Storytelling for Corporations: No Fairytale!
“Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.” (Robert McAfee Brown)
By now, many corporations are making some kind of effort to transfer themselves into a so called social business; corporations that actually listen to their (new) clients, suppliers, and employees with the objective to make more money in more sustainable ways in a happier working environment. Also, a) selecting and abstracting small useful bits of information from a huge increasing pile, b) formulating this info into one clear message and c) getting that message across to any kind of receiver (co-worker, potential client, etc) is getting more complex every day, mainly thanks to the Internet. These two factors, “dialogue creation” and “focused messaging” together call for another new skill that corporations need to master to keep their competitive edge: storytelling.
The idea for this post came up today when I was rethinking Julie Taymor’s presentation at the TED2011 conference yesterday in Long Beach – California. Julie is a film, theater and opera director – she directed for example the movie “Frida”, but yesterday the main theme was “The Rediscovery of Wonder” where she spoke about imagined worlds. What I took from her presentation is the art in which she speaks and presents herself. The way how she told her story -facial expressions, use of body, and intonation- made an equally big impression on me as what she spoke about. I enjoyed, remember, and re-think what she said because she brought her message across in a well-paced and personal way.
I believe that storytelling is a powerful skill the corporate world could really learn from. I dare even state that the ability to fascinate people with a story is a key ingredient needed in order to survive as a firm in the digital information age where information and (visual connections between) people are easily accessible to anyone. Cold calling is dead, and so is traditional “pitching” – besides being fake and highly annoying. In short, what used to work does not work anymore today. I’ve touched all these topics in a previous post, where I forecasted environmental factors that could lead to the end of the multinational.
By now, marketing and communications departments are working hard on buying the technology -and the consulting hours- to enable a dialogue with their customers. Yes – it’s a start, but definitely not a simple item you can tick off your to-do list once you’ve implemented it. In order to survive in the next few years companies need to redefine and fine-tune their target audience, message to this audience, and be able to bring this message across in the right way. Even worse, this is the only way! Storytelling should therefore be on everyone’s radar.
How do I do that?
As I’m training myself every day to be a better storyteller in my wording, (back-of-the-napkin) drawing, and in my writing, there are several people and companies who I see as teachers. One of them is Google; I think they generally keep their messages short and simple most of the time. They are easy to grasp and they use normal-people language instead of outdated corporate vocabulary that only those who use them themselves understand. Take for example corporate wikis – I generally have big troubles making sense of wikis, but the ones from Google are simple and easy to browse.
Some other folks that do a great job at storytelling are Alexander Osterwalder (especially his book businessmodelgeneration), Seth Godin (his blog and audiobooks), Jason Fried (his company website and latest book), and the design companies Xplane and FrogDesign. Lastly, I know some guys who I think have a job that will only become more important in the near future; one of them is Roland Stahel, a guy in my office who owns echtpraktisch.ch. Roland is a visual artist and professional storyteller. Companies hire him to visualize meetings, so that they can visualize business models and reduce meeting notes. Some of his work can be found in this slideshow. My last corporate event in 2010 covered storytelling as well, which my friend Riccardo Signorell explained very carefully. Riccardo produces films too.
I hope that when you read this you could recognize a clear message, a personal way of broadcasting, and a red line through this post. I published it on my private blog, which tells a story about me. Now, what’s your story and how do you explain it to others?
