Category Archives: Organizational Storytelling

Just a postscript to an earlier entry about storytelling at Procter and Gamble: P&G also has a digital story in which a Martian appears before a group of six composite characters representing various organizations within P&G. The Martian wants to know who’s responsible for innovation at P&G. As Linda Coffman, … Continue reading →

Way back in the early days of this blog, I wrote about the new (to me) concept of the business novel and one I discovered while at a conference. Barbara Fillip of Knowledge for Development, LLC, has recently written about business novels and provided a helpful list of examples. She … Continue reading →

Just about a year ago, Michael Margolis, Madelyn Blair, and Karen Dietz of the WorkingStories group surveyed member story practitioners to compile a collective picture of organizational and applied storytelling worldwide. Although the results have yet to be formally analyzed, Michael has given me permission to share a preliminary snapshot … Continue reading →

Steve Denning interviewed Procter & Gamble’s (former? Denning uses past tense) senior manager, learning technologies, Linda Coffman, who is speaking on Friday, May 9, at the Smithsonian Associates Organizational Storytelling Weekend. Here are 5 things I learned from the interview about organizational storytelling at P&G: Global Learning and Development, the … Continue reading →

Storytelling continues to emerge in academic research about organizational life. A recent issue of Group & Organization Management (Vol. 33, No. 2; find it through an academic library database) features John F. McCarthy’s “Short Stories at Work: Storytelling as an Indicator of Organizational Commitment,” in which he notes that: Findings … Continue reading →

I’ve written before about Lori Silverman’s excellent book, Wake Me When the Data Is Over, one of the few books on organizational storytelling to provide copious examples of storytelling in use in organizations. Just wanted to also point out that her Web site of the same name is an excellent … Continue reading →

The International Association of Business Communicators conducted one of the most comprehensive studies ever on storytelling in organizations in 2006, and Terrence Gargiulo and Angela Ioffredo have recently reported on the results. The researchers found that organizations were using stories in six broad categories: Stories about the organization, including its … Continue reading →

I have fallen deeply in love with both the company and Web site of A. Goodman. The site offers some terrific newsletters, called Free Range Thinking, available for download, many of them on using story in organizations, especially discussing how to tell an organization’s story, particularly nonprofits: Telling Tales to … Continue reading →

Steve Denning continues his generous ways by sharing several articles of interest: Putting Narrative Into Practice: Tips, Tricks, Exercises and Templates Creating an Organization That Is Comfortable with Change The Morphology of Stories That Spark Organizational Renewal. This one is for the academic journal Organization, to which I’m also submitting … Continue reading →

In his most recent book, The Secret Language of Leadership, Steve Denning offers a chapter on Narrative Intelligence, which he describes this way: Narrative intelligence is the capacity to understand the world in narrative terms, to be familiar with the different components and dimensions of narratives, to know what are … Continue reading →