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Earning the Right to Win: Scale Your Organization Through Storytelling, with Bill McDermott, CEO, ServiceNow, Former CEO, SAP SE, and Author, Winner’s Dream
Teach and learn in real time
People learn through stories. I think the idea of being a storyteller is just absolutely don’t spend a lot of time with formulas and rulers and pointing to chalk boards. Just tell people, because they’re really smart, what you were confronted by and how you dealt with it.
For example, I go to universities all the time today and I talk about the strategy and the future vision that I have for a very large company. And I encourage them through the scenarios, the stories, the real-time application of the battles we’re fighting, to give me their feedback and to process it with me in real time. So I find that learning is done by being in the story, by taking it as a real-time case study and just by giving real, authentic, honest answers to the way things are really happening out there. This is how we all learn.
So I think we’re entering into a world now where communication, storytelling, authenticity, problem solving, solution finding, knowledge sharing is all becoming part of the new way of leading an organization and scaling an organization and scaling a dream. No one can do it on their own.
Engage every day
I have the great privilege of running a company with 67,000 people. I never go to sleep at night feeling very good about myself, unless I feel like I’ve done something on that day to engage the other 66,999. That’s what it’s all about. And then after you’ve done that, think about the ecosystem outside of your company, that support your company. In our case, it’s 2.1 million people in some way, shape or form earning their paycheck on the backbone of that brand and that franchise. How have we initiated them in the story? What examples are we sharing with them? How are we bringing them closer to us and to our winners dream? And then you get the force multiplier effect.
And the one thing I can tell you is the winner’s dream brings the world optimism and it brings the world that idea that we can be anything that we want to be as long as we’re willing to dream and work hard enough to get it. And we need that back into society.