I’m a big fan of The Economist.

The writers have perfected storytelling for a business audience.

Of course, the writers toil in relative obscurity with a no-byline policy that leaves readers to wonder “Who the hell wrote that piece?”

So I can’t tell you who penned the masterpiece called “A Different Game,” addressing data storage in the context of business intelligence (or BI for those acronymiaks) and data mining.

Not exactly a topic that quickens the pulse.

But look at how The Economist jumps into the story:

In 1879 James Ritty, a saloon-keeper in Dayton, Ohio, received a patent for a wooden contraption that he dubbed the “incorruptible cashier”. With a set of buttons and a loud bell, the device, sold by National Cash Register (NCR), was little more than a simple adding machine. Yet as an early form of managing information flows in American business the cash register had a huge impact. It not only reduced pilferage by alerting the shopkeeper when the till was opened; by recording every transaction, it also provided an instant overview of what was happening in the business.

What a terrific anecdote.

I always wondered why cash registers had bells.

Also enjoy the way the reader is left to connect the dots that Mr. Ritty’s employees were stealing him blind.

After pulling in the reader with the Dodge City history, the story fast-forwards to today:

Sales data remain one of a company’s most important assets. In 2004 Wal-Mart peered into its mammoth databases and noticed that before a hurricane struck, there was a run on flashlights and batteries, as might be expected; but also on Pop-Tarts, a sugary American breakfast snack. On reflection it is clear that the snack would be a handy thing to eat in a blackout, but the retailer would not have thought to stock up on it before a storm. The company whose system crunched Wal-Mart’s numbers was none other than NCR and its data-warehousing unit, Teradata, now an independent firm.

I believe we have a sighting of symmetrical anecdotes.

But do we really need a definition of a Pop-Tart?

For the powers that be at The Economist, I can assure you that your readers - even those who sip sherry with an upright pinkie - know what a Pop-Tart is.

Furthermore, characterizing the Pop-Tart as “sugary” is a cheap shot. A little homework would have revealed flavors such strawberry are now made with “real fruit” and only 17 grams of sugar. Geez, a fuji apple rings in with the same 17 grams of sugar.

On the positive side, using Pop-Tarts as a bridge to explaining the benefits derived from business intelligence resonates:

Analytics—performing statistical operations for forecasting or uncovering correlations such as between Pop-Tarts and hurricanes—can have a big pay-off.

To gain a true appreciation for The Economist’s storytelling, check out a trade book’s story on business intelligence in which lines such as:

“For sure, BI analytic apps and dashboards are hotter than a recent Tiger Woods photograph.”

serve as “colorful” fodder.

The Economist piece goes on to share how heavyweights ranging from Nestlé to Wal-Mart to Li & Fung have got the sift-data religion before closing with one final quantifiable burst:

Visa, a credit-card company, in a recent trial with Hadoop crunched two years of test records, or 73 billion transactions, amounting to 36 terabytes of data. The processing time fell from one month with traditional methods to a mere 13 minutes. It is a striking successor of Ritty’s incorruptible cashier for a data-driven age.

Naturally, the story concludes with the “incorruptible cashier.”

Scorn makes for good storytelling.

It brings out emotion and ultimately unscripted drama.

Look no further than the bevy of reality TV shows cranking out the profits to understand the appeal of NOT knowing how the story will turn out.

With this in mind, I suspect we’re going to see and read a helluva story on Monday (March 8, 2010) when according to The Wall Street Journal Toyota moves to discredit its critics.

If you want to see the imprint of Toyota hiring two well-connected D.C.-based PR agencies to shape its outbound communications, watch the fireworks on Monday.

No question, the folks from Glover Park Group and Quinn Gillespie & Associates have been busy beavers applying their version of communications honed on the political front.

According to the Journal story, Toyota will challenge the credibility of the whistleblower:

The company is providing reporters with court filings that it says show the former employee has a history of mental illness and poor performance reviews.

In fact, Toyota has already started attacking the credibility of former employee Dimitrios Biller sending an e-mail to The Journal that highlighted:

Copies of legal filings that include negative job reviews for Mr. Biller at a past employer and highlight mental-health issues.

Welcome to the Gordon Liddy school of communications (”nice” snaring job reviews from another company).

Apparently, David Gilbert, the professor from Southern University who claims to have replicated the sudden acceleration in Toyota cars without creating an error code, also stands in Toyota’s line of fire:

“The Gilbert demonstration is a hoax or a parlor trick,” said the person familiar with Toyota’s thinking…

The person familiar with Toyota’s thinking?

As if there’s only one such person.

I can’t say this comes across as stellar Journal reporting either given “the person familiar with Toyota’s thinking” is the PR person whispering in the ear of the journalist.

“The analysis of Professor’s Gilbert’s demonstration establishes that he has reengineered and rewired the signals from the accelerator pedal. This rewired circuit is highly unlikely to occur naturally and can only be contrived in a laboratory.  There is no evidence to suggest that this highly unlikely scenario has ever occurred in the real world.  As shown in the Exponent and Toyota evaluations, with such artificial modifications, similar results can be obtained in other vehicles.”

Lord knows, I’ve taken my own shots at Toyota (three to be exact with the latest being Customer Letter No 4 Loses Its Way).

But Toyota isn’t the first mega brand to suffer from the-gang-can’t-shoot-straight communications.

Given the company is the largest car maker in the world and has deposited equity in the brand karma bank for years, I assumed they would eventually bounce back.

Now, I’m not so sure.

I don’t think Mr. Toyoda and his compadres have any idea about the line they’re about to cross on Monday.

To communicate through character assassination and a smear campaign is to reach a point of no return.

When it comes to a crisis, everyone tends to fixate on the “bad press.”

I think it’s more revealing to zero in on the communications controlled by the offending company.

How are they telling their story within their control?

That’s why I find the Toyota open letters to customers so fascinating.

Just because you control the words doesn’t mean you get the story right.

Playing backseat driver, I’ve weighed in on three letters:

• Open Letter to Toyota Customers Hits Pothole
• Second Letter to Customers Stays on the Road
• Third Toyota Customer Letter Falls Flat

In aggregate, the letters haven’t been very good, which unfortunately also describes the fourth called “Our Commitment to Customers.”

The first line sets the tone:

History shows that great companies learn from their mistakes.

Gentlemen, I thought we established back in the letter No. 2 days that people don’t embrace history lessons when they’re worried about charging cars.

On the positive side, I like the idea that you’ve packaged three points for easy consumption.

On the not-so-good side, the points aren’t the right points.

First, we are fixing the vehicles covered by our recent recalls.

Talk about misreading the crowd. People kind of expect you to fix the malfunctioning vehicles.

But it’s the second point that illustrates how Toyota still views the crisis through an intellectual lens:

Toyota engineers have rigorously tested our solutions – and we are confident that no problems exist with the electronics in our vehicles.

• We’ve designed our electronic throttle control system with multiple fail-safe mechanisms to shut off or reduce engine power in the event of a system failure. And they work.
• But we’re not stopping there. We’ve asked a world-class engineering firm to conduct a comprehensive, independent analysis. Their interim report confirms that our fail-safe features work.
• Toyota will make the results of this comprehensive, independent evaluation available to the public when it is completed.

Again, we see gamesmanship with language that “no problems exist with the electronics,” meaning the rest of the car remains a wildcard.

Not good.

And you’ve got the electronic throttle control system to work, but you’re “not stopping there?” Given what’s transpired over the past few months, I would have to characterize this decision as wise but not exactly one that builds equity in the brand.

By the time you get to the third point about “transparency” you’ve lost the audience.

And the sign-off points back to Toyota’s heritage of building safe cars for 50 years.

Everyone knows Toyota has been cranking out safe cars at a good price forever. You don’t have to keep the reminders coming. Let the withdrawal from the karma bank happen naturally.

I do have one final suggestion for the Toyota gang -

Don’t write any more letters.

P.S. Quick reminder that we’re curating a “Toyota Crisis PR Resource” page which will be updated by the end of the week. If you have thoughts or content for the page, by all means send them my way.

I rarely address fiction in this blog.

While many of the same concepts apply to storytelling in business, there’s still a gulf between the two disciplines.

But Sarah Lafferty pointed me to a book of Kurt Vonnegut short stories published after his death. The introduction includes what Vonnegut calls “Creative Writing 101,” which offers sound advice for storytellers of all ilk:

1.Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Yes, Mr. Vonnegut can write even when he’s pulling together storytelling tips for us mortals.

I particularly like No. 6 and the point that “no matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them.”

The beauty of storytelling in business is you don’t have to fabricate “awful things” to confront executives. They happen on their own … as the President of Toyota Akio Toyoda will attest.

Instead, the question for communications professionals becomes how much to disclose.

The standard company line is always “little if any.”

The suits are linear thinkers; i.e., the word “awful” brings a negative connotation and we don’t want the company associated with negatives.

But it’s your executive or executives overcoming the bad stuff - even things that might have been self induced - which in turn creates the drama of a good story.

As Vonnegut puts it, how your characters respond to the “awful things” allow the reader to “see what they are made of.”

So it is in the business world.

Your customers, employees and prospects want to see what you’re made of.