STORYTELLING IN BUSINESS

The Authentic and Fluent OrganizationBy Janis Forman

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Janis Forman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6871-9

Contents

Preface...........................................................xi1 Why Explore Storytelling in Business?...........................12 A Framework for Organizational Storytelling.....................223 Stories About Strategy: Schering-Plough.........................534 Schering-Plough: Lessons Learned................................715 Stories and the Corporate Brand: Chevron........................906 Chevron: Lessons Learned........................................1117 Digital Stories for Business: FedEx.............................1268 FedEx: Lessons Learned..........................................1449 Storytelling Workshops for Change: Philips......................15810 Philips: Lessons Learned.......................................18711 Ending with a Beginning........................................205Acknowledgments...................................................223Notes.............................................................231Index.............................................................273

Chapter One

WHY EXPLORE STORYTELLING IN BUSINESS?

"Meet the Press" and tell them your story. —NANA BETTY

Storytelling can be a personal inheritance, a lifelong and life-sustaining habit of mind, as well as an organizational inheritance, a management tool that helps businesses develop and even thrive. When my maternal grandmother, Nana Betty, encouraged my sister and me as children to tell stories about ourselves to her neighbors—"the press"—whom we encountered on our walks to the beach, she was building our self-confidence in talking to strangers and in finding our place in her small Manhattan Beach (New York) community. Similarly, organizations, like those featured in this book, can encourage storytelling for good purposes, such as making sense of their strategy, communicating it, and developing or strengthening culture and brand. These uses of storytelling generate positive consequences that can have a sustained and significant impact on an organization.

This book is written for business professionals who want to know more about the power of storytelling, how it has functioned successfully in companies, and how, in practical terms, it can help achieve an organization's and a professional's goals.

THE VITALITY OF STORIES

As the "Nana Betty" story illustrates, storytelling may have powerful roots in childhood. Novelist and screenplay writer Larry McMurtry reflects:

If, for example, you dare to interrupt a five-year-old's thirty-ninth viewing of "The Lion King" in order to find out a basketball score, they will, once they regain control of the remote, immediately rewind the film to the point of interruption, so as not to miss the smallest element of the story. Watching the avidity with which the very young absorb stories ... leaves one no grounds for pessimism about the survival of narrative itself. The human appetite for it is too strong.

This child's play of "story watching" is closely akin to the serious play of story creation by novelists and nonfiction writers like McMurtry, and filmmakers like the Disney studio, producer of The Lion King.

Professional storytellers like McMurtry express our intuitive understanding that people are hardwired for stories. The familiar beginning and ending of fairy tales—"Once upon a time ... and they lived happily ever after"—act as verbal bookends, marking a child's grasp of how things work (or ought to work), a predictability that can produce emotional reassurance and pleasure with repeated telling of the same story or with repetition of the familiar elements of story applied to a new topic. As the performance of a gifted storyteller, these tales not only compel a child's rapt attention and adamant demand to "play it again" but also create an intimate link between the listener and the teller of the tale, often a trusted parent or teacher. From early childhood on, the best stories, replete with memorable details, make sense of apparently disconnected facts and experiences, arranging them in a sequence that feels inevitable, and take us on a journey led by the teller of the tale, who, having earned our confidence, orchestrates it all.

The livelihood of writers and the fortunes of filmmakers depend on their ability to craft stories, rich in plot and detail, that touch audiences emotionally, from young children to the elders of a society. McMurtry grew up in rural west Texas among storytellers. In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, he reflects on the art of storytelling, weaving into his autobiography an essay on this art by the early-twentieth-century European intellectual Walter Benjamin. McMurtry reminisces about the roots of his writing life in a small town where old men would sit around at the corner store and while away the time by whittling. As they carved wood into rough shapes, an activity that kept their hands busy and their ears alert, they would take turns telling and listening to each other's stories. "Whittling cowboys," McMurtry reflects, are "perfect receptacles for stories." McMurtry's west Texas town was a close-knit community of shared stories, values, and "tribal" memory.

Even though this context for stories has vanished, McMurtry argues, stories have vitality and a sustaining presence: "Watching the avidity with which the young absorb stories ... leaves one no grounds for pessimism about the survival of narrative itself." And even though we are far removed from the leisurely pace and idyllic setting for the stories he portrays, most of us are nonetheless drawn to them despite—or perhaps because of—the pressured busyness of our organizational and private lives and by our hunger for emotional engagement in our work. As I will argue, it is now time for business to turn to narrative with greater confidence and respect for its capabilities.

WHY TURN TO STORYTELLING IN BUSINESS NOW?

Organizational life is highly pressured. We multitask, we text-message, we surf the Web, we tweet, and we check Facebook in settings, virtual or real, that are galaxies removed from the pastoral idyll of McMurtry's whittling old men: "The decline of whittling," McMurtry explains in an elegiac passage of his autobiography, "has clearly deprived storytellers of many willing listeners—most of the old men who filled the spittle and whittle benches outside the rural courthouses of my youth regaled themselves as they whittled with story after story."

Unlike McMurtry's rural storytellers, the businesspeople we want to influence are busy, harried, quick to calculate the dollar value of their time, bombarded by multiple messages from a dizzying number of communication channels, and likely to respond in haste and in kind to what comes their way. Moreover, as the Millennials who were raised with social network technology increasingly populate the ranks of management, much of business communication takes the form of instantaneous sound bites. Jim Reilly, former general manager of marketing plans and communications at IBM, acknowledges and laments this shift: "People want to knock things down to a bumper sticker. Everything is shorthand thinking. People need stimulation every twenty minutes. Today, instead of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln would have to say 'Read my lips. No slaves.'" Yet, despite, or because of, all this, a well-chosen, well-crafted story can get through to people.

How...