Summary | Stories at Work: Unlock the Secret to Business Storytelling

 

Author : Indranil Chakraborty

It is engaging to hear the story of school dropout becoming a entrepreneur. The journey of opening a small store, overcoming challenges, and innovating new products with anticipating customer requirements is heartening.  That’s the story of PC Musthafa  iD Fresh Food is engaging. His narration of business story is filled with emotions connecting the heart of listeners while delivering the story.  The power of stories helps in connect, engage, gain insights and inspire and Effective leaders are good story tellers.  Thus, stories help in explain critical, complex messages in a simple way inspiring action.

Stories at Work - is structured into three parts, first part is on creating the need on why and how to build your story bank. The second part of the book explains the various story patterns and how stories can be used to build rapport and credibility. The final part of the book is putting them all together touching upon values to be understood, understanding complex human stories, storytelling with data, etc.

The five essentials’ elements of a story are –
1. Start with a time marker, or a place marker

2. About something happening
3. If you hear names/dialogues, it is a story
4. Something unanticipated happens
5. A relevance statement: why am I telling you this story?

Four situations in business where we start our story telling journey are

1.       When we are building a rapport with people we hope to work with – clients, team members and stakeholders

2.      When we explain change – this could range from new vision, mission to transformation agenda to a small change in a administrative process

3.      When we are trying to get people to change their minds and when we are trying to handle objections or mental blocks

4.      When we are looking at sharing best practices, knowledge or success.

 

Story collection can also be used using Cynefin framework adopting a structure of  Probe, Sense and Respond.