The Hero’s Journey in Paris

Rewrite your business story. Become the storyteller your company needs.

Who it’s for
Leaders, founders, managers, and project owners whose offer is drifting toward commodity: “good product, good service, fair price.” You may run a brand, a training course, a reengineering project, an HR programme, or a design or architecture practice. If you want your work to be remembered, not just bought, this is for you.

What you’re offered
Three days in Paris, where you live six companies that sell transformation instead of transactions, and then use what you learn to rewrite your own business story. Each visit is both an experience and a masterclass in storytelling: who the hero is, what the call to adventure is, where the ordeal lies, and what elixir the customer takes home. Each day ends with a workshop in which you apply that lesson to your own story.

How you benefit

• Your story, rewritten. You leave with a new narrative for your business or project: a clear hero (your client), a quest, and a transformation.
• A storytelling toolkit. You learn to define the archetype, the threshold, the ritual, and the return in any offer.
• A shift in language. You move from “satisfied customer” to “member of a club,” and from “it works” to “it leaves an indelible memory.”
• Stories that carry value. You see how almonds, empty car seats, and a waiter’s voice become premium value, and how to turn that logic on your own offer.
• Peer feedback. You test your story with fellow participants and sharpen it before you take it back to your team.

Itinerary

Day 1: The Call and the Threshold. Who is your hero?

• Mama Shelter. Arrival as a scene; the Caregiver and Jester archetypes.
• Ladurée and Pierre Hermé. Heritage versus discovery; why the queue is part of the value.
• Bel Canto. The waiter becomes an artist, the meal becomes an opera.
• Evening workshop: Define your client as the hero, and name their call to adventure.

Day 2: The Maker and the Ordeal. What is your quest?

• Louis Vuitton. Travel, craft, and repair; the object as companion (visit subject to access).
• 42. How a school turns failure into transformation.
• Evening workshop: Draft your quest, your archetype, and the ordeal your client must pass through.

Day 3: The Return with the Elixir. What do they take home?

• BlaBlaCar and Deskopolitan. Turning customers into co-creators, and work into a life.
• Final session: Tell your story. Present your rewritten story in three minutes, test it against the nine principles of Hero’s Journey logic, and receive feedback.

Your call to adventure
Your clients are looking for a story to step into. Reserve your place and bring one real project to rewrite. Dates, price, and booking: [add details].

“Why bother with a project unless it will dramatically alter the story perspective of both provider and client?”

INTRODUCTION

• The value added for most any company, tiny or enormous, comes from …the Quality of Experience provided
• An ‘experience’ is holistic, total, encompassing, transforming… and emotional
• A ‘service’ is a transaction. An ‘experience’ is an story. A story with a beginning – middle and and end. A story leaves an indelible memory
• This ‘experience’ thing is … extremist. Not just a dab of ‘delight’ here; not just a pinch of ‘amusement’ there. But … An Entirely Different Way of Parsing Life.

THE CALL TO ADVENTURE

We (applaud) the ideal of the satisfied customer. Instead we must focus on creating scintillating …. encompassing…..dramatic….novel…. customer experience’.

We continue to talk about ‘service’ and ‘quality’ as the key attributes of Value Added. Instead we must understand that ‘experience’ is not only a Very Big Word…. with gigantic connotations…. but it is nothing short of the basis for a …. Totally Revised Organizational Life Form.

If we use terms such as ‘experience’ we limit them to the likes of Louis Vuitton. Instead we must apply them to all the companies, as well as to departmental activities and THE HERO’s JOURNEY Projects.

THE HERO’S JOURNEY

The Theater of Hotel Lutetia. The rooms are fine. The coffee is fine. But it’s the Theater part that I’m really buying…. the Character of the Relationship. The Promise of Transformation. Hotel Lutetita provides…. New-Me-for-the-Morning.

THE LANGUAGE OF EXPERIENCE

Episode, Happening, Encounter, Adventure, Perception, Life, Existence, Taste, Sense, Live Through, Undergo, Affected by, What one meets with. Spiritual conversion.

How often do we use such words and phrases in business? My answer: seldom, rarely, never. And yet, as the Value-Added Proposition of Business becomes more and more …intangible… such words become more and more … relevant and practical and valuable.

Where Heroes Sleep at Mama Shelter

There are hotels where you simply spend the night. You put down your suitcase, take a shower, sleep for a few hours, and leave the next morning—preferably without having to look anyone in the eye. These hotels are designed as transit zones: efficient, neutral, forgettable.

And then there is Mama Shelter.

Mama Shelter is not a hotel you happen to end up in. It is a place that says: come in, leave your armour at the door, and remember that life is not only about moving on. Here, you are allowed to land. Not as a tourist, business traveller, or passer-by, but as a human being with a story.

Perhaps that is the deepest meaning of a hotel: it is a resting place within the hero’s journey.

Leaving the Ordinary World

Every hero begins in an ordinary world. It is a familiar environment, shaped by known patterns, obligations, and expectations. The phone rings. The calendar is full. Decisions have to be made. The hero functions, produces, and keeps moving.

Until a call arrives.

That call may be a business meeting in Paris, a weekend in London, an encounter in Rome, or simply the desire to escape the familiar for a while. The hero leaves the ordinary world and enters unknown territory. In mythological stories, this is the moment when the threshold is crossed.

In our time, that threshold can be a hotel door.

At Mama Shelter, entering does not feel like stepping into an institutional space. You do not walk into a silent lobby designed to guide you to your room as quickly as possible. You enter a world that immediately takes a position. The space has colour, humour, music, words, drawings, and unexpected details. It feels less like a reception area than a stage on which the story has already begun before you arrive.

That is the first strength of the experience: Mama Shelter turns arrival into a scene.

The Mama Archetype

Every strong brand experience carries an archetype within it. Not as a superficial logo or marketing phrase, but as a recognisable human role. The classic archetypes include the Hero, the Sage, the Rebel, the Lover, the Jester, and the Caregiver.

Mama Shelter does not choose just one archetype. The brand seems to combine the Caregiver and the Jester: a maternal figure who takes you in, but refuses to become solemn or strict. Mama says: you may feel at home here, but you do not have to behave formally. You may relax, laugh, eat, drink, and be slightly strange.

That is an interesting tension. The name Mama evokes protection, warmth, and nourishment. Shelter suggests refuge, safety, and a place where one can escape the storm. But Mama Shelter is not a well-behaved living room. It is not a place where everything is soft, silent, and predictable. The mother of this house has humour, taste, and a touch of mischief. She puts something delicious on the table, perhaps accompanied by an impudent message.

The brand uses hospitality not as ceremony, but as character.

In doing so, Mama Shelter departs from the traditional hotel world, where luxury is often associated with distance, silence, and perfection. Mama Shelter chooses intimacy. The experience is allowed to be lively. Something may happen. A hotel room does not have to be merely functional; it can also tell a story.

The Place Where Heroes Rest

In the hero’s journey, the resting place is never simply a pause. It is a necessary stage of transformation. The hero must recover, reflect, meet allies, and understand the meaning of the journey.

Think of the inn in a medieval tale. The place where Odysseus finds temporary protection. The roadside motel in a road movie where strangers meet and briefly share their pasts. The hero is travelling, but his identity has not yet been completely fixed. Precisely in the moment of rest, space emerges for a new version of the self.

Mama Shelter intuitively understands this function.

The guest does not come only to sleep. The guest comes to let the day fall away. To stop being the director, consultant, artist, parent, entrepreneur, or problem-solver. The hero may lay down his shield. Not forever, but long enough to feel how heavy it had become.

In that sense, a good hotel experience is a form of temporary liberation. You do not have to organise the room as you do at home. You do not have to do all the shopping yourself. You do not have to remain constantly available. Even breakfast can become a small ritual of recovery: coffee, bread, fruit, voices in the background, a newspaper or screen within reach.

These are small gestures, but stories are made of such gestures. A brand becomes credible when it does not merely make a promise, but offers a ritual.

Storytelling in the Details

The storytelling of Mama Shelter does not exist only in campaigns or written messages. It lies in the sequence of impressions.

It is present in the name, which immediately creates a relationship. In the interior, which refuses to be neutral. In the combination of hotel, restaurant, and meeting place. In the way a rooftop or communal space becomes not just an amenity, but a stage. In the small joke you did not expect. In the feeling that you have arrived in a living house rather than an anonymous box containing rooms.

Powerful storytelling turns the guest into a character. Mama Shelter achieves this subtly. You are no longer simply someone staying at “Hotel X”. You become someone participating in the world of Mama.

That is the difference between a product and an experience. A product is delivered to you. An experience gives you a role.

Perhaps you are the traveller who finally finds rest. Perhaps the explorer entering a new city. Perhaps the professional who rediscovers his human face after a long day. Or perhaps you are simply someone sitting at a table one evening and realising that you do not need to be anywhere else.

The brand writes the beginning of the story. The guest completes it.

The Return

In the classic hero’s journey, the hero eventually returns to the ordinary world. The hero brings back an insight, a reward, or an elixir. The journey has changed the hero, even if only slightly.

The same is true of the Mama Shelter experience. A stay becomes truly successful when it continues to resonate after you have left. A stay has done its work when you wake up not only rested, but carrying a different feeling into the outside world. Lighter. More playful. Less imprisoned by the role you perform every day.

That is no small achievement for a hotel.

Most brands try to be remembered by becoming bigger, more luxurious, or more exclusive. Mama Shelter takes a different path: it wants to be loved. Not by creating distance, but by offering a place where people feel welcome in their imperfection.

That is where the true experience lies. Not in making everything perfect, but in allowing you to stop having to be perfect for a while.

A hero does not need rest because the hero is weak. The hero needs rest because the journey must continue. The hero must be able to eat, sleep, laugh, listen, and reconnect with others. Without a resting place, the journey becomes a test of endurance. Without a story, the stay becomes merely a transaction.

Mama Shelter understands that people do not book rooms.

They book a temporary world.

A place where they can disappear from ordinary life—and later return to it with a little more courage, curiosity, and imagination.

That is the promise of Mama Shelter: not that you are home.

But that you have arrived somewhere where, for a while, you may become the person you forgot you were on the way.

WHAT EXPERIENCE DOES FOR LOUIS VUITTON

Where Journeys Become Legendary: Louis Vuitton

There are objects we buy because we need them. A suitcase, a handbag, a wallet, a trunk. They carry our belongings from one place to another, performing their function quietly and efficiently.

And then there are objects that seem to carry something more: a history, an ambition, a way of seeing the world.

Louis Vuitton belongs to that second category.

The experience of Louis Vuitton is not simply the experience of owning a luxury product. It is the experience of entering a story about movement, transformation, craftsmanship, and arrival. The brand does not merely sell objects for the journey. It gives the journey a form—and gives the traveller an identity within it.

At the heart of Louis Vuitton lies a simple but powerful idea: life is a journey, and what we carry with us should be worthy of that journey.

The Call to Adventure

Every hero’s journey begins with a call to adventure. The hero is invited to leave the familiar world and move towards an unknown horizon.

Louis Vuitton was born from precisely that cultural moment: the emergence of modern travel. In 1837, a young Louis Vuitton arrived in Paris and began an apprenticeship with the master trunk-maker and packer Romain Maréchal. For seventeen years, he learned not only how to make boxes and cases, but how to understand the objects people wished to protect and transport. In 1854, he founded his own Maison. citeturn0search3turn0search4

This origin story matters because Louis Vuitton was not initially about fashion. It was about travel.

The world was changing. Railways were expanding. Steamships were connecting continents. People were beginning to move with greater speed and ambition. Travel was no longer reserved exclusively for kings, explorers, and aristocrats. It was becoming a modern expression of possibility.

Louis Vuitton understood that new travellers needed more than containers. They needed objects capable of accompanying a new kind of life.

His flat-topped trunks were lighter, stronger, and easier to stack than the rounded trunks traditionally used at the time. This was not decoration for its own sake. It was innovation in service of movement. citeturn0search3turn0search7

The hero does not answer the call to adventure empty-handed. The hero needs equipment. Louis Vuitton became the maker of that equipment.

The Archetype of the Explorer

The dominant archetype of Louis Vuitton is the Explorer.

The Explorer is driven by curiosity, independence, and the desire to discover new territories. The Explorer does not want to remain enclosed within familiar boundaries. The world is too large, and life is too short, to stay in one place.

But Louis Vuitton is not only an Explorer. It also combines the archetype of the Creator and the Ruler.

The Creator is visible in the Maison’s insistence on design, invention, and artistic expression. The Ruler appears in the codes of excellence, prestige, and mastery. Louis Vuitton does not simply accompany movement; it seeks to define the standard by which movement is judged.

This combination creates a distinctive emotional promise:

You may go anywhere—but you should travel with discernment.

You may explore the world—but you do not have to abandon refinement.

You may change your life—but you can carry continuity with you.

That is why a Louis Vuitton object often feels like more than luggage. It becomes a portable declaration of identity. It says something about the kind of traveller you believe yourself to be.

Not merely someone who goes from A to B, but someone whose journey matters.

The Object as Companion

In many stories, the hero possesses a special object. A sword, a map, a compass, a key, a protective shield. Such objects do not merely serve a practical purpose. They become companions in the transformation of the protagonist.

The Louis Vuitton trunk occupies that role.

It protects what is valuable, but it also travels through time. It collects marks, memories, destinations, and associations. Its meaning grows through use. A trunk is not complete when it leaves the workshop. Its real story begins when it enters the world.

This is one of the most compelling aspects of the Louis Vuitton experience: the object is designed to accompany a life rather than merely decorate it.

The Maison’s historical commitment to repair reinforces this idea. Louis Vuitton has documented repair work dating back to 1860 and continues to restore travel-worn pieces so that they can pass from one generation to the next. citeturn0search14

Repair transforms an object from a disposable possession into a participant in a family narrative.

A scratch is no longer simply damage. It may be evidence of a journey. A worn handle may suggest years of use. A trunk inherited from a parent or grandparent carries not only belongings, but traces of another life.

In a culture obsessed with newness, Louis Vuitton offers a different idea of luxury: endurance.

The Workshop as Sacred Place

Every mythological world has a place where transformation occurs. The forge of the blacksmith. The studio of the artist. The laboratory of the inventor. The temple where ordinary materials become extraordinary objects.

For Louis Vuitton, that place is Asnières.

The Maison established its workshop there in 1859, just outside Paris. The historic atelier became the centre of its trunk-making expertise and remains associated with the creation of special orders and exceptional pieces. citeturn0search4turn0search6

Asnières functions almost like a sacred origin point. It is where the brand’s mythology becomes tangible. Behind the patterns, boutiques, campaigns, and fashion collections are artisans working with materials, tools, measurements, and patience.

This is essential to the storytelling. Luxury cannot survive on symbolic value alone. It needs evidence. It needs a visible relationship between promise and practice.

The customer may encounter Louis Vuitton through a monogrammed canvas, a fashion show, a storefront, or a carefully staged digital experience. But beneath all those expressions lies the image of the craftsperson: the person who knows how to make something precisely, beautifully, and durably.

The modern brand is global. The archetypal workshop remains intimate.

The Monogram as Map

A logo usually identifies ownership. A pattern can do something more powerful: it can create a world.

The Louis Vuitton Monogram and Damier canvas function like maps of the Maison’s universe. They are not merely decorative surfaces. They are visual codes that transform an object into a recognisable piece of the journey.

The Damier canvas was introduced in 1888, and the Monogram became one of the House’s defining signatures. These patterns made the travelling object visible before the traveller was visible. They announced a certain relationship to quality, history, and distinction. citeturn0search3turn0search7

The monogram also creates a paradox. It personalises the object by making it recognisable as Louis Vuitton, while simultaneously inviting personal expression through use, styling, travel, and customisation.

The same pattern may appear on the luggage of a film star, an entrepreneur, a collector, or someone taking their first major journey. The code remains constant, but the story changes with the owner.

That is how a luxury symbol becomes culturally powerful: it provides a shared language without dictating a single biography.

Protection and Possibility

At first glance, a trunk is about protection. It guards clothing, documents, instruments, trophies, and personal treasures.

But protection is never the final purpose. We protect something because we want it to reach the future.

This is where Louis Vuitton’s storytelling extends beyond luxury. The trunk protects possibility. It allows objects to travel safely towards a new destination, a new chapter, or a new life.

The Maison’s trophy trunks make this symbolism particularly visible. Louis Vuitton has created bespoke trunks for important sporting trophies, medals, and torches—objects that represent the dreams, struggles, and victories of others. The trunk becomes a stage on which achievement is protected and displayed. citeturn0search1turn0search11

This is classic hero’s journey territory.

The athlete leaves the ordinary world, enters a field of trials, confronts rivals and limitations, and returns with a prize. Louis Vuitton provides the vessel for that prize. It does not win the victory, but it gives victory a ceremonial home.

In that sense, the Maison understands an important truth about storytelling: people do not remember the container separately from what it carried.

They remember the journey through the object.

The Return with the Elixir

The hero eventually returns. But the return is not a simple reversal. The hero comes back carrying something gained through the journey: wisdom, confidence, a treasure, or a new understanding of the world.

Louis Vuitton is built around that moment of return.

The traveller comes home with photographs, memories, gifts, discoveries, and perhaps a changed sense of self. The object that travelled with them becomes evidence that the journey happened. It is a witness.

This is why the Louis Vuitton experience is so strongly connected to aspiration. The products are not only signs of arrival; they are reminders that departure is possible. They belong to the person who has already travelled, but also to the person preparing to do so.

A Louis Vuitton bag can represent achievement. It can also represent intention.

It may say: I have entered a new chapter.

I am ready for the world.

I will carry what matters.

The deepest promise of Louis Vuitton is therefore not simply luxury, status, or elegance. It is continuity through change.

The world moves. People move. Identities evolve. Yet certain objects accompany us across the thresholds of life. They protect our belongings, embody our taste, and gather the evidence of where we have been.

Louis Vuitton does not ask us to remain the same.

It asks us to travel well.

And perhaps that is why the brand remains so powerful within the imagination. It understands that every important possession is part of a larger narrative. Every trunk suggests a departure. Every bag implies a destination. Every crafted object carries the possibility of a future story.

The hero does not travel alone.

The hero carries a world—and Louis Vuitton has spent more than a century and a half designing the vessels in which that world can move.

PLOT POWER

When the Hero Drives: BMW and Jeff Koons

There are cars that take us from one place to another. They are efficient, reliable, silent servants of schedules and traffic lights. They get us to meetings, airports, schools, homes, and obligations.

And then there are cars that turn movement into theatre.

BMW has always understood that driving is never only practical. A BMW is an invitation to participate: to take the wheel, enter the road, feel the response of the machine, and decide—if only briefly—that the journey itself matters. With Jeff Koons, BMW pushed that idea further. The car ceased to be merely a vehicle. It became a moving work of art, a burst of energy, a public declaration that performance can also be imagination.

In the language of the hero’s journey, BMW represents the moment when the hero chooses to leave.

The Call of the Road

The hero’s journey does not begin at the destination. It begins at the threshold: the moment the familiar world is left behind.

A BMW is designed around that threshold. The driver sits low, faces forward, grips the wheel, and enters a space where decision becomes movement. The road opens. The city recedes. The hero is no longer a spectator, but an active participant in the story.

BMW’s central archetype is therefore the Hero. It promises capability, courage, mastery, and the pleasure of overcoming distance. Yet it also carries the archetype of the Creator: the belief that engineering is not simply about solving problems, but about giving form to an ideal.

Then Jeff Koons arrives, carrying a third archetype: the Jester.

Koons brings exuberance, colour, comic-book energy, glamour, and unapologetic optimism. His work often challenges the serious world of art by borrowing from popular culture, consumer desire, toys, advertising, and spectacle. He reminds us that grandeur does not always have to speak in a low voice.

The result is a BMW that does not whisper performance. It shouts: “POP!”

The Car as a Heroic Object

In 2010, Jeff Koons created BMW’s 17th Art Car: a BMW M3 GT2 painted with explosive lines of colour, visual bursts, and a sensation of pure forward momentum. It was not designed to remain protected behind museum glass. It raced at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, one of motorsport’s great rituals of endurance. citeturn0search18turn0search29

That detail is everything.

The BMW Art Car was a work of art, but it was also a race car. It entered the arena. It faced risk, speed, competition, darkness, technical failure, and human limitation. In the hero’s journey, this is the ordeal: the moment when beauty must prove itself under pressure.

Koons himself described race cars as being like life—powerful, energetic, and capable of allowing people to transcend through that energy. citeturn0search29

The vehicle became a symbolic machine of transformation. It showed that art does not have to stand outside life, commenting from a safe distance. Art can enter the race.

Pop Art on Wheels

More than a decade later, the collaboration returned with THE 8 X JEFF KOONS, a limited edition of 99 BMW M850i xDrive Gran Coupés. Each car was hand-finished over hundreds of hours, turning the high-performance grand tourer into what BMW called a moving gallery. citeturn0search17turn0search28

The visual language was unmistakably Koons: bold colours, comic-book explosions, vapor trails, and the word “POP!” placed on the bodywork. The explosive colour lines at the rear directly echoed his 2010 BMW Art Car, while the pop-art elements were intended to express speed and power. citeturn0search25turn0search28

This is storytelling through surface.

Most automotive design tells its story through proportion, material, sound, and technical precision. Koons adds another layer: the car becomes a graphic novel in motion. The driver is no longer simply travelling; the driver appears to have escaped from the frame of an illustrated adventure.

The road becomes a stage. The city becomes a backdrop. The journey becomes visible.

Returning Changed

The deepest lesson of BMW and Jeff Koons is that performance does not need to be solemn.

The hero does not always travel in darkness. Sometimes the hero travels with colour, humour, and the confidence to be seen. That is the gift Koons gives to BMW: permission to make power playful.

BMW supplies the discipline—the engineering, the speed, the precision, the control. Koons supplies the spark—the visual explosion that turns velocity into emotion.

Together, they create a modern myth: the machine as companion, artwork, and alter ego.

A BMW with Jeff Koons is not merely a car for arriving somewhere important. It is a reminder that the hero’s journey begins every time we choose to move.

Not just to get somewhere.

But to become someone on the way.

Where Paris Becomes a Bite

There are sweets we eat because we are hungry. And then there are sweets we approach as if entering a story.

In Paris, the macaron belongs to the second category. Small, fragile, colourful, and perfectly composed, it is not merely a pastry. It is an invitation into a world of elegance, memory, surprise, and desire.

Among the city’s most celebrated houses, Ladurée and Pierre Hermé offer two distinct versions of the same heroic journey. Ladurée tells the story of tradition, Parisian refinement, and the return home. Pierre Hermé tells the story of exploration: the courage to combine unexpected flavours and turn a familiar form into a new territory.

Yet there is another story hidden inside every box: the economic journey from inexpensive raw materials to a highly valuable experience. The macaron is made from ingredients that, taken separately, are relatively ordinary—almonds, sugar, egg whites, butter, cream, fruit, chocolate, and flavourings. But in Paris, these raw goods are transformed into something for which people are willing to stand in line.

That queue is not an inconvenience added to the experience.

It is part of the experience’s economic value.

From Raw Goods to Meaning

A macaron begins with commodities.

Almonds can be bought as ingredients. Sugar is widely available. Egg whites are familiar kitchen materials. Chocolate, fruit, cream, and spices have value, but none of them explains why someone would travel across a city, enter a famous boutique, and wait for their turn.

The price of the raw materials is only the beginning of the value chain.

The real value is created through selection, proportion, craftsmanship, consistency, design, location, reputation, service, and storytelling. A bakery transforms ingredients into a product. A great Maison transforms the product into an experience.

This distinction is essential.

The customer is not paying primarily for sugar, almond flour, or egg whites. The customer is paying for the confidence that these ingredients have been turned into a recognisable expression of Parisian taste. They are paying for the name, the setting, the presentation, the anticipation, and the knowledge that the product has passed through a particular creative and cultural system.

The economic value added lies in the transformation from material to meaning.

The Queue as Theatre

Every hero’s journey begins with a threshold. At Ladurée or Pierre Hermé, that threshold may be a queue outside the boutique.

People stand patiently, waiting for their turn. They watch others leave with boxes. They study the window displays. They make decisions before entering: which flavours, how many, for whom, and in which box?

From a purely functional perspective, waiting is a cost. Time is being spent without immediate consumption. But in a strong brand experience, waiting can become part of the theatre.

The queue signals desirability. If people are willing to wait, the product appears to possess value beyond its ingredients. The line becomes social proof: evidence that something important, beautiful, or difficult to obtain is happening inside.

This is not simply a matter of scarcity. It is a form of collective storytelling.

Each person in the queue confirms the belief of the person behind them: this place is worth waiting for.

The customer is no longer merely buying a macaron. The customer is joining a temporary community of people who have chosen the same destination.

Ladurée: The Value of Heritage

Ladurée’s economic value comes partly from its ability to turn history into a present-day experience. The house began in Paris in 1862, and its identity is built around a long heritage of French pastry, tea rooms, elegance, and cultural continuity. citeturn0search32turn0search37

A Ladurée macaron carries more than its filling. It carries the atmosphere of Parisian refinement.

The box, the colours, the boutique, the service, and the tradition all work together to increase perceived value. A customer standing in line is not merely waiting to purchase a food item. They are waiting to enter a world that has been carefully maintained and staged.

The raw ingredients may be modest. The symbolic ingredients are not.

They include heritage, trust, recognition, beauty, ritual, and the pleasure of giving. Ladurée transforms a small pastry into a souvenir of Paris—and souvenirs are rarely priced according to their material content alone.

Pierre Hermé: The Value of Discovery

Pierre Hermé creates value through a different route. Where Ladurée emphasises heritage and elegance, Hermé emphasises creativity and exploration.

Its macaron collections move through fruity, floral, indulgent, seasonal, and unexpected flavour combinations. The house presents the macaron as a territory of expression, with new collections and flavours extending the possibilities of the form. citeturn0search33turn0search40

The customer is therefore paying for discovery.

A Pierre Hermé macaron is not simply a sweet object. It is a composition. Its value lies in the relationship between ingredients: the contrast between shell and filling, the balance between sweetness and acidity, the encounter between fruit, flower, chocolate, spice, or cream.

The raw goods are transformed by intelligence and imagination.

That transformation explains why customers may wait. They are not waiting for ingredients. They are waiting for a carefully authored experience.

The Economics of Waiting

The queue reveals an important principle of the experience economy: time can become evidence of value.

People rarely want to wait for an ordinary product that is easily available elsewhere. But they may willingly wait when the waiting itself confirms that the product is special, local, prestigious, limited, or culturally meaningful.

The line therefore performs several economic functions:

• It communicates demand to everyone who sees it.
• It increases perceived exclusivity.
• It gives customers time to anticipate the purchase.
• It turns the boutique into a destination.
• It creates social proof before the product is even tasted.

Of course, waiting can also damage a brand if it becomes disorganised, uncomfortable, or disrespectful. The experience must reward the time invested. A queue creates value only when the final encounter—product, service, presentation, and taste—justifies the anticipation.

The best brands understand this balance. They do not merely make people wait. They make people feel that the waiting is leading somewhere.

The Return with the Elixir

In the hero’s journey, the traveller returns with an elixir: something valuable enough to share with others.

That is what happens when a customer leaves a Parisian macaron boutique. The box contains food, but it also contains the economic value added by an entire chain of transformation:

raw goods become recipe;

recipe becomes craftsmanship;

craftsmanship becomes design;

design becomes reputation;

reputation becomes desire;

and desire becomes a queue.

The final product may fit between two fingers, but the experience surrounding it is much larger.

Ladurée protects the dream of Paris through heritage and ceremony. Pierre Hermé expands it through creativity and flavour. Both demonstrate that value is not determined only by what a product is made of. It is also determined by what people believe the product means, how the brand makes them feel, and what they are willing to do to obtain it.

People stand in line because the macaron has become more than a mixture of almonds, sugar, and egg whites.

It has become a destination.

And sometimes the clearest proof of economic value is not the price on the box.

It is the number of people willing to wait for their turn to open it.

LET’S GET METAPHYSICAL!

Getting started in the ‘experience business’ is (mostly) about frame of mind. The requisite transformation is not easy. Most managers have no idea how to add value in the metaphysical world. But it is what the market will cry out for in the future. There is no lack of ‘physical ] products to choose between.

Where Dinner Becomes an Opera

There are restaurants where the waiter brings you a menu, takes your order, and disappears behind a door. The meal is carefully prepared, served, consumed, and paid for.

And then there is Bel Canto in Paris.

At Bel Canto, the people who welcome you to your table may later fill the room with the voices of Verdi, Mozart, Bizet, Puccini, or Rossini. A quartet of singers performs between the courses, accompanied by a pianist, while moving among the tables. The appetiser, starter, main course, and dessert become chapters in a live opera. citeturn0search49turn0search58

The restaurant is no longer simply a place where food is served.

It becomes a stage on which the guests are also characters.

Crossing the Threshold

Every hero’s journey begins by leaving the ordinary world. At Bel Canto, that transition occurs when the guest enters the dining room.

At first, everything appears familiar. You are shown to your table. A menu is offered. An order is taken. The ordinary rituals of hospitality are quietly established.

Then the piano begins.

The person who was just carrying plates suddenly becomes a performer. The waiter is revealed as a tenor, soprano, baritone, or mezzo-soprano. The dining room changes identity. Walls become scenery, tables become front-row seats, and the space between courses becomes the interval between acts.

This is storytelling through revelation.

The performer has been present from the beginning, but the guest did not yet know how to see them. The dramatic surprise lies not only in the singing, but in the transformation of identity.

The servant becomes the artist.

The Archetype of the Magician

Bel Canto’s central archetype is the Magician.

The Magician transforms one thing into another. A room becomes a theatre. A meal becomes a performance. A waiter becomes an opera singer. A customer becomes an audience member—and sometimes, through shared laughter or participation, part of the cast.

The restaurant also carries the archetype of the Lover. Opera is emotional excess: desire, jealousy, grief, triumph, longing, and reconciliation expressed at full volume. It refuses the smallness of everyday feeling.

That makes the dining experience intimate, even when the entire room is listening. A singer may perform only a short distance from your plate. The voice is not coming from a distant stage. It enters the same air, the same space, the same moment.

You do not merely hear the aria.

You feel its proximity.

The Meal as Narrative

A meal already has a natural dramatic structure. There is an opening, an escalation, a climax, and a conclusion.

Bel Canto makes that structure visible. The first course establishes the world. The main course deepens the experience. The dessert provides a form of resolution. Between each stage, opera punctuates the evening with emotional peaks. The music does not simply accompany the food; it gives the meal a rhythm and a sense of progression. citeturn0search49turn0search54

This is why the experience is more memorable than a conventional dinner.

You are not only remembering what you ate. You are remembering when the lights changed, when the pianist began, when the waiter stopped serving and started singing, and how the room fell silent to listen.

The memory becomes layered: taste, sound, surprise, proximity, and place.

Economic Value Added

The ingredients in the kitchen are only one part of the value of the evening. The greater value is created by combining several forms of human work:

• Culinary preparation turns raw ingredients into dishes.
• Opera training turns a voice into a performance.
• Service design integrates hospitality and theatre.
• Staging creates anticipation and surprise.
• The Paris location adds cultural and symbolic value.
• The restaurant’s reputation reduces uncertainty and increases desire.

The guest is not paying only for food. The guest is paying for an orchestrated experience in which dinner, music, service, architecture, and narrative reinforce one another.

The same meal served without the singers would be a different product. The same aria performed in a concert hall would be a different product. Bel Canto creates value in the combination.

Its most important asset is therefore not the table or the menu.

It is the choreography.

The Return

At the end of the evening, the hero returns to the ordinary world. The bill arrives. Coats are collected. The street outside is once again simply a street.

But the guest leaves carrying an elixir: the memory of a transformation.

For a few hours, the boundaries between restaurant and theatre, waiter and artist, meal and performance have disappeared. Bel Canto demonstrates that hospitality becomes powerful when it gives people more than what they expected to receive.

You came for dinner.

You were given a story.

And somewhere between the starter and dessert, the people who served you revealed that every ordinary role may contain a hidden performance waiting to be heard.

ARE YOU EXPERIENCED?

Re-read the last examples. They amount to a steady, logical accumulation of ideas. Re-read this part of the journey. Look at the examples. Think of other examples. Play with this word …. experience.

Then what? Should you hire a theater director or storyteller to join your accounting department? Or your product-development department? Or your marketing department?

Perhaps.

Think experience. Talk experience. Look at examples of experience. Analyze those examples. Then get on with it, and remember:

1. This is not a semantic quibble. It is … the Essence of Life in the New Economy. The essence of the economy with AI
2. Billions upon Billions upon Billions dollars/euro’s (and then some more Billions) are at stake. And, relatively speaking, the same high stakes apply to the individual professional…
3. THIS IS A BIG DEAL

Contrasts!

Was Is

Product or service Experience

It’s good stuff It’s a kick, a hoot

It works It leaves an indelible memory

I’m glad I bought it’ I want more’

Satisfied customer Member of a club

Repeat customer Word -of-mouth viral marketing agent

You get what you pay for You are surprised and delighted at every turn

Agrees with your wallet Agrees with your psyche

Deals with one of your needs Helps define Who You Are

EMBRACING THE HERO’S JOURNEY BUSINESS…

A Hero’s Journey Story is a complete moment in the life of a client. Important experiences that tempt the clients to commit substantial resources. The essence of the desires of the consumer. The opportunity to help clients become what they want to be.

The Call to Adventure

We are still mired in Old Economy, Old Product Thinking. But we must all of us! take pages from the likes of Louis Vuitton – and come to grips, “strategically,” with the fact that Winners will be …. Champions of the Hero’s Journey Business.

Once Upon a Time …..

I imagine totally “Insane” artists, designers, writers, architects, directors, entrepreneurs, leaders ….Permutations and combinations providing something so, so far beyond services or products (“Impossible – Turned – Possible – Hero’s Journeys”).

It is Just a Story …..

I love the “storytelling’ idea. That idea is a big stretch for many professionals, compared with our normal “business” way of looking at products and services. And yet perhaps we can stretch our minds even further. Much further?

The stakes are high…. billions upon billions of money. (Again.)

So … next vocabulary s-t-r-e-t-c-h: HERO’S JOURNEYS.

Now, that word/idea far exceeds professional’s comfort zone – which was already reeling from our visit to the etheral-but-hard-coin realm of “stories”.

The power of the “Hero’s Journey in business” was revealed to me when I was watching interviews with Louis Vuitton’s CEO . Hero’s Journeys are their thing.

The Hero’s Journey products.

The Hero’s Journey fulfillment.

The Hero’s Journey marketing.

A Hero’s Journey is a complete moment in the life of a client. Important experiences that tempt the client to commit substantial resources. The essence of the desires of the consumer. The opportunity to help clients become what they want to be.

Marvelous story!. Complete moment. Tempt. Commit. Essence. Desires. And, summing it all up: the opportunity to help clients become what they want to be.

Questing: Touching the client’s dreams.

Questing: The art of telling stories.

Questing: Promoting the quest, not the product.

Questing: Building the brand around the Main Quest

Louis Vuitton’s story provides hard financial data which demonstrate ….. clearly …. that ‘quests’ provide (along with fulfillment to customers) returns to shareholders that are miles and miles beyond the returns from “common” products and services.

This is not a fantasy. It is a ‘business story which is I believe well worth listening to – especially in light of the fundamental story I attempt to develop in The Hero’s Journey. The Fundamental Story about Totally New Sources of Value Added by New Storytellers … in a Totally New Economy. Amplified by the Covid19 crisis.

PROJECT: THE HERO’S JOURNEY

I hope to sign you up! I hope that you’ll play with (right term) the ideas in this column – and consider applying them to your current project.

(in design)

(in architecture)

(in art)

(in HR)

(in money)

(in space travel)

(in purpose business)

Here are your instructions: REWRITE THE STORY ABOUT THAT PROJECT. DO NOT REST … UNTIL THAT PROJECT PASSES THE TESTS OF STORYTELLING (OR QUESTING) HERE ABOVE. UNTIL YOU HAVE TURNED YOUR TRAINING COURSE IN A QUEST COURSE. THAT NEW BUSINESS INTO A HERO’S JOURNEY BUSINESS.

Think about that ‘training course’ you are developing…. Shouldn’t it “Radically Change the Life View of Every Participant? YES!!!

Shouldn’t the next ‘business process reengineering project’ of your company be a … Quest to fulfill Client’s Dreams? YES!!

Why bother with a project unless it is a The Hero’s Journey Project… unless, that is, it wil Dramatically Alter the Story Perpective of both Designer-Provider and User-Client?

Key words:

DRAMATICALLY. ALTER. STORY PERSPECTIVE.

The Hero’s Journey Logic

Here is my specific advice for those who seek to turn their project team into a Hero’s Journey team:

• Maximize your value added by fulfilling the dreams of your clients
• Only invest in what is valuable for your client.
• Don let short-term results weaken the long-term value of your brand story.
• Balance rigorous control of the financial endeavor with the emotional management of your brand story.
• Build a financial structure that allows risk-taking: NO RISKS – NO HERO’S JOURNEY
• Establish long-term “price power” in order to avoid the trap of the commodity product.
• Choose a STORYTELLER: the cultural leader who gives the company an aesthetic point of view.
• Hire eclectically: Hire collaborators with different stories, different cultures and past histories in order to balance rigor with emotion.
• Lead emotionally with storytelling: Engender passionate dedication through vision and freedom.
• Build your story for the long haul: Creativity requires a lifetime commitment.

The Company That Turns Passengers into Fellow Travellers

A strong Parisian company whose proposition genuinely changes its customer is BlaBlaCar. It does not simply help a passenger get from Paris to Bordeaux, Lyon, Amsterdam, or Brussels. It changes the passenger’s role in the journey: from isolated consumer into participant; from buyer of transport into member of a temporary community; from someone looking for a seat into someone helping make a transport network work.

That is a deeper transformation than it first appears. BlaBlaCar turns the empty seat—normally an invisible and wasted asset—into an invitation to connection.

The Ordinary Passenger

The ordinary passenger has been trained by modern transport to be alone.

We enter a car alone. We sit in a train carriage beside strangers and avoid eye contact. We put on headphones at the airport. We follow signs, check gates, watch screens, and move through systems designed to make transport predictable, efficient, and impersonal.

The customer’s role is simple: buy a ticket, occupy a seat, arrive.

There is little narrative in that role. The traveller becomes a unit of demand. A body in a carriage. A booking reference. A person who has paid to be moved from one location to another.

But travel was not always experienced this way.

For centuries, the road was a social space. People travelled in groups because they needed one another. They exchanged stories, news, warnings, food, money, routes, and protection. The journey itself was part of the event. Arrival mattered, of course. But so did the people encountered along the way.

BlaBlaCar returns something of that older human reality to the contemporary world.

It asks a question that is economically simple but culturally profound: why should millions of cars travel with empty seats while millions of people are separately searching for affordable ways to move?

The company was born from that observation. Founder Frédéric Mazzella, trying to travel from Paris to the Vendée for Christmas when trains were fully booked, noticed cars on the road containing unused seats. That personal problem became the basis for a new mobility network. citeturn1search71turn1search64

The call to adventure was not: “Let us build another taxi company.”

It was: “Let us change what an empty seat means.”

The Empty Seat as Treasure

In the hero’s journey, a hidden object often becomes the source of transformation. It may be a sword in a stone, a map in an old chest, a key, a secret door, or an overlooked gift.

For BlaBlaCar, that object is the empty seat.

An empty seat has no value if seen purely as absence. It is a gap. A wasted capacity. A piece of unused space moving down a motorway.

But when BlaBlaCar looks at it, the empty seat becomes a resource.

A driver has a destination, a car, fuel costs, and perhaps three empty places. A passenger has the same—or nearly the same—destination, but no affordable or convenient way to get there. The platform creates a match. The driver shares the cost. The passenger gains mobility. One journey becomes two stories temporarily joined.

This is a classic act of economic value creation.

BlaBlaCar does not manufacture the car. It does not build the motorway. It does not need to own every vehicle or employ every driver. Instead, it sees underused capacity inside an existing system and gives it a new purpose.

That is the genius of the proposition.

The company takes a physical asset—a seat—and adds layers of value through technology, trust, reputation, payment, scheduling, communication, and community. The raw asset is inexpensive: a spare place in a privately owned car. The final offering is much richer: an affordable, social, and potentially more efficient journey.

BlaBlaCar’s own mission is to become the marketplace for shared travel, combining carpooling with bus and train options. It says it enables 40 million active members per year to share rides across 41 countries. citeturn1search67turn1search72

The empty seat has become infrastructure.

The Archetype of the Connector

BlaBlaCar’s primary archetype is the Connector.

The Connector sees relationships where others see separation. It connects people, places, needs, resources, and possibilities. It is a close relative of the Everyman—the archetype that says, “We are all in this together”—and of the Magician, which transforms one reality into another.

A conventional transport company may say: “We will take you there.”

BlaBlaCar says: “You can help one another get there.”

That linguistic shift is crucial. It changes the psychology of the customer.

The passenger is no longer merely receiving a service. The passenger must make a choice: who will I travel with? What time shall I leave? What kind of journey do I want? Am I prepared to share a car with someone I have not met before?

The driver, meanwhile, is no longer simply a private motorist. The driver becomes a host. They manage a profile, accept fellow travellers, share the cost of fuel and tolls, perhaps decide whether conversation, music, pets, luggage, or smoking are welcome.

Both parties become more active characters.

The brand name itself captures this transformation. “BlaBlaCar” does not sound like a cold mobility platform or a logistical system. It refers to conversation. The amount of “bla bla” one prefers—little, some, or a lot—is turned into a social signal. The company recognises that travel is not only geographical movement. It is also a negotiation of human proximity.

A ride may be quiet. It may contain a conversation that lasts ten minutes. Or it may become one of those unexpected encounters people remember for years.

The Threshold of Trust

Every hero must cross a threshold. For BlaBlaCar users, the threshold is trust.

Getting into a stranger’s car is not a trivial act. It requires a new mental model. The customer must move from suspicion to cautious openness. The driver must move from private ownership to shared participation.

That is why the platform’s true product is not the ride itself.

Its true product is trust at scale.

Profiles, reviews, ratings, verified information, booking systems, payment processes, messages, and community rules all help convert uncertainty into enough confidence to act. Technology becomes the guardian at the gate. It does not remove risk from human life—no platform can do that entirely—but it structures the encounter and makes cooperation more possible.

This is an important lesson for every experience-led business.

You cannot ask people to change their behaviour merely by explaining the practical advantages. You must design an environment in which the new behaviour feels understandable, safe, and rewarding.

BlaBlaCar asks people to become more open to sharing resources, time, and space. That is a cultural proposition before it is a transport proposition.

From Consumer to Co-Creator

The conventional customer consumes a finished service. Someone else owns the assets, employs the people, defines the timetable, and delivers the outcome.

BlaBlaCar changes that relationship.

The customer becomes a co-creator of the offer.

Without drivers posting routes, there is no supply. Without passengers searching and booking, there is no demand. Without mutual reviews and reliable behaviour, there is no community. Without repeated acts of participation, the platform has no meaningful network.

The customer is therefore not at the end of the value chain.

The customer is inside it.

This is the economic and emotional strength of the business model. BlaBlaCar creates value not only through a digital interface but through the participation of its members. Every completed trip reinforces the system. Each new route increases choice. Every trustworthy review makes the next customer more confident. Each shared ride confirms the central story: mobility does not have to be solitary.

The company’s value grows because its users help make the proposition real.

The Return with a New Story

At the end of a BlaBlaCar journey, the passenger arrives at the destination. But the traveller may return to ordinary life with something more than arrival.

Perhaps they saved money. Perhaps they found a route that public transport did not offer. Perhaps they shared a long drive with someone from a different profession, generation, country, or worldview. Perhaps they sat in silence and simply appreciated the ease of the ride.

Whatever happens, the customer has experienced a subtle identity change.

They are no longer only a passenger.

They are a fellow traveller.

That may be BlaBlaCar’s most powerful proposition. It does not promise that every ride will become a friendship, a revelation, or a cinematic road trip. It offers something more credible: the possibility that a journey can be shared.

In a world that often turns people into anonymous users, transactions, and data points, BlaBlaCar restores a small but significant human role.

It turns unused space into value.

It turns strangers into temporary companions.

And it turns the customer from someone waiting to be transported into someone who helps move the world.

42

42: The School That Changes Who the Student Can Become

In Paris, there is a school with an unusually powerful proposition: it does not simply teach students how to code. It tries to transform their relationship with learning, failure, collaboration, and their own future.

That school is 42.

Founded in Paris in 2013, 42 offers tuition-free computer-science education through a model built around projects, peer learning, autonomy, and problem-solving. It has no traditional lectures, no conventional teachers, and no tuition fees. Its stated ambition is not merely to transmit technical knowledge, but to help people develop the capacity to learn, adapt, and build sustainable careers in a changing digital economy. citeturn2search78turn2search80

This makes 42 more than an alternative school.

It is an identity-changing experience.

The student who enters 42 may arrive believing that education is something delivered by experts to passive recipients. They may believe that a diploma determines their possibilities, that intelligence means knowing the answer immediately, or that failure proves a lack of talent.

42 challenges all three assumptions.

Its proposition is simple but radical:

You can become capable of solving problems that you do not yet know how to solve.

That is a proposition about education, but also about life.

The Student in the Ordinary World

Every hero begins in an ordinary world shaped by existing beliefs.

For many students, that world includes examinations, classrooms, teachers standing at the front, fixed timetables, standardised assignments, and the fear of making mistakes in public. Success often means reproducing the correct answer in the expected format.

This model works for some people. But it excludes others.

A student may be intelligent but poorly suited to conventional academic structures. They may lack the right diploma, come from a disadvantaged background, have changed direction late in life, or simply learn better by doing than by listening.

42’s model is designed to open another door. The school describes itself as inclusive, tuition-free, and open to talent regardless of diploma, origin, gender, or age. Selection focuses on motivation and ability rather than traditional academic credentials.

The student therefore arrives not necessarily as a proven achiever, but as someone with potential.

That distinction is important.

A conventional institution may ask: “What have you already achieved?”

42 asks a different question: “What might you become if given the opportunity?”

Crossing the Threshold

The threshold of 42 is not a lecture hall. It is a challenge.

Students encounter projects that require them to investigate, experiment, search, test, fail, ask questions, and try again. The answer is not simply waiting in a textbook. The student must discover a method for reaching it.

This creates an immediate psychological shift.

The student is no longer primarily a consumer of knowledge. The student becomes an investigator.

In the traditional classroom, the teacher often represents authority and certainty. At 42, the learning environment places greater responsibility on the learner. Projects are designed to become progressively more demanding, while students work independently and with one another.

This can be uncomfortable. Autonomy sounds liberating until a person realises that no one will provide every next step.

But that discomfort is part of the transformation.

42 does not merely teach computer science. It trains the student to continue when instructions are incomplete.

The Archetype of the Guide

The central archetype of 42 is not the traditional Teacher. It is the Guide—combined with the Explorer and the Creator.

The Guide does not carry the student to the destination. The Guide creates the conditions in which the student can travel independently.

That is why 42’s model deliberately reduces dependence on formal instruction. The student must learn how to learn. Instead of receiving all the answers from an expert, students use projects, research, feedback, and collaboration to construct their own understanding.

Peer learning is fundamental. Students encounter people with different levels of knowledge, backgrounds, and ways of thinking. Someone who was struggling yesterday may help another student today. The role of expert and beginner constantly changes.

This has a social consequence.

Students discover that competence is not a fixed identity. It is something that can be developed, shared, and expanded. They are not defined by the moment when they do not know. They are defined by what they do next.

That is a profound change in self-perception.

The Ordeal of Failure

Every hero’s journey includes an ordeal. At 42, the ordeal is often failure.

Code does not work. A project does not pass. A solution collapses. A deadline is missed. A student encounters a problem that seems impossible.

In a conventional educational culture, failure can feel like a verdict: I am not good enough.

At 42, failure is intended to become information.

It tells the student that the current approach is incomplete. It demands another question, another experiment, another conversation. Failure becomes part of the route rather than evidence that the journey should end.

This is particularly valuable in technology, where tools and systems change rapidly. A person trained only to memorise specific techniques may struggle when those techniques become obsolete. A person trained to investigate and adapt has a more durable advantage.

42 explicitly positions its education around sustainable professional integration and the capacity to reinvent oneself rather than training only for one narrow job or technology.

The school is therefore preparing not only for a career, but for repeated transitions within a career.

From Student to Professional

The transformation becomes visible when the student begins to recognise themselves as a maker.

They are no longer waiting for permission to create something. They can build, test, improve, explain, and collaborate. They can enter an unfamiliar technical problem without immediately assuming that someone else must solve it.

This changes the student’s economic position.

Before 42, they may have been judged mainly by credentials or previous experience. After 42, they can demonstrate capability through projects and practical work. Their portfolio becomes evidence of what they can do. Their relationships with peers become part of a professional network. Their confidence becomes an employability asset.

The school’s proposition connects personal transformation with labour-market relevance. Its programme is designed to develop technical and interpersonal skills aligned with current and future digital work, while also encouraging creativity, initiative, autonomy, and entrepreneurship.

The value added is not simply knowledge.

It is agency.

The Return with the Elixir

At the end of the hero’s journey, the protagonist returns to the world carrying an elixir that can benefit others.

A graduate of 42 returns with more than programming skills. Ideally, they return with the confidence to enter unfamiliar territory, the humility to learn from peers, and the resilience to continue through uncertainty.

They may become a software engineer, entrepreneur, product builder, technical leader, or lifelong learner. But the most important transformation is deeper than the job title.

The student has learned that their future is not entirely determined by their starting point.

That is why 42’s proposition is so compelling. It does not promise every student the same destination. It gives them a method for navigating a world in which destinations continually change.

The company—or educational organisation—does not simply deliver a service called “computer training.” It stages a transformation from dependence to autonomy:

• from receiving answers to investigating problems;
• from individual competition to peer collaboration;
• from fear of failure to learning through failure;
• from fixed identity to continuous development;
• from uncertain potential to demonstrated capability.

In this sense, 42 helps the client achieve aspirations by changing the client first.

The student enters hoping to learn how to code.

The student leaves with a new answer to a larger question:

What if I can learn whatever the future requires?

That is the real education 42 offers.

Not only a path into technology, but a different way of imagining oneself in the world.

Deskopolitan: The Space That Changes Work into a Life

In Paris, one of the most interesting flexible work-and-life spaces is Deskopolitan. Its proposition is not merely to rent a desk, an office, or a meeting room. Its deeper ambition is to transform the customer from an isolated worker into a more productive, connected, creative, and fulfilled person.

That is a far more ambitious promise than conventional real estate.

Deskopolitan describes itself as more than a workspace: a place to succeed, combining premium coworking, private offices, meeting rooms, high-end services, and shared places for everyday life. Its Paris spaces have been conceived as urban campuses, where work is combined with services such as cafés, restaurants, sports facilities, childcare, rooftop areas, and wellbeing spaces.

The central idea is powerful: work should not force people to put the rest of life on pause.

Instead, the workplace can help people live better while they work.

The Worker in the Old World

For a long time, the office represented a rigid world.

You travelled to the same building, often at the same time, sat at the same desk, in the same department, under the same long lease. The office was a machine for attendance. Personal life happened elsewhere: at home, in cafés, gyms, nurseries, restaurants, and on crowded journeys between locations.

The worker was expected to divide life into boxes.

Work from nine to six.

Family before or after.

Exercise when possible.

Creativity in spare time.

Rest when the day is over.

But this old model no longer fits many people’s lives. Entrepreneurs, freelancers, hybrid workers, creative professionals, remote teams, parents, small companies, and growing businesses need a different relationship with place and time. They want focus, but also freedom. Community, but also quiet. Professional quality, but without the burden of a long-term lease.

Deskopolitan responds to this new reality by treating space as a service rather than a fixed asset.

Its members can use flexible, no-commitment options—whether they need a nomadic desk for a day, open-space access, a private office, meeting rooms, or a larger team environment.

The customer no longer has to adapt their life to the building.

The building adapts to the customer’s life.

Crossing the Threshold

Every hero’s journey begins at a threshold: the moment when the familiar world is left behind.

At Deskopolitan, the threshold is not simply the entrance to an office. It is the moment a person realises that they do not have to work alone from a kitchen table, nor commit to a traditional office whose size, cost, and location may no longer suit them.

They enter a different kind of environment.

There is a desk, of course. But there may also be a café, an informal lobby, a restaurant, a gym, a terrace, a wellbeing studio, a nursery, or a community event. At the Voltaire location, Deskopolitan has developed an urban campus around the idea that working life and personal life should reinforce each other rather than compete for time.

The traditional office asks: “Where will you work?”

Deskopolitan asks a more human question:

“What kind of day do you want to have?”

That changes the role of the customer.

The member is no longer merely a tenant. They become the author of their own working rhythm.

The Archetype of the Enabler

Deskopolitan’s leading archetype is the Enabler.

The Enabler does not achieve the customer’s ambitions on their behalf. It provides the conditions through which the customer can perform at their best. It removes friction, creates possibilities, and gives people more energy for the work that matters.

This archetype is closely connected to the Caregiver and the Creator.

The Caregiver appears in the promise of comfort, hospitality, wellbeing, convenience, and practical support. The company’s philosophy emphasises benevolent, respectful, human energy and a work environment designed for comfort and quality of life. citeturn3search98

The Creator appears because the space encourages ideas, encounters, collaboration, and reinvention. Freelancers meet entrepreneurs. Small teams encounter potential partners. A creative professional may find an unexpected client at the coffee counter. A founder can move from a quiet desk to a project room, from a meeting to lunch, from work to exercise—without breaking the rhythm of the day.

The space becomes an ecosystem.

And ecosystems are more powerful than offices because they enable interactions that no single company can plan.

From Square Metres to Value

A traditional office landlord sells square metres.

Deskopolitan sells productive life.

The basic raw asset is physical space: a former building, desks, chairs, meeting rooms, electricity, Wi-Fi, and square metres in Paris. Those elements have economic value, but they do not fully explain why a customer chooses one workplace over another.

The greater value is added through transformation.

A desk becomes a workplace through design.

A workplace becomes an experience through hospitality.

An experience becomes a community through interaction.

A community becomes an opportunity through relationships.

And opportunity becomes personal or professional progress.

That is the real value chain.

Deskopolitan’s offer brings together flexible offices, services, and life facilities under one roof. The company explicitly positions its spaces as places that make professional and personal life easier, supporting greater efficiency, creativity, and fulfilment.

The customer does not pay only for access to a chair and a screen.

They pay to reclaim time.

Time otherwise lost in commuting between appointments. Time spent looking for a quiet meeting location. Time spent organising lunch, childcare, sports, informal conversations, or a place to recharge. For entrepreneurs and creative professionals, time is not merely a lifestyle concern. It is one of the scarcest economic resources they possess.

Deskopolitan transforms time into capacity.

The Customer’s Transformation

The most successful customer of a flexible work-and-life space does not leave saying, “I rented an excellent desk.”

They leave thinking:

“I had a better day.”

That is the transformation.

The isolated freelancer becomes part of a professional community.

The overwhelmed founder becomes more organised.

The small team becomes more visible and connected.

The hybrid worker becomes less trapped between home and corporate office.

The parent becomes less divided between professional responsibility and family logistics.

The creative entrepreneur becomes more open to chance encounters, new ideas, and collaboration.

This matters because aspiration is rarely achieved through effort alone. People also need environments that support their energy, concentration, identity, and confidence.

A writer needs more than a laptop. They need a place in which they can think.

An entrepreneur needs more than a business plan. They need encounters, momentum, and a credible professional setting.

A team needs more than desks. It needs a shared rhythm, informal trust, and a place where culture can emerge.

Deskopolitan offers the stage on which these transformations can happen.

The Return with Energy

In the hero’s journey, the hero returns carrying an elixir: something gained that can improve ordinary life.

The Deskopolitan member returns home with more than completed tasks. Ideally, they return with energy, progress, ideas, relationships, and the feeling that work has not consumed the entire day.

That is the promise behind the work-and-life campus.

It does not eliminate pressure, deadlines, competition, or uncertainty. No coworking space can do that. But it can reduce unnecessary friction and make a working day feel more coherent.

Deskopolitan’s greatest innovation is therefore not its architecture, restaurant, gym, rooftop, nursery, or flexible membership in isolation.

It is the story these elements tell together.

Work does not have to be a place you endure in order to live elsewhere.

Work can be part of a life you actively design.

And when a flexible workspace helps customers achieve that shift—from employee or freelancer to more autonomous, connected, and fulfilled protagonist—it becomes more than a workplace.

It becomes a place of transformation.

ONCE MORE, with FEELING

I am a unabashed … Business Lover. I believe that our enterprises, public and private, can be … Wildly Creative.. I believe that they can provide Extraordinary Experiences…. for our Employees….our Suppliers…. our Customers.

I believe that ’emotion’ is ‘where it’s at’

I believe in ‘experiences’

I believe in ‘dreams’

I believe in language. Extreme language. Emotional language. Language that Engages You. That makes you … Take Off.

THE FEEL OF DREAMS: IF YOU BUILD IT…

If you get comfortable with words like ‘dream’ and ‘dreamketing’ …then you’ll get comfortable with other ‘unbusiness’ words like COURAGE

AI is the most effective profit killer on earth. It stimulates a TRUE FREE MARKET. and a REAL free market is the most dangerous of marketplaces for companies selling THE SAME OLD STUFF. To those with COURAGE (Dreamketers), free markets are great – they kill off the deadwood competitors who don’t have the Courage to Change – making way for them to LEVERAGE their DRAMATIC DIFFERENCE into profitable growth.

Hats off to ….

SCINTILLATING EXPERIENCES

DREAMKETING

DRAMATIC DIFFERENCE

HOT WORDS

CAPITAL LETTERS

COURAGE

Dreams. Entirely new possibilities. Incredible Imaginings.

I I DARE YOU …. TO GET INTO THE DREAM BUSINESS… THE INCREDIBLE IMAGININGS BUSINESS.

Will you take me up? Join Dreamers Un-Anonymous? Those Courageous Sols… willing to Pursue the (Increasingly Possible) Impossible Dream(s)?

Contrasts!

WAS IS

‘Mere experiences’ Wild Imaginings and Dreams Fulfilled

Things gone well Things not thought possible

It’s damn good ‘You can do that’

Pleased Elated

Surprised Stunned

Selling to customers Tempting customers

‘I’m not sure I need it’ ‘I GOTTA HAVE IT. NOW’

STORIES: THE SOUL OF THE NEW ENTERPRISE

• Stories are the fundamental soul of a manmade creation
• Stories are not a surface thing or ‘prettifying’ thing
• Storytellers are people who think with their hearts
• Stories are not about ‘like’ or ‘dislike’. It’s about passion. Emotion. Attachment.
• Stories are about stuff that makes me chortle.
• Stories are the NO 1 DETERMINANT of whether a product-service-experience stands out – or does not

CALL TO ADVENTURE

We consider ‘storytelling’ when we consider it at all … to be about ‘a little something on top’. BUt we must appreciate that storytelling is the Seat of the Soul…. if one is in the Hero’s Journey Business (and we all must be – from individual contributor to CEO).

We view storytelling as a ‘finishing off process’ . But we must understand that a thoroughgoing ‘storytelling sensibility’ can effectively drive Enterprise Strategy, and cease to be a neglected second cousin.

We think of storytellers …when we think of them at all – as odd ducks who should be confined to their cubes, far away from the strategy ‘war room’ . Instead we must invite the storytellers to sit, on the CEO’s immediate right at the boardroom table.

THE HERO’S JOURNEY

A Finance Department with a Musician, a Poet, an Artist, an Actress, and an Anthropologist. (As well as Some Numbers People). This Department stands for accuracy and integrity. But it is also a Scintillating Business Partner. The members of it are not drones. They do not hide behind thick, obscure Excel presentations of arcane figures. They are exciting. Their ideas are exciting. Their presentations are exciting. And Clear. And Beautiful. Because these new breed ‘storytelling’ people are STORY DRIVEN

IT HAS GOT SOUL

A fitting quote comes from John Molloy, co-founder and CEO of Memo Paris, the Parisian fragrance house built around memory, travel, and storytelling:

“Someone could actually travel there by just wearing the perfume, closing their eyes and hearing the story.” — John Molloy, co-founder and CEO of Memo Paris.

This is especially powerful because it connects three ideas: storytelling, emotional experience, and soul.

Why it matters

Memo Paris does not present perfume merely as a pleasant smell or luxury accessory. Its proposition is to transform the customer into a traveller. Each fragrance is associated with a place, a memory, or an emotional landscape. The customer does not simply wear a product; they enter a story.

Molloy explains that Memo Paris began with the idea of capturing memories of places visited around the world. The fragrance becomes a bridge between the physical and the emotional: a person can wear it, close their eyes, and mentally return to a landscape, a city, or a moment.

That is where the idea of soul enters.

The Soul Beneath the Red Sole

Christian Louboutin understands something many designers forget: people do not wear objects. They wear stories.

A shoe may be made from leather, fabric, colour, structure, and craftsmanship. But when it is placed on a person’s foot, it enters the theatre of identity. It changes posture, movement, confidence, and the way the wearer imagines being seen.

Louboutin has described the shoe as something that can tell a story. In one interview, he said:

“A shoe tells a story. It is often linked to a memory connected with seduction—a flirt, a moment, an encounter. Or to an important professional moment, such as a meeting or an interview.” citeturn0search128

That sentence reveals the soul of his work.

The shoe is not simply an accessory. It is a narrative object. It accompanies a person into a moment that may later become part of their personal mythology.

The Shoe as Character

In a story, every important character has a distinctive presence. Clothing helps create that presence, but shoes do something more intimate. They determine how the body stands, moves, approaches, leaves, and occupies space.

Louboutin has said that a person carries their clothes, but is carried by their shoes.

That is a beautiful reversal.

We usually imagine the wearer as being in control of the object. But Louboutin suggests that the object also shapes the wearer. A heel can alter posture. A red sole can change how a person walks away from a table, enters a room, or crosses a Parisian street.

The shoe becomes a character in the customer’s story.

It can express seduction, authority, playfulness, danger, elegance, or theatricality. It may reveal something the wearer already feels—or give them permission to feel it for the first time.

The Red Sole as Storytelling

The famous red sole is a perfect example of how a small design decision can become a complete brand story.

Louboutin has explained that the idea emerged when he saw an assistant painting her nails red. He took the nail polish and applied it to the sole of a shoe. The colour transformed the design and made the shoe look closer to the image in his imagination.

The red sole became a signature.

But a signature is not merely a mark of ownership. It is a condensed narrative. It tells the observer that the shoe belongs to a world of drama, confidence, sensuality, and recognition. It is visible only when the wearer moves, crosses their legs, steps onto a staircase, or walks away.

The sole is hidden—and therefore revealed through movement.

That makes it more seductive than a logo placed openly on the surface. The customer becomes part of the storytelling. The product tells its story only when the wearer performs it.

The Archetype of the Magician

Louboutin’s dominant archetype is the Magician.

The Magician transforms ordinary reality into something charged with possibility. A piece of leather becomes a gesture. A heel becomes posture. A colour becomes a code. A shoe becomes an instrument of transformation.

But Louboutin also works with the archetype of the Lover and the Jester. His designs embrace desire, fantasy, humour, spectacle, and exaggeration. They refuse the idea that fashion must be sensible before it can be meaningful.

The customer is invited to become more visible.

That does not necessarily mean becoming louder. It may mean becoming more conscious of the body, more playful in movement, or more willing to occupy the role of seducer, performer, leader, or dreamer.

The shoe does not dictate one identity. It opens a door to one.

Soul in a Luxury Brand

Louboutin has also made a direct connection between luxury and soul. He has argued that customers increasingly want to know the values behind the name they buy, and that if a company has no values or soul, people will not want to validate it through their purchases. citeturn0search124

This is crucial.

A luxury brand can have expensive materials, sophisticated distribution, famous clients, and high prices. But these elements alone do not create soul. Soul comes from coherence between the founder’s imagination, the product’s character, the company’s values, and the experience offered to the customer.

In Louboutin’s case, the soul lies in the refusal to separate design from emotion. The shoe must not merely be technically accomplished. It must provoke a reaction. It must create desire, memory, attitude, or surprise.

The brand’s value therefore extends beyond production.

It transforms material into mood.

The Customer’s Journey

The customer enters the boutique as someone looking for a shoe. They leave as someone carrying a possible future self.

Perhaps the shoe is intended for a first date, a wedding, a performance, an important presentation, a celebration, or an evening when the wearer wants to feel unforgettable. The purchase becomes connected to a threshold.

That is the hero’s journey in miniature.

The customer leaves the ordinary world, crosses into the world of desire, chooses a symbolic object, and returns with a changed posture.

The red sole becomes the visible trace of that transformation.

Christian Louboutin’s greatest storytelling achievement is not that he made red soles famous. It is that he made people believe a shoe could change the meaning of a moment.

And that is where the soul of the brand lives:

not in the leather alone,

not in the heel alone,

but in the story the wearer is ready to step into.

17 Habits of Highly Story-Driven Companies

So … suppose you focused on putting … STORYTELLING …. Front and Center in your enterprise. (including ‘finance department’) What would you do?

Here are some possible starting points. Story-Driven Companies….

1. Put storytelling per se On The Agenda of every meeting – in Every Department throughout the Enterprise
2. Have Professional Storytellers on virtually all project teams
3. Have physcial facilities that Sing and Scintillate, that reflect the SERIOUSLY COOL STORY SENSITIVITY of the products and services and experiences and transformations the Enterprise produces
4. Have internal and external Academy Awards Programs (employees, new products, vendors) that focus on STORYTELLING … per se. THESE ARE BIG DEALS
5. Measure the amount of External Recognition the enterprise gets for its storytelling activities (per se)
6. Make diversity a Top Priority. The essence of Story Excellence is sensitivity to the .. Dramatically Different, often subtle, needs of various members of our internal and external communities.
7. Include Story Sensitivity explicitly in … ALL training activities… and in everyone’s evaluation. WHAT GETS MEASURED GETS DONE – INCLUDING A FOCUS ON STORYTELLING
8. Openly use the Emotional Language of Storytelling. Stuff being ‘insanely great’. People who are Story Fanatics use such … Hot Language. And are comfortable with it.
9. Use formal Story Cops to .. Stomp Out All Vestiges of Lousy Storytelling, internally within departments as well as externally regarding the business or retail consumer
10. Have a Formal Story Board that includes external as well as internal members… which oversees the Strategich Story Sensitivity Program.
11. Talk openly about the Story Mindfulness of our ‘corporate culture’ – and work, systematically and programmatically, to insure that it is fostered.
12. Routinely invite Top Storytellers to adress the company in any number of forums. THE IDEA: KEEP THE HEAT ON – IN PERPETUITY – RELATIVIE TO THE ‘BIG STORY IDEA’
13. Have great art on the wouls.
14. Support the arts. Story-centric enterprises pay attention to Community Activities that emphasize storytelling. ‘STORYTELLING IS PART OF OUR CHARACTER – THAT’S THE MESSAGE HERE
15. Have a strong formal ‘storytelling function’ STORYTELLING SHOWS UP ON YOUR COMPANY’S ORGANIZATION CHART… NEAR THE TOP. (PERIOD)
16. The Chief Storyteller is a Member of the Board of Directors or, at the very least, a member of the Executive Committee. (RANK…. DOES…..MATTER…)
17. Have an annual or biannual ‘Story Audit’ the results of which The Company publishes in its Annual Report or in a special Annual Story Report

This is a strong set of ‘requirements’. I don’t suspect any innocent enterprise would tackle them all. The point of this list is to suggest that this ‘soft’/’emotional’ idea of a Story-Driven Company can be translated into … Hard Practical Actions

BECOME ALERT FOR STORYTELLING

Where Everyone Plays a Part: The Quiet Power of Hotel Costes

There are hotels that explain themselves. They hand you a brochure, a mission statement, and a smiling person who recites the history of the building.

And then there is Hotel Costes, on the rue Saint-Honoré, which explains nothing at all.

That is its genius. Hotel Costes understands that the most powerful stories are rarely told. They are suggested, staged, and left for the guest to complete.

The Door That Is Also a Threshold

Every hero’s journey begins by leaving the ordinary world. In Paris, the ordinary world is a street of luxury boutiques, a few steps from the Place Vendôme. You pass through an entrance that does not announce a lobby so much as a rumour.

Inside, the light drops. The colours turn deep and theatrical, with velvet, dark wood, candlelight, and a richness that feels closer to a stage set than a hotel. Jacques Garcia, the designer behind the interiors, did not create a neutral container for guests. He created a world with its own weather. You do not check into Hotel Costes. You are admitted into a scene already in progress.

Notice what that does to the guest. At most hotels, you arrive as a customer. Here you arrive as a person who has just walked onto a set, and you instinctively adjust your posture, your voice, and your sense of who you are. That is the first mark of a strong experience: the guest begins to change before anyone has sold them anything.

A Story Told in Sound

Then there is the music.

In the late 1990s, Hotel Costes began to turn its atmosphere into a sound. The resident DJ, Stéphane Pompougnac, assembled the lounge-and-downtempo mood of the place into compilations, and the Hôtel Costes albums travelled to people who had never set foot in the building. Millions of listeners could now carry a fragment of the hotel home.

This is a lesson most businesses miss. The Costes brothers, Jean-Louis and Gilbert, did not merely run a hotel. They authored a mood so coherent that it could be bottled, exported, and replayed in a stranger’s kitchen in another country. A story that can travel without you is a story with real economic power.

Most companies sell products. Hotel Costes sells an atmosphere, and the atmosphere sells everything else.

The Archetype: The Insider’s Lover

Every strong brand carries an archetype. At Hotel Costes, I see the Lover, the figure of sensuality, beauty, and intimacy, wearing the mask of the Magician and the Insider.

The Lover is visible in the textures, the shadows, and the unhurried pleasure of being looked at while you look at others. The Magician is visible in the transformation: a courtyard terrace becomes, for an hour, the most interesting place in the city. And the Insider is the quiet promise beneath it all: you belong to the people who know.

That last element is what makes the story sticky. Hotel Costes has long been associated with fashion, film, and media, and the guest is aware of it. You may be sitting beside a designer or a director, or you may be sitting beside someone merely dressed as one. It does not matter. The story gives everyone a role. The room is a theatre in which the audience is also the cast.

Mystery as a Business Model

Here is the part that should interest every manager reading this.

Hotel Costes practises narrative restraint. It does not over-explain. It does not shout its values from a wall. It does not hand you a manifesto with your coffee. It trusts the guest to feel the story rather than read it.

Contrast this with the typical corporate narrative: a paragraph of “passion for excellence” on a website, written by committee and forgotten by lunch. Hotel Costes shows that the strongest storytelling happens in the details no one can quote, such as the lighting, the pace of service, the music, and the way the room rewards those who linger.

Mystery also creates desire. A story with a missing piece invites the audience to supply it. The guest becomes a co-author, filling the gaps with their own fantasies, ambitions, and memories. That is far more engaging than being told what to feel.

The Economics of Being Seen

Consider what the guest is actually buying. A coffee, a drink, a room, a table on the terrace. The raw ingredients are the same ones available on a hundred other streets in Paris: coffee beans, water, wine, linen, a chair.

The customer pays far more for the coffee at Hotel Costes than for the beans. What they are buying is a temporary membership in a story. They are buying the feeling of being in the right place at the right moment, among the right people, in the right light.

This is the shift from product to experience, and it is the shift from you get what you pay for to you are surprised and delighted at every turn. No one boasts about the coffee. They boast, quietly, that they were there.

That is word-of-mouth marketing in its purest form. The satisfied customer becomes a storyteller, and the story spreads without a single advertisement.

The Risk of the Story

Of course, a story this strong carries a danger. When a world is built on exclusivity and atmosphere, it must be defended daily. The moment the music feels like a formula, or the glamour becomes a pose, the spell weakens. Experience brands live on consistency of feeling. One careless detail and the theatre becomes a set again.

That is why the long-haul discipline matters. A story like this is not a campaign. It is a lifetime commitment, renewed every evening.

The Return with the Elixir

In the hero’s journey, the traveller returns to the ordinary world carrying an elixir. The guest of Hotel Costes returns to the street with something intangible: a heightened sense of self, a memory of candlelight, a rhythm still playing in the head.

Tomorrow they will go back to meetings, emails, and spreadsheets. But for a few hours they were not a consumer. They were a character in a story with good lighting.

And that is the lesson for any business, from a hotel to a hospital to an HR department.

Ask yourself: What world does my client step into when they meet us? What role do we give them? What do they carry home?

Hotel Costes never answers these questions out loud. It answers them in velvet, in shadow, in sound.

Your business may not have a courtyard or a resident DJ. But it does have a story, whether you are telling it or not. The only question is whether you are telling it on purpose.

Where the Book Is Only the Beginning: Shakespeare and Company

There are bookshops that sell books. They organise the shelves by category, price the covers, take your payment, and wish you a good afternoon.

And then there is Shakespeare and Company, on the Left Bank, facing Notre-Dame across the Seine.

Here the book is not the product. The book is the doorway.

Crossing the Threshold

Every hero’s journey begins by leaving the ordinary world. In Paris, that world is the river, the traffic, the tourists with their phones raised. Then you step through a narrow green-fronted shopfront into something else entirely.

The ceilings are low. The shelves lean. Staircases creak. Rooms open into smaller rooms, and every corner seems to hold a chair, a stack, a reader who has forgotten the time. Nothing is straight, nothing is neutral, and nothing resembles the bright efficiency of a modern retail chain.

Notice what happens to the visitor. The pace drops. Voices lower. People who arrived in a hurry begin to browse. The space has changed their behaviour before a single word has been exchanged. That is the first sign of a strong experience: the environment tells you who to be.

A Story With Layers

The shop you visit today is not the original. The first Shakespeare and Company was opened in 1919 by the American Sylvia Beach, and it became a gathering place for the writers of the Lost Generation, including James Joyce, who found in Beach a champion when she published Ulysses. That shop closed during the Second World War.

The current shop was founded by George Whitman, who opened it in 1951 as Le Mistral and later renamed it in honour of Beach’s legacy. Whitman is famous for a different kind of hospitality. Over the decades, travelling writers and young wanderers were invited to sleep among the shelves, in exchange for a few hours of help in the shop and a promise to read a book a day.

Consider the strength of that story. The shop has a lineage. It has a founder with a philosophy, a ghost from the 1920s, and a tradition of generosity. Visitors are not merely buying from a business. They are stepping into a chapter of literary history that is still being written.

The Archetype: The Sage Who Opens the Door

Every brand carries an archetype. Shakespeare and Company belongs, first, to the Sage, the figure who values knowledge, wisdom, and the pursuit of truth. But it is a Sage with the heart of the Caregiver and the soul of the Explorer.

The Caregiver shows in the welcome: the sleeping beds, the tea, the sense that a stranger can be sheltered by a shop. The Explorer shows in the invitation to wander, to get lost, to discover a book you were not looking for.

Whitman is often associated with a motto painted above a doorway: Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise. Whether you read it as a literary sentiment or a business philosophy, it frames the stranger as a possible blessing rather than a risk. Few companies treat customers that way.

Rituals, Not Features

A feature is something you can list. A ritual is something you remember.

Shakespeare and Company is built from rituals. There is the stamp inside the cover of the book you buy, a small mark that turns a purchase into a souvenir. There is the wishing well, the notes pinned to walls, the piano upstairs, the reading room, the readings and events that bring writers and audiences into the same small space. There is the café next door, which extends the story outward.

None of these rituals is expensive. All of them are specific. Together they turn a visit into a sequence: arrive, wander, discover, buy, stamp, leave with a story as well as a book.

This is a lesson for any manager. Customers rarely remember your service level agreement. They remember the stamp.

The Economics of Belonging

Consider the raw materials. Paper, ink, glue, and a shelf. A book can be bought online in seconds, often cheaper and delivered to the door.

So why do people queue on a pavement for a bookshop?

Because they are not buying only the book. They are buying proof of presence. The stamped copy on a bedside table says: I was there. It becomes a small trophy of a journey, carried home and shown to friends.

This is the shift from transaction to membership. The customer is not simply satisfied. They become a quiet ambassador, telling the story of the shop to people who have never seen it. The shop is, in effect, marketed by its visitors, one anecdote at a time.

And because the story is real, with a history, a philosophy, and a community, the price power is not a trick. It is earned.

The Reader as Hero

The deepest move of Shakespeare and Company is to put the visitor at the centre.

The shop does not say, look how important we are. It says, look what you might discover. Every shelf is a possible quest. Every book is a possible companion. Every stranger in the aisle might be a fellow traveller who recommends the right novel at the right moment.

In this story, the customer is the hero, and the bookshop is the guide: it equips, shelters, and points the way, then steps aside.

That is a rare discipline in business. Most organisations want to be the hero of their own narrative. The strongest ones understand that their job is to be the mentor.

The Risk of Becoming a Landmark

There is, of course, a danger. When a place becomes famous, the crowds can overwhelm the intimacy that made it special. The risk for any beloved brand is that the story turns into a photo opportunity, and the ritual into a queue for a selfie.

The shop must keep protecting its atmosphere, its hospitality, and its sense of purpose. Experience brands live on consistency of feeling. Fame is a gift, but it must be managed as carefully as a reputation.

The Return with the Elixir

In the hero’s journey, the traveller returns to the ordinary world with an elixir. The visitor to Shakespeare and Company walks back onto the quay holding a book, a stamp, and something harder to name: the sense of having touched a long conversation between readers and writers.

Tomorrow they will go back to meetings and screens. But for an hour they were not a consumer. They were a character in a story about curiosity, generosity, and the stubborn survival of paper.

Ask yourself: What world does my client step into when they meet us? What ritual do we give them? What do they carry home?

Your business may not have a hundred years of literary ghosts or a stack of crooked shelves. But it has a story. The question is whether you are the keeper of it, or only the seller of what is on the shelf.

Where the Staircase Is the First Act: The Palais Garnier

There are buildings that let you in. You find the door, show your ticket, and are processed toward your seat.

And then there is the Palais Garnier, where the entrance is not a means of getting inside the performance. The entrance is the performance.

The Architect Who Understood Arrival

In the 1860s, Paris held a competition to design a new opera house. The winner was Charles Garnier, then a young architect with few major commissions behind him. The building opened in 1875, after years of construction, and it has never stopped announcing that it is not an ordinary place.

What Garnier grasped, and what most designers still miss, is that the audience does not begin the evening in their seats. They begin it on the way in. So he gave a large share of his building to the journey rather than the destination: the vestibules, the stairs, the landings, the foyers. Before you have heard a single note, you have already been through a first act.

Crossing the Threshold

Every hero’s journey begins by leaving the ordinary world. Outside is the Place de l’Opéra: traffic, shopfronts, the noise of the boulevard. Then you pass beneath the façade, with its columns, sculpture, and gilded details, and the street falls away.

You do not walk straight into the hall. You are slowed, deliberately, and led through a sequence of spaces that each raise the temperature a little further. Low, shadowed vestibules open toward the light. Then the ceiling lifts, and you arrive at the foot of the Grand Staircase.

Few interiors in the world have such an effect on the human body. People stop. Shoulders drop. Heads tilt back. Conversations break off mid-sentence. The marble, the colour, the sweep of the stairs, and the galleries above change who you are within seconds. You came as a commuter or a tourist. You are now someone attending an occasion.

A Staircase Built for Being Seen

Here is the cleverest part of the design. The Grand Staircase is not simply a way up. It is a stage.

Garnier shaped it so that the audience could watch itself. The stairs rise and divide, with balconies and landings overlooking the whole space, so that arrival becomes a spectacle: those climbing perform for those watching, and those watching soon climb in their turn. The theatre of the evening is not only on the stage. It is in the audience, in the clothes, the glances, and the slow ascent.

Consider the psychological genius of that. The guest is handed a role before the curtain rises. You do not wait to be entertained. You are already a character in the story.

The Archetype: The Ruler Who Plays the Magician

Every strong brand carries an archetype. The Palais Garnier speaks first as the Ruler: ordered, ceremonial, confident of its own authority. The scale, the materials, and the formal hierarchy of spaces all say that this is a place of consequence.

But the Ruler wears the Magician’s cloak. The building promises transformation. A winter evening becomes a ball. A person becomes a patron. A city becomes, for a few hours, a dream of itself. Even the legends that cling to the building, from Gaston Leroux’s Phantom, who haunts the cellars and the chandelier, to the underground cistern beneath it, feed the sense that something unseen is always at work.

Here lies the lesson for managers: grandeur alone is not an experience. Grandeur that transforms is.

Sequencing the Story

A great narrative has pacing, and Garnier designed the evening as a sequence of rising and releasing tension.

First comes compression: the vestibule. Then release: the staircase. Then display: the foyers, with their mirrors, gilding, and painted ceilings, where the interval becomes a second performance. Then the final threshold: the auditorium itself, with its red and gold, its horseshoe of boxes, and its great chandelier.

By the time the lights fall, the audience has been prepared emotionally to receive the music. The architecture has done half the work of persuasion. The opera does not need to convince a distracted crowd, because the building has already made them attentive.

This is storytelling through space. Each room is a chapter, and the order matters.

The Economics of the Threshold

Consider what the visitor buys. A seat, a sightline, and a couple of hours of singing. The seat itself is wood and fabric. The sound could be heard on a recording at home, in comfort, for a fraction of the cost.

So why dress up, travel, and pay?

Because the ticket buys access to a ritual. The entrance is part of the product. The staircase, the interval, the chatter in the foyer, and the memory of the walk to the seat are all value added that no recording can carry. The customer is not paying only for the opera. They are paying for the evening, and the evening begins at the door.

That is the shift from service to experience, and it explains why the entrance deserves a budget. Most businesses spend heavily on the product and almost nothing on the first thirty seconds. The Palais Garnier suggests the opposite instinct: the beginning shapes everything that follows.

A Story Worth Retelling

A well-known anecdote describes the Empress Eugénie, on seeing the new building, asking what style it was. Garnier is said to have answered that it was Napoleon III style. The story may be polished by repetition, but its persistence tells you something. People enjoy retelling the building because it has character, ambition, and a founder with a point of view.

That is the mark of a strong narrative. It generates stories about itself. Visitors become messengers, carrying fragments of the place into their own conversations.

The Risk of the Museum

There is a danger in all grand thresholds: they can harden into monuments. A building that is visited for its beauty alone may stop being a living stage and become a backdrop for photographs. The challenge for any institution of this kind is to keep the ritual alive, with real performances, real audiences, and real emotion, so that the staircase remains a place where something happens.

An entrance only works if what lies behind it keeps its promise.

The Return with the Elixir

In the hero’s journey, the traveller comes back to the ordinary world with an elixir. The guest descends the same staircase afterwards, a little slower, perhaps humming, carrying the afterglow of music and the memory of having moved through a world built to lift them.

Outside, the boulevard is as noisy as before. But the person walking into it is not quite the same.

Ask yourself: What is the staircase of my business? What does a client pass through before they ever reach the product? Does it prepare them to feel something, or merely to wait?

Your company may not have marble, gilding, or a chandelier. But it has an entrance, whether that is a website, a reception, a first call, or a first email. The only question is whether it is designed as a doorway into a new world, or left as a corridor to a transaction.

Where the Avenue Becomes an Aisle: Sephora on the Champs-Élysées

There are shops that sell beauty. You find the product, check the price, and leave.

And then there is Sephora on the Champs-Élysées, where the first thing the store sells is the avenue itself.

I took “the store with all the perfumes” to mean this flagship. The column below uses facts I checked this time.

The Story of an Address

Some addresses carry a plot. The Champs-Élysées is the most famous avenue in France, and a brand that opens on it borrows that drama. The flagship at 70-72 avenue des Champs-Élysées first opened in 1996 and was fully renovated for the first time in 2023.

Before that renovation, the store drew about 12 million visitors a year, a quarter of them from outside France. That is a crowd on the scale of a monument. Most retailers would simply have added shelves. Sephora asked a storyteller’s question instead: what should it feel like to walk into this place?

Crossing the Threshold

Every hero’s journey begins by leaving the ordinary world. Outside are the traffic, the pavement and the long perspective toward the Arc de Triomphe.

The redesign answers that perspective with one of its own. The store has a broad central aisle that mirrors the avenue, and at its centre stands a monumental beauty hub, nicknamed Sephora’s own Arc de Triomphe of beauty. It is the avenue folded indoors, and you walk it like a pilgrim.

The materials continue the story. Stone paving slabs and metal details inspired by the nineteenth century give the interior a Parisian atmosphere. The brand’s own signatures sit alongside them: the black-and-white stripes, the emblematic flame, and a rainbow of colours reflected in an infinity mirror.

So the visitor crosses two thresholds at once. The first is from street to store. The second is from “a shop in Paris” to “Paris, as a shop.”

The Archetype: The Explorer in Lover’s Clothes

Every strong brand carries an archetype. Sephora speaks first as the Explorer. It promises that there is always another brand, another texture, another scent you haven’t met.

Beneath that lies the Lover, because beauty is intimate. It is applied to the face and worn on the skin. And a little of the Magician is present too, since a few drops or a stroke of colour are expected to transform how a person walks into a room.

The store’s curation supports the Explorer. Thematic spaces for fragrance, skincare, makeup, haircare and services bring together established icons and new labels. The customer is not handed a catalogue. They are given a map.

Perfume: The Product You Cannot See

The perfume floor is the purest test of storytelling. Nobody can see a scent. All the customer has is a name, a bottle, a feeling, and a story they half-recall.

That is why the open shelf matters. Where perfume was once guarded behind glass, the self-service model made the customer the explorer and the assistant a companion on the quest. Sephora is built on that shift, and the flagship amplifies it. Nobody grants you permission to smell. You wander, test, return, and decide.

The rituals are small and specific: the paper strip waved in the air, the wrist, the pause, the second opinion from a friend. None of them is expensive. Together they turn a purchase into a sequence, and a sequence is what a person remembers.

Exclusivity as Plot

A story needs something you cannot get just anywhere. The flagship carries a handful of brands available only there and on Sephora’s French website, including Prada Beauty, Valentino Beauty, Glow Recipe, Maison Francis Kurkdjian and Penhaligon’s.

This does more than boost sales. It makes the trip meaningful. A customer who could order the same bottle online now has a reason to make the journey. Those exclusives are the treasure at the end of a quest, and they turn the address from a convenience into a destination.

The Economics of the Experience

Consider the raw materials: alcohol, water, aromatic compounds, glass, a cap. Online, these can be ordered in seconds, often at a discount. Yet the flagship works, with around 200 people employed there.

The customer is paying for what the screen can’t deliver. They pay for the stripe-and-stone theatre, for the sensory freedom, for a guide who can ask the right question, and for the sense of having been there. The store has moved from deals with one of your needs to helps define who you are.

There is a quieter economic point as well. The renovation was part of a sustainability strategy aiming to cut the store’s energy consumption by 50%. A story that includes responsibility is more credible, and it speaks to a customer who increasingly cares about the values behind the brand.

The Risk of the Landmark

Every beloved destination faces the same danger. When 10,000 people walk through in a day, intimacy is the first casualty. A store this grand can slide into spectacle, where visitors photograph the experience instead of living it.

The remedy is the human guide. The best advisers do not push a bottle. They ask: what do you remember, what do you love, how do you want to feel? Abundance without guidance is just noise. A curated route through it is a story.

The Return with the Elixir

In the hero’s journey, the traveller returns with an elixir. Here it is almost literal: a small bottle, a scent on the wrist, a paper strip in a coat pocket. Hours later, on a train or in a meeting, the avenue comes back for a moment, carried on the air.

The store stays in Paris. The story goes home with the guest.

Ask yourself: What is my avenue? What borrowed drama gives my business its sense of place? And what does my client carry home that nobody else can sell them?

Your business may not stand on the Champs-Élysées. But it has an address, a client, and a threshold. The only question is whether you have turned them into a world worth walking into.

Where Strangers Dance in the Dark: Le Caveau de la Huchette

There are venues where you watch music. You sit, you clap, you go home.

And then there is a cellar in the Latin Quarter where the music will not let you stay in your seat.

The Descent

Every hero’s journey begins by leaving the ordinary world. Here, that world is the lanes of the Left Bank, crowded with restaurants and visitors. The club sits at 5 rue de la Huchette, a short walk from Notre-Dame. The entrance is easy to miss.

Then you go down. One visitor described a narrow stone stairwell that spirals downward, where the air grows cooler with every step and the walls close in, heavy with centuries.

At the bottom, you step into a medieval vaulted cellar that has been a jazz club since the late 1940s. The arched stone, the amber light and the warmth of many bodies combine into something that feels less like a venue than a time machine. The same visitor couldn’t decide whether she had stumbled into a medieval crypt or a 1950s fever dream.

That confusion is the point. The ordinary world has gone. A different one has begun.

A Story With Layers

The building itself has the kind of past a storyteller dreams of. Some sources date the structure to the sixteenth century, while others describe the cellar as even older. Local legend, repeated more than verified, adds secret societies and revolutionary tribunals to the stone. I would treat those as folklore rather than fact. But folklore is also part of the story, and the cellar wears it comfortably.

What is better documented is the club’s second life. After the war, the cellar became a home for jazz and for the dancing that goes with it. Generations of swing, bebop and lindy hop followed. Accounts of the club’s history name some of the great visiting musicians, though it is worth confirming the list with the venue before you publish it.

Layers matter in a narrative. The medieval cellar, the postwar jazz club, and tonight’s crowd are three chapters in one room.

The Archetype: The Lover in Motion

Every strong brand carries an archetype. The Caveau de la Huchette is, above all, the Lover: sensual, close, physical, alive. It is also an Everyman, because anyone is welcome on the floor, and a touch of the Jester, because the mood is playful and unpretentious.

Most jazz clubs invite you to admire. This one invites you to join. The club offers a central dance floor and a lively, warm, typically Parisian atmosphere. There is no stage on a pedestal with an audience in rows. The band, the dancers and the walls share the same air.

The Guest as Performer

Here is the cleverest part of the design: the audience is part of the show.

The Farrago account captures it well. Strangers dance in the open space, shoes creak on the old stone floor, couples kiss in shadowed corners, and older pairs spin each other in dizzying circles. Nobody is a spectator for long. A beginner watches the experts, then borrows a step, then forgets to be shy.

That is a role handed to every visitor before they have ordered a drink. A product is delivered to you. An experience gives you a part. Here the part is dancer, and the cellar makes it easy to play.

The Economics of the Cellar

Consider the raw materials: stone, a small bandstand, amplifiers, a bar, a floor. None of it is rare. Visitors can hear any jazz record at home in better acoustics, with a drink they pour themselves.

Yet people queue on a narrow Latin Quarter street, then pay to climb down a staircase and stand in a crowd. They are not buying sound. They are buying heat, proximity, history and permission.

They pay for the memory of having danced to live jazz in a medieval cellar. That is the shift from deals with one of your needs to helps define who you are. And the story travels. Visitors describe the night to friends, and some return as regulars, or pass the name on to someone else. Word of mouth does the marketing.

Rituals, Not Features

A feature is something you can list. A ritual is something you remember.

At the Caveau, the ritual is the whole sequence: the hunt for the door, the descent, the hush of heat as you reach the bottom, the first bar that makes your feet move. The strangers who become partners for one song. The band that plays on past the point where everyone is tired. The climb back up into the cool night with ringing ears.

None of this costs the venue much. All of it is specific. And together it is the product.

The Risk of Being a Legend

There is a danger in an institution this beloved. Reputation can turn an authentic place into a checklist entry, and crowds can drown the intimacy that made it special. A place can start to perform its own legend instead of simply making music.

The remedy is consistency of feeling. The band must play as though the room were still a secret. The dancers must be welcomed, whatever their level. If the cellar stops being a place where something spontaneous might happen, it becomes a museum with a drinks menu.

One practical note from the sources: it is a lively, loud venue, and perhaps less suited to visitors who want a quiet evening. Honesty about that is part of a good story too. The brand knows who it is for.

The Return with the Elixir

In the hero’s journey, the traveller returns from the underworld carrying an elixir. The guest of the Caveau climbs the stairs into the night, lighter, a little breathless, a little less guarded. The elixir is not an object. It is the memory of moving freely among strangers to a rhythm older than anyone in the room.

Above ground, the lanes are quiet and Notre-Dame stands as it has for centuries. But the person walking past it has just spent an evening as someone else: someone who dances.

Ask yourself: What is the cellar in my business? Where do I give clients a role instead of a seat? And do they leave having watched, or having danced?

Your company may not have vaults or a band. But it has a floor, and a choice about whether people stand at the edge of it or step into the middle.

OBJECT OF STORYTELLING

Billions upon billions of euro’s are at stake. Some companies do get it: Louis Vuitton, Hotel Lutetia, Chanel. Mama Shelter.

NOTHING… NOTHING…. (!!!!)…

is more important to the executives of these enterprises than unadorned … unabashed… Fanaticism … about Storytelling.

But most companies (the vast majority) don’t get it. Hence they don’t really bother about storytelling (and it is a bother, it is damned hard work, and it requires constant care and attention and love and affection and ..obsession). And those that don’t bother are, to put it simply BLOWING OFF A V-E-R-Y BIG THING.

The language is strong.

The language is emotional.

But the language is also … frustrating. Story is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation. You don’t become ‘story-minded’ by opening the checkbook, spending a few hundred thousand euro’s on a great storyteller and then telling him/her to please ‘do the story thing’.

Storytelling is soul deep.

(Again: BILLIONS….TRILLIONS….ARE AT STAKE. AS WELL AS OUR COLLECTIVE SOULS)

STORY = SOUL.

BELIEVE IT.

Contrasts

Was Is

Story-challenged department Story-driven club of heroes

Storytelling as cost item Storytelling as value-driven

Storytelling is an after the fact prettifying element Storytelling is the heart and soul of a dream/solution

Storytellers labor awary in peripheral departement Storytellers have influence at the Head Table

Storytelling is outsourced to this or that vendor Storytelling is integral to entire organization

Drab HQ. Just a place to work. Cool HQ. A place to create.

Boring, businesslike Exciting, hero’s journey like

Recruit from ‘Best Schools’ Recruit from ‘most interesting’ schools

THE ULTIMATE VALUE PROPOSITION: THE HEART OF YOUR BRAND STORY

• Brand storytelling is so bloody obvious. When one has an identity … life gets a lot simpler
• Brand storytelling is simple. Brand storytelling is impossible.
• Succes means never letting the competition define you. Instead, you have to define yourself based on a point of view you care deeply about
• A brand reaches out with a powerful connecting experience. It’s an emotional connection point that transcends the product. … A great brand is a story that’s never completely told.
• Brand storytelling is ultimately about nothing more (and nothing less) than heart. It’s about passion… what you care about. It’s about what’s inside – what’s inside you, what’s inside your company.

THE CALL TO ADVENTURE

We acknowledge the unique power and value of ‘effective brand storytelling’ in our ever more ethereal economy. And yet it remains the rare instituion that truly grapss what it means to be Totally Brand Story Driven. That must change. Now.

We consider brand storytelling as the provenance of giant corporations. Instead we must understand that the branding idea applies as much to the one-person accountancy, or six-person training department, or six person project team as to Chanel or Louis Vuitton. Branding is the hard-earned Certficiation of True & Cool Distinction within the organization’s sphere of influence, enormous or minuscule.

We persist in seeing a ‘brand story’ as the ‘external image’ of a company, or a product or service. Instead, we must learn that brand storytelling goes straight to the heart (and comes straight from the heart) of an enterprise. Bottom line: Effective Brand Storytelling is in fact more INTERNAL than EXTERNAL

THE HERO’S JOURNEY

A 22 person Training Department imbedded in a big insurance company. It is known as the Best-in-Industry at AI/Marketing/Communication/Sales Training. This ‘inconsequential’ training department offers courses Globally, via the Web, and becomes a No-bull Profit Center and Source of Corporate Recognition – perhaps even the tail that wags much of the divisional dog.

FREQUENTLY UN-ASKED QUESTIONS

Brand Storytelling. I believe in it.

Insanely.

I believe in brand storytelling – for myself. As an individual. As a small company owner.

I believe in brand storytelling – for you. As a junior professional in the Purchasing Department. Or as the chief housekeeper in a 800-room hotel.

I’m befuddled by brand storytelling. I am impressed by it. It’s powerful. I am turned on by it. It is fun Most of all, I care about it. (It…Matters)

Brand storytelling is simple.

Brand storytelling is impossible.

Brand storytelling is not about marketing tricks. It is about answering a few simple and yet impossible questions:

WHO ARE YOU?

WHY ARE YOU HERE?

HOW ARE YOU UNIQUE?

HOW CAN YOU MAKE A DRAMATIC DIFFERENCE?

And most important… WHO CARES (DO YOU CARE)

WHO ARE YOU? THESE DAYS

Who Are You? Club Med and the Courage to Answer

Every company eventually faces the question the caterpillar asks Alice: “Who are you?” Few Paris companies have answered it as dramatically as Club Med.

The Hero Who Forgot Why He Left

Club Med was born in 1950, founded by Gérard Blitz and soon shaped by Gilbert Trigano. Its idea was radical for postwar Europe: an escape from ordinary life, with tents on a beach, shared tables, and a holiday as a different way of living together. It was never just a place to sleep. It was an invitation to become someone lighter.

That was a hero’s journey with an unusually clear call to adventure.

Then time did what time does. Decades passed, and the world changed around the brand. Travellers became more demanding, competitors multiplied, and the original rebellious spirit hardened into a reputation. For many, Club Med became a memory of a certain era: the beads, the beach parties, the carefree singles. The brand still existed, but nobody could say exactly what it stood for now.

That is the identity problem. It rarely arrives as a crash. It arrives as a blur.

The Question in the Mirror

When a brand cannot answer Who are you?, it starts answering everyone else’s questions instead. Cheaper? Add a discount. More luxurious? Add a spa. More modern? Add a new logo. Each answer is plausible. Together they produce a company with a hundred faces and no voice.

Club Med faced the temptation to chase every segment. The harder, more honest path was to return to its own story and ask what in it was still true.

The Answer: Same Soul, New Costume

Over the years, the group moved upmarket, investing in higher-end resorts and a more refined positioning while keeping its founding promise of togetherness, freedom and joy. The strategy was not to abandon the legend but to translate it. The hero kept his identity and changed his armour.

The details of that repositioning, and the dates, deserve checking before you publish. The lesson does not depend on them.

What Every Business Can Learn

Identity is a story, not a slogan. A logo says what you look like. A story says what you are for.

Go back to the call to adventure. Why did the company begin? What did its first customers escape from, and what did they become? The answer is usually still there, under the layers.

Keep the soul, change the costume. Customers forgive evolution. They do not forgive amnesia.

Choose a client to be the hero. A brand that tries to serve everyone ends up telling no one’s story.

Your Turn

Imagine your company at the mirror. Someone asks, Who are you?

If your answer begins with “We offer…”, you have described a catalogue. If it begins with “We help people become…”, you have found a story.

Club Med’s lesson is that the question never goes away. Brands that answer it once, loudly and honestly, tend to be the ones that get to keep telling stories.

MISSION CONTROL: WHY ARE YOU HERE?

What do you want to tell the world in the future? What does your company have that will enrich the world? You must believe in that. Believe so strongly enough to be unique at what you do.

Why Are You Here? Danone and the Price of Believing

Some companies answer Who are you? with a logo. Danone, headquartered on the Boulevard Haussmann, tried to answer a harder question: Why are you here?

The Hero with a Mission

Danone was always an unusual member of the French establishment. Its founding culture, shaped by Antoine Riboud, treated a company as a social project as well as an economic one. That inheritance is rare among the big listed names of Paris.

Under Emmanuel Faber, that inheritance became a declaration. Faber was one of the most vocal advocates of a more responsible capitalism, in which a business serves shareholders, the environment, its supply chain and society. When shareholders approved the change in Danone’s legal status to entreprise à mission, he joked that they had toppled the statue of Milton Friedman. nutraingredients

The company stated its purpose plainly: to bring health through food to as many people as possible. It became the first listed company in France to adopt the entreprise à mission status, with its social and environmental objectives written into its articles of association. That is a rare move. Most companies hang their purpose on a wall. Danone put it in its constitution. globenewswireglobenewswire

The Ordeal

Every hero’s journey includes an ordeal. For Danone, it arrived in the form of a stock price.

Nine months after the company became an entreprise à mission, Faber was dismissed amid criticism of insufficient financial results. The board was widely reported to have bowed to pressure from activist investors. The announcement came on 15 March 2021. Even the board’s own statement praised his vision and commitment to One Planet. One Health. Faber, victime expiatoire +2

The episode exposed the question underneath every purpose statement: what happens when believing costs you something? Purpose is easy to proclaim when profits are rising. It is tested the day someone asks whether you can afford it.

What Survived

Here the story becomes instructive. Commentators noted that the company’s legal status would make it difficult for new executives to abandon its course on sustainability. The idea was summed up as: “When you change captain, you don’t change the boat.” pioneerspost

That is the lesson for any business leader. A purpose that lives only in one charismatic person leaves with that person. A purpose built into governance, brand frameworks and daily decisions outlasts them.

Believe, Then Build

Your question was whether a company can believe strongly enough to be unique at what it does. Danone suggests the answer has three parts:

Say what you give the world. Not what you sell, but what changes because you exist.

Make it costly to abandon. Put the purpose where it constrains you: in your contracts, your governance, your decisions about what to stop doing.

Accept the ordeal. Uniqueness invites resistance. Those who believe least are rarely tested.

Your Turn

Ask your company three questions. Why are we here? What do we want to tell the world in ten years? What do we have that enriches it?

If the answers sound like every competitor’s, you do not yet have a purpose. You have a positioning.

Danone may not have won every round, but it asked the right question out loud, in public, with its shareholders watching. That alone is a story worth learning from.

THE BEST – OR BUST: HOW ARE YOU UNIQUE?

UNIQUE. There is no bigger word. None.

Unique means… SINGULAR. RIGHT? (And…. PERIOD)

How Are You Unique? Pierre Cardin and the Danger of Being Everywhere

Pierre Cardin was once the most futuristic name in Paris fashion. Then his company hit the question every brand must answer sooner or later: How are you unique?

The Original Rebel

Cardin delivered his first real collection in 1953. He was a pioneer in making couture reachable, and an early believer in taking fashion to department stores, and to places most couturiers never visited. He was among the first Western designers to take root in China, showing in Beijing in 1979.

That is a strong hero’s journey: a bold outsider with a vision of the future, wearing clothes nobody else would dare to make.

The Seduction of Scale

Then came the licences. Companies paid to put his name on their products, and Cardin took a share of every sale. His signature ended up on products from wristwatches to bed sheets, and at the peak, goods carrying it were sold in around 100,000 outlets worldwide.

Cardin never hid his logic. He saw a name as an asset to exploit. By the end, the counts of his licences vary by source, from several hundred to more than eight hundred, but nobody disputes the sheer scale.

The money was real. So was the cost. By the 1990s, the licensing boom had tarnished the image of many of the biggest fashion names, Cardin among them.

The Schizophrenic Brand

One observer from the Paris School of Luxury described the effect as a split personality. The creator behind Cardin had been avant-garde and modernist. The licensed products, on the other hand, were bourgeois and reassuring, far removed from his couture experiments.

Here is the uniqueness problem in its purest form. The same name stood for a space-age visionary and a reassuring umbrella. A customer could no longer say what Cardin meant. When a brand can be found on anything, anywhere, it is no longer special anywhere.

The Lesson for Everyone

Being everywhere is the opposite of being unique. Reach is easy to count. Meaning is not. A brand’s most valuable asset is what it refuses to attach itself to.

Revenue can hide erosion. Cardin’s company was reportedly valued at around a billion dollars in 2011, which is why the argument for licensing always sounds persuasive. The damage is slow, and it shows up as a lack of desire rather than a line in the accounts.

Uniqueness needs guardians. Rivals such as Dior and Ferrari later reined in their own licensing to protect their image, at considerable cost. Protecting what makes you different means saying no to profitable offers.

Your Turn

Ask yourself three questions. What is the one thing only we do? Which of our products or partnerships contradicts it? What would we have to say no to in order to be remembered?

If your answer to the first question needs a long list, you may not be unique. You may simply be available.

Cardin proved that a name can travel the world. He also proved that a name that goes everywhere can stop meaning anything.

HOW CAN YOU MAKE A DRAMATIC DIFFERENCE?

The Year Paris Forgot to Be Grey: Dior and the Question of Dramatic Difference

In the winter of 1946, Paris couture had a problem it could not name.

The war was over, but the mood was not. The fashion world and a moribund haute couture industry were yearning for security and prosperity, and desperate to throw off the drab, utilitarian clothes that wartime deprivation had imposed. Everyone agreed that something should change. Nobody could say what would make a dramatic difference rather than a polite one.

The Man Who Said No

Into this uncertainty walked a shy designer named Christian Dior. The textile magnate Marcel Boussac wanted a creative talent to revive an old, dusty house called Philippe et Gaston. Dior refused. He wanted a fresh start under his own name, not a revival of someone else’s.

That refusal was the first dramatic choice. Safe differences are made by improving what exists. Dramatic ones begin by declining to inherit it. With Boussac’s backing, Dior founded his house, at 30 avenue Montaigne, in December 1946.

The Risk in the Fabric

Then came the idea that nearly everyone considered reckless. Rationing had taught women, and designers, to economise: slimmer lines, shorter hems, less cloth. Dior went the other way. His first collection, shown on 12 February 1947, used reams of extravagant fabric, with full skirts, tiny waists, and hems dropping to mid-calf.

It was called Corolle, after the circle of petals in a flower. But Carmel Snow, editor of Harper’s Bazaar, gave it the name that stuck. “Your dresses have such a new look,” she told him.

A dramatic difference rarely arrives as a compromise. It arrives as a provocation.

The Backlash

Not everyone cheered. Women initially protested because the long skirts covered legs they had only just been allowed to show. During one photo shoot in a Paris market, models were attacked by female vendors who resented the extravagance. On an American trip, protesters in Chicago greeted Dior with placards telling him to go home.

There was suspicion about motive too. Critics suggested that Boussac, a textile manufacturer, benefited from all that fabric. Dior always denied that he had designed the collection on his orders.

Here is the truth every pioneer meets: a dramatic difference is, by definition, uncomfortable. If nobody objects, you probably haven’t made one.

The Elixir

The protests faded as wartime shortages ended. The New Look is credited with reestablishing Paris as the centre of the fashion world. Within a decade, the house had become a symbol of glamour for an entire generation.

What the Story Teaches

Dior did not ask, How can we improve a little? He asked, What do people long for that nobody dares to offer? Then he built the whole house around that single answer.

Ask yourself three things. What does my client secretly long for? What would I have to refuse in order to offer it? Who will be angry, and am I prepared to hear them?

A dramatic difference begins with a single, unmistakable idea, and with the courage to defend it when the crowd shouts “go home.”

WHO CARES? (You’d Better Care!)

It has been a long journey to see that PASSION aka EMOTION, aka CARING, aka DRAMATIC DIFFERENCE… has finally become recognized as the Staple of Successful Business. Not a poor second cousin to the ‘quant stuff’ that business schools still thrive on. Not an ‘option’.

Who Cares? Accor and the Courage to Say “Heart”

Every company claims to care. Few can prove it when the numbers are on the table.

Accor, Europe’s largest hotel group, faced the question in 2013, and the way it answered is worth studying.

The Problem with Being Big

By 2013, Accor was an industry giant. It was also, in the view of its new chief, a company that had lost some of its innovation and its ability to adapt to change. That is how Sébastien Bazin described the situation when he took over as chairman and CEO in August 2013.

Notice what that diagnosis implies. A hotel group is in the business of care: beds, breakfasts, a welcome at midnight. When the machinery grows large enough, the caring can quietly become a procedure. The buildings multiply. The brand names multiply. And the guest, somewhere in the middle, starts to wonder: who cares about me?

I’m interpreting here. The sources describe lost agility rather than lost warmth. But the two usually travel together. A company that stops adapting has usually stopped paying attention.

The Answer: Heart + Artist

Bazin’s response was not a new slogan on a wall. It was a new identity. Every employee, he said, is a Heartist, a word built from Heart (everything we do comes from the heart) and Artist (we are experts at what we do).

That combination matters. Passion without skill is sentiment. Skill without passion is a transaction. The word insists on both.

He tied it to behaviour, not decoration. Accor says it expects the highest standards of professional conduct and what it now calls “soft skills.” It wants every person to bring their own personality, story and culture to work, and to be welcoming to guests who do the same. The company’s stated purpose today speaks of pioneering responsible hospitality, connecting cultures, with heartfelt care.

The Test

A word like “Heartist” is cheap until the day it costs something. That day came in 2020.

When the Covid-19 crisis struck, Accor created the ALL Heartist Fund to support the employees and partners most severely affected. Bazin told his staff he wanted the company to continue being who it was: open, very welcoming, and extraordinarily caring toward each other.

This is the moment that separates a slogan from a strategy. Caring is proven in a crisis, when the easy choice is to protect the balance sheet and nothing else.

Why This Matters for Your Business

Business schools have long taught that numbers are the serious part and emotion is decoration. Accor’s story suggests the reverse. In a business built on people, passion is the product.

Name your caring. If you cannot describe in one word what your people feel when they do their best work, your customers cannot feel it either.

Pair heart with craft. Warmth earns attention. Expertise earns trust. You need both.

Fund it. A value that has no budget is a wish.

Who Cares?

Ask yourself honestly. If my company disappeared tomorrow, who would miss it? Who inside it would be proud to say they cared?

If the answer is “nobody in particular,” you have a procedure. If the answer is a face, a story, a name, you have a business.

You’d better care. Your customers can tell.

VERB POWER: GO WHERE THE ACTION IS

Brand stories are not nouns but verbs

Verb Power: Ten Paris Companies in Action

A noun tells you what a company is. A verb tells you what it does to you. Here are ten famous Paris names, defined as verbs.

Louis Vuitton: to journey.
To turn every departure into a story worth carrying. The trunk is only the prop. The verb is the voyage, and the repair that lets it continue for generations.

Dior: to reshape.
To refuse the safe inheritance and redraw the silhouette of an era. In 1947, a skirt became an argument that Paris could be glamorous again.

Chanel: to liberate.
To free the wearer from fuss and let ease become elegance. The verb works because it gives permission, not just clothing.

Hermès: to endure.
To make things slowly enough that they outlast trends. Craft is the strategy, and time is the customer.

Ladurée: to cherish.
To wrap a small pleasure in so much ceremony that it becomes a gift. The box, the colour and the ritual all say: this moment matters.

Pierre Hermé: to discover.
To make a familiar form surprising. Each new flavour combination is an invitation to explore rather than simply consume.

BlaBlaCar: to share.
To turn an empty seat into a conversation. The verb moves the customer from passenger to participant.

Club Med: to escape.
To offer a different way of living together, away from the ordinary world. The product is the feeling of being lighter, if only for a week.

Danone: to nourish.
To bring health through food to as many people as possible. It is a verb with a cost: it has to be defended when results disappoint.

Accor: to welcome.
To make caring a craft rather than a procedure. The word Heartist turns hospitality into an act, not a department.

Why Verbs Beat Nouns

Nouns describe a category. Verbs describe a promise. “Luggage maker,” “pastry shop,” and “hotel group” tell you where to file a company. Journey, cherish and welcome tell you why anyone would care.

Nouns also invite comparison. If you are a “ride platform,” you compete on price. If you share, you compete on meaning.

Your Turn

Try it on your own business. Complete the sentence “We exist to ______ our clients.” Then run three tests:

1. Is it a verb a client would feel? “Optimise” fails. “Reassure” passes.
2. Does it cost you something? If it never forces a hard choice, it is decoration.
3. Could a competitor claim it? If yes, sharpen it until they cannot.

The question is not what do you sell? It is what do you do to the people who meet you?

A PROMISE IS THE PREMISE

I frequently take my clients through a little drill. I call it the ‘Brand Promise Exercise’. It goes like this:

1. WHO ARE WE? a. write a two page Short Story about… Who We Are. (with a scintillating Plot Line). b. Now boil it down to one page; better yet, capture it as a Poem or Song. (Yes, including the Brand Promise Song of the Finance Department!) c. Reduce it to 25 words (or perhaps 10). Or 5. Or a verb.
2. THREE WAYS. List Three Ways in which we are …. UNIQUE to our clients.
3. DRAMATIC DIFFERENCE. State … Precisely … the… One Great & Dramatic Thing … that distinguishes us from our competitors. In 25 words (or less). (much less).
4. WHO ARE THEY? a. Explain who each Major Competitor is. In 25 powerful, precise, flattering .. and truthful ….words. (Or less) b. List Three Extremely Distinct ‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’ differences. (No bull here. No cutting corners).
5. TRY IT ON TEAMMATES. Test the ‘results’ of all this on our teammates. Talk about it. Argue about it. SCREAM ABOUT IT. Seriously. At length.
6. TRY IT ON CLIENTS. a. Tests the results on a Friendly Client b. Test them on a Skeptical Client.
7. TRY IT ON … EVERYONE ELSE. Try the results on a cross-section of Checkout & Stock Clerks (just for starters)

From Payer to Partner: Thomas Buberl and the Reinvention of AXA

An insurer has a strange job. It asks for your money every year, and the day it matters most is the day something has gone wrong. Most insurers made peace with that. Thomas Buberl, CEO of the Paris-based AXA, did not.

A Vision in Four Words

Buberl took charge in 2016, aged 43. He was German, a former BCG consultant, and one of the few foreign bosses in the French corporate elite, which made him stand out in the CAC 40. Within months of his appointment he had a clear idea of where he wanted to take the group.

He summed it up in a single phrase: AXA must move from being a payer to being a partner of its customers. In an interview with a Swiss magazine, he said that is what insurers must become for their clients.

Consider the shift. A payer appears after the damage and writes a cheque. A partner is present before it, helping you avoid the damage at all. The company’s own announcement of his appointment spoke of a new phase focused on transforming the customer experience and the business model.

From Slogan to Product

A vision becomes real when you can touch it. Buberl pointed to an app built in an AXA Germany lab, called WayGuard. A woman walking alone in the dark can connect to a control centre that accompanies her safely to her car.

That is not a claims product. It is care delivered before anything happens. It also shows what “partner” can mean: an insurer that stays by your side, not one that merely compensates you.

He backed the idea with structural questions too. He asked whether an insurer must do everything by itself, or whether partnerships are the model of the future. He also challenged the traditional split between life and property insurance, and argued that insurers must transform themselves.

The Costs of Believing

Visions have a price. Press accounts credit Buberl with redrawing AXA’s perimeter: the sale of its US life business, a refocusing on property and casualty insurance, and the rise of AXA XL. In 2024, AXA entered exclusive talks to sell its asset management arm to BNP Paribas for €5.1 billion, and Buberl described BNP as a like-minded partner.

He also arrived with a reputation for toughness, after leading a restructuring plan in Germany. A partner-led company still has to make hard choices.

What Your Company Can Learn

Name the shift in one line. “From payer to partner” fits on a slide and in a hallway conversation.

Move to the moment before the problem. Insurance is usually felt at the worst time. The strongest storytellers show up earlier.

Prove it with a product. A vision without an example is a poster.

Ask Yourself

What is the one-line change my company wants to make in how clients experience us? What is the equivalent of the WayGuard app, a concrete product that shows it?

PROMISES TO KEEP

I spoke at a seminar for a large financial services company. I listened to the CEO give a fine adress. (Truly, it was damn good). He laid out a Vision. It made sense. But it was a stretch – which is the point. A big stretch, at that. I spoke immediately after the Big Dude had finished. And I warned and challenged the several hundred people in the room.

I said that the Brand Promise (New Story) was important. And it made all sorts of sense to me. But I added that unless those in the room Totally Bought in then the whole exercise was … a comedy.

Does this Brand Promise make sense to you? I asked. As Individuals. In your daily work? With your clients? Is it a Genuine, Dramatic, Inspiring Departure from the Past? Does the new story line give you, yes, goose bumps? And if not, I said to them Please…. PLEASE…. Raise Holy & Unmitigated Hell with the CEO … and tell him why the products and services that you offer do not add up to the Scintillating (Dramatically Different) Brand Promise Story (New Vision) that he has just laid out.

Brand Storytelling is about the logo. The slogan. The marketing campaign. The advertising. But in the end brand storytelling is about …. CREDIBILITY

Do the 99,99 percent of your people who Work in the Trenches… Buy the Act? Do they Live It? (with Vigor). Do they Convey it. (With Passion).

BRAND STORY LEADERSHIP: AN EASY ACT TO FOLLOW

Siamese Twins: Ten Paris Leaders Who Were Their Own Brands

In Paris, the greatest brands were rarely built by marketing departments. They were built by leaders who understood that a symbol, a story or a gesture could do the work of an army. Strip the leader from the brand and the brand collapses. Strip the brand from the leader and the leader fades. They are born joined.

Here are ten examples, in chronological order.

1. Louis XIV: the Sun King.
As a teenager he danced the role of the Sun in a court ballet, and the image stayed. Versailles then became the stage, a palace designed so that everything visibly revolved around one person. The brand was the message: I am the centre.

2. Napoleon: the Emperor of Symbols.
He swapped the old royal fleur-de-lis for new emblems: the letter N, the eagle and the bee. At his 1804 coronation in Notre-Dame, he placed the crown on his own head, a gesture that told France where authority now came from. Jacques-Louis David’s paintings did the rest. Napoleon understood that a regime needs a logo as much as an army.

3. Aristide Boucicaut: Le Bon Marché.
He turned shopping into a pleasure. Fixed prices, free entry, and the right to return goods were radical at the time. The founder’s principle, that customers should be treated as guests rather than targets, became the store’s identity. The leader’s belief was the brand.

4. Victor Hugo: the Writer as Conscience.
His fifteen years of exile for opposing Napoleon III turned him into a symbol of principle. When he returned to Paris, he came back as the voice of the republic. His funeral in 1885 became a national event, with a vast crowd, often estimated at around two million. Few writers have so fully become a national brand.

5. Louis Vuitton: the Maison of Travel.
Founded in 1854, it grew from a trunk-maker’s workshop into a world symbol. Vuitton’s patterns and flat-topped trunks made the brand recognisable before the traveller was visible, as your own material explains. The founder’s craft became the House’s creed.

6. Gustave Eiffel: the Name on the Skyline.
For the 1889 World’s Fair, he built a tower that many Parisians initially disliked, and gave it his name. Today the tower is the symbol of Paris itself. The engineer’s confidence became a city’s logo.

7. César Ritz: the Art of Being a Guest.
Ritz built a hotel around a single idea: that every guest should feel treated as a person of importance. The Paris hotel opened in 1898, and his name became shorthand for luxury. The leader’s obsession with service became a word in the dictionary.

8. Coco Chanel: the Living Logo.
She wore her own designs, cut her hair, and shaped an image of ease and independence. When Chanel was seen in the dress, the dress was a portrait. Her name, her style and her company could not be separated.

9. Charles de Gaulle: the Voice of France.
His appeal on 18 June 1940 from London turned a general into a symbol of resistance. When he walked down the Champs-Élysées after the Liberation of Paris in 1944, the leader and the nation were one image. Few politicians have been so completely a brand.

10. Christian Dior: the New Look.
His 1947 collection reshaped the silhouette of an era and put Paris at the centre of fashion again. The house carried his name, but also his daring. Both leader and brand came to stand for the same thing: courage in the face of austerity.

The Pattern

Look at what these ten have in common.

A visible symbol. The sun, the eagle, the monogram, the tower, the dress.

A personal act. Napoleon crowns himself. Hugo chooses exile. Chanel wears her own work. The leader proves the brand with their own body and choices.

A promise larger than the product. Nobody buys only a trunk, a hotel room or a skirt. They buy what it says about them.

Ask Yourself

If my name were removed from my company, what would remain? If my company were removed from my name, what would I stand for? What is my eagle, my tower, my 18 June?

BRAND LEADERSHIP: A GREAT STORY TO TELL

Leaders achieve their effectiveness chiefly through the stories they relate… In addition to communicating stories, leaders embody those stories – Howard Gardner Leading Minds. Stories have identity (they are) narratives that help individuals think about and feel who they are, where they come from, and where they are headed. They constitute the single most powerful weapon in the leader’s arsenal.

Great leadership is …. Great Storytelling. Napolean, De Gaulle.

Great Branding is … a Great Story. The Mama Shelter story, the Coco Chanel sage.

And the incredible story you tell all your friends about Hotel Costes.

Can you, as a Brand Story Leader (of a 4 or 4.000 person operation) convey Your Story succinctly? Can you convey-animate it in a Powerful Way? Is it Believable? Exciting? Mind -altering (literally) To employees? To vendors? To customers? To the media? To your banker?

Thus we have leadership as Acting and leadership as Storytelling. But Real Leadership – especially inspired Brand Leadership – is about something more. It is about ….. LOVE.

That is not a soft statement. IT IS THE ULTIMATE HARD STATEMENT

Ten Paris Figures Who Passed the Test

The text asks whether a leader can tell their story briefly, animate it, make it believable, and change how people see the world. Then it adds the final step: love, as the hardest statement of all. Here are ten Parisians who answered it, each matched to the audience they won over.

1. Napoleon: the leader as actor.
Audience: the public. He staged his own coronation in Notre-Dame, and crowned himself. Every uniform, painting and ceremony was part of the performance. He understood that authority must be seen to be believed.

2. Charles de Gaulle: the story in one minute.
Audience: the nation. His appeal of 18 June 1940 from London was short, and it gave a defeated country a single idea to hold: France had lost a battle, not the war. A story that fits in a minute can travel on a radio wave.

3. Gustave Eiffel: believable to the banker and the critic.
Audience: investors and sceptics. Artists publicly protested against his tower. He answered with engineering proof and, as I recall, by taking on much of the financial risk himself. Belief is credible when the leader pays for it.

4. Coco Chanel: animating the story with her own body.
Audience: customers. She wore the clothes, kept her hair short, and lived the freedom she sold. Her brand did not need to explain itself, because it walked into the room.

5. Christian Dior: the mind-altering moment.
Audience: the media. His 1947 collection made journalists and buyers see the female silhouette differently, and the press named it the New Look. Few launches have shifted a mental picture so completely.

6. Aristide Boucicaut: excitement for customers, love for employees.
Audience: staff and shoppers. At Le Bon Marché he made browsing a pleasure with fixed prices and free entry, and by many accounts he treated employees unusually well, with profit sharing and pensions. From memory, so check the details. Staff who feel valued create customers who feel welcomed.

7. César Ritz: love for the guest.
Audience: customers. He built his hotel around a principle that a guest should be treated as an important person, whoever they are. Hospitality here is not a procedure. It is attention.

8. Victor Hugo: storytelling as compassion.
Audience: the public and the powerful. Les Misérables made readers feel poverty as a human face. He spent years in exile rather than flatter an emperor. His storytelling was a form of love directed at people nobody wished to see.

9. Abbé Pierre: the hard statement of love.
Audience: media and donors. During the freezing winter of 1954, his radio appeal for the homeless sparked a wave of giving that fed the creation of Emmaüs. It was short, urgent, and impossible to ignore. Love expressed as action reached millions in a few words.

10. Coluche: love with a punchline.
Audience: media and the public. The comedian launched the Restos du Coeur in 1985 to feed the hungry, using his fame and humour as tools. He showed that a story can be funny and still change what thousands of people do on a cold night.

The Pattern

Look at the progression. The first five mastered acting and storytelling. They made the story visible, short and believable. The last five added the missing ingredient: they were visibly devoted to the people they served.

That is why the text calls love the hardest statement. Love is measurable in what a leader gives up, risks, or spends. A leader who loves their people takes on the costs a spreadsheet would avoid.

Ask Yourself

Can I tell my story in one minute? Would my banker believe it? Would my staff? Whom do I love enough to pay a price for?

THE HEART OF BRANDING

Most of us won’t make a dent in the universe. But … and every one of us has this ability … we at least can try.

It’s simple

It’s impossible

It demands your attention. Your attention to..

Who are we?

Why are we here?

How are we unique?

How can we make a Dramatic Difference?

Who cares? (do we care?)

That is the heart of Brand Storytelling. Because Brand Storytelling is ultimately about nothing more (and nothing less) than Heart. It’s about Passion… what you Care About. It’s about What’s Inside… what’s inside you, what’s inside your unit, your company.

There’s more to it. (Of course). But if you ‘get’ this part of ‘BRAND STORYTELLING’ … then you’ve got its…. HEART

Contrasts

WAS IS

Good product Great ‘buzz’

Reliable Unique

Excellent Memorable

Serves a function Tells a story

Satisfies a Need Fulfills a Dream

What you see is what you get What you imagine is what you get

Customers own it Customers use it to shape their identities

Damn good food Place to be seen

Drives smooth Makes a statement

Processes my data Helps me make meaning

BRANDING FROM THE HEART

Let’s review.

Branding from the heart… from the top.

REAL Branding is …. Personal.

REAL Branding is about Integrity.

REAL Branding is about Consistency and Freshness

REAL Branding is Memorable

REAL Branding is a Great Story

REAL Branding turns on the Checkout Clerk as much as the consumer

REAL Branding Matters (to employees, customers, suppliers)

REAL Branding answers WHO ARE WE?

REAL Branding is Available to One and All … Large and Small

REAL Branding centers on Uniqueness & Dramatic Difference

REAL Branding Clarifies One Great Thing

REAL Branding is about Passion & Emotion

REAL Branding is about why We Get Out of Bed in the Morning

REAL Branding can’t be faked

REAL Branding is Systemic, 24/7, All-departments, All-hands affair

NEW BUSINESS NEW MARKETS STORY

So strange.

So very, very strange.

Namely the … Two Biggest Market Trends…. for reasons I am completely unable to explain… go virtually unnoticed:

1. Marketing to Women. This is … THE BIGGEST TREND IN THE WORLD…. and it has gone A.W.O.L.
2. Marketing to the Aging Population. WE IN THE DEVELOPED WORLD ARE GETTING OLDER … FAST Consider: Boomers. Enough money to sink an Armada. And the marketing world completely misses the boat.

Problem: To truly embrace either of these trends… and tap a substantial share of this potential …. demands… Total Enterprise Realignment … I.E.. This is a vision and brand promise discussion, not a marketing tactics discussion.

TRENDS WORTH TRILLIONS: WOMEN ROAR

• Women are the sole or primary decision makers for just about every kind of purchase, commercial stuff as well as consumer stuff.
• If a Board does not look at all like the market being served… then something (Big) is (Badly) wrong. (Which means something big is badly wrong).
• Men and women don’t communicate the same way… don’t buy for the same reasons. He’s interested in completing the transaction; she’s interested in establishing the relationship. Women make connections everywhere they go’.
• Women don’t buy brands. They join them
• Women are not a niche. Women are the long run.

THE CALL TO ADVENTURE

We dice the market into micro-segments and treat women as one ‘niche’ among many. Our organisations, meanwhile, are still overwhelmingly male in the composition of their top management & boards of directors, in their corporate culture, in their approach to product design & marketing. But we must wake up and smell the truth: Women are the primary purchasers of … Damn Near Everything. We must, therefore, strive achieve nothing less than Total Enterprise Realignment around this awesome, burgeoning, astoundingly untapped market.

THE HERO’S JOURNEY

A car dealership… where salespeople, both men and women, understand that … Women buy the Cars; and where the entire approach to marketing and merchandising and sales and service and follow – up caters to … Women’s Way of Being and Buying.

An Investment House… that builds its business not around the prospect of frequent commissions (a formula that works only if customers are impatient, trigger-and-trade happy men) but around the goals and sensibilities of women.

BEGIN TO SEE THE LIGHT

Listening to the stories of women. They own businesses. They have written books. Their combined net worth runs to the tens of millions of euro’s (at least).

I am here to listen.

I do listen. I am staggered. I listen to these Incredibly Powerful Women… dispassionately report stories of having been held in contempt. Of having been invisible. Of having been treated as brainless.

By bankers and banks and investment advisors

By doctors and hospital staffers

By car salesmen and car dealers

By clerks and waiters and hotel managers

By airline staffers and managers

By auctioneers.

By computer salesmen.

I did not know what I didn’t know. Hence the past ten plus years The Heroine’s Journey project have been penance, an effort to ‘get it’ (which I can do pretty well intellectually, but never emotionally) and become a … Noisy Champion.

Not a champion for ‘women’s rights’.. Many others have done that much better than I ever could. And continue to do so. But a champion for … OPPORTUNITY. The opportunity that exist … AMOUNTING TO TRILLIONS if bankers and carmakers and hoteliers and healthcare providers ‘got’it’ .. and started to develop the products that women want, and started to deliver them and service them in ways that women would appreciate, or at least not be offended by.

WOMEN ROAR

Twenty-Five Women Building Paris

Ask a French person to name a woman who runs a company and many cannot. Yet Paris is full of them: investors, designers, chefs and founders who built something from a gap they noticed. Here are twenty-five.

Françoise Bettencourt Meyers is the granddaughter of L’Oréal’s founder and inherited her stake after her mother’s death in 2017. She chairs the family holding company, keeps a low public profile, and writes books on the Bible and Greek mythology.

Clara Gaymard led GE France before co-founding Raise in 2013 with Gonzague de Blignières. Raise pairs investment funds with a donation fund, so business growth and giving work together.

Fleur Pellerin was born in Seoul, adopted by a French family, and rose to become digital minister and then culture minister. In 2017 she founded Korelya Capital, a venture fund linking French and Korean technology.

Céline Lazorthes launched Leetchi in 2009 so groups could pool money online. It grew into Mangopay, a payments business, and was sold to Crédit Mutuel Arkéa in 2015.

Julie Chapon co-founded Yuka in 2017. Shoppers scan a barcode and see how healthy a product is. The app earns its money from subscriptions rather than brands, which is central to its credibility.

Lucie Basch brought Too Good To Go to France in 2016. The app sells unsold food at a discount, and it turned food waste into an everyday habit for shoppers and shopkeepers.

Alice Zagury co-founded The Family in 2013, a startup community that taught founders how to grow. It later went through restructuring, a reminder that building in public carries real risk.

Eva Sadoun founded Lita.co, a crowdfunding platform for projects with social and environmental goals. She has also become a leading voice for businesses that measure their impact.

Véronique Morali leads Fimalac Développement and founded the Women’s Forum, which brings business leaders and policymakers together each year to discuss gender and the economy.

Isabel Marant started her own label in 1994 and built a following for relaxed, bohemian clothes. Her wedge sneaker became one of the most copied shoes of its decade.

Agnès b. (Agnès Troublé) opened her first shop in 1975 after working in fashion media. She has kept the company independent and uses it to support artists, photographers and filmmakers.

Rachel Delacour founded BIME Analytics, a business data tool bought by Zendesk. She went on to build another data company, which shows how a first exit can fund a second try.

Marie Ekeland co-founded the investment fund Daphni and helped create France Digitale, the startup lobby. She now works at 2050, which backs companies aimed at a sustainable future.

Jeanne Damas built Rouje from her Instagram following, selling a Parisian style she already wore. Her brand shows that a loyal audience can be a business before a shop exists.

Morgane Sézalory began by selling vintage clothes online and went on to found Sézane. Her model of small, frequent collections and an apartment-style Paris shop influenced a generation of brands.

Pauline Laigneau founded Gemmyo, a fine jewelry brand that sells online first. She cut out the traditional middlemen and offered custom pieces at fairer prices.

Carine Roitfeld edited Vogue Paris for a decade, then launched her own title, CR Fashion Book. She turned a famous editor’s eye into an independent publishing business.

Hélène Darroze is a Michelin-starred chef from a family of chefs. She runs restaurants in Paris and London, which makes her one of the few women to own and lead at that level.

Inès de la Fressange was a Chanel model before building her own fashion and lifestyle brand. She has made the Parisian look something people buy, not just admire.

Anne Lauvergeon led the nuclear group Areva for a decade. She now works as an independent investor and board member, as I understand it, which makes her a rare woman from heavy industry.

Fanny Moizant co-founded Vestiaire Collective, a marketplace for pre-owned luxury fashion. She helped prove that resale could be as desirable as buying new.

Marine Serre won the LVMH Prize in 2017 and built her brand around recycled materials and her crescent-moon motif. She shows that sustainability can be a design signature, not a compromise.

Elisabeth Laville founded Utopies, a consultancy that helps companies take sustainability seriously. She has worked on this long before it became fashionable.

Mathilde Collin co-founded Front, a shared inbox for teams, and took it through Y Combinator. She splits her time with San Francisco but remains one of French tech’s best-known founders.

Sophie de Menthon founded ETHIC, an employers’ movement, and runs her own communications firm. She is a frequent voice on work and business culture.

Between them, these women have turned a hobby, a frustration or an unfair rule into a company. That may be the market’s real opportunity: find the thing people complain about, then fix it.

THE REAL CHICK LIT: HORROR STORIES

Stories about women being dismissed or ignored in the marketplace

1. Kokoroe: “What’s the roadmap for your pregnancies?”

Béatrice Gherara co-founded Kokoroe, an online training platform. Her first round of a few hundred thousand euros from business angels went smoothly. The trouble began when she and her co-founder approached investment funds for a larger round. They were asked intrusive questions, including about the “roadmap” of their pregnancies, and six of the eight funds they approached reacted that way, from both men and women. She told this to a roundtable with France’s digital minister in 2019. The same article cites a BCG study finding that startups founded by women received only 2% of the money French startups raised since 2008, against 89% for those founded by men. linfodurablelinfodurable

2. The CFO the investors never looked at

This account comes from a 2024 Maddyness interview, and the excerpt I saw does not name her. She was her startup’s finance chief and pitched to funds alongside her co-founder, in the UK and on the US West Coast. She felt pushed into the background, as the “second knife,” and recalls one meeting where the fund’s representatives neither looked at her nor spoke to her. Her point is not only that she was ignored. She says questions put to women founders differ from those put to men, so much that some women partners let the men answer.

3. Hafida Guebli: seen as a résumé, not a person

This one is older (2018) and sits at the edge of Paris, in the suburbs. After a year in London, where companies gave her a chance, Guebli came home and could not get hired. She felt employers looked at a résumé rather than a whole person. She started a business anyway. Banks were not her route. She sold her car and asked neighbors in her housing estate for money. The article adds that women in France have historically received fewer bank loans than men, and the difficulty is greater for racial minorities. She later built NEYB’S, an app that helps tenants with language barriers talk to landlords.

DO THE MATH: DECISIONS< DECISIONS

That women are grossly underserved in the marketplace might make sense … if it made sense. But it doesn’t. It’s absolutely insane. Because women are the sole or primary decision makers for just about every kind of purchase. Commercial stuff as well as consumer stuff.

In category after category, women are instigators-in-chief of most consumer purchases. To wit:

• All consumer purchases: 83 percent.
• Home furnishings: 94 percent.
• Vacations: 92 percent
• New homes: 91 percent
• Consumer electronics: 51 percent.
• Cars: 60 percent.
• New bank accounts: women make the choice 89 percent of the time
• Healthcare: women make 80 percent of the decisions, and are reponsible for about two-thirds of spending

DO THE MATH: BUYER, BE….. WOMAN

And on it goes.

Importance in finance

• Women hold an estimated 40-45% of Europe’s wealth.
• Female retail investors control about €5.7 trillion in Europe, projected to reach €9.8 trillion by 2030.

Share of family income

• No single Europe-wide figure turned up. In Switzerland (not EU), women contribute about a third and men almost two thirds of couples’ earnings.
• In many European countries, most women earn no more than half of household income.
• Couples where the woman is the main earner are about 1 in 10 in continental Europe and Norway, and about 1 in 4 in some Spanish regions.

Ownership of stocks

• Women own 30-40% less in investments and private pensions than men (OECD, 2023).
• A 2024 ING survey found only 18% of women invest regularly, versus 31% of men.
• Kantar found 26% of women call themselves investors, against 37% of men.

Paying bills and daily decisions

• Across Europe, women more often make decisions about everyday spending and children’s purchases, while men mainly make the larger financial decisions.
• In a 24-country survey, 75% of women prioritize paying bills over everyday spending, versus 67% of men.

Net worth

• Among single adults in the EU, there is no statistically significant gender wealth gap overall. The gap is negligible among the less wealthy, but it was pronounced by 2021 at the top and has widened over time.
• Czechia and Lithuania have nearly closed or reversed the gap, while France and the Netherlands still show men substantially ahead.
• Men are more likely to own property, run businesses and invest in risky assets, while women hold more bank deposits and low-risk assets.
• In France, men’s average wealth is about 15% higher, with a 37% gap in financial assets but only 4% for the main residence.
• Within French couples, the average gap rose from €7,000 in 1998 to €24,500 in 2015.

All the foregoing relates to women’s (huge) role as ‘purchasing officers’ for themselves and their families. But women also play a predominant role as professional purchasing officers for corporations and or public agencies. They now constitute more than 50 percent of purchasing managers and purchasing agents. Their ‘commercial spending power’ also encompasses their majority staturs in HR departments, where they’re responsible for (among other things) employee benefit decisions. And they make up more than 50 percent of corporate admin officers, with awesome power when it comes to opening (or not) the commercial purse.

Add up all of the above, and the result is an European women’s economy that acounts for more than half of Euro’s GDP. Trillions of euro’s.

DO THE MATH:

Half of Euro’s GDP. And yet.

Financial services companies dont’get it

Health services companies don’t get it.

Hospitality services companies don’t get it.

Computer companies don’t get it.

Automobile companies… don’t get it.

Home furnishing companies (!) don’t get it.

NONE OF THEM GET IT.

HIS AND HERS: ACROSS A GREAT DIVIDE

THere is no doubt in my mind that men and women are equal. There is also no doubt in my mind that men and women are…. different.

And the differences are profound. And relative to my turf, business storytelling, those profound differences have profound implications for the way we create and distribute products and services, experiences and transformations and our stories about it.

Consider Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan’s classic study “In a Different Voice’ to understand the implications for the stories you tell

• Men want to get away from authority and family. Women want to connect
• Men are self-oriented. Women are other-oriented.
• Men are rights-oriented. Women are responsibility oriented.

Martha Barletta, in Marketing to Women, echoes Gilligan’s findings:

• Men have an individual perspective. Women have a group perspective
• Men take pride in self reliance. Women take pride in team accomoplishment.

Barletta reports findings that demonstrate that such differences are wired into us at the deepest level:

• Vision: Men, focused. Women, peripheral.
• Hearing: Women’s discomfort level is half that of men’s
• Smell: Women, sensitive. Men, relatively insensitive.
• Touch: The most sensitive man is less sensitive to touch than the least sensitive woman
• People orientation. By age three days, baby girls exhibit twice as much eye contact as baby boys.

Judy Rosener couches these enormous (yes) differences in terms… of language (story) ‘Women speak and hear a language of connection and intimacy, and men speak and hear a language of status and independence. Men communicate to obtain information, establish their status, and show independence. Women communicate to create relationships, encourage intereaction and exchange feelings.

Helen Fisher intriguingly adds, ‘The scripts that men write tend to be direct and linear, while women’s compositions have many conflicts, many climaxes and many endings.

WHY WOMEN BUY

Women are different. No suprise, women buy for… different reasons. And the practical consequences of such differences for product development, positioning, marketing, distribution and services are worth Trillions

How to concoct a story that will attract men…. and/or women. The men ‘need’ (NEED) tables, comparisons, rankings’. Women want ‘narratives that cohere’. Women are more ‘contextual’ and ‘holistic’. In approaching a story ‘men start with the headline’ (just the facts) While women start with the context.

The story

Le Bon Marché was founded in 1838, and Aristide Boucicaut remodeled it almost completely after becoming a partner in 1852. He replaced haggling with fixed prices, plus guarantees that allowed exchanges and refunds. He also let customers browse and touch the clothing. Under him, income rose from twenty million francs in 1870 to 72 million by his death in 1877.

Why it shows women buying differently

The store did not just sell to women. It changed shopping to suit how many women wanted to shop. Haggling and pressure to buy at the counter gave way to free entry and no obligation to purchase. One historian notes that a department store is seen as the first place after church where women could leave the house unaccompanied. These stores created the idea of shopping as a pleasant activity, especially for women, and established women as experts in selecting quality goods. the development of department stores and female emancipation

The literary twist

Émile Zola toured the store in 1882 and turned it into his novel Au Bonheur des Dames (1883). In the book, the owner Octave Mouret studies female customers so closely that he routes them through departments and displays goods to tempt them. Zola is more critical than admiring, treating this as manipulation as well as service.

A caution for your column

This is a historical story about retail design, not proof that all women shop alike. The honest lesson is that Boucicaut saw an unserved customer and changed the experience around her. That is the same opportunity your earlier research suggested.

WOMEN ARE JOINERS

.Women Are Joiners

Walk into a Sézane shop in Paris and you may feel you’ve entered an apartment. Look closer and you’ll find something more useful to business owners: a brand that has connected its customers to each other.

Sézane sells small collections to women who signed up for its newsletter. NIQ notes that this gives buyers a sense of closeness and of belonging to a community, which is part of the brand’s DNA. Customer groups called “Sézanettes” and “Sézane Addicts” let women discuss new collections, resell pieces they bought too fast, and swap items. Scarcity feeds the loop, because products often sell out in minutes, so fans compare notes. The Appartement shops and a 2019 “conciergerie” for repairing and reviving garments carry that closeness offline. By then the brand had a 2.1-million-strong Instagram community.

Others follow the same instinct. Balzac Paris regularly asks followers on Instagram which colors or shapes a future item should have, so the collection reflects its own customers. Maison Cléo, a mother-and-daughter brand, sells small made-to-order batches. Its online shop is eternally sold out, and it keeps a transparent relationship with a community of 105,000 followers.

The idea reaches beyond clothes. Aufeminin, the Paris-based women’s media group, organised “Les Rencontres aufeminin.com” and a social networking event for women called Happy Happening. It also owned 60% of My Little Paris, which publishes newsletters with a community of 1.5 million readers. In both cases, women are brought together by a shared experience, not just sold to individually.

Why does it work? When a brand connects its customers, three things change. Women become each other’s marketing, so recommendations travel faster than advertising. Customers return for belonging as well as product. And the brand learns what they want, because the conversation happens in public.

What business owners can do

• Give customers a place to talk, such as a group, a waiting list or an event.
• Ask for their votes on colors, flavors or formats, then show the result.
• Make scarcity visible, so the community has something to share.
• Treat your store as a meeting place, not just a till.

Caveat: The follower counts here date from roughly 2017 to 2023, so check current numbers before publishing. The strongest evidence is for fashion. I did not find a solid example in finance or health, which may be an opening for your column.

HI, FINANCE: GENTLEMAN MEET YOUR CUSTOMERS

Women are part of virtually all consumer financial decisions, and make close to a third of those decisions single-handedly.

So … how do these flighty women do? BETTER THAN MEN. CONSISTENTLY BETTER. And in particular they are consistently less flighty than men.

Parisian Finance, Written for Women

By Peter de Kuster

Ask most financial-services companies what they sell and they will tell you: mortgages, portfolios, insurance policies, retirement accounts, credit lines, investment platforms. Ask their clients—especially women—what they buy, and you will hear a different story: security, freedom, dignity, a future for their children, the ability to say “no” when they need to, and “yes” when they are ready.tellingthefinancialstory

In Paris, a handful of institutions have understood this gap. They have not merely added “women” as a target segment. They have acted as if women mattered to the core of their business model, their culture, and their story.

From legal permission to narrative invitation

The financial emancipation of women in France began in 1881, when a law allowed women to open a savings account in their own name. It was reinforced in 1895, when they could deposit and withdraw without their husband’s approval. Yet legal permission is not the same as narrative invitation. For decades, banks remained austere, male-coded temples where women were present, but not addressed.

That changed in the 1960s and 1970s. The law of 13 July 1965 finally allowed a married woman to become a client like any other, able to open an account and work without her husband’s consent. Banks that understood the moment did not just comply; they communicated. Between 1968 and 1978, BNP launched advertising campaigns across television, radio, press, and magazines aimed at women, demystifying banking services and introducing women to the world of finance.

One slogan captured the shift: “It’s me who counts.” In story terms, this was a move from woman as appendix to man’s finances, to woman as protagonist of her own economic life. By 1982, 77% of women in France had bank accounts, up from 27% a decade earlier; women then represented half of the bank’s customers. The numbers followed the narrative.

When women shape the culture, not just the brochure

Acting as if women mattered goes beyond campaigns. It shows up in who designs products, who leads teams, and whose experience is treated as the default rather than the exception.

In Paris today, several financial institutions have built structures that make this visible. Financi’Elles, an alliance of internal networks from 12 companies—including Allianz, AXA, BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, HSBC, ING, and Société Générale—exists to promote gender diversity across the French financial sector. These are not isolated HR initiatives; they are coordinated efforts to change mindsets, remove obstacles, and create inclusive company cultures where everyone can succeed regardless of gender.

Jennifer Baert of Financi’Elles puts it plainly: it is about creating a level playing field, not constrained by stereotypes, discrimination, or microaggressions. When twelve major players align around that story, it begins to reshape the industry’s self-image.

BNP Paribas, for its part, has integrated professional equality into wage policies, promotion processes, training, and governance. The group reports that 51% of its employees are women, 40% of its managers are women, and it has exceeded its own target for women on governing bodies, with 42% on the Executive Committee. It was the first CAC 40 company to join the #JamaisSansElles movement, pledging not to attend events with three or more speakers unless at least one is a woman.

These are not decorative gestures. They are narrative choices: who is on stage, who is in the room, whose voice is treated as authoritative.

Designing for real lives, not idealized clients

Women’s financial lives are often more complex than the standard model assumes. They live longer on average, more frequently interrupt careers for care, more often manage multi-generational responsibilities, and more often navigate economic vulnerability after divorce or widowhood. Acting as if women mattered means designing for those realities instead of treating them as edge cases.

Some Paris-based institutions have begun to reflect this in their offerings and messaging. Euronext’s women in leadership, including Delphine d’Amarzit, CEO of Euronext Paris, explicitly frame their work as closing the gender gap in finance and driving the change Europe needs to remain competitive, innovative, and resilient. Their public reflections are not limited to internal metrics; they address the next generation of women leaders, signaling that the story of finance is open to them.

J.P. Morgan’s Paris office has focused on inclusive hiring manager sessions, regular reviews of hiring, promotion, and attrition trends with senior management, and programs designed to enhance skills and networking for women. The firm states a clear ambition: to be “one of the best places for women to work in the French finance industry.” That is a story about culture as a product, not just a backdrop.

McKinsey’s Paris-based financial services practice has long argued that gender diversity is best supported by an ecosystem: management commitment, women’s development programs, precise data on representation at every level, and targeted initiatives at a company’s specific stress points. One global bank, working with schools, educated teenage girls about opportunities in the firm, kept in touch through college, and offered summer internships; entry-level representation of women rose significantly as a result. This is pipeline design as storytelling: reaching girls before they have decided what “a person like me” can do.

The story that still needs to be told

Despite progress, women remain underrepresented in C-Suite roles and positions with profit-and-loss responsibility, even in France, which leads the EU in women’s workforce participation and board representation. J.P. Morgan’s 2024 France Professional Equality Index score of 58 out of 100 is a candid admission that there is room to grow.

Acting as if women mattered does not mean pretending the work is done. It means telling a story in which women are central protagonists of the financial future, and then aligning products, policies, and leadership to match that story.

The Parisian institutions that have moved in this direction share a pattern:

• They treat women as clients in their own right, not as extensions of a male household.
• They put women on stage, in governance, and in visible leadership roles.
• They design hiring, promotion, and development systems with women’s trajectories in mind.
• They speak openly about gaps and targets, making equality a measurable part of the corporate narrative.

In the end, financial services do not sell numbers. They sell stories about what is possible with money. The Paris companies that have acted as if women mattered have rewritten that story: from finance as a male monologue to finance as a conversation in which women’s lives, ambitions, and risks are part of the script.

The next chapter is simple to state, and hard to live: make that story true in every product, every promotion, and every room where decisions are made.

CONTRAST

WAS IS

Transaction Relationship

Buying ‘brands’ ‘Joining brands’

Equality for women: a moral issue Equality for women: an opportunity

Condescending to women Catering to women

Women, buy, big time (and men ignore that fact) Women buy, big time, and men embrace that fact

Women spend men’s money Women spend their own money

Women are ‘specialty’ market Women are the market

Women’s market initiatives Women’s market strategy

Men design, unthinkingly for men Men and women design – with women in mind

Women hit a glass ceiling Women have corner offices

TRENDS WORTH TRILLIONS: 50+ BONANZA

• Reject “It’s 18-44, Stupid!’ Embrace ’18-44 is Stupid, Stupid’
• This notion of impressionable kids and hidebound geezers is little more than a fairy tale
• I HAVE NOT YET BEGUN TO SPEND
• The mature market is the dominant market in the western economy, making the majority of expenditures in virtually every category
• Review the numbers: if a group controls the vast majority of wealth and discretionary income, then … it is the market

THE CALL TO ADVENTURE WE ARE NOT PREPARED

We remain caught in the grip of a ‘youth fetish’. We orient most of our enterprise activity… in marketing, in product development, even in strategy… toward the over-coveted 18 to 44 year old demographic set. We assume, wrongly that older consumers constitute a stagnant, unapproachabele market ..and thus we overlook an enormous opportunity. But we must understand that the 50-and-over population is growing immensely in terms of numbers, wealth and longevity. And to serve that market we must completely reorient our enterprises.

THE HERO’S JOURNEY

A stream of new products designed for older consumers who seek not to give in to the aging process.. but rather to confront and transcend it.

The development of new marketing approaches by people who don’t worship at the Altar of Youth…approaches that recognize the particular demands and the abundant, fast growing wealth of 50+

The emergence of enterprises that … Strategically Realign … their entire organisation around serving a population whose members are reinventing the very meaning of ‘old’

An understanding by businesses of all stripes that 50+ are more than a niche. They are a …. Gigantic Vault…. where (damn near all ) the loot is.

Fifty is the new Paris

Here are ten Paris companies that understood what the rest of the marketing world is only now discovering.

1. L’Oréal Paris. Its famous slogan about being worth it never came with an expiry date. The brand has put women in their 60s and 70s at the centre of its campaigns, including Helen Mirren and Andie MacDowell, and nobody was cast as “the older woman.” They were simply the face of the product.

2. Lancôme. When it brought back Isabella Rossellini as an ambassador after years away, the message was clear: experience is an asset, not a problem to be airbrushed.

3. Hermès. A silk scarf is not a trend. It is something you buy at 30 and still wear at 70. Hermès sells permanence, and customers with money and patience reward that.

4. Le Bon Marché. The Left Bank department store moves at the speed of someone who has all afternoon. It has good service, space to walk, and a food hall, La Grande Épicerie, that could keep a gourmet busy for hours. Nobody is rushed here.

5. Repetto. The ballet flat was made for dancers, but it turned out to suit anyone who wants elegant shoes that don’t hurt. It looks good at 25 and at 65, which is the whole trick.

6. Club Med. Born in Paris and long associated with family holidays, it has also leaned into quieter, adults-only offerings. Many of us over 50 love our grandchildren and still want a pool without a water fight.

7. Nicolas. The wine merchants on every other corner win customers with advice, not algorithms. A shop assistant who knows what goes with your lamb is worth more than any discount code.

8. Picard. The frozen-food chain figured out that smaller households still deserve good dinners. Quality dishes in sensible portions suit empty-nesters, widowers and people who no longer want to cook for eight.

9. Le Figaro. Print still matters to a loyal readership, and this paper treats its readers as people with opinions and a long memory. Trust is a product too, and its older audience is slow to give it and slower to withdraw it.

10. AXA. The Paris-based insurer sells health, savings and retirement products to the people who actually need to plan for them. It talks about the next thirty years instead of the next thirty days, which is exactly what the over-50s want.

What they have in common

None of them shout “senior.” They sell quality, ease, taste and independence, and they let us decide the offer is meant for us. They also treat time as a luxury, not a delay.

The French have a phrase for this: l’art de vivre. It turns out it works as a business model.

MARKETING MANTRA MAKEOVER

Marketeers love youth!

Implicitly if not explicityly, they develop and direct almost every product or service you can imagine…. at ‘grabbing hold of teens and young adults, and keeping those consumers as ‘customers for life’

Hence the marketing mantra (and I mean the Marketing Mantra): It’s 18 – 44, Stupid!

What a load of crap!

I have a suggestion. No… A COMMAND.

Reject: It’s 18 – 44’Stupid

Embrace: 18 -44 is Stupid, Stupid!

We are getting older. LOTS OF US. Populations in the industrialized word are aging. FAST. And the meaning of ólder’ and ‘aging’ is changing. RADICALLY.

An overview of my argument in this chapter

1. The new mature are numerous
2. They (we) are astonishingly wealthy
3. They (we) have decades of productive, free-spending’ wild years left.
4. They (we) are accustomed to being well served by commercial enterprise.
5. They (we) are now being ill served by commercial enterprise (the older they/we get it seems, the more steadfastly enterprise seeks to avoid their/our custom

This trend is big. So must be our response to it.

THE AGE OLD ‘OLD AGE TABOO

Age Power will rule the 21st century. And it seems that we …. JUST DON’T SEEM TO GIVE A SHIT.

That’s vivid language. But I don’t see how the cold, logical facts iin the matter could lead to any other conclusion.

If you’re in business today, ignoring the ‘older’ market may well cause you to dodge enormous potential revenues. To put it bluntly: TRILLIONS UPON TRILLIONS … ARE UP FOR GRABS.

VOICES

Yves Bozzi, founder of Digital Baby Boomer (an agency that helps brands reach people over 55 online), in a FrenchWeb interview. He says sectors like luxury and automotive “n’assument pas pleinement le consommateur senior,” meaning they haven’t fully embraced the senior consumer. He also sees more openness now, and says more startups in this field are raising funds. I couldn’t confirm that his company is based in Paris, so check that first.

Cecile Gorgeon, Paris Director of Added Value, in an article on how brands target older consumers. This is her own writing, not an interview. Her advice is that seniors are experienced and hard to fool, so brands should stay honest and not mislead them. It’s useful, but it’s an article, so I wouldn’t present it as a spoken quote.

The Lauvergeon report “Innovation 2030” (commissioned from former Areva CEO Anne Lauvergeon’s working group) named the silver economy one of France’s seven innovation priorities. It cites technophile French seniors and strong start-ups as advantages. This is a group report, not a personal quote from her, so attribute it as the report’s finding.

DO THE MATH: ATTACK OF THE GODZILLA GEEZER

against the UN or Census tables. Treat them as direction and rough size.

Age group	Europe	USA
25-44	about -5% to -8%	about +3% to +5%
70 and older	about +18% to +24%	about +25% to +32%

What this means:

• Europe: The young adult group shrinks while the 70+ group grows by roughly a fifth, a spread of 23 to 32 percentage points.
• USA: Both groups grow, but 70+ grows six to eight times as fast, because the baby boomers are moving into this band throughout the decade.

The only proper response to numbers like this. Holy Shit!

THE MATURING OF THE MATURE MARKET

In an important sense, the numbers are the least of it. Or, at least, not the most of it. The slient truth of the 50+ is this: It represents an Entirely New Market… or in fact Two New Markets 50 – 70 and 70+ Beacuse Boomers are an Entirely New Group of aging folks.

The future for my father at 60? Retirement. No particular aspirations. Run out the clock.

NO MORE!

The millions of Boomers in the Western World had a Unique Life History

THEY ARE THE FIRST GENERATION IN HISTORY TO DO SO… Taken Full Charge of Their Lives.

Their attitude, then and now, as summed up in a few simple phrases:

I AM IN CHARGE. I AM ACTIVE

STORIES: THE NEW AGE-APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR

The Parisian Answer to Age

By Peter de Kuster

Paris does not believe in age-appropriate behavior.

This is not an accident. It is a philosophy — one that has shaped the city’s artists, writers, designers and performers for more than a century.

Consider four figures who made Paris their home and their stage:

Johnny Hallyday sang rock and roll at 73 to 80,000 fans at the Stade de France. His final tour was called Rester Vivant — Stay Alive. He did not retire. He performed until his body could no longer carry his voice.

Charles Aznavour released his final album at 91 and performed his last concert at 93. When asked about retirement, he replied: “I will die on stage.” He meant it. For Aznavour, there was no age limit on creativity — only on life itself.

Gérard Depardieu has appeared in more than 250 films across six decades. At 75, he continues to act alongside performers half his age. His career asks a simple question: why should passion have an expiration date?

Philippe Starck designed his first major product at 25. At 75, he is still reimagining everything from lemon juicers to hotels to sustainable cities. His message is clear: design has no retirement age.

These four lives are not exceptions. They are expressions of a deeper Parisian truth: there is no age for passion. There is only the question of whether you are still alive — and whether you are still creating.

YOU’RE ONLY AS OLD AS YOU…. LOOK!

Growing old gracefully used to mean ‘giving in to nature’ … and thus losing your luster. No more. Older folks are rewriting that old joke. Age before beauty. The new motto: Age and Beauty

Geezer Goods: A Market Comes to Age

Paris has always understood that style is not reserved for the young.

It is there in the women who still dress for the boulevard rather than for a demographic category. It is there in the men at the café who refuse the soft surrender of “age-appropriate” trousers. It is there in the long Parisian tradition of artists, designers, singers and writers who did their most interesting work after the age at which most business plans quietly stop imagining them.

Yet the corporate world is only beginning to catch up.

For decades, business treated older consumers as a problem to be managed: patients, pensioners, dependants, a cost centre with reading glasses. The emerging market is more interesting. Older people are not a niche in need of beige solutions. They are a large, diverse public with time, purchasing power, experience, taste and an increasingly visible refusal to disappear.

Call the emerging category Geezer Goods: products and services designed not for “the elderly,” but for people who intend to remain alive, mobile, curious, beautiful, connected and financially independent.

Paris and France offer a few glimmerings of what this market might become.

Take makeup. L’Oréal Paris’s Age Perfect range does something commercially intelligent. It does not ask mature women to pretend that they are twenty-five. It designs foundation, concealer, blush and lipstick around mature skin: hydration, lighter coverage and formulas intended not to settle into fine lines. The important idea is not anti-ageing. It is age fluent: beauty products that respect changing bodies without withdrawing beauty, pleasure or visibility.

Or consider margarine. It sounds absurdly unglamorous until one notices the shift: France’s ProActiv Expert turns a familiar breakfast product into a small, everyday health intervention. Its plant-sterol spreads claim to lower LDL cholesterol by 7 to 10 percent within two to three weeks when consumed as part of a healthy diet and lifestyle. The geezer-good lesson is simple: do not sell fear. Make preventative health an ordinary, attractive ritual.

Mineral water makes the same point. Hépar is not merely bottled water; its French positioning is built around mineral content, hydration and intestinal transit. Its maker explicitly notes that hydration needs evolve with age, and that constipation is common among older adults. A bottle becomes a discreet tool for autonomy — not a medical product shouting “old age.”

Then there are telephones. Doro has built products around a deceptively radical thought: simplicity is not stupidity. Its senior-oriented phones offer clear interfaces, large keys, high-contrast screens, stronger sound and emergency-call functions. The market opportunity is not to make technology “for old people.” It is to make technology that respects the human being rather than forcing the human being to adapt to the machine.

Mobility is the larger test. Paris offers a Paris Seniors Pass for eligible older residents and has made all city bus routes wheelchair accessible, with low floors and retractable ramps. This is not merely transport policy. It is a philosophy: a city remains economically alive when people can continue to participate in it.

Cars will follow. The winning vehicle for the mature market will not be branded as a “senior car.” It will be easier to enter, easier to see from, easier to park, calmer to use and more connected to mobility services. Renault’s CareMakers initiative already frames mobility support around affordability and people with reduced mobility.

Finally, financial services. The mature consumer does not only want a pension statement. They want a future. BNP Paribas Cardif’s Génération Care programme has explored digital support that connects older people, relatives and medical professionals in maintaining health and independence. This points toward the larger opportunity: financial services that connect money to care, housing, travel, work, family and the next chapter of life.

MY TARGET: TARGET MARKETING

Those are all great cases. But they are just … cases… Isolated events in a … Grand Marketing Narrative… that continues to treat Youth as its hero.

They are a far cry from … Strategic Realignment. And anything less than Strategic Realilgnment … that is, reorienting your enterprise from the ground up to serve the emerging markets will leave you in the cramped, low groth world of ‘niche’ marketing.

Don’t consign the Women’s Thing to a specialty market group. Women are the market. So too, the Godzilla Geezer tThing.

Review the numbers: If a group controls the vast majority of wealth and discretionary income, then … it is the market.

Which is not to say that my argument here is ‘about’ marketing. Rather: it is about marketing… and product development… and distribution…. and branding… and strategy. In conclusion:

THINK … WOMEN. THINK … BOOMERS

THINK … TRILLIONS

THINK … BRAND PROMISE

THINK … STRATEGIC REALIGNMENT

Contrasts

WAS IS

Gray means ‘gray’ Gray means green

Retirement Rejuvenation

Borrowed time Decades to go

Old=Decrepit Old = Active

Marketing mantra: 18 – 44 Marketing mantra: 50 & Up

Older people don’t switch brands Older people make brands

Fountain of youth Freedom of ‘age’

Maturity Longevity

Running out the clock Revving up the engine

Lost earning power New spending power

I am starting to clip coupons I have not yet begun to spend!

NEW BUSINESS NEW STORY ABOUT WORK

There’s a funny thing about management books. They talk about ‘organization structure’. About ‘motivation’ About ‘marketing strategies’. About branding. And so on.

They talk about damn near everything. Except for… THE WORK ITSELF.

I don’t give two hoots in hell about ‘theory’ or ‘strategy’. I like ‘doing stuff’. And I’m drawn to people who like ‘doing stuff’. That is, I am obsessed about THE WORK ITSELF.

Word that… Matters. Work you can Brag About. That’s the whole story here. The WHOLE STORY and the ONLY STORY.

My mantra: It is The Hero’s Journey & the Heroine’s Journey Projects, stupid.

MAKING WORK MATTER: THE HERO’S & HEROINE’S JOURNEY PROJECT!

• The hero’s journey & the heroine’s journey
• Nobody gives you power. You just take it
• Obeying the rules is obeying their rules
• Don’t just express yourself. Invent yourself.
• Astonish me
• Build something great
• Make it immortal
• Reward excellent failures… punish mediocre successes

THE CALL TO ADVENTURE

We too often view ourselves as victims of heartless organisations, as pawns, as hapless and helpless ‘cubicle slaves’. We must remind ourselves that the AI Revolution will erase all that. We must understand that in the future all work is project work – and that every project must be a Hero’s Journey & Heroine’s Journey (special) Project. Or else. No role whatsoever for cubicle slaves content to perform de facto ‘rote chores’.

THE HERO’S JOURNEY

A world where WORK MATTERS

A world where Dilbert is Denied (and so is the Advocate of the Devil)

A world where we .. Learn Something New Every Day

A world where we … Revel int he Thrill of Changing Times.

A world where we can … Brag About What We Do

THE HERO’S JOURNEY PROJECT – WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

The road to success is paved with the hero’s journey projects. Project: a task that has a beginning, middle and an end. As every story. THE HERO’S JOURNEY PROJECT: one that has ‘goals, mission and objectives’ that inspire. And inspire others.

THE HERO’S JOURNEY PROJECTS are….

• Projects that Matter
• Projects that Make a Difference
• Projects that you can Brag About … forever
• Projects that Transform the Enterprise
• Projects that Take Your Breath Away
• Projects that make you/me/us/them Smile
• Projects that Highlight the Value that You Add and Why…. You Are Here on Earth
• The HERO JOURNEY PROJECTS are … not hype.
• THE HERO JOURNEY PROJECTS are … a necessity.

VOICES

Here are ten quotes, ordered along the stages of the hero’s journey. Each comes from a creative person tied to Paris and to a big, ambitious project, and I checked each against at least one source. All quotes are under 15 words, and several are translations from French.

1. The Call: Philippe Starck, designer (Paris)

“A project is the result of a vision.”

From a Caleido interview with Starck (2006). Every WOW project starts with a vision someone cannot ignore.

2. The Refusal: Thomas Jolly, director of the Paris 2024 opening ceremony

“I was overwhelmed at first.”

AP interview, July 2024. Jolly was asked to stage the first Olympic opening ceremony outside a stadium, on the Seine. AFP reported that he called his mother in tears. It is a textbook refusal of the call.

3. The Threshold: Philippe Villeneuve, chief architect of Notre-Dame

“There was one sole [problem]: the deadline.”

AP interview, December 2024. Macron promised on the night of the fire that the cathedral would rise again in five years. The impossible deadline is the threshold.

4. The Trials: Jean Cocteau, poet and filmmaker (Paris)

“Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.”

Le Rappel à l’ordre (1926). English translations vary slightly. This is the test every ambitious project faces: boldness with judgment.

5. The Ordeal: Gustave Eiffel, engineer (Paris)

“I believe, for my part, that the Tower will have its own beauty.”

Eiffel’s reply in Le Temps, 14 February 1887, answering the “Artists against the Eiffel Tower” protest. He faced the critics before the tower stood.

6. The Descent: Auguste Rodin, sculptor (Paris)

“For a whole year I lived with Dante, with him alone.”

Rodin in the newspaper Le Matin, about The Gates of Hell, which he worked on for 37 years and never finished. It shows total immersion in a project.

7. The Inner Map: Agnès Varda, filmmaker (Paris)

“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.”

The Beaches of Agnès (2008). A reminder that every person carries a story-landscape worth exploring.

8. The Crooked Path: Jean-Luc Godard, filmmaker (born in Paris)

“Yes, but not necessarily in that order.”

Godard’s reply when asked whether films need a beginning, middle, and end. This is widely attributed to him (the exchange with Georges Franju), but the phrase has older roots. It captures how real journeys rarely run in a straight line.

9. The Mission: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, writer and aviator

“Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.”

Citadelle (1948). The French is “L’avenir, tu n’as point à le prévoir mais à le permettre.” This is the aim of a hero who has come back to serve.

10. The Elixir: Christo, artist (lived in Paris 1958–64)

“Our projects are alive.”

As Christo liked to say, per his nephew Vladimir Yavachev, at the 2021 unveiling of L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped. He first sketched it in Paris in 1961, and it was realized 60 years later, after his death.

THE HOW OF THE HERO’S JOURNEY PROJECT

How should you evaluate a project? Any project? Every project?

I urge travellers to measure every project they undertake along four dimensions (and to measure each dimension quantitatively):

Wow!

Beauty!

Impact!

Raving fans!

So what, in particular do I mean when I refer to measuring the Hero’s Journey dimension? Consider your current project. Or, if you’re the chief, consider your portfolio of departmental projects.

With every project, you should continually be asking: Is it … a Hero’s Journey? Is it still a Hero’s Journey? Does it … take your breath away’.

Take your breath away. In these… yes…. Breathtaking Times… shoudn’t that be the Goal of Anything that You Do? Isn’t that routinely what a ballplayer tries to do during a ball game? Isn’t that routinely what a cellist tries to do during a three-minute solo? Why the hell shouldn’t that be what you try to do… in Finance…. Engineering…. HR….?

LEGACY: LEAVING A HERO’S JOURNEY IN YOUR WAKE

Legacy. Legacy. It is a huge word. It asks, ‘Did I Matter?’ Legacy is not, I’ve concluded a word that applies for those who are over age 60. It is a word…. for….all of us… all the tiime.

WHY?

LEGACY?

DID I MATTER?

NOTHING SUCCEEDS LIKE….. FAILURE

Reward heroic failures. Punish mediocre successes.

I love that!

An heroic failure: You take a Bold, Brash, Brassy Leap Forward. Ooops it doesn’t work. And you end up on your behind… bruised and battered. Good for you! You went for it!

It is simple (if daunting): No true Hero’s Journey project ever comes into being without … a willingness to court … Heroic Failure/s.

In a world where …confusion reigns….where we must… Experiment Our Way into the Fture… the Only Way Forward is to … Court & Reward Heroic Failures. NO BULL

SAY NO TO MEDIOCRACY

Remember the Continuous Improvement Movement? Now it is time to just say ‘no’ to them. To be sure their work is valuable. A bit of improvement here. A touch of change there. In other words, one mediocre success after another. (Incrementaism ad nauseam).

Problem: Mediocre successes may be just fine ….for Mediocre Times. But these are not …mediocres times. These are not times that demand ‘a bit of’ this or ‘a touch of’ that. These are times that demand… Going For It.

The Hero’s Journey or Bust

Excellent or Extinct

Different or Dead.

So. No more ‘just another mediocre success. Far too much effort is wasted by far too intelligent people pursuing… Just Another Mediocre Success.

THE TRAGIC LIFE: HOW NOT TO HAVE A HERO’S JOURNEY

In my seminars I frequently point to a story that compared the most admired companies in the world to the ‘also – rands’ The losers had in common a tendency to focus on these four goals

• Minimize risk
• Respect the chain of command
• Support the boss
• Make budget

Aargh!

What a (timid) way to live.

Watch this list of famous professionals in Paris. The City That Keeps Creating Itself

Paris is not merely a beautiful city. It is a work in progress, continually edited by the people who have painted it, photographed it, dressed it, scored it, and built it. Walk through its streets and you are walking through a vast collaborative artwork—one assembled over centuries by dreamers, rebels, engineers, couturiers, and outsiders who made the city their canvas.

The Builders of a Legend

It begins with Gustave Eiffel. His tower was meant to be temporary, a controversial structure for the 1889 World’s Fair. Instead, it became the universal shorthand for Paris itself. Painters, poets, choreographers, and filmmakers have returned to it again and again, turning iron into imagination.toureiffel

Then there is Auguste Rodin, who gave the city a new language of emotion in bronze and marble. His former workshop became the Musée Rodin, ensuring that The Thinker and The Kiss remain not museum relics but living presences in Parisian life.parismatch

Claude Monet left Paris something quieter: the vast, drifting water gardens of Les Nymphéas at the Orangerie. In a city famous for its noise and movement, Monet created a room where time slows down. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec did the opposite. He made Montmartre’s cafés, dancers, and late nights unforgettable, turning the Moulin Rouge into a myth.

The Modernists Arrive

Paris became a magnet for those who did not fit neatly into their own countries or centuries. Pablo Picasso arrived from Spain and found in Paris the networks, rivalries, and freedom that helped him become Picasso. The Musée Picasso in the Marais now holds thousands of works from that long French chapter of his life.parismatch

Henri Matisse brought color as a form of liberation. Eugène Atget photographed an older Paris before it disappeared, while Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson taught the world to see the city through stolen moments: a kiss, a café table, a passerby caught between one life and the next.

Designers changed Paris as profoundly as painters. Eileen Gray and Charlotte Perriand helped define modern living through furniture, interiors, and architecture. Elsa Schiaparelli made fashion surreal, collaborating with artists to turn clothing into provocation. In their hands, Paris was not only to be looked at; it was to be inhabited, worn, and reinvented.

The Sound and the Screen

Paris also learned to move. Georges Méliès helped invent the magical possibilities of cinema, while Django Reinhardt gave the city jazz manouche—a sound of swing, speed, and resilience that still echoes through its clubs.

Michel Legrand wrote melodies that made French cinema feel romantic on a global scale. Dalida gave postwar Paris a voice of glamour and heartbreak. And today, Aya Nakamura carries that story forward: a contemporary artist whose success reflects a Paris that is no longer a single, fixed idea, but a plural, global city.

The City as Canvas

Modern Paris has extended its gallery walls outward. Renzo Piano and Jean Nouvel added bold contemporary architecture to a city once guarded by classical facades. The Centre Pompidou, the Institut du Monde Arabe, and the Musée du quai Branly all insist that Paris can honor its past without becoming a museum of itself.

JR takes that idea even further. His monumental photographic installations transform bridges, buildings, and public squares into stages for ordinary people. His recent work on the Pont Neuf shows that Paris remains a place where art can interrupt daily life rather than wait politely behind museum doors.thetourguy

Street artists such as Blek le Rat, Invader, and Miss Tic complete the picture. Their stencils, mosaics, and poetic interventions remind us that the city belongs not only to kings, architects, and luxury houses, but to anyone with an idea and the courage to place it in public view.

Twenty Legacies

Eiffel. Rodin. Monet. Toulouse-Lautrec. Picasso. Matisse. Atget. Doisneau. Cartier-Bresson. Gray. Perriand. Schiaparelli. Méliès. Reinhardt. Legrand. Dalida. Nakamura. Piano. Nouvel. JR.

Twenty creators, twenty different Paris.

What unites them is not a single style. It is the belief that a city can be more than a place to live. It can be a story continually retold—by an engineer with a tower, a sculptor with a gesture, a photographer with a glance, a designer with a chair, or an artist with a wall.

Paris endures because it keeps inviting people to add a line.

Did anyone on that list above ‘minimize risk’. Respect the chain of command? Support the boss? Make budget?

What I really want to do is to put the mediocre success peple to the Epitaph Test. I wonder… I really wonder… whether any of them, down deep, could live with a epitaph like this:

WEEKEND HERO’S JOURNEY IN PARIS

Somewhere along the way, it occurs to me that the production of each of those events was a Hero’s Journey project and thus a long way from a Dilbert style dreary day at the office. The difference is immense. Think about it.

CONTRASTS

WAS IS

A job A performance

Putting in time Putting on the Ritz

Phoning it in Fully in the moment

Forgettable Memorable

A bureaucratic task A signature piece

Faceless Full of character

A descent into routine A plunge into the unknown

Another day’s work A product of enormous investment

Acceptable work Mastery of craft

Numbing Exhausting

Hierarchy reigns Talent rules

Enervates employees Energizes performers

Tepid Hot

Pastel Technicolor

Predictable Quirky

Risk averse Venturesome

Hunkering down Reaching out

Another day older A growth experience

Colors within the lines Curious to a fault

Boss driven Project driven (teamwork city)

Blah HERO’S JOURNEY

LEADER’S WORK: HEROES, DEMOS, STORIES

• Ordering systematic change is a waste of time
• You, the leader, must turn your company into a Smorgasbord of – excellence – where Amazing Stuff is always being initiated. Most of which you’re unaware of.
• Find Heroes. Do Demos. Tell Stories
• If you want to ‘leapfrog’ change… well, then, you need ‘lead frogs’
• A good leader asks one question: GOT ANY GOOD STORIES?
• He who has the best story wins (what is your story?)
• Some people look for things that went wrong and try to fix tem. I look for things that went right and try to build on them.

THE CALL TO ADVENTURE

We still think in terms of planning and ordering change. But there’s no longer time for that. We must understand that very leader’s top job is not to make change but to find and celebrate change makers – hidden heroes who contribute to a Scintillating Portfolio of The Hero’s Journey Projects, and whoe work inspires others – by the bushel – to step out from hiding and mimic them.

THE HERO’S JOURNEY

A 123 person HR department. The department head, has five senior project managers and she treats each of them as a venture capitalist who deals with a portfolio, a portfolio of The Hero’s Journey and The Heroine’s Journey People & The Hero’s Journey and The Heroine’s Journey Projects

The leader (a VC herself) regularly asks each of her ‘VCs’ in turn to report on how their portfolio is ‘performing’ and they respond with gripping stories about revelatory demos conducted by front-line heroes. Did she order all this to happen? Hardly. Instead she charged her ‘direct reports (VCs) to encourage a thousand flowers to bloom. BUt when it comes to creating a New Cool Culture, she is ‘merely’ fertilizer salesperson for that Georgous Garden of The Hero’s & Heroine’s Journey growing up like topsy around her! That’s the Leader’s work.

OUT OF ORDER: HOW NOT TO LEAD

In the Age of The Hero’s Journey Project Work, being leader isn’t what it used to be. Mostly, that is a Very Good Thing. And a surprisingly easy thing. But it can be incredibly hard to give up the old habits of Management by Exhortation and Management by Detailed Plan. Consider the persistent tendency among managers to isssue orders ex cathedra – orders like the following:

“Get more entrepreneurial”

“Take risks”

“Implement the zero defects program”

STUPID

STUPID and STUPID.

Why? Regardless of your official rank, ordering systematic change is … a waste of time. Trying to order a new culture into being doesn’t work. Maybe it worked once upon a time. But the leader who operates that way today will find himself going nowhere fast. And maybe even backward. Those ‘clear’ orders will be executed by Frustrated Middle Managers bent on preserving their rapidly disintegrating power base – they will become the worst sort of Innovation Quashers.

The goal of leaders work must be this: Get people… many, many people initiating and then working on The Hero’s Journey and The Heroine’s Journey Projects that they will want to be remembered by! (and ask yourself: Do you want people working for you who don’t want to be remembered by what they’re doing … right now?)

One hopes those many many powerless people have read the previous chapter of this travel guide – and are thence busily engaged in Seriously Cool Projects already.

To take the idea a step further. You the leader, must turn your company into a place where… Amazing Stuff…. is always percolating. Task One is gathering an awesome array of Incredibly Cool People, people who invest in, and commit to, and execute, an awesome array of Bold Experiments, Bold Experiments and Charismatic Prototypes that turn into that Awesome Array of The Hero’s & Heroine’s Journey Projects.

THE LEADER’S WORK THAT WORKS

“I am trying to lead change and induce risk-taking at my company. Got any ideas?

There is only One Way.

FIND HEROES. DO DEMOS. TELL STORIES

To elaborate:

We need heroes: Mortal Exemplars of the Exciting New Way of Doing Things.

We need demos: Palpable Proof that this Exciting New Way of Doing Things is eminently doable

We need stories: Riveting Tales that fire the imagination of … future-but-as-yet-reluctant heroes-in-waiting

THE LEAD FROG STRATEGY

You don’t have to hire revolutionaries. Odds are (very high) you have got them already: role models .. .existing people who actually exemplify a Brash New Way of Doing Things. They are lurking! Waiting to be discovered! Waiting to be listened to! Waiting to be taken seriously!

So what you do? Seek them out. Let them loose. Teach these ‘Lead Frog’ heroes a few (but not too many) manners. Make it clear as a bell to one and all that… They Are the New Way!

THEY COULD BE HEROES

Here are some ways to add a litlle ‘stickiness’ to your Systematic Pursuit of Heroes

Fair Game: Internal Idea Fair, a ‘Bragfest’, an internal ‘trade show’.

To Catch a Freak: Start a monthly ‘The Hero’s Journey Seminar Series’. But instead of inviting the usual suspects … the gurus du jour … invite a Genuine Freak from within your company to lead each seminar. Again: Freaks attract Freaks.

Just for Fund: Another powerful approach: Create a play fund… a dedicated bucket-o-cash that people throughout you company can draw upon in small doses to pursue weird, wild, one-off projects. In short: Show them the money – and see what happens. What usually works best is to define an ‘area of need’ that is specific but not too specific.

Time Off for Weird Behavior. How about setting up a special scholarship fund for Radical Sabbaticals? People could apply – much as they would for the grant fund mentionied above – for the opportunity to spend (say) six months with this Cool Customer or that Scintillating Supplier. Or maybe they would work with a Profound Professor on a research project that relates in some way to your company’s business. Whatever. Call it ‘outside the company thinking’.

THE WAY OF THE DEMO

Heroes, Demos, Stories

Demos are what the Heroes you recruit (aka Lead Frogs) will do (or reveal to you) once you give them the green light. Demos are Exciting Experiments… under-the-radar, on-a-soestring efforts that vividly exemplify a New Way. Demos are the true ‘hard stuff’ that sells and compels. Demos are (to repeat): Palpable Proof that Seriously Cool Change is not only possible – it’s already under way!

Demos are what you tell stories about.

THE WORK OF STORIES

A key, perhaps the key, to leadership … is the effective communication of a story. One thing you learn as a student of human culture… whether your gig involves primitive tribes or corporate tribes… is the (often unsung) Power of Storytelling. It was true in the bush. It is true in the boardroom. And it’s true everywhere in between.

What, after all, do leaders really do? LEADERS … MAKE…. MEANING. And what does ‘meaning’ consist of? Compelling stories! Coherent themes! Soariing messages!

Those stories and messages are about .. you guessed it… THE HERO’S JOURNEY People (heroes, flesh and blood individuals) doing THE HERO’S JOURNEY PROJECTS (demos, real projects executed on the front lines).

As I see it, an effective leader making the rounds asks one – and only one… question: GOT ANY GOOD STORIES?

Stories…. are the red meat that animates our reasoning process

Stories… give us ‘permission’ to act

Stories… are photographs of who we aspire to be

Stories … cause emotional responses

Stories….connect

Stories…are us.

The Tower That Nobody Wanted: A Hero’s Journey

Friends, colleagues, let me tell you about the greatest work project in history. Every project has a hero, a call, a crisis, and a return. This one just happens to be 324 metres tall.

1. The Ordinary World

Paris, 1884. Gustave Eiffel is already a master. His company builds bridges and viaducts across Europe, and he has just helped build the internal frame of the Statue of Liberty. He is respected, successful, and comfortable.

Yet inside his firm, two engineers, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, sketch something strange: a giant pylon of iron, higher than anything humans have ever built. Eiffel glances at the drawing and shrugs. It isn’t his thing. Many a hero begins by refusing.

2. The Call to Adventure

Then comes the invitation. France will host the 1889 World’s Fair, marking a century since the Revolution, and the nation wants a showpiece at its entrance. A competition is announced: build something that will astonish the world.

The sketch comes back to Eiffel’s desk. The architect Stephen Sauvestre adds elegant arches at the base, and suddenly the project looks less like a machine and more like a dream. Eiffel buys the patent rights from his engineers. Now it is his bet, with his name on it.

3. Refusal and Doubt

Every project lead knows this moment. Is it technically possible? Wind alone could topple such a structure. Can it be built in two years? Who pays?

The money problem is real. The state offers only a subsidy of 1.5 million francs, about a quarter of the cost. Eiffel must finance the rest himself, gambling his own company on the promise of ticket revenue. No safety net. This is the point where most leaders hold a long meeting and decide to “study it further.” Eiffel signs.

4. Meeting the Mentors and Assembling the Team

No hero walks alone. Eiffel gathers his allies: Koechlin, Nouguier, Sauvestre, and the site engineer Jean Compagnon, who masters the logistics. Behind them stand hundreds of draftsmen who produce around 5,300 drawings, each of the 18,038 iron parts specified to a fraction of a millimetre.

The parts are made in the workshops at Levallois-Perret, pre-drilled and numbered like a giant kit. On site, they only need to fit. That was the secret: precision upfront, speed on location.

5. Crossing the Threshold

On 28 January 1887, the first foundation work begins. The hero has left the safety of the drawing board and entered the unknown.

6. Tests, Allies, and Enemies

Now the trials begin, and the first enemies are not engineering problems but critics.

In February 1887, a group of famous artists and writers publish a protest in a newspaper. Among the signatories are Charles Garnier, the architect of the Paris Opera, and the writer Guy de Maupassant. They call the tower a “gigantic black factory chimney” and a disgrace to Paris. Maupassant reportedly took lunch at the tower’s restaurant later because it was the one place in Paris where he didn’t have to look at it.

Eiffel does not respond with anger. He replies with a calm interview, arguing that the tower has its own beauty, shaped by the laws of wind resistance. He turns his critics into an audience.

Then come the practical battles. The four legs must meet perfectly at the first level, 57 metres up. Any error would mean disaster. Eiffel uses hydraulic jacks and sandboxes to adjust the legs with extraordinary precision. When the legs join, the fit is perfect.

Around 300 workers climb higher each week, hammering about 2.5 million rivets. In 1888 they strike over wages and conditions, and Eiffel has to negotiate, learning that a project’s true foundation is its people. Safety measures are unusually advanced for the time, and in the end only one worker is recorded as dying during construction.

7. The Approach to the Inmost Cave

The tower rises. By the end of 1888, the second level is complete. The project enters its most dangerous stage: the slender upper section, where winds are strongest and nothing can be adjusted afterward.

The team doubts, the deadline presses, and the world watches. Every leader knows this dark middle of a project, when the excitement has faded and the finish line is still invisible. Eiffel is often on site himself, walking the beams, showing that he trusts the work and the workers.

8. The Ordeal

The ordeal is the unforgiving calendar. The fair opens in May 1889, and the last pieces must be set in time. Elevators still have to be installed, and platforms finished.

The hero’s reward comes in two parts. On 31 March 1889, after two years, two months, and five days, Eiffel climbs the 1,710 steps to the top with a group of officials and raises the French tricolour. Paris answers with a salute of cannon fire from below. The tower is the tallest structure in the world, a title it holds for 41 years.

9. The Reward

The public arrives, and they love it. Within the fair’s six months, nearly two million visitors ride up. The revenue repays much of the construction cost in the very first year. The man who risked his company now holds the proof that courage and craftsmanship can win.

10. The Road Back

But a story isn’t over at the celebration. The tower was only given a permit for 20 years, and by 1909 it was supposed to be dismantled. Eiffel knew his hero needed a new purpose.

So he used the tower for science: meteorological experiments, aerodynamics research in a laboratory at its base, and then radio. Its height made it an ideal antenna, and the military valued it for wireless telegraphy. The tower proved useful, and the city kept it.

11. The Return with the Elixir

What does the hero bring back? Not iron, but a lesson.

First: vision becomes real through preparation. The tower went up so fast because every piece was planned before the first rivet was struck.

Second: critics are part of the journey. Eiffel’s answer was not defensiveness but patient, confident work.

Third: a project survives when it keeps finding new purposes. What was meant to last 20 years has stood for over 130.

And finally, the most human truth: the tower bears the name of the hero, but it was built by hundreds of hands. Every great work project is a journey made by a team, each person playing the hero in their own small chapter.

So when your next project looks impossible, remember the tower nobody wanted. Remember that it began as a sketch Eiffel almost ignored. Then ask yourself: what is your call to adventure, and are you ready to answer it?

The Tower That Nobody Wanted: A Hero’s Journey

Friends, colleagues, let me tell you about the greatest work project in history. Every project has a hero, a call, a crisis, and a return. This one just happens to be 324 metres tall.

1. The Ordinary World

Paris, 1884. Gustave Eiffel is already a master. His company builds bridges and viaducts across Europe, and he has just helped build the internal frame of the Statue of Liberty. He is respected, successful, and comfortable.

Yet inside his firm, two engineers, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, sketch something strange: a giant pylon of iron, higher than anything humans have ever built. Eiffel glances at the drawing and shrugs. It isn’t his thing. Many a hero begins by refusing.

2. The Call to Adventure

Then comes the invitation. France will host the 1889 World’s Fair, marking a century since the Revolution, and the nation wants a showpiece at its entrance. A competition is announced: build something that will astonish the world.

The sketch comes back to Eiffel’s desk. The architect Stephen Sauvestre adds elegant arches at the base, and suddenly the project looks less like a machine and more like a dream. Eiffel buys the patent rights from his engineers. Now it is his bet, with his name on it.

3. Refusal and Doubt

Every project lead knows this moment. Is it technically possible? Wind alone could topple such a structure. Can it be built in two years? Who pays?

The money problem is real. The state offers only a subsidy of 1.5 million francs, about a quarter of the cost. Eiffel must finance the rest himself, gambling his own company on the promise of ticket revenue. No safety net. This is the point where most leaders hold a long meeting and decide to “study it further.” Eiffel signs.

4. Meeting the Mentors and Assembling the Team

No hero walks alone. Eiffel gathers his allies: Koechlin, Nouguier, Sauvestre, and the site engineer Jean Compagnon, who masters the logistics. Behind them stand hundreds of draftsmen who produce around 5,300 drawings, each of the 18,038 iron parts specified to a fraction of a millimetre.

The parts are made in the workshops at Levallois-Perret, pre-drilled and numbered like a giant kit. On site, they only need to fit. That was the secret: precision upfront, speed on location.

5. Crossing the Threshold

On 28 January 1887, the first foundation work begins. The hero has left the safety of the drawing board and entered the unknown.

6. Tests, Allies, and Enemies

Now the trials begin, and the first enemies are not engineering problems but critics.

In February 1887, a group of famous artists and writers publish a protest in a newspaper. Among the signatories are Charles Garnier, the architect of the Paris Opera, and the writer Guy de Maupassant. They call the tower a “gigantic black factory chimney” and a disgrace to Paris. Maupassant reportedly took lunch at the tower’s restaurant later because it was the one place in Paris where he didn’t have to look at it.

Eiffel does not respond with anger. He replies with a calm interview, arguing that the tower has its own beauty, shaped by the laws of wind resistance. He turns his critics into an audience.

Then come the practical battles. The four legs must meet perfectly at the first level, 57 metres up. Any error would mean disaster. Eiffel uses hydraulic jacks and sandboxes to adjust the legs with extraordinary precision. When the legs join, the fit is perfect.

Around 300 workers climb higher each week, hammering about 2.5 million rivets. In 1888 they strike over wages and conditions, and Eiffel has to negotiate, learning that a project’s true foundation is its people. Safety measures are unusually advanced for the time, and in the end only one worker is recorded as dying during construction.

7. The Approach to the Inmost Cave

The tower rises. By the end of 1888, the second level is complete. The project enters its most dangerous stage: the slender upper section, where winds are strongest and nothing can be adjusted afterward.

The team doubts, the deadline presses, and the world watches. Every leader knows this dark middle of a project, when the excitement has faded and the finish line is still invisible. Eiffel is often on site himself, walking the beams, showing that he trusts the work and the workers.

8. The Ordeal

The ordeal is the unforgiving calendar. The fair opens in May 1889, and the last pieces must be set in time. Elevators still have to be installed, and platforms finished.

The hero’s reward comes in two parts. On 31 March 1889, after two years, two months, and five days, Eiffel climbs the 1,710 steps to the top with a group of officials and raises the French tricolour. Paris answers with a salute of cannon fire from below. The tower is the tallest structure in the world, a title it holds for 41 years.

9. The Reward

The public arrives, and they love it. Within the fair’s six months, nearly two million visitors ride up. The revenue repays much of the construction cost in the very first year. The man who risked his company now holds the proof that courage and craftsmanship can win.

10. The Road Back

But a story isn’t over at the celebration. The tower was only given a permit for 20 years, and by 1909 it was supposed to be dismantled. Eiffel knew his hero needed a new purpose.

So he used the tower for science: meteorological experiments, aerodynamics research in a laboratory at its base, and then radio. Its height made it an ideal antenna, and the military valued it for wireless telegraphy. The tower proved useful, and the city kept it.

11. The Return with the Elixir

What does the hero bring back? Not iron, but a lesson.

First: vision becomes real through preparation. The tower went up so fast because every piece was planned before the first rivet was struck.

Second: critics are part of the journey. Eiffel’s answer was not defensiveness but patient, confident work.

Third: a project survives when it keeps finding new purposes. What was meant to last 20 years has stood for over 130.

And finally, the most human truth: the tower bears the name of the hero, but it was built by hundreds of hands. Every great work project is a journey made by a team, each person playing the hero in their own small chapter.

So when your next project looks impossible, remember the tower nobody wanted. Remember that it began as a sketch Eiffel almost ignored. Then ask yourself: what is your call to adventure, and are you ready to answer it?

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Word count: roughly 1,000. I can adjust the tone, shorten it for a presentation, or turn it into a slide deck if you’d like.

Do the same for the creation of the grand boulevards of Paris by Baron

Again a creative retelling in a storyteller’s voice, inspired by Peter de Kuster’s Hero’s Journey approach. These are not his actual words.

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The City That Had to Be Cut Open: A Hero’s Journey

Friends, colleagues, today’s story is about the largest urban renovation project of the nineteenth century. Its hero is Georges-Eugène Haussmann, and his work project was nothing less than Paris itself.

1. The Ordinary World

Paris, around 1850. It is a medieval city living in an industrial age. Streets are narrow, dark, and winding. Houses lean over alleys where sunlight never lands. The population has nearly doubled in a few decades, and the city is crowded, filthy, and dangerous.

Cholera has swept through twice, killing tens of thousands. Drinking water is scarce, sewers are primitive, and traffic crawls. Barricades go up easily in the tangled streets, and the memory of the 1830 and 1848 uprisings haunts those in power.

Meanwhile Haussmann, born in 1809, is a loyal, tireless civil servant. He has served as prefect in provincial departments, known for energy, a phenomenal memory, and a stubborn will. He is not a celebrity. He is the kind of manager who gets things done.

2. The Call to Adventure

The call comes from Napoleon III, the emperor who had lived in London and returned to France dreaming of a modern capital. He had seen the parks and wide streets of England, and he wanted Paris to be cleaner, healthier, grander, and safer.

Earlier attempts had stalled. The previous prefect had not delivered. In June 1853, the emperor appoints Haussmann Prefect of the Seine. Legend says the emperor showed him a map with the desired new routes sketched in colored lines. The vision was the emperor’s, but the execution would be Haussmann’s alone.

3. Refusal and Doubt

What does the hero fear? Everything. To cut avenues through a living city means demolishing homes, shops, workshops, even churches. It means displacing tens of thousands of people. It requires enormous money, and Parisian property owners will fight in court.

And there is a political problem. The emperor wants it fast, parliament watches the budget, and critics already whisper that this is about control, with wide boulevards for cavalry and artillery. Any leader knows this feeling: the mandate is huge, the resources are uncertain, and the stakeholders disagree.

Haussmann accepts anyway.

4. Meeting the Mentors and Assembling the Team

No hero works alone. Haussmann gathers a remarkable team of specialists.

Eugène Belgrand, an engineer, designs a new water and sewer system, including the great collectors beneath the streets. Jean-Charles Alphand, the landscape and park engineer, creates green lungs for the city: the Bois de Boulogne, the Bois de Vincennes, Parc Montsouris, and the Buttes-Chaumont. Architects such as Gabriel Davioud design the lampposts, kiosks, and benches that give the city a coherent face. The emperor remains the patron and protector.

Haussmann himself is the coordinator, pushing all of them with maps, deadlines, and relentless meetings.

5. Crossing the Threshold

The first great phase begins in the 1850s. Crews cut the Rue de Rivoli eastward, and the long north-south axis, the Boulevard de Sébastopol, slices through the dense center. The hero has left the safety of planning and stepped into the unknown: bulldozing a city that people love and live in.

6. Tests, Allies, and Enemies

The trials multiply. A procession of expropriation lawsuits, protests, and bitter complaints follows. Residents lose their homes, and many working-class families are pushed to the outskirts as rents rise. This is the hardest truth of the story, and a good storyteller does not hide it. Progress had victims.

Money is the next enemy. Haussmann finances the work through ingenious but controversial methods: borrowing against future revenues, using off-budget arrangements, and capturing the rising value of land along the new avenues. Critics accuse him of hiding the true costs.

Yet the allies deliver. Tens of thousands of workers labor at once. Stone is quarried, gas lighting installed, water pipes laid, and sewers dug. The city becomes one vast construction site.

7. The Approach to the Inmost Cave

By the 1860s, Haussmann’s Paris takes shape: long straight avenues, the great star at the Étoile with radiating boulevards, new railway station squares, markets like Les Halles, and a unified style of buildings with cream limestone, uniform heights, and wrought-iron balconies.

But as the project grows, so does the opposition. Budgets balloon. Newspapers mock the “artist of demolition.” Even supporters tire of the endless dust. This is the deep middle of every great project, when momentum has become burden.

8. The Ordeal

In 1867, Paris hosts a World’s Fair, and visitors marvel at the transformed capital. It is Haussmann’s triumph. But the ordeal arrives soon after.

In 1869, the opposition in the legislature attacks his finances relentlessly, and the emperor, weakened and politically pressed, begins to waver. In January 1870, after seventeen years in office, Haussmann is dismissed. The hero loses his post just before the story’s crisis. Months later the Second Empire collapses in the Franco-Prussian War.

9. The Reward

What does Haussmann gain? Not thanks, at least not at first. But the city itself is the reward. Roughly 12 kilometers of new boulevards had grown into a network of about 85 to 90 kilometers of new streets. Well over 100 kilometers of new sewers. Clean water, gas lighting, parks within reach of every district, and a public transport logic that still works.

The new Paris breathes. Disease declines, traffic flows, and light reaches the streets.

10. The Road Back

The road back is slow. Haussmann writes his memoirs, defending his work. The Third Republic, which replaced the empire, quietly continues many of his projects and keeps his street plan. The very people who cursed him walk his boulevards.

Later generations debate his legacy. Some admire the order and beauty. Others mourn the lost medieval city and the displaced poor. Both views deserve respect.

11. The Return with the Elixir

What does the hero bring back for us?

First: a bold vision needs a relentless executor. The emperor dreamed, but Haussmann delivered.

Second: infrastructure is invisible but essential. The most important work, the sewers and water mains, lay beneath the grand facades.

Third: coherence creates beauty. A unified design language turned thousands of separate buildings into one recognizable city.

And fourth, the honest lesson: transformation has human costs. The best leaders count those costs openly and try to ease them.

So when your next project demands you to tear down the old to build the new, remember Haussmann. Ask yourself: what must I cut through, who will it affect, and what will remain when I am gone?

THE VC MODEL; OR: YOU, BETTER, BELIEVE IT!

Lurking beneath the surface of all of the foregoing is a Particularly BIg Idea: Think Portfolio. Think Leader-as-Venture-Capitalist.

Portfolio: a roster of bets that range from sure things with average payoffs to long shots that will make investors rich … or poor. All leaders are now, in effect ‘portfolio managers’.. Or to use a somewhat bolder term: They are Venture Capitalists.

What do Venture Capitalists do? Two things. And only two things: They bet on Cool People. (Heroes!) And they bet on Cool Ideas (Demos!). The result: Cool Investments. (Stories!). Many of those bets…most of them, in fact… don’t turn out. But a small number do … and change the world.

The VC Model goes double if youŕe a Very Big Deal Senior Manager. You might think that if you run a Big CO, things would be different. From that lofty height, can’t you pretty much have to ‘order’ culture change? Does the Heroes-Demos-Stories approach still hold?

My answer: DAMN RIGHT IT HOLDS!

Say there are six vice presidents (or lab directors or department heads or dvision bosses) who report to you. My advice: Turn each of those half-dozen women or men into an avowed Venture Capitalist… each with a clearly identified … Portfolio of Investments. You should be able to pull any one of them aside in the hall and ask on the spot, How’s your The Hero’s Journey Portfolio ‘performing’.?

In other words: Tell me some Cool Stories’)

LEADERS TOOLS: TOWARD A SCINTILLATING THE HERO’S JOURNEY PORTFOLIO

Once more from the top; Here are the sorts of steps I think you ought to take if you have a ‘mandate’ to do ‘culture change’. (Or even if you don’t )

1. Chat up people throughout your organisation
2. Develop a list of potential heroes (Lead Frogs)
3. Hang out with those heroes in the making. Find out what they want to change, how they would change it.. and what they have already done to change it on the sly
4. Encourage them to go for it
5. Protect them when their leaders seek revenge!
6. Turn the demos of the new heroes best efforts into THE HERO’s JOURNEY Stories
7. Showcase those THE HERO’s JOURNEY stories. Incorporate them into your speeches, your newsletters, your weekly emails. Add your public Stamp of Approval.
8. Promote one or two of the most illustrious heroes three levels at one jump
9. Treat that promotion as a Big Story – as a recruitment tool for getting the footdraggers to ‘sign up’ and ‘come aboard’ or at least get the hell out of the way.
10. Keep the cycle going: more heroes… more demos… more stories

HINT: IT NEVER ENDS

CONTRASTS

WAS IS

Top-down leadership Tap-the-grassroots leadership

Planning, planning, planning Projects, projects, projects

Issuing others Finding heroes

Micro-managing Dramatizing demos

Telling people what to do Telling stories

Promotion by seniority Promotion as story

Running the show Building a portfolio

Working through channels Walking through barriers

Resigned to life Ready to Change the World

BRINGING THE HERO’S JOURNEY WORK TO FRUITION: STORYSELLING

THE CALL TO ADVENTURE

We have depended upon ‘the hierarchy’ to ‘take care of us’ … as long as we were doing a ‘decent job’ We must understand that in order to survive in this up-ended world, we must all become … First-Rate STORYSELLERS

No ‘sales mentality’ = No THE HERO’S JOURNEY Projects = NO COOL STORIES = NO SURVIVAL

THE HERO’S JOURNEY IN SALES

Getting things done – whether you are a junior leader, a finance director is mostly a matter of ‘storyselling’. That is, getting people….inflamed…..about your ideas. Inducing them…to…..sign on…. and then to … stick with you…through thin as well as thick.

Key point: Every project has ‘customers’. Imagine that you are trying to bring radical change to a mere business process in finance. In particular, you have a Seriously Cool Idea or a new financial -reporting method or our division. The ‘users’ in other departments who will benefit rom that method – or feel put upon by it! are your Customers.

No matter how ‘cool’ your idea may be, those customers must become … Enthusiasts….of your project… if you are to make a Significant Impact. (No implementation. No impact. Period). If you can garner… passionate Grassroots ‘Customer’ Supporters …then you’ve taken a massive step toward ‘surrounding the bastards’.

You may well be a technical virtuoso (That’s why you came up with this Seriously Cool Idea in the first place!) But now it’s time to sharpen your ‘soft’ skills – to master the Rules of Sales. There are no other rules that matter as much.

All the above is a long-winded way of saying: WELCOME TO THE AGE OF STORYSELLING.

Here goes:

1. TELL YOUR PRODUCT STORY

It is an obvious point, but well worth stating: You’ve got to be smarter than hell about what you’re selling. And the ‘secret’ to product knowledge goes beyond attending some classes, beyond reading the literature, beyond training to do demos. True product knowledge is deep knowledge. ‘Straight knowledge’ is a necessary jumping off point, but no more that that.

Deep knowledge comes from finding every known factual – and editorial – comment about your product or service. Everything that’s ever been said or written about it in print, on the Internet, on AI – by your competitors.

Deep knowledge also means developing your internal network: Make friends with (deep) designers and (deep) engineers in your product-development department, and encourage them to share the ‘real story behind the product’ – along with the product’s various significant features and unfeatured shortcomings.

When it comes to product knowledge, remember: More, more, more. And, more important: Deeper, deeper, deeper. In sum: He or she who has the largest appetite for Deep Knowledge wins.

2. TELL YOUR COMPANY STORY

Another truism (which doesn’t mean that you can ever afford to forget it): You’re selling your company as much or more than you are selling a product or service.

You need to understand – cold and in depth – all the pertinent procedures and functions within your company: finance, logistics, customer support, human resources, manufacturing, engineering. Be prepared to deal with any query on any subject from a customer.

But more than that: Be ready to use that fabulous internal network you’ve developed! Guides and mentors in every critical part of your company! Colleagues who will teach you and act as your liaison to those other departments! Which will in turn grease the way to easier customer relations.

3. KNOW YOUR CLIENTS STORY

Here again, you must become a research fanatic. Scour the footnotes in financial analysts’ reports. Scour the Web. Fact: As never before, there is an incredible amount of Good Stuff availabe. Beyond that, you ought to be able to find people in your company who worked for the customer’s company – or people at one of your vendor’s operations who worked for the customer’s company.

The goal: Get to know the falover/corporate culture of the customer’s enterprise. This learning process never stops! You need to know – cold – the politics of the customer s decision-making procedures/structures.

Getting to know the customer also means getting to know the individuals you will deal with. Any form of legitimate intelligence – including (especially) personal tidbits – is worthwhile. Advice: Until your ‘intelligence work’ on all of these issues is well advanced, don’t even think about making that first customer call!

4. RESPECT YOUR COMPETITORS

When I say ‘respect’ competitors, I mean respect them …religiously. You may hate their guts. Maybe with good reason. (Hey, they screwed you out of a sale! Or so you feel). No matter.

DON’T BAD-MOUTH COMPETITORS. PERIOD

Nothing makes you look smaller than dismissing a legitimate competitor. The goal – the only goal – is to demonstrate why your product or your service is better for this customer than the other option … and why your firm is the better firm to deal with.

Deeper truth: There is no greater blessing than an extraordinary competitor. Great competitors keep you on your toes! Alas, none of us improves without having somebody who pushes us.

5. NEVER OVER-PROMISE

You want to win the sale. Your chief competitor is hungry – indeed, ferocious. You feel an overwhelming temptation to shave a few days off the expected delivery time. A little voice inside you says, ‘Hey, the factory will figure it out’.

Well…. DO NOT LISTEN TO THAT LITTLE VOICE

As a salesperson, ,you are always out front…alone at the battle’s edge. Your future is ….always ….at stake. And it is always totally dependent on your … Trustworthiness.

My advice: Even if it costs you this sale… under-promise. Add a couple of days here and there to increase the odds of ‘making target’ In the long haul, being the courier of pleasant surprises beats bing the constant bearer of ill tidings.

Try this for a personal credo: WINNING SALESPEOPLE ARE ROUTINELY AHEAD OF SCHEDULE!

6. SELL THE SOLUTION

Sell only by … Solving Specific Problems… and by creating Identifiable Profit Opportunities. Great sales people don’t sell ‘widgets’. They sell solutions (Damn Good Solutions).

Ask yourself, ‘it this a product sale’ or a solution sale that will lead to a magnificent story?

Every sales pitch you make should boil down to this: Our product solves these specific problems, creates these unimaginably incredible opportunities, and will make you this huge amount of money. Here is exactly how.

7. LIVE THE BRAND STORY

Your company sells a story. A story about the way it is to do business with us. A story about our vision, the experience we offer, our dream. In short, a story about our … BRAND.

Know that story cold. Tell it. Use it. Make it your own. I’m not urging you to be a mindless suck-yp to the company line. I am reminding you that in the best companies, Brand Value amounts to hundreds of billions and if you can’t buy into the brand promise, then you proably should not stick around.

Give the brand promise your own twist and your own turn, to be sure. Yes, personalize the hell out of it. But take full advantage o the ‘goodwill’ your company has built up over the decades.

8. TAKE FULL RESPONSIBILITY

You are the customer’s point person for your entire enterprise. You make your real money from Repeat Business. And Repeat Business comes somewhat from the product or service that you offer… but mostly from the Seriously Cool & Continuing Experience that customers have working with you. And that Experience will be absolutely, positively fabulous to the extent that you purposefully orchestrate it.

9. WALK AWAY FROM BAD BUSINESS

Don’t work with people who are dishonest

Don’t work with people who don’t keep their word

Don’t work with people who only care about themselves

Don’t work with jerks

LIFE IS TOO SHORT

10. DON’T WHINE ABOUT PRICE

It’s okay to lose business on price. I’ve lost business on price (Numerous times). Because, ultimately what you are selling is no ‘ordinary’ product or service. Once again: You are selling an Opportunity, … a Solution…. an Experience…. A Dream To Be Fulfilled. All of which still may not justify a 50 percent premium over an excellent competitor; but it damn well ought to justify some kind of premium!.

The only game in town is to ‘Add an Awesome Armload of Intangibles’ that will allow you to charge a healthy premium for what you are offering.

11. SEEK COOL CUSTOMERS

The obvious sales targets are almost the biggest, most established ones. There is obviously some logic to such an approach. But in a time of dramatic change, it is utterly imperative that your customer portfolio include a significant share of ‘leading-edge’ companies – folks that are already pursuing tomorrow’s flavors of HERO’s JOURNEY today.

You-you, the salesperson and your company – are as ‘cool’ as your customer portfolio is ‘cool’ And vice versa. It’s that simple. And that hard.

Message: Be religious in the … QUANTITATIVE … evaluation of your Customer Portfolio. Ask yourself: Does my list of customers and prospects have a high enough … Weird Quotient… to provide me with a genuine bead on the (inevitable) Weird Future?

12. TALK PARTNERSHIP

The word partnership is way overused. My advice: Use it anyway. Obsessively.

Why do I insist on using that word? Because what you are selling… no matter… ‘what’ you are selling… is just that: a partnership. A Seamless, Virtual, Encompassing Web of Colleagues and Vendors who Devote their Herculean Efforts to Creating Opportunities/Experiences/Dream Fulfillment for your Beloved Client.

Your job as a salesperson is to bring to bear – in a seamless fashion – the full power and imagination of your company’s entire supply chain.

Sounds like a ‘partnership’ to me.

So I mean it: USE THE DAMN WORD

PARTNERSHIP

13. MAKE YOUR CUSTOMER A HERO

When you look across the table at your customer, think religiously and repeatedly to yourself: How can I make this dude or dudette rich and famous? How can I get him or her promoted?

It’s not enough to focus on making the customer’s organisation successful. Yes, that’s clearly the long-term goal. But the practical, near-term imperative is to make a …. Solid Gold Hero…out of the Individual who is responsible for buying (and using) your product or service.

Consider; I am not in the widget-selling business’. I am in the ‘Hero-Making Business’.

Companies don’t buy things from other companies. Rather: Individuals buy Successful Relationships from other Individuals. (Big deal). BIG DEAL

14. AIM TO CHANGE THE DAMN WORLD!

Selling is …. Cool. Very Cool. I really do believe , when I hawk my ‘wares’ (present a seminar or write a column) that I’m doing more than buttering the bread and paying the taxes. While I don’t think I routinely change the world for large numbers of people, I know that I give a damn about what I’m up to – and I am excited about delivering my product-servie-experience-storytelling-dream-impact.

I think the notion that selling can be… ‘universe-denting’… is what keeps us motivated, and able to look at ourselves in the mirro.

15. KEEP YOUR STORY SIMPLE

If you’re in sales (and again, if you’re in the HERO’S JOURNEY PROJECT BUSINESS, you’re in the Fulltime Sales Business), sooner or later you drag out a Sales Story.

SO: keep this story lean and full of meaning!

I regularly review presentaties of startups and high tech sales people. And … I was appalled. Each of their slides, and they peddle great products, had way too much stuff on it.

Is it just my age? Am I just too old to see the fine print? No, damn it! The point of a presentation is to persuade…. not to perplex.

WE ARE ALL STORYSELLERS NOW

Want to get me angry? Try saying, I’m a finance girl. I don’t do sales.

No! No! No!

SUCCESS = SALES SUCCESS

EVERYWHERE

PERIOD

WE’RE ALL STORYSELLERS. ALL THE TIME.

CONTRASTS

WAS IS

The Sales department is down the hall The Sales Department is right here!

Command and control All sales, all the time

The Supreme Leader issues commands The team leader develops camaraderie

I was ‘assigned’ to this task I volunteered for this task

Leader: I’m in charge here My job is to sell the project