“I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” The Wizard of Oz Precipice moments: the great stories are full of them. The hero crosses an invisible threshold separating the old, familiar world from a new and decidedly hostile one. It’s the belly of the whale, a place where the old rules, doctrines and dogmas no longer apply. The hero is besieged by threats and forces too scary or lofty to comprehend given his limited life experience. Mythologist Joseph Campbell called th

What propelled a little-known wine varietal to stardom in less than a year? In the last post, I examined whether the “craze” of storytelling really belonged in the workplace or not. By looking at the lives of Edison and Disney, we learnt that stories are primal to the human condition. This week, we look to science to explain why they carry such power. In a podcast entitled “This is your brain on stories”, economist Stephen Dubner interviewed a cognitive neuroscientist abou

Storytelling” is arguably one of the most threadbare and ambiguous words in the modern business lexicon... ...even a perfunctory dig into Amazon unearths a torrent of publications on the topic. There’s “Better Selling through Storytelling”, a volume on “Putting Stories to Work in the C-Suite”, the ubiquitous “Business Storytelling for Dummies” and, somewhat creepily, “Once Upon a Time For Leaders”. Finally, as if not to be outdone, IT behemoth SAP has a seat at the boardroo