Jon Radoff’s Entrepreneur 2.0 Blog

A group of people huddle around burning logs, sparks from the fire wheeling upwards into the night towards stars yet unnamed; an orange glow paints the speaker’s face as he whispers of the massive, woolly behemoths he saw lumbering across the frost-covered plains. The beasts were large and dangerous, but the hunger of the people is great. They need food—they need to hunt these creatures—but first they need to be inspired. If they are not inspired, the people will starve.

That leader had to sell the idea to his people. He needed to convince them that the reward was worth the risk, and  fill their minds with what the future could hold. He needed a story.

Biologically, there’s little difference between us and our Paleolithic ancestors.  What can today’s business leader learn from that primordial chieftain?

Our brains are great at a lot of things—recognizing patterns, working with symbols, reasoning and remembering.  But those are things that most animals can do in varying degrees.  As far as we know, humans have a unique ability for stories.  Stories organize our memories, enable us to relate to people, to understand complex concepts.  They’re a unique survival tool for showing us rather than telling us how the world works.

In John Medina’s new book Brain Rules, he discusses how the brain needs to have its attention grabbed at least once every ten minutes to prevent getting bored.  He specifically recommends telling a story to regain attention.  He also discusses how the brain loves patterns.

Isn’t a story one of the basic patterns that our brains love?

You could reduce the structure of almost any story to:

1)    Someone is presented with a challenge – Act I
2)    They make decisions about how to confront the challenge – Act II
3)    They are changed as a result of their decisions – Act III

I think that people in business—myself included—have a lot to learn about the power of stories.   They have the ability to explain the world as we’d like it to be.  In business, that might be a product that could change the world.  But to recruit the people and capital you’ll need, it takes a story that will make it meaningful to others.

After an incredible marathon, my previous company (Eprise) went public and was later acquired by a much larger company.  After this experience I got to try many things: travel the world, helped teach a course on computational genomics, and tried my hand at writing science-fiction literature.

My experience with writing was my most life-changing and most humbling experience.  I had thought that anyone with a good vocabulary and a good imagination and enough time on their hands could write stories.  As it turns out, it’s really hard, and I’ve gained a much deeper appreciation of the people who craft fiction.  My career as a science-fiction writer is clearly going to take a lot longer than I expected, and for now I’m back to chasing my first passion: entrepreneurship.  However, I learned a lot, and the more I came to understand the more I realized how much of it applies to business.  Here is a small subset of the things I’ve learned about crafting stories:

• Start with a powerful hook
• Show don’t tell
• Use compelling, active language
• Make use of interesting characters
• Have a fascinating world that people crave to explore
• Stories are about drama, not exposition

In every sentence, every paragraph, every page—you’re fighting for attention.  The reader can put you down at any moment.

Re-read my list.  Let’s see how you might craft the story of any business:

• Your hook is what’s “remarkable” about a product—the attention grabber, the thing that’s easy to explain in a single sentence.  If someone forgets everything else, they’ll remember this.
• Nobody wants to read a diatribe about your product.  They want to see it, touch it, taste it.  Let someone experience your product, or at least show them what it does.  Stories are about drama, not exposition.  Apply the same thinking to your products and make them come alive.
• Use compelling, active language – this is the same, right?
• Products are boring but people are interesting.  Your “characters” are your customers.  They have their own hopes, dreams and desires.  Show how your product makes their lives better.
• The world of your product is the market – the whole ecosystem of companies, brands, partners and competitors that occupy the market landscape.  People are interested in experiences—they’re compelled to explore fascinating worlds.    There’s always something about your market that could populate an interesting world.  Maybe it’s the history and nostalgia of it;  maybe it’s the science;  maybe it’s the trendiness.

CEOs are expected to do a lot of things.  We’re expected to know how to raise capital, recruit the best talent, understand markets and technologies, decipher legal and accounting systems.  As companies grow and we recruit domain specialists, many of these things get delegated to experts—but the one thing you can never delegate is vision.  But a great vision needs to do more than dance inside our heads; we need to get better at storytelling to make them inspire the people around us.  There’s a lot we can learn from the world of fiction, story-craft, improvisation and games about how to make our businesses more compelling and understandable.

Add one more job to the role of CEO: Chief Storytelling Officer… And as leaders, we not only need to learn to be great storytellers—we need to help other people express themselves through stories as well.

If you enjoyed this article, I’d love to hear feedback from you on other tips for using stories in business—or join the conversation with me on Twitter.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.