Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, but for your company
A company doesn’t exist.
Not in the way a table exists, or a building, or the iPhone in your hand.
There is no physical object you can point to and say “that’s the company.”
What you call your company is a narrative that enough people have agreed to act as if it’s real. Your thesis, your brand, your GTM, your equity. Shared fictions, every one of them. And they work, beautifully, right up until the moment they don’t.
Yuval Noah Harari, one of the most widely read thinkers alive, spent years investigating a question that sounds almost absurd:
Why are humans the dominant species on the planet?
Not the strongest, not the fastest, not the longest-lived. His answer, published in Sapiens and now read by more than 25 million people, changed the way I look at every organization I walk into:
“My most central idea is simple...The story in which you believe shapes the society that you create.”
The species that runs on fiction
Harari’s insight is deceptively simple:
The defining capability of homo sapiens is not tool use, not language, not abstract thought.
It is the ability to create and believe shared fictions.
Money is a fiction. A corporation is a fiction. A nation-state is a fiction.
None of these exist in the physical world. They exist because enough people act as if they are real, and that collective belief allows strangers to cooperate at a scale no other species has ever achieved. The fiction isn’t false. It’s constructed. And the people who construct it, maintain it, and revise it hold a power most leaders never name.
Why the fiction breaks
Sapiens explained why cooperation works.
Shared fictions. Stories powerful enough to hold millions of strangers together.
But Sapiens left an open question. If shared fictions are what hold us together, what happens when they stop working? What makes one fiction survive for a thousand years while another collapses in a decade?
In 2024, Harari published Nexus. And where Sapiens explained the power of the fiction, Nexus examined the plumbing underneath it. He went looking across two thousand years of information networks:
The Catholic Church. The British Empire. The Soviet Union. Wikipedia. Each one a system that held millions of strangers together through shared belief. And each one held or collapsed for the same reason.
Information doesn’t primarily exist to be true. Its defining function is connection.
Every institution that operates at scale is an information network that trades some accuracy for coordination. The church simplified theology into ritual. The empire simplified governance into protocol. Your company simplified its strategy into a values statement and a sales deck. That’s not a failure, that’s the mechanism.
Simplification is how any fiction travels.
Harari calls the assumption that more information leads to better decisions “the naive view.” It doesn’t. More information often means more noise, more competing interpretations, more versions of the same story. What separates networks that hold from those that fracture isn’t the volume of information. It’s whether the network can catch its own distortions.
Science has peer review. The Church had confession. Democracies have a free press.
The weight just shifted to you
Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer: trust has drained from institutions and relocated to proximity.
National government leaders down 16 points. Major news down 11. But “my CEO” is up 9. Your people trust their boss more than they trust the news, the government, or the broader market narrative. That’s not a compliment. That’s part of your job description.
The shared fiction you’re maintaining inside your organization carries more weight than it has in two decades. And it just got a co-author that works 24 hours a day and never asks for context. Every prompt your team writes, every AI-generated summary they trust, every chatbot answer your customers receive is now part of the fiction.
What the drift actually costs
The trade-off between accuracy and coordination is the mechanism.
But it has a cost. And in organizations, the cost is specific and measurable.
When the fiction drifts, your fundraise takes six months instead of three. The delta isn’t theoretical. It’s your burn rate times ninety days. When the fiction drifts, your sales team tells three different versions of your value prop to three different buyers in the same quarter. The pipeline doesn’t stall because of pricing. It stalls because the buyer heard a company that doesn’t know what it is. When the fiction drifts, your reorg announcement generates compliance instead of conviction, and six months later you’re reorganizing again.
I’ve spent 24 years inside these rooms. The pattern is always the same. The strategy is often sound, but the language carrying it rarely measures up. And the gap between the two is the most expensive line item nobody tracks. Every organization has a tech stack, a data stack, a people stack. Almost none have a language stack. No system for making sure the words carrying the strategy survive contact with the people who need to act on them.
Harari would call this an information network without a self-correcting mechanism. I’d call it the tax you’re paying on every initiative that should be moving faster than it is.
The telephone test
Your strategy is a game of telephone. You just don’t know what version is playing.
Can someone who heard your strategy retell it to someone who wasn’t in the room, and would that person make the same decision you’d want them to make? That’s the test. Not once, but at every layer. Not agreement. Translation.
You articulate the strategy. Your Chief of Staff translates it for the all-hands. Your VP of Sales adapts it for the SKO. Your board member paraphrases it at their Monday partners meeting. Four translations. Four rounds of “telephone.” Four chances for the signal to degrade.
Pick the last strategic priority you communicated to your org. Now pick someone two layers removed from you. Not your direct report. Their direct report. The person who heard it secondhand.
Ask them one question: “What’s the single most important thing we’re betting on right now?”
Don’t prompt them. Don’t give them multiple choice. Just listen to what comes back. You’re not listening for the right answer. You’re listening for whether their version of the company matches yours closely enough that the decisions they’re making without you in the room are the ones you’d want.
If yes, your fiction has fidelity. The signal is holding.
If no, you just found where your strategy became someone else’s. That’s not a communication problem. It’s a governance problem. And every AI system you deploy will encode that version at scale, 24/365.
The leaders who understand this treat narrative the way they treat code: audited, tested for fidelity, maintained as infrastructure. Not because storytelling matters, but because the fiction is the operating system.
And right now, most organizations are running without version control.
Michael
P.S. Harari at Davos this January: “Soon, most of the words in our minds will originate in a machine.” The leaders who understand fiction as infrastructure will have an advantage that compounds for a very long time.