Innovation Blog

Poetry & Innovation: Mommy, Daddy, Tell Me a Story!

By Shlomo Maital

Nov. 4/2009

  Do you want to build a powerful business innovation? I ask my students.

  If you do — tell me a story.  Build a powerful narrative that has real people in it, a plot, conflict, a story line, and above all, a happy end.   These are all elements of  every great children’s book, stories we all grew up on,   Good Night, Moon,    Where the Wild Things Are,  and so on.  Children make meaning out of the world through stories.  So do we adults, it seems.   War and Peace, Anna Karenina — great novels are all great stories.   

     So — I ask my students to write a great narrative, rather than a dull-as-dust business plan with a huge spreadsheet.  Tell me a story.  Tell me how you will build a prototype, sell to one customer, scale up — and change the world.   And make sure there is a vivid photographic happy end.

    Who is the main client for such a story?  Investors?  VC’s?  No.  The main is client  is YOU yourself!    Does your story excite you, does it reflect your deepest passions? If so, you have a business idea with potential to succeed. If not — you’re wasting your time.  If you cannot energize yourself, you will not energize others that you will need on your team, in order to succeed. 

    Great stories create meaning.  They are memorable.  They inspire.  No-one ever joined a business venture because of an inspiring spreadsheet.  They do join because of a powerful change-the-world visionary narrative.

    To tell the absolute truth — many of my students do not ‘get it’.  They have been polluted by follow-the-rules here-is-how-to-do-it MBA course formulas for writing conventional business plans.  Do it this way, students learn in their MBA studies.  Is it not ironic that we teach entrepreneurship and innovation, by instructing our students to avoid innovation (in business plans) like the plague?

    I find badly-needed moral support in last week’s New York Times column by Thomas Friedman, titled “More Poetry Please”.   Here is what Friedman says:

      “President Obama has not tied all his programs into a single narrative that shows the links [among all his ideas and initiatives].  …such a narrative would…evoke the kind of popular excitement that got him elected.   Without it, the President’s eloquence is lost in a thicket of technocratic details.  OBAMA NEEDS TO ENERGIZE THE PROSE  of his Presidency by recapturing the poetry of his campaign!”

     [Yesterday’s (Tuesday) elections in the US prove the point.  The Democrats lost two key races for Governor (New Jersey and Virginia), despite Obama’s intervention there.]

     Precisely!  Every innovator, including Mr. “Yes, we can”,  must energize the prose of his or her idea (the feet-on-the-ground business details)  with head-in-the-clouds narrative poetry, to excite himself or herself and to energize the team, the investors, and even the clients.

    But innovators, beware!  Building such a narrative is extraordinarily difficult.   Entrepreneurs are not supposed to be poets!   Many innovators are engineers;  engineers are trained to understand the Second Law of Thermodynamics, not the First Law of Rhetoric and Narrative. 

     Here is a suggestion.  Do you have a business idea?   Tell it to a six-year-old.  Make it into a story.  If you can hold their interest, and elicit questions,  maybe you have a good business idea.  If you cannot,  if you cannot respond to “Mommy, Daddy, tell me a story”,  with a good one —  go back to the drawing board.