The Stickiness of Stories

From my brother James, whose company, Travelers Tales makes travel guidebooks out of stories:

From a Yahoo Finance/BusinessWeek piece today, The Seven Secrets of Inspiring Leaders [by Carmine Gallo]:

“Few business leaders appreciate the power of stories to connect with their audiences. A few weeks ago I was working with one of the largest producers of organic food in the country. I can’t recall most, if any, of the data they used to prove organic is better. But I remember a story a farmer told. He said when he worked for a conventional grower, his kids could not hug him at the end of the day when he got home. His clothes had to be removed and disinfected. Now, his kids can hug him as soon as he walks off the field. No amount of data can replace that story. And now guess what I think about when I see the organic section in my local grocery store? You got it. The farmer’s story. Stories connect with people on an emotional level. Tell more of them.”

There’s also a great line about optimism being a “force multiplier.”

The article also talks about how Bill Gates managed to recruit Steve Ballmer to Microsoft:

Steve Ballmer once said that shortly after he joined the company, he was having second thoughts. Bill Gates and Gates’ father took Ballmer out to dinner and said he had it all wrong. They said Ballmer saw his role as that of a bean counter for a startup. They had a vision of putting a computer on every desk, in every home. That vision — a computer on every desk, in every home — remains consistent to this day. The power of a vision set everything in motion.

(I wrote about this idea recently, in Yahoo’s Revival Meeting. I’m thinking a lot about this at O’Reilly, as the company approaches its third decade, and we have to keep re-investing in our vision. If we believe in “changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators,” as I’ve said we do, where does that take us, what do we have to do to live up to that vision?)

The Ballmer account is itself an example of effective business storytelling. Which brings to mind the site FiftyLessons, which is harnessing the power of stories to create a new kind of business advice site. I’ve only seen a couple of the stories, but they are indeed effective.

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