Business Storytelling

This blog post is going to highlight effective story telling in public communication. Through research trying to locate a topic that relates to cooperation or cooperative business relationships I discovered a TED video by Howard Rheingold titled The new power of collaboration delivered in 2005.

His opening sentence is inviting the audience to join him in challenging past notions on how biological creatures accomplish tasks specifically humans. The preamble continues with the presentation of commonly perceived facts of human nature. The use of the term “only” is emphasized with “competition”, “winning” and “dominating” another person or group to survive. Rheingold then shifts to highlighting another perception and emerging trend across disciplines of cooperation and interdependency. As he continues he returns back to human nature to look at the past with the lens of cooperation instead of competition. Demonstrating a past not just filled with war and conflict even from our early days of nomadic life but cooperation to achieve mutual beneficial results.

Rheingold built trust and was able to communicate his ideas by creating a contrasting palate for the audience. Simple terms that appealed to the audience, which made acceptance of his narrative palatable. The use of the term “only” for oppositional thought to his thesis created a restrictive, narrow counter argument that seems ridiculous if one only thinks of the complexity of nature itself. This made it possible for the audience to accept his thesis as it was not constrained and had multiple motives for human development through both cooperation and competition. Throughout this initial discourse he also inserted terms of communication, technology and wealth. In the end his central subject is that increased open communication through technology and cooperation can develop new forms of wealth equality.

In relating this to the cooperative business model he gives some great examples of how even large companies working in an open format are able to develop economic gains not just for themselves, but for the community that jointly participated as well. The only misgiving I have with the structure of the storytelling is that it gives me a feeling of Us versus Them, those that think one narrow way and those that have a more broad perception.  It is effective speech to win over an audience but does the audience need to be won over on this topic? I say this as the target audience for TED seems to be progressive, intelligent minds especially in 2005 which was prior to TED going to an open format for all to view (2007 was the year TED Talks started publishing to the public on the Internet). Rheingold is effective in delivering his point and his overall demeanor is good for public speaking. Even his orange suit grew on me a bit.