Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2003

Let me tell you a story. A long, long time ago -- the 1960s, actually -- storytelling was a
nonpaying endeavor, conducted by teachers, librarians and the occasional "Mountain
Man" who wandered into a folk festival or two. Then in 1967, according to "The
Storyteller's Journey: An American Revival," by Joseph Daniel Sobol (University of
Illinois Press, 1999), a young African-American doctoral student at the Harvard Divinity
School, Hugh Morgan Hill, morphed himself into Brother Blue, a storyteller in a blue beret. 

Brother Blue, who also had a degree from the Yale School of Drama, began traveling the
country telling his reworked versions of the classics -- King Lear as a homeless person,
for example. These were the roots of professional storytelling. 

In the early 1970s, Jimmy Neil Smith, a Tennessee English teacher, and some of his
students heard another storyteller on his car radio. Mr. Smith, who was also in charge of
the heritage festival in his hometown, Jonesborough, was inspired. He invited storytellers
to the next event and, because no one else was using the name, called it the National
Storytelling Festival. Besides, his alternative, the Bugaboo Springs Story Festival, just
didn't sound right.

Pancakes for Payment

Many of those early storytellers told "Jack" tales, of the plucky boy who makes good,
and the storytelling movement grew almost as quickly as Jack's beanstalk. The
Jonesborough Festival now draws more than 10,000 people each year; the National
Storytelling Network (NSN), also based in Jonesborough, has 3,000 members; most
states have their own festivals; and scores of local storytelling guilds and support groups
are training hundreds of new storytellers -- many of whom now see storytelling as a                  career path. 

NSN executive director Nancy Kavanaugh says she doesn't know how many of her
members are earning a living with their tales, but the majority of the 700 people attending
the 2003 National Storytelling Conference in Chicago in July are hoping to turn
storytelling into gold, just like Jack's magic goose eggs....

Seasonal Work

"It frustrates me to death," says John McLaughlin, a retired business owner in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., and a business consultant to storytellers. "We live in a culture that needs what stories have and all their power," he says. "One common denominator of value is money, and
when storytellers put a low price on it, the public equates that with low value." Mr. McLaughlin's mission is to convince seasoned storytellers to charge a minimum of $1,000 a day for their work. 

Because most of the days, they're not. Toni Simmons, 50, of Bloomington, Minn., left her job as a children's librarian 20 years ago to tell African and African-American folk stories full time. She's been a "featured" (read "paid") teller at festivals in 13 states, performed in Germany and South Africa and raised her fees from $150 to $600 a day. During February -- Black History Month -- she's called to do two, sometimes three, gigs a day, but most months she averages just 10 days of work, telling stories like "Gunniwolf" and "Anansi and Turtle" in schools, libraries and museums.

Syd Lieberman, 59, of Evanston, Ill., has also been telling stories, mostly pieces he's written about his own family, for 20 years, but didn't quit his day job teaching high school until recently. Today, he says, he could easily replicate his former salary if he accepted every storytelling                   engagement he's offered. "But I have my pension, so I can pick and choose," he says, "and that's a blessing." Mr. Lieberman knows several storytellers on the national circuit who make annual incomes "in the six figures," earning $1,500 -- $3,000 per festival, and $4,000 or more for
a keynote speech at the start of a corporate event or convention. "But when you're traveling that much, you can get really scattered and it's hard to concentrate," he says....

The Big Time

An even quicker route to riches is climbing the beanstalk past all those schools and libraries and right into large American corporations. Storytelling is hot and, "the ability to tell the right story at the right time is emerging as an essential management skill to cope with and get business results in the turbulent world of the 21st century," says Stephen Denning, author of "The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations," (Butterworth Heinemann, 2000). Mr. Denning is an unassuming Australian -- "My own wife says I'm monosyllabic," he says -- who discovered storytelling while employed by the World Bank.

Today Mr. Denning's keynote speeches and corporate storytelling workshops command fees of $5,000 to $30,000, says his agent, Joan Powell of Leading Thoughts in Wellesley, Mass. His daylong workshop, Storytelling in Organizations, at the NSN Conference cost $90, and it was crowded with Denning wannabes. One of them, Tim Keelan, 39, of LaGrange Park, Ill., says he quit his job, sold an apartment building and spent $30,000 on training and resources to start StoryQuest, a business devoted to "harvesting" corporate stories -- recording interviews
with company leaders, for use on company Web sites and in training programs. "There's millions to be made here," Mr. Keelan says.

Not quite. But management consultants and even cultural anthropologists are being paid handsomely for incorporating storytelling into their work with corporations and organizations. At the NSN conference, Madelyn Blair, 62, of Jefferson, Md., who has a Ph.D. in organizational
psychology, and Seth Kahan, 43, of Bethesda, gave a short demonstration of their Communities of Practice workshops, for which corporations pay up to $10,000. In these sessions, they bring together groups of people "who share a concern or a set of problems," says Dr. Blair. By helping them share personal stories and complete other exercises, the workshop helps participants form lasting communities in which they share their knowledge, enhancing the organization's efficiency, innovation and productivity.

For the full article go to:
http://www.startupjournal.com/ideas/services/20030730-bennett.html
 

Wall Street Journal: July 8, 2003: 

"Storytelling is emerging as the most important way to get new ideas into an organization," says Stephen Denning, author of "The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations" (Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000). Corporate storytelling is so popular that GoldnFleece, an informal group of "organizational storytellers" started two years ago, now has 200
members. This year's National Storytelling Conference, held in Arlington Heights, Ill., on July 9-13, includes a full day of seminars on how stories can be a catalyst for change. 

Poignancy with a Point

"The practice has gone mainstream: The June 2003 issue of the Harvard Business Review features an interview with screenwriting coach Robert McKee, who has expanded his repertoire into corporate boardrooms. The best way to persuade people, Mr. McKee says, "is by uniting an idea with an emotion." By telling a compelling story "you not only weave a lot of information into the telling, but you also arouse your listener's emotions and energy."

For the full article, go to: 
http://www.careerjournal.com/myc/diversity/20030708-bennett.html