STORY POWER

Former journalists, I think, often face a rocky transition when they first decide to join an advertising or PR firm – or the in-house corporate communications staff of an enterprise.

If they succeeded at all as reporters or editors, they nurtured a kind of instinctive skepticism with which they challenged the endless false promises and self-promotions that nag for media attention. Too often, they bring that skeptical attitude to agency work, too ready perhaps to disbelieve and dismiss whatever a client may profess as their mission and market.

I think the best practitioners in the advertising and publicity trades take on a different attitude – naturally positive, they are able to slip easily into almost any client’s belief system and be instantly supportive. That cheeriness never comes naturally to a trained newshound.

Too bad for us, however, when we don’t find a comfortable home for at least some skilled journalists in our agency mix.

Why? Because former reporters and editors are extraordinary storytellers – and too few of our professional publicists, fresh out of PR school, can shape a client’s message into a believable and true narrative that tells the client story in a way that people want to hear it.

You have to dig for that. In fact, more often than not, you have to ... report.

It’s nice to see that exceptional story-telling skills are also behind the success of some of the most extraordinary leaders in business and politics. That’s the case presented by author Stephen Denning in his book, the Secret Language of Leadership (Jossey-Bass-Wiley).

We can see this best when it goes awfully wrong. Denning discusses at some length Al Gore’s presidential run in 2000. Gore was then confusing, uncommitted, ineffective in creating a narrative that undecided voters wanted to hear.

How things have changed. In his current pursuit as climate-change guru, he has been able to leverage a fairly inexpensive PowerPoint presentation into a box-office dynamo. There aren’t many actors that could pull that off. Much of the strength of the new Al Gore is the fact-based nature of his presentation. Somebody actually did some … reporting.

Of course, some storytellers with journalism backgrounds do quite well in the agency world. Michael Sitrick, chairman and CEO of Sitrick and Company, is probably the most prominent crisis communications guru in the PR business. Sitrick is the very King of Spin, at least in Hollywood, and the very first call in the entertainment industry when starlets or studio chiefs are hauled off to the hospital or the county jail from their luxury hotel suites – and Sitrick is now increasingly popular among CEOs with legal woes.

Mike Sitrick is a master of preemption and keenly aware that the first major story – the narrative – sets the tone for almost all the coverage that follows.

A natural leader, of course, knows this without any prompting from professionals. The idea that a business leader is actually directing the day-to-day operations of a large and complex enterprise is mostly an illusion – and transparently false.

What probably keeps the best of enterprise leaders at the top is the ability to investigate and report on the contributions of others in the company … and to control the narrative.

I agree with Denning: Good story telling is the secret language of leadership.