I frequently encounter the work of Suzanne Henry and her firm Four Leaf Communications LLC in my Scoop.it curation of organizational storytelling. I truly admire her emphasis on storytelling in public relations and communications and am so pleased she is participating in this Q&A series, especially since she went above and beyond in responding to my questions. The Q&A will run over the next several days.
Bio: I have a blog at www.FourLeafPR.com/blog that discusses storytelling, but in the context of a public relations effort. After being in the field for 27 years I also have decided it’s time to write a book. (Don’t worry. It will be brief.) It will be an e-book of positioning, messaging and story exercises, and processes organized by common communication challenges. It will be available in Fall 2012.
Q&A with Suzanne Henry, Questions 1 and 2:
Q: Your Web site states, “Centered on the idea that organizations can boost their presence in their chosen markets via business storytelling.” You note your epiphany in 1999: He (or she) who tells the best story wins. What triggered that epiphany? Has business storytelling been at the core of your business from the beginning? In what ways have the concepts of business storytelling evolved for your firm over its dozen years in business?
A: I did a lot of media pitching during the dot com era in the late 1990s. I remember in fall of 1999, I was tasked with telling two stories for a large PR agency in Washington, DC. They had two companies as clients. An online vitamin retailer and a company called Equal Footing dot com.
The online vitamin retailer was run by a man who was in direct conflict with his father. They used to work together in the healthcare-supplement field, but the son broke away. Both had the idea to sell health supplements online. Pretty good story, no? Especially the family stuff. Only the son didn’t want to talk about his disagreements with his father. He wanted to talk about selling vitamins online. So, that’s what I pitched.
Equalfooting on the other hand would talk about anything. Equal footing was like the ebay for construction equipment. If you were a builder or contractor, you go online and bid for things you needed to build. They needed a lot of money to develop this site. So, I pitched to the Wall Street Journal how they were seeking to raise $250 million from investors, and wouldn’t it be cool to see what that took? I pitched a shadow story, where a reporter could follow them around and see what it actually took to raise that kind of money for basically what was just an idea — they would attend internal meetings, see proposals, sit in on investor pitches — the whole thing. Pretty good story, right? I had two reporters at the Journal wanting that story.
I did not have two reporters fighting over the online vitamin retail company.
And, that’s when it hit me — he who tells the best story wins.
And, here’s the twist: the feud story between father and son came out anyway. But, he didn’t tell I, so it didn’t come out in his way.
And therein line the second part — the best story always wins. You may have in mind two or three messages you want to get across. But, if there is a better story than yours — it will always get the ink.
Q: How did you initially become involved with story/storytelling/ 
narrative? What attracted you to this field? What do you love about it?
A: I initially was attracted to using storytelling when I was conducting a lot of media pitching for a large agency in Washington, DC. I found I was much more successful at engaging reporters when I dropped the script and started to talk like a person would at a cocktail party. It occurred to me then that there was something significant about this kind of communication. So, I began to study it, off and on, for the last 12 years.
What I love the most about storytelling is that it reminds us that we are a human being talking to another human being. Messaging, which has its place, too often disintegrates into language that sounds like a faceless entity is spewing an agenda and a position that is one sided. A story offers the listener to willingly get drawn into a journey that has meaning for both the storyteller and the story listener. It is less one-sided than messaging.