This Friday, StoryCorps encourages people to participate in the National Day of Listening. For all you aspiring storytellers, this is a wonderful way to explore living narrative. It’s a simple process of interviewing a friend or a loved one. StoryCorps provides a helpful guide on how to conduct your interview, with tips on structuring an interview guide and a handy tool to help you come up with questions. My daughter Jordan and I participated and posted an excerpt from our interview on her website.

At their best, brands tell stories. Sometimes it is overt, such as when they advertise, and sometimes it is subtle, such as when they cue a story already in your head with a brand interaction. Because stories are fundamental to the richness of our experiences, it’s no wonder that brand managers talk a lot about brand stories, brand storytelling, brand narrative, and the like. Storytelling has been en vogue with brands for years now, even before I tackled the subject in my 2002 book, Legendary Brands. The trouble is, while brand managers want their brands to tell stories, they don’t know how to systematize an approach. (more…)

Becoming a great brand storyteller requires mastery of genre. Novelists, screenwriters and poets would be lost without the guard rails it provides. The truth is that there really are no original stories. Every story you can imagine has been told before. Over centuries of yarn spinning, the storytelling patterns have clustered into familiar plot progressions and thematic underpinnings. That’s genre. The conventions of each genre strengthen the connection between audience and storyteller, which is why brand storytellers must learn to identify and utilize the genres that fuel their brand narratives.
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With the new year just hours away, it’s time to make a resolution to yourself to improve how you tell your story. I spend a lot of time on this site discussing brands and storytelling. Today we address the most important brand in your life: you.

Whether you’re writing a resume, an email to a colleague or a post to your blog, your goal should be to tell your story in each snippet of prose. Sadly, too many interesting people short-change themselves when they write. They miss the opportunity to convey their character and the essence of their story. Here are five simple things you can do to bring out your brand narrative. (more…)

Cocktail chatter is always a challenge for me because inevitably somebody will ask what I do. Explaining that I’m a strategist usually provokes an empty stare. It also sounds pretentious. I try to elaborate, but it never works and inevitably we choose a safe pop culture topic.

What is a strategist and what is strategy? There’s generally no consensus on the perfect definition of strategy, even from the gurus and pundits. Michael Porter will tell you that strategy is about choices–choosing upon a distinct set of activities that provide competitive advantage. Henry Mintzberg argues that strategy is about emerging patterns of decisions over time. The funny thing about strategy is that both perspectives are right and both somewhat miss the best part of strategy. Strategy is about storytelling. Story is strategy.    (more…)