provide a demonstration of why stories “work.” You will find many of these stories set apart from the main body of the book with a special gray background. You will also find several definitions that I use to frame the problems we face as leaders. Similarly, I have included many pictures that are designed to provide another way to access and think about these ideas. Pictures are just stories too. I’m fortunate to have a mentor who always draws me pictures to help me understand and make sense of what is happening, and so in that spirit I share these pictures with you.
“And if a picture is worth a thousand words, a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures.”
—DAN PINK2
The final page of the book is your Story Matrix, which is discussed in-depth in Chapter 5. This personal Story Matrix is designed to be completed as you progress through the book.
Finally, as I’ve immersed myself in the study of what makes great leaders, the many leaders I have met in my travels and the many authors whose books I’ve read have inspired me. You will find many of their thoughts in the margins of this book. All of these different elements are also indexed in the back of the book for ease of reference. I hope you find these additional features helpful in further exploring these ideas.
This book is not an empirical exercise. The ideas, stories, and tools have grown out of firsthand experience working with leaders and their organizations to capture and tell stories in order to enhance performance.
It is my sincere hope that you have at least several “aha!” moments as you read this, as that is the standard for which I read and recommend books and ideas. And because this work is not empirical, I encourage you to let me know if these ideas fail (or succeed!) in practice.
Finally, I have several other hopes for you. I hope you enjoy this read. Some of my favorite stories are here. I hope they make you laugh and cry and think. I hope this book inspires you to turn your stories into a competitive advantage. And I hope that you use your stories to build better relationships and have more fun.
Be a source of stories. This is the best way to succeed, and the best way to live well.
PART ONE: PROBLEM
PART ONE
There is a problem we are all facing, and it’s sneaky and subtle and hard to see, even though it’s right in front of our faces. The problem is information and its effect on how we communicate and how we live.
You have heard this before. Many pundits, from Neil Postman to Richard Saul Wurman and even Ted Koppel, have decried “information overload”—how technology and media saturation continue to fill every crack and crevice of time, and how it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine what is truly important in our communications. They have pointed our ever-diminishing attention span to how our access to, and facileness with, information has increasingly segmented our time into smaller and smaller pieces. Our lives (and even our children’s lives) and our work are overly scheduled and fragmented.
I want to begin this book with a clear definition of the problem that leaders face as we try to lead people and organizations effectively. As leaders, we need to be cognizant of this problem because it is something with which we are all grappling. And because how we manage information has a profound impact on how we communicate, plan for, and reach our goals, we need to be prepared to be part of the solution.
But it’s only until we understand the situation we are in, that we can begin to look at it differently. We are surrounded—literally—by a never-ending stream of information. Increasingly, it will be our ability to manage this constant information flow and to make meaning out of these fragments that will allow us to be successful in the near future. And the near future is today.
PART ONE: PROBLEM
1
CHAPTER 1:
AWASH IN BITS AND BULLETS
CLICK, CLICK, CLICK…
In life and in business, we are awash in “bits and bullets.” Bits and bullets are data. Facts. Bullet points on slides. Computer screens full of information. Headlines and scores ticking across the bottom of our televisions 24/7. A constant stream of ads and pitches and talking heads. Sometimes it feels like life has become one big infomercial. And the constant stream of bits and bullets doesn’t stop when we get to work. In fact, it accelerates. As leaders, most of us have never met an e-mail device or a PowerPoint slide we didn’t like. Because technology makes communicating in bits and bullets so easy, we unleash the flood.
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour, Rains from the sky a meteoric shower Of facts…they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill Is daily spun, but there exists no loom To weave it into fabric.
– EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY1
No question about it, leaders have a tough job. We are asked to deliver better performance through our people, implement the latest systems, manage goals, communicate and embody company values, and hundreds of other things. We are brokers of information. Leaders above us hand down information we need—division goals, new systems information, competitive data, new products—and then we translate that information, communicate it to our people, and perform against the goals.
Leaders of every stripe, from senior executives and middle managers to salespeople and consultants, spend an inordinate amount of time creating and brokering information, but we spend far less time standing back from that information and asking, “What is the best way for me to communicate this?” Not asking this critical question too often results in the creation of just more bits and bullets. That is, we use the same communication methods we always use the same way we always use them, which means that we whip out the laptop, throw together some slides, call a meeting, and then it’s click, click, click.
NUMBERS OR LIVES?
A couple of years ago, I was at a meeting where Ray Gilmartin, the CEO of Merck, was speaking. The purpose of his talk was to discuss how the economy and regulation were affecting the drug industry. Leading into some of the main points of his talk, he wanted to make sure that people in the room had a strong sense for what Merck had contributed to the world through the company’s development of critical, lifesaving drugs. What happened next was a perfect illustration of the power of stories.
Ray Gilmartin talked about the company’s philanthropy and the amounts that had been given to certain causes. He outlined the drugs, such as Mectizan, that Merck had developed to treat river blindness, and the company’s antiretroviral program to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa and China. Thus began a long list of impressive accomplishments, and as he talked about them, he gave specific numbers for each; 800,000 vaccines of this in Botswana, 1.4 million vaccines of that in the Americas; and list went on.
These were amazing numbers and any company would be very proud. But what was fascinating was how the crowd reacted. He was losing his audience. As he rattled off more and more numbers, people started to tune out. We were getting lost in the bullet points and losing the true value of the message itself. Instead of being duly impressed with the number of lives saved, we were wondering when he would stop.
Then he did stop. Ray Gilmartin became reflective as he stood on the stage; he paused, and then he related this story: Back in 1942, there was a young woman who contracted an infection after a miscarriage and had been hospitalized in Connecticut
