Great stories happen to people that can tell them.

—IRA GLASS

Storytelling is an art form that traces its origins back to the time of earliest man. For thousands of years now, communicating information through story has been an effective way for human beings to pass along messages, teach lessons, and define cultures. Anyone working in today's business environment can benefit from the use of storytelling as a communication tool. When delivered effectively, a story resonates emotionally with a listener and impacts the way they think or feel about a subject or topic. Different stories often contain different lessons and the same story can be interpreted in many different ways, depending on the storyteller's point of view and the perspective from which the story is told. Hollywood producer Robert Evans once said, “There are always three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each differently.”¹ A story, even in the form of a simple illustration or anecdote, can also serve to connect a listener to what they already feel is important to them—what they want or need. As author and expert storyteller Jonah Sachs points out, “One of the main reasons we listen to stories is to create a deeper belief in ourselves.”² All great leaders are great storytellers, and all great communicators understand the power of narrative. The ability to tell a good story is a crucial tool for anyone who wants to impact an audience and influence others.

When we think of the Olympic Games, we think of the world's greatest athletes performing feats of physical excellence most people can only imagine. Sports stories are powerful because they tap into our deepest dreams and desires and provide lessons with regard to success and failure, commitment and preparation, and overcoming incredible odds on the road to victory. For centuries, story has served as an essential element of this elite sporting competition. Think of Jesse Owens facing down Adolph Hitler during the 1939 games in Berlin, the U.S. men's ice hockey team beating the defending gold-medalist Russian team in the “Miracle on Ice,” and swimmer Michael Phelps, dazzling crowds by winning a record 28 Olympic medals. But for every famous Olympian like Greg Louganis, Mary Lou Retton, or Sugar Ray Leonard, there are countless other athletes with stories to tell. And these stories, while not as well known to the general public, are often just as remarkable for the lessons they contain. One such story involves a soft-spoken city worker in Chicago named Albert Robinson and something that had remained locked away for nearly 30 years.

Albert Robinson grew up in Chicago and discovered his passion for track and field early on, excelling as an athlete at Hales Franciscan High School, where he won two state championships. Robinson knew the only way he would be able to attend college would be by winning a scholarship, so he set his mind to making it happen—eventually receiving a full-ride from Indiana University. Through commitment and a solid work ethic, Robinson stood out, eventually winning seven Big Ten titles, twice being named Male Athlete of the Big Ten Championships, and running the fastest 200-meter race in the world at the time in 1984. In 1987, Robinson set his sights on his most ambitious dream to date, something he had dreamed about since he was a young boy: earning a coveted spot on the 1988 Olympic team in the 400-meter relay. As with other goals Robinson had set for himself, he accomplished this one as well, joining the elite group of sprinters who would be representing the United States in the Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea, in the 400-meter relay.

To say that the United States dominated this event would be an understatement. In the previous 15 Olympic Games, going all the way back to 1920, the United States had won the gold medal 13 times. Carl Lewis, the legendary sprinter and Robinson's childhood idol, had anchored the 1984 400-meter relay and was back again as part of the 1988 team, along with Dennis Mitchell, Lee McNeill, and Calvin Smith, a former world record-holder at 100 meters and, at the time, the world champion at 200 meters.

Robinson and his team arrived in Seoul and settled into their dorms in the Olympic Village. For Robinson, the sights and sounds of Korea and the hustle and bustle of the international athletes arriving to compete felt like a dream. He had worked his entire career, put in countless hours of sweat and toil on the track and in the weight room for this opportunity, and it was finally here. He was an Olympian and the gold medal he had dreamed about since childhood was within his grasp.

Winners focus on winning. Losers focus on winners.

—UNKNOWN

As race day arrived, Robinson changed into his uniform and sweats, grabbed his duffle bag and headed to the stadium. Waiting on the warm-up track with his teammates and the other relay teams, Robinson felt his heart beating in his chest. He breathed deeply and took in the sights and sounds of the stadium and crowd. He had been chosen to run the second leg of the preliminary qualifying round of the relay, getting the baton from Mitchell, and then handing it off to Calvin Smith. Lee McNeill would be anchoring this race for the team as Carl Lewis was sitting out and resting up for other races.

Finally it was time, and the teams took their positions on the track. The gun went off and Mitchell blasted out of the blocks. Robinson took the baton and ran his leg of the relay, passing to Smith who finally passed to McNeill, handing him the baton with a 10-meter lead. Robinson watched from his place across the track as McNeill crossed the finish line and raised his arms in victory. The U.S. team easily won the heat and moved one step closer to their gold medal.

But then something unexpected happened.

Thirty minutes after the race results had been posted, the Soviet Union, France, and Nigeria filed protests with the International Amateur Athletic Federation, the organization overseeing the games. Their complaint involved the baton pass between Smith and McNeill, specifically, that the runners had passed the baton outside of the required zone, which was a violation of the rules. After watching the tape of the baton pass, the IAAF judged the pass to indeed have occurred outside of the 20-meter zone. The U.S. relay team was immediately disqualified. For Robinson and the rest of the team, the news was like a sucker punch to the gut. They were stunned, speechless. “There was nothing to say,” said Robinson. “It was over and done with. The race is gone. You're out.” Robinson headed back to his dorm room and packed his suitcase. The next day he flew home, his Olympic dreams finished. In the years that followed, Robinson replayed the race over and over in his mind, picturing every practice and every baton pass. “You work so hard to get there and it all falls apart because of something you didn't have any control over. That's hard to swallow.”³

Albert Robinson retired from track and field a year after the Seoul Olympics and left his athletic pursuits behind him. He eventually moved back to Chicago, got married, and took a job as a city employee, working on cases of fair housing and discrimination. For Robinson, his Olympic experience was something that was not easy to process. “I really just kept it to myself.” The possibility of what could have been but never would be hung over him like a cloud that wouldn't lift. To cope, Robinson chose to pack his Olympic experience away in a box, a difficult memory, but one he refused to let define him. “To me, this was just one part of who Albert was. But Albert likes house music, Albert likes dancing, Albert likes other things than just track and field.” He rarely talked about what happened in Seoul, something he now refers to as a “dream deferred.” Even his coworkers had no idea that Robinson was an elite athlete and former Olympian. The Seoul experience would remain locked away in that box for nearly 30 years, until circumstances changed for Robinson and it became necessary to open the box and revisit his athletic past.

In 2004, Robinson and his wife, Aileen, had twin daughters, Rachel and Sydney, and as luck would have it, when they reached their teens, they began to show great promise and passion for one sport in particular: track and field. Recognizing the natural talent that each of his daughters possessed, Robinson decided that he would be their coach. He approached their training with the same fire he had approached his own training all those years ago. As he watched his daughters gradually begin to improve and excel, his passion for track and field suddenly was rekindled. For Robinson, with life experience and the passage of time, his collection of stories and experiences suddenly became a treasure chest of useful lessons he could now use to motivate his daughters, both on the track and in the classroom. “I've learned from my shortfalls and my successes,” says Robinson. “I've learned to channel these stories and break each lesson down, step by step, for their benefit. Bottom line: You have to do the hard, bitter work if you want to achieve your dreams, because that work will lay the foundation for what you do for the rest of your life.” Like Robinson, we all possess the power of story and anyone can benefit from using their individual experiences to influence or inspire those around them. As Stanislavski once wrote, and Albert Robinson's story demonstrates, “Time is a splendid filter for our remembered feelings . . . it not only purifies, it also transmutes even painfully realistic memories into poetry.”⁴

In a business context, stories can serve as springboards to communicate new strategies, structures, policies, identities, and goals. A quick anecdote that establishes common ground between you and a colleague can forge a bond that might have taken weeks to accomplish otherwise. A good story can help you personalize the information you are trying to convey and can be used to build rapport, establish trust, overcome objections, communicate value, and demonstrate results. In his bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman breaks it down even simpler: “Good stories provide a simple and coherent account of people's actions and intentions.”⁵

A recent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review discussed new research that showed how storytelling, when used in executive development, actually outperformed many other initiatives with regard to leadership skills. When leaders become comfortable using storytelling in the workplace, it “builds strategic competence and strengthens organizational character.”⁶ A good story not only makes a message more memorable, it can also help you clarify meaning and illustrate a concept or idea. And as it turns out, anyone can be a good storyteller by following a few simple rules and utilizing a structure than has been successfully used by playwrights and screenwriters for hundreds of years.

Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form.

—JEAN-LUC GODARD

Telling a story effectively starts by considering the journey your listeners will be taking as a result of hearing it. Each story you tell should suggest an adventure that your audience will enjoy embarking upon. Good stories should take a listener on a journey, beginning in one place and then dropping them off somewhere entirely different at its conclusion. In the process, the listener should have learned something new, felt something genuine, or experienced something memorable as a result of hearing it. Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin, has said,

The best way to get somebody to take in something you want to share—a lesson, a business pitch, anything—is to do it in the form of a story. When we hear stories, we can be simultaneously involved in the tale being told. We can empathize, relate and understand far more that way. The ability to tell a story with passion, humor and heart will help build trust. When I am listening to business pitches, if I can understand the vision of the entrepreneur through their storytelling, I am far more likely to get interested. The purpose and products of the business still need to be right, but storytelling can help to bring these to life.⁷

Of course, as with any communication, you must start by analyzing your audience. This will help you decide whether or not the use of storytelling will resonate with them. For example, if you are presenting numbers to a CFO or data to a scientist, it may be wise to forgo a story and let the data you are presenting create the narrative instead.

A recent Stanford University study found that the average person will retain 5 to 10 percent of what they hear in a business presentation consisting of statistics alone, but 65 to 70 percent if that information is coupled with a memorable story or anecdote.⁸ The reason for this is simple: emotion. “Psychological studies show that we don't get infected by a story unless we are emotionally transported—unless we lose ourselves in the story,” says author Jonathan Gottschall. “Great epic poems to office scuttlebutt—are almost uniformly about humans facing problems and trying to overcome them. Stories have a problem-solution structure. Stories are always about trouble.”⁹ Good stories have the ability to cross cultures and engage us in an emotional way—this is actually what gives them their power. Stories are a way for our brains to organize information and help prepare us to make decisions. They reveal character and they build trust. According to research, presentations that scored high for storytelling were more likely to influence an audience to change its beliefs or actions.¹⁰ Steve Jobs once said, “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”¹¹ Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, worked closely with Jobs during his time at Pixar, saying, “[Steve] knew how important it was to construct a story that connected with people. This was a skill he used in his presentations at Apple. When he got up in front of an audience to introduce a new product, he understood that he would communicate more effectively if you put forward a narrative.”¹²

One recent study found that when managers used storytelling to resolve conflicts and address issues with their teams, they were more successful in reaching the specific outcomes (and objectives) they desired.¹³ When situations are complex, stories can simplify information and make it easily understood and accessible. A good story or anecdote can make a point quickly and cover ground that otherwise may have taken hours to explain. An illustration can help overcome a client objection or get buy-in from a senior leader. Human beings are wired for stories, which is why being a good storyteller should be a part of any leader's personal brand. Think about how stories are used in television commercials. Many companies are increasingly using storytelling to strengthen their brand in an effort to attract top talent. As contributor Lars Schmidt wrote in Forbes, “These narratives are revealing a more human side of the business. They often go beyond ‘This is what I do here,’ instead illuminating ‘This is why I do what I do—here.’ ”¹⁴ Stories can be used to illustrate a concept or idea, show value, establish credibility, demonstrate collaboration, and foster better relationships. Stories can also be used for persuasion or to overcome a sudden objection in a business setting. Studies have shown that when you use a narrative story to make a point or paint a picture, the viewer or listener will naturally empathize with the characters in the story by feeling what they are feeling. People are more likely to buy into a proposal or purchase a product if they see themselves in the story and find it relatable. This is especially true for people tasked with presenting complicated or technical information. This can be a challenge for someone who believes that the data is what matters and the numbers should speak for themselves. “Often technical people are not accustomed to telling stories,” says Jay Bonansinga, author of the bestselling Walking Dead novels. “They are more accustomed to filling people's ears and brains with numbers and data. But it also makes narrative more important because an audience will sit up and lean in when they hear a story. Subject matter experts often fail to realize that it's not the quantity of the information they are imparting to an audience—if they're showing three pie charts, it won't make it twice as good to show six. The key that will unlock success is telling a story that generates emotion.”¹⁵

I believe in the power of storytelling. Stories open our hearts to a new place, which opens our minds, which often leads to action.

—MELINDA GATES

While overt selling or persuading are push strategies, stories involve more of a pull strategy for a communicator. A story happens more slowly, gradually drawing a listener in and forcing them to follow the characters—feel what they feel, experience what they experience—and make an emotional investment in their eventual outcome. Because of this, leaders can leverage storytelling to energize a team, shatter complacency, and galvanize a vision. As discussed in previous chapters, active intentions such as energize, shatter, and galvanize will fuel the delivery of a message and provide energy to the telling of the story itself. Leadership, driven by passion, can move an audience emotionally and enhance a leader's ability to influence. Team members in a meeting or presentation want to feel something as a result of a speaker's message and recent studies show that good stories are a scientifically proven way to do just that. According to Paul Zak, a pioneer in the field of neuro-economics, the reason for this is that stories actually trigger the release of oxytocin, a chemical that encourages empathy in the receiver of the story.¹⁶

Another positive benefit of being a good storyteller is that it can make you more attractive to others—at least if you are a man. According to research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and SUNY Buffalo, when a man is perceived to be a good storyteller, he is seen to be more attractive as a long-term partner. Interestingly though, women who were seen as good storytellers were not seen as more attractive. While it is hard to pinpoint the cause of this gender disparity, the authors suggest that for women it has to do with the fact that “storytelling ability reflects a man's ability to gain resources [and] positions of authority in society.”¹⁷

Every experience you've had and every hardship you've endured has contributed to you becoming the person you are today. We can all think of famous hardships or challenges that shaped the lives of leaders, past and present. There's Steve Jobs getting fired from Apple, Franklin Delano Roosevelt being stricken with polio, and Barack Obama being forced to produce his birth certificate, just to name a few examples. Every moment of your life—every triumph and every mistake—follows you to the present and contributes to the ways in which you are seen in the workplace. As comedian Louis C.K. rightly points out, “If you went back and fixed all the mistakes you've made, you'd erase yourself.”¹⁸

Storytelling can serve as a vital tool for defining your brand. A simple essence story can let people know how you think, how you make decisions, and how they can expect you to interact with those around you. Many successful business leaders have stories that trace their personal journeys to the top. Examples include Oprah Winfrey using her skills as a communicator to create a broadcasting empire, Donald Trump receiving a million-dollar loan from his father to start his real estate business, or Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak inventing the personal computer in their garage. These stories resonate with people. They not only become an integral part of the person's brand but also an important part of the company's culture and, subsequently, the public's consciousness. In this way, stories can help to define the culture or the organization itself. Every organization has an origin story about how it came into being that gets passed down from person-to-person until it becomes part of a company's lore. Think of famous brands such as Nike and Facebook. With Facebook, there's the story of Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard classmates coming up with the idea of a social network that eventually became Facebook, today used by over 2 billion people around the world. For Nike, we have the story of Phil Knight and how he used a waffle iron in his kitchen to create the distinctive shoe soles that defined the Nike brand, a company valued at more than $32 billion.

Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.

—SETH GODIN

Jerome Bruner, the great Harvard psychologist who pioneered the modern study of creativity, has observed that stories always rise out of the unexpected. And because surprise rewards our brains with the release of dopamine, good stories provide pleasure and make us feel good. Writes Bruner: “Narrative deals with the vicissitudes of human intentions. And since there are myriad intentions and endless ways for them to run into trouble—or so it would seem—there should be endless kinds of stories. But, surprisingly, this seems not to be the case.”¹⁹ We all possess hundreds of stories from our lives and experiences that can be drawn upon in business to influence others. To break it down into simple categories of business stories, we have detailed the five types of stories every leader should have at the ready in their communicator's toolbox, including:

The Origin Story

1. This is a story that provides a window into how your company does business, articulating its values and priorities. For example, the origin story that details how and why the company was formed is always insightful for someone unfamiliar with your organization. Also, the story about how you became part of the organization or how you first became interested in your given field is a good tale to have ready to share with a prospective client or interviewer.

The Value Story

1. This is a story whose purpose is to generate excitement and develop trust by clearly establishing the value your company has delivered for clients or customers in the past, and how the work you do benefits your customers, the community, or society at large. Identify the benefit you or your company can provide to a listener and drive that point home through the telling of your story.

The Challenge Story

1. This is a story that demonstrates a difficult or demanding situation your company has encountered and how your organization was able to adapt and overcome it. A story such as this shows flexibility, resiliency, and tenacity—all traits that will be admired by a customer or prospective client.

The Implementation Story

1. This is a story that shows how your company devised a plan and successfully put it into action. It provides a client or customer with a clear idea of how your team collaborates, operates, or shifts priorities when necessary to achieve success.

The Solution Story

1. This is a story that demonstrates how your organization identified a problem or customer need and addressed it through the use of your products, services, or expertise. This type of story can be used to persuade a potential customer to sign a deal or consider a proposal by showing a clear example of how you provided value for a previous client or customer.

Stories can be used to draw people in and guide them toward the point of view that aligns with the objective you seek to achieve. To do this, as we have mentioned previously, you need engagement. Just as audiences enjoy twists and turns in the plots of movies and plays, including these same types of revelations and surprises in a story can help build excitement and generate interest with an audience. As a storyteller, you build suspense by withholding key facts or details as long as you can, revealing information only when absolutely necessary. Think of great movies like The Sixth Sense, Chinatown, or The Crying Game, and how effectively they use the element of surprise. A skilled storyteller will hold back pertinent information during a story to help build the tension, revealing details bit-by-bit, on a need-to-know basis. By gradually ratcheting up the suspense, a storyteller hooks their listener in and engages them fully with the circumstances and stakes of the message. According to anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher, this teasing of information and the mystery it creates in the mind of a listener actually triggers the flow of dopamine, a chemical in the brain that provides a natural high.²⁰ The pleasure of following a good story comes from the release of tension as information is finally revealed and the various elements of the story fall into place. For leaders or teachers tasked with motivating or empowering others, surprise during the telling of a story can actually increase a listener's motivation to learn. Steve Jobs often used the element of surprise when launching Apple products, repeatedly using the phrase “one more thing. . .” to build suspense and draw people in.²¹

In their book, Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected, authors Tania Luna and LeeAnn Renninger, break down the science of surprise and shed new light on why human beings gravitate toward it. As it turns out, we are all hardwired to enjoy new experiences—we like the shot of dopamine we get when we make a new purchase, get a text mail alert, or meet a new friend. “Surprises point us to dangers, opportunities, and new information,” said Renninger. “Research shows that surprise intensifies our emotions by about 400 percent, which explains why we love positive surprises and hate negative surprises.”²² When we are able to surprise an audience with a twist or reveal in our story, we force them to pay attention and be present in the moment. Says Luna, “Surprise hijacks all of our mental processes and pulls our focus into one thing.”²³ Other research backs up this idea as well, finding that surprise makes people more aware of their environment and actually assists with concentration and engagement levels.²⁴ Good stories create a situation where the audience or listener feel emotionally invested in the characters and content. This can be an integral factor in someone's ability to engage with and retain the information you are presenting to them. As experts have discovered, surprise “builds new neural pathways in our brains, leading us to think more flexibly and creatively.”²⁵ Surprise jolts us out of complacency and demands our focus and attention. It challenges our assumptions and makes us question the decisions we make and even how we make them.

Everything you do becomes material that can be drawn upon when telling stories. Educators Joe Winston and Miles Tandy have studied the influence of storytelling in our lives. “We communicate our daily experience to ourselves and to others in story form,” they write, “We make sense of the behavior of others by inventing stories to explain why they act as they do.”²⁶ David Green, the former Global Marketing Officer for McDonald's, has always valued the power of story during his time at the fast-food giant. “I came to understand how important campfire stories are in big institutions,” said Green. “For instance, at McDonald's, if there was a little man in the parking lot picking up cigarette butts you knew you were in trouble, because that was [McDonald's founder] Ray Kroc. There was a time when Ray went into a restaurant that was filthy, and he jumped on top of a table and yelled out, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you are not getting what McDonald's is best at. This restaurant is now closed. Please come back tomorrow; it will be a lot better.’ That kind of story, just like fireweed, spreads throughout an organization. Every great company, whether Walt Disney or Steve Jobs at Apple, has this kind of institutional story that goes around and tells you what the culture is about.”²⁷

One of our favorite business stories has been around for many years and grown into something of an urban legend. The story involves the upscale retailer Nordstrom and their renowned customer service. As the story goes, a man brought a set of tires back to a Nordstrom location in Alaska to return them and get his money back. There was only one problem: Nordstrom, a retailer of apparel, shoes and other accessories, didn't sell tires. Still, as the story went, Nordstrom allowed the man to return the tires and gave him a full refund. While a story like this seems implausible, it actually happened, according to Nordstrom spokesman Colin Johnson. Turns out the location of this particular Nordstrom had once been occupied by a tire shop where the man bought the tires in question. The man returned to the same spot where he had purchased the tires, not realizing the building had changed ownership. Said Johnson, the Nordstrom manager who allowed the man to return the tires did so to demonstrate the company's superior customer service and also to forge a positive relationship with a potential new customer. Whether or not this story is true is not as important as the fact that it has been told and retold for over fifty years, shining a positive light on both Nordstrom and their superior level of customer service with each new telling.²⁸

Stories can often be more powerful for an organization than a company vision statement or motto when it comes to defining a culture or promoting company values. A story, illustration, or anecdote can offer an immediate lesson that is relevant and applicable to an audience or listener. In her book The Story Factor, Annette Simmons writes, “‘We value integrity,’ means nothing. But tell a story about a former employee who hid his mistake and cost the company thousands, or a story about a salesperson who owned up to a mistake and earned so much trust her company doubled his order, and you begin to teach an employee what integrity means.”²⁹ By sharing a story such as this you can demonstrate the values of a team or organization and show how these examples have tangible effects if they are put into action.

People are going to tell stories about you whether you want them to or not. Choose which ones they tell.

—BOB MCDONALD

As you begin to comb your past experiences for stories that can be used in your work, consider the following tips that need to be addressed when delivering an effective business story:

Identify the takeaway first

1. There is a reason you have chosen this story to tell. As with any communication, figure out the objective you are pursuing as a result of telling the listener your story. Always keep your audience in mind and make sure the content and lesson of the story address their needs. Stories should be clear and concise so as not to waste people's time. To accomplish this, start your story as close to the end as possible.

Utilize clear intentions

1. Once the objective and purpose for the story has been identified, choose active intentions for a congruent delivery during the telling of it. If your story is meant to inspire or empower, your word choices and delivery should support that and your verbal, vocal, and visual channels of communication should be aligned.

Don't make yourself the hero

1. Avoid making the story about you—even if it actually is about you. Focus the telling of the story on the benefit you are providing to the listener. Make them feel something, learn something, or do something as a result of hearing it. You can do this by identifying the value you are providing for them ahead of time and then focusing your story on that.

Appeal to emotion

1. While facts are important, people are more likely to be driven to make decisions based on emotion. As such, if your story can generate a feeling or emotion within the listener, they are more likely to be engaged and persuaded as a result. One way to do this is by using short sentences and small words to drive the action of your story. Using an active voice will make your story more compelling and will anchor your listeners' attention to the present moment.

Keep it simple

1. Make your story personal and stick to only the information needed to construct a concise and streamlined story. An effective business story should last no more than three to five minutes so don't get bogged down with extraneous details or unnecessary side stories. Wind a story up tight. Tell your story using the least number of words possible. Use simple language and avoid jargon or acronyms. Every sentence you choose to include should do one of two things: reveal character or advance the action.

Drive your main point home

1. Once you've built to the climax and payoff of your story, drive home the moral or lesson so it is clear to your listeners why you shared this particular tale. If your intention is to inspire or motivate, this is where your delivery and the congruence of your message needs to make us feel something so we walk away from your story feeling the emotions you want us to feel.

Creating Heroes and Villains

Shark Tank is the popular reality television program where unknown inventors pitch their new products or companies to successful billionaire investors in the hopes of securing a partnership or investment of capital. The producer of Shark Tank is Mark Burnett, who also carefully shaped the brand and image of Donald Trump on The Apprentice. Burnett understands the importance of storytelling, of creating a context and characters and building tension and suspense by creating heroes and villains that viewers can either root for or against. Every episode of Shark Tank starts by introducing viewers to the inventors through the telling of their story and the challenges they have faced. By creating empathy in the sharing of each inventor's personal story or struggle, it creates an emotional investment from viewers. If we like the inventor or investor we root for them; if we dislike them we root against them. This is important for any leader presenting information in a business setting, whether pitching a new product or implementing a new process or procedure. A good influencer will set up a problem or pain point during a pitch or presentation that serves as the villain and then presents their product or proposal as the hero who will solve their problem. An HR manager implementing a new procedure within a company must first present the “why” to an audience to explain the reason for the change or shift in policy. Defining the problem or challenge that makes the policy change necessary will help you set context and overcome any objections or resistance. The “why” in this case serves as the villain and the new procedure or policy becomes the hero that will make things better as a result.

Political strategist Mark McKinnon thinks one of the main reasons Donald Trump won the election of 2016 was his experience as a television star on The Apprentice and his ability to tell a story with clear heroes and villains: “Voters are attracted to candidates who lay out a storyline. Losing campaigns communicate unconnected streams of information, ideas, speeches. Winning campaigns create a narrative architecture that ties it all together into something meaningful and coherent.”³⁰ The same could be said for anyone delivering a message in the corporate environment. A data dump of information and numbers is not going to motivate an audience as effectively as a well-structured presentation that tells a compelling and coherent story. This is where Trump excelled and Clinton fell short, according to McKinnon.

How do you tell a story? Identify a threat and/or an opportunity. Establish victims of the threat or denied opportunity. Suggest villains that impose the threat or deny the opportunity. Propose solutions. Reveal the hero. That's what Trump did. The reality TV star understands the power of narrative. He identified a threat: outside forces trying to change the way we live. And an opportunity: make America great again. He established victims: blue-collar workers who have lost jobs or experienced a declining standard of living. He suggested villains: Mexican immigrants, China, establishment elites. He proposed solutions: build a wall, tear up unfair trade deals. And the hero was revealed, Donald Trump.³¹

Trump's ability to frame nearly all of his messages in the form of heroes and villains, winners and losers, is a touchstone of his leadership and communication style. During a sales pitch or presentation at your job, if you are able to set up a problem that needs to be solved and then suggest a solution that involves your company or product, you can use the hero/villain dynamic to your advantage by presenting yourself, your company, or your product as the solution they need to effectively solve their problem.

When it comes to constructing your material or developing your story, you have to build a foundation and structure that serves the overall objective you are attempting to accomplish. Think of an architect designing a building. With the design of a building, every beam, every pipe, every nail, every window, serves a purpose and is necessary for the overall structure of the building. This same concept is applicable when developing your business story. Every detail you include must be specific, carefully chosen, and meticulously placed. Transitions are also important elements to keep a listener engaged. They serve as a connective tissue as you move from point to point. Without smooth transitions, your story's pacing will come across as halting and it will be difficult to follow.

Storytelling is a skill that most people can master, but it helps to understand the elements that create the framework of an effective story. Playwrights, screenwriters, and novelists nearly all use variations on a particular dramatic structure developed by Gustav Freytag, a nineteenth-century German novelist. Freytag noticed patterns in the plots of classic stories and novels and devised a diagram known as “Freytag's Pyramid.”³² This diagram was used to analyze and provide a structure for storytelling, and we have adapted a version of it into our storytelling work. Take a look at the model below to understand the various elements that comprise an effective story.

Exposition

1. This is the who, what, when, and where of a story that sets the stage so your audience can follow the characters and events that will take place.

Inciting incident

1. The inciting incident is the event in your story that serves as a trigger to initiate the plot and conflict and start the action of the story moving forward.

Rising action

1. These are the events of the story that drive the plot forward and build the tension from one moment to the next.

Climax

1. This is the section of the story where opposing forces clash and the conflict reaches its highest point of tension or drama.

Falling action

1. Once the climax is achieved and the conflict is resolved, these are the few final events that signal we are coming to the end of the story.

Resolution

1. This is where the story reaches its conclusion and you tie up any loose ends, reveal any remaining secrets, and drive home the moral or lesson of the story one last time.

Think of the diagram for dramatic structure as a story map—a framework on which you can hang the details of your story. It is also quite easy to overlay the elements of a good business story onto this time-tested storytelling formula, as demonstrated below. Use the following model to outline your business story by identifying what details correspond with each of the points on the classic Freytag story map. As you progress from one point to the next, your business story should flow and build in an effective and compelling way. Let's go through each section of the business story map.

Establish background information (exposition)

1. You have to start with some background information so your client or team member can follow the journey of your story. Who is the story about and when and where does it take place? As you set up your story, provide the listener with any details they will need to know about the people, setting, and circumstances involved. The more descriptive your details, the better the picture you will paint for your audience to keep them engaged and invested in your story.

Identify the problem (inciting incident)

1. Now that you've established the basic facts of the story and the specific background information, it is time to develop some conflict. Introduce a pain point or problem that needs to be solved. This gets the action of your story started and will create interest in the mind of your listener to see how the issue will be addressed. Think of your favorite films or books. Can you pick out the inciting incident that gets the story started and grabs your interest? Do the same with your business story. What incident or event gets the ball rolling? What villain can you create and then subsequently vanquish?

Detail the solution (rising action)

1. As the story takes off, you slowly build and reveal pertinent information that drives the story forward, showing the client or team member what steps were taken to address the problem at hand. At some point, you will want to clearly identify a solution to the problem that was established at the outset. This is the “hero” of the story that will emerge to fix a problem, address a challenge, or create a positive change.

Spotlight the result (climax)

1. Once you have revealed the solution that will solve the problem at the heart of the conflict, you need to describe specifically how you did it and how a positive outcome was achieved. This is what your listener has been waiting to hear. Focus on the benefit your solution provided and ensure that the climax of the story aligns directly with the objective you have chosen for telling it.

State the takeaway (falling action and resolution)

1. Now that the problem has been solved and the villain has been defeated, the only remaining element is to wrap up your story with a one- or two-line closing that clearly defines what the listener should have learned from your story. When we use stories as a means to influence, motivate, or teach others, this is the point where the takeaway needs to be delivered so it is clear to your audience what the point was and why the lesson of the story is important to them.

Remember, in most cases, a story is always about the ending—the lesson or moral you want to drive home. Your job as a storyteller is to kick off a story and get to the ending in the fastest, most interesting way possible. Without an exciting climax or a clear takeaway, a story is just a bunch of facts strung together and you run the risk of your audience walking away feeling disappointed or unfulfilled. Winston Churchill was always an enthusiastic proponent of powerful endings in his speeches and stories, saying:

The climax of oratory is reached by a rapid succession of waves of sound and vivid pictures. The audience is delighted by the changing scenes presented to their imagination. Their ear is tickled by the rhythm of the language. The enthusiasm rises. A series of facts is brought forward, all pointing in a common direction. The end appears in view before it is reached. The crowd anticipates the conclusion and the last words fall amid a thunder of assent.³³

Using the story maps detailed in this chapter, choose a personal or professional story from your past experiences and sketch out the framework from which to begin crafting it. Who is the audience that you hope to impact with this story? What background information do you need to set up at the outset? What is the problem your company or client encountered and what solution drives the rising action? What are the result and takeaway? After creating your outline, practice telling the story to someone, perhaps a spouse or coworker who may not be familiar with it. Then solicit their feedback. Did they find it interesting? Which sections dragged on too long or were confusing? Taking their comments into consideration, go back and refine your story and tell it again, this time to someone new. While the facts and information in your story are important, keep reminding yourself that people are driven by emotion. Find stories that have strong emotional anchors. If your story can generate a feeling or emotion in the minds of your listeners, they are more likely to be engaged and persuaded. Choose strong and active intentions (such as excite, frighten, empower, inspire, etc.) to fuel your delivery and elicit the emotional reaction you want from your audience or listener.

We all possess a myriad of stories based on our individual life experiences and each of these stories can be shared to inspire or enlighten others. By using the content discussed in this chapter you can begin mining past experiences for stories and begin to structure each for maximum impact. As you sharpen and refine your abilities as a storyteller, seek out the stories of others, especially those passed down from bosses or coworkers within your organization. These stories can be shared with others who will then pass them along as well. Become a story collector and get comfortable sharing stories and anecdotes. Every story you tell is a gift, as is every story shared with you by others.