A book published by Harvard Business School Press called "What's the Big Idea? Creating and Capitalizing on the Best Management Thinking" by Larry Prusak and Tom Davenport (April 2003) endorses the power of storytelling.

The book shows how new ideas get introduced and implemented in organizations and why. It explicitly identifies stories and narratives as "the most important way" that new ideas are communicated and brought into organizations (pp 109-110, 114-115)

It gives a number of examples where telling the story had a major role e.g. particularly in the sections on KM where it talks about stories told by Tom Stewart, Tom Peters, Dorothy Leonard, Kent Greenes, Keith Pearce, Chris Collinson and Steve Denning (pp 186-191).

There are many explicit references to storytelling throughout the book. In other places, storytelling is there by implication, e.g. when Joe McCrea in the UK Government talks about setting loose some "Trojan mice" and not trying to spell out the ultimate significance of the idea (page 33)

Overall, the book is a powerful endorsement from a mainstream source about the power of organizational storytelling in the creative and innovative aspects of organizational life.

Worth a look.

Available on Amazon by clicking here