By definition, there’s a feel-good element to a hero.

They overcome obstacles on their way to a positive outcome.

And if the hero starts out as an underdog a la “David versus Goliath” there’s even more of a reason to have a rooting interest.

The same concept holds true in business storytelling.

While we tend to think of a hero as bigger than life - Mother Theresa, the Dali Lama, Shrek, etc. - the hero in the context of a business story can bridge theory to reality.

A recent New York Times piece by Steve Lohr called “Making It All Compute” does exactly this under the umbrella of National Computer Science Education Week.

Before jumping into the NYT story, it’s worth rewinding the tape to the original news release:

WASHINGTON, D.C.—December 7, 2009— The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and its partners are launching Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek) to uncover and remedy the inadequacy of the nation’s computer science education system at the K-12 level.  While 5 of the top 10 fastest growing jobs are in computing-related fields, the percent of schools with rigorous high school computing courses fell from 40 percent to 27 percent from 2005 to 2009.  The last 60 years witnessed an extraordinary burst of innovation and talent that have produced a nation where most can scarcely remember life without computers.  Yet this innovation-based society is at risk if students are not learning fundamental computing knowledge in our nation’s schools.

Nothing particularly riveting or new about the fact that American kids continue to tune out science and math.

Is there a worse acronym than the Association for Computing Machinery, affectionately called ACM? The word “machinery” conjures up the image of a restaurant-grade mixer, not exactly an attention-getter for the under-20 crowd.

But Lohr uses the ACM news announcement as a springboard into the need to better package computer education, with three heroes showing the way starting with the chief information officer at Harvard Medical School:

Growing up in the ’70s, John Halamka was a bookish child with a penchant for science and electronics. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses and buttoned his shirts up to the collar… Dr. Halamka grew up to be something of a cool nerd, with a career that combines his deep interests in medicine and computing, and downtime that involves rock climbing and kayaking

Like the oxymoron, “cool nerd.”

Hard to miss the photo of Mr. Halamka wearing a hip black shirt under a sports coat. It’s not quite Steve Jobs with the mock black turtleneck, but in the same category.

We also learn about Kira Lehtomaki, who parlayed a love for art into a gig at Walt Disney Animation Studios where she draws on a computer with specialized graphics and modeling software.

And the story closes with high school senior Mario Calleros who jumped from playing computer games to an internship at UCLA where he helped build a smartphone application for navigating the campus.

I was particularly encouraged by this last vignette. There’s still hope for my own son to get more out of Madden than the ability to mimic sports announcers.

It’s these three “heroes,” Halamka, Lehtomaki and Calleros, who bring the NYT story to life. That’s what justifies the piece being on the front of the business page above the fold.

For stories with complexity, customers can often play a similar role in humanizing the content and, again, bridging the theory to reality.

When the New York Times hired Ashlee Vance, many enterprise computing PR folks rejoiced.

Tired of watching the Web 2.0 hotshots dominate business media stories on computing, they thought, “Finally. Here is a major daily bringing on Vance with the implied message that enterprise computing once again matters.”

Not exactly.

It was as if people forgot that Vance wasn’t coming out of Computerworld or Dr. Dobbs Journal. This was a guy who spent five plus years honing his entertainment chops at The Register, the book which proudly exclaims on its masthead, “Biting the hand that feeds IT.”

For Exhibit A, consider the 2008 Register “radio” wrap-up by Vance with the header “Bill Gates cried to make the world a better place” and classic Vance narrative:

Apparently, Bill Gates let some lass from 23 and Me have it when she tried to draw a link between vaccines and autism. Touchy stuff, I know. But Bill loves his vaccines.

No, this is not your garden variety trade journalism.

Where am I going with this?

Check out the Vance story which ran in The New York Times last week: “Minnesota’s Enormous Apples Computer.”

The story explains how the University of Minnesota took proceeds from licensing the “code” to Honeycrisp apples to help pay for a $6 million supercomputer.

Can you imagine the university’s computer scientists going door to door selling chocolate bars to raise this kind of dough? No way could they equal the windfall from the apple IP.

Plus, the story is humanized by explaining one potential application that would improve a surgeon’s game before an operation.

Scientists at the University of Minnesota have started looking into creating scans of hearts and brains that can then be translated into 3-D images on a computer. With such technology, a doctor could, for example, practice doing surgery on not just any heart but rather your heart ahead of the actual surgery.

Hard to argue with the upside of this one.

Vance closes by bringing the story back to fruit, noting that while the University did not maximize its revenue from the Honeycrisp, they’re projecting up to $30 million per year in licensing fees from its latest incarnation, the SweeTango.

Kudos to HP’s Erin Collopy and her Burson team (HP helped build the supercomputer) who set the stage for the piece and ensured Vance had access to the right people at the U of Minnesota.

Ironically, it was also a medical angle that landed one of our clients ILOG in The New York Times earlier in the year in another Vance story: “The Doctor Will B.R.M.S. You Now.”

Needless to say, business rules management software isn’t exactly a door opener into the business media.

Again, the technology was humanized by showing the benefits to hospital patients framed by the fact that 1.5 million people are hurt by medication mistakes annually, which adds $3.5 billion to the hospitals’ tab.

I thought we had nicely made the point with hard data, but Vance managed to extract a pile-on comment from the director of IT integration at Vanderbilt University Medical Center:

Even top-notch doctors miss key factors, and things slip through the cracks.

Now, that’s reassuring.

To close on the subject at hand -

Enterprise computing stories need that entertainment quotient and contrarian twist to play on the big stage.

And the jarring sound bite doesn’t hurt.

Siemens recently took its new high-speed train for a spin with reporters on board.

The story provides the perfect fodder to resurrect “Iron Reporter,” the forum in which we contrast how two reporters tell the same story.

Today’s challenge pits Andrew E. Kramer from The New York Times (“Siemens Fills Need for High-Speed Trains in Russia”) against Paul Glader from The Wall Street Journal (“High-Speed Rail Keeps Train Makers on Track”).

I’ll try to channel Alton Brown as we examine the all-important lead.

Kramer ties the story to intrigue and Russia’s quest for global relevance in the waning days of the Cold War:

In the last years of the cold war, the ultrasecret research institute that had designed the Soviet Union’s nuclear submarines received an unusual request: could it build a high-speed train?

The Soviet Union, despite its dependence on railroads, had fallen far behind Japan and Western Europe on high-speed transport. That the order came to the Rubin design bureau suggests that Moscow viewed catching up as a matter of national security.

The result of the little-known program was a slate-gray, round-nosed locomotive called the Sokol, Russian for falcon, that petered out soon after the Soviet Union did. The prototype achieved a top speed of only 143 miles an hour — hardly breaking a sweat by high-speed standards.

But the fall of the Falcon created an opening for Siemens.

Talk about doing your homework and connecting the dots.

On the other hand, Glader takes the approach of capturing an “all-aboard” moment:

As an engineer pulls the throttle, villagers track side gawk at the bullet-shaped train as it gathers speed. Soon, forests and wooden shacks are a blur as a dashboard display reads 250 kilometers an hour (155 miles per hour).

Good narrative for sure, but it pales against the depth of Karmer’s opener.

Further scrutinizing the Glader/Journal piece, we discover that the new Russian train from Siemens serves as a hook into the broader topic of the high-speed train business, with Hitachi and Bombardier as well as Siemens vying for the $182B pie.

This allows Glader to parachute into Spain, China, the UK and the U.S. (noting President Obama’s $13B in stimulus money earmarked for high-speed rail) to share market snapshots. As the GE watcher at the Journal, no surprise that Glader also devotes a graph to GE’s rail operation.

In short, Glader develops a follow-the-money story tying back to the $1B that Russian Railways will pony up for the Sapsan project.

He closes with ping-pong anecdotes, one for and one against fast trains:

“I’m sure they’ll push away aircraft,” says Alexander Dumnich, a captain of the famous Red Arrow train, which was introduced by Joseph Stalin in 1931 and pressed into military service during World War II.

Alexei Daibov, an auditor with PricewaterhouseCoopers in St. Petersburg, is more skeptical. “I travel by plane,” he says, expressing but he hopes a price war will lower the cost of plane tickets.

I would classify his narrative as perfunctory with the exception of calling out the train’s upscale interior design as “a change in Russia’s egalitarian rail tradition,” a clever tip to Dostoyevsky.

Back to Kramer and the NY Times -

Rather than address the world market for fast trains, he hypothesizes that Siemens’ end game is really the U.S., “the last laggard of the high-speed age.”

This opens the door to tidbits not in the public domain, such as Siemens repotting employees from its high-speed train division to Sacramento, and that the very same Sapsan connecting St. Peterburg and Moscow is in the running for the San Francisco to LA train trek.

And Kramer extracts a terrific quote colored against the backdrop of the ride:

The United States “is a developing country in terms of rail,” Ansgar Brockmeyer, head of public transit business for Siemens, said in an interview aboard the Russian test train, as wooden country homes and birch forests flickered by outside the window.

It also turns out that the Sapsan incorporates a technological breakthrough. The train has no locomotive; “instead, electric motors are attached to wheels all along the train cars, as on some subway trains.”

Why didn’t the Glader/Journal piece mention this little ditty? I don’t know. I suppose it wasn’t deemed important.

As the Kramer/NYT story finds its way back to Russia, we learn that geopolitical friction stretched the Siemens sales pitch over a decade, and it wasn’t until “a general thaw in relations between Germany and Russia” took place that the deal was inked.

The imagery of the actual train trip is woven throughout the Kramer/NYT article with one of my favorites explaining that the Russian tracks still need to be upgraded for high-speed trains:

It was like driving a new Porsche over a rutted road.

I think it’s revealing that while both reporters close with an anecdote, Kramer draws from the actual trip:

PR consultancies are notorious for not applying their craft to building their own brands.

I’d like to think we’re an exception to the rule.

Equally important, we strive to bring the art of storytelling to our own communications as well as our clients.

As a result, we’ve enjoyed attention in publications ranging from the New York Times to CFO Magazine to USA Today and one my favorite passages (related to conducting business in China):

“It took us a good two years to get our WOFE in place in China. The twists and turns to the finish line were Kafkaesque. As part of the application, they ask for three potential names for the WOFE. Of course, the government ends up selecting a completely different name (from what we submitted) that sounds like a dim sum restaurant. Fortunately, with the right connections behind the scenes we were able to secure the right name.”

Thanks to the rise of digital media, the corresponding demand for content opens the door to more opportunities for contributed pieces.

Toward this end, today’s BusinessWeek (of the digital variety) features my op-ed entitled, “Small Biz to Washington: About Those Promises…”.

I discussed the importance of storytelling in an op-ed using AIG’s contribution to the Washington Post as an example. I’m a big believer in keeping the narrative conversational and having fun with language which hopefully comes out in the BusinessWeek op-ed with phrases such as the following:

“President Obama campaigned on an I-Will-Help-Main-Street platform”

“… to borrow from Shakespeare, here’s the rub on the $15 billion package.”

“If we learned anything from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) last year - never a good sign when an acronym rhymes with carp - it’s that pumping large sums of money into the banks by itself is not the answer to the credit crunch.”

“If someone wants to take on the burger chains with yet another beef-between-bun venture I can appreciate taking a pass on funding.”

“… regain the black on the balance sheet.”

I wanted to work in “Brother can you spare a dime” but decided it fell under the category of “cheap parlor tricks” so took a pass.

The condemnation of jargon in news releases has gone on since the invention of the tool, with the latest salvo coming from Ben Worthen at The Journal.

This is a tough one.

You can articulate a rationale worthy of the Wiley College debate team, but a given company will still insist on inserting wonderful phrases like “the agile solutions-oriented enterprise” or “the cutting-edge SCSI appliance drive.”

On the other hand, there’s no excuse for allowing jargon to impede the storytelling process (unless your gift for narrative rivals Tom Clancy).

Jargon weighs down the telling of a story.

Jargon smothers the drama of story.

Jargon bores people.

BTW, it’s not just the tech industry that suffers the slings and arrows of jargon. Every industry ranging from transportation to medical to biotech creates its own esoteric language for those on the inside.

I suppose that last point gets to the issue.

When communicating to those on the outside, the jargon loses its meaning.

I think one of the best storytellers, whether in print or on video, is David Pogue from The New York Times.

In a Ragan interview earlier in the year, Pogue made the point that having to wade through a bunch of fluff turns him off quickly.

On the other end of the spectrum, he shared the following example of a pitch that kick-started the storytellling process and ended up as a column:

“One guy said, ‘David, my client sells a laptop that can be dropped from six feet, get dunked in water and survive in 300-degree heat. Let me know if you’re interested.’

“How can I not be interested?”

Good drama in a succinct and conversational 29 words.