Why JFK jr. couldn't keep George Magazine aloft?

We cringe at the current "What can a [frog, blender, toilet plunger, whoopee cushion, etc.] teach us about Financial Services" campaign from Wachovia. But however tone-deaf, it does remind us that stories and narrative are the best ways to make a message stick. Why, gee, we used some recently while talking with a group of businesspeople:

...It's not primarily about values. That's means to an end. Necessary, vital, but a means. The point is competitive advantage. One you can sustain. Much management it seems takes the negative view of human behaviour, and it resorts to a push model; coercion, rather than co-option or the pull of ambition. For the short term, this approach satisfies us for two reasons:

A. We feel like we've done "something" about a problem-- we've intiated action.

B. Much like the cattle prod gets immediate results, the push, or coercive, model spikes improvement (or at least attention) in the desired area.

In stressed companies, these are the reflexive patterns we regress into as managers. And on the face of it, why not? After all, how many times have you felt comfortable giving up control in times of pressure? Oddly, the seemingly intuitive and instinctive thing to do is counterproductive to the desired outcome.

In this, management is not unique: when a plane stalls in flight and starts to dive and lose control, pilots must be trained to fight their instinct to pull back on the stick--an action that can further reduce speed an induce a much more deadly and unrecoverable event: a flat spin.

Of course, metaphorical thinkers will observe that directing a company and flying a plane are, at heart, management. Each requires the understanding of dynamics that are in turns obvious and counterintuitive. Each reqiures us to manage and interpret dynamical, rythmic systems. For airplanes: engines, conrol surfaces, inertia, gravity, weather. For business, the equivalents: resources, people, feelings, ideas and markets...

First posted way back here. [pardon the reprise, but we've been doing a little archive mining lately for a coming project and this seemed quite relevant to the "people far wiser" post just below, and to another coming, hopefully, this weekend.]