See a photo of Paul and John, their bios, Part 1 of this Q&A,Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.

Q&A with Paul Furiga and John Durante, Questions 15, 16, and 17:

Q: Paul, you write in a blog entry that you are an entrepreneur partly because of your family. Some entrepreneurs might find that statement surprising because business owners often find they have less time with their families than before. How are you able to find that balance?

A: Several thoughts are relevant here. Obviously, a big one is that the mobility in information technology that allows us to do many parts of our work in non-conventional environments. Another is that my spouse and I both work at WordWrite and so I guess less collective time is spent on “downloading” the day’s business to one another.

But perhaps an even bigger point is how being a small business owner is changing. Small business ownership has been perceived as very high risk because the entrepreneur forsakes the relative security of an organizational job. I worked in many organizational jobs for a lot of years. In one of them, I actually became in expert in the communications surrounding mass layoffs. I was on-site one year for more than 5,000 layoffs. I learned then what many people are just learning now — that there is actually less “security” in being part of an organization than in writing your own story as an entrepreneur. Thus, the issues of family balance are not substantially different, and in many cases are actually easier. I can afford to be more flexible when it comes to family. Yes, like any small business owner, I burn my share of the midnight oil and occasionally am on the iPhone while attending a family function, but for us the balance issue has come pretty naturally.

Q: John, you wrote a blog entry recently about how Carl Jung recognized the importance of stories. Have you always brought Jungian psychology into your storytelling work or were theories about storytelling a more recent discovery?

A: Since my graduate school days I have always been familiar with Jungian psychology but it wasn’t until Paul invited me in to collaborate on our current project that I began to make the link. Over the years Paul have clearly remained passionate about the importance of storytelling so I started to mesh some of his sustaining ideas with some of older ideas I might have once known. That’s when the Jungian connection about the “collective unconscious” became obvious.

Q: Does the current state of the economy create a greater need for businesses to tell a great story? Does the economy change the way businesses should tell their stories?

A: Yes. And because of the economic collapse, and the lies it exposed, the stories, more than ever before, must be authentic. Consider just one aspect, the collapse of residential real estate. One way of looking at it is that too many people fell in love with inauthentic story approaches to supercharge consumer activity. I mean how else do you explain a household with a $40,000 annual income qualifying for a $400,000 mortgage?

This experience should prove to businesses that we must avoid these types of inauthentic stories. The experience also makes clear that we, as a society, must leverage authenticity to help rebuild communications credibility across vast sectors of global business. The professional storytellers who let their narratives spiral into a swamp of inauthenticity in the first place have much to explain. The retribution, thanks to the independent voice that electronic communication provides, is more swift and powerful today. Without an authentic response to the anger and venom of those complaining on Twitter or blogs or web sites, the price of telling an inauthentic story is even deeper.