StoryQuest Blog

Business Narrative; the concept leveraged more and more these days in the corporate world. But what is it? What are its components? How can it be used?

In essence, a business narrative is a type of storytelling. Stories, just the same as we were told at bedtime as children, which speak to the commonalities of us as people. These “Narratives” pontificate upon our strengths, our weaknesses, our triumphs, and our failures, but most importantly, the journey to get there

Corporations have realized that their greatest resource is often within its walls: their own people. Better than a memo or a PowerPoint presentation, they can inspire their people through their own personal stories and experiences.

As Robert Dickman explains in his article, “The Business of Narrative and How it Works,” every business narrative has four essential components.

Passion

“Every successful story must have passion, the raw emotion that is wrapped around our narrative’s central fact. Passion is the fire that draws an audience’s attention,” according to Dickman. The person telling the story really has to have a fire under his belly so to speak to keep the audience interested and engaged. Technical terms and statistics will only take you so far. A story of skepticism, defeat and then overcoming circumstances to triumph will stay with a person more than a number or a graph.

Hero

This is where all the passion is derived from in the first place. The hero isn’t necessarily super in nature, but is the main character and the voice that takes the audience on the journey, or story arch.

Action

Confronting the problem or challenge, which in a good business narrative, is a shared concern or problem with the audience listening to it. Without the challenge, the skepticism or even an initial failure, this story could very easily come off as a PR or more commercial piece.  Dickman states the important point, “Powerful obstacles in the narrative make it ring true. Problems help the audience identify more deeply with the story.

Transformation

The transformation is the most essential part of the process. This is the part in the book or movie where the hero overcomes the villain and gets the girl. On a more realistic scale, this is where our hero overcomes the obstacle or problem facing their business. Dickman says, “Sacrifice and repeated effort is demanded for the problem to be overcome. Somehow audiences sense how difficult it is to create real change. They feel satisfied when they see the hero emerge from the fires of hell and a changed and better human being.”

Though email marketing has been the industry standard for many years, many companies are now finding that adding content to your website via blogging has become an even more effective strategy to draw attention to your company and get a higher ranking on the ever so valuable search engine sites such as Google and Yahoo.

In the blog “Here is Why Blog Marketing Is Better Than Email Marketing,” on the Informationcrawler website, they detail this “key to long-term success on the Internet.”

http://www.informationcrawler.com/2157/here-is-why-blog-marketing-is-better-than-email-marketing-2/

Maybe Robert Fulghum is right; maybe all we need to know we did learn in kindergarten. The lessons that we learned from the Tortoise and the Hare and the Emperor’s New Clothes are moral constructs that transcend their fable form and become an architectural construct of lessons in our adult life

Carol Mon tells us in her blog “Applying Fairy Tales to Business” folk and fairy tales are full of values and morals we learn through repetition and that as an adult storyteller she sees these lessons applied to the business world.

“Business people see the tales as a frivolous waste of time, they want to learn from ‘real’ business situations experienced by colleagues…”

Mon thinks that the fairy tale/fable language can be translated into big business stories quite easily.

Her favorite example is Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

By changing the character of the emperor to the Executive Vice President, the tailors to consultants and the courtiers to direct reports Mon claims, “The consultants fool the EVP and although the employees see it they fear the EVP’s reaction if they speak out against the consultants.”

Of course the result is the same as in the classic tale that the EVP finds he has no ground to stand on because he has a “huge bill with nothing to show for it,” Mon said.

Either way, old lessons from childhood are truly life long lessons that can be easily applied to business storytelling. With a little creativity and imagination we can place ourselves in the shoes of such archetypes as the emperor, the three little pigs, etc… All of our life lessons have already been given to us in-between our ABC’s and nap time.

As we navigate through the web today search engines are what we traditionally use to find that menu, that car, or that celebrity’s name we just couldn’t remember. The search engine paradigm may shift very soon as social media is looking to diversify revenue streams.

Check out the article “Is Google Turning Into a Social Media Company?” by Erik Qualman and find out why.

Last time I checked I haven’t seen or spoken to one of my best friend’s across the country in quite a few months, yet I know exactly what he is up to every hour of every day thanks to Facebook. We haven’t had a telephone conversation, but have communicated via instant message, texting and email. Come to think of it, besides photos and text, we haven’t had one-on-one person-to-person contact in almost two years, which makes me wonder if our friendship has disintegrated a bit because of it.

Social Media has succeeded at connecting us, but has it also succeeded in making us more socially disconnected? Well, in one way social media has made us more social. I am more connected to people from my past than I have ever been. I see their daily life, their children, their vacations, but if I email them asking them how they are doing I get probably less than a 30-word response.

Social media applications such as Twitter have taken this ideology and put it to work.  Dense, brief content that limits you to 140 -characters to describe anything you may be doing or feeling. Now with over 3-million tweets each day, Twitter has grown and expanded beyond most people’s expectations. On a broader scale, texting has also limited our verbiage as well as.

Any way you spell it, these platforms encourage us to be less articulate, create endless amounts of content while all the while become more detached doing it. On the other, I have connected to people and business prospects that may have never been possible otherwise.

Social media is a tool and a double-edged sword. Being that as it may, Facebook is the fourth most trafficked site in the world right now,thus we are all somewhat forced to pay attention. Either way, I’m along for the ride, wherever it may take my business or myself.

Telling stories, the concept is as old as mankind itself. Since the dawn of time people would sit together and share their personal challenges, their achievements and even  their most devastating failures. This ancient art has more recently transcended from the campfire to the boardroom.

Companies today do not always refer to this concept as “storytelling” but as “leader-led development.” Whatever name you slap on it, people are sharing their knowledge of their business by sharing what has happened to them in their professional life.

In the USA Today Article, “The Indian Art of Storytelling Seeps into the Boardroom” Del Jones talks to Native American’s about how their ancient art is being translated.

“Companies think they invented knowledge management, but it’s something Indians have known for thousands of years,” says Linda Mankiller, ex-chief of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma.

“…the best leaders pass down personal legends to instill values,” says Dave Anderson, founder of Famous Dave’s restaurants and member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Lake Superior Band of Ojibwa. “People might not remember what’s in the employee handbook”, Anderson says, “but everyone who hears a story knows how important quality is to the company.”

Doug Ready, president of the International Consortium for Executive Development Research agrees that storytelling surpasses technology in transfer knowledge. Read has studied 45 different companies and how they use storytelling as a learning tool.

Ready thinks if this concept is done right these stories “are so powerful you can hear a pin drop.” He believes that these stories must be delivered one-to-one in a small group and must make a point, reveal personal tales of success—or, better yet, failure…”

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