Five Journalists Offer Free Lessons in Business Storytelling

“To understand Meg Whitman, the former eBay chief executive who now runs Hewlett-Packard, it’s essential to revisit something she did 26 years ago. She had just become a junior partner at Bain Consulting, working for the brilliant but domineering Tom Tierney. One morning Whitman walked into his office, impromptu. The 31-year-old asked her feared boss if he wanted staff feedback about his leadership style; he nodded. With that Whitman grabbed a felt-tip marker and sketched a giant steamroller on a nearby flip board. ‘This is you, Tom,’ she explained. ‘You’re too pushy – you’re not letting us build consensus leadership.’”

“Somewhere within the yawning, three-level interior of Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar, is there a long refrigerated tunnel that servers have to pass through to make sure that the French fries, already limp and oil-sogged, are also served cold? Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste? The watermelon margarita? Any idea why it tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde?”

“Company officials may not be sure, but I’m fairly confident that the company copped the name from noted potato-related device inventor, Mark Pringle of Amsterdam, New York. Pringle co-patented a ‘method and apparatus for processing potatoes’ in 1942 that bears a striking resemblance to later methods of potato chip manufacture. He was, actually, trying to solve the same problem that Pringles later did. Namely, actually frying regular potatoes leads to irregularly-shaped chips of varying crunchiness that don’t last on the shelf for very long.”

“It is tempting to think of the globalisation of the labour market as a zero-sum game in which Mrs Kamal in Pakistan is benefiting at the direct expense of Ms Vetter in America. But economists point out that such calculations suffer from the “lump of labour fallacy” – the belief that there is only a fixed amount of work to go round. A better explanation, they say, is the theory of comparative advantage, one of the least controversial ideas in economics, which suggests that free markets make the world better off because everyone can concentrate on doing what they are best at.”

“He is 5 feet 7 inches, humble, pale and balding at 28, but Iniesta’s natural reticence is balanced by a chimney sweep’s comfort in tight spaces. It is evident in his vision and balance and agility, in his movement and Euclidean mastery of the geometric passing that sustains Spain and his league team, Barcelona.”