The Hindu Business Line : Transforming organisations with stories

Coimbatore/Chennai, Dec 27 There was one speaker at the annual conclave of bankers, Bancon 2007, who caught a lot of attention and for a different reason. That was Sam Swaminathan, who goes around with a visiting card that reads ‘Storyteller, Centre for Creative Thinking’.

We wondered what he was going to say to an audience of top bankers and why did he call himself a storyteller?

Here is Sam’s story: An engineer by qualification with a Masters in Business Administration, Sam moved to Dubai in the mid-90s to set up his business there. Sam’s business agenda was not ‘just business, but about raising intellectual capital’. He mooted the ‘Centre for Creative Thinking’ and decided to register it. His story (not business tale) began here!

He says, “The Economics Department in Dubai said that only a Police Department could be called a ‘Centre’. They decided instead to call my dream ‘centre’ ‘Al Afgar Management Consultancy’. But I felt that it would appear as though it were an Islamic company. I narrated the story of Altos and Apple, in which only the latter survived and managed to convince the officials that I did not want my set up to be named ‘Al Afgar’. My story telling ideas started there and since the strategy worked, I have it in my calling card.”

Participating in a discussion panel on ‘Delivering superior customer experience’, Sam, while taking the audience through a presentation, did not forget to tell stories.

According to him, wealth creation in the twenty-first century would not only be tough but a great deal different. “The situation facing corporations today is no different from that faced at the advent of the industrial age – no road maps, and the danger of depending upon past experience.”

He urged organisations to pay full attention to the customer who brings them complaints, since this presented a good opportunity to ‘recover’ a customer. If you address the issue, the customer would forgive you, even if you were the author of the problem, he said.

Giving the example of a popular international airline, he said they had learnt to do this very well. He said that typically, a customer who reached the check-in counter a few minutes late would be told that the flight was full. After listening to the pleading and recitation of a litany of reasons why that customer had to catch the flight, the counter clerk would relent a little and offer to phone up a supervisor. A few minutes later, she would hang up and then let the customer know that they would be able to find a single seat. “If you were that customer, your response would be: “Wow!”. You are not going to stop and think whether Boeing produced an extra seat for the airline just then!” he said, drawing knowing smiles from the assembly.

He quipped, “To err is human, to recover is divine”, and added in a light-hearted vein that companies now even stage failures in order to delight the customer!

Asked why the host - Bank of Baroda chose to invite a story teller to an event for the banking fraternity, Sam, without divulging much said he was involved in the bank’s transformation process. “Yet another story?” we wondered.

We thought Sam was one of a kind. But it looks like he has company. On an in-flight magazine, we saw an article that talked of another ‘story teller’. This story-teller, a teacher in Political Science at the University of Delhi, said that she strongly feels that the ‘only hope for this world would be in telling stories, true or imaginary.’

History seems to be back in fashion again. Just that, this time round, it is the professional and consultants’ ‘stories’ of corporate folk tales and mythology, instead of your grand mom’s stories of yesteryears!

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Transforming organisations with stories