Archive for the ‘Notable Quotes’ Category
Organizational Storytelling
Organizational storytelling aims to make organizations aware of the stories that exist within their walls-and then to use those stories in pursuit of organizational goals. One of the founders of the movement is Steve Denning, an Australian who began his career as lawyer in Sydney and later became a midlevel executive at the World Bank. “I was a left brain person,” he says. “Big organizations love that kind of person.”
Then one day, in a World Bank shake-up, he was booted from a job he loved and banised to the organizational equivalent of Siberia: a department known as “knowledge management,” corporate jargon for how a company organizes its vast reserves of information and experience. Denning became the department’s chief. And-grudgingly at first-he underwent a transformation. (Sounds like a hero’s journey, doesn’t it?) As he sought to understand what the World Bank knew-that is, what knowledge required management-Denning discovered that he learned more from trading stories in the cafetaria that he did from reading the bank’s official documents and reports. An organization’s knowledge, he realized, is contained in its stories. And that meant that if he was really going to be the top knowledge hocho at the bank, he had to go well beyond the L-directed lawyer exceutive approach he’d learned in the first twenty-five years of his career. So he made the World Bank a leader in knowledge management by making it a pioneer in using stories to contain and convey knowledge.
Source: A whole new mind/ by Daniel H. Pink (p. 105-106)
Why is so much of our life spent inside stories?
I am currently reading Robert McKee’s Story. In its very first chapter, he discussed why story is very inseparable from human life (pp. 11-12).
Day after day we seek an answer to the ageless question Aristotle posed in Ethics: How should a human being lead his life?
Traditionally humankind has sought the answer to Aristotle’s question from the four wisdoms – philosophy, science, religion, art- taking insight from each to bolt together a livable meaning. But today who reads Hegel or Kant without an exam to pass? Science, once the great explicator. garbles life with complexity and perplexity. Who can listen without cynicism to economists, sociologists, politicians? Religion, for many, has become an empty ritual that masks hypocrisy. As our faith in traditional ideologies diminishes, we turn to the source we still believe in: the art of story.
