Why do Americans need to attach creation myths to everything, including the origins of our most visible business ventures? We idealize the lone inventor over the company man, the garage over the office space. We tell the story of Apple Computer not as that of two former Atari and Hewlett-Packard employees launching their own product, but two starry-eyed inventors in a garage, building a dream from scratch.
This American Life host Ira Glass put the question to Fast Company columnist Dan Heath earlier this morning, and his answer reveals a lot about our business culture. When we don't have a garage, we make up something else, like the widely believed (and now discredited) story about YouTube's founding: According to myth, founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley planted the seed for YouTube while trying unsuccessfully to upload video they'd taken at a dinner party to the Web. The story, the founders have since said, is largely embellished. As Heath says:
"While it feels like a little bit of a let down to realize that this dinner party story is not the whole truth, I feel like it's a little bit unfair for us to expect more of them than the creation of YouTube. Here's this incredible site, and in some sense that's not enough for us. We want YouTube to have emerged from some kind of everyday experience. It's not enough to have the value of their work, we also want there to be a really compelling story that started it."
Listen to the entire broadcast of This American Life here.
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Related Stories: | Topics:Innovation, Management, Magazine, Made to Stick, myths, origins, entrepreneurship, ideas, YouTube LLC, Dan Heath, Internet Broadcasting, Science and Technology, Technology |
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Recent Comments | 4 Total
June 22, 2009 at 5:30pm by Loraine Antrim
Business and creation myths are a logical marriage. Business people are born storytellers. Think of it: the successful salesperson pulls a customer into a story of opportunities and closes the sale. The motivational CEO tells the story of overcoming competitive odds and rallies his troops. It's no wonder that business people have propagated "creation myths" about companies: they just love stories! But business creation myths serve a real purpose from a cultural standpoint.
In ancient times, the storyteller would roam from village to village regaling locals with tales of King Arthur or Gilgamesh or gods, goddesses and heroes. Ancient peoples needed a hero and a creation story. I think we need them even more today.
But in modern culture, we look to sports or business success for heroes and how they started.
Not much has changed from a thousand years ago: we still love to hear of someone beating all odds, achieving tremendous success, fighting an adversary and winning. We might exaggerated the details and add a few that were not in the original, but creation myths and heroes are integral to business conversations.
So it's not that we need to attach creation myths to everything, we just love the telling and retelling of the story. It's cultural glue and great business glue that keeps us focused and motivated. And anyone who cultivates the art of telling their corporate story can be a "hero" within their own organization.
Loraine Antrim, Co-founding Partner
Core Ideas Communication
www.coreideas.com
June 23, 2009 at 11:05am by Travis Price
In the modern world of 10 year amnesia, it is so easy to forget as Joe Campbell aptly puts; that we are all composed of myths, and most materialist life these days is starving for the reconnection. Ignorance of these well known truths for centuries in all cultures is on the increase it seems in a twitter world. However, George Lucas made a lot of dough tapping the male heroic myths! Travis Price FAIA - www.spiritofplace-design.com, www.archaeologyoftommorrow.com
June 23, 2009 at 11:10am by Marque Pierre Sondergaard
Hardly surprising. Human beings are by nature storied people. Myth and story communicates important values and principles in brief, entertaining and easy to remember form.
As the Greeks put it quite a few years ago, there are only 7 stories in this world - largely corresponding with the same core emotions we are all made up from and governed and motivated by.
June 24, 2009 at 6:14am by Jagjit Chipra
Myth, changed to truth. Fun reading it.