Ford Harding wrote to me about a recent posting:

You adapted criteria for stories (as published in RainToday) to sell professional services to those to be told while job seeking. It works, too. You recommended that the hero of the story be the job seeker. I suggest a possible alternative. In some cases it might be wise to let the job-seeker’s former boss share the limelight; that’s someone the future boss will identify with. The job seeker in this version of the story works with the boss, adding to and executing something that started with the boss and the boss ends up a winner. An example of how a change in hero changes an anecdote can be found in [this] blog posting. If you search the site under anecdote you will find other postings on that subject.

Harding also notes that that the story elements (plot, character, action and outcome) come from Corporate Legends and Lore: The Power of Story Telling as a Management Tool by Peg Neuhauser (McGraw-Hill, 1993), an attribution, he says, "that did not make it from my book, Creating Rainmakers, into the RainToday articles."