I was delighted when Steve Farnsworth asked me to contribute a guest post to his blog.

The content follows.

While it’s not exactly focused on storytelling, it still falls under the communications umbrella.

Steve originally approached me to share my perspective on the changing role of internal PR practitioners.

No question, the economic downturn has been one catalyst for change.

I can’t think of one corporate PR department - with the possible exception of the Johnson & Johnson PR folks who support Purell - that hasn’t been asked to do more with less after a reduction in staff or agency budget or both.

Yet, the more I thought on this topic, the more I came to realize the skills and way of thinking that will elevate tomorrow’s corporate PR pro are the very same traits that will enable tomorrow’s agency PR practitioner to succeed.

Don’t get me wrong.

I appreciate there are marked differences between an internal and external role, although my own internal experience was limited to the PR department of a union called the California School Employees Association (CSEA).

The internal demands of serving so many different stakeholders alone require a certain quality that defies definition. At the tactical level, shepherding a news release through the labyrinth innocuously known as the corporate review process requires finesse and patience.

But the same macro issues impact both internal and external professionals - hence, the decision to look at the future of the overall PR professional from a skills perspective.

I’m going to call this PR person of the future “Ruvin” (squished together my parents’ two names; not above looking for ways to one-up my siblings with the holidays around the corner).

Here’s the key.

Ruvin must command interdisciplinary skills.

Time Magazine ran a provocative Q&A last month with Malcolm Gladwell who pontificated that aspiring journalists should skip J-school and study other domains. He stressed that today’s journalist must bring something more to the table than reporting skills. As exhibit A, he pointed to Jonathan Weil from Bloomberg who broke the Enron story thanks to financial acumen as much as reporting expertise.

I’m not ready to say Ruvin should bail on a mass comms degree, but he/she might if the school’s curriculum doesn’t have the flexibility to cut across multiple disciplines.

Because Ruvin needs finance to read a balance sheet like Brother Weil.

Ruvin also needs videography, photography and editing skills that exceed your garden-variety postings on Facebook.

And don’t forget computer sciences, where programming and an affinity for adopting the latest software tools provide the means to “write on the Net.”

It might have been years since Ruvin walked into a traditional library, but he/she better have a background in library science tuned to dig out and correlate information from that big digital library in the sky called the Web.

Aspects of anthropology such as ethnology all have a place in shaping Ruvin’s foundation for a career in PR.

In other words, tomorrow’s PR practitioner must straddle business and science as well as the arts.

Yes, Ruvin should evolve and polish the soft skills too.

The art of persuasion.

The ability to probe a resource to pull out meaningful content.

Knowing how verbal cues and body language can communicate strength of conviction.

Etc.

But with society redefining relationships and what influences those relationships, and the PR profession evolving toward communications that go direct as well as through third parties, the social gadfly + writing formula by itself won’t automatically translate into success down the road.

One of my favorite modern artists is Chuck Close who takes portraits to a different level. His painting and photography talent serve as only the starting point for his pieces.

Close has immersed himself in the printing process ranging from carving linoleum blocks to applying acid to his etching plates. Geometry – the use of a grid to break the face down into incremental units – and even topology also come to play in his art.

This collision of creativity and science produces stunning results not possible with only the “arts.”

That’s how I see the future of public relations.

Only by drawing from science, business and the arts will PR continue to make extraordinary contributions to organizations.

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There’s an enduring dimension to the David-against-Goliath story that resonates with people.

It brings out a fundamental of good storytelling, the unexpected.

No one expects a David to beat the proverbial Goliath.

The same technique makes for a compelling read in the business world.

That’s why when an accomplished mathematician surfaces to challenge Google, an avalanche of stories appears in media properties ranging from The New York Times to Search Engine Land. In fact, the Computerworld story led with:

“A David has just arose to take on the Goliath that is Google: Wolfram|Alpha, a search engine which serves up formatted answers to questions rather than provide just a list of links.”

One of my favorite writers, Malcolm Gladwell, recently penned a piece for The New Yorker entitled, “How David Beats Goliath.”

As you would expect, Gladwell’s storytelling builds off of a wonderfully contrarian premise:

“David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.”

But Gladwell doesn’t numb our senses with Arreguín-Toft’s statistics and market research.

He frames the story with a subplot that anyone can relate to: a youth sports team, in this case a 12-year-old girls basketball team coached by the CEO of software company TIBCO, that demonstrates effort and smarts trumping expertise. Think Bad News Bears in pigtails (although it’s tough to visualize TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadivé playing Morris Buttermaker instead of Walter Matthau).

To provide context on Ranadivé, Gladwell needs to explain TIBCO’s business. Take a look at the TIBCO boilerplate found at the end of each news release:

TIBCO’s technology digitized Wall Street in the ’80s with its event-driven Information Bus software, which helped make real-time business a strategic differentiator in the ’90s. Today, TIBCO’s infrastructure software gives customers the ability to constantly innovate by connecting applications and data in a service-oriented architecture, streamlining activities through business process management, and giving people the information and intelligence tools they need to make faster and smarter decisions, what we call The Power of Now.

Not exactly a narrative that works in a New Yorker story.

Instead, Gladwell inserts Ranadivé’s example again built around something that everyone has experienced, lost luggage from air travel:

“You know, when you get on a plane and your bag doesn’t, they actually know right away that it’s not there. But no one tells you, and a big part of that is that they don’t have all their information in one place. There are passenger systems that know where the passenger is. There are aircraft and maintenance systems that track where the plane is and what kind of shape it’s in. Then, there are baggage systems and ticketing systems and they’re all separate. So you land, you wait at the baggage terminal, and it doesn’t show up.”

Everything bad that happens in that scenario, Ranadivé maintains, happens because of the lag between the event (the luggage doesn’t make it onto the plane) and the response (the airline tells you that your luggage didn’t make the plane). The lag is why you’re angry. The lag is why you had to wait, fruitlessly, at baggage claim. The lag is why you vow never to fly that airline again. Put all the databases together, and there’s no lag.

Sticking with the basketball metaphor, Gladwell dips into the collegiate ranks and comes up with the time a spunky team from Fordham beat the dominant University of Massachusetts led by none other than Dr. J - Julius Erving by transforming the game into 48 minutes of havoc.

But the basketball vignettes are contrasted by the “Davids” through history who chose a conventional path and were promptly squashed: the Peruvians against the Spanish, the Sri Lankans against the British and the list goes on.

The simplicity in language comes out in Gladwell’s punchline:

We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability … because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.

Furthermore, what Gladwell calls “the insurgent’s creed” involves not only outworking Goliath, but a second advantage:

They will do what is “socially horrifying.” They will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought.

Now there’s a phrase that grabs one by the scruff of the neck, “socially horrifying.”

Back to the big picture.

Gladwell uses the “how” as the vehicle to tell the story of a person, company, army and girls basketball team succeeding when the circumstances suggest it shouldn’t play out this way.

The same principle can be applied to telling a company’s story.

Companies, especially in the technology sector, leapfrog the status quo on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, the typical company wants to jump right to the punch line instead of capturing the “how” in all its storytelling glory.

Those anecdotes, numbers, obstacles, perspectives  emotions, derailments, etc. bring out an entertainment value that elevates the accomplishment (even by us mortals who don’t have Mr. Gladwell’s gift).

By the way, Ranadivé’s basketball team made it all the way to the nationals where their slingshots failed them in the third round.

One of the last places you’d expect to see the art of storytelling is where a publication sells its advertising.

Even one of the bastions of high-brow reading, The Atlantic, - home to Malcolm Gladwell and other marquee-name storytellers - offers a fairly mundane sales pitch:

The Atlantic is America’s leading destination for brave thinking and bold ideas that matter. The Atlantic engages its print, online and live audiences with breakthrough insights into the worlds of politics, business, the arts, and culture. With exceptional talent deployed against the world’s most important and intriguing topics, The Atlantic is the source of opinions, commentary, and analysis for America’s most influential individuals who wish to be challenged, informed and entertained.

Very corporate.

About what you’d expect to read in any company boilerplate after multiple revisions grind out the personality.

That’s why Blast magazine’s sales approach caught my attention starting with the kickoff:

For the love of God, SPONSOR US. We’re really freakin good, we swear.

We’ve aleady covered “freakin verus freaking,” but suffice it to say this is not a vanilla opener.

Check out the rest:

Blast is a lifestyle and tech magazine focused on us spoiled, rotten Generation Y kids born between 1978 and sometime in the early 90s. (And a few Generation X holdovers — think MTV before “The Hills,” Atari and baseball with long hair, mustaches and no steroids.) We’ve experienced Nintendo, AOL when it was dialup and all the girls in the chat rooms were models, Windows (or MAC), Doom on a 3.5″ floppy, boy bands, iPods, iPhones and college degrees that stuck us with a mortgage in student loans.

Blast’s contributors do music, movies, theater, video games, sports, fashion, sex, food and liquor for starters. We write about some of it too.

Blast is online. Don’t ask for the print edition.

And, seriously folks, we’re not a blog. We do use WordPress as our content management system, but WordPress is SO much more than a blogging platform.

Blast is a form of convergence journalism, looking to combine the quality of print journalism (and print journalists) with the convenience and unlimited space of the web. Where else can you find a 2,000-word video game review or a 3,000-word band interview? Maybe Rolling Stone. Yeah, we’re not as good as Rolling Stone.

Where else will you find coverage of both the 2008 presidential race and the latest breaking news from the porn industry? Maybe Maxim. We’re better.

We try to be equally geared toward guys and girls — forgive us if it doesn’t seem that way, but we think we balance the pregnant porn star coverage pretty well with the latest from Kaki King and Tegan and Sara.

Good stuff.

Self-deprecating with an edge.

Funny.

You come away knowing the publication’s personality and what they want to be when they grow up.

By its own admission, it might not measure up to Rolling Stone’s editorial, but Blast definitely tops the Rolling Stone media kit.