Business Storytelling

Keeping a story dry simply means removing details from it. There are occasions in a corporate setting that demand a dry story. Last month I was working with a multinational food-products corporation in China. Along with my client Maria ( not her real name ) I was working on a story that could convey the following key message, Consumers prefer small brands …

For many, making a case and storytelling sit at two ends of the credibility spectrum. A common belief is that one is fact based and the other is made-up. This perception, reinforced by corporate communication experts couldn’t be further from the truth. In case making, credibility plays a vital role. Credibility in a court is the degree to which the Judge or…

France winning the Football World Cup after 20 years was the big news this week. As we watched the media tell the World Cup story of 11 triumphant French players,  I am sure some of us noted that the rescue story of the 12 Thai boys and their coach from the Wild Boars Soccer team was disappearing from our screens. One big…

A senior business leader who is known to be a tough taskmaster and results driven, is taking over a new team. This leader has a clear idea of how to transform the new team into a high performing team. She writes a set of clear key messages and is keen to tell the vision story to the team but no matter how…

The Turkish Getup is an exercise, most commonly done with kettlebells, where you are required to lift the weight overhead whilst getting up from the ground. Unlike most weight lifting exercises, Turkish Get-Ups require you to remember a sequence. I think there are around 14 steps involved in doing one Get-Up. So, the real frustration in learning to effectively do Turkish…

Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and most of the world’s most inspiring speakers, do not use bullet points. Why don’t they use bullet points? If you have bullet points, you are making the audience listen to you and read the bullet points. That creates cognitive load. *University of Washington biologist, John Medina, has done extensive research into persuasion and…

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft tells the story about his first round of interviews at Microsoft about 25 years ago. An up-and-coming Microsoft manager named Richard Tait asked Nadella a question. The question had nothing to do with coding or solving an engineering problem. Instead, Tait asked: “Imagine you see a baby laying on the street, and the baby is crying. What…