By Paul Furiga
In the last several weeks, Peter Guber, Chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment, has been on a media campaign to support the publishing of his new book, Tell to Win.
In a Harvard Business Review blog and in numerous interviews, Guber drives home his view that if CEOs and corporate leaders aren’t sharing the company story with every stakeholder group, especially in tough times, “someone else will write their future. That usually leads to a story with an unhappy ending.”
Guber, who is also an owner and co-executive chairman of the Golden State Warriors, and a professor at UCLA, is a longtime champion of storytelling. He has the credibility of employing this powerful strategic tool in numerous situations and at more than one company. Why is it that so few corporate leaders (and their communicators) understand the power of this ageless tool?
It probably has a lot to do with the current fascination with the tools of communication as opposed to communication itself. Today, the rage is social media, which is merely a means of communicating, not a replacement for communication itself.
In the 1970s, according to business historian Richard S. Tedlow’s excellent latest book, Denial, the tool of fascination at IBM was personal overhead projectors that allowed the status-conscious IBM executive of the day to convene meetings and run slide decks from their massive wood desks. If you didn’t have a personal overhead, well, you didn’t rank.
Guber is what we at WordWrite have dubbed a fluent storyteller. In our work developing our own successful process for storytelling, called StoryCrafting, we have learned that three elements are essential for storytelling success in business: an authentic story, a fluent storyteller and a commitment to continually “read the audience” to make sure that whoever needs to see, hear or experience your story is fully engaged.
Guber is the real deal — someone who is practicing these principles from the CEO’s office, where all good storytelling should begin. If you’re interested in learning more about the practice of StoryCrafting, click here to review some of the tools we use here at WordWrite to help our clients share their great, untold stories.
And let us know how your organization is practicing storytelling. As Guber suggests, only you and your organization can share the story in a way that guarantees a happy ending.
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Paul Furiga is president and CEO of WordWrite Communications.
