Page 167 - Roy W. Rice - CEO Material How to Be a Leader in Any Organization-McGraw-Hill (2009)

148 • CEO Material: How to Be a Leader in Any Organization

Your stories improve the more you take out rather than put in.
Knock out every word that doesn’t count. To give you an idea of the neces-
sity for removing unnecessary verbiage, consider that to produce a daily
script for the Colbert Report, 80 writers boil all their contributions down
to a 30-minute script. That same kind of cutting of superfluous informa-
tion is required in your “script.”

Understand that a story simply explains how and why life
changes. It begins with a situation in which life is relatively in
balance: You come to work day after day, week after week, and
everything’s fine. You expect it will go on that way. But then
there’s an event—in screenwriting we call it the “inciting
incident”—that throws life out of balance. You get a new job, or
the boss dies of a heart attack, or a big customer threatens to
leave. The story goes on to describe how, in an effort to restore
balance, the protagonist’s subjective expectations crash into an
uncooperative objective reality. A good storyteller describes what
it’s like to deal with these opposing forces, calling on the
protagonist to dig deeper, work with scarce resources, make
difficult decisions, take action despite risks, and ultimately discover
the truth. All great storytellers since the dawn of time—from the
ancient Greeks through Shakespeare and up to the present day—
have dealt with this fundamental conflict between subjective
expectation and cruel reality.
—Robert McKee, award-winning writer, director, and
screenwriting lecturer for Harvard Business Review

Use Humor

Humor is the bedrock of humanity (that and thoughtfulness). It’s uni-
versal communication. Learning to use judicious humor is a serious part
of your business leadership development. When there is tension, the only