Annette Simmons

Annette Simmons most popular book, The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence and Persuasion through the Art of Storytelling came out in the year 2000. CEO-Read twice named it as one of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. It is now available in a 3rd edition with two new chapters. Her workbook titled Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins is also available in its 2nd edition. All five of Simmons’ business books define and promote “power-with” strategies and principles even though (and in some cases, specifically because) they undermine autocratic “power-over” strategies. Simmons earned her business degree from Louisiana State University in 1983 before spending ten years in Australia working in international business. She returned to the USA and earned a master's degree from North Carolina State University in adult education with a minor in psychology. She taught leadership and self-awareness under her mentor, Jim Farr. She began recording true stories about “turf wars” that revealed ten predictable tactics commonly used to protect silos in her first book Territorial Games: Understanding and Ending Turf Wars at Work. American Management Association gave away 40,000 free copies as their free membership gift in 1998 and it was eventually translated into eleven languages. That was the year she started Group Process Consulting. Her clients have included NASA, Microsoft, Meta, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, businesses large and small, non-profits, and governments. Annette uses storytelling to teach work groups how to dialogue about diverse perspectives and connect the dots between seemingly adversarial perceptions into a new shared bigger picture. Her second book A Safe Place for Dangerous Truth: Using Dialogue to Overcome Fear and Distrust describes a variety of facilitation strategies that increase participant self-awareness and self-regulation. Her most recent book Drinking from a Different Well: How Women’s Stories Change What Power Means in Action challenges traditional assumptions about what power is, what it is for, and who should have it. This book is a love letter to women who instinctively seek to balance “winning” with moral acts of generosity that protect the weak and preserve our planet.