Stories for Work: The Essential Guide to Business Storytelling by Gabrielle DolanMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
"These days, employees want fewer facts and less information, and more emotion and meaningful connection."Ah, the post-fact world...This seems very true in my experience, for many employees, at least for employers that don’t have a history of not telling the whole story. And that is just one target audience (employees, especially those in a corporate change program or being “indoctrinated” with company vision and values) Dolan describes in “Stories for Work”. Dolan teaches how to find personal stories, how to tell those stories, and how to use them for presentations, sales, coaching, job interviews, and basic getting-to-know you conversations, in addition to the change and vision uses previously mentioned. Dolan’s suggestions are relatively concise and useful. There is more ink used on examples than on the procedures she’s recommending, and the examples are useful and interesting to show the format of stories and the emotional content. Key learning: make ‘em short – stories should be two minutes or less. I was concerned that this would be one of those books by consultants that are just an advertisement to sell her services, but this appears to be useful without hiring Dolan. Note that she really wants you to hire her, as most of the examples are from former students of her classes or from her consulting clients. And she includes many mentions of her consultancy throughout the book. Despite the advertising, I found the content useful and interesting, and I would consider reading another book by Dolan.
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