Stephen Denning - The Leaders Guide to Storytelling

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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

658.45dc22

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 leadersomeone 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 attentionstimulate desire for changereinforce 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 work

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.

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.