The Leader's Guide to Radical Management

Leadership Storytelling 3.0: From Arithmetic to Calculus

You have to understand what numbers are before you can do algebra.  And you have to understand algebra before you can do calculus. It doesn’t mean when you are doing calculus that the numbers aren’t important.

Madelyn Blair, author of Riding The Current

In order to create people-centered organizations, organizations need people-centered processes. They need systems and processes that will keep the organization focused on systematically achieving people-relevant outcomes rather than merely the production of outputs. They need systems and processes that will continually push the organization routinely delight and enchant their customers and signal when this is not happening. They need systems and processes that will push the organization to automatically draw on the full talents and creativity of the people who are doing the work. The latest generation of leadership storytelling–Leadership Storytelling 3.0–accomplishes exactly that.

Leadership storytelling: the beginning

In October 2000, I asked to meet with the director of the Smithsonian Associates in Washington DC and proposed to her a symposium on leadership storytelling. She looked at me as though the idea was absurd and asked: “Why on earth would we want to do that?” When I told her my story, she changed her mind and the symposium took place in April 2001. It marked the beginning of a great flowering leadership storytelling in the ensuing decade all around the world.

During the decade, the leadership storytelling scene was transformed. As a result of the efforts of myself and many others, it is now commonplace to find leadership storytelling discussed and promoted in even the most conservative business journals. Most leadership textbooks now have a section on storytelling. Business schools now often include segments on storytelling in their courses on leadership. Major corporations have taken it up as a central leadership theme. In broad terms, the intellectual battle to have storytelling accepted in the world of work has been won. What was once seen as absurd is now seen as obvious. In this month—March 2011—when a book on storytelling was number one in all the top lists of bestsellers,[i] it is not too much to declare that leadership storytelling has arrived into the mainstream.

Yet not everyone is aware that the storytelling has emerged in three interconnected generations.

Leadership Storytelling 1.0

In the beginning, it was simple. The story begins: “Once upon a time…” or equivalent, and we are off, traveling on the wings of the narrative imagination. It’s a story, without a care in the world or any thought as to where it might lead or what consequences might follow. Stories naturally enable us to get inside the mind of another human being. Stories expand our understanding of other people. Stories give us vicarious experience that we can obtain in no other way. These stories “in the wild” are inherently stimulating and naturally life-enhancing.

All these advantages come from the unthinking use of story. To the extent that thinking about it occurs at all, it is usually at the level of, “Gee, that’s amazing!” The subject matter of these stories might be soaring tales of accomplishment or utter disaster, or it might be mundane gossip about who did what to whom. In organizations, the stories are told in corridors, in cafeterias, around water coolers, in meeting rooms and board rooms—in fact, anywhere where human beings get together. Storytelling 1.0 involves no more than simply telling, retelling and celebrating stories as they are occur in a state of nature.

Leadership Storytelling 2.0

In the second generation of storytelling, narrative consciousness awakens, and there is an explicit recognition of the potential effects of storytelling as well as the beginnings of an explicit understanding of mechanics of narrative. My book, The Springboard (Butterworth Heinemann, 2000) tells the story of my own narrative awakening.

In this world, there is explicit awareness that one is “telling a story” as well as the development of expertise as to what sort of story is effective in which context, and how the story could be told in a way that would maximize that effect. The recognition of different narrative patterns flows from the insight that different kinds of stories are needed for different purposes.  One kind of story—a springboard story—can spring an audience to a new level of understanding and action; it enables leaders to communicate authentically and inspire enduring enthusiasm for worthy causes. Other narrative patterns relate to communicating who you are, communicating the brand, getting people to work together, transmitting knowledge or moving people into the future. Understanding the characteristics of the stories that would perform each of these functions is a key to effective leadership storytelling. These different narrative patterns are elaborated in various places, including my book, The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling (Jossey-Bass, 2^nd Edition, March 2011).

The risks of Storytelling 2.0

Yet as Storytelling 2.0 has made its way into mainstream of organizations and leadership thinking, several concerns have emerged.

As always with the acquisition of new knowledge, there is sadness at the loss of innocence. Some people feel nostalgia for the simpler more naïve world of stories of the “once upon a time…” variety and lament the risk of losing the magic of an ancient and sacred art of storytelling.

A more serious concern is that Storytelling 2.0 can degenerate into manipulation, and be used to trick and deceive people. This risk doesn’t materialize where the storytellers are in an interactive relationship with their listeners and recognize that the only important stories are not the stories that the storytellers tell, but rather the stories that the listeners generate for themselves: these latter stories are the stories that will be acted upon.

An even more worrying concern is that the full potential of leadership storytelling is still not being realized. The hope that storytelling would enable leaders to transform dehumanizing workplaces, and turn them into creative and energizing experiences that uplift the human spirit has been only partially fulfilled. It is true that many battles have been won. Many organizational storytelling programs have been launched. Executive support for storytelling initiatives has often been forthcoming in major corporations. And yet the overall war is still not won. Something always seems to happen. There is a change in command among the senior executives. Or a cost-cutting drive. Or a reorganization. The result? The promising storytelling initiative is defunded, set aside, marginalized or simply crushed. As a result, attention is now turning to what is necessary to go beyond winning battles to create workplaces worthy of the human spirit and to win the war itself.

Leadership storytelling 2.0 is not enough

This has led to the development of new kinds of storytelling that embed human centered values in the very drivers of an organization so that the organization systematically and automatically focuses on human-centered outcomes.

One reason why this is possible now is the appearance of studies that show that even on its own terms, traditional management is failing. Thus the Shift Index has revealed that the rate of return on assets of US firms is only one quarter of what it was in 1965. The life expectancy of firms in the Fortune 500 is down from around 75 years half a century ago to less than 15 years. Only one in five workers is fully engaged in his or her work. We also know that these attitudes, values and practices have infected our education system which no longer provides an education that fits our children for the future. Our health system, which, quite apart from the recent health reform, is heading the country towards bankruptcy. These disastrous results create necessity of finding a better way of managing organizations.

But persuading people to manage the organization differently is not enough. We need to change the very processes and systems that drive the organization. If those processes and systems remain focused on the manipulation of things—outputs, demand, human resources—those processes and systems will undermine deliberate attempts to make the organization more people-focused. If the traditional systems and processes are left in place, the organization will automatically revert to its default mode—manipulating outputs, demand, human resources—even though the leaders and managers sincerely want to operate differently and contribute strenuous efforts to make it happen.

Leadership storytelling 3.0

In order to create people-centered organizations, organizations need people-centered processes. They need systems and processes that will keep the organization focused on systematically achieving people-relevant outcomes rather than merely the production of outputs. They need systems and processes that will continually push the organization routinely delight and enchant their customers and signal when this is not happening. They need systems and processes that will push the organization to automatically draw on the full talents and creativity of the people who are doing the work.

In effect, they need systems and processes that don’t need continual adjustment to achieve people-oriented results. They need systems and processes that automatically push the organization to achieve people-oriented results.

The good news is that methodologies have indeed been developed that do exactly that.

As the methodologies are people-oriented, it should not come as a surprise that they are also story-based:

• At the organizational level, the very goal of the firm is to generate positive outcomes for customers. This is best measured by a story: the Net Promoter Score is a methodology that enables the organization to measure whether it is delighting the customer by inviting the customer to imagine a story: “Would you recommend this product or service to a colleague or friend?”

• At the level of the team, work is planned in the form of user stories—a special kind of story devised to formulate the goals of teams in terms of customer outcomes.

• The user stories that are developed are then sized and prioritized using other methodologies called “story points” and “planning poker” to measure how much work is involved in making any of the user stories “come true.” In such work places, people routinely speak of “implementing stories.”

• Value stream mapping is a tool that creates a story of the organization seen from the customer’s point of view, and helps identify any delays in delivering value to the customer. It enables the organization to manage the forgotten competitive weapon: time.

• These story-based measures enable the firm to go further and—for the first time—calculate the productivity of a firm in terms of human outcomes rather than merely the production of things.

In this third generation of leadership storytelling, with the shift in vocabulary to NPS, user stories, story points, planning poker and team velocity, we are a long way away from the innocent world of “Once upon a time…” Are these methodologies still really genuine storytelling?

Using Madelyn Blair’s a wonderful metaphor from mathematics, Storytelling 1.0 is the equivalent of simple arithmetic. Storytelling 2.0 is the equivalent of algebra. Storytelling 3.0 is calculus. Each one provides the foundation for the other. We have to understand Storytelling 1.0 before we can do Storytelling 2.0. We have to master Storytelling 2.0 before we can cope with Storytelling 3.0. Each one builds on the other. New skills give us new capabilities.

What now becomes possible is to create organizations with systems and processes that are systematically life-enhancing.

To achieve this, we need to recognize that storytelling is more than just a tool. It is a different way of thinking, speaking and acting in the workplace. We must use it to convey meaning that reveals our deepest values, our very core, as human beings. It involves creating a state of mind that starts with a change of heart.

To learn more

My book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management offers a comprehensive account of the principle and practices of Storytelling 3.0.

If you would like to get together with others who are intent on using Storytelling 3.0 to master what’s involved in creating a workplace that systematically puts people at the center, please join me, Rod Collins (author of Leadership in a Wiki World, Seth Kahan (author of Getting Change Right) and others for two days on May 12-13 in Washington DC. Cool, innovative and serious fun.

Don’t delay: the early bird discount ends March 31. More details here.

From Outputs To Outcomes: Part 5: Measuring Customer Delight in Real Time: Social Media

Image via CrunchBase

This article is the fifth and final part in a series of posts on measuring what matters in organizations: the shift from outputs to outcomes. Today the focus is on measuring customer delight in real time: social media.

1. Measuring customer delight at the organizational level: NPS
2. Measuring customer delight through user stories
3. Measuring delight: sizing and prioritizing user stories
4. Measuring the neglected competitive weapon: time

In Part 1 of this series, I showed how to use the Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure what has already happened to your business, in terms of client delight and outcomes. In parts 2-4 of this series, I showed how to deploy user stories to measure the inputs that will generate client delight in the future. In this part, I look at how social media can be used to measure what is currently happening in terms of client delight in your business.

Social media has changed everything. The explosion of social media from practically nothing five years ago, to over 500 millions participants has created major threats to traditional management that is focused on outputs and making money, as well as major opportunities for organizations that are committed on delighting their customers by generating positive outcomes.

The threat of social media

“Customers know everything about your company,” wrote Christopher Meyer and Julia Kirby in Harvard Business Review in April 2010. “That has changed the rules of business forever.” When customers know everything, it becomes important that management be equally informed, particularly when customers have the ability to videotape the experience and transmit it potentially to millions of other customers. Most traditionally-managed firms are just one YouTube video away from a major brand disaster.

Consider the following examples.

In 2008, when United Airlines broke Dave Carroll’s guitar, he made a singing YouTube video that told the story of the incident; the video has now been viewed by more than 8 million people.

In 2008, when a mother took offence at a commercial for the pain reliever Motrin that implied, in her eyes, that mothers were wearing baby slings simply to be fashionable, she was able to launch a “Motrin Moms” protest movement, that within two days became the most popular subject on Twitter.

In 2008, when Howard Schultz came back to be CEO of Starbucks, he woke up one morning to find around a hundred emails in his inbox. It turned out that this was the result of a sensational story in the Sun newspaper in London about a piece of equipment that Schultz had never heard of. When his phone rang and a reporter asked him to comment, Schultz replied that he had no idea what it was. The reporter advised him, “Google Starbucks real fast!” Schultz recalls: “We had a real problem. The lesson was that the world had changed. Something that happened in London had created a world-wide story that positioned Starbucks with venom and disrespect.”

These are just a couple of eye-opening illustrations of the revolution generated by sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The scale and rapidity of the ensuing public relations crises are astonishing.

The opportunities of social media

At the same time, the positive opportunities for organizations to use the power of social media for telling the story of their products and services are equally dramatic:

Procter & Gamble has used social media to reach otherwise unreachable customers when they helped create a community for teenage girls (beinggirl.com) that provides a friendly and helpful environment for them to converse and share stories, where the girls also learn about P&G’s feminine care products.

Ford has used social marketing to launch a new car—the Fiesta—without traditional advertizing by generating a massive “Fiesta Movement,” involving stories reflected in 6 million YouTube views, 740,000 views of Flickr photos and 3.7 million Twitter impressions.

In the last five years, the dynamic of marketing has been transformed. In 2005, the examples cited above could not have happened. Now social media have hundreds of million of participants, who can and do tell stories about the products and services that they use.

Unfortunately, traditional management will find itself ill-equipped to deal with these threats or take advantage of these opportunities, because its top-down command-and-control bureaucracy focused on transactions and outputs will be unable to engage in interactive conversations. To cope with social media, traditional managers will have to reinvent their management practices and commit themselves to delighting customers through interactive relationships and conversations, as discussed in an earlier post.

Using social media to measure customer delight

For those organizations that have cross the Rubicon into customer capitalism and have committed themselves to delighting their customers, social media give us the possibility of seeing what is happening in real time. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) can tell us what has happened quite rapidly, but it is still operating in terms of days and weeks. By contrast, social media can tell us what is happening in minutes and even seconds.

Social media give us the possibility of conducting controlled experiments to tackle the complex challenge of delighting customers. We can immediately see what the nature, intensity and scale of a response to an input on Twitter, Facebook, or a blog, and adjust course accordingly. We can see how many people respond to a particular input, whether the responses are positive or negative in tone, and whether the responses are passionate or lackluster. We can combine these findings with Net Promoter Scores to determine longer term trends.

As Charlene Li points out in her insightful book, Open Leadership, “having a common metric across the company provides not only a unified view but also a way to make consistent tradeoffs.” (p. 100)

However as she also points out, the ease with which we can now collect data creates the risk that we will drown in a sea of statistics. Before venturing into this territory, it thus becomes crucial to define objectives, identify the key performance indicators that bear on customer delight, identify the activities that are likely to influence those performance indicators, establish a baseline for those indicators, track the outcome of the indicators as activities are undertaken, and then adjust activities in the ensuring cycle of work.

A different way of managing

Here, as elsewhere, the individual tools that are used to measure outcomes are less important than the management mindset that deploys them. Effectively measuring time entails a wholly different way of thinking, speaking and acting in the workplace.

What we measure determines how we see the world. It enables us to see where we have come from, where we are now and where we could be heading. It’s the foundation of discovery. It expands our knowledge, defines our progress, and sparks new insights.

To learn more about the principles and practices of measuring outcomes so as to generate customer delight, read my book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management (Jossey-Bass, 2010) which provides a comprehensive overview of the principles and practices involved.

If you would like to get together with others who are intent on mastering what’s involved in measuring time, and creating a workplace of continuous innovation and customer delight, please join me, Rod Collins (author of Leadership in a Wiki World, Seth Kahan (author of Getting Change Right) and others for two days on May 12-13 in Washington DC. Cool, innovative and serious fun. More details here.

BOOK REVIEW: Tell to Win by Peter Guber

Every year over 11,000 business books are published. Only a tiny sliver of those books are what I would call “real books”, that is, books that talk meaningfully and authentically about a subject in a coherent way. (Most of them are compilations of tired business platitudes, aimed at selling the author’s consultant services.)

A real book

One of the very few business books that is also a “real book” that I have come across recently is Peter Guber’s new book, Tell to Win. It’s a book about how important storytelling has been in Peter’s life. Peter has an amazing set of stories to tell: how he grew up in New York, went to Hollywood, became a big shot producer with films like Batman, Rain Man and Gorillas in the Mist, and is now the owner of an NBA team in San Francisco.

If you looked closely this last Sunday night, you could have seen Peter and his wife at the Oscar ceremony as one of the producers of the Oscar-nominated film, The Kids Are All Right.

In telling the many stories that make up his life, Peter also tells the story of storytelling. What makes this engaging is that Peter, despite his successes, doesn’t take himself too seriously. Many of the stories in the book are less about his brilliant successes, of which there are many, and more about the illuminating stumbles that inevitably occur as one makes one’s way through life.

Meeting the King of Thailand

One of my favorites is about when he was making a film in Thailand and had to see the king in order to obtain permission for what he was doing. So he followed his own advice and practiced, practiced, practiced his story to tell to the king and when he arrived at the palace he felt he was ready. When he saw the king, he taken aback at how impressively the king was dressed. He began his spiel and felt his assistant pulling on his sleeve. He ignored this and pressed ahead with his spiel. Finally, his assistant whispered in his ear, “Peter, that’s not the king. That’s the usher.”

The emotional transportation business

Peter sees himself as being in the emotional transportation business. His book shows how success is won by telling compelling stories that have the power to move partners, shareholders, customers and employees to action. As he says, if you can't tell it, you can't sell it!

The book is already #1 on Amazon. So it doesn’t need any help from me in promoting it. But if you are interested in buying it, you can order it now and get a set of digital gifts here.

Recently I put some questions to Peter about his book and he answered as follows:

1. How has purposeful story telling been central to your career?

Both telling stories for entertainment (film, TV, miniseries, etc.) and telling purposeful stories to propel my business goals (buying and selling sports teams, new media companies, real estate ventures) have been “the secret sauce” behind my career success.  The seminal elements of what makes a story great are the same whether we’re talking about story content for a movie such as Rain Man, or story content used in the room, face to face to propel the success of a deal such as acquiring an NBA franchise, securing intellectual property rights to a great estate like Frank Sinatra, becoming CEO of a corporation like Sony Pictures Entertainment, or raising money for a university like UCLA.

2. What's your favorite example of a story well told that helped you get ahead?

 It was how as CEO of Columbia Pictures just after it was purchased by Sony, I told the story of Lawrence of Arabia to inspire my employees to reclaim their heritage and pull together.  Ironically, this was the studio that made the movie 40 years earlier.

3. In what kinds of situations in business will the power of telling a purposeful story be most useful?

In any situation that calls for you to persuade, convince or manage someone or a group of people to do something, the ability to tell a purposeful story will be your secret sauce. Telling to win through purposeful stories is situation, industry, gender, demographic, and psychographic-agnostic.  It’s an all-purpose, everyone wins tool.

4. Why has the need for telling to win increased?

In today’s roller-coaster economy, hyper-competitive, fear-based, flat and global world, convincing anyone to do anything at any time requires getting their attention, creating their intention and turning it to action.  This means you have to render an experience.  And telling purposeful stories in the room, face to face cuts through the cacophony in both turbulent and triumphant times.

5. What did your research about telling stories uncover that most surprised you?

As a guest professor with me at the graduate course at UCLA, titled Navigating a Narrative World, Marco Iacoboni, Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA, provided one of the most surprising insights behind the power of telling a purposeful story.  Iacobani is a pioneer in the research of mirror neurons.  Mirror neurons allow us to read each other, both functionally and emotionally, as if both the teller and listener are entering and living each other’s experience.  They make it possible for the teller and listener to imitate, learn, and intuit each other’s goals through feelings of empathy and connection.  Iacobani explained that when one tells a purposeful story in the room, face to face, they evoke the mirror neuron system of their listener to feel what they are feeling in their tell and thus mirror the same intentions. A truly empathetic and powerful experience!

6. What are the essential elements of a purposeful story?

Tell to Win reveals the key elements that tellers of purposeful stories utilize to engage their listener(s) and turn them into viral advocates of the tellers’ goals.  Purposeful stories have a goal, a call to action that tellers want their listeners to do.  But, before tellers motivate their listeners, the teller, him or herself, must first be motivated.  This means he or she must be authentic and congruent.  The tellers’ story must not just be interesting, but demonstrate that the tellers are interested in what is interesting to their audience if they want to capture and retain their audience’s attention.  Purposeful story tellers must engage the listener(s) in a dialog.  Telling purposeful stories is interactive. It’s not a monolog.  Ultimately, purposeful tellers must surrender control of their stories, creating a gap for the listener(s) to willingly cross in order to take ownership.  Only when the listener(s) own the tellers’ story and make it theirs, will they virally market it.

7.  What's the simplest way we can start applying telling purposeful stories to our own lives right away?

Practice.  Practice.  Practice.  You will tap into your inherent resource.  Be clear to yourself about what your intention is, that you want to be heard and felt and what you want as your goal, i.e., what you want your listener to do upon hearing and feeling your story.  Be sure to know what your audience is interested in rather than trying to be interesting, and set your content in a context that is important to them.  Let your authenticity and congruence shine through your story, turning “me to we,” in the process.  Embed the important facts and information inside your story while rendering an emotionally resonant experience.   Hits are born in the heart or gut and then migrate to the mind.  Aim there.  Only then will your listener(s) own your goal as theirs and act on it.

The meaning of storytelling

What’s interesting to me is that ten years ago, ten years ago, storytelling was nowhere on the radar of the business world. Clever people were using stories to be successful, but no one was explaining how it was done. Now you have books like Peter’s book, Tell to Win, that take you behind the screen and reveal the secrets of what it takes to tell a winning story.

As we look more broadly now at the revolution going on in management around the world, as organizations shift from traditional management to radical management, it is becoming steadily more apparent that one of the key ingredients in the revolution is an ability to communicate authentically with their customers or their employees.  Storytelling is not just a nice additional capability to have. It’s become one of the basics.

To learn more

Peter and I will be appearing together on a discussion panel at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on the evening of April 21, 2011, talking about his book, Tell to Win, and the second edition of my 2005 book, The Leader's Guide to Storytelling, which is also being published this month.

 

The Healing Power of Storytelling: New Scientific Evidence

The New York Times reported last week on new evidence the power of storytelling in medicine.

In 2004, the New England Journal of Medicine endorsed the importance of storytelling in medicine in its issue of February 26, 2004. The NEJM article by Professor Rita Charon argued that health care professionals and patients are increasingly recognizing the importance of the stories they tell one another of illness. This is not only a diagnosis encoded in the narratives patients tell of symptoms, but also deep and therapeutically consequential understandings of the persons who bear symptoms are made possible in the course of hearing the narratives told of illness.

Last Thursday, the New York Times reported: “Despite the ubiquitousness of storytelling in medicine, research on its effects in the clinical setting has remained relatively thin. Now The Annals of Internal Medicine has published the results of a provocative new trial examining the effects of storytelling on patients with high blood pressure. And it appears that at least for one group of patients, listening to personal narratives helped control high blood pressure as effectively as the addition of more medications.”

Read the New York Times article here.

To learn more about the power of storytelling, read the new edition of my book, The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling (2nd edition, March 2011)

Reinventing management Part 6: From command to conversation

Stop shouting & start listening!

In an earlier post entitled The Reinvention of Management: Part 1, I noted that current management practices represent a set of economic, social and political problems of the first order, which cannot be resolved by a single fix.

Instead, a whole host of business leaders and writers, including Umair Haque, John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison, Rod Collins, Ranjay Gulati and Carol Sanford are exploring a fundamental rethinking of the basic tenets of management. Among the most important changes being proposed are five basic shifts in management practice:

1.     The firm’s goal (a shift from inside-out to outside-in).

2.     Role of managers (a shift from controller to enabler).

3.     Mode of coordination (from hierarchical bureaucracy to dynamic linking). 

4.     Values practiced (a shift from value to values).

5.     Communications (a shift from command to conversation).

In this continuing series of posts, I explore in more detail the specific practices needed to accomplish these five shifts.

In previous posts, I have described the practices needed to achieve the shift in the firm’s goal to delighting the client, the shift in the manager’s role from controller to enabler, the shift from bureaucracy to dynamic linking and the shift from value to values.

In this post, I describe the practices involved in the shift in communications from command to conversation.

Shift #5: From command to conversation

None of the above shifts will be sustained if management communicates in the traditional mode of top-down commands that dispirit knowledge workers. Nor will customers be delighted if communications with organization consist of unresponsive one-way messages. Instead, communications need to proceed in the mode of social norms, with adult-to-adult conversation, listening attentively and responding openly, with authentic stories, metaphors and open-ended questions.

1.                Use authentic storytelling to inspire a passion for delighting clients: For most organizations, the above four shifts entail a significant change agenda—often a fundamental shift in culture. This won’t happen, as Peter Guber explains in Tell to Win (2011), without compelling leadership storytelling—stories that show how other organizations have done it and, where possible, stories about how it is already happening within the organization.

2.            Practice deep listening: Deep listening to stories both inside the organization with employees and outside the organization with customers provide the ingredients for lasting relationships. Within the organization, employees discover what’s wonderful in each other. Outside the organization, as customers discover that the firm consists of real people who communicate authentically, the foundation for a relationship can be laid.

3.            Know the customer’s story:  The shift from producing goods and services to networks of teams that delight clients sooner, more often, and more profoundly can only happen if teams doing the work know the customer’s story. This story becomes the raw material from which hypotheses as to what might delight the client can be derived.

4.            Conduct authentic conversations with customers:  Instead of viewing the customer as thing to be manipulated with one-way messages that “manufacture demand”, the firm organizes itself to conduct authentic conversations with customers whether through social media as explained by Charlene Li in Open Leadership or in call-in centers that actually seek to turn customer problems into customer delight, as at Zappos.

5.            Deploy user stories as catalysts for conversation: User stories aren’t artifacts or instructions or commands. They are opportunities to conduct a conversation between the client and the people doing the work. The object of the conversation is to deepen understanding as to what might delight the client.

6.            Deploy stories to enhance individual performance: Carrots and sticks don’t motivate knowledge workers. Instead, skilled leaders seek to discover what drives people into action and then connect that to the goals of the team. The sharing of stories can help to create needed understanding, mutual respect and trust.

7.            Use stories to enhance team cohesion: Groups develop a sense of identity from three sequential stories: the story of who we were, the story of who we are now, and the story of who we are going to be. Having groups craft and perform this combination of stories communicates to both themselves and others what they have in common and why they might evolve into a high-performance group.

8.            Use stories to inspire high-performance teams: The telling of stories about successful high-performance teams in other similar organizations can stimulate the narrative imaginations of the team members and show how that the experience can be emulated.

To learn more:

To learn more about reinventing management, read the whole series:

• Reinventing Management: Part 1: Overview
• Reinventing Management: Part 2: Delighting the client
• Reinventing Management: Part 3: From controller to enabler
• Reinventing Management: Part 4. From bureaucracy to dynamic linking
• Reinventing Management: Part 5: From value to values.
• This post: Part 6: From command to conversation
• Coming soon: Part 7: Implementing the transition

And read books such as The New Capitalist Manifesto by Umair Haque, The Power of Pull by John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, Reorganize for Resilience by Ranjay Gulati,  Leadership in a Wiki World  by Rod Collins,  The Responsible Business by Carol Sanford, or Tell to Win by Peter Guber.

For a comprehensive review of the principles and practices involved in reinventing management, read my book: The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century.

Obama and the moral of the salmon: it's the story, stupid!

Everywhere people are lamenting the gap between what President Obama said in the State of the Union and what American actually heard. New York magazine’s headline was “All America Heard Last Night: ‘Salmon’”

On Twitter, Tim O’Reilly comments,”Ouch!”

This is based on a comparison of a “word cloud” of the speech itself (above) and a “word cloud” of how 4,000 NPR viewers thought they heard (below).

 

In the first place, let’s recognize that even in the word cloud, it’s not correct that in the NPR word cloud “all they heard was salmon.” They also heard “inspiring”, “hopeful” “education” and “future”, which is actually fairly encouraging.

The deeper lesson of the experience is this: the only thing that people remember from speeches is a  memorable story.

What made Barack Obama an effective candidate for president was that he was a master storyteller. He had an inspiring set of stories to tell and he told them very effectively. He was elected president.

Then something happened. Inexplicably he turned into a boring professor, and began talking in abstractions. Remember his Inaugural Address? Neither can I.

Let’s make it simpler. Remember one thing from his Inaugural Address? Neither can I.

Apparently he was surrounded with people who were writing boring abstractions. After two years of this, he received—not surprisingly—a shellacking at the polls.

There are signs now of the old Obama reemerging from his long hibernation. First, there were glimpses of it in this speech in Tuczon for Gabrielle Giffords and those who were killed or injured in that horrific shooting.

And now, further glimpses of it in the State of the Union address, particularly the salmon story and some of the education stories. He told other stories in the State of the Union address, but no one can remember because, frankly, they weren't very good stories.

The moral of the salmon story and the education stories is not that America isn’t listening. The moral is that President Obama needs to communicate through memorable stories if he wants people to listen.

To coin a phrase: it’s the story, stupid.

If President Obama wants to be re-elected, he could do worse than read Peter Guber’s new book, Tell to Win (March 2011), or my own book, The Leader's Guide to Storytelling, for which a second edition is being published next month.

SURVEY RESULTS: A live storytelling event in the Spring in DC

A few days ago, I invited people to participate in a survey to help determine whether there was interest in continuing the annual storytelling event in Washington DC in the Spring and if so, what sort of an event.

Many thanks to the 72 people who participated in the survey, when the survey closed today at noon.

The winners of the raffle prize (a copy of my book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century ) are Stephanie Brown and David Jamieson.

You can see the summary results here 

The main points that emerge from the summary results are:

• More than 80% were interested in attending an event about organizational storytelling and/or revolutionizing the world of work. Most felt that it was important to meet in person from time to time.
• The greatest interest was in a learning event in which participants would acquire techniques and skills. This was followed by a conference event with several speakers and then a structured event that would enable people to connect with “members of the storytelling tribe”.
• The strongest interest was in a two-day event on Friday and Saturday.
• There was interest expressed in learning sessions from all four speakers listed, i.e. Blair, Denning, Kahan and Margolis.
• Most people were comfortable with previous price range of $70-130, and 40% said that they would be willing to pay more if it was needed to cover costs.
• Happily 16 people said that they were willing to assist in organizing the event.

There were also many detailed suggestions and we are sorting through these ideas now.

My sincere thanks to those who participated. This is extraordinarily useful in helping us decide what to do.

Any further suggestions as to how to interpret the results would also be extremely helpful. You can add a comment to this blog post.

I will announce here in due course what is decided.

Do you want to attend a live storytelling event in Washington DC in the Spring?

Been to one of the Smithsonian or Golden Fleece storytelling events in Washington DC over the last ten years? Well, we are conducting a survey to ascertain the level of interest in holding another such event in Washington DC in the Spring of 2011. The event could be related to storytelling, reinvention and/or revolutionizing the world of work.

We want to find out what sort of event might interest you, on what topics and for how long.

If you would like to get right to the questions and the chance to win a RAFFLE PRIZE (a copy of my book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management ), go immediately to the survey here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/3NFCYKX

Don't delay! Don’t miss out! The raffle will close at midnight EST Wednesday January 12, 2011.

If on the other hand you would like to understand some of the background to this annual event, please read the background note set out below.

THE HISTORY

Almost ten years ago in April 2001, I organized a symposium at the Smithsonian Associates with the eventual goal of converting the world to the power of storytelling. I did so because I saw in leadership storytelling a way to make the world a more humane and better place than the grim humorless workplaces that I saw all around me. At the time, people told me that my goal was quixotic, even absurd.

The event was so successful that it led to the formation of a community of people in the Washington DC  which called itself the Golden Fleece group. This group began meeting on monthly basis in July 2001.

Since 2001, each year in the Spring in Washington DC, I have organized, with the help of many others, an organizational storytelling event at the Smithsonian Associates. The event usually lasted one day and consisted of prominent speakers talking about various aspects of leadership storytelling.  At one time or another, most of the leaders of the global storytelling movement have appeared at the annual event.

In addition, for the last eight years, the annual Smithsonian event was accompanied by a second event organized by the Golden Fleece Group. This event was organized by volunteers, including Madelyn Blair, Denise Lee and Seth Kahan, among many others. It has included presentations made by members of the Golden Fleece Group itself, as well as consistently bringing in speakers from outside the group including speakers from other countries.

The annual storytelling event in Washington DC in the Spring of each year served a variety of purposes.

• It helped continue momentum of the storytelling movement.
• It served as a kind of the annual general meeting of “the storytelling tribe”.
• It brought in new members to the storytelling movement
• It introduced the storytelling community to new speakers, thinkers and ideas.
• It helped individuals acquire new skills.
• It was generally light-hearted and fun and served as an antidote to the stuffy formal world of organizations.

THE WORLDWIDE STORYWORK GROUP

Around 2007, the Golden Fleece group decided to “go virtual” and formed an online community entitled the Worldwide Story Work with the help of Shawn Callahan and Madelyn Blair among others. It is located at Ning.com and can be joined at: http://worldwidestorywork.ning.com. It now has around 600 members.

THE REINVENTION SUMMIT

By way of additional background, in November 2010, a virtual conference with a storytelling theme entitled the Reinvention Summit was organized by Michael Margolis. It was focused on storytelling for personal, business, and social reinvention and it attracted a large and active audience. This has led to active online conversations and further online workshops. Participants in this online event have been discussing about holding live get-togethers in various places around the world. One such event might be an event in Washington DC in the Spring of 2011.

THE STORYTELLING MOVEMENT HAS SUCCEEDED

Over the course of the last ten years, many people around the world have come to embrace storytelling. As a result of the efforts of many people, it is now commonplace to find leadership storytelling discussed and promoted in even the most conservative business journals. Most leadership textbooks now have a section on storytelling. Business schools now often include segments on storytelling in their courses on leadership. Major corporations have taken it up as a central leadership theme.

In broad terms, the intellectual battle to have storytelling accepted in the world of work has been won. What was once seen as absurd is now viewed as obvious. While there is still opposition and resistance in some quarters, and many people have yet to learn about it, the nature of the effort has changed. This is less about launching a new movement and more about refining and developing a set of widely accepted and well-documented ideas.

A BROADENING OF THE GOALS

Yet my original goal of getting involved in storytelling in the first place, i.e. doing something about the grim humorless workplaces, has not been met.

Even though storytelling itself is successful, those grim humorless workplaces are still everywhere. My take is that that war has still to be fought.

Thus I have come to see that storytelling by itself is not enough. In organizations today, we find a set of attitudes, practices and values that cripple the human spirit and hamstring creativity and innovation.

I believe that the time is therefore ripe to take on the broader challenge of reinventing those attitudes, practices and values so that our organizations become curators of the human spirit rather than its destroyer.

I have invited people to join me in this quest. An online community has formed with the title of: “Revolutionizing the World of Work”. It now has over a hundred participants and a number of lively online conversations are under way. If you would like to join this community, go to: http://bit.ly/eF2wfX

CHANGES IN SPONSORSHIP

Earlier this year, the Smithsonian Associates made a policy decision to re-focus its events on the relics and collections of its museums. Hence it will no longer be a partner in our storytelling endeavors. We have appreciated their support over the years, but it is time to part company.

At the same time, George Mason University, which sponsored the Golden Fleece event in 2010 and contributed the facilities for that event, has decided not to participate in any 2011 event.

Meanwhile, several other potential organizations have expressed interest in co-sponsoring an event in Washington DC if it happens.

THE STORYTELLING MOVEMENT IS NOW MAINLY VIRTUAL

Looking back over the last ten years, we can see that what began as a handful of people meeting face-to-face in Washington DC has now spawned a number of large and growing online communities around the world. These include:

• The Golden Fleece group itself (around 60 members)
• The Working Stories list (more than a hundred members)
• The Worldwide Story Work group on Ning (around 600 members)
• The Reinvention Summit group (around 600 members)
• The group Revolutionizing the World of Work (more than a hundred members)
• Regular blogging and tweeting about storytelling and reinventing the workplace are reaching tens of thousands of people in social media.

There is a lot of overlap among the groups. Many individuals are members of more than one of these groups.  For instance, I am a member of all five communities.

Overall the storytelling/reinvention movement is now very much larger than it was some years ago and the agenda is considerably broader than it was ten years ago.

With the withdrawal of the Smithsonian Associates and George Mason University as co-sponsors, we have to decide whether any live event or events should be planned and if so, what.

One possibility would be to recognize that the storytelling world, like the rest of the world, has gone virtual, and simply continue to meet online, without any live events.

Indeed one school of thought is that social media and online events are reaching so many more people than in-person events that we should continue to put all our efforts into virtual events, and forget about organizing an event or events where we could meet in person.

Another school of thought is that it would be a pity not to continue the momentum of what has gone before as well as to open up new horizons. An in-person event or set of events could help “ground” the growing online movement, including:

• It could serve as a meeting of one of more of the various “tribes”: i.e. storytelling, GoldenFleece, Worldwide Story Work, Reinvention Summit or Revolutionizing the World of Work.
• It could bring in new members to the various movements
• It could introduce people to new speakers, thinkers and ideas.
• It could help individuals to acquire new skills.
• It could be fun.

Nevertheless, it would take some effort and money to organize. Hence before undertaking that, we would like to ascertain the level of interest in participating in a live event, as opposed to continuing to meet online. Hence this survey.

In the past, the burden of organizing a live event has fallen on a few people. If there is interest in meeting, we would also like to ascertain whether there is a willingness to help organize the event/

WOULD YOU LIKE TO PARTICIPATE IN A LIVE EVENT IN DC IN THE SPRING OF 2011?

We would like to ascertain your interest in participating in a live event or events in Washington DC in the Spring of 2011 in Washington DC so as to continue the momentum of what has gone before as well as to open up new horizons. Your participation in the survey will help us make the best decision.

If you leave your email, you will qualify for one of the two raffle prizes being offered, namely, a copy of my new book, THE LEADER'S GUIDE TO RADICAL MANAGEMENT. The two winners of the raffle will be announced in Steve Denning's newsletter. 

Please take the survey here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/3NFCYKX

My New Year's Resolutions

As we enter this festive season, in addition to wishing you and your family all the best for the holidays and the New Year, I wanted to share with you my new year’s resolutions, beginning with a quote from Albert Einstein that I love:

If at first an idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it.

Why is this so meaningful to me? Almost exactly ten years ago today, in December 2000, when I left my position as Program Director of Knowledge Management at the World Bank, I set out to convert the world to the power of storytelling. I did so because I saw in leadership storytelling a way to make the world a more humane and better place than the grim humorless workplaces that I saw all around me. At the time,
people told me that my goal was quixotic, even absurd.

During those ten years, many people around the world have come to embrace leadership storytelling. As a result of the efforts of myself and many others, it is now commonplace to find leadership storytelling discussed and promoted in even the most conservative business journals. Most leadership textbooks now have a section on storytelling. Business schools now often include segments on storytelling in their courses on leadership. Major corporations have taken it up as a central leadership theme. In broad terms, the intellectual battle to have storytelling accepted in the world of work has been won. What was once seen as absurd is now viewed as obvious.

Yet the grim humorless workplaces are still everywhere. That war has still to be fought.

Thus I have come to see that storytelling by itself is not enough. In organizations today, we find a set of attitudes, practices and values that cripple the human spirit and hamstring creativity and innovation. Fortunately, we now have robust evidence of something that we have instinctively known for a long time, namely, that these attitudes, practices and values are leading to failure even according to their own traditional criteria, such as the rate of return on assets, the life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune 500, the engagement of those doing the work or their capacity to create employment.[1]

We also know that these attitudes, values and practices have infected our education system which no longer provides an education that fits our children for the future and our health system, which, quite apart from the recent health reform, is heading the country towards bankruptcy.

I believe that the time is therefore ripe to take on the broader challenge of reinventing those attitudes, practices and values so that our organizations become curators of the human spirit rather than its destroyer.

The next ten years: a new challenge

Having decided to take on the gargantuan challenge—once again, I am hearing that the goal is absurd—of inspiring the Fortune 500 (along with the health and education sectors) to reinvent themselves and run their affairs in a way that is radically different from what most of them are doing today, I will need to lead through a combination of clear thinking, courage and leadership storytelling.

I will tell stories that show why most of the firms in the Fortune 500 are much less productive than they were fifty years ago, not because managers have forgotten how to manage but rather because the economic context has shifted and management hasn’t. I will also tell stories that show how some organizations have discovered how to manage in a radically different way that leads simultaneously to high productivity, continuous innovation, deep job satisfaction and client delight.

More than an idea: a social movement

To succeed, I will need to tell authentically true stories that capture many people’s imagination and engage them to inspire others to keep doing more. The stories will need to grow and evolve as listeners, readers and followers become a central part of the journey and participate in it and co-create it.

I will join with other authors, leaders and activists, who share this vision and do whatever I can to encourage and support them in their work. We will all need to deploy new forms of storytelling, with different strands of the story being told across multiple platforms at the same time, creating a deeply immersive experience and generating what Justine Musk has called: “world worthy of devotion”.

To create this world of life-enhancing practices, attitudes and values, we will need to convey meaning that reveals our deepest values, our very core, as human beings. We will need to inspire people to move forward, even on those miserable days when the cause seems hopeless, when the guardians of the status quo are doing their darnedest to prevent change, and everyone is discouraged and tempted to abandon the challenge.

We will need to create a world in which people can find sustenance and inspiration. Obviously, none of us can change the world alone. Ultimately, it’s about all of us inspiring others to take the future into their own hands and change the world themselves. We can give ideas and stimulation but ultimately it is others who will have to summon up the energy and the ingenuity to overcome the forces of soul-destroying stagnation and create a new world.

Eventually, this meaning will need to reach many people through multiple vehicles. It will begin with face-to-face conversations and then spread by books, articles, meetings, conferences, webinars, networks, communities, emails, websites, blogs, social media or whatever – each creating more communities and networks that link up to other communities and networks, and so create a social movement that is broad and deep.

The movement will need to be as much about listening as it will be about speaking: listening to the voices that emerge, the voices of their hopes, their deeper aspirations and their fears, giving everyone, including our seeming opponents or enemies, our respect. It’s about letting the ideas grow and evolve, all the time paying attention to life.

If you would like to join with me and help in any capacity--as participant, discussant, commentator, thinker, writer, editor, contributor, correspondent, activist, insurgent, speaker, leader, follower, muse, whatever-- to tackle this massive but worthwhile challenge, let me know.

I would love to hear from you!

POSTSCRIPT DECEMBER 25, 2010:

Owing to the strong response from all around the world to my "manifesto", I have launched a Google Group, called Revolutionizing the World of Work.

The object of the Group is:

•     inspiring business, government & social sector organizations to reinvent themselves & create a work-world of life-enhancing practices & values
•     launching a broad social movement that uses storytelling to capture people’s imagination that inspires organizations to become curators of the human spirit.

You can join by going to Google Groups at http://groups.google.com/group/revolutionizing-the-world-of-work.

Please join us there and help revolutionize the world of work!

---

[1] Deloitte’s Center for the Edge: The Shift Index; The Kauffman Foundation

Beauty, meaning & boredom in the workplace: the role of story & storytelling

"My dream? To retire," a 35 year old man tells me. Something is very wrong with this society.”

Paulo Coelho

Of all modern management’s sins, one of the least recognized is its boredom and its neglect of beauty. After all, life was once viewed as beautiful, even though it’s hard to recall this when reading management books or looking at the working life of most people today. Wealth doesn’t seem to help. As the economy advances, the workplace doesn’t become less dreary, with its total focus on analysis, optimization, and the bottom line. If a glimmer of beauty accidentally occurs in a modern organizational setting, it’s usually regarded as an embarrassment: it will be dealt with by a rhetoric that has no aesthetic sensitivity to begin with.

But what use is a life of work if there isn’t a scintilla of beauty within it? As work consumes more and more of people’s waking hours, the systematic draining of beauty from their lives becomes a graver and graver problem.

This is one of the contributions of storytelling—that of restoring beauty to the workplace. With a well-turned phrase, an elegant telling, a story creates the shapeliness of the beginning, middle, and ending. Through the story’s tensions and resolutions, both the teller and the audience experience continuing coherent existence. These elements can add beauty to lives that are otherwise bereft of it, like flowers making their way through the cracks in a vast cement pavement.

By contrast, the control mode of management is deadening. You can recognize it in the gray feeling that comes over you when you participate in a departmental meeting, listening to the voice that drones on with announcements of “new findings” that could hardly be more banal, or of the latest reorganization that is so like the previous one, or the fatuous anodynes for managers in distress. These are stagnant waters in which no living thing flourishes.

The dreariness of the modern workplace has been attacked so often that it might seem a waste of time to criticize it further. Yet there are grounds for doing so. While the cause of its ugliness—the controlling approach to leadership—is deadly, it’s not dead. Unfortunately, it’s horrifyingly active and energetic, like a garrulous bore who won’t stop talking. In fact it’s this restless energy that suggests the possibility—and even the hope—of change.

For organizations that are run in the control mode, beauty currently has to steal back into departments by way of postcards pinned to cubicle walls, muttered jokes, underground discussions, hurried lunches, or clandestine romances, while the management tries to redirect attention toward mounting a never-ending career ladder. The goal is to get people to focus on minuscule salary increments and relative enhancements of standing—a fancier title or a marginally larger workspace.

What storytelling offers is an escape route from this mortuary by suggesting a type of leadership that includes meaning as well as beauty. Story responds to our human curiosity to know how the world is connected together and to our longing for shapely forms. We not only look for narrative patterns—we yearn for them. We want to know what happens and also that it will make sense. We suffer the hunger for meaning and cannot resist its satisfaction. Through story we experience the many levels of the self as well as a deeper coherence of the world.

Through story, we learn to see each other and ourselves, and come to love what we see as well as acquire the power to change it. In this way we come to terms with our past, our present, and our future.

Through story, we can put an end to the worry, the fever, and the fret of trying to live instrumentally. Finally, we can simply be.

Excerpted from chapter 12 of the Second Edition of The Leader's Guide to Storytelling which is being published by Jossey-Bass in February 2011.

See also:

The most beautiful blog in the world.

The most beautiful statistics in the world

The most beautiful fonts in the world

The most beautiful building in the world