Business Storytelling For Dummies

Karen Dietz, Lori L. Silverman

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118730171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Kleinbetrieb

Ready to hone your storytelling skills and craft a compelling business narrative?

Professionals of all types -- marketing managers, sales reps, senior leaders, supervisors, creatives, account executives -- have to write. Whether you're writing an internal email or a social media post, a video script or a blog post, being able to tell a good story can help ensure your content resonates with your intended audience.

Storytelling is an art, but there's a method behind it that anyone can learn. Full of practical advice and real-world case studies, Business Storytelling For Dummies is a friendly, no-nonsense guide that will help you tell more engaging stories in your business presentations, internal communications, marketing collateral, and sales assets.

Connecting with customers through storytelling can help you build trust with your audience, strengthen your brand, and increase sales. Look to Business Storytelling For Dummies to

• Learn the elements of storytelling and how to use them effectively
• Become a better listener to become a better storyteller
• Make your stories come to life with relatable details
• Back up your story with data points
• Use the power of storytelling to effect change
• Choose the perfect format to tell your story

Startups, small businesses, creative agencies, non-profits, and enterprises all have a story to tell. Get the book to explore examples, templates, and step-by-step instruction and create your own compelling narrative to tell your story to the world.

Part I

Getting Started with Business Storytelling

For Dummies can help you get started with lots of subjects. Visit www.dummies.com to learn more.

In this part . . .

Highlight the role of storytelling in business and its impact on individuals.

Identify the ultimate goal of business storytelling and the results that can come through its use in organizations.

Identify the core elements of a story and what distinguishes it from anecdotes, case studies, examples, and other forms of narrative.

Outline seven types of personal and organizational stories to have in your hip pocket at all times.

Evoke, listen to, and capture stories from others in a way that empowers and honors these individuals.

Chapter 1

The Scoop on Business Storytelling

In This Chapter

Highlighting the role of story in the new economy

Identifying the best definition of a story

Connecting story to the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual

Is storytelling a tool, a technique, or a core competence and a business strategy? We believe it’s all of the above. More and more businesses are recognizing that storytelling is more than giving presentation skills to managers and staff. They’re acknowledging it’s a critical capability in effectively leading an organization. That working with stories requires an overall strategy that addresses why and what, in addition to building skills that speak to how. That storytelling in marketing, branding, and sales is about engagement, listening, and creating storied experiences to sustain customer loyalty and profits. That stories provide deep, rich, and meaningful experiences for people if crafted and told well. And that stories can be the wellspring for change and help unite a community around an organization.

Storytelling’s Role in Business

For years, businesses have realized that story can mean big money. In the 1995 article, "One Quarter of GDP Is Persuasion," economists Deirdre McClosky and Arjo Klamer calculated that persuasion activities (advertising, public relations, sales, editing, writing, art making, and so on) accounted for 25 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product (American Economic Review, vol. 85, No. 2). Author Steven Denning, formerly of the World Bank, conjectures in The Leader's Guide To Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative (Jossey-Bass, 2011), that if half of that amount is devoted to story, then storytelling is worth $2.25 trillion annually (www.stevedenning.com/Documents/Leader-Foreword.pdf). A 2013 review of literature relating to McClosky and Klamer's research suggests this persuasion number is closer to 30 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, which equates to $4.5 trillion annually (www.treasury.gov.au/PublicationsAndMedia/Publications/2013/Economic-Roundup-Issue-1/Report/Persuasion-is-now-30-per-cent-of-US-GDP). These numbers alone are enough to pay attention to storytelling!

Getting in on the storytelling action

How does this mountain of money that’s being spent on persuasive communications — which could be devoted to business storytelling —translate to organizational work? Dan Pink, the author of the New York Times best-seller A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future (Berkley Publishing Group, 2006) says business is entering a new age marked by the need to do the following:

Use synthesis to detect patterns and opportunities for new innovations

Create artistic and emotional beauty (think Apple)

Craft a meaningful satisfying narrative through story

Empathize with others

Provide purpose and meaning in both work and the products and services consumed

Replace seriousness with play

He goes on to state that desktop PCs and automated business processes have heightened the value of two types of skills. In expert thinking, new problems are solved for which routine solutions do not exist. In complex communication, interpreting information, explaining, persuading, and influencing becomes essential to success. Storytelling builds competency in both skills.

Futurist Rolf Jensen also explores this need. In his book The Dream Society: How the Coming Shift from Information to Imagination Will Transform Your Business (McGraw-Hill, 1999), he states, “The successful employee of the future is a virtuoso at acquiring and conveying knowledge, and coalescing and improving the work environment. The employee who, through telling stories about the organization’s results, manages to strengthen corporate culture will be considered a valuable asset. Nothing so inspires an organization as an enlivening story relating how the whopping contract was finally won, despite adversity and horrendous odds. The storyteller creates corporate culture.” He goes on to say, “Anyone seeking success in the market of the future will have to be a storyteller. The story is the heart of the matter.”

When it comes to business offerings, story is front and center for Rolf Jensen. He talks about a shift from generating products or services and then telling a story about them to first focusing on the story that will then generate the product or service. For him, the next generation of experience is when a company and its customers are selling the story together as co-storytellers, with engagement driving sales.

Jensen cites Harley-Davidson as an example. In 1999, the Harley story was about transportation. Today, the Harley Owners Group (HOG), a collection of more than 1,400 groups, encourages its members to tell a much broader lifestyle story around the theme "born to be wild." This broader story serves as the background to video anecdotes (these don't contain all the elements of a story as explained in Chapter 3) about individual women riders who have created one-of-a-kind H-D motorcycles. You can view them at www.harley-davidson.com/en_US/Content/Pages/women-riders/the-right-bike.html.

How storytelling can help your business

In The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage (Harvard Busine...