When I was a young actor in New York, I studied with Marian Rich, a renowned voice and speech teacher who had taught Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Geraldine Page, and countless other Broadway and Hollywood standouts. I was not one of her standouts by a long shot, but over a three-year period she taught me how to use my voice and put it to work as an expressive instrument for the stage.
My voice changed. It had more weight, more volume, more highs and lows, more fasts and slows, softs and louds. It had more intention.
Corporate Voice
Your company has a voice too. The question is, is it an intentional voice, or has it been left to chance?
In fact, does your company speak with one corporate voice? Are you speaking in unison? And, if you are, do you have a song?
Institutions have songs. Your business is an institution. Schools, universities, religions, soccer clubs–they all have songs that unify the members of the group and help recruit new members.
Sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it? Getting together and singing–and thereby creating a loyal group capable of reaching out and recruiting new members or customers.
Sounds to me like brand-building.
Vision, Mission, & Values
I can sing a few Princeton songs because my father sang them when we went on long trips in the car.
For instance, this is a Princeton football song:
Way down in old New Jersey
In a far-off jungle land
There lives a Princeton tiger
Who will eat right off your hand.
But when he gets in battle
With the other beasts of prey
He frightens them almost to death
In his peculiar way.
Bow, Wow, Wow, Wow, Wow
Here the Tiger roar
Bow, Wow, Wow, Wow, Wow
Rolling up the score
It goes on (I won’t bore you with the rest), but it occurs to me that singing together is not only fun, it’s a meaningful social and cultural activity.
So why do we not have corporate songs? We spout vision, mission, and values, but we don’t recite them together, as we do the Pledge of Allegiance. The written words that sit silently on a plaque in the lobby don’t get into our mouths, our lungs, our bodies. We don’t sing about our vision–about who we are and what we stand for.
We don’t sing about what we believe, what makes us different, and what we value. The Marines do. They sing about who they are and what they stand for:
From the halls of Montezuma
To the shores of Tripoli
We will fight our country’s battles
On the air and land and sea…
Create Meaning
Maybe our corporate radio and TV ads–our jingles–take the place of a corporate song, but those of us who spend so much time at work need a little lifting up, a little more meaning.
Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, said, “We spend too much time at work not to have it be meaningful.”
I can hear people saying, “It’s corny,” or, “Not everybody likes to sing,” but if the song is good and easy to sing, then it should be sung, not everyday, but on appropriate occasions.
Years ago I was lucky to be invited to Jump Associates, a strategy and innovation firm in California that creates new businesses and reinvents existing ones. They gather in circles at various times of the day to review what’s happening, but they also make it a practice, not to sing, but to create novel gestures.
One person gets in the middle of the circle and makes a gesture that, hopefully, has never been done before. It’s a way to stretch physically, emotionally, and maybe even intellectually.
Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions,” and to some extent, once a song is sung or a body stretched, it has more flexibility, both emotional and intellectual.
Songs are emotional; they are speech with wings. Is there a company out there with a song to sing? I would like to hear it.