BY JEFFREY L. SEGLIN

     I was desperate," said Stephen Denning, program director for knowledge management of the World Bank. He had been trying to convince his colleagues of the importance of sharing knowledge throughout the organization. But the persuasive tools he had used all of his professional life — analytical charts and graphs, written reports — weren't working. So he decided to tell them a story.
    There was a health care worker in Kamana, Zambia, he said, who in 1995 was searching for a method to treat malaria. The worker logged on to the Web site of the Centers for Disease Control and within minutes found his answer. 
    The importance of having information collected in one place and available to any World Bank worker in any out-of-the-way part of the world suddenly became clear, said Mr. Denning, author of "The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations" (Butterworth Heinemann, 2001). By the following year, an organization-wide knowledge-sharing program was put in place.
   Storytelling can be an effective business tool. "People just don't simply hear stories," said Joseph L. Badaracco Jr., a business ethics professor at Harvard Business School. "It triggers things — pictures, thoughts and associations — in their minds." That makes the stories "more powerful and engaging," he said. 
   
Jeffrey L. Seglin teaches at Emerson College in Boston and is the author of ``The Good, the Bad, and Your Business'' (John Wiley & Sons). His column on business ethics appears the third Sunday of each month. E-mail may be sent to: righthng@nytimes.com

The full article can be purchased from the New York Times for $2.50 at 
              http://search.nytimes.com/search/daily/