Shawn and I have spent the last couple of days working with a client helping them create their strategic story down in the Mornington Peninsula. There are certainly worse places in the world to spend a couple of days than at a winery in such a beautiful spot. It was a throughly enjoyable off-site, made […]

Jonathan Gottschall, a literary scholar, has just written a piece for Fast Company called Why Storytelling is the Ultimate Weapon and in the process has set back the field of business storytelling with his emphasis on fictitious stories. I can imagine that being a literary scholar gets Jonathan entwined in myths and legends and literary […]

Greg Stephens, Lauren Silbert and Uri Hasson are Princeton University neuroscientists who in 2010 conducted a series of experiments showing that an audience’s brains light up (imagine they are all in a fMRI machine) the same way as the presenter’s brain when she tells a story. In their words, “Speaker and listener brain activity exhibits […]

The following few paragraphs are part of an exercise I’m doing with Madelyn Blair. We’re writing an Essay in Two Voices, a format invented by Madelyn and Victoria Ward I believe. Here, however, you’re only hearing one voice, mine. My first part (500 words) is here. Here is my second part (250), which is partly […]

We can now confirm the venue for our ‘Storytelling for Business Leaders’ workshops in Boston, on the 5th June, is the Harvard Club of Boston. It is a truly stunning venue. Full details about it can be found here. If only those walls could talk! To read more about the course itself and to make […]

When asked for the secret of his success in the steel industry, American industrialist Charles Schwab (1862-1939) always talked about using praise, not criticism, giving liberal bonuses for work well done, and “appeal[ing] to the American spirit of conquest in my men, the spirit of doing things better than anyone has ever done them before.” […]

I did a blog post in February about reconnecting with an old friend of mine, and how she is one of the most gifted storytellers I know. In that post I said I would be sharing some more of her stories, and here is one she shared with me recently. A few years back, I […]

As soon as I walked into our office I wanted to tell Kevin the story Hugh Grant told on Graham Norton’s talk show last night. It was a funny little story; an embarrasing stituation for Hugh in a French train toilet. It made me laugh. And when I told it to Kevin we both laughed […]

I am very pleased to announce that I will be running one of our ‘Storytelling for Business Leaders’ workshops in Boston, MA on the 5th June, 2012. I am coming to the US for a three day course at Harvard with Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey around their fantastic book Immunity to Change, and thought […]

There is huge power in short stories used to illustrate a bigger point. I was in London last November delivering a project for a UK government department. One of the things I miss most about the UK (along with Irn Bru, Jaffa Cakes and MOTD) is the weekend newspapers. You could get lost for days […]