For your story to matter, be more passionate and less professional

If you want to craft purposeful thought leadership, do a 'Springsteen' and hire people who rely more on their hearts than the process

One of my favourite stories is that I once appeared in a Bruce Springsteen song.

OK, slight exaggeration but stay with me because it’s still a brilliant metaphor for business storytelling.

A couple of years ago, a client drove me from the New York office to a meeting north of Philadelphia. After about 30 minutes on the New Jersey Turnpike, the night-time heavens opened and, looking out of the left-side window, I spotted a clutch of oil refineries lit up by security lights whilst to the right, a sign pointed to the Black River beauty spot. Bruce’s wonderfully gloomy song State Trooper goes like this:

New Jersey turnpike, ridin' on a wet night
'Neath the refinery's glow, out where the great black rivers flow
License, registration, I ain't got none
But I got a clear conscience 'bout the things that I done

The cab driver (with license and registration) looked at me quizzically as I mumbled the chorus: ‘Mister State Trooper, please don't stop me, please don't stop me, please don't stop me…’

For a boy who had grown up in the Badlands of North London this was a rare simpatico moment for me and Bruce. (Contrary to my teenage delusions, the only people I knew who were born to run were members of the Finchley Central Marathon Club.)

Anyway, the journey returned to me when I started reading a brilliant new book exploring the making of the Nebraska album which includes the above song. Deliver Me From Nowhere by Warren Zanes explores how Bruce sought to escape the popular, slick brand that he had become so that he could explore a darker and more melancholic side, stripped bare and recorded with absolute simplicity.

He realised that the ‘professionalism’ that had brought him such success had stymied his creativity. He was in danger of going through the motions. Many business leaders lose their authentic selves by being surrounded by people who are devoted to process rather than passion, churning out the story they think they should be telling rather than the one that should be told. Professionalism can disconnect people from their purpose. Bruce explains it like this:

‘I was not interested in professionals. They like schedules. They like somebody who’s going to approach their work as a piece of work, and not very obsessively. I was into crafting an identity… I needed people who were going to be willing to go in as deep as I needed and was willing to go myself. Generally those are not professionals, just people who were passionate and had some skills.’

I’ve worked for so many companies where the decision-makers have replaced their passion with professionalism. Process and technocratic formality has taken over. We do things like this because, well, that’s how it’s done.

But why? What about spontaneity, creative reactions, thinking in a different way to change how you work and interact, where’s the person who you were before you got the top job, what happened to the passion that made you professional, how have you allowed PR and assumed expectation to turn you from bold and interesting into safe and anodyne?

One of the great assets of having a journalistic background is that passion for the story is essential. You approach everything as if it were the first time, forcing yourself to ask endless questions, feeling your way, using your gut instinct to get to the heart of why the story matters. So, when I’m creating company narratives, thought leadership or training teams to tell their stories more effectively, the journalist in me focuses on the passion of storytelling not only the professional process.

Most recently, I won a significant piece of work from a mega-company because the three other storytelling consultancies – much larger than mine – all focused their pitch on their professionalism. I was chosen, they said, for my perceived passion for wanting to do things a little differently, to wrestle with their real-work issues. Process will be part of it but I hope that I can inspire them to become passionate about finding, making and telling a story through journalism.

I urge you to listen to the Nebraska album and marvel at the tightness of those songs, how entire lives are squeezed into a few verses, how issues of faith, betrayal, hope, loss, togetherness and separation are more meaningful because they’re expressed through stories.

Businesses could learn a lot from how Bruce’s passion fuels his professionalism. The world of work has plenty of the latter, but needs more of the former.

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Catherine Carr is a freelance BBC radio journalist with one of the most interesting podcasts I’ve come across in ages. Where Are You Going is the first question Catherine asks random strangers across the world, many of whom then start to tell her the story of their lives. We could all learn from Catherine’s deceptively simple interviewing style – ‘polite tickling’ - because she seems to have no other questions than that one, everything else is just her listening and reacting. It’s a brilliant storytelling technique.

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This wonderful short film from Architectural Digest combines three of my favourite topics – culture, food and history, all wrapped up in a slick story. Why do all American diners look that way? Smooth curves, long counters, art deco typography, steel design, snug booths. It all harks back to when the US train was the dominant form of travel across a booming nation – and each one had a diner. Anyway, it’s a lovely short film, beautifully-made and a brilliant story.

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One of the unexpected benefits of my training sessions is team-building. I hadn’t anticipated just how important this would be for companies whose hybrid ways of working weaken connections between colleagues and departments. Bringing the newsroom into their lives provides much-needed creative glue. So this piece by social commentator Noreena Hertz really struck a chord with me. In it, she argues that all of us need to take time to talk and listen to each other. We lack a cohesive culture of engagement and it means we’re getting lonelier and more isolated, at work and in our social lives, unable even to ‘read’ each other’s faces. It’s a fantastic piece and her book, The Lonely Century is even more vital.