In today’s work life most of us experience an increasing need for motivating and engaging coworkers, partners, investors, customers, and other stakeholders. Storytelling is an effective tool for doing so. Stories engage and persuade by playing on our emotions, and we use them, consciously or unconsciously, to make sense of our surroundings. Hence, they influence our professional work life in most areas. Organizational stories can turn leaders into heroes or villains, and they can encourage or sink strategy and change processes. Stories told by customers can make or break a brand, and the narrative structure of prospectuses can influence the success of stock market launches. Understanding the role storytelling plays and how to employ it has thus become an important strategic tool at the disposal of managers, leaders, and entrepreneurs.

Research has revealed universal principles for effective storytelling across genres and formats. And some business leaders, like co-founder of Apple Inc., Steve Jobs, have applied the same timeless storytelling principles that also underpin myths, folk tales, and Hollywood movies. His highly effective presentations, deemed legendary by some, were structured as stories of tension and struggle between heroes and villains, which appealed to his audiences’ emotions.

To develop such storytelling skills, we have to open up the black box of story to explicate, articulate and codify the nature of story. In this course, we work with a wide range of stories from organizational life and marketing to movies and folk tales with the aim of recognizing their universal nature, which helps us understand how all these different types of stories relate to our own storytelling. Based on these insights, participants learn to structure their own stories to better serve specific objectives. And they learn how to apply universal story principles to make their stories more believable, engaging and persuasive.

Work life stories seldom exist separately from each other. More typically, they are interrelated, creating so-called metanarratives. As the Star Wars saga binds the stories of each movie together, an organizational metanarrative may combine an organization’s “little stories” into more consistent and effective parts of a coherent grand story. Participants will thus also learn how to structure stories into coherent metanarratives.

Stories are told in numerous formats and contexts, as in orally delivered speeches, live or recorded, in written or audiovisual company presentations, in marketing and campaign materials, in policy memos, etc. Or they may be told in bits and pieces through casual conversations or email exchanges. Each format will demand different presentation skills, but no matter format or context the story itself will be at the core. In this course we focus on the role and relevance of storytelling in the workplace.