My first reaction upon viewing Martin Scorsese’s new film, The
Wolf of Wall Street, was how closely it resembled Goodfellas, the
director’s masterful account of mob informant Henry Hill’s life in organized
crime. Like that historical snapshot of the
American Dream colorfully run off the rails, the new film tracks the wanton greed
and excessive personal behaviors of Jordan Belfort (played by Leonardo
DiCaprio) during the 1990s. Belfort made
tens of millions of dollars selling “penny stocks” and manipulating the stock
market through his firm, Stratton Oakmont, before being convicted of securities
fraud and money laundering.
While the Goodfellas parallel, in particular, urges
Scorsese’s current production to be viewed as a cautionary tale of unbridled
Capitalism, what else the film says about “Wall Street” or contemporary
business and markets – what more specific stories it may be telling about them
– is less clearcut. In a
characteristically incisive New York Times column, Joe Nocera asks
exactly that question about the film’s larger message regarding business. Commenting on Scorsese’s relentless
preoccupation with his protagonists’ sexual obsessions and drug use (rather
than, say, the specifics of Belfort’s fraudulent trading activities), Nocera
concludes that, “to use Stratton Oakmont to represent Wall Street doesn’t
begin to get at Wall Street’s sins.”
Yet Nocera’s question touches on the more
fundamental matter of how we tell meaningful stories either about specific
businesses or business activities. Typically,
of course, as in the film’s preoccupation with the dissipated indulgences of
DiCaprio’s Belfort, we tend to focus on individual leaders and their actions. Consider a few of the prevailing narratives of
business today: the visionary entrepreneur, the rapacious exploiter, or the small
businessman at the heart of the economy.
Some corporations do acquire a collective identity that shapes their
stories – Enron as the hubristic “smartest guys in the room” or Goldman Sachs as
a “great vampire squid” – but they are exceptions.
In Hollywood and, arguably, the wider popular imagination
alike, there’s a further need to simplify and dramatize the activities of
business like stock trading. At one
point in The Wolf of Wall Street’s occasional voiceover, in fact, DiCaprio’s
Belfort begins to describe the specifics of his trading activities only to
acknowledge they don’t really matter to the audience and stops. Moreover, any connection in the film between
Stratton Oakmont’s actual dealings in the 1990’s and the ethics of big Wall
Street firms’ early trafficking of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs)
becomes speculative, at best, as the film’s story increasingly dwells on
Belfort’s own spiraling out of control. The
complexity of such activities and any ethical or legal claims to be made about
them, much like the operations of other financial entities like hedge funds or
private equity firms, make them difficult if not impossible to render
meaningfully in dramatic stories. It
should give us pause in thinking about how we characterize the activities, and
differentiators, of our own businesses in the stories we tell of them.
Formal business education regularly addresses the
challenge of telling business stories.
The case method thus often requires that firms, their constituent units
and leaders, be analyzed closely. Cases
can obviously be structured in different ways, but the most typical approaches
rely on carefully drawn narratives: decision-making cases confront the
protagonist (and students) with a decision freighted with the complexity of
preceding events, for example, while best practice cases present the emergence
of those practices through a particular sequence of decisions and events. Harvard Business cases often go so far as to
intentionally scramble the elements of business narratives in order for
students to have to make sense of them.
Dexterous re-construction of the full story becomes the touchstone for
analysis and learning – while also modeling the valuable skill of producing
coherent stories from the disparate facts and other pieces of information found
in everyday life.
More broadly, the stories of business organizations
that circulate externally cannot but help shape the wider understanding of
those organizations (regardless of their accuracy). Marketers in this way rely on narratives to construct
and differentiate the status of company (or its constituent product) brands. As media and entertainment mogul Peter Guber
makes clear in his bestselling Tell to Win, the value of stories is the “emotional
transportation” they offer customers or clients. That “transportation” may lead to very
different ends, of escape or transformation or even-self discovery, but it is
ultimately borne on the wings of compelling stories that touch our hearts as customers,
partners, or collaborators.
Internal to businesses, narratives, what some
call “organizational scripts,” can spell out the distinctive and locally
appropriate behaviors to be performed in various situations. Some of these are “origin stories,” of
founders’ decisions or critical events, while others capture the defining ways the
business organizations manage change, solve problems or otherwise collectively
behave. Still other stories are
aspirational and define the organization according to the future it envisions
(for example, in Google’s case, having all the world’s information organized). In fact, the most influential organizational
stories are often those that describe where individual workers want to go
together and how they aim to get there.
At the center of such scripting and storytelling are
leaders. In their Animal Spirits,
which argues that humans are hard-wired to organize information and experience
into narratives, Nobel Laureates George Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller noted
that, “Great leaders are foremost creators of stories.” Creators, yes, but also evangelists, translators,
exemplars and finally guardians of the organizational DNA organized into and
relayed through stories.
Like all genetic influences, however, the core
elements of given stories of organizations and business activities only go so
far in shaping their eventual impact. Ever-changing
environmental dynamics, say, of shifting markets, require that stories be
continually refined. In his conclusion
to The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, Stephen Denning makes the crucial
point that narrative elements and techniques should ultimately serve as the
basis of connection and communication with employees and customers. Rather than being self-contained and complete,
in other words, stories should convey essential truths about the business they
describe while still having rough edges and opening out to continuing interaction. Although that doesn’t necessarily work in
Hollywood’s scripts and productions, such openness and adaptability in meaningful
storytelling about organizations and business activities are among the
paramount responsibilities – and most powerful opportunities – of real leadership.
