Star Wars for Contingent Workers: Wolfgang Hammer and the Array Corporation

By Raúl Escalante, Jennifer Aaker
2023 | Case No. M393 | Length 8 pgs.
The Array Corporation was a platform company that aimed to disrupt the contingency staffing industry by implementing a program that enabled contingent workers to reinvent themselves and double their earning power in as little as two years as well as provide client companies with better trained and more motivated staff. This would effectively double contingency employment agency revenues and profit. The company strategy ran into difficulties when contingent workers failed to respond to the program and remained in the same low-paid positions as before, thus negating Array’s primary competitive advantage.

Learning Objective

  • Storytelling is an effective medium to drive engagement and generate business results.
  • Individuals (employees, clients, etc.) respond to meaning, which can be found by highlighting conflict and providing a resolution to it.
  • Companies that wish to engage stakeholders through storytelling need to look beyond the “plot” (what they do, their goals, etc.), and develop the emotional and philosophical stakes of conflict.
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