Using Digital Storytelling to Engage Student Learning

No one really knows what the first story ever told in human history was, but storytelling is an art that spans many civilizations and cultures, and continues to be a major part of our modern lives. More recently, storytelling has gone digital with advances in technology and connectivity. Educators have also rediscovered how storytelling can be an effective teaching pedagogy for engaged student learning. A digital story can engage students' visual and auditory senses in a way that the written word alone cannot. This article describes such an effort. The Movie-Door-2-Door.com (MD2D) is a digital story spanning 12 episodes. The story revolves around three young business graduates who started their own business and discovered the role of financial information in managing a business along the way. An independent survey by the University's teaching unit showed that the use of such digital stories can be an appropriate pedagogy to help student contextualize accounting and its role in helping management make decisions. The first four episodes of the MD2D digital story are available for viewing at www.research.smu.edu.sg/faculty/MD2D/.     

What's your story?

When you're in the midst of a major career change, telling stories about your professional self can inspire others' belief in your character and in your capacity to take a leap and land on your feet. It also can help you believe in yourself. A narrative thread will give meaning to your career history; it will assure you that, in moving on to something new, you are not discarding everything you've worked so hard to accomplish. Unfortunately, the authors explain in this article, most of us fail to use the power of storytelling in pursuit of our professional goals, or we do it badly. Tales of transition are especially challenging. Not knowing how to reconcile the built-in discontinuities in our work lives, we often relay just the facts. We present ourselves as safe--and dull and unremarkable. That's not a necessary compromise. A transition story has inherent dramatic appeal. The protagonist is you, of course, and what's at stake is your career. Perhaps you've come to an event or insight that represents a point of no return. It's this kind of break with the past that will force you to discover and reveal who you really are. Discontinuity and tension are part of the experience. If these elements are missing from your career story, the tale will fall flat. With all these twists and turns, how do you demonstrate stability and earn listeners' trust? By emphasizing continuity and causality--in other words, by showing that your past is related to the present and, from that trajectory, conveying that a solid future is in sight. If you can make your story of transition cohere, you will have gone far in convincing the listener--and reassuring yourself--that the change makes sense for you and is likely to bring success.     

Telling tales

A carefully chosen story can help the leader of an organization translate an abstract concept into a meaningful mandate for employees. The key is to know which narrative strategies are right for what circumstances. Knowledge management expert Stephen Denning explains that, for optimal effect, form should follow function. Challenging one professional storyteller's view that more is better, Denning points out that it's not always desirable (or practical) to launch into an epic that's jam-packed with complex characters, cleverly placed plot points, an intricate rising action, and a neatly resolved denouement. True, if listeners have time and interest, a narrative-savvy leader can use a vividly rendered tale to promote communication between management and staff, for instance, or even to foster collaboration--especially when the story is emotionally moving. However, if the aim is to motivate people to act when they might not be inclined to do so, it's best to take an approach that's light on detail. Otherwise, the particulars can bog listeners down and prevent them from focusing on the message. Drawing on his experiences at the World Bank and observations made elsewhere, the author provides several dos and don'ts for organizational storytellers, along with examples of narratives that get results. The sidebar "A Storytelling Catalog" presents seven distinct types of stories, the situations in which they should be told, and tips on how to tell them. Many of these aren't even stories in the "well-told" sense--they run the rhetorical gamut from one-liners to full-blown speeches--but they succeed because they're tailored to fit the situation. So even though it's common in business to favor the analytical over the anecdotal, leaders with the strength to push past some initial skepticism about the enterprise of storytelling will find that the creative effort pays off.     

Tell me a story: Using creative writing in introductory accounting courses to enhance and assess student learning

Low student motivation, apprehension and anxiety towards accounting, and diversity in learning styles are a few incentives for employing non-traditional tools for teaching introductory accounting courses. Three modes of storytelling – fairy tales, fables, and poetry – are used in financial and managerial accounting courses to enhance and assess student learning. We find the storytelling exercises give us good insight as to whether students genuinely understand course content. Students indicate that storytelling helps them to understand accounting concepts and make the course more fun. Assignment outcomes have been used at conferences and campus events and have generated conversations about accounting beyond business faculty.     

Discovering your authentic leadership

The ongoing problems in business leadership over the past five years have underscored the need for a new kind of leader in the twenty-first century: the authentic leader. Author Bill George, a Harvard Business School professor and the former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, and his colleagues, conducted the largest leadership development study ever undertaken. They interviewed 125 business leaders from different racial, religious, national, and socioeconomic backgrounds to understand how leaders become and remain authentic. Their interviews showed that you do not have to be born with any particular characteristics or traits to lead. You also do not have to be at the top of your organization. Anyone can learn to be an authentic leader. The journey begins with leaders understanding their life stories. Authentic leaders frame their stories in ways that allow them to see themselves not as passive observers but as individuals who learn from their experiences. These leaders make time to examine their experiences and to reflect on them, and in doing so they grow as individuals and as leaders. Authentic leaders also work hard at developing self-awareness through persistent and often courageous self-exploration. Denial can be the greatest hurdle that leaders face in becoming self-aware, but authentic leaders ask for, and listen to, honest feedback. They also use formal and informal support networks to help them stay grounded and lead integrated lives. The authors argue that achieving business results over a sustained period of time is the ultimate mark of authentic leadership. It may be possible to drive short-term outcomes without being authentic, but authentic leadership is the only way to create long-term results.     

Syndication--the emerging model for business in the Internet era

Syndication has long been a fundamental organizing principle in the entertainment world, but it's been rare elsewhere in business. The fixed physical assets and slow-moving information that characterized the industrial economy made it difficult, if not impossible, to create the kind of fluid networks that are essential for syndication. But with the rise of the information economy, flexible business networks are not only becoming possible, they're becoming essential. As a result, syndication is moving from business's periphery to its center. Within a syndication network there are three roles that businesses can play. Originators create original content, which encompasses everything from entertainment programming to products to business processes. Syndicators package that content, often integrating it with content from other originators. Distributors deliver the content to consumers. A company can play a single role, or it can play two or three roles simultaneously. Syndication requires businesses to rethink their strategies and relationships in radical ways. Because a company's success hinges on its connections to other companies, it can no longer view its core capabilities as secrets to protect. Instead, it needs to see them as products to sell. FedEx, for example, is succeeding by distributing its sophisticated package-tracking capability to other companies on the Net. Syndication promises to change the nature of business. As this new way of doing business takes hold, companies may look the same as before to their customers, but behind the scenes they will be in constant flux, melding with one another in ever-changing, self-organizing networks.     

Strategic stories: how 3M is rewriting business planning

Virtually all business plans are written as a list of bullet points. Despite the skill or knowledge of their authors, these plans usually aren't anything more than lists of "good things to do." For example: Increase sales by 10%. Reduce distribution costs by 5%. Develop a synergistic vision for traditional products. Rarely do these lists reflect deep thought or inspire commitment. Worse, they don't specify critical relationships between the points, and they can't demonstrate how the goals will be achieved. 3M executive Gordon Shaw began looking for a more coherent and compelling way to present business plans. He found it in the form of strategic stories. Telling stories was already a habit of mind at 3M. Stories about the advent of Post-it Notes and the invention of masking tape help define 3M's identity. They're part of the way people at 3M explain themselves to their customers and to one another. Shaw and his coauthors examine how business plans can be transformed into strategic narratives. By painting a picture of the market, the competition, and the strategy needed to beat the competition, these narratives can fill in the spaces around the bullet points for those who will approve and those who will implement the strategy. When people can locate themselves in the story, their sense of commitment and involvement is enhanced. By conveying a powerful impression of the process of winning, narrative plans can mobilize an entire organization.     

The weird rules of creativity

For at least the past decade, the holy grail for companies has been innovation. Managers have gone after it with all the zeal their training has instilled in them, using a full complement of tried and true management techniques. The problem is that none of these practices, well suited for cashing in on old, proven products and business models, works very well when it comes to innovation. Instead, managers should take most of what they know about management and stand it on its head. In this article, Robert Sutton outlines several ideas for managing creativity that are clearly odd but clearly effective: Place bets on ideas without much heed to their projected returns. Ignore what has worked before. Goad perfectly happy people into fights among themselves. Good creativity management means hiring the candidate you have a gut feeling against. And as for the people who stick their fingers in their ears and chant, "I'm not listening, I'm not listening," when customers make suggestions? Praise and promote them. Using vivid examples from more than a decade of academic research to illustrate his points, the author discusses new approaches to hiring, managing creative people, and dealing with risk and randomness in innovation. His conclusions? The practices in this article succeed because they increase the range of a company's knowledge, allow people to see old problems in new ways, and help companies break from the past.     

The CEO's real legacy

The literature on CEO succession planning is nearly unanimous in its advice: Begin early, look first inside your company for exceptional talent, see that candidates gain experience in all aspects of the business, and help them develop the skills they will need in the top job. It all makes sense and sounds pretty straightforward. Nevertheless, the list of CEOs who last no more than a few years on the job continues to grow. Implicit in many, if not all, of these unceremonious departures is the absence of an effective CEO succession plan. The problem is, most boards simply don't want to talk about CEO succession: Why rock the boat when things are going well? Why risk offending the current CEO? Meanwhile, most CEOs can't imagine that anyone could adequately replace them. In this article, Kenneth W. Freeman, the retired CEO of Quest Diagnostics, discusses his own recent handoff experience (Surya N. Mohapatra became chief executive in May 2004) and offers his approach to succession planning. He says it falls squarely on the incumbent CEO to put ego aside and initiate and actively manage the process of selecting and grooming a successor. Aggressive succession planning is one of the best ways for CEOs to ensure the long-term health of the company, he says. Plus, thinking early and often about a successor will likely improve the chief executive's performance during his tenure. Freeman advocates the textbook rules for succession planning but adds to that list a few more that apply specifically to the incumbent CEO: Insist that the board become engaged in succession planning, look for a successor who is different from you, and make the successor's success your own. After all, Freeman argues, the CEO's true legacy is determined by what happens after he leaves the corner office.     

The five competitive forces that shape strategy

In 1979, a young associate professor at Harvard Business School published his first article for HBR, "How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy." In the years that followed, Michael Porter's explication of the five forces that determine the long-run profitability of any industry has shaped a generation of academic research and business practice. In this article, Porter undertakes a thorough reaffirmation and extension of his classic work of strategy formulation, which includes substantial new sections showing how to put the five forces analysis into practice. The five forces govern the profit structure of an industry by determining how the economic value it creates is apportioned. That value may be drained away through the rivalry among existing competitors, of course, but it can also be bargained away through the power of suppliers or the power of customers or be constrained by the threat of new entrants or the threat of substitutes. Strategy can be viewed as building defenses against the competitive forces or as finding a position in an industry where the forces are weaker. Changes in the strength of the forces signal changes in the competitive landscape critical to ongoing strategy formulation. In exploring the implications of the five forces framework, Porter explains why a fast-growing industry is not always a profitable one, how eliminating today's competitors through mergers and acquisitions can reduce an industry's profit potential, how government policies play a role by changing the relative strength of the forces, and how to use the forces to understand complements. He then shows how a company can influence the key forces in its industry to create a more favorable structure for itself or to expand the pie altogether. The five forces reveal why industry profitability is what it is. Only by understanding them can a company incorporate industry conditions into strategy.     

The reluctant entrepreneur

Unlike a lot of corporate executives, Ken Veit never longed to be his own boss. But after 30 years on the fast track, he lost his high-powered job at one of the world's largest insurance companies and was forced to take an entrepreneurial leap of faith. In 1989, Veit signed a franchise agreement to own and operate a Cartoon Corner store in a mall in Scottsdale, Arizona. Cartoon Corner was based on the Disney store idea, but it carried hundreds of products featuring cartoon characters from every movie studio. Most important, Cartoon Corner offered extensive training and an elaborate management support system for its franchisees. The company planned to franchise 100 stores over the next few years, then go public. If all went well, its young executives claimed, the Cartoon Corner chain would build a market valuation of up to $100 million by the mid-1990s. In addition, the mall, which was in the planning stages when Veit signed on, was supposed to become a new kind of entertainment mall, with seven movie theaters, a space-flight simulator, and a shark-filled aquarium. It had all sounded too good to be true--and it was. Despite Veit's careful forecasting, he suffered a series of unexpected catastrophes. The mall failed to keep its promises. The franchisor lost its venture capital. The Gulf War dried up retail traffic. But it was too late to back out. Veit went forward on his own, truly alone for the first time in his life. When the mall and his store finally opened in May 1991, they did so in the midst of a recession. Despite the inspirational stories of other former executives, Veit has learned that the life of an entrepreneur is not all it's cracked up to be. As he notes, "I began with well-above-average experience, a proven concept, and excellent capitalization, yet in my case, personal bankruptcy remains a distinct possibility."     

Simplicity-minded management. A practical guide to stripping complexity out of your organization

Large organizations are by nature complex, but over the years new business challenges--globalization, innovative technologies, and regulations, to name a few--have conspired to add layer upon layer of complexity to corporate structure and management. Organizations have become increasingly ungovernable and unwieldy: Performance is declining, accountability is unclear, decision rights are muddy, and data are crunched repeatedly, often with no clear purpose in mind. To avoid frustration and inefficiency, executives need to systematically attack the causes of complexity in their companies. Ashkenas and his partners at Robert H. Schaffer & Associates have worked with dozens of firms to help them develop strategies for simplifying. In this article, the author details the elements of a simplicity-minded strategy: Streamline the structure; prune products, services, and features; build disciplined processes; and improve managerial habits. ConAgra Foods' experience illustrates how one company turned itself around through careful execution of a simplicity strategy. The packaged-food supplier had become enormously successful by acquiring well-known brands and then allowing them to operate autonomously, evolving into a $14 billion organization with more than 100 brands, a food services business, and a commodity trading operation. ConAgra, however, had no common method for reporting, tracking, or analyzing results. Over time, therefore, it became a highly unwieldy enterprise, riddled with inefficiencies and unable to communicate adequately with investors and other stakeholders. When CEO Gary Rodkin came on board, in 2005, he invested in a series of initiatives to combat complexity. The tactic not only made life easier for customers and employees but also saved millions of dollars in costs. This article has an online interactive questionnaire that can help you assess your own company's level of complexity.     

How we went digital without a strategy

Once you say what business you're in, you put your employees into a mental straitjacket and hand them a ready-made excuse for ignoring new opportunities. So rather than dictate his company's identity, Ricardo Semler--the majority owner of Semco in S?o Paulo, Brazil--lets his employees shape it through their individual efforts and interests. "I don't know what Semco is," he writes in this first-person account of his company's expansion from manufacturing to Internet services. "Nor do I want to know." Ten years ago, Semco employees who were selling cooling towers to owners of large commercial buildings heard customers complain about the high cost of maintaining the towers. The salespeople proposed a new business in cooling-tower maintenance, and the venture is now a $30 million property-management business. That initiative led to the creation, with Semco's support, of an on-line exchange to facilitate the management of commercial construction projects. The exchange is revolutionizing the construction process in Brazil and has become a springboard for further Web initiatives such as virtual trade shows. The author shares some of the lessons he has learned along the way: Forget about the top line. Never stop being a start-up. Don't be a nanny (treat your employees like adults). Let talent find its place. Make decisions quickly and openly when it comes to reviewing proposals for new businesses. And partner promiscuously: "Our partners," Semler says, "are as much a part of our company as our employees."     

Market Based Management™*—A Key to Nucor's Success

Ken Iverson, CEO of Nucor Corporation, transformed Nucor from the virtually worthless corporate shell that it was when he took over as president in 1966 into a Fortune 500 giant with current shareholder value in excess of $5 billion. How did Iverson do it? What are the secrets to his outstanding success? This article argues that an important part of the answer is Market Based Management, a relatively new set of management values and practices that aims to bring the power of a free-market society inside companies. Stated in brief, Market Based Management attempts to replace the traditional “command-and-control” management approach with decentralized decision-making that is designed to make full use of employees' “specific knowledge.” Employees' expanded decision-making authority is reinforced by a powerful incentive compensation system that rewards them handsomely for achieving corporate goals. The result, according to the authors, is highly motivated employees who “take ownership” for their role in contributing to the success of the enterprise.     

Creating alternative futures through storytelling: A case study from Serbia

This article focuses on the project Storytelling for Peace, Gender Partnership and Cultural Pluralism, initiated in 2009 in Novi Sad, Serbia, with the primary aim of promoting educational strategies which challenge the continuation of the dominator society's status quo and facilitate the emergence of alternative, progressive and socially inclusive futures. Constructive storytelling was chosen as an educational practice that can bring about change, and was used as a tool for the transfer of alternative worldviews because it is indirect, flexible and inexpensive. The main beneficiaries of the project were the students of the University of Novi Sad and teachers and children of Novi Sad primary schools. The project utilised local knowledge and languages to foster peace and partnership-oriented individual and social narratives through the process of alternative story writing and revision of traditional Serbian and European tales. The participants learned to deconstruct master narratives, to understand deep culture and how its underlying myths shape national identity. Alternative stories became a tool to teach critical thinking and promote a diversity of voices.     

Rating the raters: Are reputation concerns powerful enough to discipline rating agencies?

Credit rating agencies (CRAs) are accused of bearing a strong responsibility for contributing to the subprime crisis by having been deliberately too lax in the ratings of some structured products. In response to this accusation, CRAs argue that such an attitude would be too dangerous for them, since their reputation is at stake. The objective of this article is to examine the validity of this argument within a formal model: Are reputation concerns sufficient to discipline rating agencies?We show that the reputation argument only works when a sufficiency large fraction of the CRA income comes from other sources than rating complex products. By contrast when rating complex products becomes a major source of income for the CRA, we show that it is always too lax with a positive probability and inflates ratings with probability one when its reputation is good enough.We provide some empirical support for this prediction, by showing that ceteris paribus, the proportion of subprime residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) that were rated AAA by the three main CRAs indeed increased over the last eight years.We analyze the policy implications of our findings and advocate for a new business model of CRAs that we call the platform-pays model.     

Bringing minds together

Boston Scientific founder John Abele has been party to his share of groundbreaking innovations over the years. But the revolutionary advances in medical science that these breakthroughs brought about were not the efforts of one firm alone, let alone one inventor. Abele tells two fascinating stories of collaboration--one about Jack Whitehead's upending of hospitals' blood and urine testing procedures and the other about Andreas Gruentzig's success in bringing balloon catheterization into the cardiology mainstream. Both Whitehead and Gruentzig spearheaded the emergence of entirely new fields, bringing together scientist-customers to voluntarily develop standards, training programs, new business models, and even a specialized language to describe their new field. The process of collaboration, Abete says, is fraught with contradictions and subtlety. It takes consummate leadership skills to persuade others to spend countless hours solving important problems in partnership with people they don't necessarily like. Moreover, managing egos so that each person's commitment, energy, and creativity is unleashed in a way that doesn't disadvantage others requires an impresario personality. Finally, true authenticity--something that few people can project--is critical for earning customers' trust and convincing them that their valuable contributions won't be used for anything other than moving the technology forward.     

Spinning out a star

Spinouts rarely take off; most, in fact, fall into one or more of four traps that doom them from the start. Some companies spin out ventures that are too close to the core of their businesses, in effect selling off their crown jewels. Sometimes, a parent company uses the spinout primarily to pawn off debt or expenses or to quickly raise external capital for itself. Other times, a company may try to spin out an area of its business that lacks one or more of the critical legs of a successful company--a coherent business model, say, or a solid financial base. And in many cases, parent companies can't bring themselves to sever their ownership ties and give up control of their spinouts. R.J. Reynolds, the tobacco giant, managed to avoid these traps when it successfully spun out a most unlikely venture, the pharmaceutical company Targacept. As the story illustrates, the problem with spinouts is similar to the problem of rich children. Their parents have the wherewithal to spoil them or shelter them or cling to them, but what they need is tough love and discipline--much the same discipline that characterizes successful start-ups. R.J. Reynolds recognized that it didn't know that much about the pharmaceutical business and couldn't merely try to spin out a small clone of itself. It had to treat the venture as if it were essentially starting from scratch, with a passionate entrepreneurial leader, a solid business plan, help from outside partners in the industry, and ultimately substantial venture backing. That these lessons are less obvious to executives contemplating spinning out ventures closer to their core businesses may be why so many spinouts fail.     

Using APV (adjusted present value): a better tool for valuing operations

Anyone who learned valuation techniques more than a few years ago is probably due for a refresher course. For the past 25 years, managers have been taught that the best practice for valuing assets-that is, an existing business, factory, product line, or market position-is to use a discounted-cash-flow (DCF) methodology. That is still true. But the particular version of DCF that has been accepted as the standard-using the weighted-average cost of capital (WACC)-is now obsolete. Today's better alternative, adjusted present value (APV), is especially versatile and reliable. It will likely replace WACC as the DCF methodology of choice among generalists. Like WACC, APV is used to value operations, or assets-in-place-that is, any existing asset that will generate a stream of future cash flows. Timothy Luehrman explains APV and walks readers through a case example designed to teach them how to use it. He argues that APV always works when WACC does-and sometimes when WACC doesn't, because it requires fewer restrictive assumptions. And APV is less prone to yield serious errors than WACC is. But, most important, general managers will find that APV's power lies in the managerially relevant information it provides. APV can help managers analyze not only how much an asset is worth but also where the value comes from.     

Strategy as a portfolio of real options

In financial terms, a business strategy is much more like a series of options than like a single projected cash flow. Executing a strategy almost always involves making a sequence of major decisions. Some actions are taken immediately while others are deliberately deferred so that managers can optimize their choices as circumstances evolve. While executives readily grasp the analogy between strategy and real options, until recently the mechanics of option pricing was so complex that few companies found it practical to use when formulating strategy. But advances in both computing power and our understanding of option pricing over the last 20 years now make it feasible to apply real-options thinking to strategic decision making. To analyze a strategy as a portfolio of related real options, this article exploits a framework presented by the author in "Investment Opportunities as Real Options: Getting Started on the Numbers" (HBR July-August 1998). That article explained how to get from discounted-cash-flow value to option value for a typical project; in other words, it was about reaching a number. This article extends that framework, exploring how, once you've worked out the numbers, you can use option pricing to improve decision making about the sequence and timing of a portfolio of strategic investments. Timothy Luehrman shows executives how to plot their strategies in two-dimensional "option space," giving them a way to "draw" a strategy in terms that are neither wholly strategic nor wholly financial, but some of both. Such pictures inject financial discipline and new insight into how a company's future opportunities can be actively cultivated and harvested.