"Boje does not reflect trends, he is among those who set them" - Hervé Corvellec, Department of Service Management, Lund University "How can I know what I think until I see what David Boje says? What he says about storytelling will forever change what we thought we knew about stories. With remarkable control over a complex argument, Boje recovers, re-punctuates, and re-animates a world of narrative and sensemaking that we have previously taken for granted!" - Karl E. Weick, Rensis Likert Distinguished University Professor of Organizational Behavior and Psychology,Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan "Few people understand stories and storytelling as well as David Boje. It is a measure of Boje′s success as a theorist that the word story can never reclaim the innocence and simplicity it once enjoyed. Nor, with the benefit of his work, can organizations be viewed as spaces which occasionally or incidentally spawn stories. Boje′s eagerly awaited book forces us to question many of our assumptions about storytelling; it also demands that we revise several of our assumptions about what organizations are" - Yiannis Gabriel, The School of Management, Royal Holloway University of London "Our company is made up of lots of stories. We′ve found that ′stories′ get told and retold and become the fabric of an organization. ′Policies′ lay unread in the company handbook or training manual. David Boje taught me the value of stories in an organization. Stories are the ′oil′ that makes the gears work. How do you get your message heard in an organization with thousands of people? David Boje taught me the value of telling stories at Stew Leonard′s!" - Stew Leonard Jr., Stew Leonard Organization "David Boje is one of the world′s leading authorities on storytelling. His work has influenced a generation of organizational theorists and students. He not only provides new ways of understanding organizations but also provides fresh insights into the way in which stories function to provide meanings" - Heather Höpfl, University of Essex The idea of organizations using `storytelling′ to make sense of themselves and their environment has generated a lot of excitement. Written by the leading scholar in this field, David Boje explores how narrative and storytelling is an important part of an organization′s strategy, development and learning processes. With excellent examples from Nike, McDonald′s and Disney, readers are shown how the theory that underpins organizational storytelling connects with storytelling in everyday organizational life. David Boje′s theories and ideas in relation to the study of storytelling in organizations are highly influential and this book will be a `must have′ for any student or scholar interested in the area.

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.

Don't simply show your data—tell a story with it! Storytelling with Data teaches you the fundamentals of data visualization and how to communicate effectively with data. You'll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story. The lessons in this illuminative text are grounded in theory, but made accessible through numerous real-world examples—ready for immediate application to your next graph or presentation. Storytelling is not an inherent skill, especially when it comes to data visualization, and the tools at our disposal don't make it any easier. This book demonstrates how to go beyond conventional tools to reach the root of your data, and how to use your data to create an engaging, informative, compelling story. Specifically, you'll learn how to: Understand the importance of context and audience Determine the appropriate type of graph for your situation Recognize and eliminate the clutter clouding your information Direct your audience's attention to the most important parts of your data Think like a designer and utilize concepts of design in data visualization Leverage the power of storytelling to help your message resonate with your audience Together, the lessons in this book will help you turn your data into high impact visual stories that stick with your audience. Rid your world of ineffective graphs, one exploding 3D pie chart at a time. There is a story in your data—Storytelling with Data will give you the skills and power to tell it!

This book highlights storytelling as a concrete and viable method which can be used in various operational fields in organizations: from change management to project management and knowledge management, it presents employees’ stories on past projects and the diverse, essential aspects of corporate culture they reveal, in an easy-to-comprehend and entertaining fashion. These stories focus on specific but generic experiences which can be adapted and exploited by the reader to ultimately tap into hidden knowledge and increase transparency during daily routines in his or her own organization. Knowledge managers, coaches, and strategists alike will find a 'real-life' connection through these stories, helping them improve their own storytelling methods. The book also provides exhaustive information on the latest storytelling methods and strategies. ​The adaptations Thier has made to bring learning histories to corporate settings accelerates the capture, flow, and application of organizational knowledge that speeds up changes to improve operations! George Roth (Principal Research Associate at MIT Sloan School of Management, Boston, United States)

Pioneering thinker in organizational communication David Boje here compiles a collection of new essays on the theme of ‘antenarrative,’ or non-linear narrative, as applied to organizations and business, bringing together different approaches and philosophical interpretations of the concept.

This book is the story of how four busy executives, from different backgrounds and different perspectives, were surprised to find themselves converging on the idea of narrative as an extraordinarily valuable lens for understanding and managing organizations in the twenty-first century. The idea that narrative and storytelling could be so powerful a tool in the world of organizations was initially counter-intuitive. But in their own words, John Seely Brown, Steve Denning, Katalina Groh, and Larry Prusak describe how they came to see the power of narrative and storytelling in their own experience working on knowledge management, change management, and innovation strategies in organizations such as Xerox, the World Bank, and IBM. Storytelling in Organizations lays out for the first time why narrative and storytelling should be part of the mainstream of organizational and management thinking. This case has not been made before. The tone of the book is also unique. The engagingly personal and idiosyncratic tone comes from a set of presentations made at a Smithsonian symposium on storytelling in April 2001. Reading it is as stimulating as spending an evening with Larry Prusak or John Seely Brown. The prose is probing, playful, provocative, insightful and sometime profound. It combines the liveliness and freshness of spoken English with the legibility of a ready-friendly text. Interviews will all the authors done in 2004 add a new dimension to the material, allowing the authors to reflect on their ideas and clarify points or highlight ideas that may have changed or deepened over time.

"The Storytelling Non-Profit is a portable consultant for fundraisers, communicators and executive directors who want to tell great stories. In this book, professionals will learn a process for telling a story that inspires and resonates with a target audience."--Back cover.

Once upon a time the practice of storytelling was about collecting interesting stories about the past, and converting them into soundbite pitches. Now it is more about foretelling the ways the future is approaching the present, prompting a re-storying of the past. Storytelling has progressed and is about a diversity of voices, not just one teller of one past; it is how a group or organization of people negotiates the telling of history and the telling of what future is arriving in the present. With the changes in storytelling practices and theory there is a growing need to look at new and different methodologies. Within this exciting new book, David M. Boje develops new ways to ask questions in interviews and make observations of practice that are about storytelling the future. This, after all, is where management practice concentrates its storytelling, while much of the theory and method work is all about how the past might recur in the future. Storytelling Organizational Practices takes the reader on a journey: from looking at narratives of past experience through looking at living stories of emergence in the present to looking at how the future is arriving in ways that prompts a re-storying of the past.

This workbook is an interactive guide for leaders and managers to help you tell compelling stories at work. The Organizational Storytelling Workbook offers: a critical engagement with academic debates on organizational storytelling; and a series of exercises designed to allow users to improve their capability as organizational storytellers. The text begins with a chapter which locates organizational storytelling within a critical account of organizational cultures. This book argues that managerial accounts of organizational culture offer a limited appreciation of the ways in which people think, feel and act and suggests storytelling as a means of redeeming our understanding of all matters cultural. Having secured this new appreciation of culture and storytelling the workbook develops a series of maxims and exercises designed to allow users: (a) to improve their storytelling practice; and (b) to reassess the cultural assumptions and priorities revealed through their practice. Enriched with interactive features to walk managers practically through the process of improving their storytelling skills, including practical exercises, contemplative questions, and space to respond creatively to the ideas in the book, this workbook is the perfect companion to any executive or postgraduate course in storytelling as well as a useful and enjoyable companion to any individual manager that wishes to improve their skills.

Storytelling in organizations is a notion that encompasses both the stories that the organization produces and the ones told by its members. It provides both an in-depth treatment of the literature on narratives, stories and storytelling and an extensive empirical case from an American banking institution.