The Leader's Guide to Storytelling E-Book

Stephen Denning

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: J-B US non-Franchise Leadership
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 535

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

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 one of the few ways to handle the most important and difficult challenges of leadership: sparking action, getting people to work together, and leading people into the future. Using myriad illustrative examples and filled with how-to techniques, this book clearly explains how you can learn to tell the right story at the right time. * Stephen Denning has won awards from Financial Times, The Innovation Book Club, and 800-CEO-READ * The book on leadership storytelling shows how successful leaders use stories to get their ideas across and spark enduring enthusiasm for change * Stephen Denning offers a hands-on guide to unleash the power of the business narrative.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

Introduction

The Different Worlds of Leadership and Storytelling

The Intersection of Leadership and Storytelling

The Role of Storytelling

What's New in Storytelling

The Emerging Leadership Discipline of Narrative

The Nature of Leadership

The Marriage of Narrative and Analysis

The Performance of the Story

A Different Kind of Leader

Let's Go!

Part 1: The Role of Story in Organizations

Chapter 1: Telling the Right Story

The Power of Narrative

Using the Storytelling Catalogue

The Return on Investment of Storytelling

Chapter 2: Telling the Story Right

Style

Truth

Preparation

Delivery

Part 2: Eight Narrative Patterns

Chapter 3: Motivate Others to Action

The Challenge of Igniting Action and Implementing New Ideas

The Main Elements of the Springboard Story

Avoiding the Main Pitfalls

Chapter 4: Build Trust

Why You Tell Your Story

How to Tell Your Story

Where You Tell Your Story

Chapter 5: Use Narrative to Build Your Brand

Marketing in the Twentieth Century

Twenty-First-Century Marketing: The Interactive Customer Story

Chapter 6: Transmit Your Values

Distinguish the Different Types of Values

Ethics in Action

Transmitting Values Through Narrative

Chapter 7: Get Others Working Together

High-Performance Teams

Catalyzing High-Performance Teams and Communities

Getting the Group to Work Together

Chapter 8: Share Knowledge

Telling the Knowledge-Sharing Story

Creating Context for the Knowledge-Sharing Story

Special Kinds of Knowledge-Sharing Stories

Chapter 9: Tame the Grapevine

The Stories That Form the Corporate Culture

Taming the Grapevine

Beyond the Grapevine

The Driving Force Behind the Grapevine

Chapter 10: Create and Share Your Vision

Why We Tell Future Stories

How to Tell a Compelling Future Story

Link the Future Story to the Listeners' Current Mind-Set

Part 3: Putting It All Together

Chapter 11: Solve the Paradox of Innovation

Why Current Approaches Don't Solve the Innovation Paradox

Solving the Paradox

The Important Role of Storytelling

Chapter 12: A Different Kind of Leader

Leadership That Participates

Leadership That Connects

Leadership That Is Like Conversation

Leadership That Is Possible

Leadership That Fits the Modern Need

Leadership That Is Not for Everyone

Leadership That Is Relatively Free of Ego

Leadership That Is Like Judo

Leadership That Has Feeling

Leadership That Avoids “Apollo Run Amok”

Leadership That Includes Beauty

Notes

Preface

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Index

Copyright © 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Denning, Stephen, 1944–

The Leader's Guide to Storytelling : Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative / Stephen Denning.—Revised and updated edition.

p. cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-54867-7 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-00876-8 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-00877-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-00878-2 (ebk)

1. Communication in management. 2. Public speaking. 3. Business communication. 4. Communication in organizations. I. Title.

HD30.3.D457 2011

658.4′5—dc22

2010048700

Preface

Much has happened in the five years since the first edition of this book provided the basic building blocks of leadership storytelling.

Since the first edition, the importance of storytelling as a leadership tool has become generally accepted, even in big organizations. The days are gone when I would be recruited by a nervous executive to hold a storytelling workshop for a major corporation with a euphemistic label like “strategic change management.” Now executives tell me, “Let's call it what it is: storytelling!”

This reflects the fact that storytelling has gained recognition as a core competence of leadership. It is now standard practice to include a section on storytelling in books on leadership and change management, such as A Whole New Mind (2006) by Dan Pink, The Leadership Challenge (2008) by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, Made to Stick (2008) by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, and Getting Change Right (2010) by Seth Kahan.

The concept of leadership has itself also evolved. Chapter Twelve of the first edition of this book argued that storytelling is more than simply a communication tool and implied the emergence of a different kind of leader—someone who engages in interactive conversations rather than merely telling people what to do. It suggested that storytelling goes beyond the use of individual stories for specific purposes and implied a different way of thinking, speaking, and acting in the workplace.

I developed these ideas further in my book The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative (2007), which examined what this different way of thinking, speaking, and acting entailed. It explored in more detail how storytelling tools could be deployed to meet the specific challenges of leadership. It showed how the leadership communication triad, “get attention–stimulate desire for change–reinforce with reasons,” could be used as a template to deal with virtually any leadership challenge. Chapter Two of this edition has been updated to reflect these discoveries.

Since 2005, a massive rethinking of management itself has also gotten under way. In 2009, the Shift Index quantified with startling clarity the long-term decline of management: the rate of return on assets of U.S. firms is now only a quarter of what it was in 1965; the life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune 500 has declined to less than fifteen years and heading toward five years unless something changes; executive turnover is accelerating; only one in five workers is fully engaged in his or her work1. The dysfunctionality of traditional management was further underscored by the Kauffman Foundation's discovery that established firms in the United States created no net new jobs between 1980 and 2005; virtually all net new jobs were created by firms that were five years old or less.2

The standard practices of management are increasingly seen as anachronistic. “Tomorrow's business imperatives,” Gary Hamel wrote in Harvard Business Review in 2009, “lie outside the performance envelope of today's bureaucracy-infused management practices… Equipping organizations to tackle the future would require a management revolution no less momentous than the one that spawned modern industry.”3

Chapter Eleven of the first edition of this book began to explore through the lens of disruptive innovation what this management revolution might involve. I argued that leadership storytelling is part of the answer. Since then, I have come to see more clearly what management actions in addition to storytelling are needed to create an organization that promotes continuous innovation on a sustained basis. In effect, storytelling is not just a core competence of leadership: it is also central component of management itself. My new book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the Twenty-First Century (2010), spells this out in more detail, and Chapter Eleven of this book has been updated to reflect these insights.

This book thus provides the building blocks of storytelling for two of my other books. The Secret Language of Leadership (2007) shows how storytelling is a central component of leadership. The Leader's Guide to Radical Management (2010) shows how storytelling is a core competence of management itself.

The importance of storytelling in branding and marketing has also been reinforced by the explosion of social media. In 2005, when the first edition of this book was published, Facebook and YouTube had just been created, and Twitter did not exist. Today these three Web sites have hundreds of millions of participants, who are telling stories about their lives and the products and services that they use. This phenomenon has had a dramatic impact on practices in branding and marketing, as the ongoing shift in power from seller to buyer has dramatically accelerated. Understanding and mastering the elements of interactive storytelling in this sphere has become even more important than before. Chapter Five of this edition has been updated to incorporate the implications of these developments.

Stories are trapdoors, escape hatches, portals through which we can expand our lives and learn about other worlds. They offer guideposts to what is important in life. They generate meaning. They embody our values. They give us the clues from which we can discover what ultimately matters. In the past five years, I have learned much from studying both the power and the limits of storytelling. I am happy to have the opportunity to share those learnings here with you.

Stephen Denning

December 2010

Washington, D.C.

Part 1

The Role of Story in Organizations

1

Telling the Right Story

Choosing the Right Story for the Leadership Challenge at Hand

“Storytelling is fundamental to the human search for meaning.”

Mary Catherine Bateson1

In 1998, I made a pilgrimage to the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, Tennessee, seeking enlightenment. As program director of knowledge management at the World Bank, I'd stumbled onto the power of storytelling. Despite a career of scoffing at touchy-feely stuff—like most other business executives, I knew that analytical was good, anecdotal was bad—my thinking had started to change. Over the past few years, I'd seen stories help galvanize an organization around a defined business goal.

In the mid-1990s, that goal was to get people at the World Bank to support efforts at knowledge management—the idea of sharing knowledge horizontally across an organization and even beyond. It was an unfamiliar notion at the time. I offered people cogent arguments about the need to gather the knowledge scattered throughout the organization. They didn't listen. I gave PowerPoint presentations that compellingly demonstrated the value of sharing and leveraging our know-how. My audience merely looked dazed. In desperation, I was ready to try almost anything.

Then in early 1996, I began telling people a story:

In June 1995, a health worker in a tiny town in Zambia went to the Web site of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and got the answer to a question about the treatment of malaria. Remember that this was in Zambia, one of the poorest countries in the world, and it was in a tiny place six hundred kilometers from the capital city. But the most striking thing about this picture, at least for us, is that the World Bank isn't in it. Despite our know-how on all kinds of poverty-related issues, that knowledge isn't available to the millions of people who could use it. Imagine if it were. Think what an organization we could become!

This simple story helped World Bank staff and managers envision a different kind of future for the organization. When knowledge management later became an official corporate priority, I used similar stories to maintain the momentum. So I began to wonder how the tool of storytelling might be put to work even more effectively. As a rational manager, I decided to consult the experts.

At the International Storytelling Center, I told the Zambia story to a professional storyteller, the late J. G. “Paw-Paw” Pinkerton, and asked the master what he thought. Imagine my chagrin when he said he didn't hear a story at all. There was no real “telling.” There was no plot. There was no building up of the characters. Who was this health worker in Zambia? And what was her world like? What did it feel like to be in the exotic environment of Zambia, facing the problems she faced? My anecdote, he said, was a pathetic thing, not a story at all. I needed to start from scratch if I hoped to turn it into a “real story.”

Was I surprised? Well, not exactly. The story was bland. I did have a problem with this advice, though. I knew in my heart it was wrong. And with that realization, I was on the brink of an important insight: Beware the well-told story!

The Power of Narrative

But let me back up a bit. Do stories really have a role to play in the business world? Believe me, I'm familiar with skepticism about them. When you talk about storytelling to a group of hard-headed executives, you'd better be prepared for some eye rolling. If the group is polite as well as tough, don't be surprised if the eyes simply glaze over.

That's because most executives operate with a particular mind-set. Analysis is what drives business thinking. It seemingly cuts through the fog of myth, gossip, and speculation to get to the hard facts. It purports to go wherever the observations and premises and conclusions take it, undistorted by the hopes or fears of the analyst. Its strength lies in its objectivity, its impersonality, its heartlessness.

Yet this strength is also a weakness. Analysis might excite the mind, but it hardly offers a route to the heart. And that's where you must go if you are to motivate people not only to take action but to do so with energy and enthusiasm. At a time when corporate survival often requires transformational change, leadership involves inspiring people to act in unfamiliar and often unwelcome ways. Mind-numbing cascades of numbers or daze-inducing PowerPoint slides won't achieve this goal. Even logical arguments for making the needed changes usually won't do the trick.

But effective storytelling often does. In fact, in certain situations, nothing else works. Although good business cases are developed through the use of numbers, they are typically approved on the basis of a story—that is, a narrative that links a set of events in some kind of causal sequence. Storytelling can translate those dry and abstract numbers into compelling pictures of a leader's goals. I saw this happen at the World Bank—by 2000, we were increasingly recognized as leaders in the area of knowledge management—and have seen it in scores of other large organizations since then.

So why did I have problems with the advice I'd received from the professional storyteller in Jonesborough?

A “Poorly Told” Story

The timing of my trip to Tennessee was fortunate. Had I sought expert advice two years earlier, I might have taken the master's recommendations without question. But I'd had some time to approach the idea of organizational storytelling with a beginner's mind, free of strictures about the right way to tell a story.

It wasn't that I couldn't follow the Jonesborough storyteller's recommendations. I saw immediately how to flesh out my modest anecdote about the health worker in Zambia: you'd dramatically depict her life, the scourge of malaria that she faced in her work, and perhaps the pain and suffering of the patients she was treating that day. You'd describe the extraordinary set of events that led to her being seated in front of a computer screen deep in the hinterland of Zambia. You'd delineate the false leads she had followed before she came across the CDC Web site. You'd build up to the moment of triumph when she found the answer to her question about malaria and vividly describe how that answer could transform the life of her patient. The story would be a veritable epic!

This traditional, or maximalist, account would be more engrossing than my dry anecdote. But I had learned enough by then to realize that telling the story in this way to a corporate audience would not galvanize them to implement a strange new idea like knowledge management. In the hectic modern workplace, people had neither the time nor the patience—remember executives' general skepticism about storytelling in the first place—to absorb a richly detailed narrative. If I was going to hold the attention of my audience, I had to make my point in seconds, not in minutes.

There was another problem. Even if my audience did take the time to listen to a fully developed tale, telling it in that fashion would not allow listeners the mental space to relate the story to their own very different worlds. Although I was describing a health worker in Zambia, I wanted my audience to focus not on Zambia but on their own situations. I hoped they would think, If the CDC can reach a health worker in Zambia, why can't the World Bank? Why don't we put our knowledge on a Web site? If my listeners were immersed in a saga about that health worker and her patient, they might be too preoccupied to ask themselves these questions—or to provide answers. In other words, I didn't want my audience too interested in Zambia. A minimalist narrative was effective precisely because it lacked detail and texture. The same characteristic that the professional storyteller saw as a flaw was, for my purposes, a strength.

On my return from Jonesborough, I educated myself on the principles of traditional storytelling. More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle, in his Poetics, said stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They should include complex characters as well as a plot that incorporates a reversal of fortune and a lesson learned. Furthermore, the storyteller should be so engaged with the story—visualizing the action, feeling what the characters feel—that the listeners become drawn into the narrative's world. Aristotle's formula has proved successful over the ages, from Ovid's Metamorphoses to The Arabian Nights to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and most Hollywood screenplays.

Despite the narrative power of this kind of story, I knew that it probably wouldn't spark action in an organization. My insight blinded me to something else, though. Believing that this wonderful and rich tradition had no place in the time-constrained world of modern business was as wrongheaded as thinking that all stories had to be full of detail and color. Later I would see that the well-told story is relevant in a modern organization. Indeed, a number of surprises about the use of storytelling in organizations awaited me.

Tales of Success and Failure

In December 2000 I left the World Bank and began to consult with companies on the use of leadership storytelling. The following year, I found myself in London with Dave Snowden, then a director of IBM's Institute of Knowledge Management, teaching a storytelling master class to around seventy executives from private and public sector organizations.

In the morning, I spoke about my experience at the World Bank and how a positive orientation was essential if a narrative like the one about Zambia was to have its intended effect. But in the afternoon, to my dismay, my fellow presenter emphatically asserted the opposite.

At IBM and elsewhere, Dave had found purely positive stories to be problematic. They were, he said, like the Janet and John stories told to children in the United Kingdom or the Dick and Jane stories in the United States: the characters were so good they made you feel queasy. The naughtiest thing Janet and John would do was spill a bottle of water in the yard. Then they would go and tell their mother about it and promise never to do it again. Janet would volunteer to help with the cleanup and John would offer to help wash the car. These stories for children reflected a desire to show things as they should be rather than as they actually are. In a corporate environment, Dave told his audience, listeners would respond to such rosy tales by conjuring up negative antistories about what must have actually happened. His message: Beware the positive story!

After the workshop, Dave and I discussed why his stories focused on the negative while mine accentuated the positive. I could see he had a point. I'd used negative stories myself when trying to teach people the nitty-gritty of any subject. The fact is, people learn more from their mistakes than from their successes.

Eventually, however, it dawned on me that our points of view were complementary. We were talking about organizational stories used for different purposes: my stories were designed to motivate people, and Dave's were designed to share knowledge. His stories might describe how and why a team failed to accomplish an objective, with the aim of helping others avoid the same mistakes. (To elicit such stories, however, Dave often had to start by getting people to talk about their successes, even if these accounts were ultimately less useful vehicles for conveying knowledge.) It was then that I began to realize that the purpose of telling a story might determine its form.

Granted, even optimistic stories have to be true and believable, since jaded corporate audiences know too well the experience of being presented with half-truths. Stories told in an effort to spur action needed to make good on their promises and contain sufficient evidence of a positive outcome. But stories intended mainly to transfer knowledge must be more than true. Because their objective is to generate understanding and not action, they tend to highlight the pitfalls of ignorance; they are meant not to inspire people but to make them cautious. Just as my minimalist stories to spark action were different from traditional entertainment stories told in a maximalist fashion, so an effective knowledge-sharing story would have negative rather than positive overtones.

A Collective Yawn

Once I saw that different narrative forms can further different business goals, I looked for other ways that managers could make stories work for them. A number of distinct story types began to emerge—ones that didn't necessarily follow Aristotelian guidelines but were nonetheless used to good effect in a variety of organizations. (For descriptions of some of them and the purposes for which they might be used, see “A Storytelling Catalogue” later in this chapter.) And I continued to come across unexpected insights about the nature of storytelling within organizations.

For one thing, if negative stories have their place, so do apparently boring ones. In Talking About Machines, Julian Orr recounts a number of stories that have circulated among photocopy machine repair technicians at Xerox.2 While rich in detail, they are even less storylike than my little anecdote about the health care worker in Zambia. Most of these tales, which present solutions to technical problems faced by the technicians, lack a plot and a distinct character. In fact, they are hardly stories at all, with little to hold the interest of anyone except those close to the often esoteric subject matter. Nevertheless, they are compelling even to this limited audience because they are driven forward by a detailed explanation of the cause-and-effect relationship between an action and its consequence—for example:

You've got a malfunctioning copy machine with an E053 error code, which is supposed to mean a problem in the 24-volt Interlock Power Supply. But you could chase the source of that 24-volt Interlock problem forever, and you'd never ever find out what it is. If you're lucky enough, you'll eventually get an F066 error code, which indicates the true source of the malfunction—namely, a shorted dicorotron. Apparently this is happening because the circuitry in the XER board has been changed to prevent the damage that would otherwise occur when a dicorotron shorted. Before the change in circuitry, a shorted dicorotron would have fried the whole XER board. Changing the circuitry has prevented damage to the XER board, but it's created a different issue. Now an E053 error message doesn't give you the true source of the machine's malfunction.

This story, paraphrased here, doesn't just describe the technician's accurate diagnosis of a problem; it also relates why things happened as they did. This makes the account, negative in tone and almost unintelligible to an outsider, both informative and interesting to its intended audience.

As I continued my investigation, one area of particular interest for me was the link between storytelling and leadership. I already knew from personal experience that stories can be used as a catalyst for action. And I had seen in several influential books—Leading Minds by Howard Gardner, The Leadership Engine by Noel Tichy, and The Story Factor by Annette Simmons—that stories can help leaders define their personality, boosting confidence in their integrity and providing some idea of how they might act in a given situation.3

I also had seen leaders using narrative to inculcate a positive set of corporate values and beliefs in the hearts and minds of employees. Think, for example, of Tyco's effort to repair its battered value system. The company began by developing a straightforward guide setting forth new rules in such areas as harassment, conflicts of interest, and fraud. But Eric Pillmore, senior vice president of corporate governance, soon learned that in this form, the booklet would merely gather dust on people's shelves. So he threw out what he had done and started again in an effort to bring the principles alive through stories. Here is one of them:

The entire team jokes about Tom being gay. Tom has never complained and doesn't seem to mind, but when Mark is assigned to work with Tom, the jokes turn on Mark. Now that Mark receives the brunt of the jokes, he tells his supervisor he wants to be reassigned. His supervisor complies with Mark's request.4

This story serves as a sidebar for the section of the guide that deals with sexual harassment and other forms of intimidating behavior. While the company's policy on harassment is clearly laid out in the guide, the simple narrative helps bring the policy to life and provides a starting point for thinking about and discussing the complex issues involved. Dozens of similar stories illustrate an array of company policies.5

An Enticing But Hazy Future

Although these types of stories furthered leadership goals in a relatively predictable way, others I came across were more quirky—particularly ones used to communicate vision. Noel Tichy writes about the importance of preparing an organization for change: “The best way to get humans to venture into unknown terrain is to make that terrain familiar and desirable by taking them there first in their imaginhations.”6Aha! I thought. Here is a place where storytelling, perhaps the most powerful route to people's imaginations, could prove indispensable.

But as I looked at examples of such stories in a number of arenas, I discovered that most of the successful ones were surprisingly sketchy about the details of the imagined future. Consider Winston Churchill's “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech and Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech. Neither of these famous addresses came close to describing the future in enough detail that it became familiar terrain in listeners' minds.

Over time—and in part through work I did that incorporated scenario planning—I realized the reason. Specific predictions about the future are likely to be proved wrong. Because they almost inevitably differ in major or minor ways from what eventually happens, leaders who utter them risk losing people's confidence. Consequently a story designed to prepare people for change needs to evoke the future and conjure up a direction for getting there—without being too precise. Think of the corporate future laid out in a famous mandate by Jack Welch: General Electric will be either number one or number two in the field, or it will exit the sector. This is a clear but broad-brush description of where Welch wanted to take the company. Like my Zambia story, it doesn't convey too much information, though for different reasons.

I also came across stories used in somewhat unusual situations that called for reactive rather than proactive measures. These stories counteracted negative ones that circulated like viruses within an organization and threatened to infect the entire body. Dave Snowden of IBM first pointed out to me how stories could be used in this manner. His hypothesis was that you could attach a positive story to a negative one and defuse it, as an antibody would neutralize an antigen.

For example, at an IBM manufacturing site for laptop computers in the United Kingdom, stories circulated among the blue-collar workers about the facility's managers, who were accused of not doing any real work, being overpaid, and having no idea what it was like on the manufacturing line. But an additional story was injected into the mix. One day a new site director turned up in a white coat, unannounced and unaccompanied, and sat on the line making ThinkPads for a day. He asked workers on the assembly line for help. In response, someone asked him: “Why do you earn so much more than me?” His simple reply: “If you screw up badly, you lose your job. If I screw up badly, three thousand people lose their jobs.”7

Although this isn't a story in the traditional sense, the manager's words and actions served as a seed for the story that eventually circulated in opposition to the one about managers' being lazy and overpaid. You can imagine the buzz: “Blimey, you should've seen how he fumbled with those circuit boards. I guess he'll never work on the line. But you know, he does have a point about his pay.” The atmosphere at the facility began improving within weeks.

A Storytelling Catalogue

Storytelling is an increasingly accepted way to achieve management goals. But leaders need to employ a variety of narrative patterns for different aims. The following sections sketch the kinds of stories I've found, following the general outline of Part Two of the book.

Sparking Action

Leadership above all is about getting people to change. To achieve this goal, you need to communicate the complex nature of the changes required and inspire an often skeptical organization to enthusiastically carry them out. This is the place for what I call a springboard story—one that enables listeners to visualize the large-scale transformation needed in their circumstances and then to act on that realization.

A springboard story is based on an actual event, preferably recent enough to seem relevant. It has a single protagonist with whom members of the target audience can identify. And it has an authentically happy ending, in which a change has at least in part been implemented successfully. (It also has an implicit alternate ending—an unhappy one that would have resulted had the change not occurred.)

The story has enough detail to be intelligible and credible but—and this is key—not so much texture that the audience becomes completely wrapped up in it. If that happens, people won't have the mental space to create an analogous scenario for change in their own organization. For example, if you want to get an organization to embrace a new technology, you might tell stories about individuals elsewhere who have successfully implemented it, without dwelling on the specifics of implementation.

Communicating Who You Are

You aren't likely to lead people through wrenching change if they don't trust you. And if they are to trust you, they have to know you: who you are, where you've come from, and why you hold the views you do. Ideally they'll end up not only understanding you but also empathizing with you.

Stories for this purpose are usually based on a life event that reveals some strength or vulnerability and shows what the speaker took from the experience.

Unlike a story designed to spark action, this kind is typically “well told,” with colorful detail and context. So the speaker needs to ensure that the audience has enough time and interest to hear the story.

For example, Jack Welch's success in making General Electric a winner was undoubtedly aided by his ability to tell his own story, which includes a tongue-lashing he once received from his mother after he hurled a hockey stick across the ice in response to a disappointing loss. His mother chased young Jack into the locker room where the young men on the team were changing and grabbed him by the shoulders. “You punk!” he reports her saying in his memoir. “If you don't know how to lose, you'll never know how to win.”8