The Power of Story and Effective Storytelling

I've always agreed with Socrates' assertion that "an unexamined life is not worth living." I would suggest that a critical part of examining one's life is examining what stories one is telling, believing, living, and, embracing. The stories we tell and retell, the stories we believe or disbelieve, the stories we tell about ourselves and about others are all prime indicators of who we are, what we are about, and how and why we make the decisions we make. And, in examining our stories, we might learn a thing or two about the roles they are playing in our lives. Are they healthy stories or unhealthy ones? In thinking about, researching, and writing about story I've come to realize that I also believe, to paraphrase Socrates that the unexamined story is not worth embracing, or telling.

What do I mean by this? I would argue that in order for story to have its fullest power, its deepest impact, and its most true and complete expression of itself, we must understand the answers to a series of questions: Where does the story come from? By what process has it come to be? Is it true? By which I mean, is it revelatory of the human condition? Is the story being used for good or for ill? There are healthy stories and unhealthy stories. There are good stories - by which I mean stories meant to do good, as opposed to stories that are well told - and there are evil stories. Hitler was a supremely effective storyteller, but his ends were evil.

When I set out to research story and its uses, benefits, and applications, I was surprised and not a little disappointed to learn that despite the vast amount of material that has been published on the subject, little of it seemed to truly understand or appreciate the great power and influence that story wields. Nor did much of the material I found seem to examine story with significant or sufficient depth. It seems there's a certain safety or timidity about how some scholars and authors talk about story. Perhaps even a reverence or an awe of which they are likely unaware. But I must confess that at the conclusion of my research for this paper, I'm left somewhat hungry for more, as if story - at least in some writings - has been somehow defanged or sanitized.

I believe that story has the power to quite literally define our lives. The stories we tell ourselves, our spouses, our children, our colleagues, and our community have an impact on who we are, what we value, and how we behave. A healthy and inclusive story can help produce a healthy and inclusive family, community, school, workplace, city, or even a nation. An unhealthy and divisive story can foster argument, discord, conflict, even war. Don't believe me? Consider Kosovo, Rwanda, the Middle East, and Darfur. Recall post-World War I Germany and the stories that paved the way for the rise of the Third Reich.

Stories can heal and stories can harm. As children many of us were told, "Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you." This is nonsense. Words can be as sharp as swords and stories can pack the destructive power of a hand grenade. If a child hears that he has peanut butter for brains often enough, he'll begin to believe it.

Story can and does change people's lives - on a daily basis! Consider the Palestinian Israeli conflict: On what does this conflict hinge? Stories. Stories about who did what to whom when. Who has a right to what land? What happened in 1948? In 1967? What was agreed to in the Dayton accords? Does it matter? Who killed whom first or last or most recently? What are the shared stories that we, as a people, as a society, embrace? What actions do these shared stories lead us to take or fail to take?

Story is the catalyst for almost every major political decision we make. What is the story of our country? What sort of country do we wish to be? What sort of country have we agreed to be? What does our history (note that "story" is the bulk of the word "history") tell us about ourselves? For instance, if we tell a story about the United States that is defined by promoting liberty and justice for all then that story itself provides us a means by which to judge whether or not we are living up to our standards, our ideals. Are we truly promoting liberty and justice for all? And, if we're not and if we still wish to stand by the story we're telling ourselves and others, then we'd best work to bring reality more into alignment with the story, or with the goal, one might say. Does torture fit into the story we tell about the United States? For some, apparently it does. For myself, I'm not really comfortable with that. I think the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, relevant Supreme Court decisions (such as the ban on cruel and unusual punishment), and, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights all lead me to think that torture should not be part of the story of the United States.

Nelson Mandela understood the power and primacy of story, which he demonstrated by his support of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission upon being elected president of South Africa. He and other South African leaders, like Commission Chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu, understood how important it was for both victims and perpetrators to be able to tell their stories. These leaders understood the healing power of story and recognized that it was a necessary step in moving toward a free society, and toward reconciliation in the radically changed South Africa.

Story is, quite simply, the principal way in which we define who we are and what we believe. It is the principal vessel for transmitting our values and ideals, our dreams and our hopes, our fears and our aspirations, our concerns and our joys from any one person to any number of other persons. Without story, we would all be utterly and completely alone, isolated, and unable to communicate complex ideas.

Some of my research supported my views about the profound importance of story. Robert McKee rightly notes, "Story is a metaphor for life. It takes us beyond the factual to the essential" (Emphasis added, 53). And, writer Ursula K. Le Guin describes story beautifully when she observes:

The story - from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace - is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind for the purpose of understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories. (Emphasis added, qtd. in Pink, 103)

I would extend Le Guin's thoughts one step further and assert that without story, there can be no society. Merriam Webster's third definition of society is, "a: an enduring and cooperating social group whose members have developed organized patterns of relationships through interaction with one another; b: a community, nation, or broad grouping of people having common traditions, institutions, and collective activities and interests." It is inconceivable that a community could devise common traditions or collective interests without employing story. Each society that can be imagined - be it a country or a country club, a book club or a basketball team, an university or a think tank - is animated and in many significant ways defined by the stories they share, tell, and, embrace. The American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution embrace very different stories about the United States and public policy.

Story is to human beings, then, what oil is to the internal combustion engine. Without the lubricant of story, how could we learn and think and conceive of things that never before existed? Without story, how could we reflect and consider and imagine a better world or a better society? Without the lifeblood of story, how would we avoid complete anarchy? Story can be properly described as the glue that holds families, communities, religions, and, nations together. It is also that which provides a reason for families, communities, religions, and, nations reason for argument, struggle, conflict, and, war. Story is neither empirically good nor bad; rather, it is ubiquitous, often taken for granted, and remarkably powerful. Shared stories can lead men and women to greatness or to pettiness.

Story is the principal tool we use in order to assign meaning to events and to understand what's going on around us. Daniel Taylor, the author of The Healing Power of Stories: Creating Yourself Through the Stories of Your Life, is one of the few sources I found who seems to fully appreciate the power and ubiquity of story. He wisely observes, "Story is so omnipresent in our lives that it is often invisible" (5). He continues with a metaphor that I find both apt and powerful: "We live in stories the way fish live in water, breathing them in and out, buoyed up by them, taking from them our sustenance, but rarely conscience of this element in which we exist" (5/6).

It is perhaps this unconsciousness about how much we live within story at all times that leads so many writers to shortchange story's power or to gloss over some critical factors that contribute to its primary role in our lives. Author Philip Martin touches upon the ubiquity of story with this passage from his article "Once Upon A Time...":

Stories connect events; they also connect people to each other. Think of the child in the bed and the parent perched on the edge, within comforting reach. Think of the man sitting by the hearth, telling old tales by a flickering light to his spellbound audience. Think back to early humans circled around a campfire, listening to a tale of magic and hunting. Stories join us in the act of listening and understanding. (35)

Martin is correct in observing that stories connect events and people, but this passage seems to suggest a sort of passivity in story, and I would argue that story is anything but passive. His final assertion that "stories join us in the act of listening and understanding" omits story's great power to motivate action. Story well employed can move a people to greatness or to commit the most horrendous of crimes.

Lies are stories that can hurt the teller as much (or more) than they hurt, insult, or disrespect the listener. However, not all lies are equal and not all lies are bad. Consider the novelist: in a very real sense, the novelist is a supreme liar, a supreme teller of tales, and yet the best novelists are deeply rooted in and committed to revealing truth. Ursula K. Le Guin addresses this directly in the introduction to her award winning novel, The Left Hand of Darkness: "A novelist's business is lying" (xii). She elaborates, "I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can express is, logically defined, a lie" (xv). Le Guin profoundly understands and appreciates the potential within story and beautifully captures the irony of story's uniquely powerful qualities. Her following thoughts regarding story in the form of a novel are among the most lucid I've encountered:

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we are changed. (Emphasis in original, xv/xvi)

Not too many years ago, thinking myself very clever indeed, I used to delight in exclaiming to a conversant, "All my lies are true." And, in a very real sense, I suppose they were in that they were revelatory of the human condition, or at least my understanding of the human condition. As Taylor asserts: "True does not mean factual... true means accurately reflecting human experience" (116). David Sedaris has strong feelings on this subject as well, especially in light of the recent scandal surrounding James Frey's characterization of his book A Million Little Pieces as a memoir. In an interview in The Missouri Review, Sedaris opines:

Okay, James Frey wrote a book saying, "I'm a fucked-up alcoholic." And the people read the book, and now they're saying, "That drunk lied to us!" Well, he kind of warned you in advance that he was a fucked-up alcoholic. I can't understand the self-righteousness that goes along with that anger. You can let the truth slide when it comes to the president, but if it's a first-time memoirist, how dare he? How dare he lead us on? ... I think autobiography is the last place you would look for truth. (79/80)

I think Sedaris is absolutely right when he suggests that there might be a double standard at work when a society excoriates a memoir writer for stretching the truth while at the same time largely accepting what has been referred to as faulty intelligence that was relied upon in the lead up to the current war in Iraq.

Taylor asserts, "knowing and embracing healthy stories are crucial to living rightly and well" (1). I think he's right, and I must admit that some of the stories I told in my younger days might not be fairly characterized as healthy ones. I'll explain.

When I was three years old, Robert "Jay" Jaycox, my natural father, left our family. His and my mother's marriage had been less than successful and he disappeared one day leaving a note on the top of the television set indicating that he had gone and thought we would all be better off without him. The loss of my natural father was devastating and my mother's decision to marry John Russell less than three years later was a most unwelcome development. From 1966 through 1977 - eleven long years - I had no communication whatsoever with my natural father. He never called or wrote or sent child support. With this background related, I'll share an example of a story that was not particularly healthy:

As a schoolboy I used story - in an unhealthy way - as a way to cope with the loss of my natural father. As I couldn't come up with any justification for his complete lack of presence in my life, I killed him off with a story. I told my classmates that he had been in the Navy and had died while serving aboard a nuclear submarine. I no longer recall all of the details I employed to flesh out this story, but I had several sources from which I drew to lend the story credence. My Uncle Ben served in the Navy, as did a great Uncle who had served on a submarine. I recall the story of my great Uncle's hair turning white overnight when a torpedo hit his submarine killing the three officers above him and placing him instantly in command of the vessel. While my natural father never served in the Navy, he was in the Army, so it didn't seem too much a stretch to my young mind to simply place him in another branch of the service. Killing my natural father through the use of a story made it somehow easier, for a brief period of time, for me to cope with the fact that he had abandoned my younger brother and me.

In his article "Living Stories, Telling Stories, Changing Stories: Experiential Use of the Relationship in Narrative Therapy," Alphons J. Richert addresses the use of story as a means of creating identity this way:

As content, self is thought of as consisting of a collection of situation-specific vignettes or stories, each of which may portray a different me, or protagonist. These stories are at least loosely organized into an overarching life narrative in which the sense of I, or self as narrator, organizer, may be explicitly developed. Self, then, is both multiple, as reflected in the various mes that populate situation-specific stories, and coherent and organized, as reflected in the overall narrative. (Emphasis in original, 193)

Richert's identification of multiple mes that are defined, to a large degree, by the stories we tell is fascinating and, I think, accurate. He comes from a school that embraces the power of story - expressed as narrative therapy - that asserts that a patient can alter their relationship to their problem by telling a different story about it. In a very real sense, when you name a problem and separate it from you yourself - in other words, the problem is the problem, not the person - you begin to write a new story about your self and your life. Narrative therapy understands, embraces, and effectively deploys the power of storytelling - and, it's not something I'm just writing about; I've experienced it personally in my therapeutic work with Klaus Boettcher, who studied with Michael White, a leading developer and practitioner of narrative therapy.

We understand who we are with the assistance of story and stories. Our earliest memories are recalled through the mechanism of story, and may well even include story as a central fact of the memory, i.e., recalling being read a bedtime story when a child. For me, one of those bedtime stories was The Little Engine That Could. And, although I have not read or heard that story in more years than I care to work out, I recall its central message as vividly and powerfully today as when I first heard it - indeed, perhaps more so, because as an adult I am more aware of the critical importance of the positive message embedded in the words, "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can."

That story contained a positive message that has supported and sustained me at times - especially during times of self-doubt and second-guessing. Self-doubt and second-guessing are, by the way, the names I've given to two of the problems that I've used story to help overcome in my own life.

Ian McGregor and John Holmes make this interesting and somewhat whimsical observation about the nature of storytelling:

The term storytelling has a delightful double meaning. On the one hand, it implies recounting experiences in a coherent narrative format with the perspective of an audience in mind. On the other hand, it can also connote a certain slippage from the realities of the episodes it supposedly portrays, if not a wholesale bending of the facts to create a 'good story.' (Emphasis in original, 403)
It seems that when writing about story, notions of truth and lies are difficult to avoid. I'll continue with some of my story of story:

By 1977, the relationship with my stepfather was somewhat improved and he officially adopted my brother and me. After the adoption, I was shocked to see that my birth certificate had been altered to indicate that my father - at the time of my birth! - was John A. Russell. What had happened to my natural father? Was my story being rewritten? And, where was Bob Jaycox, anyway? Why did he not care to have any contact with his two sons? These were some of the questions I was asking myself at the time.

During the adoption proceedings, the judge indicated that my natural father's approval was required for the adoption to go forward. If that were the case, then surely the courthouse would have some contact information for him. They did, and they readily provided me with his phone number and address in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I called him collect one cold and snowy evening in December. Within two weeks, my brother and I were on a plane to San Juan, Puerto Rico to meet our natural father.

Family tells us much about who we are and where we come from, and this almost always appears in the form of stories. Stories about long-dead relatives, stories about our parents' and grandparents' childhood adventures and mishaps, accomplishments and mistakes. Stories of every kind that help create a deeper and more vivid understanding about one's ancestors. In the absence of family - and hence, the stories that accompany family - one might feel unmoored, un-tethered, unsure.

Over the years, I saw Jay from time to time - I learned some important things about where I come from, who his parents and grandparents were, and the like... but, I never, ever, called him Dad. I refused. I recall a conversation he and I had during perhaps my second trip to visit him in Puerto Rico: I told him that I would never call him Dad. His response floored me, in a way. He said, "Well, you'll do what you need to do, and that's okay... But I will always call you son." I later came to understand that with this simple phrase, "I will always call you son," he was saying "I love you, whether you call me Dad or not. And I always will."

Why would I never call him Dad? I was angry. He'd abandoned my brother and me. And, I guess in a way he was a disappointment to me. He wasn't as successful as I'd perhaps wished he would be, and it was certainly very difficult for me to understand how he could just walk away from his two sons the way he did. But that disappointment was from the oh-so-very-simple-viewpoint of a child.

On May 18, 2005, Jay died - suddenly and unexpectedly. He was only sixty-six years old. I was completely unprepared for the grief I felt at this final loss. I had not seen him since a visit to his Oklahoma City home in 1998, and was hopeful that he would be attending my June 25 wedding in the summer of 2005. I was excited to see him again. I never did, of course, and in the months that followed, as I worked to understand my grief and to better understand the slim, but critically important, relationship we'd developed, I became aware of how disappointed I was that I had ever been disappointed in him; and, that I never called him Dad.

This new self-awareness of how harshly and unfairly I'd judged Jay, who was, after all, simply a man trying to do the best he could brought to mind the passage from First Corinthians: "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways" (Holy Bible, 1 Cor. 13.11). Perhaps, with the death of my natural father, I became a man. What is certain is that I started telling a new story about Jay. A story that includes understanding, empathy, and, forgiveness.

Story has played a central role in my life, both personally and professionally. My work as a theater director, composer, producer, and writer are all inextricably linked to the notion of telling effective and engaging stories. When I was raising money as producing artistic director of American Theater Company (ATC), I constantly tried to frame my appeal in the form of a story. I attempted to engage the listener/reader with the story of ATC and to paint a picture (a story) of how their financial support would help write the next chapters of our story.

The plays I chose to produce at ATC were driven by the stories contained within with an emphasis on a need to engage the story of a particular play now, today. In other words, I would always ask myself, "Why do this play today? What issues or ideas does this work surface that are important for us to grapple with today?" In his book Leading Minds, Howard Gardner writes, "The true impact of a leader depends on the story that he or she relates or embodies, and the reception to that story by the organizational audience" (qtd. in Kaye 44). This speaks directly to the sort of leadership I attempted to provide at ATC.

Jean-Paul Sartre argues "a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were telling a story" (qtd. in Taylor 41). Sartre's evocative image of living a life "surrounded by his stories and the stories of others" reminds me of something I've come to understand in recent years regarding the profound role of storytelling in coping with the loss of a loved one - be it a person or a pet.

My wife Gloria and I recently had to put her beloved dog Buddy down after learning that he had a massive inoperable brain tumor. He had started having seizures in late December 2006, and we were attempting to control them with Phenobarbital. For the first several months, the drugs were quite effective in limiting the seizures with minimal side effects, however in April of 2007, his behavior began to become erratic. He was circling incessantly to the right, occasionally appearing off balance or uncoordinated, and even became unable to control his biological functions - something that was never before a problem. Finally, late in the evening of May 7, 2007, we heard him whining and took him to the emergency hospital. The next day, a neurologist examined him and told us he suspected a brain tumor. An MRI performed that afternoon confirmed the diagnosis, and that night we ushered Buddy out of this world.

In coping with our grief, Gloria and I shared stories about Buddy. Stories that made us laugh in appreciation of what he brought into our lives and stories that led to tears over our loss. However, through the act of telling these stories, we began to move towards healing and acceptance. The past couple of years have also seen the death of several friends, colleagues, and family members. In these situations, too, storytelling has played a critical role in understanding, accepting, and finding a way to move forward with life. In sharing our memories of a person, in telling stories about the deceased, we begin the healing process, and the sharing of these stories can help usher us from grief toward gratitude. Gratitude for the gifts the deceased gave us, for enriching our lives in the myriad ways that loved ones do.

In his book, A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink asserts:

We are our stories. We compress years of experience, thought, and emotion into a few compact narratives that we convey to others and tell to ourselves. That has always been true. But personal narrative has become more prevalent, and perhaps more urgent, in a time of abundance, when many of us are freer to seek a deeper understanding of ourselves and our purpose. (113)

If Pink's assertion is correct, is it any wonder that an integral part of the grieving process would be telling stories? For if "we are our stories," then it stands to reason that the deceased are also their stories.

Sharing stories, then, becomes a means by which to reconnect with a loved one. To bring them back to life, if only momentarily. Such is the power of story. Isak Dinesen suggests, "Any sorrow can be borne if we can put it in a story" (qtd. in Neuhauser, 109). And Tim O'Brien, in his story "The Lives of the Dead" argues: "But this too is true: stories can save us...

In his seminal book, Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster somewhat wistfully reflects upon story, writing:

It is immensely old - goes back to Neolithic times, perhaps to Paleolithic. Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull. The primitive audience was an audience of shock-heads, gaping around the campfire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or the woolly rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. (26)

Later in this chapter, Forster explains the great power that story has, using Scheherazade as an object lesson, observing:

Scheherazade avoided her fate because she knew how to wield the weapon of suspense - the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages. She only survived because she managed to keep the king wondering what would happen next. (26/27)

Forster is not the only writer to trace the power of story far back in time. In his book Story, renowned screenwriting teacher Robert McKee recalls Plato's The Republic, writing:

In 388 B.C. Plato urged the city fathers of Athens to exile poets and storytellers. They are a threat to society, he argued. Writers deal with ideas, but not in the open, rational manner of philosophers. Instead, they conceal their ideas inside the seductive emotions of art. Yet felt ideas, as Plato pointed out, are ideas nonetheless. Every effective story sends a charged idea out to us, in effect compelling the idea into us, so that we must believe. In fact, the persuasive power of a story is so great that we may believe its meaning even if we find it morally repellent. Storytellers, Plato insisted, are dangerous people. He was right. (129/130)

Gore Vidal, in his essay "How I Do What I Do If Not Why" refers to a somewhat more contemporary variation on Plato's concern, when observing the great change that accompanied the widespread teaching of reading and writing. Vidal observes:

In the beginning, there was the spoken word. The first narrations concerned the doings of gods and kings, and these stories were passed on from generation to generation, usually in verse in order to make memorizing easier... All this stopped in the last two centuries when the rulers decided to teach the workers to read and write so that they could handle machinery. Traditionalists thought this a dangerous experiment. If the common people knew too much might they not overthrow their masters? And, in due course, the people - proudly literate - overthrew their masters. (272/273)

Taylor weighs in on the power of stories by observing, "Nazi Germany told itself powerful and compelling stories, but they were stories of death. If our storytellers fail us, the people perish" (119).

Forster, McKee, Vidal, and Taylor each seem to understand the transformative power of story. Several of the other sources I found during my research, however, seem to take a more utilitarian approach to story and how it can be employed. I'm not suggesting that there is anything inherently wrong with story having utility or purpose, per se; rather, I am noting a narrowness of understanding or exploration.

Writing in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Joanne Edgar argues that foundations should begin to hire storytellers, noting:

Every foundation sits on a treasure trove of stories that represent its values, its goals, and its impact. These stories are complex, comprehensive, and engaging, and they are the face of social change, the catalysts for moving people from apathy to action. And they personalize the message... But without the stories behind the data, these efforts end up seeming like buying a ticket to the movies and getting a PowerPoint presentation. (29)

Edgar explains that she employed storytelling in her own work with the Massachusetts state child-welfare agency, but she doesn't identify any foundations that have hired storytellers.

Writing in Rolling Stone, author Ben Wallace-Wells relates the following in an article about Barack Obama, the junior Senator from Illinois who is currently seeking the Democratic nomination for president of the United States:

"I remember when we realized something magical was happening," says Obama's pollster... Paul Harstad. "We were doing a focus group in suburban Chicago, and this woman, seventy years old, looks seventy-five, hears Obama's life story, and she clasps her hand to her chest and says, 'Be still, my heart.' Be still, my heart - I've been doing this for a quarter century and I've never seen that... All we'd done... is tell them the Story." From that moment on, the Story became Obama's calling card, his political rationale and his basic sale. Every American politician has this wrangle he has to pull off, reshaping his life story to fit into Abe Lincoln's log cabin... Obama's material is simply the best of all. What he has to offer, at the most fundamental level, is not ideology or even inspiration - it is the Story, the feeling that he embodies, in his own, uniquely American history, a longed-for break from the past. (Emphasis in original, 53)

In this instance, we see a very utilitarian use of story: story as a political sales tool.

In his book, Squirrel, Inc.: A Fable of Leadership Through Storytelling, Stephen Denning identifies seven kinds of stories:

· A story to ignite action - a springboard story - is likely to require a true story with a positive tone, told in a minimalist fashion.

· A story to share knowledge is likely to be a true story with a negative tone, focused on a problem and presenting the context, the solution, and an explanation of the solution.

· A story to get people working together will be a moving story and will spark similar stories from the audience.

· A story to lead people into the future will be an evocative story, told with minimal detail.

· A story to neutralize bad news will be a true story that satirizes the bad news itself or the author of the bad news.

· A story to communicate who you are will tend to be a story in traditional form, with context, characters, and a plot.

· A story to transmit values will likely be a believable story describing how organizational leaders dealt with adversity. (Emphasis in original, 47)

Denning's seven story types articulated above are not only utilitarian; I would argue they are highly proscriptive and overly simplistic. Denning has been referred to as a storytelling guru, and these seven story definitions certainly feel very guru-like to me. While he couches some of his suggestions with terms like "will likely be" or "will tend to be," he is overly definitive at times. For example, his suggestion that a story to ignite action is likely to be true and positive ignores the efficacy of the stories of Nazi Germany or any number of other despotic and murderous regimes that have told stories that ignited action. Similarly, I find it difficult to accept that a story to share knowledge requires a negative tone.

Author Daniel Pink points out that during the last fifteen years, "Some forty thousand people have plunked down $600 for [Robert McKee's] Story Seminar" (104). He further observes that many of these workshop attendees have been "the executives, entrepreneurs, and workers of traditional business" (104). In an interview in Harvard Business Review, McKee notes, "A big part of a CEO's job is to motivate people to reach certain goals. To do that, he or she must engage their emotions, and the key to their hearts is story" (52). Addressing how story can assist a leader in imagining, developing, and communicating a vision for the future, McKee elaborates:

Businesspeople not only have to understand their companies' past, but then they must project the future. And how do you imagine the future? As a story. You create scenarios in your head of possible future events to try to anticipate the life of your company or your own personal life. So if a businessperson understands that his or her own mind naturally wants to frame experience in a story, the key to moving an audience is not to resist this impulse but to embrace it by telling a good story. (52)

If one of a CEO's most critical duties is to create and communicate a powerful and persuasive vision for a business, is it any wonder that so many of them are actively working to better understand story and how to harness its motivating powers?

What neither Pink nor McKee seem to address, however, is how these CEO's and executives are employing story. Is it simply that they are packaging the story of their company or their brands in a more effective and engaging manner? Or, are they inviting their stakeholders to play a role in the continuing evolution of the organization's story? I'd like to know.

In her book The Story Factor: Secrets of Influence From the Art of Storytelling, Annette Simmons suggests "If you demonstrate who you are, rather than tell me who you are, it is much more believable. A story lets you demonstrate who you are" (Emphasis in original, 8). I must confess that I don't precisely understand how telling a story demonstrates who you are. Certainly a story can communicate one's values or hopes or ideals or dreams or desires; each of which will provide some insight into who you are, but her assertions are imprecise and unclear, if not downright facile. Like Denning, Simmons seems as the guru standing high upon her hill.

Elsewhere in her book, Simmons addresses the subjectivity of stories and the impact of our storytelling choices this way:

Selecting the facts, sequencing them, and picking a place to begin and end always alters the meaning of the facts. Your story creates meaning and meaning is by nature subjective. History is merely a sequence of stories we tell ourselves that helps us build assumptions about cause and effect. We figure out how the world works through the stories we choose to believe. (229)

The final sentence in the quote above can have truly frightening overtones if one considers the numerous conflicts that animate the global stage - from sectarian conflicts in Iraq to the seemingly endless Palestinian Israeli conflict to our own country's global war on terrorism. The stories we choose to believe have a dramatic impact on the actions leaders take.

In her article "Corporate Storytelling Perspectives," Hilary McClellan writes, "Why was Solomon recognized as the wisest man in the world? Because he knew more stories (proverbs) than anyone else. Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom, and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories" (Alan Kay, qtd. in McClellan, 20). I think McClellan is right when she suggests that many of us have a hunger to hear stories, and I think it's equally true that we hunger to tell stories. The great Czech writer Milan Kundera asserts in his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, "all of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ears of others" (110).

If Kundera is correct, and I suspect he is, then we must ask ourselves what the "battle for the ears of others" is about. I would suggest it's about being heard, about being listened to - we desperately want someone to listen to our stories. We are all telling stories everyday - to our colleagues, our friends, our neighbors, our children, and, indeed, to ourselves. We navigate our days with story. If story is how we assign and understand meaning to events and our lives, as has been asserted earlier, then perhaps the reason story is so ubiquitous is because we are all so desperately seeking a sense of meaning, of purpose.

Chris Hedges explores the quest for meaning in his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, writing in the introduction, "The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living" (3). He later observes, "War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us" (10). Story, too, can make the world understandable, and its power should not be trivialized or applied irresponsibly.

David Mamet, in his most recent book, Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business, somewhat drolly observes, "Storytelling is like sex. We all do it naturally. Some of us are better at it than others" (89). As far as he goes, he's right, of course. But as Roosevelt University professor Brooke Portmann noted in response to an earlier draft of this paper, "some engage in healthy sex and some in unhealthy sex." There is responsible sex and irresponsible sex. The same is true regarding story.

On May 2, 2007, Terry Gross, the host of National Public Radio's "Fresh Air," interviewed John Ridley, the author of a graphic novel, The American Way. This novel imagines that the United States government has created a group of super-heroes to fight super-bad guys as a way to make Americans feel more safe and secure. During the interview, Ridley describes what helped move him from thinking about writing this book to actually writing it:

The thing that helped bring this story together was the Jessica Lynch story at the beginning of the... Iraq War. Here was this young girl, she was out on patrol, her patrol was ambushed and, as the story went, most of her comrades were captured or killed - she fought to the last bullet, she was taken to a secret location, but American commandoes found her and in an amazing rescue saved her, and brought her home. And, it's a great story. And it's the story that the Pentagon and the government put out and it's the story that most of the media ran with. And little by little we found out that that was not actually the story. The idea wasn't that this story was put out there because the government was evil, it was not entirely made up, but we wanted to believe. At the beginning of the war, who doesn't want to believe a wonderful story about a young girl, an American hero who is rescued and saved in a spectacular operation? There was nothing wrong essentially with that story except that it wasn't the truth. But we ran with it and we believed it and we liked what we were hearing. (May 2, 2007)

Ridley makes some profound points about the power and allure of story here. He understands that the mere fact that the Jessica Lynch story was fiction doesn't mean that it didn't resonate powerfully and have an impact.

Earlier in this paper, I expressed my disappointment in some of what my research revealed. However, in addition to John Ridley's insight regarding the Jessica Lynch story, I found some other interesting thinking about the power and potential of story:

Daniel Taylor makes a fascinating point about story as he briefly dons his political scientists' hat, observing:

One reason the civil rights movement has wandered in recent decades is that we have moved from 'I have a dream' to 'I have a program.' Martin Luther King told stories; current leaders cite statistics. Stories engage both the heart and the head and move people to action. Statistics elicit counterstatistics and move people to argue. Stories demand a response (that is, responsibility); statistics encourage a rebuttal. (72)

In her book Corporate Legends and Lore: The Power of Storytelling as a Management Tool, Peg. C. Neuhauser writes:

Stories have been used by every culture ever studied for thousands of years as the primary communication tool for transmitting cultural values and rules for behavior. Stories are used to teach the young, reward the people who live up to the value and rules of society, and punish those who violate those values and rules. Without storytelling, any culture - whether it is a traditional tribe or a large corporation - would have a very difficult time protecting and passing on the best of its culture. (13/14)

Neuhauser's book is designed to help mangers use story to improve their efficacy and performance, and as such, it is certainly utilitarian, but she resists falling into the sort of proscriptive and overly simplistic lists and just-add-water recipes that I feel Denning and some others are peddling. She seems to understand and respect story and its potential for both good and for harm.

Bruce Jackson, a State University of New York Distinguished Professor at the University of Buffalo, simply and directly addresses the role of story in our lives writing in The Antioch Review:

Ordinary life is disorderly, cluttered, and full of things that don't seem to make a great deal of sense. It's in our stories that things make sense. Stories are how we know things and how we remember them. History is a story about the past that filters the endless details of reality through an idea. The idea lets us toss some things out and bring other things into sharp focus. What historians do for a living the rest of us do all the time. We organize the events of our lives in terms of these narratives. These stories are not just file cabinets or movies of ordinary life; they are also the devices with which we explain and justify ourselves to ourselves and to others. (305)

Writing once again in The Antioch Review five years after having written the article quoted above, Jackson once again considers story, writing:

We live in a world of stories. We tell them to ourselves and to other people, other people tell them to us, we experience them when we encounter radio, television, movies, magazines, and newspapers. We make up stories about what we are going to do when we apply for research grants, and we write stories about what we've done or want people to think we've done when we report on how we spent the grant money. The opening and closing statements of attorneys in court are stories, core religious information in literate and nonliterate cultures is embedded in stories, we amuse ourselves, account for ourselves, and identify ourselves with stories. (9)

His notions of identifying and accounting for ourselves with stories speaks to the primary role that story plays in our lives. I'll close with one last argument for the power of story.

Paul Zoltowski, Paul Donnelley, Jeffrey McCourt, Bob Jaycox, Seth Woodward, Benjamin Woodward II, Deborah Colky, Danny Trawinski, Richard Pearlman, and; companion animals Rusty, Sheltie, Tess, Pouncer, Spooner, Rocky, and Buddy. All of these dearly departed people and animals are kept alive through the healing power of story. Even people I've never met, like Tommy and Ignacio Almada live on through the stories my wife, mother-in-law, and brothers and sisters-in-law tell.

What can bring people back from the dead? Story can.

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