Podcasting corporate stories

The Storytellers' Chris Spencer links to Steve Smith on why podcasting helps companies communicate. Smith believes podcasting is all about remembering how to tell good stories:

Old fashioned storytelling may be the most engaging uses of podcasting within the corporation.

It's a big world

My office is on the third floor of a library. In my lazier moments—which arrive with increasing frequency—I wait for the lift, next to which hangs a poster of this eye-grabbing photomicrograph. Written above the image is a rather bold statement:

It's a big world. We've organized it.

The "We" is the OCLC, who own the rights to the Dewey Decimal Classification system. Now we should be grateful, right?

Well, David Weinberger is not so sure. On All Things Considered he says the problem with attempts by well-meaning authorities to organise information is one of context:

What something is about depends on who is looking.

Tagging, Weinberger argues, accomodates multi-subjectivity by empowering the "…readers to decide what something is about." The big lesson, Weinberger concludes, is that:

…we no longer have to act as if there's only one right way of understanding everything, or that authors and other authorities are the best judges of what things are about.

Minds less well educated

Education revolutionary Roger Schank explains in the preface to Making Minds Less Well Educated Than Our Own the origin of the book's curious title. Schank, who sat on the Board of Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the early 1990s, recounts:

When I tried to explain to this board the technological changes that were about to come that would threaten the very existence of the Encyclopaedia, there was general disbelief… Only Clifton Fadiman seemed to realize that my predictions about the internet might have some effect on the institution they guarded. He concluded sadly, saying "I guess we will just have to accept the fact that minds less well educated than our own will soon be in charge."

Of course we are now living in the middle of the changes Schank forewarned and, in response to online competition, the venerable encyclopaedia has named a new board. A decade has passed and as board member Wendy Doniger astutely points out "The world has changed," but some things haven't, like the patronising attitudes of the board, judging from this quote, also from Doniger: "We're deciding what people are going to think."

The spirit of leadership

Peter Cammock presented his poetic vision of hope for the world at the 2005 Winter Lectures. To realise his vision Cammock says: "We need a type of leadership that goes beyond rationality; we need a type of leadership that has a touch of soul."

Cammock considers great leadership might have its origins in spirituality which he defined by means of Peter Vaill's term spiritual condition: "…the feeling individuals have about the fundamental meaning of who they are, what they are doing, and the contributions they are making."

We need to bring our spiritual condition into the conversation if we are to be effective leaders. Although the stakes are high, many of us are ill-equipped to participate in such a deep dialogue, because as Cammock points out:

We live in a society that's put off the knowledge of ourselves very often for a knowledge and utilisation of the world external to us and in the process of our life of work, in the pursuit of our ambitions, we very often lose connection with ourselves—we become washed away.

Cammock believes the language we need to have this conversation is what David Whyte calls the "despised poems." Cammock quotes from Whyte's book Crossing the Unknown Sea:

For a real conversation we need a real language. To my mind that is the language not enshrined in business books or manuals but in our great literary traditions. Keats or Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson or Mary Oliver often say more in one line about the invisible structures that make up the average workday than a whole shelf of contemporary business books.