Stephen Denning

In his best–selling book, Squirrel Inc., former World Bank executive and master storyteller Stephen Denning used a tale to show why storytelling is a critical skill for leaders. Now, in this hands–on guide, Denning explains how you can learn to tell the right story at the right time. Whoever you are in the organization CEO, middle management, or someone on the front lines you can lead by using stories to effect change. Filled with myriad examples, A Leader’s Guide to Storytelling shows how storytelling is one of the few available ways to handle the principal and most difficult challenges of leadership: sparking action, getting people to work together, and leading people into the future. The right kind of story at the right time, can make an organization “stunningly vulnerable” to a new idea.

Organizations today face a crisis. The crisis is of long standing and its signs are widespread. Most proposals for improving management address one element of the crisis at the expense of the others. The principles described by award–winning author Stephen Denning simultaneously inspire high productivity, continuous innovation, deep job satisfaction and client delight. Denning puts forward a fundamentally different approach to management, with seven inter–locking principles of continuous innovation: focusing the entire organization on delighting clients; working in self–organizing teams; operating in client–driven iterations; delivering value to clients with each iteration; fostering radical transparency; nurturing continuous self–improvement and communicating interactively. In sum, the principles comprise a new mental model of management.