The Seven Books that Helped Me Cut Through the Noise and Create the Bigger Story
How to communicate real thought leadership.
After a 20 year communications career at Microsoft, I’m turning a page, starting a new chapter. As I transition to life as a writer, I thought it fitting to share the books that have shaped my thought leadership approach to corporate storytelling.
Why? Because we, in the field of executive communications, need more writers and thinkers who can authentically inspire, inform, and help us all collectively think bigger. Too many corporate communications professionals slip into advertorial-writing rah-rah, selling their company or products. Boring!
I hope this list might inspire others in the field to push leaders to offer the intellectual insight that will lead to the ah-ha in an audience’s mind. I’ve read a lot of books, but these works changed me.
So here we go. Whether turning a traditional product announcement into an unconventional story, infusing humor into dry government policy testimony, or giving a computer science research project a TED-like make-over, seven books have always been there for me:
1. Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industry and Competition, Michael E. Porter
As someone who pursued an MBA instead of an MFA, Porter’s book was the cornerstone of my business strategy and finance education and still sits front and center on my bookshelf. I pick it up every time I embark on a narrative about a new technology.
Porter asks tough questions and offers sound analysis, demanding that we situate any new business, technology advancement or competitive move into the bigger picture of industry trends. This 30,000-foot context is critical when you’re trying to communicate with the C-suite, senior government officials, or influencers who shape culture.
Because of this book, my go-to queries whenever I get a new assignment include: How will what you’re communicating restructure industry dynamics, accepted business models, customer expectations? How will the announcement reshape the way the industry might evolve? What assumptions does your audience have about current trends?
2. Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, Alfred Lansing
My husband is a United States Air Force Colonel and has been a leader of Operation Deep Freeze, the recurring Mission to Antarctica. Once when he returned from a trip, he gave me this book about Sir Ernest Shackleton’s artic exploration, and I read it when my story feels stuck.
Shackleton centers me to concentrate on what hasn’t been said before. How will this speech I’m writing for my executive lead people into the future?
Shackleton faced grueling odds but kept going. “Difficulties are just things to overcome, after all,” he said. For me, difficulty is about tension in a story, raising the counterargument, showing how problematic a concept or breakthrough can be. All great stories have a protagonist and antagonist, which we sometimes forget in corporate storytelling. The more you come across as an independent thinker, the more credible you will be.
But when you work in an organization or team with an unequivocal culture, it’s easy to fall prey to the allure of fitting in, succumbing to the objections to ideas outside of accepted norms. Shackleton reminds me that new ideas and corporate group-think are at odds. One is about assimilation and the other is about being an originator, an explorer, leading people on a new journey to the unknown.
3. Co-Active Coaching: New Skills for Coaching People Toward Success in Work and Life, Laura Whitworth, Karen Kimsey-House, Henry Kimsey House, Philip Sandahl.
During one of the positions I held, I coached 100 up-and-coming marketers to advance to director-level. I pursued CTI’s coaching training program, and this book, which encapsulates the curriculum, grew into my encyclopedia on how to be a trusted communications adviser to C-suite leaders.
A glance at this book before an executive meeting prompts me to clear the noise in my head, to enter a state the authors call “level-three listening” — being fully present so you can perceive. What isn’t he or she telling you? What is body language saying? What’s the untold narrative? We’re habitually multi-tasking, half-present, so we aren’t able to help leaders bring their deepest insights forward.
The list of questions at the back of the book sparks ideas for provocative, open-ended questions to dig deep. How important is this <opportunity, breakthrough, problem, benefit>? How did you feel when you first heard about it? What will it change for your kids?
And when I pitch story ideas to an executive that land flatly, I tap into my store of anticipated questions to reframe the conversation. What concerns you most? What is the main obstacle? What’s the moral of the story for you?
4. TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking, Chris Anderson
The first time I attended TED, I sat transfixed for the two-hour opening as if I were watching an academy-award winning movie. Journalist Carol Cadwalladr’s talk about Facebook’s nefarious role in Brexit, during which she spoke her truth to tech power, will remain ever etched in my brain. I bought Anderson’s book years earlier, but it gained new meaning that night. I don’t read it anymore; it’s a part of me.
At the onset of a communication, I ask leaders to explain why their <insight, breakthrough, product, project> is a big idea worth spreading. Is it something totally new or a new insight about something we thought we knew? The answer separates the wheat from the chaff.
Many leaders want to use superlative-laden customer testimonials to talk about the greatness of their company or products. Yet speakers who do so come across as “tedious self-promoter[s],” Anderson writes. When a thought leader speaks, the audience associates his or her intellect with the company, building the trust that will someday enable a sale.
Rather than a sales pitch, illuminate a new concept. What assumptions does your audience have about your <topic> and how will you reconstruct them into a new worldview?
5. Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, Robert McKee
When I supported communications for the leader of Xbox, the industry conversation was about the convergence of gaming and entertainment, so I thought I should learn more about the craft that defined the entertainment industry. I reached for the seminal screenwriting manual of all time.
McKee writes, “When talented people write badly, it’s generally for one of two reasons: Either they’re blinded by an idea they feel compelled to prove or they’re driven by an emotion they must express.” This idea surfaces for me when I read an advertorial-type blog or when I see a corporate video that relies on cliché. There’s a balance with thought leadership, especially in keynotes.
The question McKee moves me to ask is, Are we connecting with a universal truth? When you watch a great movie and connect with a collective concept, you’re moved and see a situation differently. Aren’t keynotes entertainment? Some are like TV episodes, 20–30 minutes, others are 90–120 minutes, a full movie. But most don’t have the same budgets as movies, so I’ve become ruthless in my reviews, going through the script minute-by-minute to pinpoint where we might lose the audience.
6. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, Natalie Goldberg
I’ve repeatedly received this book as a gift over the years, but the first time was from my Tarot instructor in London when I was in business school. Maybe she saw something in my future back in 1998?!? 😊
This book brought me one of my biggest corporate storytelling realizations: one word can change everything. Goldberg uses an example. You could write, “The Flower in the window.” Or you could write, “The Geranium in the window.” One is specific and immediately conjures an image in your mind. Too many corporate stories employ generic language. Ushering in a new paradigm shift. Redefining the future with breakthroughs. Transformational customer technology. What do any of these corporate catch-phrases mean? We have too many flowers and not enough geraniums in corporate storytelling.
7. The First 50 Pages, Jeff Gerke
I bought this book during my 12-week sabbatical from Microsoft when I first started working on my novel. From Gerke, I learned how the external events of a plot are intricately intertwined with the inner journey of an audience.
Gerke’s focus is on the first fifty pages of a novel, critical in the fiction world to grab your reader’s attention. But this applies, too, in the non-fiction, corporate world, where the opening of a blog or keynote — the opening gambit — must captivate. How are you drawing the reader in immediately with a provocative question, a personal story, an anecdote, powerful facts?
Gerke includes a valuable diagram I now use when I plot out a blog or a keynote. He maps the key plot points or beats in Acts One, Two and Three on one side of the table and on the other, shows the corresponding protagonist’s inner story arc — how he or she changes over time.
Instead of the protagonist’s arc, I outline the audience’s journey across each of the beats. I try out different flow structures, reviewing the audience’s journey from 50,000 feet, ensuring their experience is rich, varied and filled with rhythm. I evaluate with my “audience unexpected” gauge. Have I engaged my reader or viewer through my choice of structure and rhythm? Where might I add surprise?
A Journey of a Thousand Words
For 20 years, I’ve imbibed the corporate wisdom about the importance of having communications mentors and executive sponsors. Of course, I’ve learned a lot from people, but these books have been enduring teachers. The authors’ words have taken on new meaning at each turn in my career’s zigzagging road. As leaders and communicators, we have the same opportunity — to create thought leadership with words that will persist and change our audiences forever.
