Don’t tell me a story

Why does every business want to tell us about themselves, all of a sudden?

Reading the business press these days, at least when you get away from the news and finance pages, is a strange experience. Rather than manufacturing and selling widgets, businesses today fancy themselves artists, storytellers specifically, ready to bore you senseless with their origin myths before you have even asked.

Worse still is the demi-monde of press releases and the “about us” sections of websites. Here, businesses work hard to convince you that they, too, have a story to tell.

This may seem strange. After all, I have written more than my fair share of historical stories, and, more to the point, I am someone who agrees that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

In fact, that is the point. The aphorism is generally attributed to philosopher George Santayana, and it is worth considering for a moment. Santayana was talking about genuine historical understanding: memory as a defence against catastrophe. Real stories require memory, have consequences as they play out, and have the possibility of things having gone differently. What companies call their story is the opposite: a smoothed account in which everything was inevitable and nothing was contingent. A hero’s journey, indeed.

There is a further irony, and it is no small one. 

Companies have taken to talking about storytelling at precisely the moment artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to destroy the economics of actual writing. Journalists, screenwriters, novelists: the people whose work genuinely rests on constructing a narrative for an audience are watching their livelihoods collapse. Businesses and government bodies are muscling in with, now easier to create than ever, yarns but what it amounts to is little more than an approximation of storytelling. It is also an act of appropriation: borrowing the cultural shape of a craft to fill the hole in our memories left by that craft’s very vacating, while, at the same time, further diminishing that craft.

Truthfully, there is no reason why any of us should be interested in some random story issued by Widget Co., especially when, in most cases, that story amounts to nothing more than ‘once upon a time we decided to get some money’. 

Let us try to take it seriously, though. Just for a moment, let’s think about storytelling in business, and try to get to the root of why it is such an odd idea.

Needless to say, not all of the company stories we remember are plainly good. We remember Apple’s for instance, albeit reduced to: garage startup, Jobs and Woz, Mac, Jobs out, high prices, decline, Jobs back, iMac, iPod, iPhone. In this version, NeXT Computer is entirely missing from the picture. NeXT, the computer company founded by Jobs after he was given his walking papers by Apple, developed the technologies that actually later came to save it.

Leaving this part out transforms Jobs into a kind of demiurge who saved Apple by sheer force of will. The truth of the matter is that NeXT had genuinely useful technologies such as the Mach operating system kernel, a modified version of BSD Unix, Adobe’s Display Postscript and object-oriented programming and these are what saved Apple, not Jobs turning up in jeans and a turtleneck sweater. Notably, none were actually developed by NeXT, but they were implemented in a usable product. A product nobody bought, admittedly, but it provided a solid technology foundation for a revived Apple post-1996.

The just-so story version of the tale not only obscures interesting potential counterfactuals: what if Apple had, as intended, purchased Be Inc. and its operating system BeOS? Would Apple have survived? Probably, but no Jobs means no iPod, no iPod means no iPhone – that much of the story is true. 

This does not matter for the reasons Apple might think it does, though. What matters is not Apple’s success or failure, or the apparent genius of any staff member or executive. What matters is that a fragile chain of events transformed the world.

Had the iPhone not arrived, Google’s phone OS Android would be keyboard-oriented and, suddenly, the entire world looks rather different. Would we still find politics as dominated by Facebook? Twitter? If these sites would have existed anyway, and Facebook did, would they have had the same cultural impact without the iPhone driving glass slabs into all of our hands?

Likewise, many people working in the technology sector remember Acorn as a melancholy tale: the British computer pioneer that flubbed the business and home markets but got a kind of revenge by developing, largely by accident, a CPU that now powers virtually every mobile device in the world.

The Acorn story, properly told, is actually interesting: a small company that stumbled into one of the most consequential engineering decisions of the late twentieth century because it could not afford anything better. That is a story. Widget Co.'s funding round is not.

The delusion is not confined to technology companies, which at least have the excuse of operating in an industry that occasionally does something remarkable, if less frequently than it once did. The chief executive of McDonald's now maintains a social media presence, earnestly sharing his thoughts, as though the world were holding its breath for the reflections of the man ‘responsible’ for the McRib. Further down the food chain, doubtless the managing director of an aggregates supplier in Offaly is busy on LinkedIn discussing his personal journey and the values that drive the business forward. The gravel, presumably, shares those values. 

Some will say that the purpose of a story is to make us think. Fair enough. Corporate storytelling makes me think I am being lied to, or, more precisely, that the entity in question is focusing on the wrong part of the production process.

The corporate stories that matter to us are stories that actually tell us something, and that is not always good news. Think about company ‘stories’ that jump to mind. Bhopal, for one. Enron. Bear Stearns. Anglo Irish Bank. Northern Rock. More recently, we might think of Wirecard. Somewhat less dramatically, Boeing and Tesla come to mind. Good stories.

But if there is some value, somewhere, in all this yarn-spinning it is not to be found in the spinning itself. Businesses that want us to hear their story better have a good one, and the only way to get those is by doing something.

The timing is worth noting, because corporate storytelling did not arrive as news from nowhere. It arrived alongside genuine uncertainty in the form of disrupted markets, technologically-driven cultural flux, and industries that no longer knew what they were for. When the future, or even the present, becomes illegible, narrative fills the gap. Just as for individuals, a story telling who a company is and where it came from can be used as a substitute for a convincing account of where it is going. It is, in other words, a displacement activity, and like most displacement activities it is most feverishly pursued by those with the most reason to avoid thinking about the actual problem.

– Jason Walsh, 9 April 2026.