The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative Hardcover - 2011

From the rear cover

The LEADER'S GUIDE to Storytelling

This revised and updated edition of the best-selling book The Leader's Guide to Storytelling shows how storytelling can be used to handle the most important and difficult challenges of leadership: sparking action, getting people to work together, and leading people into the future.

Using a myriad of illustrative examples and how-to techniques, The Leader's Guide to Storytelling explains how you can learn to tell the right story at the right time. Throughout the book, master storyteller and former World Bank executive Stephen Denning debunks commonly held myths about storytelling and offers a practical guide for any leader--CEO, middle management, or someone on the front lines--who wants to tap into the power of stories to effect change within their organizations. He shows how to select the right narrative pattern for the leadership task at hand and offers encouragement for reluctant storytellers. He reminds us that learning to tell stories is less a task of learning something new and more one of reminding ourselves of something we already know. It is a matter of transposing the skills we apply effortlessly in a social situation to formal settings.

Leadership is essentially an activity of connection--of connecting with people's minds and hearts. Using the discipline of the business narrative, storytelling leaders can enable others to imagine new perspectives. Effective storytelling can also help leaders communicate who they are or what their company is, transmit values, share knowledge, tame the grapevine, and create a vision for what's to come.

The revised and updated edition of this book reflects changes in organizational thinking that have occurred over the last five years. It reflects how storytelling has become a central component both in leadership, as described in The Secret Language of Leadership, and in management, as described in The Leader's Guide to Radical Management. It also shows how social media are transforming branding and marketing and how our understanding of disruptive innovation has evolved.