Guillaume Wiatr  
I come from a tradition and a bit in a business consulting school that completely, you know, ignored love it was, it would be unthinkable when I started in the big firms in the 90s like it would have brought love people would have looked at you with very weird, like you'd almost been fired if you kept coming back with this topic. So I'm I come from this tradition. And I think it took me a good, you know, decade or two to really reconcile the party and understand that there is absolutely a possibility and actually should come first.

Jeff Ma  
Hello, and welcome to love as a business strategy, a podcast that brings humanity to the workplace. We're here to talk about business. We want to tackle topics that most business leaders shy away from we believe that humanity and love should be at the center of every successful business. I'm your host, Jeff Ma. And as always, I'm here to have conversations and hear stories about how real people and real businesses might operate in the real world. My guest today is Guillaume Wiatr - and Guillaume Wiatr is the creator of strategic narrative, the business strategy consulting and coaching methodology for entrepreneurial leaders of professional services firms. Through his company meta Helm, he steers an expert. He steers experts, CEOs and leadership teams to build a successful business they also love by growing narrative power, the leadership ability to defy the normal when the normal is wrong. A former big firm strategist Guillaume has also founded for b2b Ventures. His expertise is sought by clients ranging from solopreneurs to global organizations like Microsoft, Spencer, Stewart, AIG, symrise, and the Gates Foundation. Guillaume loves teaching and mentoring entrepreneurs at startup incubators, and at the University of Washington's Master of Science in entrepreneurship, which is ranked number three in the US. And so I'm very happy and very excited to welcome Guillaume to the show. How are you today?

Guillaume Wiatr  
Jeff, I'm doing very well, thank you so much for asking. I had a great start of the day. And I love being here.

Jeff Ma  
What makes a great start of the day for you, I think we're not when I asked, How are you doing, there's always the, I'm good. And it's very generic. Sounds like you're having a genuinely good day what happened,

Guillaume Wiatr  
I naturally wake up at 440 or 50. With without an alarm clock, sorry, five 545 50 without an alarm clock.

Jeff Ma  
Still Still early, but

Guillaume Wiatr  
you know, early, and then am an early bird , then my energy and may may, you know, immediately is high. So just a quick cup of coffee and I put my running shoes on and I go for a walk slash run, I live at the top of the hill. So what goes down, must go back up. And I run that hill for an hour. And I do this five to six days a week and just sets me up for a great day every time.

Jeff Ma  
So amazing. Well, I can't do any of that. I need my alarm. And I definitely don't leave the house until midday. But that is very impressive. And I

Guillaume Wiatr  
think it's okay. And here. Let's just jump right into the topic of narrative. There is this narrative about morning routines and how they have to happen and all that. And I'm listening to all of these people who prescribe those routines. And I'm like, There's no way I can do that. And my belief is that everybody should be able to choose the routine they want. And they like there is no right or wrong way to do it.

Jeff Ma  
I love that instant connection before we even started. And that's, that's amazing. We're going to dive into that. And as is my custom, I first want to ask you, about you and I want to specifically know what your passion is, and how you came to find that passion.

Guillaume Wiatr  
My passion is to connect the traditionally ignore disciplines in the business world to business. So that's a broad broad topic here. But I am an artist, I am a business person. I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a dad and I see connections with all of those areas, if you will, and I believe that run successful businesses. What when you make these connections, you're much likely much more likely to succeed to create something of value that has impact and that fulfills your life. So that's my overall My passion in life, I'm able to say this today, after 50 years on this planet, because I looked back, I'm like, oh, that's what I'm here to do. But in the beginning, that was absolutely not clear to me. Like, why is it that I'm curious like that? Why is it that I'm changing left and right, there is a common thread, which is entrepreneurship and consulting. I was very influenced by two cultures, as I grew up in France, in Normandy. on my mom's side, we've got a series of entrepreneurs, small businesses, mainly factories for apparel, accessories, buttons, zippers, and things like that. And on my dad's side, it's all about medicine. He's a doctor, he's a surgeon. And so I've always been influenced by these  two things. No one in my, in my except for my mom, no one in my family has a boss or employee, they all run their businesses. So I come from that womb, cultural womb. And I don't seem to be able to get out of it, because I like it. And so, so I was fortunate enough to be raised by parents who gave me enormous generous access to anything that sparked my curiosity, are at travel connections of all sorts. And so I was able to at a young age, you know, just fuel my life with all sorts of discoveries, engineering, even. And I've been a consultant for 27 years, I started at age 21, as I was a student, this is what I want, I instantly fell in love with that, that profession. That's what I want you to do i ebb and flow a little bit. I you know, this is being a consultant life, lifelong consult is not a straight line. It's very, you know, I had ups and downs and I did different things left and right. For instance, I went back to conservatory, and got a degree in jazz piano at age 31. But I was still consulting. So that's, I guess, now that I maybe listen to myself a little bit. Thanks for your question. My passion is life is curiosity, I guess. But through business and entrepreneurship.

Jeff Ma  
I believe that curiosity as a passion is one of the very best to have, I think it opens up, it keeps all possibilities open. And I love that. It's cool. So I want to talk obviously, today about narratives. And I think as you you know, you have created strategic narrative. But as a word narrative can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. So maybe you could start us off by defining narrative, as you understand it, and maybe helping us kind of start that journey. Yeah,

Guillaume Wiatr  
yeah, that's a great place to start. Jeff. So we, if you open it, let's start there. If you open a dictionary and look for the definition of narrative, you'll find a definition that is very close to what a story is. And that's the kind of the mainstream, you know, use of that word. It's basically at a very, very basic level at an atomic level. It's something that happens to someone, right? And the human, actually, our species, or current species is natural storytellers. We're natural storytellers. And the reason why I say this is because it's been proven by historian and researchers that we managed to survive other species, thanks to our ability to tell stories. And very importantly, thanks to our ability to tell stories to ourself, among themselves, but individually to ourself. And what comes with storytelling is the possibility to look at reality and express it in many different ways. So if you and I look at the same thing, say, a glass half empty or half full, you may choose to tell that story from two different perspective, two different narratives. One being, hey, the glass is half full. It's awesome. I have water, it's positive. And the other was like, Oh, the glass is half empty. I already drank all that I'm running out of water. I'm straight. I'm stretching the narrative here. But basically, the same story can be told here I just give you two different examples, but can be told 100 or 1000, or a million ways different. And what's very important to understand is that difference between story and narratives. It's a difference that is very well known and accepted in fields like social justice, religion, politics. Interestingly, less in Business, we're still at an early stage in our use of business storytelling. And one way to think about storytelling that I find outdated, to me is kind of dead is to think of storytelling as just this marketing technique that tricks people into hooking them to some kind of story that will help you sell more stuff. Right? So but like in any discipline, you know, you start off by doing by trying a bunch of stuff, and some is good, some is not good. Like, if you like music, the use of our synthesizer in the 80s music, there's some awesome stuff, and there's some terrible stuff. And the same goes for storytelling in business. So a narrative is something that think of it as a system of stories, think seek, think of something as, as the system that is open ended, versus a story is closed ended. And typically, if you go see a good movie, there is a great story. There is a myth, the beginning, there's a middle, probably your problem. And there's an end in in Hollywood, the the end is usually happy in French cinema, there is no end sometimes, but that's a different conversation. And so narratives are are these things that are just constantly changing, constantly moving their big systems. Think about the narrative about, as I said before the narrative about society right now the narrative about diversity and inclusion, say, you know, we may interpret what is going on and that reality from many, many different angles. So if you start with that core definition of what a narrative is, hopefully you start seeing what the possibilities might be way, way, way, way beyond just hooking people with a great marketing hook and selling them stuff. In a narrative enables you to gain the power to change the power to confirm the status quo, evolve things and decide that you're going to go another route. So when you are an entrepreneur, when you're running a service organization, and you see that something is not, right, you get to change that narrative if you want. And if you can, last the power of narrative,

Jeff Ma  
what you shared is really, really resonating with me. And I feel like in my mind, it's it's connecting and morphing along with some of the things that I typically love to talk about. And one of those is basically our mindsets. Yep. And and it sounds like what you're saying is that crafting your narrative is it keeping it open ended, I take it akin to having a growth mindset and having a mindset that's open to changing our belief systems really kind of what we're ingrained, and what we already understand, and chat being open to challenging those is that the same thing in my close or what's what's the difference there, 

Guillaume Wiatr  
you're spot on for one particular layer. So you went to the to the mindset layer. And it's interesting, because when I have other conversations, most people will gravitate towards the language side of a narrative. And there's a third side that we'll talk about in just a moment. But you're spot on a narrative happens first in your head. And that's why I say that, you know, we're fortunate to have this cognitive ability as a species, because when confronted to with hardship, or or wars or things like that, we can decide if we want to, you know, fight and survive. And in our mind, if we tell the right story, we're more likely to succeed, that's an or, or if we are starving. Or if we feel like we're missing something, we can tell ourself, this narrative about abundance, and now being a growth in your growth mindset. So see, there is a so you're spot on. The second layer is language. You know, that's we just talked about what I call the inner narrative, and we can decide to reframe it to get more growth minded. But then we, we have this fabulous thing that is our language. And you know, we can talk we can draw, we can, we can express ourselves in so many ways we can and we're a species that is smart to have invented all sorts of instruments, we can play music, we can take photography, we can. So we have this ability to you know, take it from within to the outside and that's when we get to influence people. So now we can bring other people into our narratives. So that's the second, the second facet. The third layer that I was just announced the minute ago, is with the way we behave many, many, many times almost all of the time, the narrative is there without us thinking anything or saying anything, if you, if you go into a business meeting, or you go, you go, you go to a lawyer's office, right, I'm going to take that example. So traditionally, lawyers are trained to set their offices in a specific way, or I'll take a doctor's office, because I'll take my dad's example, in my doctor's office, you would come in, and first you don't talk to the doctor directly, you have to wait and ensure that the reception and then somewhere probably in the office in the wait room, you might see a diploma hung on the wall. And the way that this room is set up, just screams, expertise, screams a frame screams a narrative that invites you to maybe shows, you know, pay some respect to that process. And there's all sorts of codes. So that's the, that's the unspoken, and in our, in our companies. And in our organizations. It's, it's our processes, our systems. It's the way it's our it's our, you know, sometimes the colors, we choose the brand identity. I mean, although although this is this, we're getting a little bit to the expression side of narrative. So three things to summarize, mindset, language, and processes. These are the three levers with which you can craft a better narrative.

Jeff Ma  
The dots are super connecting right now. It's incredible to hear good frame it this way. Because I'll tell you, because in love as a business strategy and our framework and everything, we route everything in behavior, right? Yeah. So when we, when we talk about what's the difference to make in a workplace, what's the change to impact? It always comes from a behavior. And we defined behavior as having elements of mindset, our attitudes and our communication, which is your link essentially, similar. And you know, it's not one to one, but very, very much like following what you're saying, I'm really excited to hear you frame it this way. Because one of the reasons I continue to do this show, actually, is to continue seeing the same elements being interpreted and communicated in different ways in your particular perspective is super interesting to me. I have to ask,

Guillaume Wiatr  
can I just say, I'm sorry to interrupt you. But when I read your book, I went, you know, I came across that framework that you have, and I'm like, Yeah, this is it. They did exactly that they changed the narrative for their firm. I

Jeff Ma  
love it. Yeah, this is this is exciting to me. And I guess I want to the next place my mind goes is wondering, in your strategic narrative and your methodology? What is the ask, I guess what is now that we understand there's this mindset, language and process elements? What what is the right way? Or the best way to go about what is the change you're trying to impact? And how do people do it?

Guillaume Wiatr  
So I serve first of all, I want to make sure the context is clear. I serve b2b organizations, and mostly service b2b organizations. So consultants, coaches, and marketing agencies, some tech organizations that have a service components to it. So what are they trying to do? They're trying to, they're trying to build businesses that grow successfully. And more and more, I'm seeing people interested in having a business that also has a social impact. And that's more for them for the founders to they're trying to, you know, generate demand, or though I don't believe you can generate them, and you can capture it. But that's the general term. So so the ask is to look at their organizations from an holistic point of view, not just siloed, the observation of the narrative, most people will think that the narrative is more is a marketing stuff. It's like, oh, yeah, you want to, oh, strategic? No, that must be marketing thing. That's PR ads, and so on. The ask is to look at beyond this, like, including you as a leader. So one of the I have four, four main disciplines in that in that approach, and one of them I call visionary leadership. So the ask is to be open minded enough to again, think about it as a system. That's number one. Number two, The ask is to first be curious, and to step back for a moment, and observe what is happening between the dots or the lines or the bullet points, right, what is not necessarily said. And to base so it's data gathering. So and I help with that when I work with some of my clients, I also because I'm, I'm a, I'm obviously an outsider, I come with a fresh perspective, I help with that. But I teach people how to be more curious. And the third one, the third ask is to be willing to take the risk, and at least be authentic in choosing to take the risk to, to make a change, wherever that might be. So in the four, I talk to you about one of the disciplines, visionary leadership, there's three others another one, I called meaningful marketing, like, how do you help your business? Find its relevance in the world? That's my definition of Mike of marketing, so aligning with ideal clients. Then the next one is how do you operate from a place of purpose, like intentionally building a team that has, you know, does this line on purpose and mission in this, and the fourth one is authentic selling, and replacing the art of selling is the noble art of serving your clients for that specific purpose that I just talked about? So that's the ask right there, it sounds very, I mean, I, finally I'm able to make it hopefully sound simple. But it's not easy. It's not easy, you have to recognize this is not for everyone. This is for people who are mostly interested in in change. So I call them change makers. Whether that changes personal, societal, environmental, or just like me take the just back, or for the clients, like impacting, you know, who they serve. And I think there is a, an interesting thing happening these days is the kind of the confusion between having an impact and serving people. I mean, we all get the excited about this possibility now to have businesses that will probably change the planet or disrupt market and so on, it's really bust. Hermie is, you know, there's a lot of buzz there. But I think starting with something more humble, and say, If I can just change somebody's world, I will have an impact is that so that's, that's maybe a another nuance in my ask.

Jeff Ma  
That's great. And, you know, obviously, this is love as a business strategy. So my natural kind of next line of questioning is moving into, into love. And I think, I think there's some narratives around love itself, as a concept. And as a word that, you know, everybody, if I just say the word love with no contexts, you know, there's already a number of different perspectives and mindsets around how people perceive that how people process and really interact with that concept. I'm curious what your narrative around love is, and also, where that fits within the strategic narrative system?

Guillaume Wiatr  
It's a powerful question, because I think that I'm finally finally starting to get an answer to this question for myself. But I come from a tradition and a bit in a business consulting school that completely ignored love. It was, it would be unthinkable when I started in the big firms in the 90s. Like it would have brought love people would have looked at you with very weird, like, you'd almost been fired if you kept coming back with this topic. So I'm, I come from this tradition. And I think it took me a good, you know, decade or two to really reconcile the party and understand that there is absolutely a possibility and actually should come first, in everything that you do. The first time I sensed this possibility with around 2001, I was working on a large business project with a big corporation. And they brought me on to fix a technical problem. And I noticed something I didn't say love at the time, but I could tell in the first kickoff 30 minutes meeting where I was, I was actually leading this meeting. There's no humanity. It's just like, it's almost like everybody had left their humanity at the door. And I derailed my own agenda, and I asked if they they were okay to take a piece of paper and draw the project that was stuck. They they're a little shocked like What's What is he trying You noticed when he did some kind of shrink? Or does he have a crystal ball, I could, I could read this in their eyes, they did it. And that that immediately brought that humanity back to the conversation. So today in strategic narrative love is essential is one of the core values. And whenever I feel fear, or I send stress, when I work on a client project, or I interact with my, my client during like a coaching session or with a group, if I feel this, I'm like, What could I do? What can I do to bring love to this conversation, and I have something on here on my desk, and it's, it's a rose gemstone. And that stone was given to one of our friends for a wedding. And he gave us get this as a gift telling us that everybody in the wedding had touched that stone with loving thoughts. And I always have it on my desk, because whenever I feel this, I grabbed that stone. And it's immediately like I'm connected to love. And like, Okay, what what is it I could do so very practically, I could, you know, slow down and listen more and pay attention and empathize more, and just, you know, take people where they are. So, oh, my gosh, this is a huge topic. Jeff, do you realize? I mean, obviously, you know, this is a very powerful question. Thanks for for asking. Of course,

Jeff Ma  
I mean, you can't come on love as a business strategy, avoid the word. But I think, to kind of build on top of that, you know, one of the challenges that I face, in speaking to people about love is that when we start with the business first or even some layers that feel deeper, just like leadership, and teams, interpersonal relationships, all these things, all these things connected to love, I find that what I'm kind of connecting today with you is that we don't always, we're not always successful in addressing the individuals narrative, their own belief systems, around what love really is, before we start tackling the bigger problems. And sometimes it's because we say love, we tried to find it. But this person, their life experience, their culture, has told them that love is soft and love, it means people walk all over you that love includes abusive relationships, toxic relationships, love does, what does love look like to them. And I think it's so important, as I think of narratives, in the way you defined is to to really be intentional for each person to have the space to really craft and shape their own narrative around love not to match mind, per se. But to take the time to really think about what a loving environment really means to them to what showing love really looks like and feels like these things being established and clear and being able to have the conversation around that would be so powerful if we treat it as this narrative to first align around share through our mindset through our language in our in our process and behaviors. I really, I'm really excited actually to really connect those those concepts for myself and for others.

Guillaume Wiatr  
You were hired, let me down. But Joke aside, the what came to mind when you were describing this opportunity is the possibility to give everyone's space and safe space to define what love you know, personally and using their language. And so there is you know, there's a famous book about the languages of love. And there's that I read this book maybe a year or two ago. So recently, I think it was written a long time ago, and once again reminded me that we all have different ways to express who we are and in love in different ways. So I grew up in a family where love meant money, hard work, abundant material abundance, not necessarily respecting your individual choices. I was told at a very young age that my job my job ideas, my for my future. were limited to maybe a couple and that's something that I was kind of traumatized for a while because I could because I disagreed and I I had no away, I didn't know how to express my disagreement. And I kept internalizing this, and finding myself in difficult situation, early stages of my career because I was making choices that were not congruent with what I thought would be lovable for my life, if I can say that. So. So I wish there were more spaces where is and I think, and that's what I love about the your podcast, and the work that you guys did, is creating that space, you know, look, even 30 minutes here on your podcast. And we're, we're probably impacting other other folks to rethink, too. And we're giving people an opportunity to also answer these questions if they wish, just like you did for me.

Jeff Ma  
I appreciate that. And, like, you know, one of the things I'm very passionate about, consistently in my own life, and for others, by extension is around this idea of our mindsets. But also, more importantly, those belief systems that drive so many of the things that that it's like a hidden is the hidden driver behind so many of our decisions and our behaviors and our actions. Because whether it's something as I'll just throw a bad example out, but you know, like, if you grew up in certain cultures, where women are supposed to behave a certain way, or a man has to be a man, you have to do certain things, and certain jobs are better than others and all these core belief systems in place, well, one of the things I'm very passionate about is finding the ability to, to challenge these not not because they're wrong, inherently. But to better understand where they come from, and to find our truth inside of them. They're not they're not, we build them for ourselves, because they're important for us to survive in the world for us to have what I now understand to be narrative around, right and wrong, good and bad, these things. But I also think that they can be somewhat of a prison, when we don't have the ability to health in healthy ways, challenge them and look at them in different ways and say, you know, what, maybe this thing I believe my entire life is not only not true for me, but definitely not true for others. Right? It's definitely not a universal fact. And, and when I have this conversation around narrative with you, I'm, I'm feeling better equipped to have those conversations framing it this way, because I think it's such a great way to really bring that big, more difficult concept down to something that I think people relate to more regularly. Well, you

Guillaume Wiatr  
just surfaced another aspect of a narrative, which is, narratives are very, they're essential to our survival. They're, they become almost like, they're automatic, you know, one of the narratives we have about, you know, about car safety, for instance, is, what's the first thing you do when you you have a car you drive? First of all, don't worry, buckle up, buckle up, right. Okay, so that wasn't the case in before 1959 or 1960, you would not buckle up, because people would believe that if you if you buckled up, and you had a car crash, you would be trapped in the car, and you couldn't avoid the, you know, the fire. And we changed that narrative. And now it's automatic. Like, it's like, even your car reminds you but most of the time, you don't have to be reminded you just you just do it. So that's, that's a positive that that's a helpful narrative. So narratives sometimes are helpful, and then become toxic. Because, you know, things change. And so what you're referring to is this ability of a narrative to evolve and, or stay where it is, and us evolving, filling that gap. Right. So that's exactly what happened with your organization a long time ago. You felt like okay, no, this is the narrative we created. We started this firm is, we've outgrown it, we're actually now making more damage then. And we should we have to completely rethink this. And so that's, that's the same at the personal level, team level. Yeah, we could go on like this for them.

Jeff Ma  
We could go on, but we're out of time. And people ready. Yeah. And people keep telling me 30 minute episodes of the sweetspot. So yeah, I believe  too. We are at 34 minutes or something, but give them I really want to appreciate you for taking the time today. This has been a great conversation and really helpful for me, but I know it'll it'll help change. I know it's already started the change of some people's narratives or at least how they view some of their narratives that they're that are listening. So it's very valuable. I appreciate it.

Guillaume Wiatr  
My pleasure, Jeff, my pleasure if it could help you already, you know, if you felt that something flipped, or the flip was confirmed in your case, Jeff, then I think we've achieved our mission. Absolutely.

Jeff Ma  
So thank you to . Thank you to all the listeners and thank you to everyone who's supported us and encouraged us along the way. Please continue to check out our book follow us on social media, all those great things that I will always continue to ask you to do an unashamedly and do subscribe rate, the podcast, please rate. Sorry, review, leave a review for the book on Amazon. I always forget to include that one because those really help get the word out and we're very passionate about all this. So with that, thank you very much. We will see everybody next week. Hope you have a good one.