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BENITO
CORPORATE
CARTOONS

Copyright © Benito Asociados

We used cartoons to capture and express the culture, values, and aspirations at a company.


We were looking for a medium that could be friendly and profound at the same time, that would communicate the shared values and experiences effectively. We decided to use cartoons to represent fun anecdotes that also provided lessons to be learned..

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The simple fact of using cartoons is an invitation to dive into the story behind them. Someone can take it on face value as the scene that is represented and just leave it there, and it’s still a good thing. Because it’s a shared anecdote. The kind of anecdote you find at the very root of a company’s culture.

But people can also use the cartoon to spark a conversation with a colleague or boss.

Or if there is space and trust, they can suggest an idea for improvement based on what the cartoon represents.

 

These cartoons contain lessons inspired by the concept of Learning Organizations” developed at Harvard.

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Encouraging workers to speak to their teammates, to trust one another, to tell each other things and mutually support one another.

 

Knowing how to have a conversation is a muscle that has to be trained to stay in shape. In fact, when someone becomes withdrawn, it’s as if they lose the ability to speak and interact with others. These cartoons are a friendly way of helping keep people talking and thinking.

This Project includes more than one hundred scenes, each one based on a true story drawn from the collective memory of many. Every cartoon is full of lessons and positive meaning.

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With this scene, we can see that when you belong to a big company, people look at you as if you were a giant.

That’s why we need to be twice as careful with every movement we make, because without meaning to we can do a lot of damage.

 

All these learnings were drawn with a big friendly giant who was very careful about every moved he made.

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A long-standing forestry man taught us something new when the boom in technology for registry, monitoring, and support systems was just getting going.

Technology is useful for a lot of things and it’s very important to be up to date because you can reap surprising rewards.

But we should never forget how important it is to connect with nature and other people.

You could say that the world of technological accessories provides an infinite scope of possibilities.


Contact with nature keeps us with our feet firmly planted on the ground, connected to our surroundings and other people, creating ideas, actions, and deeper, longer-lasting relationships.

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A worker’s wife visited the sawmill where her husband was working to leave him something. But she’s met with a security guard who tells her “your husband didn’t come in today”…


This created a real security issue when the husband arrived home later that evening…


Besides the anecdote, there are plenty of lessons to learn: whatever your role, whatever job you are doing, you need to do it with the utmost responsibility. Even though many might not believe it, a worker told us: “we are all just as important as a doctor”.

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This scene shows something that we saw many times while “on the road” with the sales team.

 

A salesperson from a competitor was heading for the same bodega where we were, and offered to make the owner a sign for their business if they put their products in front of ours.

 

And the store owner accepted…

 

A little later, another salesperson used the same technique: they offered to paint the store if the owner put their products in the best position.

 

And the owner accepted again…

We used this scene to provoke reflection around business relations. We think that what happened here is the exact opposite of a valuable relationship.
 

Everyone was trying to get one over on the others, but no bonds were created.

 

The offers all contained a seed of self-destruction and promoted empty relationships that were only based on the size of the check being offered.

This example of an experience from the world of sales also shows us something about how companies relate to their communities. Often, we can fall into the trap of just offering money without getting to know one another first, without listening to what’s really important and build real bonds. In practice we were able to see how much value can be created when we are willing to do away with those old relationship dynamics and build sturdy bridges. Without spending a penny.

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This scene tells the story of a worker who is seeing off his boss at the airport because he’s travelling to South Africa. Without realizing -although his colleagues sure noticed- he shed a couple of tears as he waved his boss off. Everyone at the company knows who this was, and they still tease him about it today. It’s a funny story in itself, but it also has a deeper lesson behind it: There’s nothing wrong with showing emotion. The reality is quite the opposite, in that it can help create healthy and secure relationships.

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This little signpost aims to symbolize something we learned on this Project:

We always think about simple things that add up just right. They just make sense: Two plus two is four. It might seem basic, but it’s a good thing to be reminded of once in a while.

This is a requisite for any conversation, especially in a professional context. It’s also true for any proposal or campaign that we have to do.


There’s no need for things to be overly complicated.

If 2+2 makes 4, things will just work.

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This cartoon shows us something that applies to everything and in every organization:

It’s good to have a healthy, friendly relationship with your work. To learn to love what you do. To love nature and your co-workers.

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Here we drew an organization that is exposed to the world: these are the workers and listeners of a large news radio company that broadcasts throughout Chile.

The company culture is in a sensitive position because it’s on the air 24/7.

 

This is why the health of this company is so important, along with the shared stories and values.  

Radio programs are made with words, with intonations, and with emotions.

 

However, it was very difficult to teach marketing clients and agencies about the special characteristics of your media.

 

Everything was based on surveys and ratings that didn’t show the ways in which different media channels interact with the community.

 

And we thought this would be something essential to show exactly who we were and what we could (and couldn’t) offer. So we did. 

We shared dozens of stories that in one way or another represented both internal and community values.

With time, these ideas took on a “life of their own” and have been used to teach a range of concepts in other organizations.

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Sometimes it’s good to know how to run.

You have to know how to run fast, without taking your eye off where you’re going.

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We think it’s a good idea to know how to look far away and close up at the same time.

To see the forest, but at the same time to see all the individual trees. To combine theory with practice, and to know how to combine strategy and tactics.

 

And also, to be careful not to miss something because you were only looking at the bigger picture. That is what is being shown here in this cartoon

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We can sometimes tend to see everything as a uniform mass.

 

Especially when we look at something unfamiliar, all parts of it can seem the same.

This cartoon has helped to open dialogues and encourage people to look beyond the familiar and apparent uniformity.

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A fish out of water can make mistakes. 

And those mistakes can be compounded by jumping into something you think will save your skin before you’ve analyzed the situation.

We have to be careful at all times!

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This is the story of Israel Muñoz Santander. In the final years of his long career, he collaborated in the setup of Radio Bío-Bío in Santiago, before they even had a broadcast frequency. Israel worked for many years as an office boy. In Argentina, this kind of role is known as a “cadet”, and in Chile, “junior”. But Israel couldn’t be more “senior”, both as a person and as an expert in the field.

You could spend all day going over a tough decision in your head. Then you’d speak to Israel and you knew exactly what to do. He would move from ministry to ministry with requests for licenses for a tiny, then-unknown, southern-Chilean regional radio station that wanted to take its news national. He was proud of his role. Even though, we don’t usually include names in our cartoons, giving Israel this recognition was something we thought was important.

The key? Relating to everyone you work with on a one-to-one basis, regardless of whether they are a “junior”, because there can be years of wisdom hidden away in there, the same as you’d expect from a “senior”.

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