The Leaders' Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative

Citation

Murphy, A. (2007), "The Leaders' Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 28 No. 2, pp. 189-190. https://doi.org/10.1108/01437730710726886

In the introduction Denning describes the rationale for the book as both practical and pedagogical, intending to explain to the reader how to use story telling to deal with the most difficult challenges faced by contemporary business leaders. The book is structured into twelve chapters distributed among three parts. It has a useful twelve page bibliography. The dust cover describes the book as a hand‐on guide to telling the right story at the right time so that leaders in organisations can spark action, get people to work together and lead people into the future. Denning, formerly a programme director for the World Bank, is described as a consultant to multi‐national companies, the US army and others, specialising in knowledge management and organisational storytelling. The book is described as a follow‐up to Denning's earlier books, Squirrel Inc. and The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge‐Era Organisations.

The books' claim to being both practical and pedagogical is broadly achieved. Denning argues that the discourses of management and of leadership are more or less the same discourses regardless of the size of the organisation or its location globally, and that these discourses focus on analysis and abstractions, valuing sharpness, rigour, explicitness and crispness. An understanding of the discourses of the storyteller, according to Denning, is essential for effective leadership, where the rational and abstracted needs to be connected to the actual people in the organisation. He argues that it is more effective to describe and explain the complexities and continuous changes in the global economy by stories of actual events than by abstracted representations of them, and that storytelling as a phenomenon has been used to explain and motivate over millennia in all cultures, societies and nations.

The two chapters in Part One of the book deal with the craft of storytelling in a general way and how we tacitly know how stories work in organisational management by constant expose to them. This part sets out the general rationale for this additional book in the series.

Part Two gets into didactic mode and describes the eight narrative patterns and their purposes as follows: to motive into action; to build trust in you; to build trust in your organisation; to transmit your values; to get others working together; to share knowledge, to tame the grapevine and to create and share a vision. This part of the book reads like the guide the book claims to be, and has useful matrices and templates. There are stories and realworld examples interspersed throughout the second part by way of illustration of the theoretical points being made.

In the third part there is extensive treatment of theories and categories of leadership with examples of each theory and category in use. There is a defence of the argument that the effective leader is an interactive leader who knows the techniques of storytelling to lead and motivate. He describes the command‐and‐control leader as Napoleonic while the interactive leader is Tolstoyan, the former succeeding by exercising superior strength the latter working with the world rather than needing to control it. He differentiates between leadership that is a skill, leadership that is a trait, leadership that is a style, leadership that is contextual and leadership that is transformative. The arguments are built up throughout the second and third parts of the book to promote the ideal leader as transformational, a quality he claims that can be regarded as a trainable and measurable behaviour in managers in successful organisations.

Overall this is a provocative book. It is sometimes difficult, however, to identify its ethical values other that those which contribute to organisational success. In the first part especially there is some ambivalence around the nature of stories themselves where the distinction between a true story and a successful story are not always obvious.

The book is remarkably gender free, though there are acknowledgements of women writers in the introduction. There is no obvious critical awareness of gender power dynamic in organisations, how knowledge might be distributed differently on the basis of gender or other criteria, or how particular stories might represent specific worldviews while claiming to be generic and universal. The leadership style being promoted in the book is essentially male, western male, even when there are descriptions of audiences as being of all types with geographic differences, and that storytellers are urged to slice through the social and political barriers among his listeners. The readers being addressed in this book are marvellously disembodied from their own identities, other than the identity of workers in organisations who identify with the organisation and accept its stories. Like all storytelling, there is a seductive quality in the book which will provoke reaction regardless of the readers' context or belief in personal agency. A useful pedagogical tool nonetheless.