1st Edition
The Organizational Storytelling Workbook How to Harness this Powerful Communication and Management Tool
This workbook is an interactive guide for leaders and managers to help you tell compelling stories at work. The Organizational Storytelling Workbook offers:
- a critical engagement with academic debates on organizational storytelling; and
- a series of exercises designed to allow users to improve their capability as organizational storytellers.
The text begins with a chapter which locates organizational storytelling within a critical account of organizational cultures. This book argues that managerial accounts of organizational culture offer a limited appreciation of the ways in which people think, feel and act and suggests storytelling as a means of redeeming our understanding of all matters cultural. Having secured this new appreciation of culture and storytelling the workbook develops a series of maxims and exercises designed to allow users: (a) to improve their storytelling practice; and (b) to reassess the cultural assumptions and priorities revealed through their practice.
Enriched with interactive features to walk managers practically through the process of improving their storytelling skills, including practical exercises, contemplative questions, and space to respond creatively to the ideas in the book, this workbook is the perfect companion to any executive or postgraduate course in storytelling as well as a useful and enjoyable companion to any individual manager that wishes to improve their skills.
Introduction.
Section One: Talking the Talk, Walking the Walk.
Section Two: Maxims for Organizational Storytelling.
Section Three: Storytelling Exercises.
Section Four: Researching the Storyworld.
Biography
David Collins is Professor in Management at University of Northumbria, New-castle and the founder and Managing Director of Gain Insight Ltd, a consulting organization offering bespoke services on HRM, organizational change/transformation and the application of narratives to organizational problems. An academic with more than 30 years’ experience, David holds advanced degrees from the universities of Glasgow, Strathclyde and Essex. This is his sixth book. Previous works published by Taylor & Francis, Routledge include Organizational Change: Sociological Perspectives (1998); Management Fads and Buzzwords: Critical-Practical Perspectives (2000); Narrating the Management Guru: In Search of Tom Peters (2007); Stories for Management Success: The Power of Talk in Organizations (2018); and Management Gurus: A Research Overview (2021).
