Stories Drive Strategic Results

Lori Silverman, the editor of Wake Me Up When the Data Is Over: How Organizations Use Stories to Drive Results, captures a truth far too few leaders appreciate: "Stories are a natural stimulant. They are the antidote to boredom and indifference. Like viruses, they are also contagious. Tell a story to someone and you will get one back in return."

How wonderful to find a new book that brings together two things that are essential to making change work—organizational stories and strategic results! Lori Silverman’s interviews captured in her new book take the power of story and focus it through the prism of meaningful results. You will hear leader after leader talk about how story can make a difference in driving results that matter. Everyone is looking for ways to capture return on investment, and this book helps capture fresh windows to that challenge. In analyzing her findings, Lori Silverman found that 36 percent of the examples demonstrate story use positively impact financial performance; many have achieved double digit growth. Eighteen percent said stories helped them achieve organizational goals.

In a good presentation, it is often the stories that are remembered and shared. No one comes back from a program and says, “That graph touched me! I want to put it up on my office wall to inspire me!” No, stories inspire, inform and challenge us to change. Missions are not meaningful without targeted measurements. We love to keep score so we can win, but the story of how we win is captured in the rest of the story about a team’s journey to victory. A continual deluge of bullet points and graphs can put any audience to sleep. As a leader and communicator, keep people grounded in the facts but enlivened by the story of how your team made a difference. What are you doing to make your organization’s stories contagious and effective?

If you want motivation to better use stories in your organization and you want part of that motivation to come from your desire to produce strategic results, read Lori Silverman’s Wake Me Up When the Data Is Over: How Organizations Use Stories to Drive Results. If you buy that book on Amazon for less than $20 before midnight on October 19th, you will be able to receive over $500 worth of f-r-e-e items! Here's all you have to do . . .

Click here to buy the book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0787982709?ie=UTF8&tag=sayitwithasto2-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0787982709

Afterwards, click here to get your f-r-e-e items: http://www.wakeupmycompany.com/promotion.htm

Source: Lori Silverman, (ed.). (2006). Wake Me Up When the Data Is Over: How Organizations Use Stories to Drive Results. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

Comments

[Emotivation]

Read these stories that can be used in any organization appropriately.

http://www.emotivation-stories.blogspot.com