I’ve been writing recently about telling organizational stories in “About Us” pages, but, of course, “About Me” pages, seen most often in blogs, serve a similar purpose and come off best when told in story form (which I realize this blog’s “About Kathy Hansen” really doesn’t. Must fix that).
In the meantime, the About Me page of the blog an undone calm made me smile. The author is ACloudman, and I think the A stands for Anne.
Here’s this week’s A Storied Career word/tag cloud from Wordle.net:
The cover article of the current issue of American Scholar, published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society, carries the headline “The End of the Black American Narrative,” with this subhead:
A new century calls for new stories grounded in the present, leaving behind the painful history of slavery and its consequences
(Not surprisingly, Barack Obama is pictured on the cover and on the Web page carrying the article, and it thus seems appropriate to publish this entry on the day Obama accepts the nomination of his party for President of the United States). 
Here is how author Charles Johnson, the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Professor for Excellence in English at the University of Washington, Seattle, characterizes the current black American narrative:
It is a very old narrative, one we all know quite well, and it is a tool we use, consciously or unconsciously, to interpret or to make sense of everything that has happened to black people in this country since the arrival of the first 20 Africans at the Jamestown colony in 1619. A good story always has a meaning (and sometimes layers of meaning); it also has an epistemological mission: namely, to show us something. It is an effort to make the best sense we can of the human experience, and I believe that we base our lives, actions, and judgments as often on the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves (even when they are less than empirically sound or verifiable) as we do on the severe rigor of reason. This unique black American narrative, which emphasizes the experience of victimization, is quietly in the background of every conversation we have about black people, even when it is not fully articulated or expressed. It is our starting point, our agreed-upon premise, our most important presupposition for dialogues about black America.
Johnson begins his argument by analyzing just what a story is, asking:
These are the questions he tells his students they must ask of a story, adding that a story must offer “a conflict that is clearly presented, one that we care about, a dilemma or disequilibrium for the protagonist that we, as readers, emotionally identify with.”
Does the black American story meet the criteria? Yes, Johnson says, it “beautifully embodies all these narrative virtues.”
Johnson builds his argument by summarizing the horrors of slavery and subsequent oppression. He calls the Civil Rights Movement “the most important and transformative domestic event in American history” after the Civil War. In sum, “The conflict of this story is first slavery, then segregation and legal disenfranchisement. The meaning of the story is group victimization, and every black person is the story’s protagonist.”
Johnson invokes the words of W.E.B. DuBois and the success of today’s prominent African-Americans (such as Obama and Oprah) to “challenge, culturally and politically, an old group narrative that fails at the beginning of this new century to capture even a fraction of our rich diversity and heterogeneity.” He critiques Louis Farrakhan and discusses a scholarly debacle in which a 19th Century black woman writer turned out to be white, “a cautionary tale for scholars and an example of how our theories, our explanatory models, and the stories we tell ourselves can blind us to the obvious, leading us to see in matters of race only what we want to see based on our desires and political agendas.”
I am vastly oversimplifying here and drastically summarizing when I’m longing to paste the whole article into this space. Bottom line: It’s an important article not only for what it says about Black Americans but for what its says about story and narrative.
And what narrative should replace the existing one? Johnson writes:
In the 21st century, we need new and better stories, new concepts, and new vocabularies and grammar based not on the past but on the dangerous, exciting, and unexplored present, with the understanding that each is, at best, a provisional reading of reality, a single phenomenological profile that one day is likely to be revised, if not completely overturned. These will be narratives that do not claim to be absolute truth, but instead more humbly present themselves as a very tentative thesis that must be tested every day in the depths of our own experience and by all the reliable evidence we have available, as limited as that might be. … These will be narratives of individuals, not groups. And is this not exactly what Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of when he hoped a day would come when men and women were judged not by the color of their skin, but instead by their individual deeds and actions, and the content of their character?
Certainly Obama’s acceptance tonight of the presidential nomination (on the 45th anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech) is a triumph of the individual.
No sooner had blogger “Nien” written these words:
… social media is all about the person and telling the their story. I think it’d be a trip either adapt a novel that’s told through Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Flicker, blogs and whatever or write an entirely new novel using the same devices…
… than the above appeared on the Chicago Tribune’s headcandy, A Modern Day Romance (using Facebook’s News Feed feature as a narrative device).
Of course, about 5 billion commenters jumped on the headcandy poster to point out that the Facebook News Feed is in reverse chrono order — with the most recent items appearing first, but it was a cool idea.
My mother’s side of my family has long been tantalized by the mystery of what became of my great-grandfather, Walter Scott Fenimore, who disappeared after leaving for work in Beverly, NJ, without a trace in September of 1913, leaving my great-grandmother, Katharine Hathaway Fenimore, after whom I am named, and her four children. My grandfather, H. Haines Fenimore, being the only male offspring, was left to support the family.
Speculation about Walter Scott Fenimore’s disappearance has suggested he was an alcoholic and that perhaps he ran off to Alaska, maybe to prospect for gold.
My mother’s family has always known little of the circumstances of my great-grandfather’s disappearance until recently when my sister Robin began to do some digging and found the newspaper clipping shown here (his middle initial was mistakenly reported as “F.”) that relates that $500 in bail money also disappeared with my great-grandfather. I had never known he has a justice of the peace, similar to a judge of today.
A subsequent clipping from the Philadelphia Inquirer on Sept. 24, some two weeks after his disappearance, noted that he had been the “committing magistrate” for the city of Beverly, and “the records of important cases that came before his court are said to be much complicated because of his continued absence.” The clipping mentions a sensational case involving the shooting of a National Guardsman, allegedly by a chauffeur who cited the attentions of the Guardsman to the chauffeur’s wife. It was the Guardsman’s bail money that disappeared with my great-grandfather.
Could his disappearance have been related to that case or another case before him as a judge? Perhaps the story will continue to be unraveled.
The other day, I blogged about storytelling on About Us pages. Following on that discussion, Jim Randall of The Raconteur, describes a process he takes clients though to “create enterprise through stories.” 
He writes:
To be successful we need to connect with, inform and engage those we serve and those who contribute to our success. Engage them in developing ideas and initiatives, building relationships and facilitating our progress.
An organization’s story, Randall contends, consists of:
I would suggest that all the same points can apply to the job-seeker. Going through the bullets above and articulating your response to each will serve you well as a job candidate, especially in preparation for interviewing.
Randall goes on to explain that to become engaged in your enterprise, people want to know:
Again, these points can be adapted to the job-seeker to a great extent. In researching an employer before you go into an interview, you can develop responses about taking the organization to a more promising place and how you will get there. You can also demonstrate your understanding of the organization’s constituents — employees and customers.
Randall’s site also contains his “story so far” and a section with “Stories that demonstrate operating beyond integrity,” although it contains only one story at this point.
Danish story practitioner Svend-Erik Engh, who will be featured in a Q&A interview in A Storied Career this fall, has written a fine little 145-page book, Tell a Story: Be Heard, Be Understood, Create Interaction, that is both written and designed in a reader-friendly manner.
The book is full of Svend-Erik’s stories and describes his journey to becoming a storyteller and organizational-storytelling practitioner. It is also loaded with practical advice on how to tell all sorts of stories.
The book can be ordered here.
As the 29th Olympiad comes to a close, I note an interesting trend. With some exceptions, most athletes have been narrating their own stories in the video “packages” on NBC’s telecast. No voiceover narration from an omniscient sportscaster. The athletes who’ve done it seem very camera-savvy and well-spoken.
I find it a refreshing trend. It peels back a layer of mediation and minimizes the maudlin quality that my best friend has always complained about.
Here’s an example, though maybe not the best one (but you can search for others at the same page).
I get very frustrated when Web sites either have no About Us page or have About Us pages that really reveal nothing. A classic case in point of a tell-nothing About Us page is Twitter’s. Now, I know what Twitter is, what it does. But I’d like the perspective of the folks who run it. How did it start? Where did the idea come from? What it Twitter’s story?
At the blog Buzz Canuck, Sean Moffitt writes:
“Search high and low and if you scan 100 websites, you’d be challenged to find one good story about the company or brand it supports. Even the good ones in my recent search, can hide themselves behind the trivial stuff. A good story should be there smack dab on the front page attracting you like a mosquito to the nightlight.”
The blog of Caterina, co-founder of Flickr (whose About page, by the way, is a fun bulleted list), turned me onto the story of Plum (“Plum is a free online service that lets you collect and share all of the cool, interesting, and important stuff in your digital life. We started Plum because we think that collecting and sharing on the web is really fun and useful — but much too difficult to do.”)
Curiously, the Plum story isn’t on its About Us page but is in its blog (by Hans Peter):
Plum was born because making it easier for people to capture their knowledge and share it with their communities could help make the world a better, more connected place.
For me, a personal story illustrates this. In 1999, my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and my siblings and I (at the time living in Anchorage, San Francisco, New York, and Oslo) sought information and insight. We used the web for research and email to share our findings with each other. Our research led us to become informed and armed with questions and even some suggestions as we discussed his condition and care with the doctors and our parents. I firmly believe that the information and knowledge we shared helped both extend my dad’s life and maximize the quality of his last days with us.
Two years later, a good friend emailed me. Her boyfriend’s dad had been diagnosed with the same cancer, and she remembered that we had done tons of research and wondered if I would share it with her. I pulled out my tweezers and went through my old email, but sadly was only able to recover a small amount of the information we had gathered. I would gladly have shared the collected information and resources we had pulled together with anyone who had an interest in the subject. But other than hand-crafting a personal web site to collect the links, the emails, and the additional notes we found and shared with each other, there was no simple way for me to do so. Our cumulative knowledge and information was lost.
The next time someone emails me to ask “do you still have the research you did on this topic?” I want to be able to simply point them to the collected information. One reason I jumped back into the startup world is because with Plum, such collected knowledge and information will be easy to make and keep accessible. We’re still evolving and refining the service, working to make it simpler than ever to collect and share all kinds of knowledge and information that we care about, stumble across, or need. I think this has the power to change the way we use the net, and I hope it will change the world, if even just a little bit.
The blog Geekpreneur has a nice, comprehensive piece on telling your organization’s story on your About us page, stressing that the story should stick in reader’s minds and “leave important messages in the listener’s memory.”
Somewhere in all these pieces about organizations telling their stories, I came across the Squidoo lens Arrowsmith Printing: Entreprenuership in Small Town Iowa in Mid /Century, which tells the wonderful, detailed story — complete with video — of a small family business. The profile of author Margo Arrowsmith provides a glimpse at the mentality that created this fascinating lens:
I was born into a small business, I believe that small business and entrepreneurs are the backbone of America and what has made us great. They are what made us great and will save us in these unsure times, when corporations are outsources to any place where the labor is cheap.
James Chartrand wrote in the article The Savvy Copywriter’s Advantage: Creative Storytelling on Copyblogger:
Entire websites can be stories too. The About Us page is a great place to start. The Home page of any site tells a story too (and if it doesn’t, it probably isn’t doing very well in the conversion department).
Each page leads a reader from one story to another:
- Who these people are.
- How these people can help.
- Why you need these people.
- Why you should buy.
Finally from a post at Jew Point 0 are some good questions for organizations to ask themselves as they attempt to tell their stories in About Us pages or otherwise:
- In what ways does your online presence depict your organization’s story?
- How does it reflect the diversity of your membership and its experiences?
- What are the values, beliefs, and rituals projected in your online narrative?
- How would someone new to your community — a new “reader” — interpret your organization’s story?
- And in what ways can we facilitate connecting these stories to the larger, ever expanding, intricately interwoven community?
Not long ago, I blogged about a community storytelling initiative in Oakland, CA. Commenter Tim Enerata pointed out that lots of place-based, community-based storytelling projects are thriving out there, some of which are listed at The Center for Digital Storytelling’s StoryMapping Stories page. 
I’ve also just come across Denver’s Five Two Eight O, described as being “about you, your life, and your neighborhood in the context of Denver’s larger community, its intersecting histories, development, challenges and successes.” Further:
Five Two Eight O draws on personal stories, the arts and dialogue to bring people together to identify and explore what it is to live together in this city, this neighborhood, this time- as ourselves, with our own experiences, among these particular people.
You’re probably curious as to what Five Two Eight O stands for:
Five Two Eight O stands for: five events (one in Berkeley-Regis; one in Lowry; one in the Santa Fe Arts District and one in the Five Points area). The fifth and final event is a culminating evening of art and performance created and developed from the four preceding neighborhood events – a two-act celebration of Denver’s community and communities. Eight stories will be presented in that final evening — stories told and heard this summer, when Five Two Eight O comes to your neighborhood. Dialogue circles (O) will be an integral part of every event.
The stories of some of the folks behind this project can be accessed from its site and are quite fascinating.