Check out part one of our series: Strategic Storytelling: Where Business and Stories Meet.
Giuseppe Caltabiano
Apr 26, 21 | 6 min read
strategic storytelling part 1
Reading time: 5 minutes
May 2018. It’s a warm day in Manhattan, New York. A beautiful spring morning.
A few weeks ago I joined Contently, a martech startup . My hotel is in Soho. I still suffer a bit from jet lag. Ten minutes walk and I’m across Broadway, near Houston. If you asked me, I’d move to New York tomorrow.
The office is just around the corner. It’s a lovely old building, right in the middle of that little area squeezed between the eastern and western villages. So different from the shiny glass towers of the city centre.
I wait for the elevator and then go up to the fourth floor. I go in and introduce myself to some young people. I’m looking for familiar faces.
They tell me to go all the way down the hall. The marketing team is just around the corner. And then I see that phrase stamped on the wall.
Storytellers rule the world Those who tell the stories rule the world.
It’s a Native American proverb painted on Contently’s Broadway office. When Contently moved to Wall Street in 2018, the wall wasn’t reproduced in the new office.
I have been using that quote so many niue email list 150000 contact leads times as an introduction to my keynotes. For so many years.
I’m finally in front of that wall. I look around. I wait for the hallway to clear and then I do what I would never have done in any other situation.
I take some selfies.
Giuseppe in a selfie in Contently
I take selfies too
It’s been three years since then, so many changes. We’ve been through a global pandemic; in fact, we’re not completely out of it yet.
I left that company almost a year ago. Today I work for a new and exciting Martech startup . Same category.
Content experiences and storytelling. I am still fascinated by the power of stories, which is probably why I never left this business category.
What is not a story?
The intention is not to write about how we can rule the world, but rather how to be good business storytellers. I will write about stories, storytelling, business narrative.
Salman Rushdie, the famous writer, said: “We are story-telling animals. We are the only creatures on earth who do this unusual thing of telling ourselves stories in order to understand what kind of creatures we are.”
So true. Stories fascinate us. They move us, thrill us, provoke us, entertain us. We continually seek out stories, in good times and in difficult times. But what exactly is a story? Perhaps we should start with what a story is not.
“When a child is born, the first thing it needs is care
security and love. When these things are fulfilled, almost the next thing the child asks is “tell me a story.”
Salman Rushdie
A story is not a process. Like a story, a process has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Unlike a story, a process has no desire, no conflict, and no central character (the hero).
A process accumulates the progress of the story before you create an editorial calendar! you need to know: A story is not a chronology either. Executives and marketers often think of strategic storytelling as the story of their company.
The history of the company is just a temporal process, told as a list of growth milestones accumulated in a sequence of dates.
So what is a story really? Let’s start with a formal definition.
A story is a dynamic sequence of events driven by conflict that brings about a significant change in a character’s life.
Ultimately, strategic storytelling is the art of alb directory telling stories, merging and organizing many streams of desire into a flow of events that points to a single object of desire.