Having a business strategy is important. Ensuring all staff understand the strategy is even more important. And it all starts with the senior leaders having a clear and consistent understanding of where you are going and why. Lou Gerstner summed it up well: All strategies are essentially the same; the difference is execution. And to […]

The idea that you can tell if someone is lying by analysing certain physical cues has been prominent ever since the 1920s, when the polygraph first made an appearance. Psychologists such as the influential Paul Ekman swear by the technique, and they have the backing of popular culture in the form of TV shows like […]

I was recently asked by a law firm to come up with an activity they could conduct during an upcoming staff retreat. They were keen for their junior staff to learn the importance of understanding the dynamics of a dispute, not just its procedural aspects, and they were interested in doing this through the use […]

We love spending time in the US, but we only get across once or twice a year. So its vital that we make the most of it when we do… This year Mark will be coming to Orlando from 17th – 20th May to attend our first Association for Talent Development (ATD) Conference – the […]

Narrative is the oldest and most compelling method of holding someone’s attention; everybody wants to be told the story. Always look for ways to convey your information in narrative form.1 Many years ago, I worked on a big consulting project with a brilliant engineer who had a bad stutter. I noticed that in meetings he […]

Stories are powerful – we all know that. So powerful that, sometimes, a single example can overwhelm a wheelbarrow full of facts.   Business storytelling sceptics I came across an example of this in mid-2012. I was having lunch at a restaurant in Melbourne – reputedly the best laksa restaurant in town. I was meeting […]

There are many reasons why stories are not used in business settings. One of the reasons is that every story we tell reveals something about our character, and we tend to be very protective of our character. Another reason is an unwillingness to give out any personal information. Turn what you say into a story […]

I visited Amsterdam in early April and met Paul Joosten and Ronald van Domberg. Both fabulous facilitators and both working in the story field. Within a few months they had become Partners in delivering the Storytelling for Leaders program and had completed their accreditation. While many programs in The Netherlands are delivered in English, there […]

At Anecdote, much of our work is focused on making strategies stick by converting them into understandable, memorable and influential stories. We often discover entrenched views that worked against the new strategy. These ‘anti-stories’ must be identified and tackled to give your strategy a chance of succeeding. This is our second post in a series […]

This post is part of our series on Leadership Humanity. In 2010 I was working with a law firm in Sydney to help launch their new values. One of the values is Respect. At the launch event we collected stories about Respect: some bad, many good. One of the senior partners related an experience from […]