I wrote a post a few weeks ago about how even smart people often fail at discerning poor quality information from the good stuff. It turns out that my cousin, Todd Quinn, a business and economics librarian at the University of New Mexico, deals with this issue every day and even teaches classes to help …more
Today’s guest post comes from Dave Kellogg who participates in the madness called Silicon Valley from a variety of perches. I met Dave when he was CEO of a software startup called MarkLogic, periodically lunching at the San Carlos Airport café where we hatched plans to get the world to care about unstructured data. While …more
By Mark Pinsent, Managing Director Europe, The Hoffman Agency . . Breakfast: the most important meal of the day (they say). But often the easiest one to skip as a shortcut to the goal of weight loss. Too many marketers treat a proper investment in strategic development in the same way. But as skipping breakfast …more
By David Frost, CEO, PR Deadlines, Sydney, Australia As an executive journalist on the Fin Review two decades or so ago, too much of my time was spent trashing PR handouts. Eventually head-hunted by a PR agency that wanted someone who could actually write, it took me a while to reach an equilibrium. Balancing the needs …more
Many business professionals today accept storytelling as an effective means for communicating … in theory. Whether they actually embrace the act is a different story (retaining my reputation for bad puns). Of course, many books promise to recast you with Ira Glass’s gift for narrative and Jimmy Kimmel’s wit. I wrote about one such a …more
As a storyteller, I often combine sad stories with one another. Mostly with a positive outcome, but often I use stories without a happy ending. Stories where listeners really have to think about what they just learned. Stories where there is no gold at the end of the rainbow. It’s amazing when such stories evoke …more
I’ve known Shawn Callahan for some time. I just had never met him or spoke to him. You see, he runs a management consultancy based in Australia that specializes in the use of storytelling in business. I’ve followed his firm, Anecdote — great name, by the way — from afar. That changed last month when …more
After publishing my book “On storytelling, leadership and the power of connection,” I started the project www.hetverhaalvandeleider.be. What encouraged me to do this was an incident at my book’s publication event. An economic weekly magazine offered two key leaders from the Belgian economic community to speak at the affair, but they were ultimately offered nothing …more
I can’t pinpoint exactly when I met Raf Stevens. He’s part of what I refer to as the “storytelling posse” on Twitter, those evangelizing business storytelling 140 characters at a time. Not one to limit his narratives, Raf recently published his second book “Leadership, Storytelling and the Power of Connection” which explores the role of …more
