CIO: You say it's relatively easy to change the minds of employees, even those who work for large companies.

Easier, not easy, I would say. There's a distinction between leading a nation, leading a sprawling company and leading a more focused company like, say, Microsoft. The more the company is homogeneous, in the sense that the people have the same type of training and the same kind of background, the more you can approach these things at a conceptual and theoretical level.

Any CEO or CIO needs to make a distinction between the times he or she is addressing a rather heterogeneous group — say, everybody who works for Wal-Mart — as opposed to dealing with top management. It's a matter of identifying and speaking to your audience. Think about what you're doing when you're dealing with the whole organization, and what you're doing when you're dealing with a homogeneous group - which is most likely to be the people in your immediate circle, but it could be a very different group as long as they're homogeneous. It could be all the technical people working in the same corner, it could be the people in charge of the Web site - they all have the same expertise.

CIO: How much of changing minds is manipulation?

I don't believe behaviour change lasts unless people's minds change voluntarily. I'm interested in leadership that's overt and mind-changing that's intentional.

People often way overemphasize how much they have to keep things a secret and manipulate people. To be sure, there's evidence that in the short run, it's much more effective to be deceptive. Many people think they have to deceive in the short run. But in the long run, people and companies get found out. Ultimately, manipulation backfires.

CIO: You say that stories are one of the most effective ways for changing minds in organizations. What kinds of stories?

When I say story or narrative, I have a pretty elaborate definition. There has to be a protagonist. There have to be goals. There have to be obstacles people can identify with. There has to be an ultimate resolution - hopefully a positive one. It's not the same as having a message or a vision or a slogan. It's a more encompassing, realistic, enveloping thing.

The overall narrative of your story is so important. Basically, what leaders of organizations ask [you the employee] to do is put aside or reject the story you have grown up with, believed in, internalized and seen yourself as a character in. Leaders say: "No, it's a different story. You may not like it initially, but it's a better story in the long run, and you have to go with it, and here's why, and I'm going to show you by my own behaviour that it's important."

Usually the people best at dissolving resistances are the ones who have the same resistances themselves - because they know in their gut how powerful they are.

CIO: Besides changing the minds of their staffs, CIOs have to convince CEOs and other top officers of their goals.

When it's two people talking, resonance is the key factor. There is no general recipe for resonance; you have to know your audience well enough to know what's going to resonate with this person on this day. If you want to bring about a change in the CEO, you have to know him or her very well.

You need to do your homework before you get into that one-on-one situation. You need to know if this person is a story person, a theory person, an emotion person or a paranoid person. You need to know what are the sets of levers that work with him. And to the extent that it's a very high-stakes performance - this is your two minutes, you have to make the case now or never - you've got to be monitoring very carefully.