To succeed in the 2020s, start with your unique skills–your “core competency.”
Then, to get the most out of these skills, master the art and science of storytelling.
Storytelling not only helps you to communicate with the people who matter, inside and outside the organization.
Studies show that storytelling improves recall of facts and ideas by 700 to 1,300 percent.
- A study at Stanford University asked subjects to memorize a list of words. One group created a story out of the words; the other used other techniques to remember the words. The story-makers remembered seven times as much as subjects who did not.
- In another study, also at Stanford, people hearing a narrative form of a presentation remembered 13 times as much as people hearing a non-narrative description of facts.
So people hearing information wrapped into a story improve their command of ideas as much as 13 times better.
Thirteen times better.
But if that’s not enough, consider this:
Storytelling also sharpens your edge at every other task: Strategy and planning. Management. Development and design. Marketing. Fundraising. Everything.
Take it from the icons of modern storytelling in the professions:
“Marketing is no longer about the stuff you make but about the stories you tell,” says Seth Godin, the founder of Squidoo and Yoyodyne (acquired by Yahoo) and a prolific blogger and author on marketing.
“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller,” said the master storyteller Steve Jobs. “The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”
“Great businesses have to be great storytellers,” said Angela Ahrendts, the CEO of Burberry before taking over retail operations for Apple. “We have to tell stories–emotive, compelling stories–even more so because we’re nonfiction.”
Ditch the long meetings and slide presentations, said Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Instead, start a meeting with someone’s short memo-story: “There is no way to write a six-page narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.”
Most professionals recognize this basic truth. They open a presentation or document with an anecdote. They depict their story as a heroic journey. The build conflict and resolution into their annual report or marketing campaign. All of this is worthwhile, but not enough.
But in the story-saturated world of the 2020s, stories have to hit all the notes. You need to deploy all the essential story moments. You need to get the tempo and sequences right. You need to strike the right emotional chords.
You need a thick feast of details–but also avoid overwhelming the audience with too many. Developed by author Charles Euchner, the Story Seminar is the most complete storytelling program anywhere.
But here’s the thing. It’s not just complete. It’s also simple and to the point. Rather than giving you a thick set of atlases to find the secret treasure, we offer a simple map to the treasure. More isn’t better; succinct is better.
Next Step . . .
Want to learn more? Take a look at the brochure below (and download it here).
And drop us a line.
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