Outstanding Business Success, Creating a Rogue Monkey Culture
August 20, 2009
If you happened to read the “Plus Ultra“ story a few months ago, you might remember that a business man from Japan, wrote me to say that he’d had great success motivating his team by using that story. Wonderful!
When he mentioned a current problem he was having, I told him that I had another story he could use called, “The Rogue Monkey.“ He went ahead and read the story, then used it to motivate his team. But more than that, he actually created the beginning of a Rogue Monkey Culture. He used a story once again to lead his team to great success. This is an amazing example of the power of story to change corporate culture. Here is his letter:
Annie, I have had great success with the Rogue Monkey story. One of my American colleagues here in Tokyo, organized a brainstorming session with the other American partners to come up with ideas to improve the “operational effectiveness” of certain functions that we perform in the office.
He asked us to send him our ideas before the meeting so that he could summarize them and use them to jump start the discussion. Since this is an area where I have much experience, I prepared a Powerpoint summarizing my suggestions. But because I knew that some of my colleagues might react negatively to my suggestions, e.g, tried that before, won’t work here etc.,I began the presentation with the Rogue Monkey story.
It has a very positive impact on the group. They all liked the story. There was almost no criticism of my suggestions and most of the discussion was focused on how to implement them. In fact, the term “rogue monkey” was used as a collective term to describe my suggestions, as in “Ok, let’s take the top five priorities ouf of Rogue Monkey and focus on how to implement.”
In follow-up discussions after the meeting, the group used the term rogue monkey as a sort of shorthand to refer to the results of the meeting as in “What are the next steps for the rogue monkey?” which we all understand to mean – how are we moving forward on implementing the operational effectiveness?
Outside of the meeting, on matters unrelated to the brainstorming session, I have heard my colleagues say, “Hey you don’t sound much like a rogue monkey”, meaning have an open mind. I heard one person refer to another’s attitude by saying, “I think he was sprayed with water once to often,” meaning that he does not want to take any chances.
So the term has entered our corporate culture with the American partner group.
So thank you Annie for the story. It worked for me!
Annie’s note: Wonderful example of the power of story.
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