Storytelling in Organizations PDF

Rating: Author: Stephen Denning ISBN : Product Detai New from Format: PDF

Download PRETITLE Storytelling in Organizations POSTTITLE from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror linkThis book is the story of how four busy executives, from different backgrounds and different perspectives, were surprised to find themselves converging on the idea of narrative as an extraordinarily valuable lens for understanding and managing organizations in the twenty-first century. The idea that narrative and storytelling could be so powerful a tool in the world of organizations was initially counter-intuitive. But in their own words, John Seely Brown, Steve Denning, Katalina Groh, and Larry Prusak describe how they came to see the power of narrative and storytelling in their own experience working on knowledge management, change management, and innovation strategies in organizations such as Xerox, the World Bank, and IBM.

Storytelling in Organizations lays out for the first time why narrative and storytelling should be part of the mainstream of organizational and management thinking. This case has not been made before. The tone of the book is also unique. The engagingly personal and idiosyncratic tone comes from a set of presentations made at a Smithsonian symposium on storytelling in April 2001. Reading it is as stimulating as spending an evening with Larry Prusak or John Seely Brown. The prose is probing, playful, provocative, insightful and sometime profound. It combines the liveliness and freshness of spoken English with the legibility of a ready-friendly text. Interviews will all the authors done in 2004 add a new dimension to the material, allowing the authors to reflect on their ideas and clarify points or highlight ideas that may have changed or deepened over time.Direct download links available for PRETITLE Storytelling in Organizations POSTTITLE

• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• File Size: 350 KB
• Print Length: 208 pages
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Up to 4 simultaneous devices, per publisher limits
• Publisher: Routledge (June 14, 2012)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B008BTVF8S
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray:
  Not Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,410,707 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Storytelling in Organizations PDF

I read with keen interest and anticipation "Storytelling in Organizations", by Brown, et. al. By profession, I coach an organization in a fortune 100 firm in how to create and deliver stories. I concur that telling stories in the organization is extremely effective in educating and persuading teams to improve products and services, and for my company, that has translated to literally millions of dollars in savings, improved product usability and service delivery, margin preservation, and increased market share.

Though the book is written by professionals and academicians, they only do a fair job of telling the story and describing "what" storytelling is and to some extent "why" it works. It is ineffectual in teaching the most important lesson--the "how" to tell a story.

Regretfully, only one author's work is effective, and it is a shame his strength is watered down by the mediocrity of the others. The result is that this book represents a lost opportunity to impart meaningful, actionable knowledge sharing.

Two reasons account for the failure. First, no clear-cut model is presented. This hinders the would-be story teller in that there is no repeatable roadmap to follow in structuring a story, thereby making storytelling practice and critique difficult. Second, the book itself is a poor example of story telling.

The reader is severely distracted by the disparate writing styles and sometimes overlapping content of the authors, the not-so-occasional editorializing and a peppering of poorly written case studies that lack the very punch that the authors are suggesting is the power of the story. I found myself asking, "what's the point" a number of times.

Sad to say, I to agree with the previous reviewer - this book is a real disappointment.

Of course the title is incredibly vague, and is in one sense entirely true even if the authors merely mention both storytelling and organizations in passing. They don't - in order to justify this title - have to tell us anything at all ABOUT storytelling or organizations. Though having said that, I suspect that the title will lead most people to EXPECT to learn something about the use of storytelling in organisations, the what, the when, the why and the how.

Unfortunately, as the previous reviewer comments, only one of the four authors comes anywhere near meeting these expectations.

The book, which comes in at just under 200 pages - just under 180 if you ignore the index, the potted biographies and the "Further Reading" list - is divided into just six chapters.

Chapter 1 consists of 4 descriptions of "How I came to Storytelling" - one by each author.

Chapters 2-5 inclusive are each allocated to a different author and consist, as far as I can tell, of (a) the transcript of the person's presentation at a conference on storytelling held in 2001, followed by the author's "reflections" approximately four years later.

Chapter 6 is a "wrap up" chapter by Steve Denning on "The Role of Narrative in Organizations."

First problem - the way someone talks in a presentation should be quite different from the way they write the same information. Apart from anything else, repetition is useful and necessary in a presentation - it can be boring and frustrating in a written text. And that is certainly the case throughout most of this book.