Hearts & Minds: CEO storytelling is just what the doctor ordered

What makes a brand unique, what makes a CEO? It’s too easy to allow everything to blend and blur into one indistinct mass. Too often, companies and their bosses forget their identity, what sets them apart.

In the process, they ditch their story, how they started and how excited they were to take those first tentative steps. At times like these as well, they dwell on problems, discussing difficulties. That defining spark is lost. That’s as true of nations – we focus on the bad, ignoring the good.

So, it is refreshing to see Ije Nwokorie, an American, relaying to analysts how he came to be new CEO of iconic British label, Dr. Martens.

Of course, he was presenting figures but he was also personal. He explained why the job mattered to him; and the rest was more authentic and arresting for it.

‘I came to Britain nearly 30 years ago from New York City. The country in the mid-90s inspired me. It was a time of political change and cultural energy - from pop to high art. But what intrigued me most was the uniqueness of British business. British brands combined math and magic: commercially strong, globally competitive, yet distinctly human.’

Said Nwokorie: ‘Think of Virgin Atlantic serving ice cream in the sky, First Direct hiring cabbies and hairdressers because they knew how to talk to people, and a mobile phone company called Orange that boldly declared, "The future’s bright." These companies were successful, not despite their humanity - but because of it.’

To those Brits reading this, we still have it. Soft power is something the UK does well and can still do well, if it is allowed to.

Nwokorie ‘pursued a career at the intersection of math and magic’. He ran the brand consultancy Wolff Olins. Then came senior roles at Apple, thinking ‘how to delight consumers every day’.   

Finally, Dr. Martens. ‘This is a brand that I have adored since I bought my first pair of 1460 boots from a street trader in Harlem in 1992 when I was a student in New York’. He owed it to his younger self ‘to get involved in a business with whose products I’ve had a long love affair’. 

Dr. Martens ‘embodies that same British alchemy that caught my attention way back in the 90s.’ The audience cannot have failed to get him, and why.

CEOs and comms advisors: more of the same, please.

Chris Blackhurst is one of the UK’s foremost business journalists. He was previously Editor of The Independent and City Editor of the Evening Standard.