Story, Poetry, and Metaphor: Subjective Solutions for Subjective Problems

摘要

Despite a few weak smiles, the senior managers' faces displayed mostly anxiety or aggression. Their jaws tensed and released. The CEO shook my hand a little too hard. I stood before 33 post-merger survivors surrounding a U-shaped table. When the CEO introduced me as "a young lady from North Carolina," I winced. This "merger of equals" was not going well. The CEO clearly saw the dilemma as "us versus them" and considered me (hired by the chairman of the board) one of "them." His sabotage of the process had begun in earnest. Military metaphors like "necessary losses" and "taking a bullet" had placed lines of demarcation and created an impasse. I needed a story to create some gray in their black-and-white world.