When I was a child, “telling stories” meant telling lies. But a recent article claims that
“Storytelling will be the biggest business skill of the next five years.”
Could this really be true?
The science supports it. A 2013 article in the Scientific American explains that “It is in our nature to need stories. They are our earliest sciences, a kind of people-physics. Their logic is how we naturally think.”
So the basic idea is that, in a world awash with information, “those who can create, find, and share the good stories will build followings.”
If you want to be a good leader this means you need a “good story” to explain to your customers why they should buy from you. You need another good story to tell colleagues and employees why they should work with you. And you need a third good story to explain to investors why they should place their money with you.
The simplest way to build three different stories that align and weave together is to build them all around a common purpose. That shared purpose is what brings together the three groups of people your business needs in order for it to work: participating in different ways in a shared or common goal, purpose, or enterprise.
Get that right and, just like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, your story will be told and retold many times over, in different words and languages, each time different, yet each time the same.
Chapter 6 of Inner Leadership shows how to create a story, including purpose and tailored for different audiences, that acts as an inspiring vision for achieving any goal or direction you have chosen.
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