pushed back to the second league, etc. Every company is fighting some kind of a dragon – the redundancy monster, the hydra of unfair competition. Each company manages to combat doubts and discover the treasure of innovations. You can show that by adding a goal to your narration, something to identify with, and a stake that every reader will play for. With no one to support in a story, you could just as well publish cold facts.

Traps
Where are the traps on the way to your readers? The first pitfall is values, which should be coherent and visible in the story. This may require determining the basic model for narration about the company, so that it’s clear which values are important. Bare declarations are not enough. The way you let people go, organize cleaning, production or reply to complaints must be coherent. Values are often only a list in a catalogue, and are not visible in actions because it hasn’t been planned.

Another problem is communication patterns: you can’t express enthusiasm in the language of an administrator, you can’t tell about originality in the language of processes, nor can you tell about the dynamics in a language that is heavy with nouns. No healthy reader would feel enthusiastic about the language of a rulebook.

Remember Steve Jobs talking to young students: Stay hungry, stay foolish. He told us that everyone can change the world. And who would you want to support more than yourself?

Dr Jacek Wasilewski – works at the Journalism and Political Sciences Department, University of Warsaw, where he is occupied with media rhetoric and message effectiveness. At the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in the Cultural Studies Institute he is occupied with the semiotics of media message and cultural patterns of using the media. Screenwriter for documentary films, social campaigns. Currently he collaborates with psychologists in developing methods for altering the image of common courts.