29 Posts Found

Storytelling is a key business skill. Here’s how to make your narratives more persuasive.

Content: Article | Authors: Craig Wortmann, Emily Stone, Liz Livingston Howard, Michelle L. Buck, Mitchell A. Petersen, Steven Franconeri | Source: Kellogg Insight | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Storytelling

A clever strategy on paper is only the starting point for engaging those who will implement it. Strategies must also be communicated and understood — and they must motivate action. Most strategy documents and presentations fail miserably when it comes to this last point. […] Strategy stories can provide a powerful bridge between arguments and actions, intentions and results, and strategists and implementers. […] A … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Madeleine Michael, Martin Reeves, Roeland van Straten, Tim Nolan | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Storytelling, Strategy

Business strategy is usually born of a highly rational process, grounded in facts and analysis. Storytelling, often associated with fiction and entertainment, may seem like the antithesis of strategy. But the two are not incompatible. A clever strategy on paper is only the starting point for engaging those who will implement it. Strategies must also be communicated and understood — and they must motivate action. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Madeleine Michael, Martin Reeves, Roeland van Straten, Tim Nolan | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Storytelling, Strategy

When we talk about the format of storytelling, there’s the specific format of the medium—motion and sound, resolution, and aspect ratio—that create a channel within which you have to fit the story. And then there are the diffusion properties that affect where a story can go, how long it’s going to live on, and how it’s going to morph as it passes through the hands … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Deb Roy | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Storytelling

Senior managers may feel that crafting a story around the data is a pointless and laborious effort—that the facts alone are enough to initiate the desired change. Unfortunately, this opinion is based on the flawed notion that business decisions are solely based on logic and reason. A multitude of experiments from the field of behavioural economics clearly prove that emotion, not rational thinking, is what … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Eoin Whelan, Kieran Conboy, Seán Morris | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Storytelling

Most startups don’t spend nearly enough time recognizing people. Most people need to know their managers and org leaders see their hard work and value it. They’re hungry for this type of acknowledgment. When you tell a story about them, you kick their motivation into hyperdrive, and you make them a model for the rest of the team to follow their lead.

Content: Quotation | Author: Don Faul | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Motivation, Storytelling

If you don’t have a past experience you can use to connect to your team’s current plight, get familiar with what’s happening for them now. Listen to their stories, so you can eventually tell one that will speak to people and make them feel seen.

Content: Quotation | Author: Don Faul | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Storytelling

… people attach emotion to individuals. They love rooting for people. They love experiencing the world through others’ eyes. The more you can tell stories about actual people that connect to the broader purpose, the more your audience will feel and not simply hear what you are trying to tell them.

Content: Quotation | Author: Don Faul | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Motivation, Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior, Storytelling

Don Faul shares the nuts and bolts tactics of influential storytelling he’s learned at Google, Facebook and as Head of Operations at Pinterest — and the three types of stories every manager and startup founder should be able to tell fluently.

Content: Article | Author: Don Faul | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Storytelling

It’s not hard to see why stories are so powerful. Advocacy messages, whether for a cause or a brand, automatically invite scrutiny. They prompt us to put our guard up. Stories are different. Not only do stories encourage people to identify with the characters they portray, but by inducing the willing suspension of disbelief they leave the audience predisposed to accept their premise, at least … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Storytelling

When I say story or narrative, I have a pretty elaborate definition. There has to be a protagonist. There have to be goals. There have to be obstacles people can identify with. There has to be an ultimate resolution—hopefully a positive one. It’s not the same as having a message or a vision or a slogan. It’s a more encompassing, realistic, enveloping thing.

Content: Quotation | Author: Howard E. Gardner | Source: CIO Magazine | Subject: Storytelling

People really don’t want more business information. They are up to their eyeballs in it. They want faith—faith in you, your goals, your success, the story you tell. It is faith that moves mountains, not facts. Faith needs a story to sustain it—a meaningful story.

Content: Quotation | Author: Annette Simmons | Source: Context Magazine | Subject: Storytelling

Innovations from call waiting to the remote control to the DVR have given us the ability to break into conversations, change channels, or fast-forward through stories. This challenges our sense of continuity as well as our dependence on linear stories to create meaning

Content: Quotation | Author: Douglas Rushkoff | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Storytelling

A fact wrapped in a story is 22 times more memorable than the mere pronouncement of that fact, according to cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner.

Content: Quotation | Source: MarketingProfs | Subject: Storytelling

What you want to remember is that every single time you tell a story, you have a goal. Why hide it? People see that you’re hiding something, and they don’t trust you. You need to have your intention clear before you go into the room. You have to be congruent. Make sure your feet, tongue, heart, and wallet are going in the same direction, because … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Guber | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subject: Storytelling

Good stories have three components: a strong beginning, a strong end, and a point of tension. Most people confuse stories with situations. They’ll tell about a situation: X happened, Y happened, Z happened. But a good story takes Y, the middle part of the story, and creates tension or conflict where the reader or the audience is drawn into the story, what’s going to happen … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jennifer Aaker | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Storytelling

There are at least four important stories that all companies should have in their portfolio. The first is the “who am I?” story—you know, how did we get started? The second is the “vision” story, the “where are we going in the future?” This may or may not be connected to the “who are we?” story. A third is the “apology and recovery” story. In … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jennifer Aaker | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Storytelling

Psychologist Jerome Bruner contends that individual learning requires the construction of a mental model of reality to make meaning of our lives. In Actual Minds, PossibleWorlds (Harvard University Press, 1987), he suggested that there were two complementary ways of building such models. The first is the narrative method, or the telling of stories, and the second is the paradigmatic method, or the formation of logical … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: David K. Hurst, Jerome Bruner | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Learning, Storytelling

Rather than attempt to manage behavior with reasons or rewards, we’ll be more effective if we manage the ideas that drive behavior. As one experiment has shown, an idea can change not just how we think, but how we feel. Subjects were shown a picture of a woman crying and brain scans showed enhanced activity in the emotion-generating amygdala. But when the researchers changed the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Charles Jacobs | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Personality / Behavior, Storytelling

Because a story is not an argument, it doesn’t summon up reason in defense. Stories ask only that we entertain them, and when we do, we rehearse the view of the world they embody. If we fnd it more attractive or a better ft with our experience, we adopt it. Because stories are experiences, they address both the intellect and emotions that drive our decision-making.

Sociologists … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Charles Jacobs | Source: ChangeThis | Subject: Storytelling