30 Jan 04 @ 5:21 pm
Every Leader Tells a Story
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.”
posted in category(s): Points of Interest
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