The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative

by Stephen Denning

Book Overview

How leaders can use the right story at the right time to inspire change and action This revised and updated edition of the best-selling book A Leader's Guide to Storytelling shows how storytelling is... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 078797675X
• ISBN13: 9780787976750
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Humanising Leadership Through the Art of Story Telling

In the weeks since I first read Denning's book, I have had to make a number of appearances. In one case, I was invited by the head of my department at my alma mater to speak to graduating students. Others were either speeches made in the course of marketing my services or training workshops. My deliberate incorporation of story telling made even normally dry technical subjects come alive. And in the case of the talk to graduating students, I like to think I must have touched a life or two. Denning shows you how to use stories to ignite action, build trust in your person and brand your organisation, transmit values, encourage collaboration, share knowledge, deal with harmful rumours and share your vision. Fusing all these story telling patterns into your leadership style will help you become an involved, interactive and transformational leader.

Deserves a Place in Every Leader's Day

Let me tell you a story. I read and review books about leadership in hopes that people will find the books that will help them do the right thing. Usually, I don't succeed in finding good resources as often as I succeed in finding resources that don't add anything to what Peter Drucker first said 50 or 60 years ago. I recently heard Steve Denning tell a 15 minute story about how he used one brief anecdote to develop the support he needed to help transform the World Bank from a lagging lender to poor countries into a premier source of knowledge management. I was transfixed by that story and immediately ordered this book in which that story appears. In The Leader's Guide to Storytelling, I learned that we often go into hypnotic trances when we hear such a story. I must admit that I did. In fact, I didn't even understand why the story worked at the World Bank until I read the book. Here's what happened. Steve Denning had been given an opportunity to speak on behalf of knowledge management for 10 minutes in front of some of the World Bank's senior executives. What can you do in 10 minutes? You can tell an arresting story that stimulates the hearers to fill in their own solutions that advance your agenda. And that's what Steve Denning did. Two leaders turned that anecdote into their idea of what the World Bank should do in knowledge management. The rest is history. While the story could have been built up into hours of interesting details, I found that the "minimal" version affected me much like Lincoln's Gettysburg address does. I felt the story throughout my body. I lived that moment with Steve Denning. And I understood both his point about story telling and about why brevity works better in business. The strength of this book comes in Steve Denning's experience in changing major agendas in large organizations. Although the book's title says the book is about storytelling, The Leader's Guide to Storytelling is actually about a new style of collaborative management that goes beyond the familiar boundaries of theories X, Y and Z. The notion is to invite a collaboration to achieve more worthwhile directions as the main focus of an organization. While other authors, such as Senge, Hamel and Christensen, argue for innovation to hide in the wings until it is ready to take center stage, Steve Denning persuasively argues that innovation can take the stage before it has fulfilled its potential . . . and accomplish more as a result. Everyone who reads this book will admire the moral legitimacy of that position. It's the viewpoint of a winner, rather than someone who is afraid to take on the toughest challenges. I intend to recommend that my university begin offering a course based on this book for all of its business and NGO graduate students. While most books about storytelling are strong on the storytelling subject (such as Annette Simmons' The Story Factor), The Leader's Guide to Storytelling puts stories into an or

How to tell a story and knowing why you do it

Steve Denning's book is filled with knowledge about how business works. Steve is able to connect all this knowledge with a great and profound respect for the world, I live in: Storytelling. As a storyteller I use the book not only because it's great to learn more about organizations, but also because it is filled with a lot of new insights on how stories work. I will gladly recommend this book. Read it, use it. Svend-Erik Engh, danish storyteller.

THE guide to business storytelling

Profound, witty, comprehensive, practical, passionate - this book has what any leader needs who wants to learn how to use the power of story for constructive purposes in an organization, in a community, in a family, in a country - anywhere where change needs to be sparked, where people need to work together better, where values need to transmitted, where knowledge needs to be shared!

Certain to Become a "Business Classic"

Those who have read Denning's The Springboard and/or Squirrel Inc. already know that he specializes in knowledge management and organizational storytelling. In this volume, he develops his core concepts in much greater depth, acknowledging his high regard for Peter Senge's vision of the Total Learning Organization as delineated in his pioneer volume, The Fifth Discipline. Briefly, in it Senge suggests that there are five separate but interrelated "disciplines": building a Shared Vision which enables an organization to build a common commitment to the same long-term goals; formulating Mental Models which guide, inform, and sustain creativity and innovation; encouraging and supporting Team Learning; Personal Mastery of certain skills which enable an individual to learn and understand more and thus perform at a higher level of competence; and finally, Systems Thinking which establishes a holistic view, both of one's organization and of the marketplace in which it pursues success. In his Introduction to this book, Denning asserts that "the best way to communicate with people you are trying to lead is very often through a story. The impulse here is practical and pedagogical. [The Leader's Guide to Storytelling] shows how to use storytelling to deal with the most difficult challenges faced by leadership today." Denning wholly agrees with Senge that a learning organization is an environment "where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together." However, while agreeing on the importance of "systems thinking" as a way of looking at systems as a whole that will enable people to see complex chains of causation and so solve complex problems, Denning has three concerns which he shares on page 253. By the time his reader arrives at that point in the narrative, she or he may well share the same concerns. My purpose in this brief commentary is to focus on what I consider to be Denning's key points as he explains why and how storytelling is often the best way for leaders to communicate with those whom they are trying to lead. What he offers is a cohesive and comprehensive system. These are the core principles, as discussed thoroughly in Chapters 3-10: 1. Select and then tell the story which is most appropriate for the given leadership challenge. 2. Tell that story with style, truth, thorough preparation, and effective delivery. 3. Select a narrative pattern based on the primary objective: to motivate others to action, to build trust in you, to build trust in your organization, to transmit your values, to get others working together, to share knowledge, to "tame the grapevine," or to create and share your vision. Each reader will appreciate Table 1.1. (on page 18) which summarizes key points for each of the eight different narrative patterns discussed separately in Chapters, 3-10. (Additional Tables are provided later in the narrative whenever app