Story Pros: Karen Dietz—The Dynamics of Business Storytelling
Karen is the top curator globally on the subject of business storytelling (www.scoop.it/t/juststory-it) and the owner of Just Story It. She is a 25-year veteran in business storytelling consulting, training, leadership, and organizational development. She’s also the former Executive Director of the National Storytelling Network.
Highlights from the Show
As a senior practitioner, she offered LOTS of insights about the art and science of business storytelling.
Among them:
- Why we need to go beyond understanding story mechanics to understanding story dynamics.
- The core competencies of the business storyteller.
- Why Karen doesn’t even like the word storytelling (at least part of the time).
- Why you need to tailor your storytelling tools to a particular application.
- Why the hero’s journey story framework is limited.
- Why we want our stories to be more than transactional (i.e. my story leads to a sale) when they have the power to be transformational (where both listener and teller are changed by the encounter.)
- How to be a story-listener and elicit great stories.
- Why you shouldn’t tell a story when your building’s on fire…
Hear the interview with Karen:
Click here to go to the full interview on ITunes (#64)
More about Karen
Karen knows how to combine the science of storytelling with the art of performing to grow stories that inspire, influence and impact an organization’s bottom line. She’s worked with Disney, Princess Cruises, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs and get this – Disney – one of the biggest storytellers of them all.
She received her Masters and PhD from the Department of Folklore at the University of Pennsylvania, where the department and was the most advanced place to study in the field when Karen attended.
John Wiley publishers recruited Karen for their Dummies series. Her how-to book Business Storytelling for Dummies, co-authored with Lori Silverman, combines a conceptual overview with practical examples, steps to take, and useful questions that help you become a masterful story listener as well as a storyteller. (I vouch personally for its usefulness!)
Karen offers lots of free resources on her website, http://www.juststoryit.com/. Sign up for her newsletter and receive some great bonus material! And check out her fabulous Just Story It curation by clicking here: Scoop-it.
2 thoughts on “Story Pros: Karen Dietz—The Dynamics of Business Storytelling”
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This is really interesting. I’m going to get her book. Very thought provoking.
Yes — she was/is quite the pro and a lovely woman, too!