Every Business Has Lore—Are You Listening to Yours?

For the Better comes to you bi-weekly with ideas about how and why to build companies focused on human flourishing and stories of the people who are doing it. Other enthusiasms may occasionally appear.

Lore is powerful. Every company has it, especially if they’ve been around a long time. Sometimes they recognize its value. There’s a famous story about a Nordstrom refund made more than half a century ago for a product they didn’t even sell that has made its way into the company’s training as an example of truly good customer service. In Fairbanks, Alaska, a man who’d bought tires with a guarantee at the business formerly located in what had become a branch of Nordstrom brought them in for return. To the Nordstrom associate who received him: 

“everything the man told him rang true, so he felt compelled to do the right thing, despite not selling the man the tires in the first place..Nordstrom took over the building where the original purchase and guarantee promise was made so [he]r ecognized the obligation. With his supervisor watching the interchange from the backroom and effectively giving him thumbs-up, [he] called the local Firestone dealer to find out what the tires were worth – about $25 per time at the time – and refunded the money.”

But every company has stories that operate at the unofficial level, too. The person who made a Hail Mary pass and saved a big deal, or someone else who refused to compromise company values under pressure and never told their manager, or even the many smaller casual anecdotes about people who stayed late when it mattered, or did something thoughtful for a colleague in need that changed their trajectory. Of course there are also lore horror stories: the terrible manager, the team member who thought only of themselves, and so on. These tales emerge almost of their own accord. They float around offices and weave themselves into the culture. Most managers are shocked when they hear them for some reason or another, as they’re often completely unrelated to whatever values they believe the company is conveying, if it tries at all (I wrote a bit about this in a previous newsletter). 

If it’s true that we tell ourselves stories in order to live, we also tell them to learn about who we are. Lore is being generated at every organization, all the time. This gives it the potential to connect us on a human level to all kinds of organizations, including in other domains we may know less about. What we learn from them teaches us to value our own company in new ways. Paying attention to lore is the first step towards understanding a firm as a polis or anthropological body of its own. It can help us see the unseen in an organization, providing a new perspective on what it might be capable of.

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