Recently, a friend described how companies often rely on a handful of stories to define their culture. He also noted how the tales grow like fishing stories. He cited Kinko's lore about the first shop, which was so small we had to wheel the copier onto the sidewalk to do business. He said every time he heard the story, the shop got a little smaller, and he expected to hear one day that I opened the first Kinko's in a refrigerator box and had to produce my own electricity with a hand-cranked generator.

I had to laugh, because I've heard lots of stories about the company that bear little resemblance to the events I recall.  But if true stories evolved into myth over time, they did so to better communicate the culture's core values. Like any other society, a company retells certain stories to indoctrinate new members in the values of the culture.

Kinko's had creation myths, like the one mentioned above. We had hero myths, which included the story of store manager Frank Perez taking a very public stand against corporate mandates. We had sacred place myths, wherein executives bragged about their time spent in "the field." And we had our flood myth, about recreating the business after the Basic Books lawsuit halted production of our primary product.

The creation myth expressed our belief in entrepreneurialism, the hero myth our support of free speech, the field stories our veneration of the frontline coworker, and the flood myth our adaptability and openness to new ideas.  And the stories provided a common language for discussing these issues. Naturally, a company that promotes from within has an easier time holding onto its stories, but also risks becoming too insular and arrogant. We need new stories, but it's a delicate task to weave them into an existing culture.

Mergers and other business takeovers don't always fail, but often fail to live up to their potential. New leaders have their own stories to share, or, lacking that, generic stories from popular business books. If the stories of conjoined organizations do not express complementary values, the combined entity produces friction rather than synergy.

When Clayton Dubilier and Rice took over Kinko's, their expertise was in fixing failing companies, so their first impulse was to reform the Kinko's "free-wheeling" culture. I don't think they understood the company's values at all, or how those values created our success. It's one thing to buy a failing business and turn it around; in those cases one hopes to replace an inferior culture with a superior one. But when one buys a successful business, how do we avoid turning it around?

I think a successful merger or transfer of power requires a lot more anthropology and a lot less imperialism. We need to hear coworkers' stories to understand their deepest, sometimes un-articulated values, because their values drive the application of their talents. And those individual talents drive the company.