The companies annually ranked among those most highly admired and best to work for are also annually ranked among those most profitable and have the greatest cap value in their industry segment.

What else do they share in common?

Their best workers are competitive both internally and externally; they also have high-impact skills in communication, cooperation, and collaboration, both internally and externally. What else? Workers throughout the healthiest as well as most productive workplace cultures tend to think and behave in terms of first-person PLURAL pronouns. They are proud of the fact that “We always go the extra mile for our customers,” for example, and that “Our leaders really appreciate what we do and always make certain that we have what we need.”

Years ago, Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell wrote a book in which they explain how to create “customer evangelists.”  In Drinking from a Different Well, Annette Simmons explains how to create a workplace community of employee evangelists. Her insights are based on more than thirty years of wide and deep experience in all dimensions of the business world. Her five previous books were all bestsellers and explain the potential power and impact of “truth well-told” in a narrative format.

In her latest book, she focuses on how and why “women’s stories change what power means in action.”  This is hardly a secret. Long ago, Theodore Roosevelt asserted that “people won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Women are far more effective doing that than men are. More recently, Maya Angelou observed, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” I made a list of those who have had the greatest impact on me. All of them are women.

Keep in mind that Roosevelt is probably the most competitive, the most argumentative president this nation has had thus far. No one who knows Angelou well would ever describe her as wishy-washy, sentimental wuss. They would laugh at the idea.

I agree with Simmons that men tend to think of power in terms of competition whereas women tend to think of it in terms of positive influence through cooperation or, better yet, collaboration. The material she provides in Drinking from a Different Well is drawn from her wide and deep experience in the business world for more than thirty years, supplemented by the hundreds of interviews she conducted as well as dozens of research sources listed in her Bibliography.

Simmons’ primary purpose is not to attack male assumptions about power; rather, to challenge them. She asks her reader to check out two lists of “Power Preferences” on pages 75-79. The examples are anchored in real-world situations. It is immediately obvious from which gender each list was drawn.

Males and females have different mindsets based on different values and points of view. They have different assumptions (i.e. working hypotheses) that guide and inform their behavior as well as the stories they embrace to explain their point of view (exposition), to make their appeal vivid with compelling details (description), to examine a process/procedure or develop a plot to their story (narration), and to convince others to challenge all assumptions, especially those that have serious implications (argumentation).

I think this is the most important book that Annette Simmons has written…thus far. Why? Because it will have the widest and deepest impact through the stories she will help countless women to create: collective, inclusive narratives — hopefully in collaboration with enlightened men who now “drink” with them at the same “well.”