Fast Company magazine has put together a series of online guides (best-of compilations of Fast Company articles) on a variety of business topics. Every Leader Tells a Story (in their Leading Your Team guide) makes the case for storytelling as a powerful communication tool:
Forget bullet points and slide shows. The best leaders use stories to answer three simple questions: Who am I? Who are we? Where are we going?. . . So what’s your story?
[…]
“Humans are storytellers,” says Peter Orton, who spent 15 years as a Hollywood script- writer and story editor before enrolling at Stanford to write a PhD thesis on the effects of story structure on audiences. “Stories enhance attention, create anticipation, increase retention. They provide a familiar set of ‘hooks’ that allow us to process the information that we hang on them.”
[…]
“Stories use plot and character to generate conflict,” Orton says. “Every script-writer knows the story elements that increase the chance of hooking an audience: a protagonist the audience can empathize with, something important at stake, mounting jeopardy, a formidable antagonist.”
The Wall Street Journal’s latest “cubicle culture” piece, Been Here 25 Years And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt, makes the case that most employee-recognition programs do more harm than good — and there’s a lot on the line:
Employee-reward programs can be so unrewarding. The plaques, tchotchkes with logos, goofy contests and ham-handed presentation tend to backfire. It’s not that they’re all bad, but too often they seem like empty gestures supported by upper management, administered by a less-than-enthused middle management, and received by underwhelmed staffers. All this when an honest thanks would have gone further.
In other words, it’s the thoughtlessness that counts.
A majority of the recognition programs that exist today “do more harm than good,” says Curt Coffman, global practice leader at the Gallup Organization. His polls show that 71% of U.S. workers are “disengaged” — essentially clock-watchers who can’t wait to go home. “We’re operating at one-quarter of the capacity in terms of managing human capital,” he says. “It’s alarming.”
In a recent Washington Post article, Q: What will happen when a national political machine can fit on a laptop? A: See below, Everett Ehrlich pulls out one of economist Ronald Coase’s key insights to explain Howard Dean’s surprising success as “essentially a third-party candidate using modern technology to achieve a takeover of the Democratic Party”:
Back in 1937, an economist named Ronald Coase realized something that helped explain the rise of modern corporations — and which just might explain the coming decline of the American two-party political system.
Coase’s insight was this: The cost of gathering information determines the size of organizations.
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This won’t come as a surprise to many…
Towers Perrin recently surveyed 1,000 US workers to measure the extent to which they believe the information their employer communicates to them, and among other things, found that:
* 51 percent of the respondents believe their company generally tells employees the truth, while almost a fifth (19 percent) disagree.
* 51 percent believe their companies try too hard to “spin” the truth.
* Employees believe their companies communicate more honestly with shareholders (60 percent) and customers (58 percent) than with workers.
* Information emanating from senior leadership is the least reliable, with almost half (48 percent) agreeing that they receive more credible information from their direct supervisor than from their company’s CEO.
* Employees are more likely to believe information about their pay (64 percent) and benefits (59 percent) than they are to believe information about company direction and business strategies - information most often communicated from the executive suite.
Sigh. (For more detail, “>%20press%20release…
Don Watson, Australian political speechwriter and historian, has written a new book, Death Sentence, The Decay of Public Language, that attacks the “managerial language” that has infiltrated not only the world of business, but the worlds of politics and academia as well. Fighting the Death Sentence describes a recent speech he gave:
People were rocking with laughter; some were in tears. Deadpan, Don Watson waited. One audience member said later it was the funniest dinner of academic deans he had ever attended. But Watson was not joking. He was reading from a university mission statement and other material on its website.
“To provide outcome-related research and consultancy services that address real-world issues” — shrieks of laughter. The university’s “approach to quality management is underpinned by a strong commitment to continuous improvement and a whole-of-organisation framework” — uproar in the room.
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