Storytelling is essential for everyone in business.
If you're selling your ideas, you're selling products, you're
trying to convince your team to follow your idea.
Today on Episode #794 of CXO Talk, we're speaking with Josh
Bernoff. He's an author.
He's a famous ghostwriter. It's funny thing, right, to say
you're a famous ghostwriter, but but he is, he's a former
industry analyst and most of all for us today, he is an expert
storyteller. I spent 14 years as a startup
executive in the Boston area and then 20 years as an analyst at
Forrester. I wrote a book called
Groundswell along with Charlene Lee, another analyst that sold
150,000 copies. So since that time.
I've been focused on books and stories, working with analysts
at Forrester on those, and then for the last eight years doing
that independently. And that's those.
All that experience is what's in here.
Build a Better Business book, which is how to plan, write and
promote a book that matters, really a topic that anybody
who's going to be writing a book, but especially.
Senior executives need to pay attention to if they want to
create influence. Why are stories so important in
your book? You begin the whole book with a
discussion about storytelling. Why?
Stories are what resonate with people.
The first time I tried to write a book, I sent the book proposal
to to the agent we were working with.
And he's like, well, I can't sell this.
I said why not? He said well because business
books are made of people and stories and there are no people
and stories in here. Reads like a research report.
Well, I was an analyst. I wrote research reports.
But at that moment I was I thought that we're on this, that
I can do that I can find people and stories and and since that
time I have realized that that is essential to communicating
any idea is to allow the person reading to put themselves in the
position of the. Person you're describing and
say, Oh yeah, that's what that felt like.
That's what it's like for me. Oh, he did that and it worked.
I guess that might work for me. Oh, she did that and it didn't
work. Maybe I should learn from that.
Companies are stories. You tell a story to every
consumer and every employee about who you are and what
matters to you. And if that story coheres and it
resonates with them, you can succeed.
And if it doesn't, then you're just a collection of people who
who happen to be working together right now.
Josh, listening to you talk about your early experience
writing a book where you were an analyst and you were used to
writing research, I think many business executives, especially
technology focused ones, come out of that very intellectual as
opposed to emotional mindset. And so there is a challenge in
translating. Our ideas, our intellectual
ideas into stories that convey emotion.
How does one go about doing that?
It really is a question of empathy.
I mean as to why this matters, I I like to cite this little study
Dan Heath, the author I did with his students at Stanford.
He had some people give a presentation that included some
stories and some statistics. And then later he came back to
the students and said. Do you remember the statistics?
5% remember the statistics. Do you remember the stories?
63% remember the stories. And that just shows you the
power here. Now, as far as what what CE O's
need to do, you're going to be telling two kinds of stories.
One is a story about people who matter like a customer.
Who whose life was changed by something that you did or
another customer who had problems.
And they we use that story to help illustrate why we do things
one way and not another. But it also relates to the
brands that companies have, because every company is a
story. And that story basically says
this customer has this problem, we come along and we offer this
solution. The customer uses our product or
our service. And therefore, they have a happy
ending. And that's certainly the kind of
story that marketers tell, but it also motivates employees and
everyone else associated with the company to know this is our
story. We help these people solve this
problem with this product, and then they live happily ever
after. But what about folks who are,
again, technology oriented, who are used to speaking with other
tech folks? And in a kind of shorthand, this
could be CIOs or Ctos for example, right?
They speak in a kind of shorthand to convey the message,
and the expectation is that you know I'm giving you the
information and therefore you should act on this information.
The idea that we can reduce everything to some simple and
logical set of statistics is I think.
At the root of a lot of these problems I you know that
companies have, you don't think Apple could have been where it
was now without a story about why it was better.
It wasn't just about the products, it was about the story
that they told. And I mean let's just talk about
technology products. We we before we got on the air,
we're talking about a Zoom, the the video conferencing company
and yes. They can tell people about how
they're more effective and they work with large companies and
small using the same technology and you know how dependable they
are. But the story of Zoom is when
you need to connect with somebody else on video, it's
really easy and it just works. And therefore you can have a
relationship with the person you're connecting with on video,
even if you're not in the same room.
And therefore that's really good for you and the when.
Some other video conferencing company tries to come into, say,
ACIO and say, well, you should use us instead of Zoom.
All the people have heard that, you know, they're like, no wait,
Zoom is really easy. I've been using, well, can't we
use Zoom? Well, that's because this, the
Zoom story is stuck in their brains.
That's even if you're dealing with selling technology on a
technologist to technologist basis, somewhere beneath that
someone is like, oh, this just works better and it solves my
problem. But the the message zoom is
simple or any product is simple and easy.
That's kind of a marketing message as opposed to telling a
story, right? Or where am I not correct in
that? No.
Well, that is a marketing message.
But a marketing message is a story.
A purpose statement from a company is a story.
A marketing statement is a story about customers.
If this customer uses this thing, then they'll be happier.
And when you see a commercial, let's say the commercial doesn't
say, you know these things are better for these people.
Now they have, they show a person who's actually has a
problem and then solves the problem.
But that's the story about a person that's not just a
marketing message. What is it, then, about stories
that make them? More memorable than the facts
and figures as you were describing.
Earlier, I wish I could completely answer that, but I
think that solution is what's deep in people's brains, about
the way their brains work. You know, we've been telling
stories to each other since we were cave people sitting around
the campfire. So it's just how people think
and. I I mean, this comes up
specifically in the books that I help people with where if you
have a, you know, extremely logical and well supported,
statistically supported set of information about why this thing
is better than that thing, people may read it, they may
even understand it, but they won't remember it.
But if you say, Oh well, you know, this person had this
problem and then they did this and it didn't work and they did
this other thing and it did work and therefore it's better to do
it this other way. The next thing that happens is
they go into the somebody else and say, Oh yeah, well, I heard
this story about this person who had this problem and they solved
it. It's just how people's brains
work. So you're really tapping into a
fundamental psychological principle or truth of us people.
Yes, it is absolutely part of the human experience And you
know, people in India don't. Solve problems the same way as
people in France, as people in Japan, but they're all telling
stories. You can see a television
commercial from Japan and get the message, even if you don't
understand a word they're saying, because you see that
people are solving problems and that's the story that you
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OK, we we have an interesting question from Twitter from
Arsalan Khan. He's always, Arsalan always
listens and he asks very intriguing questions.
And so thank you for listening, Arsalan.
And he asks a hard question. Here's what he says he says data
transformation is a part of. Business transformation and it
requires us to create a story to convey what the data is trying
to tell. And I'm you must be very
experienced with that from your time as an analyst using data to
tell the story. Now here's his question.
How do you address the challenge of a narrative and story and
bias that executives have even before you convey?
Your data story. So you walk into a room with
your data story and people have a bias before you even begin.
How do you address that? Basically you have to fight fire
with fire. So I certainly executives, we've
all heard these these stories about how somebody comes in to
talk about you know what the business has to do from a
technology basis and the. CEO says, Oh well, my daughter
just learned about this new thing and you're like, we're
going to have to deal with this. But that's the problem is that
the daughter's learned experience is somehow more real
to that CEO and all of the data that you've brought.
And that means that you need to put your own story together.
Now, a story supported by data is much better than a story by
itself. And that very much was what we
did at Forrester. We collected lots of data of all
different kinds, and then we would use it to support our
perspective, which was assembled based on lots of research about
the truth. But in the end, it all boiled
down to well, here's a story that I'm going to tell you
about. These people have these
problems. Here's how they solve them.
Here's an example of somebody who.
Had this issue and here's some statistics so you know I'm not
just making this stuff up. Let's jump on to another
question from Twitter, another really good one.
This is from Carmen Hill, and I'll thank Carmen for asking
this in advance because I was thinking of the same the same
question, she says. I often get pushback from sales.
Typically that storytelling is just marketing fluff.
Especially in the context of sales emails, she wants to know.
She wants an effective response to that pushback.
I love the idea that's that sales people are saying, oh,
this stuff is just marketing fluff.
Well, where does sales come from?
What's this? What's the raw material that
they have? You know, it's all coming from
the marketing department. So already it's like, OK, yes,
you can complain and whine about that, but in the end, that's the
truth. But take a look at what
marketers typically do assemble for salespeople to use and
among. All of the speeds and feeds and
the the statistics and the product descriptions are case
studies, very powerful. It's like, you know, here's how
we helped General Motors to streamline its supply chain.
Or here's how we used agile processes to enable this bank to
respond to its customers 40% faster and.
Those case studies matter because then the the person on
the other end of the sales calls like, Oh well, if they help this
bank, I wonder if they could help me.
And if you have those stories, you can succeed.
If you don't and the sales guy for your competitor does,
they're more likely to succeed. So I I guess I'd go, I'm going
to make an extreme statement here, which is that any
salesperson who's not adept at telling.
Stories about customer success is going to fail, because if you
can't do that, there's no way the person on the other end of
the phone or the other end of the e-mail is going to feel
like, Oh yeah, this will work for me.
I totally agree with that. I mean, even at the most basic
level, explaining how customers are using whatever we sell to
support. The the goals of of of these
customers and audience and to describe audiences that are
similar to the folks that you're selling to.
Again, I think it comes down to having that empathy that you
mentioned earlier because you really have to have a good sense
of who am I speaking to and what kind of story will resonate with
that person. One of the things I want to get
at here is talk about ideas, because in the end.
Companies that really grow and are really successful are based
around an idea. And that idea might be that you
know, design is really important in the design of computers.
In the you know usage of computers.
Or that idea might be you should be able to do everything that
you need to do with this bank without ever going into a
branch. And but the ideas are abstract.
Ideas can be motivational. But until you.
Actually reduce that to stories. It doesn't resonate.
I mean chewy, right? The the pet food company, their
idea might be we know more about pet owners and pets and what
they need than anybody else. But you hear a story about how
an owner says I need to send this product back because my dog
died and then the next thing you hear is that they they they.
Comped the product, told them to give it to the local shelter and
send flowers to the person. That's what people remember.
And they're like, Oh yeah, chewy really.
Does actually understand pet owners.
All of this begs the question of how do we put an effective story
together? What are the components of a of
a great story, An effective story?
At one point when I was at, Forrester hired a guy named Doug
Lipman. Who is a professional
storyteller to come in and address the analysts and explain
storytelling to them. So I want you to imagine this
guy who was actually known for Yiddish stories standing up in
front of a bunch of technology analysts and saying this is how
stories work. But all of our research reports
in the end were were stories. And what what I learned from him
is that the essential things about stories are that they
start with people. And the things are told in
sequence. First this happened, then this
happened, then this happened, then this happened, and then
this other thing happened. And we're all trained in that
from childhood by looking at, you know, hearing stories in
books and and in, you know, video programs and so on.
So the the sort of archetypal business story is this person
had a problem. These are the This is why it was
a problem for them. These are the things that they
tried tried this. They tried this, they tried
this. It has to be in sequence.
And then you explain what the knowledge was that they gained
and how that worked to succeed with them.
And I'm going to tell you something that I learned from,
from many years of writing business books, that if you
start a chapter with a story like that.
The people will always read from the beginning to the end of the
story. They always want to know what
happened. And then at the end of the
story, you can say anything you want is the lesson of the story.
And people will nod their heads be like, Oh yeah, yeah, that's
right. That's how powerful it is.
It's like, you know, and that's, that's how you get ideas to
stick in people's brains. And yeah, you're going to back
that up and say, well, here's some statistics and here's what
an expert had to say. And you know, here's why other
alternatives that you think of wouldn't work.
But in the end, that story, plus the moral of the story is X is
what sticks in people's brains. So the basic form Here's the
situation, and here's why the situation is hard for whoever is
the subject of the story. And here's.
The way it need it can be solved in order to fix the problem and
everything turned out. And here's the summary, here's
the moral of the story, Is that the basic structure?
It is. I'm going to mention one more
thing, which is detail. So you know, when if you read
about somebody in a fiction book, it's like, Oh yeah, she
had long flowing hair and penetrating blue eyes.
That doesn't belong in a business story.
That because unless it's a story about shampoo, right?
But but it does help to provide little details that make you
empathize with the protagonist of the story.
So I when I ghost wrote a story about Echostar the the the
satellite television company. In one of the books that I wrote
about artificial intelligence, the protagonist grew up in a in
a Indian family that's that spoke Hindi and always watched
Hindi television programs on satellite.
So the fact that he would then grow up to go work for this
satellite company becomes a little more interesting because
of that. Now is his in general ethnic
background is not going to matter but in his case it was
like okay. Here's a little detail that
matters. You don't read that and say,
what was he tall or short? That doesn't matter.
But but his the idea that satellite TV was really
important to these, these people in ethnic families and that that
would meant that he had to help the satellite TV company to be
successful. That helped to make the story
resonate. OK, we have another question.
Arsalan Khan comes back again and he says, I know he asked
good questions and sometimes they are complicated, so but
that's good you have you know. Have to put our thinking caps on
you. So Arsalan says there are
different levels of storytelling.
One is conveying your message to customers, another is conveying
your message to employees. And yet another level is
connecting these stories together for a holistic view.
Are there other levels of storytelling?
At one point I wrote a blog post about business books, and I
basically said they're like the turtles and that fable.
It's narratives all the way down.
There's an overarching narrative.
Each chapter is a narrative and within that they're that they're
separate stories. So really at every level of
detail it's like fractal stories.
But these things all do have to come together.
So if the story that you tell to customers is we're there for you
no matter what time of day 24/7, we can be depended on.
And the story that you're telling to employees is go ahead
and knock off early on Friday, because we love you.
Those stories don't connect up, do they?
So you want to be able to inspire everybody with a common
story and that's that's where you know, vision and purpose in
companies comes together. And it's why the individual
stories about customers or about problem solving.
Connect up because they all align along that you know,
whatever it is that that makes the company unique.
Now I want to jump back to something you said earlier.
You spoke earlier about case studies and of course many, most
companies even write a variety of different case studies.
You look on their website, you know we're great because of this
and we're great because of that. What I see in many of these case
studies is the. The study is not about the
customer or we can even broaden this to marketing materials and
marketing stories in general. It's not about the customer,
it's about the company who's doing the selling.
And so instead of having a customer talking, these case
studies are really, you know, let me extend my arm so I can
pat myself on the back and tell you how great we are.
That's pathetic. All of us are.
Programmed to be suspicious of marketing because we've been
marketed too since we were small children.
So the the more you talk about yourself, the the less effective
it is. And I do think you're right.
I read these cases I I recently did a ghost writing project
where I had to take case studies that these these companies had
posted on their site and turn them into stories for a book.
And I was like, Oh well I need to interview this person because
most of what I need is not here. If you read an actual Harvard
Business School case that they use, you know that Harvard
originated this at Harvard Business School.
It starts with something like, you know, Ellen had only been
the CEO for 41 days when this crisis happened and these things
happen, and then she had to make this decision.
You're like, OKI can put myself in the position of that
protagonist and say, what would I do?
What can we learn from this? And yet if you read the case
studies that are published on people's websites, it's often
hard to do that. So I'd I'd rather see things
that that elevate the customer to the point where you can say,
Oh yeah, that could be me as I I want to mention one other thing
here, which is that, you know, there's all this anti woke talk
here and people who are upset about diversity.
But unless you have some diversity in your case studies.
You are going to leave customers behind if all your case studies
are about old white guys and there's a young black woman
saying, I wonder if this product is right for me.
It's an obstacle for her to say, Oh yeah, I guess I think just
like these old white guys do. And I don't just mean ethnic
diversity or gender diversity. I mean.
Diverse industries, diverse situations.
If you really want to hit all of your customers, then you're the
stories you tell should be about a variety of different kinds of
customers. But how do you overcome the
issue that your marketing sort of takes inputs in and then
regurgitates it out so that it's not about the customer, but it's
about you as a company? This is endemic to technology
companies and technology marketers.
I don't even know why we're having this conversation.
They companies that talk about how they help customers succeed
and companies to talk about how great they are generally don't.
And I it's really, really rare to see a company that that
succeeds based only on one talking about itself.
And I want to exempt Apple here. Apple's always the weirdo
example that. That you shouldn't look at,
because nobody can be like Apple, but if we put them aside,
every other company on the planet succeeds because they
talk about how they help customers.
Well, the interesting thing to me about Apple is from a
storytelling standpoint, you alluded to this earlier.
It's all about the core message and the core set of values.
And so everything, so the so the story therefore is everything.
We produce, all these products, all these features.
The only reason that we do this is because we are trying to make
your lives better and come into our into our journey of helping
you. There's probably better
engineering inside of Apple than inside of any other hardware
company you can think of. And yet that's not what they
talk about, right? They're not saying, oh, we're
four times faster than the other guys.
They're saying look at this beautiful device you can hold in
the palm of your hand that lets you do a thing you could never
do before, lets you, the customer do a thing you could
never do. Before, that's a very, very
important point that you just mentioned because again most
technology companies. Don't approach it that way.
They approach their storytelling through features.
Oh, our latest release now does this.
Have you ever had Scott Brinker on this program from HubSpot?
Oh, of course. I've known Scott for many years.
OK. Yeah, so he makes these.
Yes, Mr. Chief Mark on Chief, right, right.
Yeah, so he makes these huge, huge charts of, like, the, the.
1962 companies that make marketing technology or the, you
know, 270 companies that do artificial intelligence.
And it's impossible to look at all the logos of all of those
companies and say, oh, well, we're going to succeed because
we are, you know, our we're 11% faster than than the other guy.
No. Well, those companies in there,
they only succeed to the extent that they tell us a better story
than the other people is at that level of competition.
That's the only thing that stands out.
Okay, let's jump back to Twitter.
We have a few more questions. This is from Chris Peterson and
Chris says from your blog, Does a quote UN quote Malcolm
function as a form of bottom line upfront communication that
business folks seem to like? So you need to explain that for
us. There recently was a blog post,
I don't remember the guy's name, that wrote it.
It was a post on Medium about these things called Malcolm's.
So he was complaining that he was reading business books.
And they they always have these chapters that start with a a
story about somebody in the problem that they had which is
called a Malcolm because Malcolm Gladwell is famous for for using
these stories and that it's become this this trite thing.
But. If you look closely at the stuff
that he complained about, the problem is people who are using
secondhand stories that have been told over and over and over
again, you know, so you know the the the story about Dave Carroll
and what United Airlines did when they broke his guitar, that
was interesting in the beginning, how he got revenge by
making a music video. But my God, we've all heard this
story 100 Times Now. So if you start your chapter
with that, it's like really you think that that's interesting.
I've I've. I've already heard this.
I. So I I think that that the idea
of tracking down unique content, people who did things that have
not been heard about before, and then actually telling their
story in a way that connects up to the ideas that you're talking
about. Is successful, and yeah, you can
denigrate it and call it a Malcolm, but that's a way better
way to start your chapters than it is to start your chapter with
with a bunch of argumentation that puts people to sleep.
So again, you're doing an emotional kind of grabbing them
by their shirt, by the throat and pulling them closer.
People want to hear stuff they haven't heard before.
It's still successful and the fact that.
I mean I think this the guy who wrote about this was writing
mostly about economists writing stories about the economy and
they don't have a whole lot of stories to draw on.
So they go back and they they retell the story about how Harry
Truman asked for A1 handed economist.
So we wouldn't say on the one hand and on the other hand,
right. Yeah, that was funny the first
time I read it and it is sort of funny but.
You can't really make the point that I have a unique perspective
here if that's all you got, is that Hackney thing that
everybody's heard before. If you want to present a unique
perspective, then you actually have to have a unique
perspective. Otherwise you're you're not
presenting a unique perspective. We have a couple of other
questions from Twitter. This is from Elizabeth Shaw who
says assuming the story arc is important.
How do you create a story arc and how can you use examples to
serve that story arc? It's a really good question.
When you talk about story arcs that relates to literature and
television and movies where people have they, they have an
ongoing growth. It's, you know, you look at the
Joseph Campbell, you know, traditional hero's journey.
They have to learn things along the way and have obstacles and,
you know, have despair and then come out of the underworld and
they have to have companions. And then at the end you're like,
not only did they have a happy ending, but now they're smarter
or more mature, or they finally realized that everything they
needed was in themselves. And that's, that's wonderful if
you were in Hollywood. But case study stories don't
have an arc like that. Case study stories are, you
know, you know, Alan I had was spending 25% of his time in his
small business keeping track of expenses.
And then he realized that he could use this, this product and
now he now he can spend his time with his customers and he gets
home in time to be able to read stories to his kid at bedtime.
And that's not really a story arc, right?
We don't know whether Alan is somehow realized something
important about himself that he didn't know before.
So no, we don't need, we don't need Hollywood level stories
here. We really need something much
simpler. You say that case studies,
business stories, don't have a story arc.
What do they have? OK, how do we, how do we decide
what the flow should be? And if you could tell us that
really quickly, that'd be great. What they have is a person who
you can empathize with. That person has a problem and
they have a method for solving that problem that shows why that
method is new and works better versus something that that that
maybe isn't. So I mean that's in the in the
book that I wrote here. Believe it or not, this is 24
chapters. It's got 24 case studies about
authors. Each chapter starts with one.
And that's because you can look at this and say, oh, how did
this person get past writer block, writer's block?
Oh, how did how did Charlene Lee actually differentiate her idea?
What did the Laurie Gesner honing do that was so powerful
in her book that one of the readers got the cover of the
book tattooed on her arm? These these are things worth
reading about but, you know, don't require investment in a
huge story arc. So if I can summarize that the
customer. Here's the case here.
Here's the business story flow. Customer has a problem.
Your method is solving the problem, the great outcome, and
then a moral, A moral of the story.
Yeah, and it would help in there if if we can talk about how
other methods of solving the problem that they might have
tried before it didn't work because you need a little bit of
conflict, It's I can't resist saying this that.
Occasionally I've I've interviewed people for a case
study story and then somebody in PR says take out the bad parts.
So your story then becomes they were happy and they tried this
thing and then they were happy and that's not really a good
story. Actually, thank you for that,
because you know, we with CXO talk, we tell stories and.
It's amazing to me sometimes that PR people want to sanitize
it. So it's exactly as you said, you
know, everybody was happy and then we got involved and they
were still really happy. The end.
That's that's not a story. Sorry.
That's a sequence of words, but it's not a story.
I love that. OK, another another question
from Twitter. I'm just going down to find them
here. Arsalan Khan, for the third
time, comes back to the well. And he says what is the
importance of storytelling in the for business IT alignment So
and and you have any examples. Can you help CI O's chief
information officers help them tell stories.
Really, what it amounts to is that every business has a story
at the heart of it of of how they solve problems.
The marketing department typically tells that story, and
I T needs to find ways to become a part of of the solution there.
If the story of it is we block it when you're trying to help
the customer, that doesn't work so well.
So for if you can, at Forrester, they call this the Business
Technology Officer, because your job is to provide technology
that will help the business to solve a customer's problem.
This is from Steve Eisenberg. This is a very specific one.
We're going to test you on this one, Josh.
Oh no. He says.
What are the top three AI tools for B2B storytelling?
AI tools are not good for storytelling because they say on
the edges off and they do the generic thing that's like what
everybody else is doing. So the best AI tool for
storytelling is your own damn brain.
Steve Eisenberg comes back and he says are you aware of a
directory of mastermind group for different industries?
And functions. Alternatively A mastermind group
for B to be book authors. The first I don't know about,
and there are there are groups for B to be book authors.
I'd encourage people to actually contact me at Josh at Bernoff
Calm and I'll make those connections because the reason
that those groups work so well is because they carefully gate
the people that go into them. And I can't just be sort of
sending everybody into a group like that.
Another question. Wow, from Steve Eisenberg again,
he's like rivaling Arsalan Khan. Here he says Do you have any
opinions about Amazon creating AI to write books and cut out
the human author? That would be you.
I don't want to read a book written by an AI because
there's, let me tell you in one sentence, in one word, what AI
authors don't have that humans have wit.
OK, what is wit? Wit is knowing when to switch
from one mode to another. Wit is humor.
Wit is what makes human storytelling interesting.
And if you read stuff that's written by AI, it doesn't have
that. And so in general, people are
just not going to be willing to settle for that.
I use ChatGPT for various purposes all the time, and I
asked ChatGPT to. Take something and write it in
various very business dry and write it in various styles.
You know, rap song in the style of Shakespeare, maybe in the
style of Chaucer, and it's pretty darned funny.
It's unintentionally funny. It's not trying to be funny.
And that's the whole point, is that if you want to be
imitative, if you want to write in the style of Chaucer, it's
good at that. But that's not the originality
that draws people to it. This is again from Carmen Hill,
she says. Good question, thoughtful
question here. One challenge in telling
authentic, resonant customer stories is the reluctance of
customers to share unvarnished details about their pain points
and weaknesses. How do you handle that?
Because nobody wants to present a bad face.
They don't want to expose those weaknesses.
If you have the confidence of a customer, if you've worked with
them from beginning to end, you often can get them to admit that
they had a problem in the beginning, which is what you
need to do. And as long as there's a happy
ending, you can do that. And sometimes there's not a
happy ending. I've certainly done business
stories where things ended badly.
There are some in my book about authors that made terrible
mistakes, but I don't identify people by name.
We use pseudonyms because. Yeah, Nobody wants to have the
story of how they've they ultimately failed be the thing
that they're reading about. And you know, you don't need a
whole lot of disaster stories. You only need one or two.
And if those two are anonymized and everything else, as people
mentioned by name, then you can do just fine.
Can you distill down everything that you know and have
experienced about storytelling into kind of capsule advice?
For those of us in business who need to tell stories, and maybe
we're not expert at it. Really at the center of that is
empathy, and you help us to understand how somebody feels
when something doesn't work, when something is a challenge.
If you can do that and then make the connection to how your
business makes a difference for them, then you will be
successful. And if you can't do that, then
you won't succeed. That's really interesting, so.
At the very basic, at the most basic level, if you want to tell
a successful story, you must establish an emotional
connection with the audience, and that means understanding who
your audience is and what they care about and what their pain
points either are or like or are likely to be.
Does that sound right? That's exactly right, and what
you just described is also what makes the business successful.
It's not just making us the storytelling successful, but
understanding your customers pain points is pretty essential.
Then I'm reminded of the phrase in Ted Lasso, which many people
have seen on Apple, where one of the players says soccer is life,
and according to what you just said, storytelling is business.
OK. Sounds good to me.
I think you're right. All right.
And on that note, I, I want to say a huge thank you to Josh
Bernoff. Josh, thank you so much for
taking time and sharing your great expertise and storytelling
with us today. I really, really appreciate it.
Michael, what you do with CXO Talk is unique and excellent and
just the ability to be a part of that is really means a lot to
me. So I'm glad that you gave me the
chance to be here. Well, thank you so much.
I really appreciate that and everybody that watch, thank you
for watching, especially those folks who ask such great
questions. I always say this because it's
really true. You're such an insightful and
intelligent and thoughtful audience and your questions make
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