Good Books on: Storytelling and Business
Some Recommendations!
Applying Storytelling to business and management has been a recent trend. These are books on how to to do that and I recommend them to you. For information concerning their prices, availability and, if desired, your convenient purchase, follow any of the linked titles, a service of Eldrbarry's Story Telling Page in association with Amazon.com Books.
First, Several books for aspiring "Professional Storytellers"
This big book of 379 pages is full of practical information on every aspect of establishing and running a storytelling career and business. Highly recommended!
This book is full of the practical "nitty gritty" of becoming a fulltime professional by someone who has done it. She tells how to sell yourself, organize and prepare; run a business, as well as matters such as censorship, contracts, ethics, props, music, etc. It will help you avoid the pitfalls along the way. This book is packed with practical information and excellent resource lists. It is not just for Storytellers - teachers, librarians, clowns and other children's performers will find it valuable as well. I can't think of a better how to book for prospective storytellers.
Using his experiences as an arts program presenter and input from arts administrators, Heflick has produced a pragmatic guide for the artist looking to supplement his or her income through in-school performances. Heflick begins by detailing just what the secondary and elementary schools are looking for in terms of educational and entertainment content, the accompanying materials required, the length of presentations, and how to employ appropriate themes. He also discusses ways for artists to mold their experiences into presentations, concerns for working with younger audiences, how to market one's self, keeping the necessary paperwork, and secondary opportunities for income. Logical and no-nonsense, this should be a real boon to artists attempting to break into an expanding, lucrative market. Touring extensively with The Dave & Cindy Duo, David Heflick has performed over 1000 school assembly programs since 1984.
The authors interviewed more than fifty storytellers - professionals, teachers, actors, authors, etc. and present here their contributions on a lot of topics. There is material here for the novice teller as well as the beginning professional. There is a lot of advice on topics ranging from learning stories and dealing with stage fright to ethics to setting fees and marketing yourself. Get and Read this book!
After sitting through one too many truly boring business presentations, the author decided to write a book to teach business people how to make their dry material into stories. This 101 page paperback sounds like just the thing - for those who have to give presentations, or for those who have to sit through them to give away as a gift.
This book is timeless, because storytelling's power is timeless. But it's timely, too, very timely. The marketplace is demanding that we burn the policy manuals and knock off the incessant memo writing; there's just no time. It also demands we empower everyone to constantly take initiatives. It turns out stories are a - if not the - answer to both issues.
Sure-fire techniques for keeping any audience engaged and engrossed. People don't want to see how clever you are-they want to discover how clever they are. This is one of Roy Underhill's guiding principles in Khrushchev's Shoe. An audience-centered approach to making inventive presentations, this unique book offers lessons from some of today's most diverse personalities such as Garrison Keillor, Larry King, Katie Couric, and historical figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Francis Bacon. A field guide for anyone who will benefit from more effective dialog, Khrushchev's Shoe is ideal for educators, trainers, advocates, and presenters, its strategies go beyond bland presentation techniques to reveal the underlying principles that make interaction both more meaningful and more enjoyable. For casual conversations or formal business interaction, this essential resource contains tools that can be implemented immediately.
In The Triumph of Narrative, celebrated journalist and critic Robert Fulford explores narrative in all of its forms from conversation, gossip, and urban legends to journalism, literature, film and television. Fulford vividly illustrates how storytelling formed the core of civilized life, how stories shape us as much as we shape stories, and why the human appetite for narrative persists. Pursuing his subject across a landscape that includes The Birth of a Nation, Chinatown, television news, Twain, Hemingway and Nabokov, sex scandals, and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Fulford elucidates the timeless elements of narrative and articulates the intimate connections between stories and how we live and view reality. During an era when mass media and mass leisure have enabled us to spend much more time absorbing stories than any of our ancestors could, The Triumph of Narrative is an incisive look at one of our most fundamental, irreplaceable needs.
The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations is the first book to teach storytelling as a powerful and formal discipline for organizational change and knowledge management. The book explains how organizations can use certain types of stories ("springboard" stories) to communicate new or envisioned strategies, structures, identities, goals, and values to employees, partners and even customers.
A "collaborative behavior" consultant to public and private organizations, Simmons argues that storytelling may just be the best management tool available to modern business leaders because it exerts influence in ways that other techniques cannot. And she doesn't suggest that stories be exclusively reserved for formal presentations, either; on the contrary, Simmons shows how they can be used effectively in small group settings and even one-on-one situations. She begins by describing six basic types that can be adapted to any circumstance (Who I Am, Why I Am Here, The Vision, Teaching, Values-In-Action, and I Know What You Are Thinking). She then offers pointers for finding them and advises that ideas be jotted down whenever they appear, built upon consistently, and practiced in private until the telling comes naturally. To that end, she includes helpful tips on presentation, noting that the words are only part of a package that includes body language, clothing, tone, and other components.
The author opens with a model of how stories are used and the effects they can have, and with vignettes and other examples, he identifies their common uses. Stories can facilitate the Human Resource function overall and Gargiulo provides trainers with specific story exercises and techniques to use in their day to day work. Stories can also be used to capture, analyze, and understand business processes. Gargiulo discusses the role of stories in the development of effective leadership, and how they can be used to create and manage corporate culture and to develop future executives. He then shows how stories help build rapport, teach, and help maintain relationships with employees in coaching and mentoring situations. Moving from the conceptual to the applied, Gargiulo presents a model of the "story mind," and closes with a series of exercises to help build a large reservoir of stories for use throughout the organization, in various settings for different purposes. Consulting and workshops offered through Makingstories.net
This book takes the everyday stories of life in a variety of organisations and suggests, not only why they are vital, but also how to start telling stories that could make a difference in a working environment. Based around seven diverse settings, the book weaves a picture of life in these places through telling stories of them and about them. Some of the accounts are fictionalised but their truth is clear - they describe situations, and characters, we have all met at some time in our working lives. But this is not simply a book of stories. Bringing together an intriguing, and eclectic selection of stories, theories and exercises, the authors provide a practical and stimulating way of doing things differently.
A book for Advanced storytellers. Fran Stallings says "Although the book is full of suggestions for exercises and very practical remedies, it is more than a how-to manual. It teaches the aesthetic and moral principles we must understand in order to make our own informed decisions as responsible tellers."
See alsoThe Storytelling Coach : How to Listen, Praise, and Bring Out People's Best: by Doug Lipman, Jay O'Callahan (1995)
In The Power of Personal Storytelling, professional storyteller Jack Maguire explains how to mine your memories to communicate more effectively, enhance personal and professional relationships, and understandyourself better so that you can better understand others. Step by step, he illustrates how shaping and expressing true stories about our lives and those of the people we've known can connect us more vitally with others; develop our creativity; strengthen our humor, courage, and confidence; and render our lives more memorable.One device is to help students find a "counterpart"story from the traditional body of folklore and well-known material we all grew up with. Jack has lots more ideas -- activities that allow students to link personal memories (reality) with abstract ideas. He has a chapter that uses storyboarding as a way of finding key scenes or stepping-stones as parts of a developing story.
Practical and entertaining, "Corporate Legends and Lore" reveals seven methods of using "hero" and "survivor" stories, "letting off steam", stories, and "kick in the pants" stories to promote short- and long-term goals. It identifies the key storytelling roles of leaders, managers and employees in any organization; features dozens of storytelling situations, scenarios, and actual stories; demonstrates the impact of storytelling in such areas as quality improvement and productivity enhancement; and shows how to manage storytelling to strengthen an organization, control events and build personal influence.
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