Leaders all over the world are discovering that with a few skills and some practice, they can become the communicator and presenter that stands out from the crowd. Asia is no exception. Some leaders like Jack Ma use storytelling naturally and effortlessly. For example, in this video Jack answers Obama’s first question with a story […]

In my work with Anecdote over the last 13 years, I’ve come across thousands of stories. Some of them have had a huge impact on people. They’ve revealed weak spots in organisations, changed cultures, and inspired people to achieve far beyond what they believed they were capable of. In most cases, a story has the […]

Imagine if someone tells you that the single biggest thing you can do to improve your organisation’s performance in the next 12 months is to stand in front of the entire organisation and bare your soul: your vulnerabilities, your fears, the low points in your life as well as the highlights. And once you’ve done […]

A few weeks ago I had dinner at a friend’s house. At the table, my friend’s 9-year-old daughter challenged me with a riddle. You might be familiar with it. A father and son are involved in a serious car accident. The father dies instantly while the son is airlifted to hospital in a critical condition. […]

There are many ways to think about the term ‘organisational culture’. A favourite perspective from decades ago is ‘Culture is the way we do things around here’. It can also be useful to think about culture as an image, like on a TV screen, that is made up of millions of individual pixels. In the […]

To reignite creativity, innovation, and learning, leaders must rehumanize education and work. Brene Brown Anecdote was formed on 11 August 2004. At our first board meeting we discussed our purpose. It was possibly one of the shortest ‘purpose’ discussions I can imagine. The phrase ‘helping restore humanity to the workplace’ was immediately suggested and we […]

We often see people making one of two mistakes in their storytelling. They either don’t tell a story at all, or they go overboard and turn it into something you’d read in a Stephen King novel. The danger of either mistake is that your audience will lose interest. So how do you make sure that […]

Last week I was in Atlanta with two of the Anecdote team (Lucy and Shelley) at the Association for Talent Development (ATD) international conference and exhibition. For the first time ever we had a booth at the exhibition. The exhibition was open from Monday to Wednesday and we were inundated with people wanting to know […]

Time is one of my most valuable commodities. It’s probably the same for you. So anything that wastes time reduces productivity, right? And that’s something we all want to avoid. The overwhelming view of stories in business is that they waste valuable time. This is demonstrated every time I run one of our programs or […]

Back in late 2014, Shawn resolved to start writing a book on business storytelling to share what we had learned about achieving business results using the power of stories. It was 10 years since Shawn founded the company and it was definitely time to get the book out. Like most books, the writing was a […]