Steve Harvill Management Consultant | Using Business Storytelling To Gain A Competitive Advantage

Steve Harvill, Business Keynote Speaker and Strategic Management Consultant, discusses how stories of a corporate organization are impactful, inspirational and powerful.   In his article The Narrative Arc: Stories Tell It All published by Business Leader Magazine, Harvill provides insight on how corporate organizations can utilize business storytelling to gain a competitive advantage.

Business storytelling provides useful information to move your corporate organization forward from the leading to cutting-edge of its industry. Steve Harvill Strategic Management Consultant explains that the power that lies in focused storytelling is as old as mankind, and its useful application to the stoic numeric principles that drive business is being ignored.  The same principle applies to business storytelling.  By expanding your sphere of understanding, by capturing the intricacies that lie in the Narrative Arc, you can add the key link to building a complete business strategy that will form a clear picture of non-quantifiable intangibles that can make a difference in the pursuit of business success.

Creative Ventures, Steve Harvill's organizational consulting firm, teaches a strategic management process called the Narrative Arc.  This strategic management process is designed to take advantage of the critical information contained in the stories of a corporate organization. The Narrative Arc strategic management process is a soft and somewhat open systemic approach to gathering critical information. By tapping the rich well of information gained through business storytelling, corporate organizations often find their own competitive advantages.

When corporate organizations pursue their business best practices, they generally follow an objective approach, creating a series of business performance metrics that take into account everything from the number of cold calls necessary to generate a sale to the correct percentage of cost to revenue. They know the numbers inside and out, but when tracking their top performers and  top performing offices, they discover obvious gaps in their business performance metrics. The Narrative Arc is a strategic management process that helps fill in these gaps.  Here is a summary of how it works:

• A tool is created in collaboration with a client.  This tool is the questions that will be used to build the Narrative Arc.  This includes questions for top performers that generate business performance metrics as well as open-ended questions with boundaries that are part of the Narrative Arc.
• Stories are shared.  Key contacts and top performers are interviewed in business storytelling sessions.
• Analysis is conducted. Impact points and patterns that exist in the stories are identified.  These patters form a clear picture of the non-quantifiable intangibles that can contribute to business success.  This provides insight into business best practices that are contributing to top performers competitive advantages.
  
• Good impact points are repeated.  Some impact points are repeatable successful acts (RSAs) that can be repeated across offices and product lines.  These are the Narrative Arc gems.  These Repeatable successful acts can become core business strategy in in moving a company forward.