Review of “The Story Factor” by Annette Simmons

By Annette Simmons, link to the book at Amazon:The Story Factor

Discovering the value of story telling.

I worked as an IT-instructor within programming and internet security for many years for different international companies. Got a lot of good feedback on both the training material and my own performance. We used the exact same material and my colleagues didn’t have the same success rate. For years we tried to train the trainers and implement improvement projects, some more and some less successful.

Story doesn’t grab power. Story creates power.

For couple of years ago I read a book about Story telling and it hit me. The reason I received the level of good feedback was that I had lots of stories about real life and hypothetical scenarios. I started to work with stories and how to tell them.
There are a huge number of books about the subject and it looks like it is a growing subject, judging on the number of new books being published on the subject.

Telling a story about story telling must be the most difficult psychological hurdle to overcome. Annette Simmons did it with great success.

Annette Simmons starts by giving different stories about why story telling is important. This part can be useful for you if you are trying to implement the concept internally in your team/company.
Annette Simon has chosen a great layout for this book. As mentioned a short introduction, followed by different scenarios and stories about how to tell a story. The chapters are a great mix of advice and experience. This makes it easy to grasp and recognize the essence of the techniques. One of my favorites are the chapter “Influencing the unwilling, unconcerned, or unmotivated“. This chapter is interesting as it gives hints, not all as obvious, but many hints on how to handle a tough crowd.

Storyteller Dos & Don’ts, brings new angels to old techniques.

At the end of the book there is a great case study. Highly recommended!
Also, one of the important parts is the “resources” chapter at the end. There is a long list of good references to other books. What I found really interesting is the fact that many “old” books on the subject have even more useful things. This brings an interesting aspect. New books are very much repetition of each other. While old books on the subject bring interesting and different views of storytelling.

In summary, this is an excellent book both for beginners and advanced users of storytelling.