Michael Moon: So I would like to talk about the most important corporate storytelling platform that exists today. And why we, my company, has organized a series of conferences around this particular subject.

At the end of the day, a corporation exists to find and keep customers satisfied. It then becomes imperative in that process to do it increasingly more efficiently. And if it finds and keeps customers and invests in the resources and practices that allow it to do it better, cheaper, faster, it will turn a reasonable and fair, if not outrageous levels of profit.

Now there is a big argument underway and I think it is really between the Darwinists and the non-Darwinists around why companies exist. The Darwinists suggest that companies exist to earn a profit. I repudiate this for the same reason I repudiate Darwin.

Let me just summarize evolutionary theory in the manner that you could explain it to your six year old. Evolutionary theory stipulates that if you were walking down the beach and you found a garbage sack, you know, garbage bag and you threw a handful of sand in there, or two. And you are walking down the beach and then you found a couple of tin cans and threw those in there, a couple of copper pennies. And a couple of pieces of plastic. And, and then you tied it up. Evolutionary theory stipulates that if I kick that bag long enough, hard enough and right enough, some billion years later, out will pop a crazed supercomputer, with 2,000 self-repairing, self-programming, self-learning software programs that never need maintenance.

Now that I have just described is the functioning of a hemoglobin. One of two or three thousand systems that constitute a human being. Evolutionary theory is dog that don't hunt. You cannot get high ordered systems out of lower systems. It is a mathematical proof. You cannot get higher ordered systems out of an atrophic state. So. what do I have? The problem in the scientific world is you cannot repudiate any model, you can only supplant it with a superior one.

Unfortunately we just don't have a superior one to supplant this otherwise broken one called evolutionary theory.

Interviewer: So what is the alternative for the non-evolutionist corporation. If it is not seeking profit?

Michael Moon: It is to serve and satisfy customers. Now, I stand with Peter Drucker on this. The corporation exists to find and keep customers. Period. It is amazing how many companies espouse that philosophy but run themselves in a Darwinistic fashion. This is one of the paradoxes that we live with right now and I don't have solution to it other than to say it exists.

I do know that as we move into a network economy, when customers don't get served and satisfied, they will form the network economy equivalent of a trade union. And they will extort hugh reparations from offending vendors.

Interviewer: And what would be an example of that in the marketplace.

Michael Moon: CEO has a 150,000 e-mails when he comes to work the next morning. 20,000 customers turn their pounder on the corporate website. 100,000 customers each send a 10 megabyte file to the company.You haven't seen anything yet. It is going to grind them up just like it ground up Indonesia.

The service companies get it. The product companies don't. The people in the service businesses really understand the importance of relationship and continuity over time. Really making sure that the person that you are serving has experience in value and satisfaction. And people in services, also recognize, especially personal services, whether it is retailing or whatever, that all it takes is just one genuinely unpleasant circumstance and whoosh, we have lost this person forever.

Unlike the car company or the software company, any color you want as long as it is black. F-you.

I am coming back then to what is the most important thing for senior executives to know about the network economy and where do they start. And so this represents, if you will, the convergence of digital storytelling and the central concerns of the CEO.

Now if you go to Andy Grove's book on high output at management, if I could net it out for you. The CEO basically does three things. Goes to meetings and listens to people. Nudges people. And tells stories. That is all the CEO is supposed to do. Go to meetings and listen. Nudge people and tell stories.

He says if you have got a CEO doing anything more than that, you have got a company in trouble because the coach will have gotten sucked into the game and no longer see the game board. So what kind of stories do CEOs tell? They tell stories principally to customers and investors, trade partners and staff. Four stakeholders. What is the principle mediated platform that the CEO has by which to tell a story? The Annual Report.

So let's then take these principles of digital storytelling, interactive relationships, collaborative fair exchanges of value, and let's put that into the context of an Annual Report, an interactive Annual Report. And then it becomes an interactive Annual Report and investor relations website.

Who are the six stakeholders that have immediate interest in an Annual Report? Employees, why? Well they have 401k money. Usually matching dollars for some of the larger firms. Employees and, more importantly, employee's spouses want to know how is our retirement program going here? And if they are not confident, guess what? They sell their stock.

And the CEO wants to have as many buy and hold investors. They want to have Warren Buffets that buy the company and never sell. Because when, and then when you miss your numbers or you have some bad news they just say, hey, it is White Flower Day. I am going to buy some more. So, employees, number one.

Number two, institutional investors. Three, press. Why? Well they influence everything. Four, self-sighted stock analysts. Five, trade partners. Why? Well it turns out that your balance sheet is oftentimes a key sales tool. Six, other executives. Other parts of your executive team.

And if you really did this right, the interactive Annual Report would actually articulate right down to a real time budgeting system by departments. Mail room, stock room etc.

Interviewer: But what we are also talking about is putting faces in the annual report. I just saw was this gorgeous piece from Price Waterhouse Coopers. A branding piece. It was just stories of individuals throughout the company. You know there are 135,000 employees. There are some really interesting people around the world that work for that company.They had gorgeous photographs and really good stories about these people's 'other' lives or how they approached their lives.

Michael Moon: Wouldn't you rather go in to a Price Waterhouse Coopers.com and see five, five or so streaming video quick time clips from that person in New Delhi. This is now personal story telling again. Where I am not buying Price Waterhouse, I am buying Sajiv in New Delhi. Who happens to have access to all of the resources, but I want him on my business. And I am not quite sure I know why. But I want him. And that is because storytelling uses rich mediums to convey all of that nonverbal communication that goes directly into the part of our brain by which we make these snap decisions. And then we have to go to our rational part to justify why we already want what we want.

If we can show, if we can get CEOs to grock, to really understand their Website and more specifically the interactive Annual Report as a platform for personal storytelling to customers, investors, trade partners, and staff, this then changes the entire context of personal story telling within the larger digital storytelling efforts within the corporation.

And I'll tell you, as soon as the CEO drinks that Koolade, everything changes.

Interviewer: We are seeing it happen. If we get the CEOs, but what about CIOs, the information officers, aren't they likely to latch on the importance of this kind of communication.