Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative

How leaders can use narrative to inspire the hearts and minds of employees.

Leaders communicate for the purpose of persuading people to act, not simply to inform. Using multiple examples from a range of organizations, Stephen Denning reveals the process of how people make decisions and bring about change. For action to follow communication, he says it is necessary to:

Get the audience's attention
Stimulate desire for the intended action
Give reasons why the intended action makes sense
Denning shows how this triad plays out in the different areas of persuasion, explaining the overall context of communication within which storytelling and other modes of communication fit.

Stephen Denning (Washington, D.C.) is Senior Fellow at the James MacGregor Burns Leadership Academy at the University of Maryland and the author of The Leader's Guide to Storytelling (0-7879-7675-X) and Squirrel Inc (0-7879-7371-8). He is former Program Director, Knowledge Management, at the World Bank. In 2003 he was named as one of the world's Top Two Hundred Business Gurus. His articles have appeared in leading business publications such as Harvard Business Review and Strategy & Leadership.