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.”
Former presidential speechwriter James Fallows has annotated this year’s State of the Union address. His commentary includes useful insights on topics like argumentative structure, the use of analogy, and effective summary and transitions in speechwriting.
In the wake of the highly critical Hutton report, BBC director general Greg Sykes has resigned. He made the right call…and his final email to all BBC staff sends an appropriate message. He takes responsibility, offers no excuses, and bids farewell in a way that is somewhat sentimental but not cloying.
This is the hardest e-mail I’ve ever written.
In a few minutes I’ll be announcing to the outside world that I’m leaving after four years as Director General. I don’t want to go and I’ll miss everyone here hugely.
However the management of the BBC was heavily criticised in the Hutton Report and as the Director General I am responsible for the management so it’s right I take responsibility for what happened.
I accept that the BBC made errors of judgement and I’ve sadly come to the conclusion that it will be hard to draw a line under this whole affair while I am still here. We need closure. We need closure to protect the future of the BBC, not for you or me but for the benefit of everyone out there. It might sound pompous but I believe the BBC really matters.
Click here to read the whole thing.
From Reuters:
U.S. companies are asking technology workers to help export a new product: their jobs.
As programing and other computer services move to low-cost locations in India and China, some workers are in the awkward position of training their replacements.
Software developer Mike Emmons was shocked two years ago when Siemens AG, the German telecom equipment giant, decided to replace him and his colleagues with lower-paid programmers from India.
According to Emmons, Siemens told about 20 workers in Lake Mary, Florida, that outsourcing was the wave of the future. The company gave them severance — provided they trained employees imported by Tata Consultancy Services of India to do their jobs.
Read the rest…
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.”
The New Yorker is now offering electronic versions of its cartoons for use in presentations–for $19.95 each. Click here to check out the most popular selections.
A recent Fast Company article on how to reward employees “when you can’t pay for it” describes an unusual approach to inspiring increased productivity and performance:
In the early 1990s, [GM] dispatched a group of executives from Detroit, assembled all of the 3,500 [Wilmington] employees in a vast area of one building, and told them that GM had decided to shut down the place by 1996 to reduce costs. “There is nothing you can do to affect this decision,” a visiting GM suit proclaimed from the podium.
After the execs left, plant manager Ralph Harding made an impassioned speech to the shell-shocked workers, whose morale was at its lowest ebb. “There may be nothing we can do to affect this decision,” Harding said. “But there is something we can do: We can make them feel really stupid!”
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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…
As you may have heard, Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich drew attention with his use of visual aids in yesterday’s NPR radio-only debate. In his honor, we’re reposting the link to this previous CommLog entry regarding media richness, where you can download CRA’s two-page primer on matching messages and media.
