Guidelines for Entrepreneurial (or Job-seeker) Stories

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I’ve been interested in entrepreneurial storytelling since I taught an entrepreneurial seminar using storytelling as the central theme.

If I were teaching it now, I might direct my students to a blog entry and podcast by author and marketing expert Lisa Johnson of Reach Group Consulting offering a framework for entrepreneurial stories:

1. Start by identifying a defining story that either highlights the market need for your business or your personal abilities.

2. Next, explain your personal connection to the business. Describe how your business allows you to use your talents, pursue your passions, and/or work with people you care about.

3. Finally, show how your background and past experiences have brought you to where you are today. What key markers affected your decision and ability to run your own business, such as trial-and-error, mistakes, serendipity, etc.

These guidelines also translate to the job-seeker telling the story of how he or she meets the employer’s needs, how he or she uses his or her passion in his or her career, and how the job-seeker has arrived at where he or she is today.Also on the subject of entrepreneurial storytelling, the office of NASSCOM (a global trade body with more than 1,200 members, of which 250+ are global companies from across US, UK, EU and A-Pac) in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi, India, holds experience-sharing talks on the second Friday of every month.
> The idea is to get people from emerging companies to share their best practices in the areas of technology, marketing, business strategy, entrepreneurship etc., so that others could learn from them without having to reinvent the wheel.

No need to travel to New Delhi if you live far away, however; NASSCOM archives the sessions.

Yet another posting about entrepreneurial storytelling is from a blog post in MarketingDeviant by David Kam:
> Practice on telling a good story about your business (how it started, why you are doing it and the twist and turns of your business) because many legends and old stories have survived due to great storytellers. A good story about your business makes it very marketable. Pave a way of success through storytelling about your business.

Community Storytelling

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Oakland, CA, is fortunate to have The Organic City, a thesis project created by the combined efforts of Seamus Byrne and Sarah Mattern, students in CSU East Bay’s Multimedia Graduate Program.

The Organic City seeks to connect with the community through its website where visitors can find and tell stories about local places. In addition, the project offers mobile media that can be experienced onsite with mobile media players and Pocket PC’s.

The project’s goal is to facilitate exploration of the “relationships between place, story, and community; as well as the ways in which new technologies can enhance our appreciation for these important components of human identity and experience.”

The site offers several ways for visitors to find stories (such as by author or by geographical area in which the story is based), as well as Story Tours that enable users ton download stories onto a mobile device and play them while in the area in which the stories take place. Visitors can also tell their stories on the site.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if all cities and towns undertook a project like this?

Success Stories for Sales and Careers

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Communispond, an e-mail newsletter about sales and presentation skills, recently talked about using success stories of other customers to sell to new customers.

The same structure for shaping success stories that Communispond recommends can apply to the job search:

Story of An Addiction … to Internships

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I’m really excited about a story from a favorite former student and advisee, Julie Davis. I put the story together, but she deserves all credit for it. It is just such an inspiring tale of kicking off one’s career in a smart, smart way by completing multiple internships:

As a college student struggling to make ends meet, would you have the courage to swear off typical college restaurant and retail jobs and commit yourself to career-boosting internships — even unpaid internships? Rising Manhattan College senior Julie Davis did — even after relocating from Florida to the far more expensive New York City.

Marketing major Davis, 21, aspires to enter the music business. With four internships under her belt, additional hands-on experience while in high school, and a budding not-for-profit college radio promotions entrepreneurial venture to her credit, Davis could be characterized as already being in the music business.

“I’ve wanted to work in music as far back as I can remember,” Davis recalls. “I’ve always had a love of music, mostly stemming from the obsessions my family had. As I got older being part of the music became more ingrained in me.” Davis notes that she can “effortlessly give a timeline of my life based  on the music I was into and mixtapes I made at each period.”

A native of Sunrise, FL, Davis began to truly get her feet wet in music at around age 15. “My brother decided he wanted to be a musician and start planning events, so I think I gained much of my interest in working in the industry from him pushing me to help with recordings and shows,” Davis says.

“From there I helped him set up a recording studio in my mom’s house, and I started recording and managing my friends’ bands. At that point I was  doing anything and everything to keep working in entertainment —  planning high-school concerts, working with night clubs, programming at [radio station] WKPX and so on.”

Read the rest here.

Storytelling in the Classroom

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A couple of recent items about using storytelling in teaching:

In a publication about teaching corporate ethics, Timothy Fort
writes:
> It’s important to include the use of narrative in class, and there are often other more subtle and powerful forms of narrative that can be used as well. On the micro-level, sharing personal stories gives students permission to share their own stories. … Without turning the classroom into a therapy session, sharing stories of struggle invites students to share their own accounts. As students share their personal stories, they begin to connect with the larger themes …. As a first assignment, students in my class tell a personal story of something that happened in business that they believed to be good. … On a macro-level, the class itself can be used as a model of a narrative story on how to create positive organizational cultures.

Noting that stories in the classroom can be as simple as case studies, “baldTrainer” writes about using storytelling in online classes:
> Storytelling isn’t just a possible option to include within an eLearning course. It is an absolute necessity.

This Week’s Wordle Story

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Found the most awesome toy this week, Wordle. Above is what you can do with a Wordle — make a word/tag cloud. Generated the one above simply by enter the URL for A Storied Career. You can do all sorts of colors, fonts, and designs.

I’ve decided I’ll post one every week as kind of a snapshot of what I’m talking about in this space.

Visually Painful Stories

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I’m fortunate to live near one of the best photography museums in the nation — though I don’t take advantage nearly enough. It’s the Southeast Museum of Photography at Daytona State College.

Through Aug. 29, the museum has a show by one of its own faculty members, Eric Breitenbach, called Lifestories. I’m disappointed that the museum’s Web site doesn’t tell more, but Daytona Beach News-Journal arts writer Laura Stewart fills in nicely:

Between 1984 and 2006, the Daytona State College photography professor documented subjects that are beyond painful to see, and opened his viewers’ eyes on a long series of telling moments.

Read Stewart’s full review.

Better Digital Storytelling Needed Here

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This video, Storytelling Theory and Practice, was recommended by a blogger as “excellent” and offering great tips. I’m sure the content is excellent and does offer terrific tips. But I couldn’t get through more then 5 minutes of its 45 minutes. Yes, the presenter, Dr. Brian Sturm of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, does incorporate a story early on. Yes, he’s a decent presenter. But he stands in front of a whiteboard, flanked by a screen, giving a lecture in front of a classroom. We also get to see some fuzzy slides projected on that screen next to him.

Just can’t help thinking that with all that’s going in digital storytelling, this information could be presented in a way that would entice me to listen to the full 45 minutes.

Are You More Than Your Personal (Hi)story?

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I dabbled a bit in the Oprah cultural phenomenon around Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth. I gave up a little too quickly when the technology didn’t quite work during the first installment of the Oprah/Tolle Webcasts. I also didn’t really grok the first chapter of A New Earth. So, the following entry comes from a place of not totally understanding Tolle’s philosophy.

In the May O magazine, Oprah interviews Tolle and asks, in part:
> We live in a world where most people believe they are their story. … If you are not your story, then who are you?

Tolle, who believes humans possess a dimension deeper than the thoughts inside them and that they need to be more aware of the present moment, responds, in part:
> You cannot deny, of course that these events [that make up people’s stories] exist; one’s personal history has its place, and it needs to be honored. It’s not problematic unless you get totally lost in that dimension. … If you’re totally identified with these thoughts in your head, then you’re trapped in your past history. …Are you more than your past history?

I’m quite ambivalent about these concepts. I have come to believe that we are our stories. On the other hand, getting lost in and totally identifying with past stories, I agree, can be quite unhealthy. I have gone through difficult periods in which I have been far too lost in painful stories of the past.

Since I am not yet in a place where I can be fully aware of the present moment, I suppose I prefer the idea of creating new stories to replace unhealthy past ones, and future stories to guide and inspire the time to come. I wonder what a “present moment” story would be like?

Envisioning Your Career as a Future Story

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Natalie Shell, whose considers her life’s work “a dialogue project [in which] conversations and stories are key themes,” writes about “future vision,” which she compares to strategic planning:

  • You will still see that most people spend a lot of time and money paying for a strategic plan. A plan that plots out a set of things that addresses the current state of thinking and projects that and the past forward. … if we are looking at a strategy of what we want to grow towards, what we want to become, then perhaps it is wise to have inkling of what we are trying to grow towards? … pick a future point, a vision of where what (and why) you want to be/become. Then imagine/put yourself there. Now work backwards in time and space at the steps you have to take…. What is a future outcome I would like to be part of?” instead of asking “what is the problem I would like to solve” or “what is the change I want to make”, “what do I want to change in the world” , present and past-centred questions, perhaps we need to reflect more what, who and how we want to be? What is the future vision we are growing/climbing towards? … Choose a point in the future, focus on it, look at what steps/rungs you have to take to get there from there to where you are, describe that vision, share it in story…and become it!

    Again, career can certainly play a major role in “the future outcome I would like to be part of.”

  • Shell also notes similarities between her process and Dave Snowden’s The Future Backwards technique, of which he writes:

    You create stories going forwards in time to cover possibilities. Now if you have strong opinions about what should happen, then it is easy to influence the evolution of a scenario that will support your proposed actions. Its also easy to describe how the past led to the present in such a way as to vindicate your view of history. We found that by getting people to construct history in reverse that they explored more possibilities and were more open to novel discovery.

    Greater detail about The Future Backwards in this download.

  • Finally, in the blog Future of Health IT: Trends and Scenarios, Dale Hunscher describes Future Scenario Planning as it applies to healthcare, quoting from his own white paper:

    Scenario planning is the art of storytelling applied to the future instead of the past or present. In this way it is not unlike science fiction — it’s about “remembering the future.”

    Hunscher notes 6 steps to the Future Scenario Planning method:

    1. Framing the question
    2. Researching the facts
    3. Identifying local forces
    4. Finding the driving forces
    5. Developing the matrix

    How could you apply these to planning your career?

    Lots more on the technique in this section of his blog.