‘Stories at work: Unlock the secret to business storytelling’ by Indranil Chakraborty, Portfolio/Penguin, Gurgaon 2018.
The boredom-killing stratagem of storytelling has become the new business in business communication and invaded boardrooms. CEOs are discovering the virtues of storytelling as the medium for their message in this age of information overload and attention deficiency. Storytelling has also provided a platform for the voices of Kalawatis and Sufiya Begums for larger causes. Indranil Chakraborty is one of the small tribe of business storytelling trainers in the world with the gift of the gab and with experience in large organisations. He has authored the book, which is halfway between a magazine article and a research paper, a la mode, to be a bedside companion for corporate czars and their cohorts.
Stories can range in size from a six-word gut-wrenching terribly tiny tale by Ernest Hemingway to the monumental epic Mahabharata, which seeks to point the moral compass of the believer timelessly to true north. Stories trigger parts of our brain to release the hormones dopamine and norepinephrine that influence memory and information and also synchronise or align listeners in empathy, which often triggers the nobler emotions. They are, therefore, an invaluable tool in persuasion methods and inculcation of values. “The book eggs us on to get back to storytelling and use it in everyday business,” says advertising guru, Piyush Pandey, in his delightful foreword.
Chakraborty teaches the “science of storytelling”, which is a process approach amenable to a quality management system type of induction in an organisation. His world includes employee and customer engagement, anecdote circles, a classic management representative working under the aegis of the CEO’s office, an assessment of added value by achieving improved results and preventing negative effects, all rounded off with a sustainable cycle of story collection. The importance of constructing a story library with profiles, soundtracks and smartphone videos, accumulating case studies and building a narrative to provide meaning and an emotional connect is emphasised. To the Aristotlean dramatic form of “a beginning, a middle, and an end”, however, he has added other structural props, triggers and pattern recognition to elevate the art of storytelling to a science. This book is no Aesop’s business fables or Yiddishe Kop, however, and the parable gathering is largely left to the reader.
I think that the book is a primer in that it is good as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. For example, it does not deal with the development of story arcs into mega-serials or with tuning the ‘beat’ into a melody. Legends and myths are dismissed as not being relevant to the corporate world. However, the embedment and alignment (narrative cueing) with the company’s goals in the collective unconscious is a subject that requires attention. ‘Getting strategies to stick’ (a chapter in the book) is a sticky wicket. A simple clarity story approach is not enough to tackle the problem.
As Goodyear chairman Kramer said, “Consistency of message to all stakeholders leads to trust and confidence. When associates hear the same things we are telling Wall Street, they know that we are committed to our strategy and direction”.
As the Akira Kurosawa classic Rashomon shows, four people involved in an incident can tell varying accounts of what happened. Even AI’s algorithms and deep learning systems can amplify human prejudice and create hoaxes that can fool other AI systems and humans. So, unification and encapsulation of stories into a corporate bible will require sustained efforts at keeping problems from getting embedded in any given system. But that is another story.
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