Stories Entertain and Inform in Business

Let’s dispense with the myths.
2

The mom admonishes the kid,
“The next time you tell a story, young man,
you’re going to find yourself on a timeout
that NEVER ENDS.”
4

But professor,
I’m telling you my paper on Freudian
Impulses During The French Revolution was
finished when I went to the fridge for my
roomie’s leftover pizza and out of nowhere
comes Mrs. Robinson’s Great Dane who
literally …
6

Stories deliver comic relief.
7

“When she threw that toupee out the window, it was
the best thing that ever happened to me. I feel like my
old self again: neurotic, paranoid, totally inadequate,
completely insecure. It's a pleasure.”
George Constanza
Seinfeld
8

OK, comic relief is
not a total myth on TV.
9

THE REALITY
Today’s journalists, bloggers and business
writers embrace classic storytelling
techniques as a means to entertain.
10

Technically Speaking,
“Stories have such a powerful and universal appeal
that the neurological roots of both
telling tales and enjoying them are probably
tied to crucial parts of our social cognition.”
Scientific America Mind
(August/September 2008)
11

And if that wasn’t deep enough
The human brain is
predisposed to think in
story terms.
This predisposition is
continuously reinforced
and strengthened as the
brain develops up through
the age of 12.
Adults are dependent on
interpreting events and
other humans’ behavior
through story
architectures.
12

25 November 2008
You don't have to be a crazed Jungian,
a structural anthropologist,
or a seven-basic-plots believer to agree that
storytelling is something of universal
importance in human experience,
and something that
exhibits deep and suggestive
similarities across cultures.
13

Back to the Core Premise:
Stories entertain, helping media properties
and others rise above commodity hell
sometimes known as “Google alerts”
14

Advertising
Gets the Power of Narrative
15

Are you thinking it
behooves communication
pros to develop content
that aligns with this
storytelling reality?
16

Story Trees
[stawr-ee tree] noun
An internal document that captures content for
helping others build their own stories.
18

Story Trees should articulate
the difference between
“what was” “what is”and
T I M E
19

The bigger the gulf between the two,
the greater the
drama.
20

If you jump to the end of the movie
and see Rudy finally going into the
game to play for Notre Dame,
this has zero
meaning.
22

Instead, one
needs to
understand
he originally got rejected, parlayed a junior
college stint into admissions, walked on to
the team as an undersized player, etc.
Once Upon A Time
One + Magazine
23

Companies often stum le with the
“what was.”
They don’t want to rehash a negative;
i.e., “cut from the football team a la Rudy.”
24

But without this context,
the advancement
“what is”
can’t be fully appreciated.
25

Story Trees should bring out the
humanity of the characters,
the people in your company.
26

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and
innocent your leading characters,
make awful things happen to them –
in order that the reader may see what
they are made of.
Story Tip #6
Kurt Vonnegut
sketch by C.K. Sample III
27

Senior executives don’t like
recounting the awful things that
happened to them
(sometimes by their own doing).
28

Which is why this type of
content opens doors that
might otherwise be closed.
29

Story Trees should communicate
the unexpected
30

USA Today Story
on turning table scraps into energy:
• 2,300 companies provide food scraps.
• 30 million tons of food waste go to landfills each year.
• The utility processes 100 to 200 tons of food scraps a week.
• Food scraps provide enough to power for 1,300 to
2,600 homes.
• If the utility secured all 1,800 tons of scraps from
commercial enterprises in the region, it could power
25,000 homes.
• 50% of U.S. food waste could power 2.5M homes.
33

Introducing
the anecdote,
arguably the most important
element in the Story Tree arsenal
34

There is a disconnect in how different
people perceive anecdotes
35

Lead in Business Intelligence Story:
In 1879 James Ritty, a saloon-keeper in Dayton, Ohio, received
a patent for a wooden contraption that he dubbed the
“incorruptible cashier.”
With a set of buttons and a loud bell, the device, sold by
National Cash Register (NCR), was little more than a simple
adding machine. Yet as an early form of managing information
flows in American business the cash register had a huge impact.
It not only reduced pilferage by alerting the shopkeeper
when the till was opened; by recording every transaction,
it also provided an instant overview of what was happening
in the business. 38

In other words,
Ritty’s employees were
stealing him blind.
39

“Everyone has a natural
detector for psychological
realism.”
Raymond A. Mar
Assistant Professor of Psychology
York University in Toronto
41

Finally,
Lose the jargon
which smothers a story
and bores people.
43

Resources
• One + Magazine: Storytelling and Your
Quest for Business Success
(February 2010)
• Harvard Business Review: How a Two
Minute Story Helps You Lead
(August 4, 2009)
• Scientific American: The Secret of
Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn
(August 2008)
• The Telegraph: Grand Theft Auto, Twitter
and Beowulf All Demonstrate that Stories
Will Never Die (November 25, 2008)
• Steve Denning blog: The Leader’s Guide
to Radical Management
• Greg Morris blog: What’s Your Story?
• Kathy Hansen’s blog: A Storied Career
• Michael Margolis’s blog: Get Storied
• Mike Bonifer’s blog: GameChangers
• Claudio Perrone’s SlideShare deck
Presentation Storytelling Techniques
• Ishmael’s Corner: Five Storytelling
Techniques to Give Business
Communications Liftoff
There’s a considerable amount of information
available on the topic of storytelling.
If you’d like to dig deeper, the following
provides a cross section of resources:
45

We conduct customized training and
workshops on storytelling for both executives
and communication professionals
46

We blog on storytelling through a business
prism at www.IshmaelsCorner.com.
47

Europe: Mike Sottak +44 (0)7 4632 47399
North America: Stephen Burkhart 1 408 286-2611
Asia Pacific: Cassandra Cheong 86 (21) 6203-3366 X125
Global: Lou Hoffman 1 408 286-2611
Thank You
IMAGES: CORBIS
http://www.hoffman.com 48

Stories Entertain and Inform in Business

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