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The Job Of Being A Professional Storyteller
Telling stories for fun and profit in the cutthroat world of serious business The title on my business card reads, “Raconteur.” It’s a somewhat archaic term that simply means storyteller, but it’s a hell of a lot better than consultant. The word itself has a rapscallion air to it, as if describing someone who might very well be a bit of a scoundrel, yet one with a sense of style and a flair for the dramatic. The type of gentleman grifter we don’t see much anymore. It’s not a professional word, or even a particularly safe word. There’s an element of danger involved, with an almost mystical aspect to it, as if the…
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The Lost Art of Listening
Maintaining quiet confidence in the face of uncertainty My wife Jane is the type of person who likes to ask a lot of questions during a movie. She has never quite accepted the idea that the filmmakers are only interested in revealing the amount of information they want to reveal, at the precise moment they want to reveal it. This is not always to her liking, but it is how good storytelling works. It’s a story, after all, not a summarization. You are not meant to know all there is from the start. Neither are you meant to jump too far ahead. In fact, one might argue that if the storyteller…
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Serving Culture For Breakfast
Crafting A Hospitality-Centric Culture The business guru Peter Drucker once famously quipped that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” If you have a culture of pursuing excellence and providing unparalleled service, you will always prevail over the most elaborate and heralded business strategy. Culture is an integral part of who you are, whereas strategy, more often than not, is an overlay or an afterthought. You can claim anything you like, but you are who you are unless you work to become something else. Every company has a culture, just as every company has a brand. Unfortunately, in most cases, there is no intentionality to what develops, and if you are not…
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Radical Authenticity: Your Mind Makes It Real
The power of storytelling in the world of authentic branding There is a scene, early on in The Matrix, where Neo and Morpheus are fighting in a simulator, and when they’re done, Neo realizes his mouth is bleeding. “I thought it wasn’t real,” says Neo. “Your mind makes it real,” says Morpheus. I was watching a video of Liquid Death founder Mike Cessario, and he was talking about their early attempts at making viral marketing videos. One of them involved taking a few vials of blood from skateboard legend Tony Hawk, then pouring that blood into a gallon of red paint. That paint then became the primary color of a limited edition series…
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Why There’s No Substance Behind Your Sparkle
Generative AI is technoglitter, the cheap bedazzling of marketing and entertainment with dubious results As far as I’m concerned, generative AI is little more than the bedazzling of marketing and entertainment by feckless tech bros looking to make a quick buck. The technoglitter of the 21st century. A whole lot of sparkle with very little substance. Look what I did! Even though it looks difficult, complicated, and expensive, it took almost no work on my part and cost me next to nothing. Isn’t that something? It is something. The technology is truly impressive. Someone taught a computer to create derivative art by stealing the work of real artists, and then you asked it to replicate…
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The Value Of Stumbling Around In The Dark
After decades in the business, the recipe for success remains the same There are not many instances in my life or career where I followed a traditional path to achieving my goals. This wasn’t because I was such a maverick, intent on doing it my way and breaking with tradition. I just didn’t know any better. I took the route that seemed open to me, which was never the well-worn path of others. When I was first starting out, rather than trying to get an entry-level job with an advertising agency, I joined forces with another novice and simply started our own. I came from the music industry, and he came…
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Better Brand Engagement Through Creative Storytelling
The path to better consumer engagement lies in making the customer the hero of the story Suddenly, everyone is a storyteller. As if stories haven’t been at the heart of human culture since the dawn of time. It’s easy sometimes to become enamored with all our technological advances and arrogantly believe we have transcended our primitive roots. We can ignore the stories now and get right to the details. Forget the narrative and show them the goods. The thing is, that’s rarely the case. Eventually, we come back down to earth and realize that it’s all storytelling in the end. The biggest obstacle facing most brands today is the ability to…
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Why Storytellers Matter
An international branding expert explores the value of authentic storytelling and how it informs the practical world Not long after we crawled out of the primordial ooze and discovered fire, human beings began to tell stories. We started painting on cave walls to document our lives, and as our brains and soft palettes developed, we told stories. Eventually, we learned to draw pictures of the sounds we made and began to write our stories down. We told stories to explain the world around us, where we had come from, where we were headed, and why we were here. From this humble beginning, we branched out to religion, science, history, art,…
