A marketing professor had a set of subjects memorize a 2-digit number and another set memorize a 7-digit number. All were told to go down the hall to the next room and recite the number. Along the way, though, they are offered a choice between chocolate cake or fruit.

Amazingly, the 7-digit memorizers overwhelmingly chose cake while the 2-digits chose fruit. The theory: two parts of the prefrontal cortex — a rational and an emotional — are in a tug of war. Occupy the rational one with a job like remembering a 7-digit number and the emotional part gets a free shot at calling the shots. The theory explains why when we’re tired, at the end of the day at work, we are more prone to yield to temptation of a snack or an extra martini.

You have to hear the Radiolab creators dramatize the war of the cortexes to appreciate this excellent example of news storytelling. I also like NPR’s rewriting of audio stories so that they are appropriate for the online reader. In this case, the Web account retains the humor but executes in a completely different way.

The main point: Fear, facts and force are the favored approach for those who want to facilitate change, but they never work. Doctors know that even the threat of death is not enough to influence eight out of nine heart attack patients to change their lifestyles. Instead, successful change agents rely on a mixture of:

• Relate – Establish a new, emotional connection with a person or community that fosters hope.
• Repeat – Use this new relationship to learn and practice the new skills and behaviors you need to sustain change.
• Reframe – Allow this new relationship to help you see your situation and the world in a new light.

Good doctors have the first one down. To reframe, they need to help patients see the benefits of healthy changes today – healthy food can be delicious, exercise can give them more energy, meditation can reduce their stress symptoms. And they need to help them savor short-term wins so that they will repeat the behavior over and over until it becomes their new habit.

Best part about this book: The writing. Deutschman is a magazine writer (Fortune, GQ, Fast Company) and book author (The Second Coming of Steve Jobs) who has a raft of stories at his disposal. He never tells, he shows. He has spent quality time with the change leaders he profiles — so much so that you find out, for example, that 35 years into her successful program to rehabilitate criminals at San Francisco’s Delancy Street, Mimi Silbert still has days when she doesn’t have that fire in the belly. Her solution: act “as if” she does, and eventually the fire comes back.

Favorite quote:

I don’t think a leader can accomplish major change without being willing to slice yourself open and become part of the change. I say, ‘You guys force me to be my best self because I live in a glass house.’ — Mimi Silbert

Bits that stuck:

• Quick wins reward the hard work of change, nourish the faith and keep critics at bay.
• When stuck with a problem I haven’t been able to solve myself, the first step is to seek out a new relationship with someone or some group that has had success in this area.
• When the spirit flags, “fake it until you make it.” Act “as if” you have the spirit and it will come to you.

Diane Gage-Lofgren, our national VP of communications and PR, had asked a poet/performance artist  to bring life to our communication team’s new vision statement. A stroke of genius. I will forever have a visual and resonant image to add soul to our vision: To be a model for communication excellence as Kaiser Permanente is a model for the future of health care.

How did Sekou Andrews do it? By story, of course. He became Health Care. He was big, powerful, essential. He was the most important issue of our day. “But no one seems to be impressed with all this,” he said. “Because to the average American I am intimidating, extraneous, inaccessible and even bewildering.”

And he himself had no voice. He needed us to tell his story. He needed us to tell it in 140 characters, in video, in wikis — whatever it took and wherever the audience. And we communicators at KP have the special responsibility and opportunity to tell his story on behalf of an organization that is “offering a solution to the leader of the Free World.

I could see myself in the story — as the hero, of course. “Not observers. I need visionaries who can see as far as I can reach.” He needs me. I’m in.

And that’s how leadership storytelling works.

By comparison, my job as an organizational communicator is easy. Still, I have a well-drawn gameplan, thanks to Guber’s article in the December 2007 Harvard Business Review (you can search for it on my public Evernote folder). His four key principles:

The story must be true to the storyteller, reflecting his/her core values:

“He must enter the hearts of his listeners, where their emotions live, even as the information he seeks to convey rents space in their brains. Our minds are relatively open, but we guard our hearts with zeal, knowing their power to move us. So although the mind may be part of your target, the heart is the bull’s-eye. To reach it, the visionary manager crafting his story must first display his own open heart.”

The story must be true to the audience:

Every storyteller is in the expectations-management business and must take responsibility for leading listeners effectively through the story experience, incorporating both surprise and fulfillment. At the end of the story, listeners should think, “We never expected that – but somehow, it makes perfect sense.”

The story must adapt to the moment:

Intensive preparation and improvising are two sides of the same coin. If you know your story well, you can riff on it without losing the thread or the focus.

The story must elevate:

Even in today’s cynical, self-centered age, people are desperate to believe in something bigger than themselves. The storyteller plays a vital role by providing them with a mission they can believe in and devote themselves to.

Tellingly, the guy from Hollywood says the story has its own power, regardless the medium:

It isn’t special effects or the 0′s and 1′s of the digital revolution that matter most – it’s the oohs and aahs that the storyteller evokes from an audience. State-of-the-art technology is a great tool for capturing and transmitting words, images, and ideas, but the power of storytelling resides most fundamentally in “state-of-the-heart” technology.

Kai gives Granny a knitting lesson from Steve Krizman on Vimeo.

What I’ve learned so far:

• Video is not as forgiving as written storytelling. If you don’t get the beginning, middle and end captured in video, your story will stink. You either have to stage a reenactment, or you resort to a silly text card.
• Sound is the most important part of video. I’ve had decent visual, but lousy sound. Nothing you can do with that. Conversely, with good sound you can get by in editing.
• On the scene, you have to work harder on a video story than on a written story. You snooze, you lose the one piece of action that would make the whole story.

I uploaded several months’ worth of video capture to my Vimeo account today. Rather than use the feature-filled, but molasses-slow CyberLink software, I slapped segments together using FlipShare. I am satisfied with the FlipShare results — the editing quality matches the Flip capture quality. We’re not talking Cannes here.

The video I chose to embed in this post is my favorite from a video storytelling standpoint — a finger knitting session between my Mom and my 9-year-old daughter. No written word can match the close-up of my Mom’s gnarled fingers, or the quiet exasperation on Kai’s face, or the poignant moment between Mom and my wife Karen, or Kai’s feet-kicking thrill when Granny thanks her for the help. It doesn’t cover a lot of territory, but it is a hint at the special power of video storytelling.

Dan Meyer told the story chronologically, so we come to learn that this arrangement had a drawback: no homecoming football game for Arickaree High. But the Liberty team decided to play one of their home games on the Arickaree field — “I teach the boys to be selfless,” the coach says. We hear the Arickaree cheers when their lone senior boy breaks for a long touchdown run. We hear the halftime ceremony as he is crowned homecoming king. We hear the public address announcer congratulate the losing visitors, a team of precisely six players who had played every down and now faced the four-hour bus ride home.

Colorado Public Radio produced the story as part of a series on the issues faced by small towns. Homecoming is a rite of passage that many of us experience. Putting it into a rural context is an excellent way to give city-dwellers an appreciation for the difference of rural life.

The eagle gently coaxed her offspring toward the edge of the nest. Her heart quivered with conflicting emotions as she felt their resistance to her persistent nudging. “Why does the thrill of soaring have to begin with the fear of falling?” she thought. This ageless question was still unanswered for her.

As in tradition of the species, her nest was located high on the shelf of a sheer rock face. Below there was nothing but air to support the wings of each child. “Is it possible that this time it will not work?” she thought. Despite her fears, the eagle knew it was time, her parental mission was all but complete. There remained one final task – THE PUSH.

The eagle drew courage from an innate wisdom. Until her children discovered their wings, there was no purpose for their lives outside the nest. Until they learned to soar, they would fail to understand the privilege it was to have been born an eagle. The push was the greatest gift she had to offer. It was her supreme act of love. And so, one by one, she pushed them — and they flew!

I later asked Frank where he got the story. He said Samantha Ortiz, the dean of students, gave it to him. Sam told me she picked it up from a previous college she worked at, but wasn’t sure where it originated.

An Internet search reveals the story comes from the book, Even Eagles Need a Push by international business speaker David McNally. The search returned more than 100 instances when this story was used, most often in educational rites of passage.

Now that’s a story with wings.

1. Make your first paragraph work. “I am thrilled to apply for ….” “Enclosed please find ….” “I noticed your posting ….” Will blend right in with about 95 percent of the letters. Start by saying why you want this job, or what you think you will bring to the table. Here’s one that I liked:

How many times have you attended an event and wished you could get those 60 plus minutes of your life back? Many I bet. I’m here to help.

2. Follow the marketing mantra: Talk about the benefits you bring, not your features. Forget about sentence after sentence of traits and skill sets “attention to detail … people-person … budget management … vendor relations … passion.” Tell me what you can do for me. Such as:

To this position, I will be bringing established relationships with

vendors, caterers, printers, entertainers.

3. Tell stories, but be short and to the point. Think very hard about that list of traits and skill sets and come up with stories that illustrate them. Descdribe the situation, what you did, and how it all turned out. Like this:

I single-handedly coordinated a party in Montréal, Canada for the company’s affiliates. Challenges included selecting a venue without an in-person visit, communicating with restaurant owners in French and negotiating cost in another currency. (The company’s) president and managers told me it was the best party in company history.

4. Cut the jargon. It’s great that you worked hard on the letter, but work harder on distilling the wording — reduce the sauce. Instead of “well-versed in conducting business in a university setting,” just say “I know how to do business at a university.”

5. Know something about the organization. There’s no excuse for not visiting the organization’s Web site and finding out what their mission and vision statements are, what their current advertising campaign is, what they’re putting in their news releases. Use this information to write a great first paragraph and to convert your “features” into “benefits.”

6. Edit the darn thing. You don’t get a second chance at making a first impression. The cover letter colors my perception before I open up your resume. The worst thing that can happen is you clearly demonstrate that you don’t have “attention to detail.” The second worst thing is that I close the thing without any sense of why you want to work in my organization and what you might bring to it.

There were a couple of interesting variations of note:

Two or three letter-writers had a short intro, then tabulated the job requirements on the left and their qualifications on the right. Not very engaging, but it sure made for a quick and easy scan. I can’t say any of these made my finalists list, though.

A couple of letter writers were clever. One wrote the “top 10 reasons why I am right for this job.” Another had a list of things about herself that indicated what a “event planner wonk” she is. They gave me an indication that these are outside-the-box people, and probably have nice personalities. But I don’t think the gimmicks are as good as well-tuned, specific stories.

Coincidentally, my favorite applied storytelling blogger, Kathy Hansen, last week released a book, Tell Me About Yourself, with advice on using stories to get jobs and advance your career. It’s in the mail from Amazon (if it were on Kindle, I’d have it already!).

I have thoughts on resumes, but that will be another posting.