INTRODUCTION

      A RUSHING RIVER

      This book is written for people who want to make a difference; people who want to build, create, learn, share, and inspire; people who want to give themselves and others the powerful gift of story.

      What is your story? Have you thought about it? Certainly, you are full of stories. We all are. Stories are one of the things that make life and work fun and fulfilling. They are all around us every day as we move through the to-dos, experiences, ups and downs, and all of the other “stuff” of life.

      Imagine for a moment that you are standing knee-deep in the middle of a rushing river. The water flows past you, and underneath your feet are rocks and sediment. You are holding a dented metal pan with a screen on the bottom, and you reach down into the riverbed and pull up a panful. As you shake the mud and grit out of the pan, gold appears. Gold nuggets. These gold nuggets represent the experiences—the stories—of your life. The mud and grit that get shaken back into the river represent all of the forgettable data and details of your life—the stuff that happens in between the stories and experiences.

      Now imagine yourself getting off of the elevator at work and walking into a meeting. You are in the midst of a rushing river of information. You have e-mails to attend to, voicemails, presentations, and paperwork. You have responsibilities and goals and a limited amount of time. Empowered by technology, information comes at you nearly 24/7 from many different angles. Your “pan” fills very quickly. In fact, your pan may fill so quickly that you often find yourself just trying to stay ahead of the mud and grit without ever getting to touch the gold!

      But it is in experiencing and telling these stories—the gold nuggets—that we establish a connection to each other and to the organization. The gold is the stuff that allows leaders to lead and people to perform. All of the rest is just “mud and grit.”

      INFORMATION REVOLUTION

      Over the past couple of decades, technology has transformed our organizations and our work lives. We now have access to more information than we could ever hope to use. Indeed, information is now, quite literally, “in the air.”

      Technology has helped us capture most of the high-value information in our organizations. Thanks to technology, we now know who our most profitable customers are, how they behave, what they purchase, and how much they spend. We know how our entire supply chain is affected by a change in pricing strategy and we know how to distribute trucks or call volumes across our different resources. We can give our people access to their benefits information through an employee portal, their training through a learning management system, their customer information through customer relationship management (CRM), and the company’s resources through enterprise resource management (ERM). That is an incredible amount of information that has now been parsed, categorized, tagged, and made available to leaders and employees.

      Unfortunately, we haven’t captured the highest value information of all, the stories that hold all of the people and tools and technologies together. Stories about what’s expected of people in this organization. Stories about how we succeed and how we fail, what’s important and what’s not, how to get things done, how to manage, how to sell, and how to lead. We haven’t captured stories that show people how to make ethical decisions, how to delight customers, how to streamline operations, and how to balance work and life. But these are the stories that hold all of our systems together. In fact, these stories are the glue that holds the whole organization together, just as stories of our history, our parents, and our friends hold families and communities together. These are the stories that become the fabric of large organizations and the grit that helps entrepreneurial companies succeed in the face of overwhelming odds. These are the stories that need to be told—the gold that should be passed around.

      The truth is that we don’t have a “system” to hold this most valuable information. And if there is no system, it doesn’t get captured. This book is a kind of “system.” Its purpose is to show you how to capture the high-value information that is all around you—the gold—and put it to use to impact your own performance and the performance of the organization. This book will show you why stories are powerful and how to capture, organize, and tell those stories in a way that inspires your performance and the performance of those around you.

      Lest I be accused of being a Luddite, I think that most technology is extremely beneficial. As leaders, we have a plethora of tools to use in our communications. We have more ways than ever to reach out to people and build relationships, and we must make daily choices with our communications. But we must be conscious and intentional about how we use these tools.

      E-mail, PowerPoint slides, pagers, and phones are the most common ways we communicate. In the crush of the average day, we make many snap decisions about our communications, often unconsciously. But what happens to the content of the message? As media analyst and philosopher Marshall McLuhan pointed out, too often the message gets shaped by the medium, so leaders strip away the extraneous material and give us the bullet points; just what we need to know—delivered fast. Most communications end up as disembodied information that is out of context, and, as such, doesn’t connect with people. This means that we end up filling people’s pans with more mud and grit and detail instead of offering them a gold nugget that will be much more valuable to them.

      “Learning is like Velcro. An unfiltered fact is not a complete fastener. Only one side