It’s been almost two months since my last roundup of storytelling tweets that enjoyed significant buzz in the Twitterverse. Time to look at what folks think is worth re-tweeting in the storytelling world:

• The book Why Now Is the Time Crush It! Cash in on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk has its own hashtag, #crushit, on Twitter, and one tweeter said his/her favorite line from the book is: “Storytelling is by far the most underrated skill in business.”
• Another quote I like, which comes from @jonbuscall via @rbrtstar: “All media is storytelling media — web 2.0 makes stories independent of space and time.”
• Much talked about on Twitter in the last month or so has been Michael Margolis’s terrific book, Believe Me:

“Does your Innovation have a story?” by Jeffrey Phillips

Guy Kawasaki’s recommendation of Michelle James’s interview with Michael, “The importance of storytelling in creative leadership: An interview with Michael Margolis.”

• An article in the Los Angeles Times, “‘Transmedia’: A brave new world in entertainment marketing,” about transmedia guru Henry Jenkins teaching this topic at the University of Southern California, proved buzzworthy.
• Much talked about was Beth Kanter’s article Multi-Channel Fundraising Campaigns: Storytelling Is Key, which in turn cited the blog entry “What Story Are You Telling Your Donors, Where Are You Telling It?” by Thomas Negron. Negron reported on presentations at the NYC chapter of NTEN’s 501 Tech Club that included Rebecca Willett of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Kanter includes Willett’s slide deck in her post. “The point of [Negron’s] post is that good storytelling is the heart and soul of donor solicitations,” Kanter writes, “and a consistent story must be told across all donor touch points.” She quotes Negron: “This presents a wonderful opportunity because every time a donor interacts with your organization it is a chance to share another aspect of your story and reiterate the work they make possible.”
• A tweeter suggested that a Google Search can tell a story, as in this video, “Parisian Love”.
• In the great PowerPoint vs. storied presentations discussion, Prezi and Ahead were cited in the Twitterverse as two good alternatives to PowerPoint because they “make you think about concepts, not serial slides.

• Finally, and not necessarily buzzworthy, I came across a Web application, TweetCloud that creates a cloud of the words one tweets the most over a given period. At left is @AStoriedCareer’s tweet cloud for the last year. No surprises on the big words; perhaps a few surprises on the smaller ones.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Reader Raf Stevens’s challenge to me to present examples of good storytelling had the interesting effect of getting me thinking about categories of storytelling that one can access on the Internet. Here’s the list so far:

• Digital/video storytelling
• Live storytelling performance, captured on video
• Live storytelling performance, captured on audio
• Stories — preferably nonfiction — that are told purely with words in print (as opposed to spoken words); in other words, a story that must be read. I asked for nominations here, but have not received any yet.

I’ve come across a couple of examples of sub-genres in the last category:

• The founding story of an organization. Thaler Pekar turned me onto the story of how Mercy Corps was founded 30 years ago.
• Blog storytelling. I’ve written before about blogs that consistently present good storytelling, and Moon Over Martinborough remains one of my favorite examples. Here’s a single story in a blog that touched me: Reprise: Ode to FM Sunday Mornings, by Jesaka Long, whose a.k.a. writer blog is a delightful new find.

Why is it important to categorize, appreciate, and identify good examples of the narrative Web? To counter assertions like Ben MacIntyre’s “the Internet is killing storytelling” that I took on here. All of these examples show the Internet’s capacity for enhancing and disseminating excellent storytelling.

(I smell “Best of the Narrative Web” awards.)

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Pointing to a staggering “proliferation of recruiting videos since the advent of Web 2.0,” David D’Angelo writes on ERE.net that employers often confuse the goals of two different types of stories they typically tell prospective workers.

The two categories of story in these videos (which can be seen in such venues as career pages on organizational websites or go to Career TV, Social Networks, and YouTube) are:

• Real Job Previews (also called Realistic Job Previews or RJPs), which D’Angelo says “should break down several of the key aspects of the job that is being discussed. The discussion should present a candid discussion an idea of what the day in the life of the position is like.” The author cites Day in the Life of a Territory Sales Manager as an example.
• Recruiting videos, in which, D’Angelo writes, “the organizational brand is showcased along with values, community involvement, and the mission of the organization, to attract potential candidates who will have an affinity to the messages being presented.”

D’Angelo is addressing employers in his article, cautioning them that “quite often the real job preview video will miss the mark in delivering a real job or position preview and instead incorporate the goals of the recruiting video.” But job-seekers would also do well to be aware of these differences in the stories employers tell with these videos and take them with a grain of salt.

Is the employer telling an overly rosy story about working for the organization? Or does the story unfold with a realistic view of the job, including the challenging aspects of working there?

A recruiting story might entice a candidate to work for an organization. “The goal of a recruiting video is to recruit employees,” D’Angelo writes. “This is usually achieved by selling the brand, communicating the culture and values of the organization, as well as the mission.”

But if the story presented in the recruiting video doesn’t match the reality of what it’s like to work there, the job-seeker may feel duped and may not stay in the organization even if recruited. That’s why, as D’Angelo writes, “the goal of the preview is to match the right people with the right jobs as well as increase retention and lower turnover. The preview should be performed in a style that generates interest while discussing the realities of the position being discussed. Genuine real job preview videos discuss both positive and some challenges of the position. Giving a realistic glimpse of the culture and the mission of the organization will go a long way in retaining talent.”

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The day after Thanksgiving is the day that StoryCorps has set aside to ask folks to spend one hour recording a conversation with someone important to them. You can interview anyone you choose: an older relative, a friend, a teacher, or someone from the neighborhood, StoryCorps suggests.

For this National Day of Listening, StoryCorps offers a free Do-It-Yourself Instruction Guide. The organization also has a question list and a question generator for compiling questions to ask your your interviewee.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Guest entry by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team.

We’re continuing a tradition at The Health Care Blog started last year. Asking you to take a moment this weekend to discuss your desires for how to live the end of your life as meaningfully as possible — If you want to reproduce this post on your blog (or anywhere) you can download a ready-made html version here

— Matthew Holt

Last Thanksgiving weekend, many of us bloggers participated in the first documented blog rally to promote Engage With Grace — a movement aimed at having all of us understand and communicate our end-of-life wishes. It was a great success, with more 100 bloggers in the healthcare space and beyond participating and spreading the word. Plus, it was timed to coincide with a weekend when most of us are with the very people with whom we should be having these tough conversations — our closest friends and family. Our original mission —to get more and more people talking about their end of life wishes — hasn’t changed. But it’s been quite a year — so we thought this holiday, we’d try something different.

A bit of levity.

At the heart of Engage With Grace are five questions designed to get the conversation started. We’ve included them at the end of this post. They’re not easy questions, but they are important. To help ease us into these tough questions, and in the spirit of the season, we thought we’d start with five parallel questions that ARE pretty easy to answer: 

Silly? Maybe. But it underscores how having a template like this — just five questions in plain, simple language — can deflate some of the complexity, formality and even misnomers that have sometimes surrounded the end-of-life discussion. So with that, we’ve included the five questions from Engage With Grace below. Think about them, document them, share them.

Over the past year there’s been a lot of discussion around end of life. And we’ve been fortunate to hear a lot of the more uplifting stories, as folks have used these five questions to initiate the conversation.

One man shared how surprised he was to learn that his wife’s preferences were not what he expected. Befitting this holiday, The One Slide now stands sentry on their fridge.

Wishing you and yours a holiday that’s fulfilling in all the right ways.

To learn more please go to www.engagewithgrace.org.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve previously mentioned THE STORY BOX PROJECT, but you might not have a good feel for how it works just by reading its own site and THE STORY BOX PROJECT global publishing and sharing Ning group.

Limor Shiponi has chronicled her experience with THE STORY BOX PROJECT both on the Ning group, starting here and on her own blog, Limor’s Storytelling Agora, starting here (also the source of the photo shown here).

Here are a few brief excerpts:

Several years ago I asked Kevin Cordi for the StoryBox to arrive to Israel. Several years later, here it is. … I was overwhelmed by my own excitement when the box arrived. … I got to school early, some of the kids spotted me carrying the box, “but I thought it would be special” they said. “This is just the cover you are seeing, wait for the bell,” I replied.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

When I first published my free e-book, Storied Careers: 40+ Story Practitioners Talk about Applied Storytelling back in September, I didn’t have the right software to make the links in the book “live,” meaning clickable so you are taken to the referenced Web site.

Now I have the software, so I’ve tweaked the book so links are clickable, making it much easier to enjoy the many resources the practitioners in the book suggested. Best of all, links to the 43 practitioners themselves are now live, including e-mail links and links to Twitter profiles.

Here are the two download sites for the book: My personal site.

Download page here on A Storied Career, where you can also read more about the book.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Ozge Karaoglu’s Blog recently presented 100 Digital Storytelling Tools for Your Digital Selves + Natives (Part 1), 100 Digital Storytelling Tools for Your Digital Selves + Natives (Part 1), 100 Digital Storytelling Tools for Your Digital Selves + Natives (Part 3), and 100 Digital Storytelling Tools for Your Digital Selves + Natives (Part 4).

While these tools are fantastic if you’re into Digital Storytelling (upper-case D and S), they also expand the storytelling universe for those who enjoy trying new tools for telling stories.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Who knew there was an emerging web documentary genre? A small part of IDFA, the 22nd International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, is dedicated to this genre.

Doc Lab, Amsterdam’s “hotbed of experiment, is the special area of the festival exploring the relationship between ‘new media’ and documentary filmmaking. The program is open to all media that can be used to tell a documentary story. During the festival, Doc Lab presents films, web documentaries, and installations that innovate the documentary genre. Projects are showcased in the Doc Lab Media Lounge and in Amsterdam cinemas during a number of special Live Screenings and events. The theme this year is Live Stories, and the principal guest is Ira Glass.”

Doc Lab programmer Caspar Sonnen says DocLab is focused on “finding ways to reach an audience bigger than just new-media experts… the point is that there are great stories emerging online and we have to show them!”

You can get a good sense of these great stories here.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Recently saw an interesting premise on the blog (called Naming and Treating) of K and J Investigations and Case Management. In a post titled Diagnostic Voices of Community: “control over our stories”, the blogger(s) — Kathy and/or Jeff Gaddess — start by citing the words of New York Times columnist David Brooks:

… unlike the other animals, people … have a drive to seek coherence and meaning. We have a need to tell ourselves stories that explain it all. We use these stories to supply the metaphysics, without which life seems pointless and empty. … Among all the things we don’t control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to make sense of the world. … The stories we select help us, in turn, to interpret the world.

The bloggers(s) agree:

… we do have some control in the ways in which we interpret and then project who we are, what we think and feel, and what we have been through. Our stories become us. If we perceive ourselves as victims then this is who and what we will struggle with and be. If we consider ourselves heroic, mostly winning and dominant over adversity, then this sense of self will be the story we tell even if how we see ourselves in this way is not entirely correct.

Inherent in this notion of having control over our stories is the idea that we can change our lives by changing our stories.

I have most certainly known people — some I know quite well in fact — who have wrapped their lives around the story of their victimology and cannot seem to move forward and craft a new story.

I’m at least a bit guilty of clinging to a story that doesn’t serve me well — the one in which I’ve concluded that my contributions will always be undervalued, and I’ll never achieve a certain kind of success.

The other piece of Brooks’s premise — the sensemaking piece — also intrigues me: “We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to make sense of the world.” I’m troubled, though, about the large and dangerous faction in the US that presents a false narrative in the guise of “news,” and plays on the population’s vulnerabilities, gullibilities, and especially, fears.

What do you think? Do we have more control over our stories than we do over other aspects of our lives? Do you hold onto a story that’s not serving you? What do you look for in selecting “the narrative [you] will use to make sense of the world”?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

If you’re a newbie in the world of organizational or applied storytelling, you will likely appreciate Robert Star’s slideshow, Release the Stories in Your Organization. The concepts and arguments in favor of storytelling in organizations will be familiar to veterans of organizational storytelling, but they are nicely organized and presented. Of course, my usual critique of presentations about storytelling applies — like most, this one seems to have no stories. Here’s how he responds to that critique:

The only criticism is about the lack of stories - something done deliberately to give a freedom to improvise when I present it orally. The slides are the foundation from which I improvise for a specific audience, time and place.

For me, there’s a big difference between the digital / visual and the verbal storytelling. Here it was important to try to involve the reader, bring the problem solver to life and convey a message through emotional images. If, on the other hand, I want to present it orally, it’s more important who I am, what stories are relevant for that situation - although the message about storytelling would be the same.

There’s also a transcript of the presentation. Enjoy his fine work:

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Ben Macintyre’s Times of London article from two weeks ago, The internet is killing storytelling continues to generate huge buzz on Twitter, and I expected to vehemently disagree with it. But I surprised myself by acknowledging that Macintyre has a few good points.

First, I like the staccato spew of his opening salvo:

Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.

I also admit that the Internet has diminished my attention span. I find it harder and harder to summon the patience to read longer newspaper and magazine stories these days — like Nicholas Carr’s experience that Macintryre describes:

[Atlantic Monthly essayist Nicholas Carr] admitted that he can no longer immerse himself in substantial books and longer articles in the way he once did. “What the net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” he wrote. “My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swift-moving stream of particles.”

Thus, I can’t completely disagree with Macintyre’s claim: “If the culprit is obvious, so is the primary victim of this radically reduced attention span: the narrative, the long-form story, the tale. … Very few stories of more than 1,000 words achieve viral status on the internet.” This last statement is probably true, though Macintyre offers no evidence. (Stephanie West Allen cited this blog entry in which David DiSalvo points out the lack of any citations that support Macintyre’s assertions.)

But here’s where we start to part ways. Macintryre writes: “The blog is a soap box, not a story. Facebook is a place for tell-tales perhaps, but not for telling tales.” Sure, that’s true of some blogs — but many others are wonderful venues for storytelling, providing a storied outlet for both writers and readers that didn’t exist 15 years ago. And while storytelling on Facebook may be flawed, millions more people are telling and reading stories than did before the age of social media.

I disagree with Macintyre’s assertion that Internet storytelling is not nourishing us. The vast variety of ways the Internet has opened up for people to tell stories has led not to an anorexic culture but one confronting a Thanksgiving feast of story possibilities:

The internet is there for snacking, grazing and tasting, not for the full, six-course feast that is nourishing narrative. The consequence is an anorexic form of culture.

I certainly agree with these assertions by Macintyre — except for the “paradoxically” part. Since we do hunger in unprecedented ways for stories, it is not at all paradoxical that the Internet has provided vast, unprecedented, and varied tools and venues for storytelling:

Paradoxically, there has never been a greater hunger for narrative, for stories that give shape and meaning to experience. .. Our fascination with other people’s stories is as great, if not greater, than any time in history.

In a blog entry, Dan Conover, Joel Achenbach and Deborah Potter on storytelling, responding to a different piece written before Macintyre’s piece ever appeared, Deborah Potter wrote:

… is Twitter a threat to storytelling? Of course not. And not just for the obvious reason that Twitter is an entirely different medium from long-form narrative. It’s never going to replace good writing. Checking a Twitter stream is an entirely different experience from curling up with a good book, and most serious readers — even those who are also avid tweeters — wouldn’t trade one for the other. But here the real reason Twitter isn’t a threat to storytelling: Twitter can make writing better.

So, two more points to counter Macintyre’s argument: There’s still plenty of room for long-form narrative in people’s lives, and sometimes less is more. Where is it written that stories must be long to be good?

Jean Marie Tenlen responded to Macintyre’s essay with a blog entry carrying examples “to illuminate the multiple layers of narrative that the Internet enables.”

Macintyre’s piece also sparked discussion on Golden Fleece’s Working Stories discussion list. A few excerpts:

I don’t agree. That’s like saying sex is killing love.

— Seth Kahan, president, Performance Development Group, Inc.

A similar perspective as this article was posited by a well known neuroscientist (who I remember had a grand title but I don’t remember her name) from the UK who said that gaming was killing social capabilities. It was a TV report and I laughed to myself when they cut to four young guys in an in-depth conversation about how to best make progress in one of the latest video games. Seemed like there was plenty of socialising happen and the game was the trigger.

— Shawn Callahan, Anecdote

… my teenage kids are just as likely to read Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc as they are to spend time on Facebook and IM’ing. In fact, they spend hours IM’ing, which seems to me to be the modern equivalent of hours on the phone. They spend just as much time gossiping (telling each other stories) as I did as a teenager. They watch movies, and as I said, they also read books. Long books with intricate plots that carry through the series. They don’t like reading most of the texts they are given to read for school. So what exactly is different? … WIth email, I write more than I did before email. I send friends interesting stuff about our travels, before it was what would fit on a postcard. So technology has helped me write more stories, well, personal stories. If we are talking about literature, well no, technology hasn’t added to me reading anymore than I did before the internet came along. But then it hasn’t reduced it either. I read when I am interested, I stop reading when I lose interest. I don’t think my level of interest, or attention span has changed as a result.

— Melanie White

What forms and venues for storytelling — as well as levels of storytelling participation — were unimaginable before the Internet?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Roxanne Ravenel doesn’t really break any new ground in Building Career Success Stories: Why Storytelling is Essential to Finding Your Next Job, but she reinforces the importance of storytelling for responding to behavioral job-interview questions and provides an example of the class Challenge > Action > Results formula.

I’m delighted that Rusty Rueff, Glassdoor.com’s career and workplace expert, is talking about storytelling in the job search in his guest blog entry, How to Tell the ‘Story of You’ in A Job Interview: Part 1. But I’ve gotta quibble with this statement:

So, you have gotten the interview that you desired and you know that you are going to be asked once, twice, maybe five or six times, some question that is like, “so, tell me about you”. You then have five to seven minutes to tell your story.

As I wrote in the comments section of his blog entry: “Five to seven minutes to respond to the “tell me about yourself” question?!?! Oh my goodness, the interviewer will have nodded off long before you get to the end of even 5 minutes. Two minutes at the absolute most for your storied job-interview responses.”

But I love what Rueff says here:

Of the thousands of interviews I have conducted in my career, I can tell you that few of those stories stand out. And why don’t they? It’s because they are not told as stories. Instead, what I receive is a regurgitation of their resume and a data dump that lasts too long and is far from being interesting. As my mind wanders off to something else, I want so desperately to hear a story of intrigue.

I’m also looking forward to his next entry on the six plots that make up your personal career story.

Speaking of voices, I can’t bear to listen to my own and refuse to listen to my interviews and podcasts, but if you’d like to, here’s a link to a show I did in September with the aforementioned Roxanne Ravenel on her BlogTalkRadio show, The Savvy Jobseeker: Get Hired by Mastering the Fine Art of Storytelling

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

When I give publicity to a contest in this space, I feel I should follow up and reveal the winner. A few weeks ago, I posted about the Obama administration’s healthcare video contest, noting that some entries among the top 20 finalists were more storied than others. On the continuum of storytelling —> not storytelling, I’d say the winner falls slightly closer to storytelling than not.

Please pardon the pitch for a donation at the end.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve made some changes and additions here on the ol’ A Storied Career.

I’ve moved several of the long lists of links to storytelling blogs and resources to inside pages. In part, I made this move to shorten the depth of the main page so it will contain fewer entries — so the page will load faster for you, dear reader. You can still easily check out all the links and resources I’ve found for you by clicking on the links on my sidebar under the Pages heading. Just for quick reference, here are the link categories:

• Links to Interdisciplinary Storytelling Resources.
• Links to Organizational Storytelling Resources.
• Links to Blogs that Relate to Storytelling.
• Links that Relate to Storytelling and Career.
• Links to Other Cool Blogs.
• Links about Memoir-Writing, Journaling, and Personal Storytelling.

I also deleted a couple of small link categories that had fallen by the wayside.

As for the bling:

• I’ve added many more links and resources on these new inside pages.
• I’ve fattened up my Story Wisdom page, which contains many powerful quotes about storytelling — and now even more.
• I’ve updated and added to my Definitive Storytelling Twitter Follow List to give you ideas on storytelling practitioners and entities you may want to follow on Twitter.

Enjoy, and let me know if you have any comments, critiques.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Today, I conclude my series of three questions I asked of Michael Margolis, author of the new book, Believe Me: Why Your Vision, Brand, and Leadership Need a Bigger Story (see yesterday’s entry and Friday’s.) Michael writes that the Believe Me manifesto is just the beginning. “Follow-up books will be more practical, with frameworks, case studies, and a how-to driven approach,” he writes toward the end of Believe Me. “I am eager to explore more deeply the topics of 1) brand storytelling, 2) social innovation stories, and 3) the stories every entrepreneur must tell.”

I asked him to elaborate on his planned books:

Here’s my confession, I’ve always clearly envisioned writing at least 7 or 10 books in my lifetime (humble ambitions, right?). Yet, every time I’d sit down to write a book, all 7 to 10 books would show up at once, like competing voices arguing in my head. So writing was a pretty frustrating experience — with plenty of false starts over the years. In the case of Believe Me, I wrote the book in just 90-days (!) from the first word on paper to the “publisher’s proof” in hand. Clearly, technology (and a little elbow grease) is a game-changer, profoundly changing how we produce and consume stories today. I skipped working on my tan this summer, and instead produced a book. Joking aside, I’m in the midst of developing the material for the next four books. I’ve launched a series of free/paid tele-classes, new workshop offerings, and putting the finishing touches on a 6-month executive-education program called High Stakes Storytelling. I share all of this, because these current activities will form the basis of my next books — and will take a more practical, hands-on approach — guiding readers through a variety of real-world scenarios and business applications. I haven’t yet decided which of the four books comes out first, but the topics I’ll be covering in more depth include brand storytelling, entrepreneurial narratives, social media storytelling, and storytelling for social change. In essence, helping to map out the new paradigm of business especially for society’s change-makers, innovators, and pioneers.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

As I noted in yesterday’s entry, I’m introducing Michael Margolis’s new book, Believe Me: Why Your Vision, Brand, and Leadership Need a Bigger Story by asking him some questions about it, as well as sharing my own impressions.

I asked Michael what kind of reaction the book has generated. Here’s what he said:

This book is intended to be a conversation starter. So I welcome correspondence from your readers. The feedback I hear regularly about the book, is that its short, provocative, and digestible. Honestly, I wrote it for someone like me who has a pretty dismal attention span. So the print is big, the layout is fun, and every few pages, something is designed to jump out and get you thinking. And yet somebody like me also expects substance, meaning, and emotional depth. That’s who I tried to write for. The book will probably leave you with more questions than answers. And that’s equally part of the intent. This book is not for everyone. It’s just 88-pages long (short enough to read on a plane, or in a single sitting). I was trying to write more in the style of Tom Peters or Seth Godin (two of my business book role models), yet make it something totally unique and unexpected in terms of narrative format/structure. I’d love to hear what your readers have to think. As you know they can download a free excerpt of the book, and that way get a better sense of the book’s message and visual experience.

The book centers on 15 storytelling axioms (my favorite: “Reinvention is the new storyline”), and the design most definitely is fun and easily digestible. In turn, the 15 axioms fall into one-word categories (for example, Meaning, Perception, Relationship, Memory, and Choices) within three “Acts.” These Acts, Michael says, follow the classic three-act story structure: Set-up, Confrontation, and Resolution (also known as beginning, middle, and end). A wonderfully useful section in the back of the book, Putting Ideas Into Practice, summarizes the one-word categories in the Acts by presenting prompts/questions to ask yourself “to explore your story.” For the “Meaning” category, for example, the prompts/questions are:

• What is most meaningful or memorable about your story?
• What kind of bigger experience might people pay a premium for?

Full-page quotes are liberally sprinkled throughout the text, and I plan to record these quotes in my Story Wisdom section.

Michael ends the book with a page titled, “This Story Is Just the Beginning,” in which he notes that Believe Me is just an introduction and tantalizes by promising to produce more practical followup books. In tomorrow’s entry, Michael talks more about the future books he has in store.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

My friend Michael Margolis has just come out with the terrific new book, Believe Me: Why Your Vision, Brand, and Leadership Need a Bigger Story. In addition to being fun and easy reading (even a slow reader like me can devour it in a single sitting), the book offers free bonuses in the back said to be worth $265. These bonuses include a Story Engagement Index, a Believe Me Action Guide, a subscription to Michael’s Story Mojo newsletter, and a free telephone strategy session.

The cover proclaims Believe Me to be “a storytelling manifesto for change-makers and innovators.” I was curious about why Michael felt such a manifesto was needed. Here’s what he told me:

It seems like everybody I know is in some state of reinvention (including me). Change, innovation, adaptation are the new business as usual. I wanted to write a book that framed storytelling around these larger archetypal themes. The topic also reflects the personal path that I’ve walked as a social entrepreneur, business storyteller, and “arm-chair” cultural anthropologist. Makes for a lot of threads to tie together. There was a real creative tension that I tried to balance throughout. I didn’t want to dumb down the topic and insult the reader. And yet it was important for me to make the book “pop culture” accessible. My goal is reach really smart people who maybe don’t have “storytelling” on their radar as a strategic mindset. The Manifesto attempts to introduce readers to the greater possibilities of story in an expansive and integrated fashion. Of course, its far from complete or authoritative. It’s meant to be a spark of light, the bright yellow cover being a metaphor for the sun and the power we have to create our own reality.

Coming up: Over the next two days, I ask Michael two more questions about the book and offer my thoughts on it.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Why does the public buy into stories like the Balloon Boy? Why do the media purvey stories that are often not as they are portrayed to be — and the public gets sucked in?

Those were questions raised yesterday in a thought-provoking teleconference by Paul Costelllo, director of the Center for Narrative Studies in Washington, DC.

I had seen Costello give a powerful keynote address at this year’s Golden Fleece Day in April, and he was my partner in one of the icebreaker activities we did that morning (hence, the lovely closeup photo of him at right). He’s a stimulating thinker and presenter.

Costello is developing a narrative critical method that suggests that we stand at a distance from a given story — on the balcony, as he says — and look at the big picture, the patterns that emerge. He suggests we ask: What’s the story of the story?

Other examples of stories that were not what they seemed include the Columbine shootings (misconceptions about which were cleared up in a 10th anniversary book by Dave Cullen), weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Bernie Madoff, subprime loans, and the death of Pat Tillman.

Just as storytellers make choices in how they choose to tell stories, Costello says, the audience has a choice in how we consume the stories.

Costello applied his narrative critic al method to his book The Presidential Plot. The teaser for the book here gives a flavor for Costello conveyed in yesterday’s teleconference:

Stories are great to share but do they really make any difference to the world? This book takes the 2008 election as a Case Study to show that a narrative critical method can bring a whole new explanatory power to our understanding of the public stories and their impact on us as citizens. It begins by asking Why are we suckers for a good story? … We bought the story that we need to go to war. We bought the story that fraudulent companies like Enron were re-inventing the energy business. (They were — it was pure invention). We bought the story about our innocence and our exceptionalism, that told us that we don’t torture and our military don’t lie, and most recently, we have been sold the tale that our money is as safe as a bank ! That has proved to be too true.

Costello’s current initiative is applying his narrative critical method to the Middle East, an effort called New Story Leadership, described on its site like this:

New Story Leadership for the Middle East (NSL) addresses [old stories of grievance, suspicion and fear, recycled endlessly, that have kept generations of Israelis and Palestinians from imagining and moving toward a future free of conflict] by offering Israeli and Palestinian college students a transformative leadership experience in America that will help inspire a new story of possibility for their generation. [you can find many more details about the project on the site]

Narrative critical method is a way to diagnose what are often diseased story systems, Costello says, and to design new story architectures that fit the systems. You must ask: Can you get to where you want to go using X story? Thus, in the case of the Middle East, Costello says, the question is: Can you get to peace using the current story? No, Costello says, you can’t get to peace with the old story, so you must change the story.

Put another way, the question is: “What has to go into the story for X to be the ending?”

And just why do we get sucked into stories that turn out to be something they are not? Costello says we have habitual narrative vulnerabilities — fear, for example — that make us susceptible. He talks about a “military-industrial story complex,” stories as products, and audiences as consumers of these products who have the ability to choose the way we wish to consume stories.

So many of the stories we’re subjected to could benefit from narrative critical analysis. We truly need to ask: What’s the story of the story? I’m excited by Costello’s potentially world-changing methods and initiatives.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Yep, it’s true that the next Job Action Day is almost a year off, but the message from this year’s event — about taking positive action for your career is worth repeating.

I received a ton of great stories about laid-off workers who found new opportunities. These four transformed unemployment into creative entrepreneurial ventures:

Kim White
I am a single, work-at-home mom, and I homeschool my son, who has chronic migraines. So when I lost my position as a marketing director for a franchise expert in direct response to the stock market crash, I had to scramble. I found a graphic-design position through Craigslist pretty quickly, but the company I worked for was paying relatively little to keep my copyrights and use them on several of their high-paying websites, other than the small site they had contracted for.

When I asked that client to pay me more promptly, they fired me. Deciding that I needed to be more self-sufficient and spread my opportunities out a bit, I began building my own websites in three different subject areas (content at www.crunchydata.com, slideshows at www.fauxflix.com, and digital scrapbooking freebies at www.freequickpage.com) and started writing for content aggregator websites for residual income. I am in my third month of this venture, and am starting to see my profits increase. I definitely see myself being able to make a living this way.

I also began selling my digital designs on Etsy a couple of months ago. There were no sales for almost two months, and all of a sudden this week, I started getting orders.

The first content site I wrote for was eHow. When glitches with their payment system prevented several of us new members from earning anything the first few weeks (they resolved this), I recruited a group of like-minded people for mutual support. We are helping each other to earn more online, and we see this as one of the keys to our growing success.

I am also the national Theme Weddings Examiner and the Sacramento Digital Scrapbooking Examiner for Examiner.com.

Nancy Lynn Jarvis
The real-estate market was a mess. What was a Realtor to do?

I’m a 20-year veteran of the real-estate industry who is writing murder mysteries set in Santa Cruz County instead of selling houses. I never planned to write anything, but since I couldn’t make money as a Realtor, after having been quite successful in the past, I decided to use my experiences and have some fun. The money hasn’t been great, but my friends who tried working through the market weren’t making much money either.

You can read the first chapters of The Death Contingency and Backyard Bones .

Real estate is an interesting business. The stress level involved in buying or selling a home ranks right after death and divorce. People reveal a lot about themselves during the process. The business attracts its share of colorful practitioners, too.

Their stories and my own experiences provide the settings where my Realtor and part-time sleuth character, Regan McHenry, works while she unravels mysteries.

After earning a BA in behavioral science from San Jose State University, I worked in the advertising department of the San Jose Mercury News. A move to Santa Cruz meant a new job as a librarian and later a stint as the business manager of Shakespeare Santa Cruz.

My work history reflects my philosophy: People should try something radically different every few years. Writing is my newest adventure.

Brian Peters
I left my job at a Japanese bank on Park Avenue in Manhattan September 2008 and used my severance package to travel around the world. Since coming home, I’ve built up a blog and am ready to publish a book on my trip and how the goal of round the world travel is achievable to anyone — even someone who has lost their job. The blog was recently selected as one of the best round-the-world travel blogs

David Moye
I managed to get a job — and switch careers — during the worst recession since the 1930s by creating a puppet show.

When I was laid off from a journalism job in September, I decided to switch to PR.

But even though I had experience in knowing how to pitch the media and had consulted for PR agencies, a lot of places wouldn’t give me the time of day.

So I decided to show off both my knowledge of media relations and my creativity by creating a YouTube series called PR Puppet Theatre where I offered PR advice to my daughter’s puppets.

I filmed five episodes and, using the contacts in my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, got two of them featured on the CNBC.com Web site where it was called “must-see entertainment/ education for every PR flack.”

I made sure when sending out my cover letters and resumes to point out: “If I can get a cheesy puppet show on CNBC, think of what I can do for your good clients.”

That pitch helped me get my current job at Alternative Strategies, a boutique PR agency in San Diego, and I am doing a pretty good job so far. After seven months, I have pretty much broken every company record for media placements and billing.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Continuing interesting story observations folks have made about marketing, advertising, public relations, and branding, from yesterday’s entry …

• Even names and labels can tell a story. Sarah Mahoney says (in an article that now appears to be password-protected) many marketers miss the opportunity to create a storyline through labels, especially when attempting to tout green products. Meanwhile, Russ Meyer blogs at What’s up below deck?
about the Mortgage Lifter tomato and the story behind it (the tomato became so popular that its developer was able to pay off his mortgage). Not every product can have an enigmatic, intriguing name that begs to have its story told, but it doesn’t hurt for your product (or service) to have a compelling, storied name.
• Stories that your audience experiences make your marketing message memorable and resonant. Randy Gage writes: “Simply assaulting your audience with facts, statistics and information will never create a bond. … But tell them a story of something that happened to you that illustrates a point - and they’ll often remember the story (and thus the point), five years later. … when you do it right — the recipient will not hear the story, or read the story - they will experience it!
• The narrative freedom of the Internet is changing patterns of story consumption and production. That was story/branding guru Michael Margolis’s assertion in an interview he did with Sarah Welt of the Custom Publishing Council Blog. But hark! Here’s an opposing view of that point from Nathan C. Ford on Art=Work, who asserts that advertising has failed on the Internet “because of the tired notion that people want to hear a story about the brands they consume. The internet is a social medium, and stories do not make for engaging conversation.” Stories do not make for engaging conversation? Really? That’s not the case in my world.
• A marketing campaign story must be connected to the company’s overall story. So says my friend Ardath Albee, continuing: “Stories are not just used in the way articles are written to inspire dialogue, but serve as the thread that pulls a buyer from interest through consideration to purchase.” In the same a blog entry, Ardath offers an excellent set of bullet points characterizing a good company story.
• Terrific examples of storytelling in marketing abound. Here’s where you can find some:
• Barbara Rozgonyi offers numerous examples in Storyteller Marketing | Search Engine Strategies Coverage on Wired PR Works.
• The Ford Motor Company has had a couple of successful storied campaigns. Read a case study of the “Ford Cars: Built to Last” campaign and about the winner of a Mustang Stories Contest, described by Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford.
• The Brand Story Web Marketing Process by Jerry Bader offers examples.
• Dr. Pamela Rutledge discusses Hang in There Jack: A Case Study in Cross-Platform Digital Storytelling on the Media Psychology Blog (the advertiser is Jack in the Box).
• A commenter, Ernest Nicastro, to this blog entry cited a classic ad, They Laughed When I Sat Down At the Piano But When I Started to Play! by famed copywriter John Caples as “probably the greatest example of storytelling in marketing.”
• The blog Storytelling To Create Impact Brands cites the Coke commercial below, “Happiness Factory,” as a nice example of storytelling in advertising.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Here’s a piece I’ve been meaning to post for a long time. First had it scheduled for January, then February, then April, and now here we are.

Some interesting story observations folks have made about marketing, advertising, public relations, and branding:

• Storied characters provide a human way for marketers to relate products to the public. That’s the assertion of a multi-part series about characters in in advertising on the blog hubbub. Interestingly the blogger, who offers his photo and bio, but not, as far as I can tell, his name, says the three archetypes for advertising characters are slaves (from real slaves to corporate servants), heroes, and clowns.
• Customer experiences must tell customers the story you want them to re-tell. That’s the edict of Frank Capek, who writes here. He poses these questions: “What are the stories your customers tell about their experience with you and your business? What do they think you really stand for? What are the most memorable aspects of their experience? What surprises them? What frustrates them? How do you make them feel?” Further:

  Your ability to retain customers is directly related to the nature and quality of the stories they tell themselves about their experience. … If you don’t effectively tell the story… how can ever expect that your customers will either get the message… or have the material to be able to pass the story effectively on to others.

  Most businesses don’t make full use of their customers’ stories, says John Williams on Entrepreneur.com, in an article that no longer seems to be online. But, “the brands that win tomorrow are those whose customers tell the best stories,” writes Alain Thys.

  Want some ideas for how to tell a story customers will re-tell? The blogger behind Rocket Watcher offers 4 Characteristics of a good product story.

  Before branders can expect customers to re-tell the story they want re-told, they should listen to the stories customers are already telling about the product (or service), says Nicholine Hayward on econsultancy Noting that the key drivers of a brand’s storytelling strategy are motive, means, and opportunity, Hayward advises that brands need to give consumers a reason and a reward for telling their own stories, arm them with a storytelling arsenal, and provide channels and platforms that invite and incentivise consumers to tell their stories.

  How about an example storytelling aimed at encouraging customers to re-tell it? That’s what Starbucks did in response to McDonald’s McCafe coffee drinks, which they claimed were an attempt to “commoditize” coffee, wrote Clair Cain Miller in the New York Times. Full-page, text-heavy ads “describe[d] how Starbucks selects only the best 3 percent of beans and roasts them until they pop twice, and gives its part-time workers health insurance,” Miller wrote.

  The Story Lady, Ronda Del Boccio, describes a storied customer experience that started well but didn’t deliver on its initial promise — a server that explained the origin of oil as a dip for bread at Macaroni Grill (but Del Boccio was disappointed that no more storytelling followed).

  Reinforcing this idea of consumer involvement in telling a brand’s story, Ian Tate, creative partner at Poke, said during a creative workshop (reported about on the Amsterdam Ad Blog): “It’s not just about telling a story anymore, the consumer has to be involved and should be able to ‘live the story.”

• Storytelling architecture provides structural patterns that fit brands. Laurence Vincent describes structural patterns, such as the MasterCard “Priceless” campaign:

  The storytelling architecture relies upon telling the story through purchases. Each purchase builds dramatic tension. The denouement occurs with the final element, which has no price. That example is heavily tied to the brand advertising, but there’s no reason the pattern could not extend to other brand touch points. In musical notation, that pattern could be expressed as A-A-A-B, where the A’s are the verses and the B is the chorus.

  What storytelling architecture and patterns can you pick up on in other storied advertising/marketing

• The Unique Story Proposition can anchor every story you tell in branding. Anyone who has ever studied marketing or advertising knows about a product’s or service’s Unique Selling Proposition; the Unique Story Propositions “stem from the reason a brand exists,” writes Alain Thys in an article that helpfully offers The Ten Truths of Branded Storytelling.
• Public relations is the strategic crafting of your story.Those are the words of Seth Godin, who often writes about storytelling in marketing. David E. Henderson, writer I really admire, goes a step further when he writes: “I predict the time will come when traditional public relations agencies and services are replaced by consultants and a new forms of agencies that will have the skills to teach effective storytelling.”

See Part 2 tomorrow.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Seemingly at just the exact moment yesterday when I was posting my entry about storytelling in the troubled world of newspaper journalism, my friend Thaler Pekar was expressing great enthusiasm on Facebook for an upcoming publication, San Francisco Panorama, a one-time-only newspaper to be published by McSweeney’s. Here’s why the publishers say they created San Francisco Panorama:

You can understand why this publication is a one-shot deal; these folks took five months to put together a newspaper. Obviously most newspapers are created in a day (kind of a miracle, I’ve always thought).

More about why they’re doing it:

Issue 33 of McSweeney’s Quarterly will be a one-time only, Sunday-edition-sized newspaper—the San Francisco Panorama. It’ll have news and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there. Expect journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much, much more.

As you look at the images of San Francisco Panorama pages on the nine-page press release (or download the PDF version), you do get a sense of how this publication combines traits of the Internet and print newspapers — or perhaps magazines to a greater extent — to be a 21st-century newspaper.

If any media company can figure out how to create something this cool in less than five months at a per-copy price of less than the $16 McSweeney’s is charging, it could just be the future of newspapers.

PS: One other cool thing — McSweeney’s collaborated with dozens of out-of-work and laid-off Bay Area journalists, as well as students, to produce San Francisco Panorama.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

We had only one heartbreak during our wonderful summer and early fall in Kettle Falls, WA — we were unable to have a daily newspaper delivered to us. The Spokesman-Review of Spokane had recently cut costs by ending home delivery in our area. Given that we were 20 miles from the nearest store, we could get the paper only on the couple of days a week when we went into town.

Heartbreak might seem like too strong a word, but not for lifelong, die-hard newspaper readers. On our trip back to Florida, we sampled many newspapers along the way, and happily were able to pick one up at most of our RV stops.

Meanwhile, discussion continues about the health of newspapers — or lack thereof — as well as the role of storytelling, not only in print journalism, but in the new digital formats that are enhancing the presence of newspapers on the Internet and possibly keeping newspapers alive.

Here are four (somewhat) recent pronouncements about storytelling in journalism:

When storytelling is reduced to content, ideas die. These were the words of Gary Goldhammer in an impassioned blog entry called The Last Newspaper. Goldhammer imagines a character, Daniel, who has purchased the last newspaper ever to be published and is answering questions from curious onlookers and telling them about how “what they now refer to as ‘content’ used to be called ‘stories,’ delivered by trained individuals known as ‘storytellers’ and ‘journalists.’”

He goes on to rail against content:

Stories are personal and transformational. Stories have definition and character. Stories are history personified. … But content is cold, distant. Content is a commodity — a finite consumable of fleeting value. Content is artificial intelligence.

Goldhammer has a kindred spirit in This American Life’s Ira Glass, who said in a keynote address to the American Library Association: “most journalism makes the world seem smaller and stupider and less interesting” [because it tries to eradicate the narrative.] But we live in a world where stories provide hope.”

Narratives ask us to invest in characters, was the pronouncement of Daysha Eaton, based on a talk she attended by Celeste Freemon, who teaches literary journalism at UC Irvine and is a senior fellow for social justice/new media at the USC Institute for Justice and Journalism. Unilke Goldhammer, who seems to think good storytelling can take place only in the print incarnation of newspapers, Freemon’s talk and Eaton’s blog entry recognize that narrative that invites investment and characters can be accomplished in digital forms.

In fact, storytelling is essential to new forms of journalism, which is pretty much what Amanda Michel, editor of distributed reporting at the investigative outlet ProPublica, says in an article about her on the Columbia Journalism Review site by Megan Gerber. “Journalism Plus” is one term these new forms of journalism (Robert Scoble coined the term, reports Josh Halliday in InJournalism magazine.) Medium is immaterial to those who espouse Journalism Plus. Halliday quotes student editor Greg Linch: “Journalism is not about the medium — it’s about the story. Audio and video helps the subject tell [his or her] own story. Multimedia storytelling allows us to do better journalism.”

So what are some of these new forms, and how well do they tell stories? Some examples:

• A College Media Online Journalism Contest 2.0 offers clues by way of its categories of winners: audio slideshow, breaking news video, video package, data (best use of data, best use of mapping), interactive package design, interactive graphic design, overall design, use of social networking sites, community engagement, innovation, breaking news package.
• Telling stories with Google Maps, as described by the Readership Institute: “Not enhance stories by adding maps, but tell stories using the maps.”

The Readership Institute, in the person on Rich Gordon, also lists what it takes to tell a good story online: The story needs to be visual, interactive (as in, the user is in control of the storytelling experience, interactive (as in, users can interact with the content), structured, multimedia, technology-driven, navigable, user-generated, personal, usable, and a team game.

Final pronouncement: Readers are looking for meaning. This statement was part of heartfelt talk by Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Hallman of The Oregonian, as excerpted by the excellent site Nieman Storyboard. In his talk, Hallman struggled with the changes in how he now tells stories and how, in his opinion, his Pulitzer-Prize-winning story would have been ruined with an online component. Part of the struggle is that editors prescribe shorter, more disciplined stories. That’s not easy, Hallman said, but stories can still be told in short form; in fact — because readers are looking for meaning — storytelling will be the salvation of newspapers. One writer who is using a very short form to convey meaning to readers, as well as invite them to invest in characters, is Brady Dennis, who writes a series called 300 Words. He won an Ernie Pyle Award for human interest for these 300-word stories.

In an interview with Dennis by Michael Weinstein on the Poynter Online site, Dennis says, “I believe that each person not only has a story to tell, but that each person has a story that matters.” He suggests that a good writer need not struggle with long-form vs. short-form storytelling: “I learned it doesn’t take 3,000 words to put together a beginning, middle and end. A good story is a good story, no matter the length. And sometimes the shorter ones turn out [to be] more powerful than the windy ones.”

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

If it’s Friday, it must be “Fast Company columnist supports storytelling resumes” day. At last that has been the case the last two Fridays, and both times Thomas Clifford told me about the articles.

Last week it was Nick Corcodilos supporting storytelling in or instead of resumes.

Today, it’s Dan Heath, half of the Heath brothers team that authored Made to Stick, which in part talks about how stories make ideas “sticky.”

In a Fast Company article this week, Heath actually says it’s impossible to make resumes — with their bulleted format — into storytelling communications that stick. Instead, Heath says to use your cover letter to make your resume stick by telling sticky stories in it:

Make it your goal, in the cover letter, to do two things: (1) Give headlines; and (2) Defend the headlines with stories. For instance, if you’re applying for a job in retail consulting, a headline might be: I’m the right guy because I have experience mining data to find useful insights. But don’t stop there. Support the claim by telling a story from one of your past clients: “In a recent engagement, my team worked for a major supermarket chain that had issued ‘loyalty cards’ to its customers. It worried that these loyalty cards were not improving profits — that they were simply giving away discounts to customers who would have shopped there anyway. They wanted us to study whether they should drop the discount cards. It was my job to explore the data in a systematic way — I’d love to discuss the process with you — and what I found, in short, is that discontinuing them would have been a $100 million disaster.”

I completely agree that cover letters lend themselves to storytelling far better than do resumes. But about a third of hiring decision-makers don’t read cover letters.

Thus, I am far from giving up on the idea of the storytelling resume.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Job Action Day is technically over for this year, but there’s no reason its message about taking positive action for your career can’t continue — especially since I received so many great stories about laid-off workers who found new opportunities. These three applied their experiences — their stories — to entrepreneurial ventures that enabled them to work at their passions:

Denise LaBuda I have recently reinvented my work path. I have spent the first 25+ yrs of my career working for large companies in marketing positions or consulting to those organizations. I was laid off in December 2008, and I am now building a business following one of my passions.

I am deeply troubled by the almost complete lack of training offered to our citizens around money. Over many years of watching the pain brought about in the adults around me because they did not have foundational skills in budgeting (let alone borrowing and investing), I have started a business to work with families to teach their kids budgeting skills before they leave home for college or work after high school — and hopefully begin to break this bad cycle.

For me, it is very exciting, scary, overwhelming, and deeply satisfying work. I know that it is time for me to give back to the great society in which I live, and finding work that has significant impact is now very important to me. Are my shifting priorities due to my age, my experiences, the sick economy? Probably all three.

Cindy Clawson
After 20 years working as a human-resources professional in the financial, healthcare and advertising industries, my HR position was eliminated. As I pondered what to do next, I spent time talking to friends, family and colleagues about my passions and goals in life. It was during these conversations that a I decided to venture into the entrepreneurial world and pursue my own business as a Professional Organizer. I have always loved to organize “stuff” and streamline processes, so helping others do this just comes naturally. You can read more about me and my business, Ideas in Organizing, by visiting my web site.

I love what I do, and I have already touched people’s lives in ways that I never thought I could. I have learned more about the world of small businesses and have a much greater respect for the small business owner. My priorities have changed in life — I no longer have a six-figure income, work long hours, play politics, and have no control over decisions made by the CEO or the board. It’s more about finding what makes me and my family happy, persevering and making it work. Life is good.

Michael Ambrose
In March of 2009, I unexpectedly lost my job working for a manufacturing company due to the economic downturn. I was paid very well and had worked with the company for the better part of 15 years when the cut occurred. While I knew the business was suffering, and cuts would be made, it still came as a complete shock because of the critical nature of my position. I would later find out that a previous employee who had been laid-off from his job made contact with the company and is now making substantially less money doing the work I once enjoyed.

Having only a high-school education with some additional college, I was very realistic about my chances of getting a job in the manufacturing sector at the premium salary I had been earning. I was prepared not to let that hinder me from finding any reasonable
employment, almost no matter the pay. What I was unprepared for was just how bleak the job outlook would be.

Still, I did not let this deter me from also working to make a change in my life to something that was potentially more rewarding and outside of “the usual.” With the help of my partner, Lexi, we set about turning the very difficult divorce and custody experience I had endured into a job that would serve to help others. I’ve actually been doing that for free via a successful personal blog I maintain. I did this out of the desire to see others avoid mistakes I had made during the long journey through the Family Court System, which continues today.

In an effort to turn this successful effort into a paying job, we created a new website to help others who are going through a high-conflict divorce and custody situations. The website is called Mr. Custody Coach. I utilized my research and writing skills to create a web-based business that is chock-full of helpful information and dedicate my time to helping our clients prepare meaningful parenting plans. Then, they can take their plan to an attorney and work to its implementation.

Since embarking on this project back in the spring of 2009 and a launch at the end of the summer of 2009, our business is continuing to grow. The best part of this endeavor? It’s a topic about which I’m passionate and serves to help people while saving them substantial amounts of money in legal fees — savings that can be earmarked for the most important parts of their cases while we assist them in planning wisely. It’s a job I can truly say is exciting and rewarding in a way that no other job has been in my life.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Continuing a list of story prompts and activities begun in yesterday’s entry:

The next prompt requires some herculean thinking and work, as well as knowledge of transmedia storytelling. It comes from a blog entry for a class called Theories of Texts and Technology taught by Blake Scott. (The entry is by “lamothej,” but that’s the extent to which I’ve been able to identify this blogger).

Take a well known story/narrative (it can be a story that’s been read in class, an influential TV show or movie, an intricate comic book, a popular video game, etc.) and build off of it to create a “narrative universe” by adding to the story through transmedia storytelling.

In her Storycatcher Blog Christina Baldwin described a session with her publisher in which participants formed a circle and asked these questions:

• What did you notice on the fringe of society 15 years ago that is now at the center?
• What do you notice on the fringe of society now that you hope will move to the center in the next 15 years?
• What are you willing to do to contribute to that happening?

The responses to these questions might not necessarily be stories, but for Baldwin, they were, as she related in the blog entry.

The site jpb.com describes a visual method of brainstorming to generate stories (rather than mere lists):

… To facilitate brainstorming session participants to build stories rather than lists of ideas, you need to be explicit in your instructions and, ideally, provide objects that help participants focus on building their story.

Explicit instructions need to be given as an introduction to the brainstorming activity and should be incorporated into the creative challenge itself. For instance, if you want a team of brainstormers to generate ideas on how to improve the efficiency of your manufacturing plant, don’t ask the typical “In what ways might we improve the efficiency of our production line?” This is just asking for a list. Rather ask, “Describe the journey of [your product] riding down an ideal production line.” Add to the challenge some additional instructions such as: “Include as many ideas as you possibly can and do not worry at this time about contradictions, impossibilities or strange ideas.”

The author also suggests using other props and tools to aid brainstorming, visualization, and story generation.

Finally, from the newsletter of my friends at Anecdote, an exercise for enhancing the visual palette when telling a story:

Pair people up: a storyteller and a listener. The storyteller has to start their story by describing the place where the story begins: “It all started in a tiny red brick house on the upside of the street. The poplar trees were blowing in the wind and my Dad was sitting on the front steps …” That sort of thing. The listener then has the job of interrupting the story at anytime to get more description. “Poplar tree?” they might ask, at which point the teller needs to say more about the poplar trees until the listener says “continue.” The storyteller then just keeps telling their story from that point on. One of the variations they had us do is then walk side by side and talk about our stories. There is something about strolling which improves the conversation.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I love collecting story prompts and activities because they have applications across the spectrum of the kinds of things I explore here, on A Storied Career. Organizational practitioners can use them as warmups/icebreakers or to get at deeper objectives. Memoirists and journalers can use them to get their creative juices flowing and explore aspects of themselves they may want to write about. Careerists can use them to learn more about themselves so they can convey their authenticity to employers. The list goes on…

Here are some nice ones I’ve encountered. More to come tomorrow:

Eldrbarry.net offers a whole slew of Storytelling Games and prompts, from activities that use no props, like “Cast of Thousands,” to storytelling board games, roleplaying games, and games that use decks of cards.

Joe McKeever describes 10 ways for preachers to sharpen their storytelling skills, taken from Austin Tucker’s book, The Preacher as Storyteller; however, I can see uses for these activities outside the pulpit:

1. Summarize a short story.
2. Turn a cartoon or comic strip into a narrative.
3. Place a quotation in its historical context.
4. Glean from leisure reading and TV time.
5. Quote a verse of a hymn or other poetry in its narrative setting.
6. Use one of the elements of narrative to brighten exposition.
7. Try your hand at creating a parable, a fable, or an allegory.
8. Narrate in a few sentences your own thoughts on the passing parade of life.
9. Use your testimony or the testimony of others.
10. Recast a news story.

In a list of 100 Useful Web Tools for Writers, Laura Milligan includes a section called Finding Inspiration that offers links to idea prompts and inspirational tools.

From an article on this year’s International Day for Sharing Life Stories back in May, the story prompt, “Miracle Story,” “a story centered by what, by its impact on your life and/or surprise, felt like a ‘miracle’ to the teller.”

“Evergreena” in her blog, Evergreena’s Journal, describes a game she invented with her brother in which they both start a writing a novel with the same title and characters and race to get to the 50,000-word mark. “Whoever gets there first is the winner.” She notes they both finished in six days in 2007 and five days in 2008. I know it’s not easy to write 50,000 words in five to six days, and I’m not sure what purpose this activity serves, yet I find it oddly compelling.

Thomas Clifford once kicked off a blog entry with the question: “Do you remember the exact moment you knew what you wanted to do for the rest of your life?” What a great story prompt! And I do remember my moment. A story I wrote in third grade, “Our Funny Dinner,” was published in the school paper. From that moment on, I knew I wanted to be a writer.

Katie Neuman described in a blog entry a Charlie Rose lecture in which he revealed his secrets of storytelling. The list of Rose-inspired questions Neuman devised to apply to her field works as a set of story prompts for products, services, businesses, and job-seekers:

• Explain to me what your [product/service/self] does and why it excites you.
• Tell me the moment you realized there was a need to invent this new [product/service/self] because you had a vision of something that could be.
• Tell me the moment you saw on your [customers’/employers’] faces that your [product/service/self] would change their lives.
• Take me back to what it was like when you were first getting the [product/service/self] off the ground.
• You joined the [entity] years after it was up and running. Take me back to the moment when you realized you just had to be a part of realizing this vision.

More story prompts and activities tomorrow.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Today is Job Action Day 2009, a day for job-seekers to take action steps right now — today — to move forward in their careers. The Quintessential Careers family of blogs (including this blog and Quintessential Careers Blog, Quintessential Resume and Cover Letter Tips Blog, and Career Doctor Blog), is looking at a promising aspect of the currently employment scene — turning unemployment into entrepreneurship.

For Job Action Day 2009, Quintessential Careers and a cadre of writers and bloggers are targeting several areas as offering bright spots of opportunity. In this entry, we look at stories of laid-off and displaced workers who are developing and marketing inventions:

Cheryl DelMastro
The economy forced my hand into making changes to survive financially.

I’m a Florida real-estate broker who owned a successful agency of 22 realtors strong. Once my agency all but closed due to the plunging housing market and loss of income, I chose to “reinvent” myself. Wanting to also set a good example for my three children, turning a negative into a positive was my mission in becoming a “mompreneur.” Within 18 months of sheer determination and hard work, my invention Stay with Me TM Baby Socks are currently in select Target stores nationwide. Mead Johnson will be test-marketing them this fall in hospital gift bags for new moms in the Northeast.

Always looking for the silver lining, I knew I could find a promising future in spite of the economic times in which we are living. So many people are now “reinventing” themselves as well. Whether going back to school or changing industries, we are reassessing our direction and purpose in our lives.

It’s all about taking the good out of a difficult situation and making a positive difference for you and your family.

Angela Larson
When let go from Wall Street in November 2008, I chose to chase a dream and start a toy company, Fierce Fun Toys. We now have our first product, Norman PhartEphant, on the market, a book, and two more prototypes in development.

Changing careers — shocking, but really a great move for my creativity, connection with my children, but still stressful financially, but I wouldn’t change a thing.

Trish Cooper
My story is one of entrepreneurship and the launch next month of my business venture resulting from the loss of my job.

This past January I lost my job after my company in which I was a CFO merged with another and moved out of state. When the day finally arrived, even knowing in advance I would no longer have my job, I was still somehow shocked, hurt, and my self esteem was at an all-time low. I had been sending out resumes without success and I was now out of work. All I could think was “I’m middle aged … what do I do now??”

After two days of my own “pity party”, I decided to take a deep breath while I figured it out and spend some of my new found free time with my beautiful grandbaby.

One activity that my granddaughter and I really took pleasure in was looking at family photos. As I was teaching my granddaughter about family members through photos and trying not to let smudge or crinkle the pictures, I was struck with an idea. I began to make interactive soft face photo-recognition flash cards for her that she could hold in her own little hands. The face photo-recognition game that we played is such fun and she was learning so much … when it struck me….

… Why not go for it and make a “real” game out of it? And that’s how the idea and my new business venture for my new interactive infant and toddler game Zatswho™ was born! Zatswho™ flash cards teach about family through face recognition, allowing you to share precious memories with little ones in a very hands-on and interactive way. They are designed to also help children learn about colors, basic shapes, and sequence. The flash cards, as well as the colorful tote they come in, are soft, easy to grasp wipe clean easily and are non-toxic.

After doing due diligence I determined it was worth the risk to go forward even if starting out I had to use my own personal funds. It’s been an exciting time for me and my family. I come from a close-knit family that loves getting together, sharing meals, going on outings, and just enjoying life and each other.

For me, watching my granddaughter’s face light up as she points out “Mommy,” “Daddy,” “Grand-poppy,” and other family members is an incredible thrill that never gets old! Zatswho™ flash cards have kept my granddaughter interested in more ways than I anticipated. Now that she’s grown into a toddler, she enjoys identifying different family members by name. She hugs and kisses the pictures, traces the shapes with her little fingers and is learning about matching as well. She carries her tote containing “her little treasures” wherever she goes!

The philosophy behind Zatswho™ is to fully embrace the core concept of love of one’s family including includes the need to know about family members, as well as the pursuit of wisdom by intellectual means through simple educational and developmental products. Our toys and games will be geared toward encouraging caregiver interaction with babies and toddler-aged children

I’m learning so much each day. Although I’m not a success story yet, I am a good example of not allowing the economic slowdown or my age to stop me from doing something out of my comfort zone and moving forward. I could never have imagined I’d be doing this. I have prepared a Business Plan to keep me focused.

I am to the point that I have begun to take orders. I’m having my website developed, getting ready to launch my new business venture next month in time for the holidays and then to the NYC Toy Fair in February, and I have just applied for an SBA micro-loan to help continue to fund my start-up.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

If I mentioned to you a book titled Memory Mining, what would you think it was about? Improving your memory? Digging through your memory to construct your life story?

What if I told you the book’s subtitle: Digging for Gems from Your Past Good Work? For what purpose? Why should the reader dig for these gems?

Although, in my opinion, author Alan Hays has given his book an unfortunate title, he has developed a useful system for developing the kind of material that makes for effective stories in the job search. I suspect he titled the book Memory Mining because memory mining is what he calls his system. Unfortunately, I don’t think that title does anything toward explaining what this book is about and why its topic is important.

As Hays notes, hiring decision-makers “want to hear stories that point to a specific and relative outcome or accomplishment, experience, or even a failure they can measure against their perceived needs.”

I well know from my years in the career field, especially my stint as a resume writer, that most people don’t track their accomplishments well and have difficulty dredging them up from memory when they need to update their resumes.

Hayes advises a detailed process of analyzing the job description for any position the job-seeker is considering apply to, and then, through the Memory Mining Question Set, the job-seeker cultivates fodder for accomplishment stories that are specifically targeted to the opening. I have all the confidence in the world that this process is quite effective. My experience, however, tells me that many job-seekers are unwilling to put in the solid work it takes to go through this process.

Hays also prescribes a skills-based process for jogging the job-seeker’s memory. The job-seeker lists and prioritizes skills and then writes accomplishments stories for the top eight skills.

I hope job-seekers don’t miss out — because of a nondescript title — on a small gem that could boost their job searches significantly.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.