135: organizational & business storytelling in the news archive

Steve Denning
The website for business and
organizational storytelling

See daily confirmation of
the huge impact of
organizational & business
storytelling in the news

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"Read all about it!" Organizational Storytelling Is In The News

How important is storytelling? A million, a billion or a trillion dollars?
Pick up any business newspaper and what do you find? The large-scale financial impact of organizational storytelling on a daily basis. What does all this storytelling add up to? In 1995, Deirdre McCloskey startled the rigorously analytic world of economics when she published an article in the American Economic Review entitled “Persuasion Is A Quarter of GDP.” showing that persuasion is more than a quarter of the GDP. If at least half of this is storytelling. storytelling in the U.S. economy amounts to more than US$1 trillion annually. In this archive, you'll find the daily confirmation of the financial impact of storytelling in the news.

April 30, 2004
Summary of storytelling in the news for April 2004

April 2004 furnished another rich and fascinating tapestry of the impact of storytelling in the news. Despite the intent here to focus mainly on business stories, the business news was significantly affected by both politics and the war in Iraq, and the interplay between them.

Explicit consideration of the role of organizational storytelling

One of the striking things about storytelling in the new in April 2004 was the number of explicit news about storytelling itself.

On April 14, 2004, I gave a radio talk on organizational storytelling 119

On April 24, 2004, the Global Province noted the growing role of storytelling in business 129

On April 25, 2004: I gave a web interview on using PowerPoint to empower your story 130.

On April 28, Investor's Business Daily featured a piece on organizational storytelling as a leadership tool: 133; with references to the The Smithsonian Associates organizational storytelling weekend, which was also covered here in 122 and 123.

Knowledge sharing stories: the difficulty of learning from the past

Another theme of the month concerned the difficulty learning from stories about the past.

On April 5, 2004, in the midst of the 9/11 commission debate about why the US didn't respond to the threat of terrorism earlier, we looked at the widespread complacency in the face of plausible stories US economy: disaster scenarios: 110

On April 21, we looked at the claims of Eli Lilly & Co to be learning from mistakes and failure 126

On April 26, we looked at the irrational exuberance of those who, having lost their shirt when dot-com burst, are about to lose their trousers in the upcoming Google IPO: 131

On April April 29, we looked at the great difficulty that human beings have in seeing the likely evolution of events, when everyone else is telling "bad news" stories. When Carl Icahn was able to do so in the case of ImClone, he made a profit of $250 million: 134

On April 6, we noted the important endorsement by the New England Journal of Medicine of the role of narrative medicine 111. Subsequently on April 18, the New York Times covered the same story.

Future Stories

Future stories played a prominent role in the April 2004:

On April 2, the publication of the March job data sparked positive storytelling and a stock market market rally 107

On April 3, we noted that competing storytelling at the National Australia Bank (NAB) led to very different versions of the future story of that organization: 108

On April 12, we looked at the increasingly positive future stories that economists were telling each other: 117

On April 23, we looked at the competing future stories of the impact of higher interest rates 128

On April 27, we examined WTO's preliminary decision against the US on cotton subsidies and the $300 billion that this story has put in play: 132

Stories about values

Stories about values were also prominent, particularly stories about honesty:

On April 7, 2004, we took a critical look at the implicit values in a Harvard Business Review article praising hardball strategies (a.k.a. stories) 112

On March 26, we had looked at the difference between personal honesty i.e. telling the whole truth, including those elements that are perhaps less flattering to the person or supporting arguments they may be making; and the more limited organizational honesty i.e. being "factually accurate as far as the statement goes," with the possibility, if not the probability, that elements less flattering to the organization or not supporting the organization's. On April 9, we looked at Dr. Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission from this perspective: 114

On April 20, we looked at the issue of institutional spin in business and the huge cost of lying 125

On April 10, we looked at the crucial role of individual persistence in successful innovation in biotech research: 115

Stories of identity

Stories of branding and identity are ever-present in the news:

On April 4, we examined the differences between a linear vs a cyclical view of storytelling and the implications of creating a new story involving personal or organizational change 109

In the story on April 6, about narrative medicine, we noted that it involved doctors acquiring a new sense of identity: 111

On April 22, we looked at the stories that customers have about two cell phone companies, and the huge impact of the difference -- in April 2004 -- between the story that "Samsung is hot" while "Nokia is not": 127

Humor and taming the grapevine

Our piece on April Fool's day was no joke: it looked a the huge impact of humor in politics and leadership: 106

On April 15, we took time off from the unfunny subject of taxes to look at the role of self-satirical narrative in politics and leadership: 120

Images and stories

On April 11, we looked briefly at the little-understood phenomenon that images only have meaning when embedded in a story, and the growing recognition of this in fashion photography: 116

Performing the story: form vs content

On April 8, we examined the contributions made by the form vs the content of a story, in the context of Dr. Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 Commission: 113

Unhelpful stories: blaming someone else

Although this website is mainly focused on high-value stories, we took time on April 13 to examine the unhelpful practice of the Secretary of Treasury, John Snow, of blaming someone else for problems that his own actions have caused: 118

All in all, a fascinating month of storytelling!

For more examples of Storytelling in The News, go to the Archive

Are these really stories? What the heck is a story?
   In this website, “narrative” and “story” are used as synonyms in a broad sense to include an account, or anything narrated. In practice, the use of the word "story" is very broad. Traditionalists sometimes question whether some examples are "genuine stories" or merely ideas for possible stories. If we adopt a narrower, predetermined idea of what a "real story" is, we may end up missing the most useful forms of organizational and business narratives. As an example of this phenomenon, see Gabriel, Yannis: Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, Fictions, and Fantasies. Oxford, 2001. (For more information about accepting a broad usage of "story," see Polkinghorne, Donald E.: Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. NY: SUNY, 1988.)
   Thus I don't see the possibility of any viable distinction between "straight news" and "stories". After all, what is "straight news" but a journalist or a newscaster telling a story about something that has happened? And very often: a journalist or newscaster telling a story about someone else's storytelling? e.g. the example on January 9 where "the news" is a story about the story being told by the statistics-ridden IMF, whom most people wouldn't think of as a storyteller.
    But there we are. The statistics themselves aren't news. It's the story that is told about the statistics that is news. If the IMF had stuck to its statistics, its report would be gathering dust on a shelf somewhere, instead of being covered on the front page of the New York Times.
   Some may baulk at the proposition that straight news is storytelling, perhaps because we have been told for so long that there are hard solid objective facts out there, which are different from soft squishy emotional stories, and that we should stick to the former and avoid the latter. But when we think about it just a bit, we can see that we are living in a sea of the soft squishy emotional stuff on a continuing basis: there's no getting away from it.
   You'll see that some examples of the soft squishy emotional stuff on this website are more honest and truthful and stick closer to what is supported by evidence than others, but their basic nature doesn't change whether they're truthful or not - they're still stories. What the website is trying to do is to point out the most notorious examples in the business world on a daily basis and the massive financial implications of the phenomenon.

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