When Steve Jobs took over Apple in 1997, one of his first decisions was to remove the Apple Museum that blocked the space in front of the reception when people walked through the door. He said that he refused to work in a company that was living in its past and living in its historical success. He wanted to be defining the thoughts of the future.
We know that people are substantially motivated by a company’s transcendent purpose; how they improve lives, and the transactional objective of how they sell stuff, and that’s why when we are looking at brands and companies, we want companies that take us on a journey. That’s why story telling has this unique ability to bring to life that transcendent purpose; that objective that actually unifies a company’s story, future, and vision.
I believe that stories are critical to the success of a community, an individual, a company, or a society because stories demand generosity from the storyteller. The story teller has to open up and to be vulnerable and exposed to their own anxieties and fear. We are able to connect with people on a much deeper level than ever before, and so the more we share stories, and share these exchanges, and observe stories in life, the more we are actually able to create change and inspire change makers.
McKee, a famous creative writing instructor, believes that the best way to get ideas out into the world is through storytelling. His students have won 18 Academy Awards, and he says that we can engage listeners on a whole new level. It's almost like we are still acting like we are in our primal and caveman features, using bullet points and power points to tell stories when actually now we have video. We have a virtual reality that allows us to transport our audience to a whole new realm. To parallel universes where they can actually experience and live in this situations. They can and actually believe that they are walking in the same footsteps as the speaker, or as the storyteller.
A Stanford research found that in the average one minute, a student used 2.5 statistics, and only one in 10 people told a story, but when they looked at the retention rates they found something really interesting, they found that 65% of people remember the speeches with stories yet only 5% remember those with just statistics.
Terry Pratchett said that people think that stories are shaped by people, but actually, it’s the other way around. If you want to understand a culture, listen to the stories. But if you want to change a culture, change the stories. It's really vital today that we dissect and observe our own stories, and even think about how we can communicate them digitally so they can reach more people across the world so that people in a different location can listen, experience and connect with our perspectives and our thoughts.
We love brands and companies that have or create stories, that tell and live their story authentically and genuinely, and that’s why leaders need to learn how to be uniquely human through digital storytelling, and the ones who can communicate through video or film interactivity are the ones who feel. To tell great stories we need to live with the character, and that’s why we need to go out and live the stories that we want to tell. And that’s why we an American poet wrote, the universe is made up of stories, not atoms