Wolfgang Hammer - The Power of Story

“Story works in 3 layers. One, there's the external mechanics of how the character interacts in the world, and you can substitute character for product. That's a requirement. And in the case of technology, it's technical. You got to have something that works. And then there are 2 more layers, which is a subjective layer of why is this series of events important to me and what does it mean to me personally? And then there is a philosophical layer.”— Wolfgang Hammer

Strategy & Decision Making · Leadership & Management · Philosophy & Reasoning

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3 layers: external, personal, philosophical

“Raymond Loewy, the designer, had a similar rule around 80/20. The most tolerable element of new before it's rejected by the human mind is incomprehensible. With the idea of originality and creativity, there's a tension. Originality is highly prized and there's this belief that only the very new is truly novel. And with storytelling especially, but I even think in business or innovation, the new is really just the obvious uncovered through systematic trial and error over a certain period of time.”— Wolfgang Hammer

Creativity & Innovation · Psychology & Behavior · Strategy & Decision Making

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80% familiar, 20% new is maximum tolerable novelty

“All society is communication, and that because of its complexity, communication breaks down into buckets of specialty. It's in essence being a master communicator of an almost infinite amount of buckets and knowing to context switch between them and understanding the language games that each one of these buckets plays, but never forgetting the core principles underneath all this. Some of it is unspoken. I've observed, especially one person that I admire enormously, doing a massive turnaround.”— Wolfgang Hammer

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior · Operations & Execution

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Fixed philosophy, adaptive emotional framing per audience

“The questions are something like: How should the world be in a general sense? How do I believe the world should be? The good life? The second layer is why am I doing this? What is it about my specific story that maps back onto that? And the third is what are we doing about it?”— Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Leadership & Management · Philosophy & Reasoning · Strategy & Decision Making

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How world should be, why me, what now

“Don Rosenthal had this wonderful way of repeating back to you the absurdity of your beliefs. And laughing at them. So you would be laughing at these absurd constructs, that these stories that you've come up with and believe to be fundamentally true, mainly because you hadn't done the work of just saying, well, what do you really believe? Once you do that, it's your ultimate concern and it's your bedrock.”— Wolfgang Hammer

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management

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Expose absurd beliefs to find bedrock truth

“Robert Towne, who was a great screenwriter and wrote Chinatown, said this to me at lunch years ago when I was a young executive. He said, stories are either desires fulfilled or anxieties purged. And I think he's right. These are great minds who've made great films and it's never left me. I think it has to do with overcoming basic human condition.”— Robert Towne

Psychology & Behavior · Philosophy & Reasoning · Creativity & Innovation

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Stories: desires fulfilled or anxieties purged

“Someone called me, hadn't heard from them in a while, and they said, we realized we've been selling to the wrong level. We have to sell to C-level as opposed to frontline manager level. And the sales pitch didn't work to the C-level. It was because they had not changed the framework, this objective personal philosophy. The C-level has a very different worldview of what's happening in company than the line manager. And we worked on it and it was like magic.”— Wolfgang Hammer

Business & Entrepreneurship · Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management

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Match narrative to buyer's worldview

“Everyone believes this, I believe that. When this is steel-manned, this is really helpful. So this is on a global level about how the world works. And then you do the same for the personal as well. So you can do it for a customer, you can do it for a person you're selling to. How do they believe things should be done? And you juxtapose that with what you think should be done.”— Wolfgang Hammer

Strategy & Decision Making · Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior

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Steelman their worldview then position yours

“Character in action through action. This is the great discovery of the pragmatists, which I think is a huge reason for why the American experiment has been so successful, is that people do a lot of doing happening. You cannot have a good narrative without an active character. There's no one that sits around and thinks their way through problems.”— Wolfgang Hammer

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management

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Action reveals subconscious, pragmatism wins

“Originality, I have this specific view I think very often successful people, when they do something great, somehow it was entirely original so as to aggrandize their achievement. And it's entirely possible that they felt that this was the case. I think very often it's much more derivative. And I think we should be much kinder to the notion of derivative. And I think we should understand perhaps that originality is just another form of derivation.”— Wolfgang Hammer

Creativity & Innovation · Psychology & Behavior · Philosophy & Reasoning

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Originality is derivative done differently

“Fear is present, but it's a fear of potential of all that could be. So you think fearing greatness is like the ultimate fear? I think fearing greatness, as long as we define greatness as a manifold of flourishing of life. So in all its forms, not just a great engineer or a great company builder. If we believe that storytelling is thousands of years of myth-making, that we have thoroughly enjoyed people realizing potential in the world, that there is an inner drive to reach one's potential.”— Wolfgang Hammer

Psychology & Behavior · Philosophy & Reasoning · Leadership & Management

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Fear of greatness: potential too big to bear

“Doing the thing is so difficult and complex that the idea of having to frame this now on top of everything else in some sort of philosophical way is overwhelming and doesn't even seem necessary at times. Of course, it's always present and people just are not conscious of it. When the predicate understanding of what is actually happening is made conscious and is communicated in a way that doesn't quite name the thing, but is able to metaphorically describe it, it can be extremely inspiring becaus...”— Wolfgang Hammer

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior · Philosophy & Reasoning

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Conscious philosophy communicated metaphorically inspires deeply

“Story is character and action. Things don't happen to you. You act against obstacles. And as you do require knowledge, with knowledge comes power to then affect the outcome. It's also interesting to see that this is never done alone. There are always surrogates, people who give you knowledge and people who aid you in the quest, whatever the quest may be.”— Wolfgang Hammer

Leadership & Management · Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior

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Agency plus knowledge equals power; never alone

“Money stores potentiality. The mind can imagine anything. So it's the ultimate story in some sense where both all your desires and fantasies can be fulfilled and all your anxieties can be purged to such a degree maybe that the money project is a denial of death project. The more you accrue of that, it allows itself to be imprinted with any vision that you want. The more you accrue of it, the more it gives the illusion that you're not going to have to leave your consciousness.”— Wolfgang Hammer

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior · Economics & Markets

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Money as stored potentiality, death denial

“I ran these mid-sized places. I think it has to do with being able to communicate in different worlds, which is actually quite difficult because you have to speak the language of filmmakers who live in their own world, and then you have to speak the language of corporate because there are reporting requirements, business requirements. You have to speak the language of marketing and sales. You're in these different worlds.”— Wolfgang Hammer

Leadership & Management · Operations & Execution · Business & Entrepreneurship

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Leadership is translation between different worlds

“Someone has an ability to be a Greek hero, which means to live and espouse a worldview that is universally disliked. That's iconic. I'm really interested on this pure narrative level in what Elon Musk is doing because it's so unconcerned with the traditional hero trajectory. It's almost Greek. And this idea of breaking societal rules, if you will, that you get to some Platonic ideal that is worth more than acceptance.”— Wolfgang Hammer

Philosophy & Reasoning · Leadership & Management · Culture & Society

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Greek hero: universally disliked worldview toward Platonic ideal

“I was at Stanford when the turnaround for Apple in its second inning. This was a man who had a philosophy, a personal worldview, and knew exactly what he was fighting against at all times, and then acted accordingly with unbelievable discipline and courage and created something that was a work of art in many ways. He literally wanted to make business art, and he kind of did.”— Wolfgang Hammer

Leadership & Management · Philosophy & Reasoning · Creativity & Innovation

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Clear worldview plus disciplined action creates art

“All stories have in common the idea of resilience, that the character will overcome these obstacles and things are not working and there isn't enough knowledge and enough power to go where one must go or one has impelled or has been impelled to go and keep going anyways. This idea of resilience and to keep going anyways, even though the obstacles are getting enormous, inspires that begrudging admiration.”— Wolfgang Hammer

Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management · Philosophy & Reasoning

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Resilience despite growing obstacles is universal story core