A company doesn’t run out of stories. It runs out of the habit of noticing the ones it’s already living through. My co-founder and I once ran into a scaling problem at an agency we were building. We each handled…
Or is it just something we say to feel better about not talking numbers? A few months ago, I sat in on a sales pitch. The team had done everything right. The slides were clean, the thinking was sharp, and…
This question comes up in almost every serious conversation, though rarely this directly. More often, it arrives in pieces: will this actually help my sales team, will leaders start communicating better, is this something we’ll see or just feel good…
Most people don’t ask it directly. They circle it. Is this presentation skills? Is it like communication training? Will my team finally learn to speak better? Fair questions, but all slightly off. Because what happens in a storytelling workshop usually…
A senior leader finished a presentation. He had clear slides, solid logic, and strong numbers. The room nodded. Everyone filed out. In the corridor afterward, three managers compared notes. One said the company was clearly focused on aggressive growth. Another…
In the last edition, I argued that the most powerful stories in a company are the ones nobody wrote, the internal narratives that emerge from decisions, promotions, and everyday behavior. That piece was about companies accidentally telling the wrong story.…
Three editions ago, I asked whether “storyteller” was a real job or a fashionable label. Then I laid out how to build a storytelling function that actually works. Then I named companies doing it well and badly. All of that…
Two issues ago, I asked whether “storyteller” was a real function or a fad. In the last issue, I argued that most storytelling functions fail because of org-chart plumbing, not talent. This issue, as promised, let’s name names. I want…
In the last issue, I asked whether “storyteller” is a real job or just a fashionable relabeling of marketing. I was talking about this with a bunch of people at Story It, and we were wondering how we would actually…
In 2009, I did something that felt a little audacious at the time. I went into my LinkedIn profile and typed the word “Storyteller” into my headline. I remember hesitating over it. Storytelling wasn’t a job title back then. It…
