Thursday, June 12, 2008

Business and Storytelling

Anyone whose spoken to me for more than a few minutes will quickly find out that my passion is story telling. In fact I believe that ALL business communication, be it in sales, marketing, technical publications, white papers, reports, even simple emails, is simply different forms of telling stories.

Sitting on my desk next to me is a book with the great title Whoever Tells The Best Story Wins. I'll be honest I wasn't too impressed by the actual content - but I keep it on my desk so that every day I see that title.

Today doing some business plan research I was looking for examples of the ultimate in business story telling - The Elevator Speech.

What's an Elevator Speech - the idea is that if you are riding in an elevator and someone asks "What does your company do?" - you can answer before the elevator ride is over. In other words you can tell your business story in less than thirty seconds.

That research lead me to the video below.

The video has some good pointers on composing a good Elevator Speech - but what really caught my attention was the idea of a CEO using the job title "Chief Storyteller." - That's a job title I think we should all adopt, at least in spirit if not in practice.











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