From little things,

Big things grow, was a song written and sung by Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody, describing the 1966 Gurindji Tribal strike led by aboriginal activist Vincent Lingiari, that sparked the indigenous land rights movement in Australia. The strike lasted 8 years and ended with the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act of 1976, giving indigenous Australians freehold title to traditional lands in the Northern Territory, the power to negotiate over mining and development on those lands and also what type of compensation they could receive. Lingiari was eventually recognised with an Order of Australia for his efforts, that started with a small strike no one took notice of and no one believed would end with such an achievement.

The power of the individual is never stronger than when it is required for social change and Vincent Lingiari was the perfect lightning rod for change in the Northern Territory and his legacy lives on in the land rights movement and in the recognition he attained, having one of Australia's largest electorates named after him. The division of Lingiari encompasses most of the Northern Territory as well as Christmas and Cocos Islands and the fact the land has remained unchanged is a testament to him.

Yet not everyone can change the course of history like Vincent but everyone has the opportunity to bring about change, even in a small way, for the things they are passionate about. In 1949, Reyn Spooner, a young man from California, entranced with the Pacific, set up a small haberdashery store on Catalina Island. An inauspicious start to a lasting legacy that saw him move to Hawaii in 1956 to set up the "Little Grass Shack" with one sewing machine, in due time ending up at the shopping mecca that became Ala Moana Centre and to ubiquitous status as the "Brooks Brothers of the Pacific". Reyn pioneered the incarnation of the Aloha Shirt, known everywhere as the Hawaiian Shirt with his innovative washed out reverse print fabrics known as "Spooner Kloth". For someone with an array of Spooner originals in my closet, that would have been enough to have Reyn enter the hall of fame for casual shirts.

Yet there is more to be thankful for, as his influence would soon reach the far corners of the globe with his activist membership of the Hawaiian Fashion Guild, who in the mid 60s took the unorthodox method of distributing two Hawaiian shirts to every member of the Hawaiian House of Representative and Senate to promote what they considered was the spirit of Aloha. "Operation Liberation" had the desired effect and a resolution was passed in the Hawaiian Senate the aloha attire be worn over a summer and eventually the campaign lobbying for "Aloha Friday" was successful in seeing the aloha shirt replacing business shirts for the corporate sector on the last day of the week. By the 1970s, Hawaii's tradition of "Aloha Friday" had become the the norm in business attire and the custom eventually spread to California and beyond, to see "Casual Friday" accepted globally by the 1990s.

Two men, one an activist, one a sun worshiper, from different worlds, in their own ways affected their tribes and made the world a better place. So next time you pull on your favourite comfy jeans for casual Friday, think about Reyn and his passion for loud shirts with palm trees and hula dancers and if you ever get the chance to visit the majestic Top End, consider Vincent Lingiari and his achievements to keep the land pristine for all to enjoy. Change does not need a large stage, in fact if you can change things for the better, one handshake at a time, you'll be surprised what you can accomplish. From little things.....

Tell me story.

There is a trend for company leaders to have or develop a long forgotten skill, a skill for so long only used by tribal elders, who didn't need Internet access to get across their ideas and thoughts to their people. Telling stories and sharing stories to inspire staff and relating those stories to the business at hand is what's driving successful global brands today. With a purpose attached, a story is more powerful than an array of endless PowerPoint presentations covered with graphs and indecipherable mathematics. Slide presentations are waning and in their place pictorials and info-graphics woven into stories are more memorable and longer lasting than the last slide showing company results for the last quarter. In an epoch of information technology there is no requirement to inform, when at the flick of a switch or the touch of an APP, everything can be revealed. Yet how much of that information is remembered?

With a nod to Yamini Naidu (Hooked), business leaders of today look to "inspire and respect", moving away from "inform and expect", where the action items were mandated. Today it's about being as flexible as possible because the landscape is ever changing and leaders want their staff to remember more than statistics, they want them able to react according to the stories and culture of the company. Stories are easier to remember and as such bring a focus to situations that all the PowerPoint presentations in the world could not fix. For stories to have the ability to change people and their perspectives, they need to be real and aligned with people's thinking and world views. It's the reason great story tellers remain the most potent of leaders and it's the reason company decisions are made when a CEO becomes a story teller. Stories are outcome driven, using emotional and logical thought process and totally opposite to building a slide deck of data dumps, where the numbers become numbing to the brain. Yet without the data, there is no understanding and that becomes the challenge for story tellers who need to weave the narrative around the facts.

"Imagine if", has great portent for a story of change and immediately grabs the listener who wants to hear what that change involves. "Imagine if I can put 1000 songs in your pocket", is far more engaging than "this MP3 player has 10 gigabytes of memory that you can use to store things". Yet story telling needs to be more than just marketing, it needs to produce, ideas, change, decisions and generate revenue.

Companies as varied as Intel, GE and Boeing are among the leaders when it comes to providing the platform to communicate the stories relevant to their products, their people and their future. Even without the ability to stand in front of an audience, the company leaders have at their disposal a plethora of forums, market places, chat options, videos and online alternatives, providing avenues to tell their story in written narrative and the all important moving pictures. There are no reasons you should not be able to tell your story, there are no restrictions to shipping you story, so what's stopping you from becoming the next great corporate story teller?