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The power of stories…

Back in 2007 Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates was only able to sell his pottery bowls for $25 a piece, despite a great deal of time, effort and money going into making them.

“I decided that the reasons were: I’m a nobody, so the bowl is a nothing,” says Theaster. “The bowl looks like lots of other bowls that are mass produced you can buy for even cheaper than $25; the bowl has no magical context that would help get it valued in other ways. If I could be a somebody; if I could elevate [the bowl] beyond the everyday context, would people value it more?”

So Theaster set about creating that all-important magical context in the form of an imaginary mentor with an intriguing and appealing story to match. Meet Yamaguchi, a gifted Japanese potter who fled Hiroshima for Mississippi, where he married a black woman and created a unique ceramic style blending Asian and African-American techniques.

This carefully crafted fiction paid dividends. Theaster/Yamaguchi’s bowls began selling for far more than $25, for people weren’t buying the pottery so much as the character and story surrounding it. They were buying into the magical context – the brand in other words. For all great brands are essentially great stories. Therein lies their power.

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This tale begins in Nebraska…

Praise for the Sage of Omaha in today’s FT, not so much for his legendary skill as an investor as for his use of clear, simple language:

“Mr Buffett’s plain speaking shows confidence,”says Sam Leith… “Two things in particular make the plain style sing for him. He tells stories and he uses metaphors… As far as storytelling goes, his letter to shareholders this year…opened with an account of a small investment he made years ago that did little to change his net worth. “This tale begins in Nebraska,” he wrote, before describing his 1986 purchase of a farm. He went on to explain how the story illustrated “certain fundamentals of investing”. “As for metaphors, Mr Buffett can barely get through a sentence without one… “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”

His use of storytelling and metaphor means that even when Mr Buffett is talking about something as complex, impersonal and abstract as finance, [he can] make it sound simple, human and concrete.”

Outstanding investment success and clearly characterful language – now that’s a connection to conjure with.

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Lovable letters…

I’ve just added to my Christmas list Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells A Story, a mighty fine sounding new book by Michael Rosen.

“Writing this book has been a fascinating journey,” says Mr Rosen. “The story of our alphabet turns out to be a complex tug of war between the people who want to own our language and the people who use it. I know which side I’m on.”

Me too, and I can’t wait to read these stories of A to Z. Thanks Santa!

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To begin at the beginning…

“To begin at the beginning is, next to ending at the end, the whole art of writing; as for the middle you may fill it in with any rubble that you choose. But the beginning and the end, like the strong stone outer walls of mediaeval buildings, contain and define the whole,” says Hillair Belloc in On Nothing and Kindred Subjects.

“Remove everything that has no relevance to the story,” says Chekhov.

Two top takes on what goes into good storytelling, and what stays out.

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Strategies are stories…

I’ve been doing a fair bit of work recently which has included discussing with clients what strategy is all about. The conversations have tended towards couching the strategy thing in terms of good decisions and actions. Looking at it this way, strategy comes down to a group of people (a team, a company, a country…) answering a few simple yet essential questions: What are we going to do? Why? And how? It’s a world away from those thick and expensive docs heavy with impenetrably overloaded matrix diagrams so beloved of a certain kind of consultant and belittled by the great information design guru Edward Tufte.

So strategies are social. They are action. And they are something else, too: they are stories. Bad strategies are tragedies, full of loss and woe. Good strategies are adventures – epic tales of worthwhile quests and real achievements, of great characters and grand deeds.

I know which strategies I’d like to read…

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Why add the adjective?…

In 1956, sci-fi horror doyen Richard Matheson wrote a story he called The Shrinking Man. When Hollywood came to make the movie they couldn’t resist mucking with the title: in 1957 The Incredible Shrinking Man was released. It went on to become a cult classic but Mr Matheson was understandably irked by that extra word: “It’s already pretty incredible that a guy is shrinking!” he said. “Why add the adjective?”

A neat reminder to leave out what you don’t need in. Although, on reflection, you could make a case for keeping that “incredible” in as it adds a certain melodic rhythm to the title.

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Beware the lumbagain…

Great to see that BBC2’s short story competition for children had around 90,000 entries. Including Cloud Boy, a rather brilliant tale that turns raindrops into people, written by my daughter Gilly :).

Great to see also that these young authors share The Bard’s predeliction for inventing new words, adding to the richness of our lovable language. Words like lumbagain – a ghost who makes people dull and boring. What a wonderful twist on the grand tradition of scary spooks, and what a fantastically fitting word for said ghost – a mighty fine combination of meaning and melody. Imagine one lumbering after you, gaining ground surprisingly fast…

Beware the lumbagain!

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Beautiful lies…

If you want to tell the truth, tell tales. Facts alone are not enough – you need fiction. Back in 1861, Charles Reade brought this vividly to life in the opening lines of his novel The Cloister and the Hearth…

“Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words, and suffer noble sorrows. Of these obscure heroes…the greater part will never be known…their lives and characters lie hidden from nations in the annals that record them. The general reader cannot feel them, they are presented so curtly and coldly…they are not like living breathing stories appealing to the heart…nor can he understand them…for epitomes are not narratives, as skeletons are not human figures… Here, then, the writer of fiction may be of use to the public – as an interpreter…

There is a musty chronicle, written in intolerable Latin, and in it a chapter where every sentence holds a fact. Here is told, with harsh brevity, the strange history of a pair, who lived untrumpeted, and died unsung, four hundred years ago; and lie now, as unpitied, in that stern page, as fossils in a rock. Thus, living or dead, fate is still unjust to them. For if I can but show you what lies below that dry chronicler’s words, methinks you will correct the indifference of centuries, and give those two sore-tried souls a place in your heart – for a day.”

As Charles Reade attests, to free what really matters, what you really want to get across, from the deadweight of dry facts, you need imagination – that flight of the mind that can uncover and convey the hidden meanings, the true messages at the heart of your story.

For fiction is, after all, the truth wrapped up in a beautiful lie.

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The best story wins…

Cold hard facts or clear compelling stories? When it comes to really understanding our world, it’s the latter that matter.

Writing in the FT, John Kay picks up on the age-old power of stories to help us make sense of things: “Probabilistic reasoning has become the dominant method of structured thinking about problems involving risk and uncertainty – to such an extent that people who do not think this way are derided as incompetent and irrational. Yet this probabilistic approach, a recent intellectual development, was heavily implicated in the 2008 financial crisis. Legal systems have evolved over hundreds if not thousands of years…to establish the degree of confidence in a narrative, not to measure a probability in a model. Such narrative reasoning is the most effective means humans have developed of handling complex and ill-defined problems… We cope with these situations by telling stories, and we base decisions on their persuasiveness.”

So stories rather than stats are the great sensemakers. And as John Kay implies and Life of Pi highlights, the best story wins.

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Charismatic communication…

What’s the secret of charismatic communication – communication that’s highly enchanting and persuasive?

In an article in the FT, Alicia Clegg cites many different factors, including a dozen communication habits – from telling stories to letting your feelings show – rooted in the principles of classic rhetoric, the importance of not just talking well but listening carefully, using appealing everyday language, and being sincere.

All good stuff, but in the interests of boiling it down: write from the heart with your ears.

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True stories travel light…

For psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, our innermost feelings can only be understood through stories, and the key to storytelling is truthfulness. The kind of truthfulness that brings your stories to life and lets them fly.

“My friend [the poet] Wendy Cope says, ‘Make it more truthful.’ Is this exactly what the patient said? Is that exactly how it was? You have to dig down really deep to make it good – but you’re also after lightness. You don’t want to write about the Oedipus complex, you want to take weight out of the story. That, for me, is what the great writers do… When I taught a course on writing case histories, I discovered that what I felt was true had nothing to do with length. What counted was telling the story so well the reader had the same experience as the writer. I’m not convinced by statistics or page count, I’m convinced by someone who’s been there, got really close, seen what they’ve seen, and can put it across in writing.”

This Lightness of touch forms one of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium. True stories travel light – covering a lot of ground quickly. As the Sicilian saying quoted in Calvino’s chapter on Quickness puts it: “Time takes no time in a story.” Creating the story on the other hand can take a great deal of time and care but it’s always worth it. By digging deep into the truth of a story you can set it free to capture people’s attention and imagination.

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Brilliant advocates…

It’s good to see storytelling in business gets a big thumbs up from Luke Johnson in his New Year article for the FT.

“What is the special secret that makes a great entrepreneur? The power to motivate – to lead others in a grand task. So how do they enthuse and encourage followers? A key ingredient is the ability to tell stories. The more compelling the storyteller, the more devoted the adherents. From Benjamin Franklin…to Akio Morita…these were not spin masters but brilliant advocates who caught people’s imaginations and won both hearts and minds.”

Equating storytelling with advocacy is spot on, for the best stories in business, like the best representations in court, are carefully considered and crafted for a particular purpose and audience. Their emotional appeal is finely tuned and precisely targeted. As Luke Johnson says, this is the opposite of the chatter and noise of the daily news. “Rolling news channels and the digital revolution mean the exposure and pitch of headlines are more intense than ever. We cannot influence any of these events, unlike our own stories. So I recommend that readers avoid too much news and focus instead on cultivating their own narratives.” And if you like, enlist an expert to help you cultivate them.

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Wise words from the man in the 90-year-old lederhosen…

Johannes Gutmann has over the past two decades or so built from scratch a highly successful business based in his home region of Austria marketing organic produce to over 50 countries around the world. Along the way he has become known for sporting the same pair of 90-year-old lederhosen and scarlet shoes pretty much everywhere he does business.

It has been a highly distinctive and memorable bit of brand building. “You just need an idea of how you want to present what you have,” says Johannes. “For example, for someone who sees my lederhosen, they are worth nothing. But they have a high non-material value: they are a story. And that works just as well on the world stage as at a market in the Waldviertel.”

From Austria to Australia, from farming to pharmaceuticals, no matter where in the world you are or what business you’re in – for your brand, stories are priceless.

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Economy of expression…

Top of my Christmas list is Philip Pullman’s reworking of Grimm’s tales for young and old.

Why revisit these classics? Because the stories themselves bear endless telling. More particularly, as Philip Pullman points out, his edition clears “out of the way anything that would prevent them running freely.” It promises the “economy of expression” Italo Calvino identifies as the first characteristic of folktales, in his Six Memos for the Next Millenium. For the best fables are compressed stories – free flowing, fleet of foot, impactful. Floating like butterflies, stinging like bees, they are the Muhammad Alis of the storyworld.

As Philip Pullman notes, “There is a great pleasure in telling a tale swiftly and clearly.” And a great pleasure in reading them, too.

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The best story wins…

Writing in the FT recently, John Kay touched on the power of stories in our fluid fluxy world: “The real world is characterised by radical uncertainty… We deal with that world by constructing simplifying narratives. We do this not because we are stupid, or irrational, or have forgotten probability 101, but because storytelling is the best means of making sense of complexity. The test of these narratives is whether they are believable.”

As John Kay points out, juries convict because they find the prosecution’s account more believable than the defence’s. Just as investors follow the most compelling investment stories. In the courtroom, in business –  in all walks of life, the best story wins.

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Let your imagination fly…

There’s a magic at the heart of many of the best stories. A magic that draws you into their world and takes you where they want you to go.

Take the Arabian Nights, where for centuries we have stepped out of our daily lives into a world where we happily fly magic carpets, follow genies and sail the Seven Seas with Sinbad.

Marina Warner, Professor of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and author of Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, talks of “the atmosphere of enchantment, of wonder, that is very specific to the book. There is a sense of a kind of endlessly emancipated imagination. You don’t feel that you need to observe any of the coordinates of ordinary life. The stories are simply asking you to let your imagination fly.”

An invitation many of us find irresistible.