I recently recapped the “business novels” I’ve covered here on A Storied Career and then received an e-mail from Omar Adams with a link to 50 All-Time Best Business Novels.

I thus realized that perhaps I need to more specifically define the kind of business novel I’ve written about here. I write about novels that employ a story, parable, or fable to convey business principles or lessons. Of course, there are plenty of novels in business settings, but most aren’t explicitly trying to teach a lesson. On the list Omar shared with me, “my” kind of business novel is called “Business ‘Parable’ Novels, written by well-known business experts and consultants, aim to illustrate principles of success.” Interestingly, not one of the titles in this category has appeared in my previous entries about business novels.

Other list categories include Tales From The 18th and 19th Century; Novels With Philosophical Perspective; Stories of Personal Crisis, Disillusionment, and Sometimes Redemption; Business Novels With A Touch of Romance; and Business Novels With Mystery and Suspense. All worthy categories and examples of storytelling, but perhaps not applied storytelling.

Here are the parable-type novels from the list Omar shared:

The Goal Written in a how-to, piecemeal style wrapped in narrative fiction, Eliyahu Goldratt’s novel is able to delineate his philosophy through the story of a man who tries to build his marriage and business.

It’s Not Luck This is the sequel to Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal. Alex Rojo, the main character, must figure out the most profitable way to sell his companies while trying to manage his personal life.

Getting Naked Patrick Lencioni tells the story of fictitious consultant Jack Bauer. He learns to use the “naked service”model for his business, which changes his life forever.

Critical Chain Eliyahu Goldratt continues his series of business novels, building on the Theory of Constraints. This novel again questions the theories of conventional management.

Necessary but not Sufficient This is another novel by Eliyahu Goldratt about the Theory of Constraints. It discusses many of the pressures and challenges of high-tech companies.

The Deadline Consultant Tom DeMarco uses creativity with deep insight to deliver this story commenting on the principles that affect software development. Mr. Tompkins, the main character, divides his company into eighteen teams and force them to compete with each other and a deadline.

Selling the Wheel Business novel bestseller Jeff Cox uses a narrative approach to give advice on how to best sell a company to customers. Told from the point of view of Max, this story tells how four different types of business men help him reach success.

The Small Business Billionaire Frank Mills is struggling with his restaurant when a robbery takes place. Fortunately, a young millionaire comes along to give him advice.

The Cure The widget company Essential is on the verge of losing clients because of incompatibility between its employees. Will the three main players join forces just in time?

Under the Gun Jack Griffin is a young entrepreneur satiated with the sudden success of his company. However, will the same things that brought about his success bring consequences later down the line?

The Time Seller This hilarious quick read talks about selling time in a bottle.

Miller’s Bolt Jim Manion is a good worker, but he doesn’t seem to be appreciated by his co-workers. Fortunately, Peter is willing to help save his career.

Jack’s Notebook Jack Huber’s daydreams about starting his own business as a professional photographer. Unfortunately, he’s not too experienced–until a mentor comes along.

The Venture Michael DiGabriel’s video production group has been downsized. They decide to build their own production company while learning a lot on the way.

The Squeeze This novel tells about the struggle of a small family-owned Midwest manufacturer. Fortunately, he learns about sustainability.

Meanwhile, I came across yet another one, The Ginger Bread Man, “the story of a young man who leaves a faceless job in a cubicle to pursue the personal craft of baking. He faces several everyday challenges that help him follow his heart and grow into a life he truly enjoys. At its root the book is about learning who you are and finding joy in a career that suits your skills and personality. … The Ginger Bread Man is about our quest to live up to that creativity in our daily lives. … The book also contains several discussion questions suitable for book clubs and classroom use.” (The several typos in the book’s Web page, corrected here, concern me a bit about the book.)

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I know that I have extolled the webinar-presenting prowess of Terrence Gargiulo on several occasions, but I really can’t express often enough how well he puts on a webinar.

That goes double when he teams up with Shawn Callahan of Australia’s Anecdote consulting firm. The two had presented an excellent webinar about a year ago, so I was eager to “attend” their most recent production, It’s a Marathon Not Magic: Deliberate Practice Approach to Developing Business Storytelling Skills.

I’ve talked before about what makes Terrence’s webinars so special, and this one last week enables me to add to the list:

• Terrence is wonderful about welcoming folks and chatting with them as they enter the webinar. Shawn noted that Terrence is “the master of saying g’day to everyone.”
• He (and his co-presenters) always stick strictly to the planned schedule, never failing to end on time — but this time, Terrence and Shawn invited folks to stick around if they wanted to continue the conversation.
• And “conversation” is key because Terrence and Shawn ran this webinar as more of a give-and-take discussion instead of a purely didactic presentation. They also involved participants in a couple of polls during the session. In one, a third of webinar participants felt it was not hard to notice stories in events and other aspects of everyday life. Asked how often they use a book or movie story to illustrate a point, participant responses were pretty evenly distributed among possible answers.

The webinar offered a number of valuable suggestions — not just by the presenters, but also by participants — for enhancing storytelling skills. Here are some of them (and of course, you can see all of them in the video of the webinar, embedded below):

• Noting that Ben Franklin rewrote his essays and then wrote them again in verse, the presenters suggested practice, repetition, and soliciting feedback are excellent ways to polish storytelling skills.
• Starting a story with a “relevance statement” (Why would you want to hear this story?) is an effective technique.
• Find a story in a book or on the Web. Work out its point and pinpoint the aspects of the story that make it work.
• Try telling the story of a book or movie in varying lengths of time.
• Jot down stories or notes about stories as you encounter them in real life. Participants suggested the applications Evernote and Whrrl as excellent tools for this kind of note-taking. (I wrote about Whrrl, a “storytelling application for the web and mobile that lets people share and remember their real-world stories as they happen,” here. I’ve gotten the sense from at least one tweeter that the app has changed since I originally wrote about it.) Writing stories down, of course, is more for clarifying them in your mind than for memorizing.
• Terrence offers a “circle” technique (best absorbed by viewing the webinar video), which prompted a participant to suggest mind-mapping as a good way to work out stories.
• Practice techniques are also listed here.
• A fabulous resource for finding appropriate stories in Anecdote’s StoryFinder.
• Care and intention, the presenters noted, make your story believable. You can open the doorway to your story by posing a question to the audience.

Meanwhile, Steve Denning has posted a related 3-minute video about how anyone can tell a story in business. “If we all do it, we can learn to do it better,” he says, echoing Shawn’s and Terrence’s theme. (The audio is a little hard to pick up in the video.)

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I wrote recently about the site scholar David Boje has set up, StoryOrgs, where folks can ask questions about the organizational storytelling concepts he researches and writes about.

Another of the vast resources Boje offers online popped onto my radar recently and is worth sharing: David Boje’s Annotated Bibliography on Storytelling and Consulting.

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Recently, storyteller Eric James Wolf turned the tables on me. I’ve conducted more than 57 Q&As with story practitioners — and now Eric has done a Q&A with me. I thought it would be worthwhile to excerpt some of it here because it explains some of my philosophies and approaches with this blog.

In this entry, Eric had asked me about the relationship between storytelling and postmodernism.

I view the current storytelling movement as an outgrowth of postmodernism. Postmodernism is characterized by critique, irony/ionic humor, mockery, parody, playfulness, disorientation, things that are symbolically rich and meaningful, multiple perspectives, conflict, the discontinuity of traditions, contradiction, ambiguity, paradox, metaphors, a strong aesthetic dimension, diversity and multiplicity, fragmentation, as well as questioning pre-established rules, values, expectations, right vs. wrong, good vs. bad, and underlying faith in reason and science.

In part, story becomes a way to make sense out of and find meaning in fragmented postmodern life.

Postmodernism means seeing organizations as texts, narratives, discourse, stories. David Boje, arguably the scholar who has most significantly connected storytelling with postmodernism, writes that “Stories are not indicators [of an organization], they ARE the organization.”

Boje writes:

The postmodern turn has several key method assumptions. First, humans as storytelling animals act toward their organization and environments based upon their storied interpretations of self, other, organization, and environment. Second, story making is a collective process of social interaction in which story meanings change over time. Third, story meaning changes with the context of the telling as storytellers select, transform, and reform the meanings of stories in light of the context of the telling. Fourth, in [storytelling organization] theory the individual is part of the collective enterprise of constructing and transforming stories told to the world and stories of the environment being constructed. This is different from a structural-functionalist model of organizations in which story functions as measures of variables of an abstract structure. Fifth, the inquirer is a story-reader who upon entering the story-making world changes the story-making processes by being there at all.

Postmodernism also means fusing modern techniques with traditional concerns. We can never get away from traditional oral narrative culture because we think in story; that’s how our brains are wired. But a postmodern view says that story does not come from an authority on high but belongs to everyone. It’s collective and distributed, and many people and perspectives participate in constructing stories (think about social media and blogs). Postmodernism also means rejecting the idea of an objective “reality;” there is only the reality we construct with others through discourse — by telling our stories.

Probably my best attempt at connecting postmodern storytelling with traditional oral narrative culture is in an essay I wrote as part of my PhD program.

Having said all that, I am less interested in postmodernism than I used to be. Postmodern theory provided my entry point into storytelling, and [this] blog still carries the tagline “Kathy Hansen’s Blog to explore traditional and postmodern forms/uses of storytelling,” but it’s not a big part of my current thinking.

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David Boje is one of the leading scholars of organizational storytelling. I encountered large bodies of his work while in my PhD program, and I must admit it takes me an enormous amount of effort and brain power to wrap my head around his research and concepts. But he has a prodigious Web presence, so there’s no lack of material to try and understand.

One of the newest — or at least one that I have most recently come across — is StoryOrgs, described as a “Knowledge Sharing site where we explore the mysteries of organizational storytelling and linguistic sensemaking together.” The site is a place where folks can pose questions about Boje’s concepts. A few samples:

• Does restory unearth submerged narrative/antenarrative patterns?
• Derrida and deconstruction vs storytelling and antenarrative?
• What academic pursuits have been facilitated by antenarrative based story analysis?
• How do we explain zen koans in linguistic or antenarrative terms?
• End and means, is an END an ANTEnarrative or not?
• The limits of language and sensemaking?
• What is NOT an antenarrative ?!?
• Experimental methods for antenarrative research?
• What is the difference between story and narrative?

The concept of “antenarrative” is one of Boje’s most significant contributions to organizational storytelling research. StoryOrgs clearly needs users to understand antenarrative and links to this explanation in its FAQs:

Antenarrative is defined as a ‘bet’ on shaping the future, and a ‘before’ a full blown stable narrative has been constructed.

For first use of term ‘antenarrative’ see: Boje, D. M. 2001. Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research. London: Sage.

Antenarrative is defined as “non-linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted, and pre-narrative speculation, a bet, a proper retrospective narrative with Beginning, Middle, and End (BME) can be constituted” (Boje, 2001: 1). Antenarratives are “in the middle” and “in-between” (Boje, 2001: 293) refusing to attach linear BME coherence. Whereas, most BME narratives and narrative fragments are retrospective (backward-looking) antenarratives are more often prospective (forward-looking). BME Narratives must achieve coherence, developmental plots required by narrative theorists (Gabriel, 2000:20, 22; Czarniawska, 1997: 79, 98; 1998: vii, 2).

Routledge is releasing a book: Storytelling and the Future of Organizations: An Antenarrative Handbook, David M. Boje, Ph.D., Editor

StoryOrgs is characterized as being different from discussion boards and the like because:

• It has a simple question-and-answer (Q&A) approach
• Knowledge is naturally organized by a flexible, faceted tag-based topic system (folksonomy)
• The system automatically protects the community from irresponsible online behaviors
• It offers many social media features such as newsfeeds, alerts, profiles,

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A week or so ago, a friend asked me to help her come up with a seven-minute story to read for a Toastmaster’s assignment.

I was flummoxed and disappointed with myself. Here I am exposed to stories all the time, but I lacked any type of mental or virtual database from which I could easily draw a story that would meet my friend’s needs.

But that same day, I got a newsletter from Anecdote, the Australian consulting firm, that announced its Story Finder. There it was — a database with a slew of topics, arrange alphabetically, each topic with at least one story just a click away.

What a fabulous resource!

Anecdote also unveiled its new Web site, the firm having previously told its story in a blog format.

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Several groups related to corporate/organizational storytelling have sprung up on LinkedIn recently (or at least have recently come to my attention). A lot of overlapping content seems to populate these groups, which confuses me a bit.

The group Corporate Storytelling has been discussing The Real Reason Stories Are Important, among other topics. (You may need to join the group to see its content and discussions). On Organizational Storytelling, members are recommending readings. Storytelling Organizations is based on the approaches of narrative scholar David Boje.

And on Stories for Business, Rachel Parkin challenged members to tell 6-word stories about themselves in the manner of the 6-word memoirs at SMITH Magazine. Some storytelling purists find the 6-word format gimmicky and antithetical to actual stories. But I find it fascinating to see the kinds of 6-word stories that story practitioners tell about themselves. Several dozen members of this group posted their 6-word bios.

Here are profiles for each of these groups:

• Great leaders inspire their people through both actions and words. Their ability to engage, motivate and inspire through the spoken word is an essential characteristic of their leadership and forms part of their personal and organisational brand. Corporate Storytellers [sic] is for leaders in the corporate world who strongly desire to engage their people by sharing a common purpose and belief through the power of storytelling. Our greatest leaders have employed the power of the spoken word to change the course of history. Barack Obama won the American people with his inspired oratory skills and his ability to engage people through powerful stories. Leaders and managers in the corporate world can also use the power of storytelling to engage their people and drive personal and organisational performance.
• Do you love storytelling - telling them, listening to them or reading them? Do you know a great story? Have you written a great story? Someone shared a story in [Linkedin] Questions & Answers about the recession in business, and they got 74 replies. I wondered how many more great stories (real or allegorical) there are that have the potential to inspire us all and get others on business thinking differently. So I [Alison Smith] decided to set up [Stories for Business] to see.
• Organizational Storytelling [is] an informal group of academics and practitioners who share an interest in organizational storytelling.
• Storytelling Organizations provides workshops, seminars, and consulting to balance narrative-past, living story emergence, and antenarrative future. Antenarrative is a bet on the future, the moves away from stuckness in past narratives, and capitalizes on living story webs of relationships. This group is open to anyone with an interest in storytelling organizations. See David Boje’s book: Storytelling Organizations (London: Sage).

Know of any other LinkedIn groups related to applied storytelling?

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Sometimes when I get an especially meaty comment on this blog, I publish is as a blog entry since comments don’t appear very prominently on A Storied Career. Such is the case with this comment by Paul Stewart of New Zealand’s On Brand Partners, who commented on my entry about strategy and story:

There is no doubt the wave around [strategy as story] is building. We use stories and narrative a lot in our work, but for our friends at Anecdote, it’s their bread and butter. They are doing fantastic work working with CEOs and their teams to help them build stories which explain their companies’ strategies. [Here, Paul referenced a piece on Anecdote’s site about story and strategy.] for a small insight. Interesting to think ‘why’ stories are so effective in this context? Sure there’s the usual thought - stories tick the box on many of the principles of effective communication. Go deeper, and science tells us that stories actually change the way we think and the way we act. For example, neuroscience highlights to us that it is through “stories” and the “experiences” people have that new pathways are created in the brain (by discovering insights for themselves), which ultimately influences how we make sense of the myriads of data — such as in typical strategy documents — we are exposed to in the world (or in this case the organisation).

The CEO’s perspective is unique — I often say that he or she is effectively the only person in an organisation who will really lose sleep over ‘how does everything integrate, or fuse together’. It’s a question I often get asked by CEOs — “what’s the glue? How do I get everyone aligned and engaged.” Of course they can’t do the “fitting” or the “gluing” — they rely on everyone else to do that. Think of culture as the neural patterns of the organisation.

Stories illustrating and reinforcing vision and strategy are an important conduit in creating new organisational mindsets (c.f., neural pathways at a company level). They allow everyone to have those ‘aha’ moments - an insight that connects what they do to the “something bigger.” As that happens a different pattern of behaviour starts to emerge from within the organisation. Whenever CEOs (and any leader for that matter) ask themselves “How do I create the right mindsets?” rather than “How do I change behaviour directly?”, stories start to become the key tool in their kit. It’s even better if they use the stories as a stimulus to develop dialogue with and, amongst, their people. I suspect that in each of the examples you’ve highlighted, the CEO has either consciously or unconsciously adopted that starting point.

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I have a very embarrassing confession, especially as a former business professor. Three alliterative business concepts — strategy, sustainability, and scalability — elude my total comprehension. I basically understand the concepts on a rudimentary level, but I have not completely wrapped my head around them. If you asked me to explain them, I could not do so in any truly articulate way. And they are not easy concepts to explain; for example, see if you can draw a picture that explains “strategy.” When I searched for graphics to accompany this post, most of the images that came up showed chess games. Yeah, chess requires strategy, but does a picture of a chess game explain strategy?

But two recent blog posts have boosted my understanding of strategy by tying it to story.

The first is posted on Ben’s Blog by Ben Horowitz, cofounder and general partner (along with Marc Andreessen) of the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. In this piece about how Andreessen Horowitz evaluates CEOs, Horowitz states that “in good companies, the story and the strategy are the same thing. As a result, the proper output of all the strategic work is the story.” Here’s more, including the CEO’s role in the storied strategy:

The CEO must set the context that every employee operates within. This context gives meaning to the specific work that people do, aligns interests, enables decision-making and provides motivation. Well-structured goals and objectives contribute to the context, but they do not provide the whole story. More to the point, goals and objectives are not the story. The story of the company goes beyond quarterly or annual goals and gets to the hardcore question of why? Why should I join this company? Why should I be excited to work here? Why should I buy your product? Why should I invest in the company? Why is the world better off as a result of this company’s existence?

When a company clearly articulates its story, the context for everyone—employees, partners, customers, investors, and the press—becomes clear: When a company fails to tell its story, you hear phrases like:

“These reporters don’t get it.”

“Who is responsible for the strategy in this company?”

“We have great technology, but need marketing help.”

Toward the end of the section on strategy (Horowitz goes on to discuss decision-making, getting the company to execute, and measuring results against objectives), the writer makes the startling statement in the headline of this post.

Commenter “Deckerton” notes that storytelling, which he/she characterizes as “setting context in emotionally and intellectually compelling ways,” is a skill that is rarely taught. (Which is why I wish I were still teaching).

Examples of strategy as story? Horowitz offers the first one on this list, while commenters to the post suggested additional examples:

• Jeff Bezos’ 3-page letter to Amazon shareholders in 1997
• Steve Jobs talking about Apple’s story (video)
• A collection of Warren Buffet’s letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders

Commenter Scott Allison also suggests the storied exercise in this blog post.

Which leads to the second blog post that elucidated strategy for me. In Moving From Strategic Planning to Story Telling by Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, Martin suggests “think[ing] about a strategic options as being just a happy story about the future.” Further:

When you have assembled the happy stories/options, you can then begin to deploy the most important question in strategy: what would have to be true? For each individual story, what would have to be true for it to be a terrific choice? Work backward from an attractive possibility to see what would have to be true to make this a feasible and attractive option.

That is the dead-easy way to produce great strategies.

Now, those are some approaches to strategy I can wrap my feeble brain around.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Steve Denning published a blog entry last month on an important but often overlooked topic in organizational storytelling — how to create a culture of storytelling within the organization. He offers six steps for doing so.

Though grounded in Denning’s earlier work in storytelling, the steps seem very much tied to his more recent work for his upcoming book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management.

If I ever have the opportunity to teach again, I would consider implementing these steps to create a storytelling culture in the classroom that students could take into their future workplaces. I always found it a bit difficult to get buy-in from business students on the value of storytelling.

Denning’s six steps follow, but his elaboration on each step is the real meat of his prescription, so I hope you’ll check it out:

1. The goal that is being pursued in establishing a storytelling culture is to foster high-quality interactive human relationships.
2. Stories should be recognized as one of the ways of fostering high-quality human relationships, but not the only one.
3. The organization must have as its goal to satisfy, please and even delight other people.
4. The work should be conducted in self-organizing teams.
5. The work should be done in relatively short cycles,
6. Communications should be more open than in a command-and-control bureaucracy.

[Photo: Story circle at McKenna Museum of African American Art discussing juvenile detention reform in New Orleans in 2008.]

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