...author, has successfully developed stories for large corporations, describes how to do it.

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Leading business is all about risk--taking it and mitigating it. Regardless of how strategically you think, how tactically you tackle emerging situations and how decisively you act, you never quite know whether you'll hit the mark and get where you want to go.

Therefore, despite the preaching and pleading of leadership gurus for collaboration and engagement, when leaders set corporate direction, the natural tendency is towards maintaining as much control as possible. One of today's hottest set of buzzwords--employee engagement--falls on deaf ears as most corporate leaders opt for the safe and systematic over the daring practice of involving employees in direction-setting.

What actually happens when a business leader steps back from total control and asks employees to collaborate in corporate strategizing or calls on them to become engaged in shaping a new reality and determining their company's future direction? And what happens when that leader issues a really big challenge: Give me a story that will help us all visualize the shape of things to come and see what our future might look like.

In fact, exciting things happen. The buzzword "employee engagement" is suddenly hot and is filled with purpose. And something that humans have used since the beginning of time to understand where they are now and what they should do next--building and telling stories--is called on once again to serve that purpose.

Leave it to a master visionary and reductionist, Steven Covey, to sum it up pointedly and pithily, yet with a great deal of profound wisdom. After presenting us with a bestseller containing seven habits to make us more effective, he gives us the 8th Habit Approach: "You assume people are knowledge workers and are reasonable and capable and treat them as such. The idea is, involve people in the problem and work out solutions together. When people understand the 8th Habit, it puts the 7 Habits under the main tent, because the 8th Habit deals with organizational leadership and...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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