Stephen Denning

Filled with examples from every business sector, The Age of Agile helps leaders of businesses both large and small learn to act entrepreneurially. It enables an enterprise to nimbly adapt and upgrade products and services to meet rapidly changing technology and customer needs.

How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done

The Age of Agile

A radical new management model for twenty-first century leaders Organizations today face a crisis. The crisis is of long standing and its signs are widespread. Most proposals for improving management address one element of the crisis at the expense of the others. The principles described by award-winning author Stephen Denning simultaneously inspire high productivity, continuous innovation, deep job satisfaction and client delight. Denning puts forward a fundamentally different approach to management, with seven inter-locking principles of continuous innovation: focusing the entire organization on delighting clients; working in self-organizing teams; operating in client-driven iterations; delivering value to clients with each iteration; fostering radical transparency; nurturing continuous self-improvement and communicating interactively. In sum, the principles comprise a new mental model of management. Author outlines the basic seven principles of continuous innovation The book describes more than seventy supporting practices Denning offers a rethinking of management from first principles This book is written by the author of The Secret Language of Leadership—a Financial Times Selection in Best Books of 2007.

Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century

The Leader's Guide to Radical Management

Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative

The Leader's Guide to Storytelling

The book introduces the concept of narrative intelligence—an ability to understand and act and react agilely in the quicksilver world of interacting narratives. It shows why this is key to the central task of leadership, what its dimensions are, and how you can measure it. The book’s lucid explanations, vivid examples and practical tips are essential reading for CEOs, managers, change agents, marketers, salespersons, brand managers, politicians, teachers, parents—anyone who is setting out to the change the world.

How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative

The Secret Language of Leadership

Storytelling as a powerful and formal discipline for organizational change and knowledge management is taught in this book, which explains how organizations can use certain types of stories to communicate new or envisioned strategies, structures, identities, goals, and values to employees, partners, and even customers.

How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-era Organizations

The Springboard

Take a satirical scamper through organizational life in the midstof changing times, brought to you by master storyteller andformer World Bank executive Steve Denning. With wisdom and ahealthy dose of wit, Denning introduces a cast of furry characterswho together learn the fine art of change through storytelling intheir quest to overcome obstacles, generate enthusiasm andteamwork, share knowledge, and ultimately lead their company into anew era of success and significance. Through the stories ofSquirrel Inc., readers will learn that the ability to tellthe right story at the right time can determine the outcome of anymajor change effort. In each chapter Denning's squirrels learn touse storytelling to address leadership challenges: How to bring about change How to communicate who you are How to transmit values How to foster collaboration How to stop rumors How to share knowledge How to lead your organization into the future

A Fable of Leadership through Storytelling

Squirrel Inc.

In his best-selling book, Squirrel Inc., former World Bank executive and master storyteller Stephen Denning used a tale to show why storytelling is a critical skill for leaders. Now, in this hands-on guide, Denning explains how you can learn to tell the right story at the right time. Whoever you are in the organization CEO, middle management, or someone on the front lines you can lead by using stories to effect change. Filled with myriad examples, A Leader’s Guide to Storytelling shows how storytelling is one of the few available ways to handle the principal and most difficult challenges of leadership: sparking action, getting people to work together, and leading people into the future. The right kind of story at the right time, can make an organization “stunningly vulnerable” to a new idea.

John Seely Brown

Laurence Prusak

Katalina Groh

This book is the story of how four busy executives, from different backgrounds and different perspectives, were surprised to find themselves converging on the idea of narrative as an extraordinarily valuable lens for understanding and managing organizations in the twenty-first century. The idea that narrative and storytelling could be so powerful a tool in the world of organizations was initially counter-intuitive. But in their own words, John Seely Brown, Steve Denning, Katalina Groh, and Larry Prusak describe how they came to see the power of narrative and storytelling in their own experience working on knowledge management, change management, and innovation strategies in organizations such as Xerox, the World Bank, and IBM. Storytelling in Organizations lays out for the first time why narrative and storytelling should be part of the mainstream of organizational and management thinking. This case has not been made before. The tone of the book is also unique. The engagingly personal and idiosyncratic tone comes from a set of presentations made at a Smithsonian symposium on storytelling in April 2001. Reading it is as stimulating as spending an evening with Larry Prusak or John Seely Brown. The prose is probing, playful, provocative, insightful and sometime profound. It combines the liveliness and freshness of spoken English with the legibility of a ready-friendly text. Interviews will all the authors done in 2004 add a new dimension to the material, allowing the authors to reflect on their ideas and clarify points or highlight ideas that may have changed or deepened over time.

Storytelling in Organizations

The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations is the first book to teach storytelling as a powerful and formal discipline for organizational change and knowledge management. The book explains how organizations can use certain types of stories ("springboard" stories) to communicate new or envisioned strategies, structures, identities, goals, and values to employees, partners and even customers. Readers will learn techniques by which they can help their organizations become more unified, responsive, and intelligent. Storytelling is a management technique championed by gurus including Peter Senge, Tom Peters and Larry Prusak. Now Stephen Denning, an innovator in the new discipline of organizational storytelling, teaches how to use stories to address challenges fundamental to success in today's information economy.

Stephen Denning

Books

Your next favorite book is out there