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 […]

In this episode of Anecdotally Speaking, we explain what it is that Mark and I do for work, why some stories work for some audiences and not for others, and the difference between the typical ‘brand stories’ we see and the one we share today. Lots of companies have ‘brand stories’. The problem is that […]

Gerry Lynch is the general manager of Mars New Zealand, the food and retail business that gives us Mars bars, M&Ms, MasterFoods and Whiskas, to name just a few of their brands. The company, which employs a couple of hundred people, is also a regular finalist in, and winner of, New Zealand’s long-running IBM Kenexa […]

Time is one of my most valuable commodities. It’s probably the same for you. So anything that wastes time reduces productivity, right? And that’s something we all want to avoid. The overwhelming view of stories in business is that they waste valuable time. This is demonstrated every time I run one of our programs or […]

Companies often mistake planning for strategy. This seems to be particularly true of large organisations. A few years back, we got a call from a large company headquartered in the Netherlands. Their head of strategy felt that their people didn’t understand the company strategy – a common concern across most big businesses. The strategy group […]

About 10 years ago, we started working with organisations to convert their strategies into strategy stories. It was clear right from the start that creating a compelling story was only one of the conditions for success. The other non-negotiable was that leaders had to have the skills and confidence to tell their version of the […]

During our recent work on a major strategy story project, we ticked off our priorities. We encouraged the company’s leaders to take responsibility for the story, as opposed to outsourcing it to a department or an external agency. We helped each leader clarify their understanding of the strategy. We talked about the necessity of including […]

When I did my first degree back in the early 1980s there were some big issues to focus on. One of them was ‘what will we do with all the leisure time society will have when computers are doing many of the jobs people currently do?’ Obviously, this issue was nothing to worry about! But […]

Have you ever heard someone say, that picture really tells a story? When I first heard someone say this I just couldn’t see it. How could a single image tell a story? Surely a story is a set of events culminating into something unexpected. There needs to be more than a single image for it […]