The power of the press

Archaeologists in Greece have just unearthed a clay tablet containing the oldest known extract of Homer’s Odyssey.

Although it dates back thousands of years, the tablet is nowhere near as old as the Odyssey itself, which is thought to date back to the 8^th century BC.

In those days, of course, most stories were never written down, because very few people knew how to write. The only reason the Odyssey survived is because it was such a good story that people would learn it, word for word, and recite it around flickering campfires.

All that changed in 1439, when Johanes Gutenberg invented the mechanical printing press. For the first time, it became possible for written information to be shared beyond a tiny elite. It was a hugely significant moment in the emergence of the modern world: it democratised learning and led directly to the renaissance, the enlightenment and the revolutions (both political and industrial) of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It also transformed the way we tell stories. Thanks to Gutenberg and those who followed him, we have the luxury of being able to forget things, because we know that forgetting them no longer means they are lost forever.

Which, in some ways, is a bit of a shame.

Like the ancient world to Homer’s Greek audience, modern businesses are complex and confusing things. The people who work in them, or buy from them, are busy and often distracted. And, like those ancient Greeks, they’re searching for meaning to help them make sense of it.

But the stories we tell have become much more complex, too. We don’t have to keep them simple any more because, thanks to Gutenberg and his successors (such as Microsoft and Google), we can write down and share as much detail as we like. We can weave in lots of different narratives and ideas. We can use film and graphics and satellite technology to add richness and detail and immediacy.

This can make our stories more engaging. But it can also make them less clear, harder to remember and, somehow, a bit less real.

When was the last time you heard someone in your business (or any business) give a compelling speech or presentation straight off the cuff, with no props?

When was the last time you read a company’s mission statement or values and thought ‘wow – I’d love to work for them’?

Is it time we stopped being so clever and got back to telling better stories?

Try this test on your own business:

Choose five people at random and tell them to imagine you’re someone they’ve just met at a party. Ask them to explain, in one sentence, what the business does.

Then ask them to explain, also in one sentence, what they do and what difference it makes to their customers.

That should give you a pretty good sense of (a) whether the people in your business actually have a shared sense of purpose and (b) whether they can articulate it in terms that are meaningful to anybody else.

If the answer to either of those is ‘no’, you’ve got some work to do.