Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Introduction
The Different Worlds of Leadership and Storytelling
The Intersection of Leadership and Storytelling
The Role of Storytelling
What's New in Storytelling
The Emerging Leadership Discipline of Narrative
The Nature of Leadership
The Marriage of Narrative and Analysis
The Performance of the Story
A Different Kind of Leader
Let's Go!
Part 1: The Role of Story in Organizations
Chapter 1: Telling the Right Story
The Power of Narrative
Using the Storytelling Catalogue
The Return on Investment of Storytelling
Chapter 2: Telling the Story Right
Style
Truth
Preparation
Delivery
Part 2: Eight Narrative Patterns
Chapter 3: Motivate Others to Action
The Challenge of Igniting Action and Implementing New Ideas
The Main Elements of the Springboard Story
Avoiding the Main Pitfalls
Chapter 4: Build Trust
Why You Tell Your Story
How to Tell Your Story
Where You Tell Your Story
Chapter 5: Use Narrative to Build Your Brand
Marketing in the Twentieth Century
Twenty-First-Century Marketing: The Interactive Customer Story
Chapter 6: Transmit Your Values
Distinguish the Different Types of Values
Ethics in Action
Transmitting Values Through Narrative
Chapter 7: Get Others Working Together
High-Performance Teams
Catalyzing High-Performance Teams and Communities
Getting the Group to Work Together
Chapter 8: Share Knowledge
Telling the Knowledge-Sharing Story
Creating Context for the Knowledge-Sharing Story
Special Kinds of Knowledge-Sharing Stories
Chapter 9: Tame the Grapevine
The Stories That Form the Corporate Culture
Taming the Grapevine
Beyond the Grapevine
The Driving Force Behind the Grapevine
Chapter 10: Create and Share Your Vision
Why We Tell Future Stories
How to Tell a Compelling Future Story
Link the Future Story to the Listeners' Current Mind-Set
Part 3: Putting It All Together
Chapter 11: Solve the Paradox of Innovation
Why Current Approaches Don't Solve the Innovation Paradox
Solving the Paradox
The Important Role of Storytelling
Chapter 12: A Different Kind of Leader
Leadership That Participates
Leadership That Connects
Leadership That Is Like Conversation
Leadership That Is Possible
Leadership That Fits the Modern Need
Leadership That Is Not for Everyone
Leadership That Is Relatively Free of Ego
Leadership That Is Like Judo
Leadership That Has Feeling
Leadership That Avoids “Apollo Run Amok”
Leadership That Includes Beauty
Notes
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
Copyright © 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Denning, Stephen, 1944–
The Leader's Guide to Storytelling : Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative / Stephen Denning.—Revised and updated edition.
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-54867-7 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-00876-8 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-00877-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-00878-2 (ebk)
1. Communication in management. 2. Public speaking. 3. Business communication. 4. Communication in organizations. I. Title.
HD30.3.D457 2011
658.4′5—dc22
2010048700
Preface
Much has happened in the five years since the first edition of this book provided the basic building blocks of leadership storytelling.
Since the first edition, the importance of storytelling as a leadership tool has become generally accepted, even in big organizations. The days are gone when I would be recruited by a nervous executive to hold a storytelling workshop for a major corporation with a euphemistic label like “strategic change management.” Now executives tell me, “Let's call it what it is: storytelling!”
This reflects the fact that storytelling has gained recognition as a core competence of leadership. It is now standard practice to include a section on storytelling in books on leadership and change management, such as A Whole New Mind (2006) by Dan Pink, The Leadership Challenge (2008) by Jim Kouzes and
Barry Posner, Made to Stick (2008) by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, and Getting Change Right (2010) by Seth Kahan.
The concept of leadership has itself also evolved. Chapter Twelve of the first edition of this book argued that storytelling is more than simply a communication tool and implied the emergence of a different kind of leader—someone who engages in interactive conversations rather than merely telling people what to do. It suggested that storytelling goes beyond the use of individual stories for specific purposes and implied a different way of thinking, speaking, and acting in the workplace.
I developed these ideas further in my book The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative (2007), which examined what this different way of thinking, speaking, and acting entailed. It explored in more detail how storytelling tools could be deployed to meet the specific challenges of leadership. It showed how the leadership communication triad, “get attention–stimulate desire for change–reinforce with reasons,” could be used as a template to deal with virtually any leadership challenge. Chapter Two of this edition has been updated to reflect these discoveries.
Since 2005, a massive rethinking of management itself has also gotten under way. In 2009, the Shift Index quantified with startling clarity the long-term decline of management: the rate of return on assets of U.S. firms is now only a quarter of what it was in 1965; the life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune 500 has declined to less than fifteen years and heading toward five years unless something changes; executive turnover is accelerating; only one in five workers is fully engaged in his or her work1. The dysfunctionality of traditional management was further underscored by the Kauffman Foundation's discovery that established firms in the United States created no net new jobs between 1980 and 2005; virtually all net new jobs were created by firms that were five years old or less.2
The standard practices of management are increasingly seen as anachronistic. “Tomorrow's business imperatives,” Gary Hamel wrote in Harvard Business Review in 2009, “lie outside the performance envelope of today's bureaucracy-infused management practices… Equipping organizations to tackle the future would require a management revolution no less momentous than the one that spawned modern industry.”3
Chapter Eleven of the first edition of this book began to explore through the lens of disruptive innovation what this management revolution might involve. I argued that leadership storytelling is part of the answer. Since then, I have come to see more clearly what management actions in addition to storytelling are needed to create an organization that promotes continuous innovation on a sustained basis. In effect, storytelling is not just a core competence of leadership: it is also central component of management itself. My new book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the Twenty-First Century (2010), spells this out in more detail, and Chapter Eleven of this book has been updated to reflect these insights.
This book thus provides the building blocks of storytelling for two of my other books. The Secret Language of Leadership (2007) shows how storytelling is a central component of leadership. The Leader's Guide to Radical Management (2010) shows how storytelling is a core competence of management itself.
The importance of storytelling in branding and marketing has also been reinforced by the explosion of social media. In 2005, when the first edition of this book was published, Facebook and YouTube had just been created, and Twitter did not exist. Today these three Web sites have hundreds of millions of participants, who are telling stories about their lives and the products and services that they use. This phenomenon has had a dramatic impact on practices in branding and marketing, as the ongoing shift in power from seller to buyer has dramatically accelerated. Understanding and mastering the elements of interactive storytelling in this sphere has become even more important than before. Chapter Five of this edition has been updated to incorporate the implications of these developments.
Stories are trapdoors, escape hatches, portals through which we can expand our lives and learn about other worlds. They offer guideposts to what is important in life. They generate meaning. They embody our values. They give us the clues from which we can discover what ultimately matters. In the past five years, I have learned much from studying both the power and the limits of storytelling. I am happy to have the opportunity to share those learnings here with you.
Stephen Denning
December 2010
Washington, D.C.
Introduction
This book is an account of a simple but powerful idea: the best way to communicate with people you are trying to lead is often through a story. The impulse here is practical and pedagogical. The book shows how to use storytelling to deal with the most difficult challenges that leaders today face.
The Different Worlds of Leadership and Storytelling
Storytelling and leadership are both performance arts, and like all other performance arts, they involve at least as much doing as thinking. In such matters, performers always know more than they can tell. I have tried to convey here as much as I can of what works—and what doesn't—at the intersection of the two different worlds of leadership and storytelling.
For the first several decades of my working life, I remained firmly in the world of leadership and management. I was a manager in a large international organization. The organization happened to be the World Bank, but had it been any other large, modern organization, the discourse would have been essentially the same: rates of return, cost-benefit analyses, risk assessments, performance targets, budgets, work programs, the bottom line—you name it.
The organization happened to be located in the United States of America, but the talk would have been the same if it had been situated in any other country. The forces of globalization have rendered the discourse of management and organizations thoroughly international. It's a world almost totally focused on analysis and abstractions. The virtues of sharpness, rigor, clarity, explicitness, and crispness are everywhere celebrated. It's a world that is heavy with practical import: the fate of nations and, indeed, the economic welfare of the entire human race are said to rest on the effectiveness of the discourse.
It was the force of circumstance rather than temperament that led me away from the world of the boardroom, the negotiation table, and the computerized spreadsheet to a radically different world: the ancient performance art of storytelling. At the time, I was facing a leadership challenge for which the traditional tools of management were impotent. In trying to communicate a new idea to a skeptical audience, I found that the virtues of sharpness and rigor weren't working. Having spent my life believing in the dream of reason, I was startled to find that an appropriately told story had the power to do what rigorous analysis couldn't: to communicate a strange new idea and move people to enthusiastic action.
Initially the idea that storytelling might be a powerful tool for management and leadership was so counterintuitive and contrary to my entire education and work-life experience that I had difficulty in believing the evidence of my own eyes. In fact, it took me several years to admit to myself that I was being successful through telling stories.
“Soft.” “Fuzzy.” “Emotional.” “Fluffy.” “Anecdotal.” “Irrational.” “Fantasy.” “Fairy stories.” “Primitive.” “Childish.” These were just some of the terms that the advocates of conventional management hurled at leadership storytelling. They saw it as contaminating the world of pure reason with the poison of emotions and feeling, thereby dragging society back into the Dark Ages. It took a certain amount of intellectual courage to brave this disdain and suggest that the world of rational management might have much to learn from the ancient tradition of narrative.1
The Leader's Guide to Storytelling Page 1
