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The paper aims to warn executives that their strategy initiatives are at risk every time the message delivered in their speeches is not convincing or clear. The responsibility for producing a successful narrative is on leaders to transfer meaning and motivation, rather than on the audience to receive and interpret a speech.

The paper focuses on four elements when crafting effective narratives: audience, purpose, acts, and flow. Each of these elements involves a fundamental choice. The paper proposes that understanding these elements will enable to messages to be put across using the right architecture for persuasion. Detailed points on each are offered.

The paper finds that, when crafted with emotion and logic, potent stories can motivate people to adopt a challenge or change their behavior.

The authors are veteran scenario developers whose clients include prominent corporations and innovative federal agencies. Their how‐to advice is based on field experience.

The paper proposes that effective narratives – stories – that win both hearts and minds – enable leaders to achieve difficult goals.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an interview with Alison Esse, Director of The Storytellers Ltd, an organization that has harnessed the power of Storytelling to help business leaders improve organizational performance by connecting employees to strategy, vision, values and change.

This briefing is prepared by an independent interviewer.

The Storytellers' innovative engagement programme has proved itself with dozens of blue chip organizations all over the world, and the company is now preparing for significant growth over the next few years. The vision of the company is that: “everyone in business will realise the power of their Story”.

Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that can have a broader social impact.

This interview gives some insight into the Storytellers' innovative engagement programme, which can help business leaders connect their people to strategy, vision, values and change through the power of storytelling.

Employee engagement has been directly linked to organizational outcomes, and at present, improving employee engagement has increasingly been a main focus for organizations. However, studies evaluating the impact of storytelling interventions on increasing the level of employee engagement are limited. Storytelling is one of the intervention methods that can provide cognitive stimulus to employees, which in turn could change their attitudes toward work including employee engagement. The purpose of this study is to determine the effectiveness of storytelling as an intervention tool for increasing employee engagement in one of the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in West Java, Indonesia.

This study uses a quantitative method. Employees from a West Java branch of large SOEs were randomly assigned into experimental and control groups. The research design used a pretest and a post-test with an expressive writing method to identify the extent of employee engagement by comparing participant groups and measuring the increase of employee engagement as a result of the storytelling intervention. The experimental group participated in three storytelling sessions that had been set up by panels of experts, while the control group was not given any treatment. The expressive writing analysis was conducted using software that has been developed and tested for validity and reliability. Furthermore, statistical analysis was used to test the results of expressive writing scoring to determine the impact of storytelling interventions.

Direct storytelling is proven to be one of the most effective methods of increasing employee engagement in one of the SOEs in the West Java region. The results of this study showed that there were differences between the experiment and control groups after experiencing a direct storytelling intervention where there was a significant increase in the dimensions of employee engagement. Participants in experimental group had higher scores than participants in control group in most of the employee engagement dimensions. Additionally, expressive writing methods are also proven to be able to provide a stimulus for employees in expressing thoughts, perceptions and motivations for employee engagement in the company.

As direct storytelling has not been frequently used, especially to improve employee engagement, more studies should be conducted in various settings, with different measurement tools, and in a more controlled environment to confirm the effects of the intervention.

This paper provides insight into how companies can use direct storytelling to improve the dimensions of employee engagement. Additionally, this research can also be used as a reference by companies in Indonesia, especially SOEs, for applying the same method in an effort to improve work-related attitudes, such as employee satisfaction and organizational commitment.

This study raises social implications in which employees enthusiasm increases in improving personal relationships between employees and storytellers, who are middle or upper management employees. In addition, employees also more appreciate their struggles when starting their careers, so they care more about increasing their role and involvement in the company.

This paper provides resources and information for companies and organizations to improve employee engagement through the implementation of direct storytelling. The focus of this paper is to gain information on the role of direct storytelling in improving employee engagement within a company or organization.

There is an increased research interest in the recent phenomenon of Chinese small and medium‐sized businesses (SMEs) going abroad. The paper aims to enrich the literature by proposing a “Flying High, Landing Soft” curriculum helping Chinese SMEs going abroad. This innovative entrepreneurial curriculum is based on the Soft Landings program originally developed by the National Business Incubation Association. The objective of the curriculum is to provide a platform for students at various levels (undergraduate, graduate, and executive education) and business communities to engage in China‐USA‐Brazil entrepreneurship.

The “Flying High, Landing Soft” curriculum, consisting of three core elements (resources and networks; five steps process of coaching; cultivating storytellers), is grounded in the theories of input‐process‐output model of strategic entrepreneurship and docility‐based distributed cognition.

A “Flying High, Landing Soft” curriculum was developed to help the Chinese SMEs to invest in USA and Brazil. The curriculum is designed to take advantage of resources from the participating entities with the impact of enriching our students' educational experience and enabling business communities to engage in global business opportunities. The “Flying High, Landing Soft” curriculum is a win‐win program for everyone involved.

The curriculum is based on the Soft Landings International Incubator Designation program originally developed by the National Business Incubation Association. Since there is a need for the soft landings companies to go global, there is also a need for students to go global; the “Flying High, Landing Soft” curriculum is a merge of these two concepts.

The authors have developed a curriculum that links China‐USA‐Brazil entrepreneurs, investors, students and institutions to collaborate in order to help individuals to exploit market opportunities as well as use the process to educate students. This form of entrepreneurship curriculum is a contribution to our understanding about entrepreneurship, especially international entrepreneurship of SMEs.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the successful strategy formulation process of a new purchasing department at an international engineering group.

The strategy formulation was co-created by the department manager and employees at a storytelling workshop, facilitated with interview technique from narrative therapy, and later authorized by the business area director. The organizational intervention preceded the scholarly inquiry.

Employees’ retrospective storytelling about working at the company enabled them to formulate a joint mission statement using words and expressions from their own stories. Prospective storytelling enabled them to formulate a joint medium- and long-term vision and a corresponding action plan. This paper proposes interview technique from narrative therapy as a new practice-oriented strategic management tool and calls for further experimentation in rethinking best practices in strategy development.

Introducing narrative therapy interview technique in an organizational context is valuable because it may facilitate affinity of employees to strategy through storytelling thus contributing to contextualized strategy formulation and paving the way for subsequent implementation. This “from practice to research” approach can serve as inspiration for action researchers interested in driving organizational change.

This study aims to use Simon’s theory of strategies to explain Ever Rich’s strategies for introducing innovation. Ever Rich is a very successful duty-free shop in Taiwan that makes profits by improving airport lobby/terminals and enhancing Taiwan’s tourism brand image. This study shows a design artifact to explain Ever Rich’s strategies for introducing innovation. The design artifact is based on Herbert Simon’s classical work of Sciences of the Artificial. The design artifact is also grounded in the theories of customer service life cycle, input-process-output model of strategic entrepreneurship and docility-based distributed cognition.

The authors interviewed the executive management with the pre-determined 14 questions regarding resource inputs, processes of resource orchestration and outputs.

Introducing innovation requires appropriate strategies. Based on Herbert Simon’s research on “Science of the Artificial”, this case shows a design artifact of strategies for introducing innovation. The design artifact is in line with Ever Rich’s corporate philosophy, including training and education of duty-free professionals, customer-oriented services, guarantee stringent quality control of products, newness and innovation and contributions to community. The design artifact, therefore, serves as a source of discovery with benefits for knowledge-building and relationship-building that are useful for students and practitioners.

The success of this case and the reasons of success can be an inspiration for others.

A significant contribution of the paper is that the design artifact serves as a source of discovery with benefits for knowledge-building and relationship-building that are useful both for students and practitioners.

This paper aims to look into the motivations of managers to commit their time and energies to look at environmental, social, and ethical issues. In short, this research set out to answer the following research questions: What are the different types of change agents for sustainability, in terms of their existential needs? What are the motivations and frustrations faced by sustainability managers as change agents? and How are the motivations and frustrations of sustainability managers framed by the sources of meaning in their life and work?

As the research is still at an exploratory stage, a qualitative methodology was adopted. This methodology was also appropriate for the purpose of this research, which was focused on studying how meaning emerges and changes in situated organizational settings. The authors were engaged in 27 value‐laden semi‐structured interviews where they were looking to build a close relationship between the researcher and what was studied. The interview process was divided into three phases to ensure the planning and validity of the process.

It identifies four such categories of sustainability managers, those being Scientist, Messenger, Artist and Storyteller. The findings suggest the key role of expertise, empowerment, values, inspiration, strategic thinking and social contribution as key meaning for these managers. The empirical findings help build on understanding of the different psychological dimensions of corporate sustainability management, and provides a useful tool for developing effective organizational leadership, enhancing recruitment and retention of sustainability talent, and improving individual and team performance for key sustainability growth.

This research has helped to deal application of existential psychology theories to complement corporate sustainability. The findings more or less confirm the usability of major existential psychology theories to find sources of motivations of sustainability managers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how corporate heritage identity (CHI) implementation strategies are communicated by Grundfos, a 70-year-old global company from Denmark, in their internal history references.

Drawing on an interdisciplinary methodological framework related to heritage identity communication, hypertextuality, and multi-modality, it proposes a multi-leveled analysis model through which communicative strategies are explored at the level of four semiotic modes (written text, speech, still image, and moving image) and at the level of their hypermodal interplay.

This exploratory case study explains how CHI implementation strategies are communicated in accordance with the potential and constraints of semiotic modes and hyperlinking affordances. The analytical work suggests that the management employs complex CHI implementation strategies in order to strengthen organizational identity and to influence employees’ identification with the company across past, present, and future.

By examining the semiotic modes’ interconnectivity and functional differentiation in a hypermodal context, this paper expands existing research by extending the multi-modal focus to a hypertextual one.

By exploring CHI implementation strategies from a hypermodal perspective and by providing a replicable model of hypermodal analysis, this paper fills a gap in the heritage identity research. Furthermore, it can also be of value to practitioners who intend to design company webpages that strategically communicate heritage identity implementation strategies in order to engage the employees in the company’s heritage.

This chapter discusses Launching through the Surf: The Dory Fleet of Pacific City, a project which documents the historical and contemporary role of dory fishers in the life of the coastal village of Pacific City, Oregon, U.S. Linfield College’s Department of Theatre and Communication Arts, its Jereld R. Nicholson Library, the Pacific City Arts Association, the Pacific City Dorymen’s Association, and the Linfield Center for the Northwest joined forces to engage in a collaborative college and community venture to preserve this important facet of Oregon’s history. Using ethnography as a theoretical grounding and oral history as a method, the project utilized artifacts from the dory fleet to augment interview data, and faculty/student teams created a searchable digital archive available via open access. The chapter draws on the authors’ experiences to identify a philosophy of strategic collaboration. Topics include project development and management, assessment, and the role of serendipity. In an era of value-added services where libraries need to continue to prove their worth, partnering with internal and external entities to create content is one way for academic libraries to remain relevant to agencies that do not have direct connections to higher education. This project not only developed a positive “town and gown” relationship with a regional community, it also benefited partner organizations as they sought to fulfill their missions. The project also serves as a potential model for intra- and inter-agency collaboration for all types of libraries.