From Anecdote partner Indranil Chakraborty. Close to midnight on a humid, monsoon-laden day in August 2011, a few of my colleagues and I were staring at hundreds of colourful sticky notes on a wall. They were the result of a day’s efforts by the senior management of my company, Mahindra Holidays, to create a corporate […]

Salespeople detest brand gobbledygook. And it’s no wonder. Have you heard brand lingo lately? Lovemarks, saliency, brand-defined competitive sets, brand character, brand claims, brand personality, 80-slide PowerPoint presentations sprinkled with made-up words and forgettable catchphrases … It’s hard for a salesperson to understand this brand bumf, much less translate it into something they can share […]

Twice in the past week I have been asked about our thoughts on presentation skills training as part of learning to be an effective storyteller… So, remembering that we are talking about business storytelling here, my advice is that you spend 98% of your effort thinking about the story: its point, the details necessary to […]

You want a persuasive story with impact, right? So your natural response is to gather all the details you need to paint a vivid picture, add some emotion, and throw in a good twist. Then you craft your story. When you’re happy with it, you practise telling it – you practise, practise, practise. And then […]

“We don’t have time to hear a story. Just give us the facts.” Have you heard that before? The thing is, it’s simply untrue. We have all heard ‘facts’ drone on for ages. Yet you can tell a powerful and memorable story in a minute and a half, or less. Check out the video below […]

Last week I had the pleasure to meet Eileen Sutton who is a financial services copywriter in New York. I was describing some of the work we’ve been doing for the National Australia Bank (known as ‘nab’ here in Australia and the largest bank in our country by asset size1) and she was amazed that […]

Yesterday I presented a couple of storytelling workshops at the Science Communicators Conference in Brisbane. Great people. Excellent conference. One of the highlights of the conference happened on Sunday at the Storytelling of Science panel discussion. Five distinguished panelists and our host Dr Andrew Stephenson (Prof Peter Adams, Prof Tim Flannery, Prof Jenny Graves, Lynne […]

The story I’m about to share featured in a case study we recently published about our work with Yammer. It got me thinking about something Ursula (the protagonist in the story) did that all business leaders are trying to achieve. Have a read and let’s have a look. Ursula Llabres had just 10 minutes to communicate […]

Have you ever wondered why you can remember someone’s job but not their name? Here’s a simple experiment you can do that I learned from Joshua Foer (who wrote an excellent book on memory called Moonwalking with Einstein): Ask someone to remember a person’s name, such as Baker. Ask another person to remember the job […]

Late last year we helped Yammer’s Customer Success Managers build their story capability across their global team using our Storytelling for Leaders Program. They learned how to tell, elicit and trigger stories. And like many companies we work with our story-listening techniques are a real eye-opener for them. Today we’re delighted we can share this […]