The Family Legend
In 1863 a play in Sicilian dialect was put on in Palermo: I mafiusi di la Vicaria, The Mafiosi of the Vicaria, the Vicaria being the city prison. The public adored it. Historians believe it was this play that spread the word “mafiosi” across Italy in its present sense. Before it, in Palermo speech, the word simply meant a handsome, bold, self-assured man.
But what’s more interesting is the story the play told. The prisoners in it live by their own law; they have a chief, an initiation ritual, talk of respect and humility. The chief forbids his men to rob defenceless inmates. After the murder of a prisoner who talked to a policeman, he prays on his knees for forgiveness. At the end he leaves the gang and joins a workers’ mutual aid society. The historian John Dickie calls this the first version of the myth of the good Mafia, the one that respects honour and protects the weak. And he adds that the ending has nothing whatever to do with reality. A mafioso in a workers’ mutual aid society is a fox joining a society for the protection of hens.
The myth has lived for a hundred and fifty years. It has outlived everything the courts have learned about us. Courts write stories too; their endings are just duller. That’s what a well-told story is.
Why People Need a Story
People don’t remember lists. They remember stories: who wanted what, what stood in his way, what he did and how it ended. The figures about your Business will be forgotten by evening. The story of how it began will be retold for years, and every retelling will bring a new man to your door.
Look at what the play did. It gave the audience a hero they wanted to sympathise with, and a conflict they recognised from their own lives: the law outside is unjust, and your own people stick together. The audience left the theatre feeling they’d understood something important. They’d been sold not a fact but a meaning.
Your Business needs a story too. Not an invented one, a true one, told so that it has a person, an obstacle and a way out. Why you started. Which of the client’s troubles you solve. What you did once when everything went wrong. Don Vincenzo liked to tell new hotels how, in the first winter, the laundry would have burned down if a presser hadn’t raised the alarm, and how for a year afterwards he paid her double wages. The story was true. The managers remembered it better than they remembered our prices.
A Story with a Hook Inside
And still, a good story is dangerous if there’s nothing behind it. The economist Gambetta noticed something about Mafia reputation that every businessman should know.
A good name saves on production. A good name helps a car factory sell cars, but the cars still have to be made. For those who sell protection, according to Gambetta, reputation and product very nearly coincide: the stronger the name, the less often it has to be proved by deeds. Hence the temptation to live off the name without backing it up. And Gambetta gives examples. He cites researchers who believe that since Prohibition the American families lived largely on their names, while in fact they were growing weaker. In 1990 The New York Times reported the words of the head of a New York organised-crime task force: a high-ranking turncoat had complained to him bitterly that his family could no longer find reliable hands among its own and was hiring outsiders. And Tommaso Buscetta admitted that the myth of Buscetta the cruel and ruthless boss was largely an accident: his restraint in prison had been taken for power.
A name without deeds holds up until somebody checks it. And there’s a second consequence: since a name is so valuable, people start to fake it. If people are ready to pay for a name, there’ll be those who want to go by it. So the real ones are forced to invent signs that are hard to fake, and the impostors to copy those signs. In your office the same thing happens with any brand that’s worth something.
The conclusion is simple. Let your story be a truth that can be checked. Then a fake can’t frighten you: the client will come, check and see the difference.
A Man’s Name and the Family’s Name
Gambetta noticed one more thing. In Sicily a family is usually called by the name of the man who runs it. Buscetta explained to the judges that the Inzerillo family exists but goes by another name, because its head is now someone else. Another witness, Salvatore Contorno, could not list the names of the families for the court without naming people; if you don’t name the man, he told them, more or less, we won’t understand each other. The name of a Family there is the name of the living Don. The Don dies, the name dies.
But in New York five families have kept their names, though they’ve long been run neither by their founders nor by their sons: Bonanno, Gambino, Genovese, Colombo, Lucchese. Gambetta compares those names with Ferrari and Jaguar. Their advertising, as he puts it, was done for them by the newspapers and the police, who never meant to.
For a businessman the main question here is about inheritance. If your whole reputation rests on your face, the Business will die with you, or on the day you fall ill. If the reputation rests on the name of the Business, on rules that all your people keep, it will outlive you. Don Vincenzo understood this late, but he understood it. In his last years he made no promise in his own name. He would say: “The laundry promises.” And he saw to it that the laundry delivered, even when he himself was out of town.
A Fight over a Name
Not everyone likes a good story. Nor should they. In 1971, when Coppola and the producer Albert S. Ruddy were getting ready to shoot The Godfather, the Italian-American Civil Rights League, headed by Joseph Colombo, demanded that the words “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra” be cut from the script. Coppola later said the word “Mafia” appeared in the script only twice. Ruddy went for talks, met Colombo and the League’s delegates, and agreed. The words were replaced, the film lost nothing, and in the end the League backed the picture. A fight that could have stopped the shoot ended in a deal, and people were talking about the film before it even opened.
You’re unlikely to have to negotiate with Colombo. But the lesson is worth remembering. If you have a position, there’ll be people who disagree with it. That’s normal. A business everyone likes is usually a business nobody needs. A fight draws attention and gathers around you the people who think as you do. Only fight over what you believe in, not for the noise. We’ve already discussed noise, with Giuliano as the example.
What Reputation Is
To finish, I’ll be blunt. Reputation isn’t the story you tell. It’s the story they tell about you when you’re not in the room. You can influence it in only one way: every time, do what you promised, and say only those things about yourself that will stand up to checking.
A legend is good as long as every new client confirms it. When it stops being confirmed, it becomes what the ending of that 1863 play became: a pretty invention that historians smile at later.