Storytelling in Business: The Authentic and Fluent Organization

Storytelling can be a lifelong and life sustaining habit of mind, a personal inheritance that connects us to our communities. It can also serve as an organizational inheritance―a management tool that helps businesses to develop and thrive. For more than a decade, award-winning author Janis Forman has been helping executives to tell stories in service of their organizational objectives. In Storytelling in Business: The Authentic and Fluent Organization, she teaches readers everywhere how the craft of storytelling can help them to achieve their professional goals.

Focusing on the role of storytelling at the enterprise level, this book provides a research-driven framework for engaging in organizational storytelling. Forman presents original cases from Chevron, FedEx, Phillips, and Schering-Plough. Organizations like those featured in the book can make use of storytelling for good purposes, such as making sense of their strategy, communicating it, and developing or strengthening culture and brand. These uses of storytelling generate positive consequences that can have a sustained and significant impact on an organization. While large firms employ teams of digital and communication professionals, there's much that any of us can extrapolate from their experience to create stories to further our own objectives.

To show the reach of storytelling, Forman conducted 140 interviews with professionals ranging from CEOs in small and thriving firms, to corporate communication and digital media experts, to filmmakers―arguably the world experts in visual storytelling. She draws out specific lessons learned, and shows how to employ the road-tested strategies demonstrated by these leaders. Although this book focuses on storytelling in the context of business, Forman takes inspiration from narratives in literature and film, philosophical and social thought, and relevant concepts from a variety of other disciplines to instruct the reader on how to develop truly authentic and meaningful tales to drive success. A final chapter brings readers back to square one: the development of their own "signature story."

This book is a pioneering work that guides us beyond the pressure and noise of daily organizational life to influence people in a sustained, powerful way. It teaches us to be fluent storytellers who succeed by mastering this vital skill.

Janis Forman is the founder and Director of the Management Communication Program at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. In this capacity, she has taught communication as a form of persuasive storytelling to full-time and executive MBA's who conduct strategic studies for multi-national companies like Coca-Cola, Disney, and Microsoft and for start-up firms in the United States and abroad. Forman has received numerous awards for her research, including fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Center for International Business Education and Research, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the UCLA Anderson Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. With Paul Argenti, she is author of The Power of Corporate Communication, which won the Distinguished Publication Award from the Association for Business Communication. Forman has consulted with a wide variety of organizations.