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?