The Leader's Guide to Storytelling
Chapter One
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 Bateson
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 such touchy-feely
stuff-like most 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-a strange notion in the
organization at the time. I offered people cogent arguments about the ... read full excerpt from The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative ebook
