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 […]

  20 March is World Storytelling Day. On that date back in 2011, we launched TheStoryTest.com, a website designed to help people develop their ability to spot stories. We now have close to six years of data from across the globe about the ability of people to know what is and what is not a […]

When I was doing my first degree back in the late 1970s, one of the very important – and simple – techniques for being a more effective manager was known as ‘management by wandering around’ (MBWA). The essence of MBWA is to get up from behind your desk – which managers often think of as […]

The process of becoming an effective storyteller in business is … well … a process. It doesn’t often happen by chance. The first step is learning how to spot a story. Then you need to start actively noticing stories – assessing things that happen in terms of their potential as useful stories. The next step […]

We developed the first version of our Storytelling for Leaders program nearly 10 years ago. Subsequently, we were asked many times to modify the program for sales teams. The results were so effective we set about developing a specific program for sales, Storytelling for Sales, which was released in 2015. I’ve just finished reading a relatively recent book […]

Simon Sinek walked on stage wearing jeans, casual shoes and a long-sleeve t-shirt. He was about to deliver the Monday keynote at ATD 2016 to about 10,000 people at the Denver Convention Centre. Armed only with a humble flipchart and marker he started by talking about a recent experience: About three weeks ago I was […]

About 10 years ago, we started working with organisations to convert their strategies into strategy stories. It was clear right from the start that creating a compelling story was only one of the conditions for success. The other non-negotiable was that leaders had to have the skills and confidence to tell their version of the […]