The leaked email explaining how the Nokia Platform is Burning reminded me of something I wrote a decade ago, during one of my sojourns into Australia’s wealth management sector, on the uses and abuses of story telling in the Business World. 

Needless to say it equates great storytelling with great leadership…

Last week one of my client’s invited me to attend a two day exposition by one of the world’s leading Management Consulting and Research conglomerates. The subject? Well let’s just say it was about making it happen.

Content aside, what interested me the most was the language and style of the international consultants.

Every tribe, as Sir James Frazer  eloquently observed in his Edwardian Classic “The Golden Bough”, has a priesthood or a medicine man, a tribal oracle to be consulted on important matters.  In this regard the modern Techno-Jungles are no different from the wild jungles of Africa.

Business leaders regularly call upon the modern tribal Medicine Men to consult the signs before embarking any new military undertaking (read: new product launch, take-over bid, strategic plan, restructuring).

Nor should this come as a surprise. The medicine man is an essential part of the cultural fabric of any tribe.  Even in the modern context. Indeed it is their actions, their language and their symbols that provide us with the deep cultural insights we need to really understand the fundamental fears and goals that drive the tribe.

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