Last month I had the opportunity to give a 90-minute talk to 16 Silicon Valley CEOs in San Jose. They all believed in business storytelling and wanted to dig into the practicalities of the skill. One of the questions they had was, ‘How do you do storytelling with deeply analytic and scientific communities, both internally […]

As a leader, you often need to establish a rapport with others, to connect with them. It might be when you meet new people in an office or when you give a presentation or a talk. In each case, the other people will want to know who you are and what you stand for. They […]

Warning: This article contains explicit language. Do not read if you might be offended. Have you ever had the feeling that you and your colleagues are all on the same page, and you feel good about how everyone understands what’s happening? I had an experience last week that illustrates just how illusory that feeling can […]

A lot has been written recently about how Jeff Bezos and his executives run their meetings. Amazon has made it very public that their senior team (the S Team) has banned PowerPoint, and that each meeting starts with a six-page narrative memo which the executives read and absorb for up to 30 minutes before the […]

We’ve recently been doing some work around diversity and inclusion for a project with a large construction company. An insight we’ve taken away from this project is how much leaders can be shielded from the underlying issues in their company. No-one wants to worry or disappoint the senior leadership because it could make them seem […]

We recently began an Anecdote book club for the office. For our first book, we read The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact. The authors, Chip and Dan Heath, wanted to explain what a moment is and how you can purposefully create these moments to have more impact on things like a […]

We understand that life gets busy. Between emails, meetings and projects it can sometimes be hard to deliberately think about useful business stories that you’ve encountered recently. We want to make it easier to become better business storytellers, and for that reason we’ve decided to post regular stories that include bite-size tips on how to […]

The numbers tell the story. At least, that’s what many accountants would have us believe. “Accountants are so used to talking in numbers, we forget to contextualise what it is all about,” says Grant Anderson CA, head of government relationships at Xero in New Zealand. “Storytelling is so fundamental, particularly if you can hook into […]

We were about 20 years too early. Back then, my group at IBM extolled the benefits of understanding organisations as complex systems – ones where it was impossible to predict how things were going to turn out; where technology and the speed of change fostered non-linear relationships; where a small thing could have a big […]

Perfect stories told perfectly are suspicious. This is especially true in organisations. Business people feel more comfortable with imperfect stories. They are better received. Here’s a small example. I recently heard a government employee tell a story about a work-related change he was experiencing. Mid-story he said, ‘… and then there were some big policy […]