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 […]

Imagine if someone tells you that the single biggest thing you can do to improve your organisation’s performance in the next 12 months is to stand in front of the entire organisation and bare your soul: your vulnerabilities, your fears, the low points in your life as well as the highlights. And once you’ve done […]

Sujit Nair was perplexed. Last year, the global consulting firm he worked for had invested a considerable sum in measuring employee engagement. The survey had helped the firm identify four areas that offered potential for improvement. It told them these areas were important to their people but it didn’t tell them what was driving the […]

Executives who are exposed to the power of stories often ask me how they can get interesting anecdotes they will be able to use as business stories. After they learn how to spot a personal story with a business point, their natural tendency is to recall such stories or look for them in the workplace. But […]

As Gandhi stepped aboard a train one day, one of his shoes slipped off and landed on the track. He was unable to retrieve it as the train started rolling. To the amazement of his companions, Gandhi calmly took off his other shoe and threw it back along the track to land close to the […]

A few weeks ago I had dinner at a friend’s house. At the table, my friend’s 9-year-old daughter challenged me with a riddle. You might be familiar with it. A father and son are involved in a serious car accident. The father dies instantly while the son is airlifted to hospital in a critical condition. […]

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 […]

There are many ways to think about the term ‘organisational culture’. A favourite perspective from decades ago is ‘Culture is the way we do things around here’. It can also be useful to think about culture as an image, like on a TV screen, that is made up of millions of individual pixels. In the […]

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 […]