(FORTUNE Magazine) – Most chief executives often have little use for business journalists, so we were bemused to hear that Sears CEO Arthur Martinez had asked his top 100 or so officers to try their hand at writing stories about their very own enterprise. It seems that soon after Martinez swooped in to revive the retailing giant in 1992, he would gather his top troops each month for strategy sessions and assign some homework beforehand. And sure enough, one weekend he asked them to write the first two paragraphs of the business story that would be written about Sears in 1999.

Several of the efforts take potshots at a FORTUNE cover story that called Sears a dinosaur. One reads like this: "The dinosaur might have been lying on its back, but that was just labor pains. This ole dinosaur gave birth to a brand-new Sears."

The writing exercise, says Martinez, did have its uses. "The usual planning processes are expressed in terms of dry financial statistics," he says. "We wanted people to come up with a more textured vision of the customer's world."

--Ronald B. Lieber