Tag: Storytelling

monochrome photo of couple holding hands — Photo by Min An on Pexels.com

Let me tell you what happened to my friend…

March 7, 2024 / Srikrishna / 0 Comments

“Capture the stories you already tell. “

This is one of the first exercises we ask students in our course—Personal Success through Persuasive Storytelling to do.

This creates a variety of interesting responses. There’s always the one person who immediately begins jotting down all the stories they tell—be that at work, at a party, wedding or reunion.

Then there’s the person who can’t recall a single story that they tell. And of course most folks fall somewhere in between.

I find myself telling three or four three kinds of stories. These include those

from my own experiences and idiocy as an entrepreneur,
of young (& not so young) entrepreneurs that I mentor/encounter
I’ve learnt as the parent of two young women and
that I’ve heard others tell—primarily my father and business partners

Though my father passed in 2011, my appreciation and understanding of him has only grown—primarily as his stories keep popping out of my mouth.

While many stories my father told were situated firmly at work or around business interactions, the occasional personal stories he shared, usually with a life lesson, have always been special. One particular story of his experience as 17 or 18-year old apprentice in Shimla, was the cause of much ribbing by his kids for the rest of his life.

My father came to the city—Chennai as a 16-year old, two years after he lost his father. An uncle who he’d hoped would help him go to college didn’t do so. With a widowed mother, younger sister to be married and two younger brothers still in school, he felt he had little or no options.

So he “ran away” (only his mother knew) to New Delhi. There a couple of friends he’d made in Chennai helped him get work as an apprentice at an accounting firm, they worked at.

One month the three friends were sent to Shimla, to conduct the quarterly audit at client’s offices. Shimla, set in the foothills of the Himalayas was the summer capital for the Brits (who were still running India in 1945/6). Once they day’s work was done, the three young men (boys?) would hang out at The Mall, what Wikipedia quaintly calls a pedestrian avenue. ie the main drag!

As my father tells it, one evening a young woman walked up to them, grabbed my father’s friend‘s hand, and declared, “Marry me!”

Keep in mind this is 1945 or 46. If this happened even today in 2024, it would be a scandal. So as you can imagine my father and his friends were flabbergasted. One of them squeaked out, “What do you mean?”

“Well, I’ve seen you here everyday staring at me,” she said. “So if you like me so much, you should then marry me!”

My father’s friend was so mortified, that he could barely get his hand free and run away as fast as he could. My father and his other friend ran after him, and never again did they hang out at The Mall.

At this point in the story, one of us—sure if it was my mom or one of my sisters asked, “Was it really your friend’s hand she grabbed or yours?

My dad gave an enigmatic smile and said no more. From then on, whenever my dad narrated a story, we all ribbed my father with “And, this happened to your friend?”

Now every time I tell a story, my daughters ask me the question, “And, this happened to your friend?” So the story and traditions continue.

My father would have turned 95 earlier this week. I miss your stories, dad!

mad formal executive man yelling at camera — Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

Throwing your laptop—not the best negotiating tactic!

March 2, 2023 / Srikrishna / 0 Comments

“Is this some kind of negotiating tactic?”

I was in the company pantry, at a major client’s office. They’d licensed a critical software component from my startup which would be bundled with their radio chips to sell to electronic manufacturers.

For the previous half-hour their new VP of Sales, the entire engineering team and I had been in a meeting. Notionally the meeting was between THEIR sales and engineering folks and I was in the meeting as part of the ‘engineering’ team, representing the ‘application’ group.

The VP of Sales, who had been recently hired for his deep relationships and track record with manufacturers had just returned from a trip to Taiwan and China. We’d been discussing delivery dates and it was clear that the sales vp had made commitments to the customers that there was no way the engineering teams, either the clients or mine would be able to deliver on.

Yet no one spoke up from the engineering team. Not their VP or any of the project managers. And the VP of sales was not asking but telling what the delivery dates would be. Finally the VP of engineering responded.

“It’ll take us four weeks for us to be ready, once we have the software.”

At this point all eyes turned towards me.

“When will you deliver the software?” the VP of Sales asked.

Thus far I’d not spoken up in the meeting as I felt it was their meeting. Which it was. But I was not happy! The engineering vp knew that our ability to deliver software depended on their providing us their new hardware and firmware.

“The software delivery is scheduled for early May. And that’s the best case,” I said.

“Are you friggin’ kidding me?” Their vp of sales lost it.

I didn’t blame him. I suspect he’d been given optimistic dates by the engineering team and he’d taken them at their word. Worse yet he’d committed things to the customer and was just finding out that we’d not be able to meet them.

I looked at their CEO who seemed happy to let sales tell engineering what they should do. And that too not necessarily in a pleasant manner. When the vp sales continued to press the engineering team and they remained silent, I just lost it.

“Why am I the ONLY one one telling the truth?” I screamed at their engineering team. “Why aren’t you guys telling him that there’s no way you are going to deliver this in May?”

I then stood up and threw the laptop that was in my hand on to the conference table and said “That’s it—if this is how you want to do business then I don’t want to your business.”

Luckily before anyone else said anything, their CEO intervened.

“We’re going to take a short break. Everybody needs to cool down. Get a drink of water or soda. Or walk around the block. We’ll reconvene in 10!”

That’s how I found myself in the pantry. That’s when their VP of engineering posed his question, “Is this some kind of negotiating tactic?”

I looked at him to see if he was serious. And boy was he serious. He was perplexed by my outburst and thought I was trying to play hardball to get the VP of Sales to agree to a new date.

It was my turn to ask a question. “You know there’s no way we are going to be ready. Why aren’t you pushing back?”

When we got back into the conference room, I first apologized for my outburst. Then I made my case that we need to both communicate better while being realistic!

“Folks I know we’ve all worked so hard this past year and a half. I don’t envy the job sales has to do. Trust me, I do. But I don’t think we are helping them by not being realistic. Worse yet we’ll hurt their credibility and burn bridges with our customers, which I don’t think any of us want.”

We then began to have a productive meeting.

Surprisingly the vp of sales and I ended up becoming really good friends, so much so many years later he offered us the use of his cottage in Tahoe when I had family visting. We found we were both similar in being plainspoken and blunt. We both angered slowly but cooled down fast.

Both our companies ended up being acquired by different buyers and all of us have learned much from one another, prior to that and since.

I share this story with other clients, entrepreneurs that I advice or mentor and my students for a variety of different reasons

The need for clear communications to avoid misunderstandings
Being aligned internally before making customer commitments
Things that I’ve done that I’m not to proud of
How not to handle or resolve conflicts
When do you walk away from a client (or not)
– How company culture can hinder or help success
Just because we speak in English doesn’t mean we are hearing the same thing
Even in prospecting calls as an illustration of how we’ll hold them accountable (of course without the throwing laptops around part!)

I’m sure you have many such stories that you tell. Question is do you have them handy? Written down even if it’s just four or five words? And do you repurpose and reuse them for different audiences, places and purposes? I’d love to hear from you. Share your favorite one!

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If you tell stories (and who doesn’t) and want to be a better storyteller check out the upcoming cohort of our course “Personal Success Through Persuasive Storytelling” on Maven.

japanese food in a bento — Photo by Marvin Sacdalan on Pexels.com

The Japanese Salad that nearly broke our team

February 14, 2023 / Srikrishna / 0 Comments

“I can’t believe that you praised that da*n salad!” My colleague and engineering manager was furious. His team mate joined right in, “It’s one thing to be polite, but to go overboard like that!”

We’d just spent the whole day in a conference room at a Japanese customer’s divisional headquarters. My colleagues and I had flown in from India.

We’d then taken the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Osaka. Then a local train and finally a cab to get to the village outside which their factory and offices were.

As we were scheduled to spend two days in discussions and negotiations our hosts had kindly arranged for lunch to be served in the conference room. Not just that, but they had accommodated our needs as vegetarians by preparing a special meal for us.

It was this meal that had made my colleagues mad! No strike that. It was my praise of this meal that had made them mad.

The meal that was served in rather large bento boxes had vegetable tempura (not unlike Indian pakoras) and a variety of colorful and green salads with sauces. Having spent the previous two decades in California, I found the salads to be exquisite—fresh, subtle and tasty.

My colleagues on the other hand found the experience most dissatisfactory—“as though we were chewing on grass” in their words. They ate the tempura and had politely made as though they were eating the salads, which were left largely untouched. I was oblivious of their travails whilst busily tucking in!

When we got started on the post-lunch session, our ever considerate hosts enquired how we’d enjoyed our lunch, whereupon I’d waxed at length how amazing it had been!

I must admit I like my food and do tend to get carried away.

By the time we returned to the hotel, my colleagues were not just hungry and grumpy but absolutely livid with me.

“Because of your dang praise, they are now going to serve the same da*n lunch tomorrow!”

And they were right.

My colleagues did eventually forgive me but never failed to share this story with anyone who was willing to hear it.

Nowadays we get a good laugh out of it and even share it with customers and partners, who in turn get to share their own stories.

Each of us have stories like this – personal and professional, sometimes funny other times poignant or even sad. Stories allow us to connect with others and build relationships. Business at the end of the day all about relationships.

What stories do you have? And find yourself telling frequently?

If you’d like to learn to be a great storyteller, join us at the upcoming cohort-based Success Through Persuasive Storytelling course.

The Secret to Good Storytelling

March 11, 2021 / Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Each semester as the entrepreneurship class that I teach reaches about midpoint, I find myself talking about storytelling and it’s centrality to business in general and startups in particular. You’d think storytelling would be easy, given how long humanity has been at it. And all those folks on Moth Radio and stand up comedians make it look easy. Yet telling compelling and concise story is a skill that seems in much shortage. This is a topic that I’ve written about before here, here and here and still talk about constantly.

Recently, I came across TED curator Chris Anderson’s video on what they’ve learned at TED about storytelling. The eight minute video (half the length of the typical TED talk, concisely lays out four points.

Pick one idea We often start with one, but it gets lost as we layer more on there. Don’t just stick with one but share context, give examples and link back to it throughout your talk
A reason to care Give your listeners a reason to care and the best way to do this is by stirring your audience’s curiosity. Provocation is one way to do it he suggests but I’d say try challenging them.
Build your idea piece by piece Most of us fall into jargon while trying to explain our ideas. Chris reminds us it is critical to use metaphors or analogs to explain in the audience’s language
Make your idea worth sharing No surprise since this is indeed TED’s byline. By articulating who benefits, you can help the idea spread

So not only can you tell good stories but inspire others.

Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast

April 16, 2019 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Both in startups and large companies—heck in any company—culture is critical to success. This is something that I’ve been waxing about for close to 20 years now. And the criticality of storytelling in businesses is another favorite and recurring topic in this blog. So I was tickled this morning, to come across an interview of Paul Teshima, CEO of Nudge (and formerly of Eloqua) being quoted saying

culture eats strategy for breakfast, and business culture can be built through storytelling.
Paul teshimA

What was particularly gratifying about this was his assertion was made in the context of marketing and sales. Sales folks have always understood that relationships are critical to their success. However their challenge has been to quickly identify and nurture the most promising ones, as they balance their need to deliver on results on finite timelines with the lead times of building meaningful relationships. Good marketers recognize that their job is to help sales shorten their selling cycles, by getting qualified leads to them consistently. Storytelling is a powerful to achieve this and a culture that promotes such consistent storytelling to customers and serving sales’ needs will always will the long game.

Hear Paul tell it in his own words here.

Paul Teshima of Nudge.ai on Sales Pipeline Radio

How Do They Do It? Secrets of Great Storytelling

November 1, 2018 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Twenty-five years after publicly announcing it, at a party in Cupertino, I’ve finally begun to work on my first mystery novel. The visit to Hampi, which ironically I did many years after I had visited Pompeii, was the catalyst to set my murder mystery in early 16th century Vijayanagara. If you think making daily sales calls is hard writing every day is harder still. And I’m not even talking about writing well, just putting words on paper.

As entrepreneurs, we have to be storytellers. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about making stuff up. Each day, whether we are trying to hire a new person, motivate an employee who can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, persuade an investor to make a bridge investment or trying to get a customer to buy or better yet pay us an advance, we are trying to persuade others. Make no mistake, persuasion is selling. In a manner of speaking, we are all sales folks. The sooner we accept it, the sooner we can get better at it.

It’s no accident that the best sales folks are ~~good~~ great storytellers. Here’s the good news, like most things storytelling is a learned skill. With a little attention to how others do it and a good deal of practice, we can all get better at it. November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) – and there’s no reason you can’t make a resolution or start a new habit on the 1st of November. Make improving your storytelling skills a goal. Notice I say improving, for we are all natural storytellers. Any time you’ve tried to lie to your mom, or a friend or fudged the facts with your spouse (none of which you’ve ever done of course!), you were telling a story—not necessarily well. Let’s get started. One of the simplest and most fun ways to do this is to join a ToastMaster’s club near you. Your storytelling will get better (mine certainly did) but at the very least you’ll make some new friends. It never hurts to have a life (and a few friends) outside of our businesses.

To make things easy for you, I’m sharing one video (below) and one article.- Get rolling.

Storytelling in a corporate setting – 11 examples

Crafting that Compelling Story – A 3-Point Cheat Sheet

March 1, 2018 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Regardless of our job role, one skill every one of us needs is storytelling. The truth is we are all born with it, but let’s just say some of us are a little rougher around the edges. Having spent most of my time around tech folks, I suspect we probably beat this skill out of them which is why so many presentations we sit through or documents we read, make us at the very least drowsy — some even maybe put us in a coma. These same people, when you observe them talking to friends or colleagues can be great raconteurs. Some of this comes from just not having performance anxiety that presentations induce in all of us. So without having a few libations how do we spin a good yarn? And particularly in a business context how do ensure that we’ve provided our listeners or readers something of value – that elusive takeaway?

Here’s what I’ve learned.

A. Begin with the end in mind I’ll use the example of a seminar or webinar that you intend to host. Write down the one takeaway that your listener or audience walks away with – it could range from broad statements or highly specific

Entrepreneurship is hard – so you’d better be certain, what it is your passion? And why you are doing this?
Good leaders recognize strategy is as much about deciding what NOT to do, as it is about what it is you’ll do
Writing 1000 words every day is the key to finishing your book – then all you have to do is edit it
Measuring ROI on your GIS project can seem hard but it’s not rocket science – here’s how our customers are doing it

B. Use the power of three While scientists and psychologists thought that the human brain can hold only 5-7 things at a time, newer research suggests that number might actually be (gasp) 4! So why risk it? I find if you break down things into three chunks, they are a lot easier to hold at least in my easily distracted mind. Now break it down into three chunks. Sticking with the entrepreneurship or leadership theme,

Context: Set the stage – often best set as a story – that usually illustrates or reinforces a widely held belief. How Steve Jobs had a mythical touch when building products or how Unilever or P&G were masters of strategy leading to their success; Or why government projects are always a boondoggle, like the Big Dig in Boston
Counterpoint – core premise: Is that really the case? Here are eight products that Steve Jobs launched with much fanfare and failed miserably at; here are the huge missteps P&G made and here’s what we’ve learned from NASA’s space mission, which has had minuscule failure rates – so here’s the takeaway – entrepreneurship is hard, there will be naysayers, you’ll fail before you succeed, so you’d better know what your passion is about, if you wanna be able to stick with it
Break it down: Offer an actionable set of things that they can do – how can they realize this core premise you’ve made? Maybe it’s a checklist – that helps them understand themselves better? It’s reading of case studies – of how other entrepreneurs succeeded (or better yet failed and recovered), followed by a checklist.

This can work, whether the topic’s losing weight, giving a speech, or how to measure the return-on-investment on a project.

C. Challenge your audience This is what we marketers term the Call to action! This could be as simple as inviting questions that allows them to challenge your assertions or having them take the first step (“What will you do differently tomorrow morning, because of what you learned here”) The key here is that this doesn’t remain your story but one that compels them to action – ideally an action that benefits them. Of course, if it benefits you whether purely psychically (I did some good!) or professionally (lands you a consulting gig or job) that’s icing on the cake. As my father tried to teach me, “Give first before you ask.”

Here’s a great presentation on how one technical guy (Claudio Perrone aka AgileSensei) went from being just a dude to a compelling storyteller to even cynical technical folks).

Be Empathetic – Lessons from my dad

May 24, 2016 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

My father was a great teller of tales. However, neither he nor I realized this for much of his life. If I had asked my father tell me a story — which I’ve don’t recall ever doing — he’d have likely said, “I don’t tell stories.” However, he did. And darn good ones at that. Only they were narrated while we waited at railway stations or airports or while he was dressing up for work or waiting for dinner to be served. Many of them were just vignettes – episodes from his own life, that it took me many years to figure were stories – darn good ones – well worth repeating. And today as I share them with my daughters or at times with unsuspecting colleagues, I understand how they’ve shaped me.

My favorite story was my dad’s recounting of how as a young man he’d attended a village play and particularly his re-telling of a specific scene from the play. My dad as with many Indians’ of the pre-WWII generation grew up in a small village. Entertainment meant the occasional village fair, a rare trip to town and most often a religious celebration which would include makeshift theater featuring song and dance. Plays, much like Indian movies of the early forties, were largely based on religious themes – often stories from one of the two great Indian epics Ramayana or Mahabharata.

For those not familiar with the Indian epics, the Ramayana is the tale of the hero-king Rama, who is banished to 14 years of forest exile, on the eve of his coronation. His life in exile, including the search for his kidnapped wife Sita culminating in the epic good vs evil battle with the demon Ravana and his triumphant return to the throne, forms the arc of the story line. Rama’s father, the old king Dasaratha is forced to exile Rama, due to an IOU – a promise he made to his youngest wife Kaikeyi (he had three) — who sought the throne for her own son.

Photo: Margarent Freeman

Village theater, even today in India, is often a makeshift stage, with a curtain or cloth draped to separate the backstage from the action up front. The actors heavily made up, rely on their costumes and loud voices to make up for the lack of scenery or other props. With stories such as the Ramayana, the audience which knows every scene needs little else.

As the curtain pulls back, the old king Dasaratha is reclining on the royal couch. My father’s voice chokes up as he narrates the scene. When I was much younger, I could never understand why dad choked up thus. We knew how the story ended! My dad’s eyes fill up and he’s not able to speak any further. With some nudging and prodding, he starts again. “Rama, Rama, Rama” the King calls out – loudly first, his voice filled with anguish and then softly. He gets off the couch and staggers forward as if wanting to go after his son. He continues, calling out “Rama, Rama, Rama” in a voice that breaks and gets weaker by the moment. And then he collapses and dies right there.

By this time, my father’s eyes, still wet, begin to twinkle – as though he’s thought of something naughty. “Then the crowd goes wild – they clap, cheer, hoot, jump up to their feet. “Encore, encore” a lone voice is heard. Then the crowd picks it up and shouts itself hoarse.” My dad is back in the crowd himself. Then the actor, playing the dead King, rises – steps back and begins again “Rama, Rama, Rama” and goes through the whole scene, crying, staggering, calling out and dropping dead. The crowd can’t have enough. By now my dad and I are both laughing out loud. I never tired of hearing this story and would ask my dad often to narrate it.

Yesterday when my younger daughter asked me, for a school project, to tell her what was happening in Palestine, I started to recount the tale of Israel. But in a moment, my own eyes were filled with tears – hot tears of anger and frustration at the real and perceived injustices. The same tears flow just as easily when I narrate the tale of Abhimanyu the young prince from the Mahabharata, cut down in his prime by eight great warriors, who trapped and ambushed him. While “sad songs say so much” as Elton John put it, it’s not just sad news or unfairness that brings me tears to my eyes. I could just as easily be watching Martin Luther King Jr. assert “I have a dream” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial or listening to Eminem crooning “Mockingbird” to his daughter Haley. Like my father crying and laughing at the same time while recounting the encore rendition of the death of Dasaratha, I too find myself emoting easily.

“Be empathetic” is the lesson my dad taught me that day and as my kids wipe my tears and try to coax me to continue, I realize how that one death scene has shaped me!

Five years ago today, my father passed away. The good news was that I got to spend a lot more time with my father, the last five years of his life – even as he and my mother struggled with his Parkinson’s Disease. The bad news is that no amount of time would have been enough. An earlier draft of this article appeared on Medium.

Entrepreneurship in India – Rules for Spectators – Part 5

January 24, 2010 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Image by Ravages via Flickr

Entrepreneurship 2.0

What should all of us who care about entrepreneurship and helping it thrive in the Indian milieu do? There are three simple steps I believe we can take.

Story telling Collect and disseminate stories of entrepreneurial success at every forum and opportunity. Blog about it, write it up in a newspaper, share it at meetings. Just as the story of Dhirubhai or Karsenbhai inspires, stories such as Girish’s or Balan’s can ignite others to follow them. We need more stories of success, small and big, to make entrepreneurial success a realizable dream for more Indians. Every time we read a story of someone who’s made it big, we better find and tell stories of five others who have made it small. Demand that our newspapers and magazines celebrate the little guy as much as they do the big guy.

Encourage During and just after the Kargil war, there was a spurt of public appreciation for soldiers and the men (and women) in uniform. Even today when I travel in the USA, I see strangers walk up to soldiers in uniform, in airports or shopping malls, and thank them for doing their job. When was the last time we did that with any entrepreneur or business owner? The gentleman who runs the tyre shop with its six employees may well be tomorrow’s Kishore Biyani with the right breaks. Ask how their business is doing, listen to their story and appreciate them openly and explicitly.

Educate Each of us has skills that if we share with entrepreneurs will help them get ahead. It could be teaching them how to raise capital, hire senior staff, make better presentations, manage their cash flow or land major accounts. This education is best accomplished by doing. “Show – not tell!” as good writing coaches say. We can do this even by creating forums for bringing entrepreneurs together. Just by sharing each others experiences they can learn from one another and most importantly gain the insight that they are not alone.

Now as three of us embark on our latest entrepreneurial journey at Zebu, we are once again those little guys starting out (though not in a garage but in a small house). I know we could certainly use all the encouragement, education and story telling to stay the course.

Storytelling and Culture in Companies

January 25, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Photo Credit: Bindaas Madhavi via Compfight

I was lucky enough to grow up with a paternal grandmother, a maternal grandfather and even his mother, my great grandmother (GGM), who were always ready with a story. My GGM’s life story itself is worth a whole separate post – widowed at nineteen, while pregnant with my grandfather, she raised him, through a polio attack (when he was two, that left him crippled in one leg), saw him through college, and when he was widowed with ten kids, she then in her sixties, raised the kids, (and the first grandkids) while managing the household, ten cows and a small farm-sized garden.

Some of my favorite memories of my GGM are from dinner time. Six or seven of us kids, cousins and siblings, would be sitting in a semi-circle, on the floor of my grandfather’s dining room. GGM would be seated with her back to the wall, at the center of the half circle, with a large stainless steel bowl of mixed steamed rice and yoghurt. Each night, she’d narrate a story as she fed us dinner. She’d scoop up one handful of the rice and drop a dollop in each of our outstretched hands, going clockwise. And with each handful or mouthful, she’d narrate what happened next, in the tale for the evening. Oh, on so many nights, we’d have to stop eating and console her, as at particularly poignant moments in the tale she’d stumble, stutter then sniffle before a stream of tears would run down her wrinkled face. At other times, she’d have to stop the story to urge us to continue eating or close our mouths as we’d listen to her all agog, our food and outstretched hands totally forgotten.

Those local tales of lions that came as bridegrooms and sparrows that stuffed themselves and the longer tales from the Indian epics have not only stayed with me but taught all of us the values that my GGM held dear. In a very small way I have tried to share that with my own two children. However, the larger lesson I have learnt is the value of stories and storytelling to imbibe culture in families and companies.

There is a large swath of didactic and somewhat intimidating academic research done in recent times on the role of storytelling in business. Leaving that to the experts, in every company I have worked with, there has been storytelling – of dream deals that were saved or won by heroic individual or team efforts; customers from hell or my own favorite, of a customer who insisted on paying by Sep 30th ahead of our delivery milestone, as his budget would vanish on Oct 1st, but wanting a handwritten personal note from the CEO assuring that we’d still deliver on our commitments; our own story of how we asked engineers and managers to have their pay raises deferred and then to take a pay cut and my wife’s favorite, of how I was a zombie the day we lost that truly big, already-in-the-bag and company-saving quarter million dollar deal and the mourning we went through (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – all in a day.)

Of course storytelling need not be just in front of the fireplace, over dinner or by the water cooler. Books, emails and memos can just as powerfully share stories and values. The best examples I can think of include

- “Memos from the Chairman” by Alan C. Greenberg, former Chairman of investment
  banking firm Bear, Stearns & Co. In a series of memos, many at less than 150 words, he has shared his views, thoughts and narrated tales (with a fictional protagonist) in an informal and easy style
- “Small Decencies: Reflections and Meditations on Being Human at Work” by John Cowan – a collection of fluid essays that narrate tales from John’s personal and work life and lend tremendous insight into our own lives, without hitting us over the head

I’d recommend both these books for a hearty good read, even if storytelling and organizational culture are not your favorite topics!