No Story, No Fans is available on Amazon as an e-book

If I don’t have a story, I won’t have fans. I believe Raf Stevens when he delivers this message in dozens of ways, through dozens of captivating stories and through concrete steps to find and deliver that story. I believe him because I know what he says is true. I know it in the only way one can truly know anything, through direct experience.

I wish I had had a copy of No Story, No Fans when I was floundering to reinvent myself as an organizational narrative consultant (aka community developer, though that’s not how I thought of myself). Annette Simmons held my hand, with her Story Factor. David Armstrong led me too, with his Managing By Storying Around.

Mostly I felt like a lonely charlatan, waving the flag of storytelling without really knowing how to make the leap from performing storyteller to organizational narrative consultant. I managed, and even succeeded, but it was a scary journey.

Earning trust by demonstrating it

Things are different now. A lot of books and Web sites explore what storytelling means within the context of defining a vision, conveying it, and trying to turn it into sales. And sales are obviously important. A company with fabulous stories that operates in the red is going to sink.

Raf talks a lot about trust. That’s what his subtitle refers to: “Build Your Business through Stories that Resonate. Using the power of corporate storytelling to create loyal customers, fans, and friends.”

He earned my trust right off the bat. In an era of smartphones, I don’t even carry a cell phone. When I’m away from my right arm, er, computer, I don’t want a leash. So when I clicked on the PDF of Raf’s book and saw all the QR codes, I bristled. “Oh, yeah. He’s going to make me feel like an outsider.”

I was wrong. If I’d had a smartphone, I could have pointed it at those squiggly squares and called up fascinating Web sites. Instead, I accidentally moved the cursor over the first one and was startled by a dialog box asking me if I trusted the link or wanted to block it.

That Raf Stevens! So smart. He wanted even semi-Luddites like me to enter the realm of wonder. I ended up clicking on every link. Darn you, Raf Stevens! I’m busy. I don’t have time for all this Web wandering, but your links were so good I was afraid I’d regret not clicking on any one of them.

So here I am, weeks after accepting Raf’s invitation to download his book in exchange for a review, just starting to formulate a response to a book that makes me want to rewind the clock and re-start my consulting career with No Story, No Fans in hand.

A generous book

One thing that leaps out for me, in reading the book, is generosity. Raf gives a lot away. Stories, links, ideas, tips, resources. He just keeps dishing them out, some within the text itself and others a click away. By the time I start Part I: Trading Stories, I’m already feeling as if I’ve stumbled onto a gift exchange. He has already demonstrated his advice to first give something away, to engage emotionally, and to promote trust by promoting other people’s stories.

Partway through Chapter 2, “Flipping Your Script!”, two sentences stop me in my tracks:

Most communication nowadays fails to connect and is not trustworthy because it is too descriptive of situations and facts instead of sharing actual stories about what occurred. That is the script that needs flipping.

I think maybe Raf got hold of the first reports I did for clients when I started my community development career. I was so afraid they would find out I was really a storyteller in consultant’s clothing they wouldn’t trust my work. I overwhelmed them with numbers and facts and insider language so they could see I knew what I was doing.

Only thing was, it was never the heavyweight data that worked. It was always the stories. I could have spared a lot of trees if I’d had Raf’s book to hold my hand while I was learning the ropes.

So I feel like cheering when he writes:

It is tempting to continue to use terms like internal branding, positioning, brand voice, brand identity and so on, while explaining the power of story and storytelling in relation to brand and organizations. Many business leaders are more familiar with these terms than they are with storytelling. Storytelling is for wimps, right? But I am not giving in. We need to flip the script!

Make room for this book

Raf doesn’t try to impose one good model of storytelling. Instead, through dozens of examples, some solid advice, and some well-formulated tips, he encourages readers to find their own storytelling voices. That makes the book useful to a wide range of audiences in both the corporate and non-profit worlds. The book will hold an important place alongside books by Annette Simmons, Stephen Denning, Peter Guber, and Lori Silverman, but it will occupy its own niche.

The field of storytelling books has a lot of entries these days, but No Story, No Fans proves not only was there room for one more. There was a need for this book.

[Note: You can read the first part free on the Web site.]

Children's museum tug of war, Photo by Paul J. Everett, Flickr Creative Commons

I’ve been listening to politicians from the left and right as they tell their versions of debt in the U.S. The right insists no agreement is possible without a constitutional amendment capping debt. The left insists no agreement is possible without raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy. Each side claims the other’s story is a false interpretation of the way things really work.

I confess bias toward the left. The gap between rich and poor in the U.S. is the worst in the world, and it keeps on widening. The trickle-down story, where leaving money in the hands of corporations and the wealthiest ensures jobs for everyone else, has proven fictional but still has incredible staying power.

It’s clear the U.S. needs a new and healthier story of how government should function in a democratic society. The minimal-government right is suspicious of anything that gives power to those not in the producing sector, as if roads, hospitals, schools, libraries, and parks were not of benefit to everyone. They are suspicious of all regulations, as if industry would, on its own, stop polluting our streams, land and air and poisoning our bodies.

No side has a corner on The One True Story. Life is far too complex for that. However, it seems to me that any country in which the predominant story is focused more on accumulation of wealth than on egalitarian principles is doomed to failure.

An article published on Oakland Local last December said of the need for viable stories, “In a world so out of balance, we need landmarks and milestones to help us see the way forward. Narrative is like a series of virtual cairns that help us stay on the path.”

May the U.S. build new cairns before once again bringing the world to its financial knees.

Related reading:

• Canada’s Rich Forget to Trickle Their Money Down

Recently I had a chance to be one of three people exploring storytelling as a healing art. Russ Dionne showed up to videotape the session. The café’s white noise was a non-stop rumble, but the videos (Artists Celebrate the Creative Spirit through the Gift of Storytelling) have value for anyone interested in personal narrative. I am a firm believer that everyone on the planet has stories worth hearing. That’s the seed I was planting in my part of the program.

Parts of the talk I’ve written about on Story Route: Exquisite silence about the way the room goes still when we fall under the enchantment of a story. Digging in the treasure box of memories about the role of stories as we age.

Most of the talk was related to my current focus, which is on the narrative legacy that is the most valuable bequest we can leave behind. Every time I move (and I seem to do that a lot), I shed “stuff”. What I never leave behind are the years of letters, photographs, journals, and digital backups. They’re what I would grab in an emergency, what I would mourn if they were lost.

People are fond of saying, “I could write a book…”, as if writing were a snap, something they could dash off and will some day. My challenge to the people at the café, and to anyone who harbours that dream, is to chain the muse to the desk and get the job done. Today is a good day to start.

Some of my favorite companions on the personal-stories journey might inspire you too:

• Hannah Hinchman, whose A Life in Hand: Creating the Illuminated Journal transformed my journal keeping from a litany of woe to a celebration of each day’s gifts
• Patti Digh, whose Life Is a Verb: 37 Days to Wake Up, Be Mindful, and Live Intentionally is a visual delight, a reading treasure, and a source of inspiration
• Carolyn Heilbrun, whose Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty gave me the quote that inspired me to start Catching Courage http://catchingcourage.com : “Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledged—desires that now seem possible. Women can catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend.”
• Christina Baldwin, Storycatcher: Making Sense Of Our Lives through the Power and Practice Of Story is a volume I dip into repeatedly, always finding ideas that stir my thinking.

I hope you’re all gathering and sharing the stories that are uniquely yours. Only you can create the legacy of your time here on the planet.

A toy is an empty space, waiting for a child to fill it with stories. Photo from nerissa's ring Flickr photostream

The brown-eyed five-year-old proudly held up her new doll. As always, I asked what her new companion’s name was. You’ll know this was a while back when I tell you her response: “Strawberry Shortcake”.

Children in the K-3 school where I spent my last two years as a school librarian loved to show off their new doll, plastic duck, stuffed animal, or train engine. I always oohed and ahed appropriately, and I always asked what they had named it. I can’t remember a single time when they had given it a name they hadn’t heard in a commercial for it.

I’d never had children, but I figured not re-naming toys gave story-making power to the corporations that created them. My job was to return that power to the children.

“Does she have another name? A special name you gave her?”

“No. She’s Strawberry Shortcake.”

“What does she like to eat? What’s her favourite game? Does she sleep in her shoes? Does she wear her t-shirts inside out?”

Question by question, I’d encourage the children to create a story about their new toy. Give it character, eccentricities, preferences, secrets only the child could know. Some gave up quickly. They couldn’t imagine a life for the toy that existed outside the confines of the marketing story. I was sad for them but hoped all the stories they heard during their library visits would fill them with enough colourful details to stir their imaginations.

Others entered into the game, whether quickly or reluctantly. After they had answered a dozen questions, I’d say to them, “That doesn’t sound like a Strawberry Shortcake (or whatever other name they’d given). Ask her if she has another name she likes better, a name that is hers alone, a name she’d like you to call her.”

For the children, the new names became signals for the toys’ stories. For me, they were a way to combat the weighty power of marketing by encouraging children to believe in the power of their own story-making abilities. They were born with them, but advertising had been having its way with them, robbing them of some of their belief in their own creativity.

My insistence on children’s giving names and stories to their toys was a tiny gesture in the big scheme of things. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

“Where your talents and the needs of the world cross lies your calling.” ~ Aristotle

From eavesdropping to storytelling

One advantage of being a quiet, well-behaved child was that I could listen for hours to stories not meant for young ears. I could color or play with dolls while adults within earshot spun tales about betrayals, triumphs, furtive meetings, secrets. I never tired of the stories and stored them away in my heart.

I didn’t think of their hold on me as a calling until I was in my thirties. I credit a kindergartener with helping me see I could turn that fascination into a career. Her rapt attention as I told a story to her class threw me headlong into storytelling, first as a school librarian and then through twists and turns in my professional life.

I discovered I could take the stories I’d heard, read or lived and give them back and that sometimes people listening to or reading the stories found a measure of healing in them. I also learned I could nudge people, and even organizations, to believe in the power of their own stories to heal themselves, others, their communities.

Finding healing in stories

Isak Dinesen is often quoted as saying, "All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell them as a story." (Photo of Cathryn in Queenstown, New Zealand)

In Storytelling: Imagination and Faith William Bausch nailed my calling in two sentences: “When a man [sic] comes to you and tells you your own story, you know that your sins are forgiven. And when you are forgiven, you are healed.”

When I began to contemplate sharing stories in the public sphere of blogs, I chose this quote from Carolyn Heilbrun, in Last Gift of Time, to guide me: “Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledged—desires that now seem possible. Women can catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend.”

Though both quotes are gender specific, I re-write them in my mind to include any hearts that vibrate when touched by stories.

A legacy of stories

My calling is to create a legacy of stories. I’ve done that in many ways during my meandering career as teacher, librarian, storyteller, farmer, musician, rancher, consultant, community developer. Now I’m doing it as a writer, primarily through three blogs: Catching Courage, Story Route, and Crossroads.

Stories are the one thing of value I can pass on. Not just my own stories but others that inspire and teach me. I write and tell stories because they have the power to stitch together sorrows, passions, joys, and confusions. I piece them together to lay a quilt of comfort over a wounded world.

In a 1990 interview with Common Boundary magazine, Alice Walker said, “Stories differ from advice in that, once you get them, they become a fabric of your whole soul. That is why they heal you.”

And so I write—and occasionally tell—stories. They are my most valuable possessions, my life’s calling. This is where I find meaning, working to create a healing legacy of stories.

“If we look upon our experiences as assets, we must manage to preserve or transfer those assets to other people before we die or they dissolve in the grave with us.” Phyllis Theroux, The Journal Keeper

Calling Dream Kit contest:
You can follow the blog tour on the What’s Your Calling? Facebook Page. Subscribe for a chance to win a Calling Dream Kit including $200 in Amazon.com gift credit to buy supplies you’ll need as you pursue your calling, a DVD and poster of The Calling, and an hour of coaching to help plan your project and the chance to share your calling with the community.

What’s Your Calling? explores notions of “calling” from both religious and secular perspectives, or what people feel most passionate about doing with their lives – and why.

Two of my personal favorites on this wonderful site are:

• Poet Ruth Forman on The Power and Magic of Language, who says: “Have the courage to address those things inside of you that you’re afraid to address. So, for instance, as a writer, have the courage to write about those things that you’re afraid to write about, that you wouldn’t even want to admit to yourself because if you can conquer that in yourself, you can probably conquer everything else that’s going on around you.”
• T.J. Anderson, talented composer who says in Any man or woman in a bathtub can give you a tune, “The reason people doubt is they’re seeking perfection. I sought to be the best I could be at a particular time and am still seeking that.”

We all know the headlines: Devastating earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan. Floods in Australia. Tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan. Protests in Egypt. Civil war in Libya. Acidification and plastic pollution of our oceans. Peak oil. Climate change. Drought. Hunger. Disease. Fear. Violence. Corruption.

So I was pulled up short when Liz Weir, a dear friend and one of the best storytellers on the planet, sent this to me:

You storytellers know how to describe peace. We need you more than ever.

I am a journalist. I get paid for writing about wars and other disasters.

You storytellers know the truth behind what we other people think is the
truth.

Tell us all about it!

Winfried Dulisch

Winfried is a talented writer and musician. He is also an astute critic. He has experienced the spell of Liz’s stories. He understands that in the space between words and listeners something important happens. And that something is truth.

Not the capital T kind that True Believers of any ilk use as a club. More the subtle kind of truth that sneaks up on us and startles us into awareness.

So many times I’ve been jolted upright by a story. Epiphanies emerge from folk tales, myths, and legends. They rise out of history, family stories, and dinner conversation. And, yes, they pop up in the news.

Just this past week I’ve been reminded of that. Bombarded by death, loss, destruction and war, I have found refreshment in the well of stories.

When workers at the Fukushima nuclear plant began exposing themselves to dangerous levels of radiation, I remembered the story Dr. Wangari Maathai told in the movie Dirt! While all the animals of the forest fled a raging fire, the hummingbird flew back and forth, filling her beak with water, pouring it on the fire. She persisted when the other animals mocked her puny efforts. Matthai said she will be like the hummingbird: “I will do the best I can.”

A video about factory farming plunged me into despair, but another about a dog who would not leave his injured canine pal buoyed me. The two friends were rescued by compassionate volunteers. The injured dog was taken to the vet, the faithful pal to a no-kill shelter. The video went viral, and money poured in to help other animals in need of rescue.

A couple days ago Dayna from Bella Coola sent me the link to Singing Our Treasures Back to Life. She cautioned me to start at the bottom, with the first entry, and work my way up. The blog has only a few entries, every one of them powerful.

Six young men from the Heiltsuk community traveled from Bella Bella, British Columbia, to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The young men brought the spirit of the Heiltsuk people to objects taken from their land long ago. Their intent was “to sing these treasures back to life”.

The whole account is deeply moving. I will never again look at items in a museum in quite the same way. And so I take to heart this message from the blog:

“Please carry this story with you. It’s your story now, and I want you to share it. Celebrate with us. We uphold you and uplift you – you have witnessed something that is of great importance to us. The strength of our story, like the strength of our people, will not diminish. We hold it in a sacred space within us – a space of narrative, memory and language – a space of touch and sound and light – a space that is shared between all of us, and you, and everyone who reads this. We will remain strong together.”

Strong together. Yes. That’s it. Our world’s not just a sorry old place. It is mysterious and beautiful. Our lives have meaning. For every act of corruption, violence or betrayal, there are thousands more of generosity, love or compassion.

We must tell those stories. We must live those stories. We must pass them on.

Stories are a sacred legacy.

Stories are our truth.

As we were watching films about corporate greed, environmental degradation, and white-collar crime, a 9.0 earthquake was shaking the earth and changing the lives of tens of thousands of people in Japan. The fourth Fukushima nuclear reactor is spewing radiation as I type.

So this visual metaphor from a talented designer is timely and deserves a wide audience.

Based loosely on Rafe Martin‘s adaptation of a Japanese folktale, Roopaantar tells the story of a young man who enters a forest and falls in love with a mysterious young woman.

She goes with him to the city, but the destruction of the forest spells death to the tree spirit she is. The young man’s tears bring the tree back to life. In death he rejoins his love.

Pandey ends her short film with a quote from William Blake:

A tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.

Share this one with your friends, and send thanks to Radha Pandey.

The full title was “Stories, Neuroscience and Experimental Technologies (STORyNET): Analysis and Decomposition of Narratives in Security Contexts.” The hosting agency was the Defense Sciences Office (DSO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Here’s the description:

This workshop is intended as a precursor to exploring the neurobiological mechanisms which undergird narrative processing so as to establish fertile ground for connecting our understanding of the neuropsychology of stories with models, simulations and sensors salient to security concerns. To this end, the workshop will focus on surveying theories of narrative, understanding what role they play in security domains, and establishing the state of the art in story analysis and decomposition frameworks.

If you remember Orwell’s 1984, you may recognize an unnerving similarity to the Ministry of Truth and its Fiction Department. One of the first things the novel’s government had to do was normalize a new language. Newspeak turned ordinary stories on their head.

Wandering through the DARPA Web site, where war is normalized as nothing more alarming than business strategizing, I got to thinking about George W. Bush on “weapons of mass destruction”, Sarah Palin putting cross hairs on the districts of pro-health care reform Democrats or the Harper government’s decision to scrap the long-form census because it was “coercive and intrusive”.

What all three examples have in common is a defective story with serious ramifications. Soldiers and civilians continue to die in Iraq. Palin supports powerful forces working to keep Americans from having universal health care. The Harper government’s decision to scrap the longer census means there will be inadequate information on which to base policy and funding decisions. When questioned about their actions, Bush, Palin and Harper all created new stories to explain how right they were.

George Orwell explained how it works in his appendix to 1984, “Principles of Newspeak”:

When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one’s knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable.

I believe in the power of story but acknowledge its knife cuts both ways. We owe it to our children and to the seventh generation to avoid Newspeak, to tell stories that shed light, that inform, that inspire and that, ultimately, lead to a better world.

Tell to Win focuses on “purposeful” stories. These are stories with a mission, not just entertaining anecdotes. Guber writes, “They cleverly contain information, ideas, emotional prompts, and value propositions that the teller wants to sneak inside the listener’s heart and mind.”

Having stumbled into the field of organizational narrative many years ago, I jumped at the chance to review the book. Developing my own practice, I’ve learned from a string of intelligent, articulate practitioners. So I’m happy to report this new entry in the cannon lives up to expectations.

For one thing, it’s fun. That’s high praise. A book that doesn’t capture my interest quickly joins the pile of books I sample and pass on. This one kept me reading to the last page. I laughed, shuddered, and nodded my head as Guber spun tales of Michael Jackson’s mouse-devouring snake, Michael Milken’s “Keep dad in the game” campaign, and the New Guinean tribesmen’s plan to protect their tourists from the 9/11 terrorists.

Anyone with Peter Guber’s breadth of life experience has fascinating stories to tell, but not everyone knows how to relay them. Guber does. If the book were only a collection of his memories, it would win a place on my shelf. But Tell to Win is more than that because the author has stopped to analyze why the stories he tells, and the best he hears, are so powerfully effective.

He did not just rely on his own considerable powers of observation. He questioned people whose training and experience he could trust, people like Robert Rosen, Dan Siegel, Steven Denning, and many more. He hosted conversations at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, where he is a full professor. And then he reflected, synthesized, and wrote.

The result of this thorough examination will lead even the most tentative storyteller to become more adept at engaging an audience. Tell to Win starts with the “why” and leads readers through the “how”, illustrating every point and every technique with compelling stories—the kind of purposeful stories Guber believes are game changers.

These stories are game changers because they have a purpose. They are not just entertaining stories, though that is a pre-requisite. They are stories that climb into the hearts and minds of listeners, planting a seed that can grow into action.

When asked if people who aren’t natural storytellers can learn the skill, Guber replied: “Every single person who has watched television, gone to a movie, read a book, listened to a speech, read a newspaper, talked to their family is a story listener. You just turn it on its head and recognize that the same tools for listening done the other way are for telling.”

Tell to Win demonstrates this premise from the first story to the last. Along the way Guber reveals what goes into a good story, how to tell it compellingly, how to connect with an audience, and how to motivate action. Whatever sector you work in, the book will help you learn how to do what the subtitle promises: “Connect, persuade, and triumph with the hidden power of story.”

Peter Guber, Chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment Group, has been a force in the entertainment industry for over thirty years. He has told memorable stories in the films he personally produced or executive produced, including Rain Man, Batman, The Color Purple, Gorillas In The Mist, and Flashdance which have resonated with audiences all over the world, earning over three billion dollars worldwide and garnering more than 50 Academy Award nominations. Guber oversees one of the largest combinations of professional baseball teams and venues nationwide and is the owner and co-executive chairman of the Golden State Warriors.