Of Stories Partly Told and Partially Heard : An Exploration of Presentations of Practice
The practice of inviting managers and leaders to make formal presentations telling the story of their experience to others is widespread. In this paper we explore these as one manifestation of the transfer of management practices. We include among those considered, a range of speakers from high profile quot;circuit speakersquot; to unknown quot;experience sharersquot;. A conceptualization of the nature of practice transfer between speaker and audience is developed. Initial theoretical expectations were that successful transfer stories would appear as quot;factual descriptionquot; with causal connections, attributed agency and intentional acts. Our investigation, however, found stories that were rich in detail relating to self positioning, framing and stylistic turns, but had little detail on what was done or why. We also found that what had survived translation and memory loss in audience members were snippets that constituted the skeleton of a story to be reconstituted by the listener for their own purposes