The Transformational Power of Narrative

I'm sharing a sub-portion of a longer workshop I am honored to lead at next week's Aspen Institute Business & Society Program summit. The workshop's focus is designing a culture playbook to radically transform business performance. It is my life's work and passion I share with Long-Term Value Advisors co-founder Raymond Jones .

This portion is a case study on LinkedIn and how former CEO & Chairman Jeff Weiner leveraged the power of narrative to inspire us as a team to transform our company and realize our vision & mission.

Sometimes in business, you get tingles down your spine. When you do it means you've struck a chord of inspiration. Writing this case gave me those tingles, and I wanted to share it during this difficult moment in the economy and world affairs to remind us that aspirational narrative has the power to transform.

Over the coming months we'll share the full culture playbook, but for now, enjoy the LinkedIn narrative.

The content:

In Everybody Matters, Bob Chapman talks about his frustration when private companies (most of them) keep business results hidden from employees. It’s not much better in many public companies where the average person will see quarterly earnings, but not a whole lot else unless you’re a member of a leadership team privy to key dashboards and meetings. Even in the knowledge worker age, many employees feel shut out of understanding their business and its results. People often feel like cogs and outputs, DISCONNECTED from how their work matters to the greater whole they serve.

Case Study, LinkedIn & CEO Jeff Weiner.

Jeff was LinkedIn’s CEO for over a decade and is the master of company narrative. I was fortunate to collaborate on building LinkedIn’s powerful narrative focused on human connection and economic opportunity. Narrative may have been Jeff’s favorite business word, I once counted us using it over 100x in a single day of earnings prep.?

Narrative framed our company’s purpose & values, our strategy, our key objectives & results, our weekly & quarterly operational cycle, our daily team standups, and everything else in between. The LinkedIn narrative permeated all that we did as a company, and each employee had multiple touchpoints back to our core company story in their work and lives.?

That narrative inspired each of us. For me personally, our mission to create economic opportunity connected with my own family history. My great-grandparents fled poverty in post-genocide Armenia and post-WWI Germany to create new lives in America. My motivation for raising capital and telling our company story sprung from belief that LinkedIn would create greater opportunities for immigrants than those afforded to my great-grandparents. I still get chills thinking about that connection a decade later.?

And while the narrative itself is powerful, it was Jeff’s commitment to transparency & engagement that made it effective.?

Jeff leverages a simple yet powerful framework to deliver a narrative. In fact, he shared it on-stage with former Fortune editor Adam Lashinsky at the Aspen Institute’s 2015 Business & Society Program summit in San Francisco (and many other forums). The article is linked in the appendix and covers three points:

• 1 - Inspire with purpose: Define vision, mission, values, objectives, & strategies aligned with the impact the company wants to have on the world.
• 2 - Repetition: “The narrative has to be reinforced at every turn, authentically believed and held and constantly manifested.” Jeff famously also repeated the mantra, “In order to effectively communicate to an audience, you need to repeat yourself so often that you grow sick of hearing yourself say it, and only then will people begin to internalize the message.”
• 3 - Stick together and stick to it: Repetition is not just in saying the words, it is in how you execute the business. The narrative is the business, the business is the narrative.

Vision, mission, and values were all embedded across the company. One example was our quarterly business review (QBR) process. This involved every major line or operating function presenting its strategy & results to the executive team each quarter. But it wasn’t just strategy & financials, the common template each business used included its own vision, mission, culture, and values. You didn’t dare come to the meeting without the culture component, we could spend half the discussion there.

What’s more, what started as closed-room exec sessions eventually evolved into any relevant participant being able to join and listen. Much like how General Stan McChrystal transformed the speed and quality of decision-making in Iraq through daily open intelligence meetings, LinkedIn transformed the speed and quality of strategy and business execution through transparency and constant communication. The QBRs were one of the key operational catalysts (amongst many others) behind over 5x revenue growth from ~$3bn in 2015 to $15bn today.