10 Putting Brevity to Work: Grainger and the Al and Betty Story
Long story, short. W. W. Grainger dared to be different by deciding to map, tell, talk, and show its five-year vision as a strategic narrative all employees could embrace.
One of the most compelling cases that combines mapping, telling, talking, and showing is how W. W. Grainger, a Fortune 500 industrial distributor headquartered in suburban Chicago, turned a complicated strategy into a simple story.
When I met with Grainger’s head of strategic planning, John Borta, over coffee, I told him his company could use a narrative to simplify its complex business strategies.
“A lightbulb immediately went off for me when we started talking about how our senior leadership team could use Narrative Mapping to synthesize our five-year strategic vision,” John said. “The thought of a strategic narrative was appealing, because it might help us speak to a broader base of managers and employees.”

Grainger had spent the two prior years extensively studying market dynamics, key customer considerations, and how the company could tackle a much larger opportunity.
“We had literally mounds of research, insights, data, and recommendations that were rolled into lengthy presentations and detailed documentation,” Borta told me. “It was the right plan, but we were really struggling to find a simpler way of talking about the vision without losing everyone in the process. The stakes were high.”
So John had me come to a senior leadership team meeting at Grainger where the top dozen leaders of the U.S. organization were talking about finalizing and rolling out their five-year strategic vision. I led them in building a Narrative Map to explain the plan as a clear, concise, and compelling story.
During the 4-hour mapping session, I asked them questions about their planning process, the market, and key insights.
“Who are your customers?” I asked. T
he response: “We really think we have two different customers: a janitor and a finance person.”
I drew two columns with stick figures on the whiteboard.
“Okay, so let’s call the janitor customer A and the accountant customer B to make it easier,” I said. But rather than call them A and B, I named them Al and Betty. It made it simpler and more personal.
The attendees quickly rattled off the attributes of each customer type, and I jotted the descriptions under two columns.
We discussed what mattered to these two customers and how they were different.
“Al is a janitor who would buy products from Grainger, the Grainger catalog, the branches, and online. He has a ton of work to do and is worried about saving time when he needs a critical part or support service—like a screw, lightbulb, pump, or specialty item to keep the facility up and running and safe.”
Words such as time, convenience, and quality appeared under Al’s list.
“Betty is more of an accountant or finance person. She creates and approves purchase orders. She lives in a spreadsheet and runs the budget,” they told me. “She works in the back office and cares about saving the company money.”
We write value and price beneath Betty.
Over the next few hours, the senior leadership team developed a story around Al and Betty to explain their five-year strategic vision. When they finished mapping the narrative on a large whiteboard, their strategic vision was logically outlined in a simple and concise way.
“Everyone was on the same page, and they were excited to share the story,” John told me.
Rolling the story out to the top 200 managers was the first challenge. The next was to explain it simply to that group.
The leadership team opted to abandon the traditional PowerPoint approach. Instead, it decided to draw pictures and have a conversation with the managers.
Grainger’s president, Mike Pulick, stood up in front of the 200 managers and said: “We have a story that we want to share with you that’s challenging and exciting. It explains what really matters to our customers and how we’re going to help them.”
“Let’s start with what’s at the heart of our strategy.” With that, Pulick took out a blank sheet of paper and placed it in an old-school document projector, like the one you might have seen in a high school biology class. He used a marker to draw a circle, which was the focal point of the Narrative Map. Inside it he drew a picture of a first-place ribbon: the point of it all—to be the customer’s first choice.

He handed the marker to one of his team members, who drew the next picture and the next part of the map. And so on. There were pictures of a clock and money, stick figures of Al and Betty, and other basic images. This was how they revealed their five-year strategic vision.
“People were transfixed,” Borta recalled. “The leadership team never spoke so clearly and simply before. It was powerful and held the audience’s attention for 40 minutes. And we didn’t use one slide.”
Then, as a challenge, Mike grabbed another blank piece of paper and a marker and placed them under the lone light of the document camera. He asked for a volunteer to come up and explain the company’s five-year strategic vision to test the managers’ understanding.
So one of the managers got up, took the blank piece of paper, and redrew the pictures and explained the strategic vision. She absolutely nailed it and told the story perfectly in less than 2 minutes. Everyone gave her a roaring round of applause and a standing ovation.
The story of Al and Betty captured the company’s imagination. People immediately understood the strategy—what the plan was, why they were needed, whom they served, what made them special, and how they would deliver it.
And the most crucial part was that everybody there not only got it; they could tell it. As a result, 200 leaders went back and told their teams—and the story spread.

That was a defining moment for Grainger, and its impact continues to grow. Harvard Business Review cited the Al and Betty story, and the company’s employees continue to talk about these two characters.1 It helps them focus on the strategy and do what matters for them.
The employees recreated stick figures of Al and Betty on their own, and referred to Al and Betty in later presentations. Somebody made Al and Betty jewelry, and others left a chair for Al or Betty at meetings. They even created a music video.
Now, everybody asks, “How would this help Al?” and “How would this serve Betty?”
Al and Betty compelled more than 13,000 U.S. employees to think about how they can personally and simply connect with similar customers.
Grainger’s strategic vision was sticky because it was presented as a brief story. The example of Al and Betty reflects how mapping, telling, talking, and showing can all work hand in hand as powerful tools to ensure brevity and effectiveness.
Long story, short. W. W. Grainger dared to be different by deciding to map, tell, talk, and show its five-year vision as a strategic narrative all employees could embrace.