I can't help but note that what is written below is an important reason
Jesus (and many other very wise people) taught using parables. I think if
you look at organizations, you will find that each has it "legends" which
people use to give meaning to the values of the company and expected
behaviors. We should also note that these legends may provide examples
not just of admirable traits (to an outsider) but to those that to the
outsider are not so admirable, but are seen as necessary inside the
organization.
Here's a legend I read about the old GM (early 80s): An executive was
visiting another part of the country and those he was visiting heard he
liked to have a cold beer in the evening. They arranged for a
refrigerator to be placed in his hotel room. The only way they could get
it in was by using a crane to lift it in the window, at company expense.
This narrative/legend/parable speaks volumes about what was important at
GM at that time, and perhaps helps to explain its problems then and
direction now. As another example, I read that when Robert Eaton became
chairman of Chrysler, he and Robert Lutz (president of Chrysler) called a
conference for top executives at a resort in Northern Michigan. As the
executives arrived, they found Eaton and Lutz waiting to park their cars
and carry their luggage in. That is also a parable that speaks volumes.
>In a remarkable, and remarkably depressing, essay in the October 23 New
>Yorker, dealing with the Simpson trial and, to a lesser extent, the
>Million Man March, Henry Louis Gates wove together the impressions and
>thoughts of a number of black Americans -- Spike Lee to Jessye Norman to
>Rita Dove to Walter Mosley -- and, toward the beginning, states the
>following: "People arrive at an understanding of themselves and the world
>through narratives -- narratives purveyed by schoolteachers, newscasters,
>'authorities,' and all the other authors of our common sense.
>Counternarratives are, in turn, the means by which groups contest that
>dominant reality and the fretwork of assumptions that supports it.
>Sometimes delusion lies that way; sometimes not. There's a sense in which
>much of black history is simply counternarrative that has been documented
>and legitimatized, by slow, hard-won scholarship...In any case, fealty to
>counternarratives is an index to alienation, not to skin color..."
>
>I've been fascinated by this notion of narrative, and now its evil (or
>not-so-evil) twin crops up. I hate to trivialize Gates's essay, but I
>wonder whether one can map parallel narratives in (now hold your breath,
>everyone...) organizational settings. And if so, do the lines EVER cross
>(forgetting for the moment about the standard definition of "parallel")?
>Can you lay over those parallel narratives other views of the
>organization's life cycle? If so, what would you find?
>
>In the same week this essay appeared, Robert Kelly reviewed Umberto Eco's
>newly-published (in the US) novel, "The Island of the Day Before." Kelly
>writes that the book "is really a book about telling about the utter
>necessity of narrative. With our shipwrecked hero, we are in a world in
>which the only clarity is the story we tell, which is also our only
>escape..." And later: "Only by telling a story can you tell if an idea is
>valid. The great speculators are the artists who told the story in wich
>we find ourselves, the story in which we, in our turn, create them."
>
>And imagine...Tom Bertels, who's out there on this list, told me about a
>conference, to be held next July in New Zealand, on "Metaphor and
>Narrative Across the Disciplines."
>
>--
>Ron Mallis
>ron 2785@eworld.com
>
>
>
>
-- John Woods jwoods@execpc.com