The Power of Storytelling in Business

foreign brought to you by alumni FM connecting people through stories uh this is Greg LeBlanc and I'm here with David Riemer who is not only an instructor at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business um and the advisor to many many startups he's a former career as a VP of marketing at um a little company called Yahoo I also worked in various ad agencies had taken CMO positions but David I think you're best known as the master coach Storyteller you're someone who helps startups to come up with their story not only to kind of generate funding and recruit people but also to kind of motivate them and help them figure out what they're really all about um and of course you're the author of this book right here uh get your startup story straight welcome David that's great to be here thanks Greg for having me on your pod so the book that you've written is really all about storytelling and a lot of what you've been doing not just kind of recently when you're working with startups but pretty much your entire career has really been all about storytelling and I think in the beginning of the book you you go back to your undergraduate commencement when you told a story and I think that was sort of The Germ of everything that you've done kind of more or less sense um and you know I think that a lot of people underestimate the important of story importance of stories you know when I teach I try to bake a lot of stories into what I teach and when I talk to students who have graduated many years later it's the stories that they remember much more than sometimes the Frameworks the models the certainly the formulas the formulas are kind of the first to go and yet even when people themselves know that they tend to remember stories they fail to understand how important it is when they are doing the communicating so you know what is it about stories first of all that that it's so so powerful and then you know why is it that people seem to underestimate the power of stories well um let's start with the second part of that question why do people underestimate estimate them I think we uh we beat it out of people uh as they we educate them we're all about facts and it's all about Frameworks and uh we and especially people in MBA programs uh you know or in some cases Engineers uh logic and data is is what we're trained and putting together presentations where we logically walk people through things so we're literally beating out of them what we've literally evolved to be as human beings which is we we've evolved to respond to story you know our whole species separated itself from other versions of of human uh the homo sapiens separated themselves from every other animal by being able to basically tell a story about what could happen in the future uh other other species could communicate but we were the first species that could sort of say hey watch out next time you're on the Serengeti uh when you when you when you get to that rock over there be careful because the last one of our buddies who went over there didn't end out end up so well and then when it came to organizing simulation civilizations and communities um and then ultimately businesses and and Enterprises and stories is what people would gather around um and yet we have this sort of in our Education and Training where we're training people around some other things so when I got involved with Berkeley Hospital 15 years ago I realized I saw this Gap and that's what I started to teach I entered a number of innovation programs that started to teach storytelling to people in the context of innovation and then that led to all the other work I've been doing with startups and and product folks around Innovation storytelling right and so in the world of startups um you know you talk about the importance of Storytelling but part of that is about getting other people inspired and part of it's about getting funding presumably for your your startup but I think you also talk about how the storytelling itself kind of forces the teller of the story to think seriously about what it is that they're doing right like if they can't tell a good story maybe it's because they don't really know what it is that they're doing doing so is storytelling kind of a form of sense making um that's another way to think about it yeah I mean I absolutely in fact sense making is a really nice bit of language around it um I mean a simpler way of saying it a story is strategy I like alliteration if you haven't figured that out from the title of the book but story is strategy uh you know it's it's always funny when I start working with um startups and and you might we talked a little bit about databricks which we'll probably talk about on this call on this pod a little bit but when I started working with them like most companies it's all about how can you help me as a company tell the story but as we get into it together and we lay out a narrative for the company we get all the narrative elements in place that I teach in my frame with my framework about building a story um you end up getting in strategic conversations is this the best first Target customer and and not like all businesses but if this was a SAS business but specifically what kinds of businesses and who in the business because businesses don't buy products people buy products so who's the buyer who's the user what type of company um is going to be the best place to start and then once you figure that out that might actually help inform the problem that you're solving and then that's going to inform the thing you actually build so the the point is that if we really use a a discipline story framework at the beginning of this process it's going to get you to rethink a little bit the thing you're actually creating and who you're creating it for and that's that's all about product strategy well I think the the main thrust of your book is really about how startups can tell this story to those folks that they're trying to attract resources from right and and you know when I think about Venture capitalists at least when you know when you teach a course on venture Capital as I do you're teaching people how to evaluate the the business model you're teaching them how to evaluate the capacity to sell product the capacity to generate right market share the capacity to you know create um recurring Revenue right and the capacity to build a moat and prevent others from you know taking away your your rents the ones you generate and when I think we teach that course we're teaching people to be very analytical we're teaching people to be very rigorous you know we're teaching them to to you know bring I guess what you might think of as their um their system two to the table right the part that is uh requires a lot of education and I think what you're saying is well not only do people bring their system one or at least their the part that is more easily influenced by this less analytical part of the brain but but also that not only do they but they should to some degree um and and so should we be teaching Venture capitalists to be more like literary critics to some degree and a little bit less like oh yeah absolutely absolutely because they're going to learn all those other things and they're going to come to it with that as a focus because that's the way the people who enter that field typically think um and yet this other part of it is so important because frankly if you and if you talk to venture people they'll tell you one of the two or three most critical aspects of a strong leader of a startup that they look for is the ability to tell a story and the reason that's so important is that first of all they have to have the story to tell and you know you I don't as a listener to the story I don't care about business model I don't care about their go to market strategy I don't care how great their team is all of that until I want to know all about about that at some point but I don't care about any of that until I know there's a real customer out there that has some issue that this person or this Venture feels they can solve better than the other things that are out there and that's the core product story and if you can tell it in a way so that I really empathize with the customer you have to know who your customer is right you have to have that specific customer mind if you can make it so that as the listener I'm empathizing with a customer and I believe there's a problem to solve and then you can convince me that you've solved the problem with the solution you've built then I'm like okay there's the great Foundation there now now tell me what's the business model and how are you going to go to market and do you have you protected IP and how are you going to grow the business over time and what's the market opportunity Etc but at first I've got to viscerally feel there's someone who's hurting and you're going to help them hurt less and if you could do that and that and that that does rely on storytelling skills and and the ability to evaluate a story so yeah I think we should teach people that now the the protagonist in most of the stories that you discuss in the book is the customer right and and it's sort of an ideal customer you know in Venture we always talk about the ideal customer profile so you you personify this ideal customer um but in some cases the protagonist is the founder themselves uh and and that's usually when the founder identifies with that ideal Customer because maybe they are the this one and the same you know they're the person who has first-hand experience with this with this pain either by going through the pain themselves or you know observing someone very close to themselves uh that's experienced this um and I've seen increasingly numb you know startups that begin their pitch with this with this narrative it's it's become much more commonplace do you think that um that they're kind of figuring this out you know that they've they've they've picked up on it have you seen a kind of an increase in the number of of startups that have been taking this advice yeah well certainly the folks that I work with because I coach them on it you know um and I'm definitely seeing more of it certainly in general I think people in general are realizing they have to connect with their audience um and there's something interesting that happens when we tell a personal story our eyes start to spark a little bit more we get a little bit more animated uh we might you know our eyes might open a little bit more we might smile a little bit more because we're literally as we're telling the story we're remembering the experience that we had and guess what happens when you do that your audience feels the same way because as human beings unless we're a sociopath we're we've evolved to respond to those cues and so now I'm beginning to feel a little bit more of the story what the Storyteller is talking about because of how animated they are and you just can't help it now not everybody has the ability to tell a personal story because they may or may not be the customer but sometimes there's a way as you said to enter through the personal lens and then introduce the customer I'll give you an example a Founder that you may recall a Berkeley founder named Tebow doucheman starts his presentation for his company by saying my parents are deaf my sister is deaf and already you're hooked and I go my God what's that like he speaks and he he has he can hear but his parents couldn't his sister couldn't and then he says I understand how painful it is uh for someone who's deaf to try and follow a group conversation he looks over here he says you're looking over here and someone says something over there you miss it and now you're lost in the conversation that's how he starts his pitch so he's it brought himself into the story because he's witnessed it firsthand but he's not himself the customer and in a very economical way he's he's found this personal narrative that quickly introduces the customer in the story explains their problem and now you're in the edge of your seat wondering okay what have you built to make that easier for them and of course he's built an app called Ava which transcribes conversations as they're happening and color codes them based on who in the room is saying well you describe a couple stories where um Founders never mentioned their personal story and they left it out of the pitch and the pitches were kind of flat and then they sort of as an aside it mentioned the personal story and then all of a sudden the The Listener was was hooked why why do you suppose when you have that kind of ammunition why is it that so many Founders are are kind of reluctant to bring it into the mix well let's use the story to to explain why that might happen uh serbi sarna is one such person another Berkeley uh Alum undergrad from Berkeley uh who uh was was working on in a biotech space and working on a solution uh to help women uh with early detection over of ovarian cancer but she had never talked about her own experience with it as a 13 year old and it was because she had a terrible experience with it growing up um passed out was taken to the hospital was had a terrible time going through tests many trips to the hospital never talked about it because she felt it was inappropriate in a business setting to talk about her personal experience and one day she's meeting with Tim Draper who's one of the most famous Venture capitalists you know in Silicon Valley as part of some uh Workshop he was doing or something and uh he kept asking why are you working on this particular area of Science and finally she said well and she told this story he's like oh my God he said you have to use this story every time you talk about your business because a um I'm now rooting for you to solve it a b i underst I know that you really understand the issue and see I know what your commitment is to solving it you have to use the story she started using the story he gave her a four million dollar investment in her company the first major investment and she's ultimately she sold it to a major biotech company for a quarter of a billion dollars several years later That's The Power of of telling a personal story but people sometimes feel uncomfortable it's not appropriate we don't do that in my culture I hear all sorts of reasons right and maybe it's in part because people feel like they have to almost become like method actors to some extent I I have a friend who when he became CEO he was very uncomfortable you know because before he was CEO he was he was a doer and and now he felt like he was a performer right and he was had to go around and you know rally the troops and you know just kind of say the same thing over and over and over again and it's kind of like when you know when you and I are teaching the same class multiple times you know use the same joke twice and you feel like a fake you know you feel like a phony if you have to use the same joke twice but that's what professional comedians do the same joke a hundred times right yeah when you perform a show uh you know if it's running for four weeks in a regional theater you're going to perform it you know eight nights a week for four weeks if you're on Broadway you're going to be doing that same joke for a year um and every night you have to give it your all so there there are professionals who who really understand that comedians are is another example but the other thing to think about is every time you tell the story it's going to be a little bit different for the simple reason that there's a different player in the storytelling and that's your audience and when the audience is different you know this as well as anybody as a teacher that people respond differently to different things and it can lead you to different paths and down different channels so it's always a bit of a dialogue and even when your audience isn't speaking or you're not asking them for feedback they're giving you feedback anyway they're looking interested They're laughing they're they look like they're emotionally impacted or uh or maybe they look distracted and they're looking at their phones and you're like uh oh I need to do something to get this story back on track one of the things I teach with my teams when I'm coaching teams is that remember you're having a conversation with the audience even if you're the only one Speaking and one of my favorite illustrations of this Greg is from a a State of the Union Address that that President Obama gave in 2015. and he's telling he's telling a story about an American uh who had she and her family had trouble coming through the uh the financial crisis of the late to you know 2008 around there and he was talking about government program programs that could help them and as he's telling the story he says you know Rebecca and Ben erler were newlyweds as he said that someone in the audience clapped when he said they were newlyweds like that's a good thing and she's literally in in the Congress while this is happening in the chamber and after that person clapped someone laughed thinking it was funny that someone clapped and then another person laughed and then Obama who was paying attention to his audience he just stopped he smiled he tilted his head and then everybody in the chamber laughed including uh the John Boehner the speaker the the house who like was trying so hard not to laugh because he's on the other side of the aisle and he didn't want to give Obama the credit but he couldn't help it the point being that happened because Obama was realizing he's he's in a conversation and he let the audience have that moment and then everyone in that chamber had a moment together so that's that's part of the power even if you're telling the story multiple times recognize that you're having a conversation with your with your audience so then do the storytellers have to be authentic in in some way I mean you know I've I've watched some Founders I've seen their stories evolve over time and the stories take on more of a compelling kind of narrative but they start drifting a little bit away from you know what I know to be the truth um and uh and you know maybe I'm the only one that knows that there's a little bit of a fudging they're kind of like when people apply for for graduate school and they say why do you want to do this and they come up with some narrative like that goes all the way back to birth which shows that going to graduate school at this school for this degree is the culmination of you know 27 years of inevitability right and and um yesterday yeah so so is there you know is is there is authenticity requires do you have to kind of teach people to be to be authentic um I mean or just to be good actors no definitely authenticity wins the day there's no question about that uh now there's there's also no question that people can become better performers and there's no question there's an element of performance here you're trying to take an audience whoever it is you could be you could be having a one-on-one meeting with someone who you're trying to convince to join the company and you want to tell them a story that's going to inspire them enough to say yes I'm going to join your company and then be able to go home and tell their partner that here's why I should join this company and it's such a good story they can go home and share it with their partner well there's a little you have to there's a little bit of performative you know be honest be true to yourself but there is a little bit of performative element sometimes people think if someone is showing um energy and and their voices is you know has showing vocal variety and they're using their arms and maybe they're walking around and looking and making eye contact that they're not being authentic well they they're being human um there's you can you can be authentic and be a good performer one isn't you know doesn't replace the other and I always advise people that true stories are better than made up stories I want to hear about a customer that you actually have met and that you've talked to bring them into the room tell their story um and the and the more authentic the better I mean sometimes as Founders they're things we're going to choose not to talk about in our pitch because we haven't quite sorted them out yet but that's a question that's like any good marketing you figure out what's what are the aspects of this story that I can tell that are true that are going to get me to that next conversation but authenticity important there was an example in the book where um a Founder has trouble really coming up with the story and then you realize that this founder had really not gone out into the field and spoken to any real customers and so it was really no wonder that they didn't have a good story and once they did go out and talk to the customer they they wound up realizing that their original idea wasn't really that great right so you know we all know about kind of get out of the building Steve blank pivoting and all that that but but you know you need some kind of mental framework for for interpreting that that kind of data that rolls in through those encounters with the customer right yeah yeah I mean to me the simplest way of thinking about it is a technology does not equal a product and a product does not equal a business there there are things that you have to move from one to the next and one to the next to get ultimately to a business as an entrepreneur so these guys you're talking about they these are guys in the in the um uh in the uh autonomous car business who've done a lot of work there and they were frustrated with the pace of that business so they thought let me let me go and try and see if I can take some of my learning and move into a consumer business and um so they had a cool technology but they didn't have a product and they thought they could create a subscriber version of uber right where people subscribe and then they get unlimited number of rides a month they thought for commuters or two parents working only one car this would be a great solution but they hadn't really talked to anybody about whether that was the right solution um so again they had some really great technology but they hadn't yet landed on a product well finally they talked to those people they find out no they're not interested in that they actually pivoted to something completely different which was more of a delivery service and then they they decided that didn't land and they ultimately went back to the autonomous space and and took their camera technology and that's what they ended up developing and then they turned that into a SAS business and then okay now we're going to turn technology to the product and then here's how we turn it into a business but the point is that the you know Steve blank talks about talking to 100 customers what you're doing when you're talking to those 100 customers is you're vetting your story you've got a premise I have this customer I think this is the set of customers I'm going to start talking to them and see what they think and I think these are the issues the functional needs the emotional needs I think this is the problem I'm solving and they have their effectively a storyboard in their head and then the book I give you about format for making it a little easier to put all those pieces together and then you talk to people and they'll tell you yeah that story is right on or you know that's not really the story I'm having a different issue or my friends over there are having that problem but I'm not having that problem that's a different segment whatever it is and then you're constantly evolving The Narrative until you've landed on a solution that somebody needs and now you've got your story well you make reference to um other types of Storytelling right you talk about Pixar and how they go about creating successful movies um are the same types of stories uh do we see the same types of stories you know in all these different domains I mean we've we there's a whole bunch of books on how to how to write screenplays and there's a whole bunch of books on you know what makes for a successful story and you know allegedly there's only you know a certain number of kind of story archetypes does all of that kind of map over into the world of of corporates and and the world of startups well I felt that it does but I felt that there was nobody who'd written about it in other words there's a lot of books about storytelling for business people a lot um but what I hadn't seen because a lot of students asked me and startup Founders that said I want to do more with this I need more resources would point me to a book point me to the podcast point me to the the videos and I realized that no one was doing exactly what I was doing uh which was taking story and saying okay how do we use the story for something new for an innovation so that's why I put the book together but the basic framework of a story and the way it applies so beautifully is in a classic story any great story usually you're introduced to some protagonist there's something they're trying to accomplish and um and as an audience we know who the protagonist is we know what they want and then we see some obstacles thrown in their way that keeps them from getting what they want and then we watch the movie or we read the book or we watch the play uh to find out are they going to end up getting what they want um well guess what that's an innovation story you meet a customer you realize the customer has some set of issues there's something that's making it hard for the customer to get what they want and um and then you go through this journey with them and hopefully the solution you've created solves the problem better than other the other stuff that's out there and it's just like the movie and literally in the book I give examples of story arcs in a you know for a movie in like Pixar film and then compare it to the story arc for a for a startup well when uh startups no longer a startup and it becomes a more mature company do do mature companies also need kind of you know stories and narratives to um ground them and we've seen all these companies that come up with defining principles or that come up with um you know the Amazon has the 14 leadership principles and you know there's there's defining principles also kind of companies have slogans or logos you know whether it was you know do no evil or you know our goal is to provide information to the world or whatever so we've got slogans we've got leadership principles do companies need to have these you know stories that bring everybody together well I'm I'm there's a whole world of branding with out there and even though I grew up with it as an advertising person the book and the stuff that I'm most interested in now are stories about products because Brands encapsulated so many other things brand values and brand history and there's brand architecture and there's just so many other elements but there's no question that over the life of a brand um they constantly need to introduce stories that refresh the brand and bring and and and have the brand land for people example um Google a brand that is known universally around the world and has a million associations it's still important for them to prove to the world that their useful thing to have and for people to not take them for granted and one way to do that is to have people feel that Google's useful so if you might uh remember back to last year's Academy Awards and it was also on this year's final four and some other very high profile uh television events there was a commercial about a coda family which is kind of ironic given that this year's Academy Award went to the film coda coda is the children of deaf adults and in this wonderful commercial by Google they show how this this person who grew up in with both parents being deaf uh how he learned to sign and how he helped navigate things for his family and then fast forward to now he's an adult he's married and during covid he had a child and his parents meet the child over a bunch of Google tools uh you know the way we're talking right now but through you know a Google solution Google meet and sub captions and all these other things they do the point is that story was very powerful very memorable and one of the most memorable things even from the whole Academy Awards show the first time around was that commercial and that makes you feel like you have a stronger connection to the Google brand and some of those Google products so yes absolutely it's important to do it it's important to find ways to do it but with the brand thing is a much bigger and there's a lot a lot of thought pieces on on how to do branding as well but again for the book I wanted to focus on people who were sort of had a specific product but even big companies like apple are launching new products um and just this one more example of a big company with a powerful ad um I I own a uh an Apple watch now um and I never did until very recently my my wife bought me one for my birthday three weeks ago and it's only because I started talking about oh maybe I should get an Apple Watch and they've been around for a long time but there was a commercial where they did such a great job of demonstrating the problem that the Apple watch can solve I don't know if you've seen this but it's a commercial where they show uh you just all you hear are voiceovers of people talking about some terrible circumstance they found themselves in and they're literally calling 9-1-1 on their watch because they can't get to their phone and it literally saved their lives and it was such a great they were all narratives like four different narratives in this commercial people literally having their lives saved these beautiful little story arcs into 60 seconds that had convinced me that I needed this product and that's a brand obviously it's been around a long time but it's coming up with a new way of telling a story about a new product that is going to convince me now I finally this this needs to be a part of your life well so since you were somebody who was an executive in an ad agency a while back let's say um have you noticed I mean there's a change in in the world of of marketing a lot of these ad agencies have had to kind of reposition themselves uh you know when when we think of marketing we don't think of Don Draper anymore and you know you reference the time Draper Carousel story of the book right uh marketing nowadays is really much more about you know data and about kind of Market segmentation and about you know recommendation engines and and so forth and a lot of these agencies traditional agencies have have struggled a bit um is it that they are failing to convince companies of the relevance of Storytelling or is it that kind of they've lost the capacity to tell the stories and the companies themselves have kind of taken over that role what's what's going on in that world of kind of traditional agency marketing foreign yeah well it it's I don't follow it nearly as closely as I might have it's literally been 24 years since I worked in an advertising agency uh that's like a lifetime for most professionals right um but what I've obviously observed is that you have to be able uh to compete as someone who who can understand the data side of marketing marketing is all about data now but it's not exclusively about data so you have to have a foot in both camps and good marketers have to have a good a foot in both camps it's not enough as a marketer uh to be a really talented growth marketer who can constantly do a b testing and and um and constantly refine the the marketing funnel and all that sort of stuff and the marketing stack because there's so many Technologies in there all of that stuff is there's no question it's essential nowadays if you're not using those tools it's like a baseball team that doesn't believe in data analytics they're going to be terrible but at the same time they're still in art to the world of marketing it is some Art and Science and you still have to be able to tell stories um and the most successful agencies have to be able to do both or at least be able to identify what part of that world they're playing in and being super well positioned so people know exactly why you're going to the agency but the fact is this to me is a more interesting conversation about marketing leaders marketing leaders need to not just be all about one or the other they're leaving a lot on the table uh either way depending on you know what they're what you really do need to to be able to do both things but storytelling still matters there's no question it still matters well in many ways it may be even more important because it seems like we have much higher rates of of attrition right of employees and uh you know customer loyalty is something that's kind of up for grabs on a more or less continuous basis because of aggressive competition so it's it's like every single day your customers and your employees are asking the question like why should I continue to do business with with this company as opposed to another company and they need to have have some kind of a story that informs that decision right yeah and that and that stands out and it's memorable I mean compare the consumer experience or the business professionals experience who's looking at business products there's so many different messages they see now during the course of a day it's not unlike if you're a venture person and you go to a demo day at an accelerator and you see 20 companies well which company are you going to remember it's the ones that told the best story right so when you walk away from those 20 presentations in those in in demo day the the best storytellers are going to be the ones who end up being the ones that the people who leave the room are going to want to talk to and talk about and the same goes through goes for our lives as consumers and as business people who are trying to make decisions about the products and services we're going to use so many different messages you know I'm referencing two commercials that were just great stories um uh that I used earlier and I'm I'm holding on to them and retaining them because they were just wonderful stories and they've got me to feel better about the brand Google and it got me to convince my wife to get me a Google an Apple Watch right um so because of all the zillions of messages that I see those ones really landed and stayed with me because they were compelling stories now is it do you think it's more important that the story resonate with the listener because of some familiarity or that they can identify with the protagonist or is it more important when that listener is you know somewhat remote or distant you know I'm thinking oftentimes you have these Venture capitalists who are you know generalists and maybe they don't really understand the The Domain in which you're you know creating your startup and so uh they need to be familiarized with kind of the problem of these people that maybe they they've never been in those shoes right and so there's a lot of folks who say that literature is a great way to build empathy right and if you're trying to understand what it's like to be someone who's very very different from you literature helps in that regard so in that sense it was that would suggest that it's far more important that when you're communicating say a healthcare Healthcare story to an investor that doesn't really know a lot about health care you better darn well have a good story but the the alternative to that would be if if you know if the story is a story that the listener can identify with because they themselves have felt that pain then the story is going to be even more compelling so is it more important when you're talking to someone that they can viscerally identify with the the protagonist or is it kind of more important when you're going across domains and they're gonna say both you're gonna say both I think you're gonna often find yourself no no you're going to find yourself more often than not talking to people who don't have the Deep experience with that customer experience that's far and away the more common experience you have to assume that your audience is not an expert in this category that they don't necessarily know and and demo day is an interesting example because if you're gonna be speaking to a bunch of people in a room I might be speaking to a venture person in the room who has no experience in this category but someone in their office does so if they can understand the story you're telling about the customer you're there to help and that person even though they don't know nothing about the category they can go back to their office and say oh my God I heard this amazing solution for this type of customer and I know you're going to find this interesting because this is your thing you have to get that person to empathize with your customer and it's more often than not someone who doesn't have the Deep experience category and my advice to people is like well how do you do that well look for the thing that is just human about what you're doing the the what I did the work with data bricks we were talking about the data scientist that's trying to uh you know be effectively they're being asked to be a superhero in their company this goes back to 2014 when we started uh the companies were spending a gazillion dollars on giant giant data forms and data Lakes to hold on to every every single transaction that ever happened especially with companies that tons of transactions sort of detail type companies and the data scientists were hiring they said okay your job is to find the magic in this data that's going to give us this incredible business Advantage so we can cross the competition go and they had these massive expectations because of the Investments and the whole notion big data is going to save the day well these data scientists would go back to the desks expect it to be superhero with capes on and they go back to their desks and their hands are tied behind their back because it's so hard to build and run the programs they need to do to get at the Insight so they're spending all their time building and running programs in zero time looking for insights and there was this huge gap between what was expected of them and what they were able to do with this tools they had that expectation Gap is a very human thing who hasn't at some point in their life had these Great Expectations on them to do something and then they didn't have what they needed to meet those expectations so we use that very human thing as a way of understanding a very complex business that was Data bricks and then of course we talk about how they solve that problem make it easier to to develop and run the program so that they can you know spend time in the insights um and anybody can understand that whether you're an expert in that category or not so what's the human thing one more example of a very human thing that really struck me was one of my Founders you may know Steve derrico a Skydeck guy uh Berkeley Sky Deck he was working on a solution to help people manage their cancer uh if they had cancer or a caregiver trying to manage someone else's uh treatments through through going through uh they're they're trying to survive cancer and he while we were chatting about it at one point he said you know it's like having cancer like a full-time job and I just stopped him when he said that because it was it was so powerful like the idea that if you have a full-time job and now you have another full-time job or God forbid you can't have a full-time job because this is your full-time job like oh my God that's horrible so if you can have a solution that will help make it less of a full-time job then boy I'm rooting for you to do that because that's a terrible thing well anybody can understand that whether you've ever had cancer or know someone personally who's had cancer or not you can understand that and that's a very human thing so if we're looking for ways to people for people to empathize and have something resonate with someone who may not understand the experience or the category I always encourage people to look for that human experience that that helps explain the struggle of the customer so that you can then when you describe the solution anybody can relate to what you're talking about now can these same stories be redeployed when it comes time to do the customer acquisition right so for instance with data break can they take that same story and bring it to you know a CIO and and uh or is the CIO going to be um uh you know less likely to think of their data scientist as a superhero or you know how does do these stories when you take these stories and start using them in other domains oh absolutely uh and I would I would argue that in some cases the person solving the problem for the person in the example of the SAS solution of data bricks the person working on solving the problem may actually understand better what that customer the data scientist is going through than even the CIO and your job is to tell the CIO there's someone who works for you who's miserable and let me tell you why she's miserable she's miserable because you're expecting her to do this you're telling her save the company and and here's what she has to do and let me describe all the things she has to do to develop and run a program that will enable her to get one Insight out of that massive data Lake and and now the CIO is like damn I I'm paying these people a lot of money it's hard to hire data scientists to begin with and and I'm I'm hamstringing them because of the what I'm using and you're telling me you can give me something that's going to make them much more productive and able to achieve some of those expectations I'm all in uh so it so absolutely I encourage people and especially in a situation where the customer who's buying the solution isn't the same person is the one who's using the solution which is the case with the CIO in a big giant company that's buying these Data Solutions um yeah it's in some cases even more important because you're trying to help them empathize with their own employees then they may not even understand the degree to which struggling I have a friend who's a partner at a large Venture firm in the valley and and he says that he spends a big part of his job teaching Founders how to tell stories uh because they they really don't know how to sell necessarily right and they don't really that's not that was never part of their their training now presumably they must have been decent enough to get the funding already from this you know fairly successful venture capitalist but I think you know that they're in the business of finding more potential so is has this idea of kind of Storytelling been institutionalized at at different levels in different places right have uh accelerators all more or less adopted storytelling as part of their curriculum have Venture capitalists embraced kind of Storytelling as something that they can provide to their portfolio companies and their Founders as a as a skill to what extent has this movement become uh kind of pervasive yeah it's definitely growing uh in significant Leaps and Bounds certainly since I've started uh working on uh this particular area about you know 12 to 15 years ago uh many many more uh VCS are talking to me about what they're doing in the organization and how much time they're investing in demo day and they're reading my book and they're coaching their teams on it um you know but all that being said it's still hard uh it's hard storytelling is hard for the people who make stories for a living I'm working on an original musical I've been working on for 10 years um and we're still working on the story uh you know it takes five years to make a film with Pixar and there's some great stories about things where they've really struggled telling a story so when you're dealing with people who aren't professional storytellers who are trying to work on their stories um we need to give them as many tools as possible it's the reason I wrote the book because I wanted to scale what I do I can't meet with every startup that's going I can't spend time with every team but at least there's a method in the book that they can learn and there's a number of Storytelling techniques they can use to try and tell an emotional and a compelling and a logical story their story archetypes in the book so the purpose of the book was to just give people another tool um and and Venture folks and anybody who's in this in this Innovation ecosystem to keep working on it because it's hard and as you said it's not something that people innately come by especially a lot of folks who are in engineers and product people who are creating a lot of these products and companies well if you wanted to find folks to coach people on storytelling skills the way you do could you rely on people without domain knowledge in the world of business could you rely on the folks who are professional storytellers you know we at Berkeley have hired people who are you know in the movie industry people who are you know improv actors and and so forth do you need to have kind of a a business background or knowledge to provide the kind of coaching that these startup Founders need uh you know in a perfect world you'd find someone who has a foot in both camps I mean I'm so lucky that I I grew up writing shows um and being involved in advertising which is a storytelling business um and and working you know in the tech space as long as I have for startups and you know companies like Yahoo and Etc um if you bring someone in who's just a Storyteller um they may be able to help you and I love the idea of bringing that resource in because what they may be able to do is help find the thing and what people are talking about that's the human thing that's the thing that they just relate to as a Storyteller because I find that's usually the most difficult thing when people are trying to develop their stories and doing demo day there's a lot of people who can help make slides clear and try and make sure that there's a logic to the presentation but it seems like actual storytellers are best at saying wait a minute the real human thing in this story is this thing over here you know my example of it's like a full-time job but what what is that like now let's really empathize with someone who has a zillion things to worry about like a full-time job to manage their cancer uh is is something that like who's gonna land uh identify that so I think it could be a really compelling idea for people to bring into demo perhaps someone um who who has just is going to be looking for the where's the emotional story in this obviously if someone has both sets of experiences they can then try and connect the dots a little bit better to the business story because you still you still have to watch the story go you know wait a minute the Achilles heel every presentation has an Achilles heel as you know um the business model isn't making sense or this sounds great but it sounds a lot like this other solution that's already out there how is this really different from the other solution that's out there or whatever the business piece is um but yeah if you don't have the person who could do both it would be really interesting to bring someone in who Could sort of help you find there's the hook of the story build something around that that emotion at the business school to uh MBA students and is this something that you think ought to be kind of more integral in the curriculum uh do you think that you know business students should have storytelling as one of their kind of fundamental skills I mean it's if you look at the Core curriculum for instance you know we'll have data analytics and we have all this other stuff you know management and so forth we don't have any specific courses on storytelling although you'd find it in all of them or for instance in data science if you can't do visualization and you can't communicate it you know it's going to be difficult to move the needle but it's something we should kind of incorporate into General business education yeah I I believe so uh I mean obviously it's that's what I'm most passionate about uh but it's also because we beat it out of people so much we got to put a little bit of back in there uh with MBA students uh it's it's one of the things that separates a leader in their career the best leaders are good storytellers and these are all folks who want to grow in organizations and and continue to move up the ladder and have bigger jobs and storytelling can be a great differentiator for them in their careers you know we're doing more in business school with teaching people how to present themselves and how to communicate we have more Communications classes we hire people at Berkeley we have improv people teaching communication skills and I think all of that stuff is tremendous and yet it's a different skill to know how to build a story how to structure a story what are the elements of a story and how do I piece those together so I need that great story in the first place before I can exercise those great communication skills to tell the story I gotta know how to build the story and that is something I think we should be teaching um and in fact uh you know I've been teaching it on and off in various programs uh at Berkeley house for the last 12 to 15 years but I'm meeting with Dean Harrison soon uh to have another conversation about how we can make it a little more Central uh to the learning I think it's a great differentiator for uh well I think you know universities and Business Schools do have stories of their own right I think that um we are always telling stories about students that have overcome challenges come through our degree programs and then gone on to kind of do kind of successful things right and that's sort of what we do that's sort of what we tell people in order to attract them to come to our schools in the first place right we don't usually talk about well we've got this we've got this we've got this we usually point to these kind of success stories and these Transformations that we enable right and yet there's also a foundation to that story I I'll never forget when I first started I I just left Yahoo's VPN Marketing in in 2008 and I had lunch with uh Rich Lyons that then or he was about to be Dean he hadn't become Dean yet but he was about to become Dean and he talked about his Ambitions about wanting you know Berkeley to be a top 10 business school and everybody to know what it stood for he said well you have to has to be some clear point of differentiation and and Rich was starting to lean into this culture thing and and he ended up really leaning into it and you know the defining principles of Berkeley the culture of the school and how that forms both how it informs who we uh accept to the program um and how we continue to sort of build this culture while they're in the program and encourage them to maintain it when they're out of the program that's one of the major underpinning elements of the story so when we choose to tell stories by sharing individual success stories we want to pick stories where that is sort of a central theme team in the story look what look how they're making this contribution by behaving in a certain way or you know committing to be involved in this purpose-driven business or whatever it is that's all rooted in those four principles uh that that that rich really leaned into to try and differentiate programs right so I think that if you have defining principles if you have leadership principles um you need to have kind of illustrative stories right for each and every one of them otherwise they're they're simply uh they're just simply too abstract I mean you know if you're a lawyer and you're reading through a law code right um you always want to see the examples right about the examples it's pretty hard to make sense of you know what they actually mean in in practice and so do you think teachers need to be um coached up on storytelling skills because you know I find a lot of students complain that um the teaching is too abstract right and that um very difficult to remember because it's it's too abstract do you think teachers realize the extent to which storytelling is necessary in order to kind of implant the ideas into the students heads yeah I mean yes and I would argue that most people don't appreciate how important storytelling is whatever they do I mean I didn't I was a Storyteller professionally as a business person and I didn't really fully grasp the power of what I was doing or even understood Fleet all the methods to like how to do it really well um until I started to think about it uh this last you know 10 15 years of my career where it's I'm sort of like okay I'm gonna double down in the storytelling thing and try and figure it out but even marketers could be better storytellers back to our conversation about shifting more towards a data approach and their job they are the business Storyteller a marketer is a business Storyteller and absolutely you know people respond to things that where they can connect and engage and and and and part of the way that we learn is by having emotional experiences and connecting to things and certainly we have to be able to hold on to things so we can apply them later and one of the things we haven't yet talked about I don't think on this podcast is that the emotional part of the brain the plane that part of the brain that processes emotion the insula is the same part of the brain that that has the memory Center so we're up to 22 times more likely to remember something if we if we learned about it in the context of a narrative so why wouldn't we as a teacher if we want someone to hold on to something tell a story about something so that by remembering the story you can remember the point I mean I in this talk I've used a number of survey sarna right the white why is it important for someone to tell a story when they didn't tell a story well they didn't just explain the science of it I told you about survey sarda and now that story about that person who had that terrible experience with of an ovarian cancer scare how that transforms into a quarter billion dollar company you're going to remember that because I told you about it in the context of a story so yes absolutely we could all get better and uh teach us I remember I was teaching uh data and decisions a couple years back and I was talking about how important it is that you base your decisions on data and not on anecdote and in order to kind of cement the point I I told a couple stories of people that had made really bad decisions you know based on anecdote and so one of the students one of the first year students said you know you just used an anecdote to explain why we shouldn't use anecdote and I said you're absolutely right I sure did and I did that on purpose office but what's the just what's the distinction there right you used an anecdote to make a point about Theta right you didn't they're not independent you know one of my favorite examples of this is a student walked into my office one day uh 10 12 years ago uh komal Ahmad Pakistan first generation Pakistani American immigrant um and uh she said I want to solve The World's Dumbest problem it's like oh what's that she says it's hunger so can you tell me more well fast forward three or four years later she's on the floor of the U.N giving a speech at the U.N about this company she's built to solve The World's Dumbest problem and what she did in my office and what she did in the floor of the U.N is she told the story about finding a meeting a homeless person a block away on Telegraph Avenue from the Campus Dining Hall where there was all this leftover food after a big giant event or something and she meets this homeless vet who hadn't eaten in three days his name was John and she had lunch with him and he told him her story told her his story um and it was through that she discovered and then did the research that there's 50 million people 5-0 who who go to bed hungry every night in this country in the United States and there's 365 million pounds of perfectly edible food that's wasted every single day in the United States and her business was created to connect those 365 million pounds of perfectly good food that's wasted with those 50 million Americans who are going to bed hungry that's our business it's a two-sided market and her job is to build a technology solution that can connect those two numbers two data points and you will remember those data points not because they're good data points but because I told you about them in the context of the anecdote of Como walking down the street a block away and connecting John to that dining hall so yes to both give me data but give it to me in the context of a narrative of an anecdote and I'm dramatically more likely to remember it and have it move me so that I want to do something about it well David this book get your startup story straight is full of you know great stories um and of course the stories that you tell about how you learned about these stories are stories in and of themselves but in addition to kind of recounting those stories you also provide future storytellers with kind of a Playbook to kind of help them get started and to craft better stories particularly as as startups to help raise funds so I really appreciate you joining me great to see you oh it's it's been really fun thanks for having me and uh I hope some folks learn more about this discipline and put some time into it because it'll really help them make whatever they want to have happen check out the book thanks again [Music] this is on Silo brought to you by alumni FM connecting people through stories

foreign brought to you by alumni FM connecting people through stories uh this is Greg LeBlanc and I&#39;m here with David Riemer who is not only an instructor at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business um and the advisor to many many startups he&#39;s a former career as a VP of marketing at um a little company called Yahoo I also worked in various ad agencies had taken CMO positions but David I think you&#39;re best known as the master coach Storyteller you&#39;re someone who helps startups to come up with their story not only to kind of generate funding and recruit people but also to kind of motivate them and help them figure out what they&#39;re really all about um and of course you&#39;re the author of this book right here uh get your startup story straight welcome David that&#39;s great to be here thanks Greg for having me on your pod so the book that you&#39;ve written is really all about storytelling and a lot of what you&#39;ve been doing not just kind of recently when you&#39;re working with startups but pretty much your entire career has really been all about storytelling and I think in the beginning of the book you you go back to your undergraduate commencement when you told a story and I think that was sort of The Germ of everything that you&#39;ve done kind of more or less sense um and you know I think that a lot of people underestimate the important of story importance of stories you know when I teach I try to bake a lot of stories into what I teach and when I talk to students who have graduated many years later it&#39;s the stories that they remember much more than sometimes the Frameworks the models the certainly the formulas the formulas are kind of the first to go and yet even when people themselves know that they tend to remember stories they fail to understand how important it is when they are doing the communicating so you know what is it about stories first of all that that it&#39;s so so powerful and then you know why is it that people seem to underestimate the power of stories well um let&#39;s start with the second part of that question why do people underestimate estimate them I think we uh we beat it out of people uh as they we educate them we&#39;re all about facts and it&#39;s all about Frameworks and uh we and especially people in MBA programs uh you know or in some cases Engineers uh logic and data is is what we&#39;re trained and putting together presentations where we logically walk people through things so we&#39;re literally beating out of them what we&#39;ve literally evolved to be as human beings which is we we&#39;ve evolved to respond to story you know our whole species separated itself from other versions of of human uh the homo sapiens separated themselves from every other animal by being able to basically tell a story about what could happen in the future uh other other species could communicate but we were the first species that could sort of say hey watch out next time you&#39;re on the Serengeti uh when you when you when you get to that rock over there be careful because the last one of our buddies who went over there didn&#39;t end out end up so well and then when it came to organizing simulation civilizations and communities um and then ultimately businesses and and Enterprises and stories is what people would gather around um and yet we have this sort of in our Education and Training where we&#39;re training people around some other things so when I got involved with Berkeley Hospital 15 years ago I realized I saw this Gap and that&#39;s what I started to teach I entered a number of innovation programs that started to teach storytelling to people in the context of innovation and then that led to all the other work I&#39;ve been doing with startups and and product folks around Innovation storytelling right and so in the world of startups um you know you talk about the importance of Storytelling but part of that is about getting other people inspired and part of it&#39;s about getting funding presumably for your your startup but I think you also talk about how the storytelling itself kind of forces the teller of the story to think seriously about what it is that they&#39;re doing right like if they can&#39;t tell a good story maybe it&#39;s because they don&#39;t really know what it is that they&#39;re doing doing so is storytelling kind of a form of sense making um that&#39;s another way to think about it yeah I mean I absolutely in fact sense making is a really nice bit of language around it um I mean a simpler way of saying it a story is strategy I like alliteration if you haven&#39;t figured that out from the title of the book but story is strategy uh you know it&#39;s it&#39;s always funny when I start working with um startups and and you might we talked a little bit about databricks which we&#39;ll probably talk about on this call on this pod a little bit but when I started working with them like most companies it&#39;s all about how can you help me as a company tell the story but as we get into it together and we lay out a narrative for the company we get all the narrative elements in place that I teach in my frame with my framework about building a story um you end up getting in strategic conversations is this the best first Target customer and and not like all businesses but if this was a SAS business but specifically what kinds of businesses and who in the business because businesses don&#39;t buy products people buy products so who&#39;s the buyer who&#39;s the user what type of company um is going to be the best place to start and then once you figure that out that might actually help inform the problem that you&#39;re solving and then that&#39;s going to inform the thing you actually build so the the point is that if we really use a a discipline story framework at the beginning of this process it&#39;s going to get you to rethink a little bit the thing you&#39;re actually creating and who you&#39;re creating it for and that&#39;s that&#39;s all about product strategy well I think the the main thrust of your book is really about how startups can tell this story to those folks that they&#39;re trying to attract resources from right and and you know when I think about Venture capitalists at least when you know when you teach a course on venture Capital as I do you&#39;re teaching people how to evaluate the the business model you&#39;re teaching them how to evaluate the capacity to sell product the capacity to generate right market share the capacity to you know create um recurring Revenue right and the capacity to build a moat and prevent others from you know taking away your your rents the ones you generate and when I think we teach that course we&#39;re teaching people to be very analytical we&#39;re teaching people to be very rigorous you know we&#39;re teaching them to to you know bring I guess what you might think of as their um their system two to the table right the part that is uh requires a lot of education and I think what you&#39;re saying is well not only do people bring their system one or at least their the part that is more easily influenced by this less analytical part of the brain but but also that not only do they but they should to some degree um and and so should we be teaching Venture capitalists to be more like literary critics to some degree and a little bit less like oh yeah absolutely absolutely because they&#39;re going to learn all those other things and they&#39;re going to come to it with that as a focus because that&#39;s the way the people who enter that field typically think um and yet this other part of it is so important because frankly if you and if you talk to venture people they&#39;ll tell you one of the two or three most critical aspects of a strong leader of a startup that they look for is the ability to tell a story and the reason that&#39;s so important is that first of all they have to have the story to tell and you know you I don&#39;t as a listener to the story I don&#39;t care about business model I don&#39;t care about their go to market strategy I don&#39;t care how great their team is all of that until I want to know all about about that at some point but I don&#39;t care about any of that until I know there&#39;s a real customer out there that has some issue that this person or this Venture feels they can solve better than the other things that are out there and that&#39;s the core product story and if you can tell it in a way so that I really empathize with the customer you have to know who your customer is right you have to have that specific customer mind if you can make it so that as the listener I&#39;m empathizing with a customer and I believe there&#39;s a problem to solve and then you can convince me that you&#39;ve solved the problem with the solution you&#39;ve built then I&#39;m like okay there&#39;s the great Foundation there now now tell me what&#39;s the business model and how are you going to go to market and do you have you protected IP and how are you going to grow the business over time and what&#39;s the market opportunity Etc but at first I&#39;ve got to viscerally feel there&#39;s someone who&#39;s hurting and you&#39;re going to help them hurt less and if you could do that and that and that that does rely on storytelling skills and and the ability to evaluate a story so yeah I think we should teach people that now the the protagonist in most of the stories that you discuss in the book is the customer right and and it&#39;s sort of an ideal customer you know in Venture we always talk about the ideal customer profile so you you personify this ideal customer um but in some cases the protagonist is the founder themselves uh and and that&#39;s usually when the founder identifies with that ideal Customer because maybe they are the this one and the same you know they&#39;re the person who has first-hand experience with this with this pain either by going through the pain themselves or you know observing someone very close to themselves uh that&#39;s experienced this um and I&#39;ve seen increasingly numb you know startups that begin their pitch with this with this narrative it&#39;s it&#39;s become much more commonplace do you think that um that they&#39;re kind of figuring this out you know that they&#39;ve they&#39;ve they&#39;ve picked up on it have you seen a kind of an increase in the number of of startups that have been taking this advice yeah well certainly the folks that I work with because I coach them on it you know um and I&#39;m definitely seeing more of it certainly in general I think people in general are realizing they have to connect with their audience um and there&#39;s something interesting that happens when we tell a personal story our eyes start to spark a little bit more we get a little bit more animated uh we might you know our eyes might open a little bit more we might smile a little bit more because we&#39;re literally as we&#39;re telling the story we&#39;re remembering the experience that we had and guess what happens when you do that your audience feels the same way because as human beings unless we&#39;re a sociopath we&#39;re we&#39;ve evolved to respond to those cues and so now I&#39;m beginning to feel a little bit more of the story what the Storyteller is talking about because of how animated they are and you just can&#39;t help it now not everybody has the ability to tell a personal story because they may or may not be the customer but sometimes there&#39;s a way as you said to enter through the personal lens and then introduce the customer I&#39;ll give you an example a Founder that you may recall a Berkeley founder named Tebow doucheman starts his presentation for his company by saying my parents are deaf my sister is deaf and already you&#39;re hooked and I go my God what&#39;s that like he speaks and he he has he can hear but his parents couldn&#39;t his sister couldn&#39;t and then he says I understand how painful it is uh for someone who&#39;s deaf to try and follow a group conversation he looks over here he says you&#39;re looking over here and someone says something over there you miss it and now you&#39;re lost in the conversation that&#39;s how he starts his pitch so he&#39;s it brought himself into the story because he&#39;s witnessed it firsthand but he&#39;s not himself the customer and in a very economical way he&#39;s he&#39;s found this personal narrative that quickly introduces the customer in the story explains their problem and now you&#39;re in the edge of your seat wondering okay what have you built to make that easier for them and of course he&#39;s built an app called Ava which transcribes conversations as they&#39;re happening and color codes them based on who in the room is saying well you describe a couple stories where um Founders never mentioned their personal story and they left it out of the pitch and the pitches were kind of flat and then they sort of as an aside it mentioned the personal story and then all of a sudden the The Listener was was hooked why why do you suppose when you have that kind of ammunition why is it that so many Founders are are kind of reluctant to bring it into the mix well let&#39;s use the story to to explain why that might happen uh serbi sarna is one such person another Berkeley uh Alum undergrad from Berkeley uh who uh was was working on in a biotech space and working on a solution uh to help women uh with early detection over of ovarian cancer but she had never talked about her own experience with it as a 13 year old and it was because she had a terrible experience with it growing up um passed out was taken to the hospital was had a terrible time going through tests many trips to the hospital never talked about it because she felt it was inappropriate in a business setting to talk about her personal experience and one day she&#39;s meeting with Tim Draper who&#39;s one of the most famous Venture capitalists you know in Silicon Valley as part of some uh Workshop he was doing or something and uh he kept asking why are you working on this particular area of Science and finally she said well and she told this story he&#39;s like oh my God he said you have to use this story every time you talk about your business because a um I&#39;m now rooting for you to solve it a b i underst I know that you really understand the issue and see I know what your commitment is to solving it you have to use the story she started using the story he gave her a four million dollar investment in her company the first major investment and she&#39;s ultimately she sold it to a major biotech company for a quarter of a billion dollars several years later That&#39;s The Power of of telling a personal story but people sometimes feel uncomfortable it&#39;s not appropriate we don&#39;t do that in my culture I hear all sorts of reasons right and maybe it&#39;s in part because people feel like they have to almost become like method actors to some extent I I have a friend who when he became CEO he was very uncomfortable you know because before he was CEO he was he was a doer and and now he felt like he was a performer right and he was had to go around and you know rally the troops and you know just kind of say the same thing over and over and over again and it&#39;s kind of like when you know when you and I are teaching the same class multiple times you know use the same joke twice and you feel like a fake you know you feel like a phony if you have to use the same joke twice but that&#39;s what professional comedians do the same joke a hundred times right yeah when you perform a show uh you know if it&#39;s running for four weeks in a regional theater you&#39;re going to perform it you know eight nights a week for four weeks if you&#39;re on Broadway you&#39;re going to be doing that same joke for a year um and every night you have to give it your all so there there are professionals who who really understand that comedians are is another example but the other thing to think about is every time you tell the story it&#39;s going to be a little bit different for the simple reason that there&#39;s a different player in the storytelling and that&#39;s your audience and when the audience is different you know this as well as anybody as a teacher that people respond differently to different things and it can lead you to different paths and down different channels so it&#39;s always a bit of a dialogue and even when your audience isn&#39;t speaking or you&#39;re not asking them for feedback they&#39;re giving you feedback anyway they&#39;re looking interested They&#39;re laughing they&#39;re they look like they&#39;re emotionally impacted or uh or maybe they look distracted and they&#39;re looking at their phones and you&#39;re like uh oh I need to do something to get this story back on track one of the things I teach with my teams when I&#39;m coaching teams is that remember you&#39;re having a conversation with the audience even if you&#39;re the only one Speaking and one of my favorite illustrations of this Greg is from a a State of the Union Address that that President Obama gave in 2015. and he&#39;s telling he&#39;s telling a story about an American uh who had she and her family had trouble coming through the uh the financial crisis of the late to you know 2008 around there and he was talking about government program programs that could help them and as he&#39;s telling the story he says you know Rebecca and Ben erler were newlyweds as he said that someone in the audience clapped when he said they were newlyweds like that&#39;s a good thing and she&#39;s literally in in the Congress while this is happening in the chamber and after that person clapped someone laughed thinking it was funny that someone clapped and then another person laughed and then Obama who was paying attention to his audience he just stopped he smiled he tilted his head and then everybody in the chamber laughed including uh the John Boehner the speaker the the house who like was trying so hard not to laugh because he&#39;s on the other side of the aisle and he didn&#39;t want to give Obama the credit but he couldn&#39;t help it the point being that happened because Obama was realizing he&#39;s he&#39;s in a conversation and he let the audience have that moment and then everyone in that chamber had a moment together so that&#39;s that&#39;s part of the power even if you&#39;re telling the story multiple times recognize that you&#39;re having a conversation with your with your audience so then do the storytellers have to be authentic in in some way I mean you know I&#39;ve I&#39;ve watched some Founders I&#39;ve seen their stories evolve over time and the stories take on more of a compelling kind of narrative but they start drifting a little bit away from you know what I know to be the truth um and uh and you know maybe I&#39;m the only one that knows that there&#39;s a little bit of a fudging they&#39;re kind of like when people apply for for graduate school and they say why do you want to do this and they come up with some narrative like that goes all the way back to birth which shows that going to graduate school at this school for this degree is the culmination of you know 27 years of inevitability right and and um yesterday yeah so so is there you know is is there is authenticity requires do you have to kind of teach people to be to be authentic um I mean or just to be good actors no definitely authenticity wins the day there&#39;s no question about that uh now there&#39;s there&#39;s also no question that people can become better performers and there&#39;s no question there&#39;s an element of performance here you&#39;re trying to take an audience whoever it is you could be you could be having a one-on-one meeting with someone who you&#39;re trying to convince to join the company and you want to tell them a story that&#39;s going to inspire them enough to say yes I&#39;m going to join your company and then be able to go home and tell their partner that here&#39;s why I should join this company and it&#39;s such a good story they can go home and share it with their partner well there&#39;s a little you have to there&#39;s a little bit of performative you know be honest be true to yourself but there is a little bit of performative element sometimes people think if someone is showing um energy and and their voices is you know has showing vocal variety and they&#39;re using their arms and maybe they&#39;re walking around and looking and making eye contact that they&#39;re not being authentic well they they&#39;re being human um there&#39;s you can you can be authentic and be a good performer one isn&#39;t you know doesn&#39;t replace the other and I always advise people that true stories are better than made up stories I want to hear about a customer that you actually have met and that you&#39;ve talked to bring them into the room tell their story um and the and the more authentic the better I mean sometimes as Founders they&#39;re things we&#39;re going to choose not to talk about in our pitch because we haven&#39;t quite sorted them out yet but that&#39;s a question that&#39;s like any good marketing you figure out what&#39;s what are the aspects of this story that I can tell that are true that are going to get me to that next conversation but authenticity important there was an example in the book where um a Founder has trouble really coming up with the story and then you realize that this founder had really not gone out into the field and spoken to any real customers and so it was really no wonder that they didn&#39;t have a good story and once they did go out and talk to the customer they they wound up realizing that their original idea wasn&#39;t really that great right so you know we all know about kind of get out of the building Steve blank pivoting and all that that but but you know you need some kind of mental framework for for interpreting that that kind of data that rolls in through those encounters with the customer right yeah yeah I mean to me the simplest way of thinking about it is a technology does not equal a product and a product does not equal a business there there are things that you have to move from one to the next and one to the next to get ultimately to a business as an entrepreneur so these guys you&#39;re talking about they these are guys in the in the um uh in the uh autonomous car business who&#39;ve done a lot of work there and they were frustrated with the pace of that business so they thought let me let me go and try and see if I can take some of my learning and move into a consumer business and um so they had a cool technology but they didn&#39;t have a product and they thought they could create a subscriber version of uber right where people subscribe and then they get unlimited number of rides a month they thought for commuters or two parents working only one car this would be a great solution but they hadn&#39;t really talked to anybody about whether that was the right solution um so again they had some really great technology but they hadn&#39;t yet landed on a product well finally they talked to those people they find out no they&#39;re not interested in that they actually pivoted to something completely different which was more of a delivery service and then they they decided that didn&#39;t land and they ultimately went back to the autonomous space and and took their camera technology and that&#39;s what they ended up developing and then they turned that into a SAS business and then okay now we&#39;re going to turn technology to the product and then here&#39;s how we turn it into a business but the point is that the you know Steve blank talks about talking to 100 customers what you&#39;re doing when you&#39;re talking to those 100 customers is you&#39;re vetting your story you&#39;ve got a premise I have this customer I think this is the set of customers I&#39;m going to start talking to them and see what they think and I think these are the issues the functional needs the emotional needs I think this is the problem I&#39;m solving and they have their effectively a storyboard in their head and then the book I give you about format for making it a little easier to put all those pieces together and then you talk to people and they&#39;ll tell you yeah that story is right on or you know that&#39;s not really the story I&#39;m having a different issue or my friends over there are having that problem but I&#39;m not having that problem that&#39;s a different segment whatever it is and then you&#39;re constantly evolving The Narrative until you&#39;ve landed on a solution that somebody needs and now you&#39;ve got your story well you make reference to um other types of Storytelling right you talk about Pixar and how they go about creating successful movies um are the same types of stories uh do we see the same types of stories you know in all these different domains I mean we&#39;ve we there&#39;s a whole bunch of books on how to how to write screenplays and there&#39;s a whole bunch of books on you know what makes for a successful story and you know allegedly there&#39;s only you know a certain number of kind of story archetypes does all of that kind of map over into the world of of corporates and and the world of startups well I felt that it does but I felt that there was nobody who&#39;d written about it in other words there&#39;s a lot of books about storytelling for business people a lot um but what I hadn&#39;t seen because a lot of students asked me and startup Founders that said I want to do more with this I need more resources would point me to a book point me to the podcast point me to the the videos and I realized that no one was doing exactly what I was doing uh which was taking story and saying okay how do we use the story for something new for an innovation so that&#39;s why I put the book together but the basic framework of a story and the way it applies so beautifully is in a classic story any great story usually you&#39;re introduced to some protagonist there&#39;s something they&#39;re trying to accomplish and um and as an audience we know who the protagonist is we know what they want and then we see some obstacles thrown in their way that keeps them from getting what they want and then we watch the movie or we read the book or we watch the play uh to find out are they going to end up getting what they want um well guess what that&#39;s an innovation story you meet a customer you realize the customer has some set of issues there&#39;s something that&#39;s making it hard for the customer to get what they want and um and then you go through this journey with them and hopefully the solution you&#39;ve created solves the problem better than other the other stuff that&#39;s out there and it&#39;s just like the movie and literally in the book I give examples of story arcs in a you know for a movie in like Pixar film and then compare it to the story arc for a for a startup well when uh startups no longer a startup and it becomes a more mature company do do mature companies also need kind of you know stories and narratives to um ground them and we&#39;ve seen all these companies that come up with defining principles or that come up with um you know the Amazon has the 14 leadership principles and you know there&#39;s there&#39;s defining principles also kind of companies have slogans or logos you know whether it was you know do no evil or you know our goal is to provide information to the world or whatever so we&#39;ve got slogans we&#39;ve got leadership principles do companies need to have these you know stories that bring everybody together well I&#39;m I&#39;m there&#39;s a whole world of branding with out there and even though I grew up with it as an advertising person the book and the stuff that I&#39;m most interested in now are stories about products because Brands encapsulated so many other things brand values and brand history and there&#39;s brand architecture and there&#39;s just so many other elements but there&#39;s no question that over the life of a brand um they constantly need to introduce stories that refresh the brand and bring and and and have the brand land for people example um Google a brand that is known universally around the world and has a million associations it&#39;s still important for them to prove to the world that their useful thing to have and for people to not take them for granted and one way to do that is to have people feel that Google&#39;s useful so if you might uh remember back to last year&#39;s Academy Awards and it was also on this year&#39;s final four and some other very high profile uh television events there was a commercial about a coda family which is kind of ironic given that this year&#39;s Academy Award went to the film coda coda is the children of deaf adults and in this wonderful commercial by Google they show how this this person who grew up in with both parents being deaf uh how he learned to sign and how he helped navigate things for his family and then fast forward to now he&#39;s an adult he&#39;s married and during covid he had a child and his parents meet the child over a bunch of Google tools uh you know the way we&#39;re talking right now but through you know a Google solution Google meet and sub captions and all these other things they do the point is that story was very powerful very memorable and one of the most memorable things even from the whole Academy Awards show the first time around was that commercial and that makes you feel like you have a stronger connection to the Google brand and some of those Google products so yes absolutely it&#39;s important to do it it&#39;s important to find ways to do it but with the brand thing is a much bigger and there&#39;s a lot a lot of thought pieces on on how to do branding as well but again for the book I wanted to focus on people who were sort of had a specific product but even big companies like apple are launching new products um and just this one more example of a big company with a powerful ad um I I own a uh an Apple watch now um and I never did until very recently my my wife bought me one for my birthday three weeks ago and it&#39;s only because I started talking about oh maybe I should get an Apple Watch and they&#39;ve been around for a long time but there was a commercial where they did such a great job of demonstrating the problem that the Apple watch can solve I don&#39;t know if you&#39;ve seen this but it&#39;s a commercial where they show uh you just all you hear are voiceovers of people talking about some terrible circumstance they found themselves in and they&#39;re literally calling 9-1-1 on their watch because they can&#39;t get to their phone and it literally saved their lives and it was such a great they were all narratives like four different narratives in this commercial people literally having their lives saved these beautiful little story arcs into 60 seconds that had convinced me that I needed this product and that&#39;s a brand obviously it&#39;s been around a long time but it&#39;s coming up with a new way of telling a story about a new product that is going to convince me now I finally this this needs to be a part of your life well so since you were somebody who was an executive in an ad agency a while back let&#39;s say um have you noticed I mean there&#39;s a change in in the world of of marketing a lot of these ad agencies have had to kind of reposition themselves uh you know when when we think of marketing we don&#39;t think of Don Draper anymore and you know you reference the time Draper Carousel story of the book right uh marketing nowadays is really much more about you know data and about kind of Market segmentation and about you know recommendation engines and and so forth and a lot of these agencies traditional agencies have have struggled a bit um is it that they are failing to convince companies of the relevance of Storytelling or is it that kind of they&#39;ve lost the capacity to tell the stories and the companies themselves have kind of taken over that role what&#39;s what&#39;s going on in that world of kind of traditional agency marketing foreign yeah well it it&#39;s I don&#39;t follow it nearly as closely as I might have it&#39;s literally been 24 years since I worked in an advertising agency uh that&#39;s like a lifetime for most professionals right um but what I&#39;ve obviously observed is that you have to be able uh to compete as someone who who can understand the data side of marketing marketing is all about data now but it&#39;s not exclusively about data so you have to have a foot in both camps and good marketers have to have a good a foot in both camps it&#39;s not enough as a marketer uh to be a really talented growth marketer who can constantly do a b testing and and um and constantly refine the the marketing funnel and all that sort of stuff and the marketing stack because there&#39;s so many Technologies in there all of that stuff is there&#39;s no question it&#39;s essential nowadays if you&#39;re not using those tools it&#39;s like a baseball team that doesn&#39;t believe in data analytics they&#39;re going to be terrible but at the same time they&#39;re still in art to the world of marketing it is some Art and Science and you still have to be able to tell stories um and the most successful agencies have to be able to do both or at least be able to identify what part of that world they&#39;re playing in and being super well positioned so people know exactly why you&#39;re going to the agency but the fact is this to me is a more interesting conversation about marketing leaders marketing leaders need to not just be all about one or the other they&#39;re leaving a lot on the table uh either way depending on you know what they&#39;re what you really do need to to be able to do both things but storytelling still matters there&#39;s no question it still matters well in many ways it may be even more important because it seems like we have much higher rates of of attrition right of employees and uh you know customer loyalty is something that&#39;s kind of up for grabs on a more or less continuous basis because of aggressive competition so it&#39;s it&#39;s like every single day your customers and your employees are asking the question like why should I continue to do business with with this company as opposed to another company and they need to have have some kind of a story that informs that decision right yeah and that and that stands out and it&#39;s memorable I mean compare the consumer experience or the business professionals experience who&#39;s looking at business products there&#39;s so many different messages they see now during the course of a day it&#39;s not unlike if you&#39;re a venture person and you go to a demo day at an accelerator and you see 20 companies well which company are you going to remember it&#39;s the ones that told the best story right so when you walk away from those 20 presentations in those in in demo day the the best storytellers are going to be the ones who end up being the ones that the people who leave the room are going to want to talk to and talk about and the same goes through goes for our lives as consumers and as business people who are trying to make decisions about the products and services we&#39;re going to use so many different messages you know I&#39;m referencing two commercials that were just great stories um uh that I used earlier and I&#39;m I&#39;m holding on to them and retaining them because they were just wonderful stories and they&#39;ve got me to feel better about the brand Google and it got me to convince my wife to get me a Google an Apple Watch right um so because of all the zillions of messages that I see those ones really landed and stayed with me because they were compelling stories now is it do you think it&#39;s more important that the story resonate with the listener because of some familiarity or that they can identify with the protagonist or is it more important when that listener is you know somewhat remote or distant you know I&#39;m thinking oftentimes you have these Venture capitalists who are you know generalists and maybe they don&#39;t really understand the The Domain in which you&#39;re you know creating your startup and so uh they need to be familiarized with kind of the problem of these people that maybe they they&#39;ve never been in those shoes right and so there&#39;s a lot of folks who say that literature is a great way to build empathy right and if you&#39;re trying to understand what it&#39;s like to be someone who&#39;s very very different from you literature helps in that regard so in that sense it was that would suggest that it&#39;s far more important that when you&#39;re communicating say a healthcare Healthcare story to an investor that doesn&#39;t really know a lot about health care you better darn well have a good story but the the alternative to that would be if if you know if the story is a story that the listener can identify with because they themselves have felt that pain then the story is going to be even more compelling so is it more important when you&#39;re talking to someone that they can viscerally identify with the the protagonist or is it kind of more important when you&#39;re going across domains and they&#39;re gonna say both you&#39;re gonna say both I think you&#39;re gonna often find yourself no no you&#39;re going to find yourself more often than not talking to people who don&#39;t have the Deep experience with that customer experience that&#39;s far and away the more common experience you have to assume that your audience is not an expert in this category that they don&#39;t necessarily know and and demo day is an interesting example because if you&#39;re gonna be speaking to a bunch of people in a room I might be speaking to a venture person in the room who has no experience in this category but someone in their office does so if they can understand the story you&#39;re telling about the customer you&#39;re there to help and that person even though they don&#39;t know nothing about the category they can go back to their office and say oh my God I heard this amazing solution for this type of customer and I know you&#39;re going to find this interesting because this is your thing you have to get that person to empathize with your customer and it&#39;s more often than not someone who doesn&#39;t have the Deep experience category and my advice to people is like well how do you do that well look for the thing that is just human about what you&#39;re doing the the what I did the work with data bricks we were talking about the data scientist that&#39;s trying to uh you know be effectively they&#39;re being asked to be a superhero in their company this goes back to 2014 when we started uh the companies were spending a gazillion dollars on giant giant data forms and data Lakes to hold on to every every single transaction that ever happened especially with companies that tons of transactions sort of detail type companies and the data scientists were hiring they said okay your job is to find the magic in this data that&#39;s going to give us this incredible business Advantage so we can cross the competition go and they had these massive expectations because of the Investments and the whole notion big data is going to save the day well these data scientists would go back to the desks expect it to be superhero with capes on and they go back to their desks and their hands are tied behind their back because it&#39;s so hard to build and run the programs they need to do to get at the Insight so they&#39;re spending all their time building and running programs in zero time looking for insights and there was this huge gap between what was expected of them and what they were able to do with this tools they had that expectation Gap is a very human thing who hasn&#39;t at some point in their life had these Great Expectations on them to do something and then they didn&#39;t have what they needed to meet those expectations so we use that very human thing as a way of understanding a very complex business that was Data bricks and then of course we talk about how they solve that problem make it easier to to develop and run the program so that they can you know spend time in the insights um and anybody can understand that whether you&#39;re an expert in that category or not so what&#39;s the human thing one more example of a very human thing that really struck me was one of my Founders you may know Steve derrico a Skydeck guy uh Berkeley Sky Deck he was working on a solution to help people manage their cancer uh if they had cancer or a caregiver trying to manage someone else&#39;s uh treatments through through going through uh they&#39;re they&#39;re trying to survive cancer and he while we were chatting about it at one point he said you know it&#39;s like having cancer like a full-time job and I just stopped him when he said that because it was it was so powerful like the idea that if you have a full-time job and now you have another full-time job or God forbid you can&#39;t have a full-time job because this is your full-time job like oh my God that&#39;s horrible so if you can have a solution that will help make it less of a full-time job then boy I&#39;m rooting for you to do that because that&#39;s a terrible thing well anybody can understand that whether you&#39;ve ever had cancer or know someone personally who&#39;s had cancer or not you can understand that and that&#39;s a very human thing so if we&#39;re looking for ways to people for people to empathize and have something resonate with someone who may not understand the experience or the category I always encourage people to look for that human experience that that helps explain the struggle of the customer so that you can then when you describe the solution anybody can relate to what you&#39;re talking about now can these same stories be redeployed when it comes time to do the customer acquisition right so for instance with data break can they take that same story and bring it to you know a CIO and and uh or is the CIO going to be um uh you know less likely to think of their data scientist as a superhero or you know how does do these stories when you take these stories and start using them in other domains oh absolutely uh and I would I would argue that in some cases the person solving the problem for the person in the example of the SAS solution of data bricks the person working on solving the problem may actually understand better what that customer the data scientist is going through than even the CIO and your job is to tell the CIO there&#39;s someone who works for you who&#39;s miserable and let me tell you why she&#39;s miserable she&#39;s miserable because you&#39;re expecting her to do this you&#39;re telling her save the company and and here&#39;s what she has to do and let me describe all the things she has to do to develop and run a program that will enable her to get one Insight out of that massive data Lake and and now the CIO is like damn I I&#39;m paying these people a lot of money it&#39;s hard to hire data scientists to begin with and and I&#39;m I&#39;m hamstringing them because of the what I&#39;m using and you&#39;re telling me you can give me something that&#39;s going to make them much more productive and able to achieve some of those expectations I&#39;m all in uh so it so absolutely I encourage people and especially in a situation where the customer who&#39;s buying the solution isn&#39;t the same person is the one who&#39;s using the solution which is the case with the CIO in a big giant company that&#39;s buying these Data Solutions um yeah it&#39;s in some cases even more important because you&#39;re trying to help them empathize with their own employees then they may not even understand the degree to which struggling I have a friend who&#39;s a partner at a large Venture firm in the valley and and he says that he spends a big part of his job teaching Founders how to tell stories uh because they they really don&#39;t know how to sell necessarily right and they don&#39;t really that&#39;s not that was never part of their their training now presumably they must have been decent enough to get the funding already from this you know fairly successful venture capitalist but I think you know that they&#39;re in the business of finding more potential so is has this idea of kind of Storytelling been institutionalized at at different levels in different places right have uh accelerators all more or less adopted storytelling as part of their curriculum have Venture capitalists embraced kind of Storytelling as something that they can provide to their portfolio companies and their Founders as a as a skill to what extent has this movement become uh kind of pervasive yeah it&#39;s definitely growing uh in significant Leaps and Bounds certainly since I&#39;ve started uh working on uh this particular area about you know 12 to 15 years ago uh many many more uh VCS are talking to me about what they&#39;re doing in the organization and how much time they&#39;re investing in demo day and they&#39;re reading my book and they&#39;re coaching their teams on it um you know but all that being said it&#39;s still hard uh it&#39;s hard storytelling is hard for the people who make stories for a living I&#39;m working on an original musical I&#39;ve been working on for 10 years um and we&#39;re still working on the story uh you know it takes five years to make a film with Pixar and there&#39;s some great stories about things where they&#39;ve really struggled telling a story so when you&#39;re dealing with people who aren&#39;t professional storytellers who are trying to work on their stories um we need to give them as many tools as possible it&#39;s the reason I wrote the book because I wanted to scale what I do I can&#39;t meet with every startup that&#39;s going I can&#39;t spend time with every team but at least there&#39;s a method in the book that they can learn and there&#39;s a number of Storytelling techniques they can use to try and tell an emotional and a compelling and a logical story their story archetypes in the book so the purpose of the book was to just give people another tool um and and Venture folks and anybody who&#39;s in this in this Innovation ecosystem to keep working on it because it&#39;s hard and as you said it&#39;s not something that people innately come by especially a lot of folks who are in engineers and product people who are creating a lot of these products and companies well if you wanted to find folks to coach people on storytelling skills the way you do could you rely on people without domain knowledge in the world of business could you rely on the folks who are professional storytellers you know we at Berkeley have hired people who are you know in the movie industry people who are you know improv actors and and so forth do you need to have kind of a a business background or knowledge to provide the kind of coaching that these startup Founders need uh you know in a perfect world you&#39;d find someone who has a foot in both camps I mean I&#39;m so lucky that I I grew up writing shows um and being involved in advertising which is a storytelling business um and and working you know in the tech space as long as I have for startups and you know companies like Yahoo and Etc um if you bring someone in who&#39;s just a Storyteller um they may be able to help you and I love the idea of bringing that resource in because what they may be able to do is help find the thing and what people are talking about that&#39;s the human thing that&#39;s the thing that they just relate to as a Storyteller because I find that&#39;s usually the most difficult thing when people are trying to develop their stories and doing demo day there&#39;s a lot of people who can help make slides clear and try and make sure that there&#39;s a logic to the presentation but it seems like actual storytellers are best at saying wait a minute the real human thing in this story is this thing over here you know my example of it&#39;s like a full-time job but what what is that like now let&#39;s really empathize with someone who has a zillion things to worry about like a full-time job to manage their cancer uh is is something that like who&#39;s gonna land uh identify that so I think it could be a really compelling idea for people to bring into demo perhaps someone um who who has just is going to be looking for the where&#39;s the emotional story in this obviously if someone has both sets of experiences they can then try and connect the dots a little bit better to the business story because you still you still have to watch the story go you know wait a minute the Achilles heel every presentation has an Achilles heel as you know um the business model isn&#39;t making sense or this sounds great but it sounds a lot like this other solution that&#39;s already out there how is this really different from the other solution that&#39;s out there or whatever the business piece is um but yeah if you don&#39;t have the person who could do both it would be really interesting to bring someone in who Could sort of help you find there&#39;s the hook of the story build something around that that emotion at the business school to uh MBA students and is this something that you think ought to be kind of more integral in the curriculum uh do you think that you know business students should have storytelling as one of their kind of fundamental skills I mean it&#39;s if you look at the Core curriculum for instance you know we&#39;ll have data analytics and we have all this other stuff you know management and so forth we don&#39;t have any specific courses on storytelling although you&#39;d find it in all of them or for instance in data science if you can&#39;t do visualization and you can&#39;t communicate it you know it&#39;s going to be difficult to move the needle but it&#39;s something we should kind of incorporate into General business education yeah I I believe so uh I mean obviously it&#39;s that&#39;s what I&#39;m most passionate about uh but it&#39;s also because we beat it out of people so much we got to put a little bit of back in there uh with MBA students uh it&#39;s it&#39;s one of the things that separates a leader in their career the best leaders are good storytellers and these are all folks who want to grow in organizations and and continue to move up the ladder and have bigger jobs and storytelling can be a great differentiator for them in their careers you know we&#39;re doing more in business school with teaching people how to present themselves and how to communicate we have more Communications classes we hire people at Berkeley we have improv people teaching communication skills and I think all of that stuff is tremendous and yet it&#39;s a different skill to know how to build a story how to structure a story what are the elements of a story and how do I piece those together so I need that great story in the first place before I can exercise those great communication skills to tell the story I gotta know how to build the story and that is something I think we should be teaching um and in fact uh you know I&#39;ve been teaching it on and off in various programs uh at Berkeley house for the last 12 to 15 years but I&#39;m meeting with Dean Harrison soon uh to have another conversation about how we can make it a little more Central uh to the learning I think it&#39;s a great differentiator for uh well I think you know universities and Business Schools do have stories of their own right I think that um we are always telling stories about students that have overcome challenges come through our degree programs and then gone on to kind of do kind of successful things right and that&#39;s sort of what we do that&#39;s sort of what we tell people in order to attract them to come to our schools in the first place right we don&#39;t usually talk about well we&#39;ve got this we&#39;ve got this we&#39;ve got this we usually point to these kind of success stories and these Transformations that we enable right and yet there&#39;s also a foundation to that story I I&#39;ll never forget when I first started I I just left Yahoo&#39;s VPN Marketing in in 2008 and I had lunch with uh Rich Lyons that then or he was about to be Dean he hadn&#39;t become Dean yet but he was about to become Dean and he talked about his Ambitions about wanting you know Berkeley to be a top 10 business school and everybody to know what it stood for he said well you have to has to be some clear point of differentiation and and Rich was starting to lean into this culture thing and and he ended up really leaning into it and you know the defining principles of Berkeley the culture of the school and how that forms both how it informs who we uh accept to the program um and how we continue to sort of build this culture while they&#39;re in the program and encourage them to maintain it when they&#39;re out of the program that&#39;s one of the major underpinning elements of the story so when we choose to tell stories by sharing individual success stories we want to pick stories where that is sort of a central theme team in the story look what look how they&#39;re making this contribution by behaving in a certain way or you know committing to be involved in this purpose-driven business or whatever it is that&#39;s all rooted in those four principles uh that that that rich really leaned into to try and differentiate programs right so I think that if you have defining principles if you have leadership principles um you need to have kind of illustrative stories right for each and every one of them otherwise they&#39;re they&#39;re simply uh they&#39;re just simply too abstract I mean you know if you&#39;re a lawyer and you&#39;re reading through a law code right um you always want to see the examples right about the examples it&#39;s pretty hard to make sense of you know what they actually mean in in practice and so do you think teachers need to be um coached up on storytelling skills because you know I find a lot of students complain that um the teaching is too abstract right and that um very difficult to remember because it&#39;s it&#39;s too abstract do you think teachers realize the extent to which storytelling is necessary in order to kind of implant the ideas into the students heads yeah I mean yes and I would argue that most people don&#39;t appreciate how important storytelling is whatever they do I mean I didn&#39;t I was a Storyteller professionally as a business person and I didn&#39;t really fully grasp the power of what I was doing or even understood Fleet all the methods to like how to do it really well um until I started to think about it uh this last you know 10 15 years of my career where it&#39;s I&#39;m sort of like okay I&#39;m gonna double down in the storytelling thing and try and figure it out but even marketers could be better storytellers back to our conversation about shifting more towards a data approach and their job they are the business Storyteller a marketer is a business Storyteller and absolutely you know people respond to things that where they can connect and engage and and and and part of the way that we learn is by having emotional experiences and connecting to things and certainly we have to be able to hold on to things so we can apply them later and one of the things we haven&#39;t yet talked about I don&#39;t think on this podcast is that the emotional part of the brain the plane that part of the brain that processes emotion the insula is the same part of the brain that that has the memory Center so we&#39;re up to 22 times more likely to remember something if we if we learned about it in the context of a narrative so why wouldn&#39;t we as a teacher if we want someone to hold on to something tell a story about something so that by remembering the story you can remember the point I mean I in this talk I&#39;ve used a number of survey sarna right the white why is it important for someone to tell a story when they didn&#39;t tell a story well they didn&#39;t just explain the science of it I told you about survey sarda and now that story about that person who had that terrible experience with of an ovarian cancer scare how that transforms into a quarter billion dollar company you&#39;re going to remember that because I told you about it in the context of a story so yes absolutely we could all get better and uh teach us I remember I was teaching uh data and decisions a couple years back and I was talking about how important it is that you base your decisions on data and not on anecdote and in order to kind of cement the point I I told a couple stories of people that had made really bad decisions you know based on anecdote and so one of the students one of the first year students said you know you just used an anecdote to explain why we shouldn&#39;t use anecdote and I said you&#39;re absolutely right I sure did and I did that on purpose office but what&#39;s the just what&#39;s the distinction there right you used an anecdote to make a point about Theta right you didn&#39;t they&#39;re not independent you know one of my favorite examples of this is a student walked into my office one day uh 10 12 years ago uh komal Ahmad Pakistan first generation Pakistani American immigrant um and uh she said I want to solve The World&#39;s Dumbest problem it&#39;s like oh what&#39;s that she says it&#39;s hunger so can you tell me more well fast forward three or four years later she&#39;s on the floor of the U.N giving a speech at the U.N about this company she&#39;s built to solve The World&#39;s Dumbest problem and what she did in my office and what she did in the floor of the U.N is she told the story about finding a meeting a homeless person a block away on Telegraph Avenue from the Campus Dining Hall where there was all this leftover food after a big giant event or something and she meets this homeless vet who hadn&#39;t eaten in three days his name was John and she had lunch with him and he told him her story told her his story um and it was through that she discovered and then did the research that there&#39;s 50 million people 5-0 who who go to bed hungry every night in this country in the United States and there&#39;s 365 million pounds of perfectly edible food that&#39;s wasted every single day in the United States and her business was created to connect those 365 million pounds of perfectly good food that&#39;s wasted with those 50 million Americans who are going to bed hungry that&#39;s our business it&#39;s a two-sided market and her job is to build a technology solution that can connect those two numbers two data points and you will remember those data points not because they&#39;re good data points but because I told you about them in the context of the anecdote of Como walking down the street a block away and connecting John to that dining hall so yes to both give me data but give it to me in the context of a narrative of an anecdote and I&#39;m dramatically more likely to remember it and have it move me so that I want to do something about it well David this book get your startup story straight is full of you know great stories um and of course the stories that you tell about how you learned about these stories are stories in and of themselves but in addition to kind of recounting those stories you also provide future storytellers with kind of a Playbook to kind of help them get started and to craft better stories particularly as as startups to help raise funds so I really appreciate you joining me great to see you oh it&#39;s it&#39;s been really fun thanks for having me and uh I hope some folks learn more about this discipline and put some time into it because it&#39;ll really help them make whatever they want to have happen check out the book thanks again [Music] this is on Silo brought to you by alumni FM connecting people through stories

Transcript for:The Power of Storytelling in Business

Transcript for:
The Power of Storytelling in Business