The Storytelling Advantage: How Narratives Shape Leadership
Storytelling is as old as humanity—shaping history, culture, and business. We remember facts 20 times better through stories, yet crafting a clear narrative in today’s content-saturated world is harder than ever. This series explores how top leaders use storytelling to build trust, drive growth, and navigate today’s complex landscape.
“Without stones, there is no arch.”
We all know how it goes. And probably also how it ends…
Storytelling.
Telling stories has been part of humanity for as long as history itself. The word ‘story’ is baked right into it.
Stories have been around us, indeed part of us, for longer than we can remember.
From the cave paintings at Lascaux in France, to the Pyramids in Egypt, the Bible, Bhagavad Gita and the Koran, through Disney, CNN, Fox News and Netflix in the digital age, storytelling is as much part of the human condition as breathing - at different times inspiring us, driving us, soothing us.
Storytelling is not just a social activity. It has a measurable impact on our brains and our emotions.
Psychologist Jerome Bruner put a number to it: individuals are over 20 times more likely to remember a fact when it’s part of a story.
As an industry in its own right, ‘telling stories’ is highly lucrative.
The combined value of the nearly 400 largest entertainment, media and gaming companies in the world is a little over $2 trillion.
While that pales in comparison to the global tech firms that power the distribution of much of the world’s information today (Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are worth nearly 8x that) - the role of storytelling in building (and growing) these and other billion-dollar companies has arguably never been more important.
And it’s never been more difficult.
An overwhelming amount of news and content channels, podcasts, data sources, review sites and social media make building a consistent company narrative feel more like alchemy than part of your business strategy.
That’s where this column hopes to help. A little.
In a world where information dissemination can be as toxic as water pollution in its ability to destroy business value and customer trust and demotivate your staff, over the coming weeks we’ll be exploring the intersection between effective leaders and leadership, and the narratives (stories) that are being told to build successful, thriving businesses.
We’ll look at the strategies winning and fast growing companies are deploying; what leaders are doing to develop the ‘storytelling muscle’; what 2024’s election mega-year (where incumbents everywhere seemed to take a battering) told us about the relation between media output, consumption and leadership credibility at the polls; and that most contentious of all - the connection between data facts and customer (or employee or stakeholder) feeling.
It’s no easy task for a simple column like this. But it is definitely a story that needs telling. And we’re excited to help you try to navigate it.
Simon Hardie is an author and founder of findexable - the digital analytics and insight platform. He co-hosts the Born to Disrupt podcast with Mingzulu and Disrupts
