The Corporate Storyteller:
A Writing Manual & Style Guide for the Brave New Business Leader
Elaine Stirling
The Corporate Storyteller: A Writing Manual & Style Guide for the Brave New Business Leader
Published by NoTreeBooks.com
Copyright © 2010 by Elaine R. Stirling
All rights reserved. Brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews are permitted.
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The Corporate Storyteller:
A Writing Manual & Style Guide for the Brave New Business Leader
Elaine Stirling
For my family, with love
Contents
Origins of The Corporate Storyteller
Chapter One: Create a Civilization of Leadership
Chapter Two: Three Steps to Everywhere
Chapter Three: Cultivate Vitality
Chapter Four: Clichés and Assumptions of the Industrial Age
Chapter Five: The Five Indispensable Talents
Chapter Six: Sentient Analysis
Chapter Seven: Structure of the Leader Mind
Chapter Eight: The Ten Intentions
Chapter Nine: “I’ve read The Corporate Storyteller. Now what?”
Appendix A: The Brave New Leader’s Communication Checklist
Appendix B: Organizing the Longer Document
This little book would not exist without the help and inspiration of many great souls, one of whom was my sixth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Chapman. Her grammar lessons were always lively, and I remember telling myself, “This is important. I need to listen.”
I want to thank all the corporate clients and adult learners who have entrusted me with their communication styles, allowing me to poke around and offer my admittedly biased opinions. Every time you challenged me, which was often and with good humor, another tiny portion of The Corporate Storyteller fell into place.
Thank you to Antonio Lovisi, who handed me class notes that he’d typed up and said, “You should turn this into a book,” to which I promptly replied, “Why would I want to do that?”
Words cannot convey my gratitude to friends and colleagues at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. Ed Carson, Janet Paine, Gillian Bartlett, and Lee Gowan are real-life models of leadership and generosity of spirit. You have given me opportunities I could never have dreamed of, and you listened when all I had were the vaguest notions of something that might, maybe, I really don’t know, work.
Thank you most of all to my indomitable family. Mom (I know you’re up there, smiling) and Dad, you kept a roof over this writer’s head for all the years she couldn’t do so for herself. Nick, after reading an early draft, you spoke from the heart and saved us tons of anguish. Ben, you rescued this techno-illiterate more times than I can count and never made me feel bad for asking. Thank you to my daughters-in-law, Erin and Jillian, for bringing joy to my sons; to my sister Lisa; to Kevin, Adrianne, Kara (my photographer), and Erik. No one should wish for a writer in their midst, but you guys have one, and you have shown her more love and support than she can ever hope to return. May The Corporate Storyteller serve as one small token in that direction.
Origins of The Corporate Storyteller
Strange things started happening in my corporate communication workshops a few years ago. I had brought in, as a case study in leadership, a letter from a CEO responding to the issue of lead paint found in his company’s toys. The letter had appeared on the corporate Web site and as a full-page ad in papers around the world. His choice of words, sentence structure, and tone was a dazzling illustration of integrity and the ownership of language. I remember thinking, “Wow, isn’t it great that we have business leaders like this to learn from!”
Then weeks passed, and product recalls started happening in other industries--pet food, sliced meats, condiments, and housewares--but leadership responses grew weaker and weaker. In some sectors, they disappeared altogether.
Next came the layoffs. Suddenly, there were so many case studies in “how not to lead” that I had trouble choosing. On corporate Web sites, voiceless, faceless bullet points took the place of CEO messages; font size on press release pages shrank to near invisibility. The following example from a company announcing the reduction of 24,600 employees was typical:
The reduction is part of XX’s plan to integrate recently acquired YYY, an acquisition made for the purpose of developing a comprehensive portfolio of IT solutions that help customers manage and transform their technology environments.
Acquisitional jargon had become so pervasive that no one was questioning its cut-and-paste nature. No one stood up to the passive sentence structure and lack of imagery to say, “Wait a minute. You’re not saying anything here.”
Passive sentences are ideal for creating a wall between writer and reader. An absence of personality in writing creates the illusion that no one is accountable.
Perhaps XX had cause for throwing up a wall. The computers they manufactured were crashing all over the place. Everyone I talked to who’d bought a new XX around that time experienced a complete wipe-out of their hard drive within days of purchase. Months later, they were still waiting for repairs or replacements, while XX’s online product presentation remained as glitzy and self-congratulatory as ever.
Another illustrative case study came from a major auto manufacturer that announced its first layoff of ten thousand employees. (This was in the pre-downturn era when five-figure numbers still had the capacity to shock.) On the very day that the announcement appeared in major newspapers, the CEO crowed on the corporate Web site about “the elimination of waste.” He was seeking to impress the new investors, of course, but Web sites are not boardrooms. What kind of leader believes that employees don’t read corporate Web sites, or that they won’t forward the link to family and friends, all of whom are potential customers? And if a CEO doesn’t possess that kind of awareness, who in the company does?
Here’s the other funny thing that happened in my workshop.
I used to ask participants at the beginning of every session to name one frustration they encountered over and over in business communication. The answers were pretty much what you’d expect them to be: unclear messages; aggressive tone; lack of direction; bad spelling; lousy grammar. Then one day, to save time, I asked them to discuss their frustration in small groups and present a collective answer. To my amazement, the answer from every table was the same, and it consisted of one word.
Fear.
It was an epiphanic moment.
For years, I’d been knocking my head against walls, trying to understand why intelligent, articulate people who know their jobs inside out write like Philistines. Fear, of course. Fear shuts down our higher centers and forces us to hide behind bullets, twitter-babble, and fonts too small to see.
What are we afraid of? Standing out, mostly; being noticed. We’re afraid of being heard and being read too closely. Language, which operates from a deep, unconscious level, is a great tool for staying hidden, if that’s what you want. Language will also support growth and innovation; it’s especially good for that. What a person can’t do with words is hide and persuade at the same time. You can’t lie to one group, demotivate another, and build loyalty in a third without eventually grinding things to a halt. There are fundamental reasons why you can’t.
The Corporate Storyteller is a writing manual and style guide for leaders who support innovation, growth, and authenticity. By leader, I mean anyone who is willing to do things first. It doesn’t matter where you sit on the org chart.
Of course, no one should attempt anything without a reasonable expectation for success, and being noticed gets uncomfortable really fast if results don’t start happening. So here are some other things you’ll want to know.
Everything you read in The Corporate Storyteller has been tested, challenged, applied, and refined by approximately one thousand business people in all sectors of industry. Improvements, they tell me, start happening within the first day, and the positive effects ripple throughout their organizations almost as fast. Some examples:
* Executive assistants transform the way their bosses write e-mails.
* Sales reps hear from customers within minutes instead of days.
* IT support teams, by communicating differently with users, experience fewer system crashes.
I hear stories of stress levels dropping. Clients enjoy personal growth and advancement that would never have happened, they say, with their old communication style.
The Corporate Storyteller has been designed to approximate a thirty-six-hour intensive business writing workshop. I will give you real-life examples (names and details changed) of what works, what doesn’t, and why. I will talk about the changes in business writing styles and where they began. You will find charts, tables, and easy-to-use techniques that you can apply right away and refer to later to keep your writing fresh.
My one recommendation is that you read The Corporate Storyteller from the beginning to the end rather than jumping around. The narrative style and lapses into metaphor are deliberate and will take you through careful stages of learning and unlearning. By the time you’ve finished your first quick easy read, you will view language, thought, and leadership differently. You won’t want to go back to the way you used to write because it will make no sense to do so.
Our world is in desperate need of brave new leadership. My fondest hope in offering The Corporate Storyteller is that you will recognize the brave new leader to be you.
Create a Civilization of Leadership
A long, long time ago, the ancients described communication as a river with three streams: written, spoken, and numeric. Each stream was considered sacred, another way of saying essential or necessary for life. If all three were not flowing freely, the ancients believed, a society couldn’t function.
Communication, the surviving texts tell us, was also broken down into levels. You had the surface meaning or the literal, and beneath were layers of subtext, all of which contributed to an inclusive, energetic whole.
Centuries passed; empires rose and fell. Over time, leaders convinced followers and eventually themselves that subtext didn’t matter. If we ignored layers of meaning, perhaps they would cease to exist.
“Give me the facts, ma’am. Just the facts.”
More recently, numbers were deemed to be the most important form of communication. “The dryer the statistics, the better,” said one Victorian gentleman, revered for his ability to push through unpopular legislation. What was spoken behind closed doors bore no resemblance to what was said outside, and the highest form of business writing was also the least comprehensible. Courses were set up to learn incomprehensible writing.
An ancient would take one look at the society we’ve created and say, “Well, no wonder it all came crashing down.”
Travel any bus or subway today during commuter rush hour, and you will see people crammed into seats or gripping ceiling straps, immersed in paperback novels. Yes, there are laptops and handhelds, but books, despite what tech media would have you believe, are actually becoming more visible.
Ask commuters why they read thrillers, romances, and classic literature en route to the office, and they will probably say something about escape. True enough. But the deeper truth is that people are magnetized toward story and always have been. Whether or not a story is “true” is irrelevant. We are attracted to flow and subtext, and where these are denied (like in the workplace) we feel starved. We reach in private moments for the streams and layers that a fiction author takes great care to develop.
I am here to tell you that it is absolutely possible to create flow and subtext in your business documents. You won’t be writing fiction, if that’s what you fear, but your writing will magnetize readers as if it were a story.
The Corporate Storyteller is primarily a writing manual, but we will also travel freely through spoken and numeric communication. The techniques you learn for e-mails will help you on the phone. Once you’re comfortable with structure, you will understand why numbers can’t take primacy in business communication. They have their place, of course, and you will know where that is.
The ultimate result is that you will contribute to a business where everyone leads and where friction is seen for what it is--wasted energy.
The three streams will become a flowing river again and. . . since we’re creating a new civilization anyway, we might as well have a pyramid.
The Pyramid of Ownership
Ours is called the Pyramid of Ownership. In the coming pages, we are going to climb it, beginning with the solid base of Intention, moving up to Document and Sentence Structure, and finally reaching the summit, Word Choice. From that peak with a view, we will descend the other side of the pyramid, returning in the final chapter to Intention.
You will know that you have explored the Pyramid of Ownership enough when you can account fully for every word you write--and in some cases, the words you shouldn’t have written.
Which brings us to Sarah. . .
Sarah is an account manager in a mid-size consulting firm. She is a top producer who travels for her job and communicates from a laptop and a handheld device. Sarah, like everyone you are going to meet in The Corporate Storyteller, is not a real person. She is a composite of frailties and strengths that are common to all of us.
Please read the following e-mails that Sarah sent over a period of eleven days to her colleague, George.
Monday
Hi George, could you send me the McMillan report ASAP. Thx. Sarah.
Wednesday
Hey George, did you get my earlier e-mail about the McMillan report?
The following Monday
Thx for the report. What I actually needed was full content, not summary, and I need it as a PDF. How soon can I expect it? S.
Thursday
I understand you’re busy on the expansion project, but my client expected deliverables two weeks ago, and now everything has been pushed back.
If you were George, how would you feel about Sarah? Seeing her name in the inbox, would you:
a) Jump to answer her e-mails?
b) Wait until replying suited you?
c) Accidentally hit delete?
d) A combination of the above.
Sarah brings revenue to the company, but she is not a leader. For every deal Sarah closes, she corrodes and reduces internal energy.
Corrosion, a contributing factor in profit and loss, cannot be measured. It’s like subtext that way. You can deny its presence, but that won’t make it go away.
Like rust, corrosion spreads; unchecked, it destroys.
Sarah is not, by nature, a nasty person. If I were to interview Sarah, asking her to defend her communication style, she might say something like:
“My job is to bring in clients. I deliver quickly and expect others to do the same. Should I give more thought to internal communication?
Probably, but I send out, on average, two hundred messages a day. You can only squeeze so much blood from a stone.”
“But what are your intentions?” I ask, noting her bloodless choice of cliché.
“Intentions? Uh. . . to close the deal, usually.”
“No, that’s a task. Intentions run deeper.”
Sarah blinks. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Most of us aren’t aware of our intentions, while our readers, on the other hand, are. Intention is perceived as tone, yet if you were to go around and ask everyone what they think of your tone, you’d be no further ahead. Intention sources from the inside, and there is only one intention that will never fail you.
Before we name it, let’s take a look at Sarah’s unconscious intention in each of her messages.
Hi George, could you send me the McMillan report ASAP. Thx. Sarah. [Intention: to get what Sarah wants]
Hey George, did you get my earlier e-mail about the McMillan report? [Intention: to get what Sarah wants again, with a slight nod toward benefit of the doubt]
Thx for the report. What I actually needed was full content, not summary, and I need it as a PDF. How soon can I expect it? S. [Intention: to push George and to make things a little bit his fault and not at all Sarah’s]
I understand you’re busy on the expansion project, but my client expected deliverables two weeks ago, and now everything has been pushed back. [Intention: to blame George]
Do you see the downward spiral? Do you see how everything Sarah says only makes things worse? She may write two hundred e-mails a day, shoulders hoisted impressively to her ears, and bring in a few bucks, but what she’s creating is friction. Sarah spends sixteen hours a day wasting energy.
What Sarah can do to change all of that--instantly--is to intend relationship.
To intend is action at the level of thought, a sort of pre-action, if you prefer.
Intending relationship is a highly refined application of thought. It is not idealism nor fluffy, touchy-feely stuff. It is the simple recognition that every iota of communication affects the relationship between writer and reader, speaker and listener. Intending relationship is an internal driving force that either creates, sustains, or strengthens how things are. There are no neutral messages; there are, however, many unconscious messengers.
Let’s imagine Sarah now as a brave new leader. She understands the power of intending relationship, so rather than a scattershot of four frustrating e-mails sent over days, she spends four minutes composing one.
Good morning George,
Do you remember the work we did together on the McMillan project? I’ve just met with some clients who are intrigued by our approach. If I can sell them on it, we have the potential of a huge new market.
I can’t find my copy. If you have the McMillan report, could you please send me the full version as a PDF? I’ll need it before September 20.
Hope all is going well with you!
Thanks,
Sarah
416-555-1234
If today were September 1, would George wait until the 20th to send Sarah the requested document? Probably not. It’s an easy request, and it always feels good to clear something off our plates. Odds are good that Sarah will receive the report right away.
Those are the surface reasons for George’s quick response. Down below, at the level of subtext, he answers readily because Sarah’s message contains warmth and sincerity. As living breathing organisms, we gravitate toward warmth. We recoil from its absence. So, placed in a business context, would you rather have your readers gravitate or recoil?
Intending relationship, however, is not an on-again, off-again venture. Sarah doesn’t practice sincerity some days and only with people she can get things from. That picking and choosing we’re all guilty of is another intention entirely.
The result of Sarah’s brave new leadership is that she now writes 75 percent fewer e-mails and receives exactly what she wants, well within her timeframes. The relationships in her department are strong; clients are happier; more deals are closing. The company president notices the spike in sales and the laughter and conversation that always seems to come from Sarah’s corner of the workplace. He’s curious to know her secret.
On low-energy days when Sarah feels tempted to fall back into old habits, she brings out three assumptions and props them in front of her computer. On the days they read like gibberish, she begins new documents by taking a walk.
Three Assumptions
Assumptions are operating systems based on belief. We all have these systems; we’re hardwired for them. What we believe and how it got there, people don’t necessarily question. We inherit belief systems from our family and our culture; over time, they become assumptions or what appear to be truth. They are a default setting.
When Sarah is not irritating George, she frequents the same upscale neighborhood coffee shop on weekend mornings as Harold. Sarah and Harold both have favorite beverages and their favorite chairs. Harold brings a scratch lottery ticket, which never wins him anything, and a copy of the Sun. He has worked all his life in retail.
After months of small talk, Sarah has a pretty good idea of Harold’s assumptions. They are: 1) people are essentially lazy and will slack off whenever your back is turned; 2) the system exists to beat you down, and your only hope is to beat the system; 3) the guys in charge are crooks.
There’s something deeply comforting about Harold’s belief system. It gives off a sort of “Don’t you worry, dear. None of this is your fault” hum.
Harold shows Sarah the headline about a CEO who resigned after his mortgage brokerage firm posted a $7.9 billion loss with a severance of $161.5 million. That’s one hundred, sixty one, and a half million dollars for performing badly. It would take a far, far nobler person than Harold, Sarah, or the author of this book to wish that CEO well during his tenure of joblessness.
So, given that a huge part of us wants to agree with Harold--yeah, guys in charge are crooks--what’s a well-intentioned person to do? How can you create, sustain, or strengthen relationship within a belief system that says, “Why bother? The whole lousy thing is corrupt anyway.”
The answer is that you can’t.
The good thing about assumptions, however, is that they can be rewritten. You can start at any moment from a different reality perception, and the results will change accordingly. Your efforts might feel wobbly at first, but practice and results lead to belief, and belief to life experience, just as Harold’s assumptions prove him right all the time.
Here is a truth. Despite our many differences, Harold, the CEO, and I walk the same earth. We are all going to leave this planet someday, and we can’t take anything with us.
From that reality, I can revise my assumptions to look like this:
1. Everyone wants to live a good life.
2. Everyone wants to do a good job.
3. The customer, colleague, or investor is a person no different from me.
These are the assumptions that Sarah props in front of her computer whenever she’s tempted to write like her old self. Some days, she has to stare at them a long while before their deep subtext reality surfaces. Over time, they become not second nature, but first. They replace her old assumptions.
We’ll leave Sarah now to craft her document. She begins, as she always does, with the Three Steps to Everywhere.
Chapter Two
If you could rely on a single thought pattern for every document you’ll ever write, how much easier would your work day become? It wouldn’t matter if you had never written a business plan and the board of directors needed one from you by Monday. Your coworker could move to Tahiti, with your boss throwing her jumbled draft report on your desk. No problem. You’d be able to sort it out or explain succinctly why that will never happen. Your e-mails would be answered promptly; your proposals would shine and get serious reads. You might even find the courage to introduce ideas you’ve been carrying around like secrets for years.
You will come to understand why the Three Steps work. If you are aware, as we go through explanations, of a little voice inside saying, “Yeah, but . . . ” that’s good. We will speak directly to that little voice later.
For now, let’s look at the steps.
Ignore the bolded columns on each side for the moment, and read the numbered steps over a few times. They total twenty-three words. I encourage you to memorize them like you did the alphabet and the multiplication tables. Read them out loud to yourself.
Now look at the words within the Three Steps that have been bolded and italicized:
I
You
I + you
What intrinsic order do you observe?
In “Create a Civilization of Leadership,” the first chapter, we defined intending relationship as a high-level application of thought. Here, we add a mathematical dimension to relationship. I extends to you and becomes we, in the same way that a point . . . extended to a second point . . . creates a line.
Relationship is a workplace fact. I can’t do what needs doing by myself, so I reach out to you, the reader, activating relationship, and together, with our combined efforts, result is achieved.
I + you = we.
We have just defined the left-hand column. I/you/we is an extrapolation of the Three Steps to Everywhere and is one of two easy ways to remember them. You can call the steps, for short, “I/you/we.”
Tom is the executive director of a non-profit organization that funds inner-city sports for kids. He’s a shrewd businessman who worked for years in finance until mergers and downsizing took their toll. Tom has a poster above his desk that shows pedestrians strolling arm-in-arm on a wet city street. They walk over soggy, tattered money. The caption reads:
Human interaction is our only real currency.
The poster reminds Tom never to send e-mails like this one.
Team:
Attached please find agenda of an all-staff compulsory meeting that will introduce a new fundraising campaign. The meeting will be held in the third-floor boardroom on Thursday, August 24 at 2:00 p.m. Please bring your ideas and be prepared to discuss.
Tom
Technically, the message follows the Three Steps to Everywhere.
1. Why I’m writing this (there’s going to be a meeting)
2. What you need to know (the topic, place, and time)
3. What I need from you and when (ideas and discussion)
If conformity, no progress, and wasted time are Tom’s goals, the document is perfect. It’s the kind of invitation we read and maybe even send every day.
Let’s hover above this hypothetical e-mail that Tom would never send and observe what would happen if he did.
People will skim his e-mail, scarcely aware of the clenching in the belly--not another meeting! Most readers won’t open the attachment until a few minutes before the meeting, if at all.
Opening attachments we haven’t requested distracts us from what we’re doing now. We put it off. Then we forget.
If Tom had used his computer’s meeting request feature or if readers program the information into their calendar, they can be assured of timely reminder “bings.” Computer memory is a great invention for all kinds of reasons. In this situation, it postpones thinking and creates a vast chasm between receipt of a message and action.
In one ear, out the other . . . [insert ten-day pause]. . . bing.
As for ideas, there’s very little danger that any have been percolating in the back of readers’ minds, since Tom hasn’t specified what kind of ideas they should have. Anyway, people always say that, don’t they? Bring ideas. They don’t actually expect you to have any.
Ten minutes before Tom’s meeting, the office printer breaks down, so people who haven’t printed a copy of the agenda are out of luck. Oh, well. Tom will bring copies, or he’ll use PowerPoint. The office is trying to go green anyway.
Many arrive at the meeting empty-handed. Most minds are filled with whatever is not getting done at their desks. There are a few low conversations about things unrelated to the agenda, but for the most part people are quiet, their expressions registering vague annoyance.
Twelve minutes after two (this version of Tom allows for stragglers), he rises and declares heartily, “So! Who’s ready for brainstorming?”
This dreary scenario is repeated millions of times around the world every day, to the point that we have convinced ourselves that that’s just how meetings go.
That is not how meetings go in Tom’s agency.
Here is his actual invitation:
Hello everyone,
We are ready to make history! At least, that’s what I’m hoping.
A few of us, over lunch, came up with a fundraising idea that we believe will be fun, original, and our most successful ever--but we won’t know that until you’ve had a chance to look at it.
I’ve scheduled an all-staff meeting for next Monday. Here’s what I need you to do in preparation:
Print out and read the attached overview.
Create a PDF with your name on it that identifies five good things about the campaign.
Identify five weaknesses--or more if you see them.
Write a brief sketch of your most successful fundraising experience and why it worked.
Send the PDF to your department head no later than 12:00 noon on Wednesday, August 23.
Finally, please join us on Monday, August 28, at 2 pm in the third floor boardroom. The meeting should last about two hours.
We will provide sandwiches and treats, in case you worked through lunch!
Regards,
Tom
Every time I present this e-mail to a corporate workshop, the energy in the room changes. Interest zooms from a mild buzz to deep and instant focus. Sometimes there are comments like:
“I’ve never read anything like this.”
“I want to work for this guy.”