In this witty interview
given by Robert McKee to Harvard Business Review, the notable
screenwriter and director explains why CEOs and business people
should "toss their Power Point slides and learn to tell
good stories instead."
In business, when executives need to persuade
employees or investors, they typically use "conventional
rhetoric" to appeal to their listeners' intellectual reason.
The problem with this, McKee notes, is that "the people
you're talking to have their own set of authorities, statistics,
and experiences. While you're trying to persuade them, they are
arguing with you in their heads. Second, if you do succeed in
persuading them, you've done so only on an intellectual basis.
That's not good enough, because people are not inspired to act
by reason alone."
The solution, McKee suggests, is to use
storytelling, not rhetoric, to unite "an idea with an emotion."
By engaging your listener's emotions as well as their minds,
you can be much more successful at persuading them to see your
perspective. To do this, he says, you must tell a good story.
For example, a fictional drug company named Chemcorp making a
pitch to potential investors might show some slides giving the
size of the market, the business plan, the organizational chart,
and other statistics, making the investors "nod politely
and stifle yawns while thinking of all the other companies better
positioned in [the] market." If the CEO instead,
...(T)urns his pitch into a story, beginning
with someone close to him -- say, his father -- who died of a
heart attack…The story might unfold like this: In his grief,
he realizes that if there had been some chemical indication of
heart disease, his father's death could have been prevented.
His company discovers a protein that's present in the blood just
before heart attacks and develops an easy-to-administer, low-cost
test. But now it faces a new antagonist: the FDA…turns down
the first application, but new research reveals that the test
performs even better than anyone had expected, so the agency
approves a second application. Meanwhile, Chemcorp is running
out of money, and a key partner drops out and goes off to start
his own company. Now Chemcorp is in a fight-to-the-finish patent
race…By now, he has them on the edges of their seats, and
he says, 'We won the race, we got the patent, we're poised to
go public and save a quarter-million lives a year' And the bankers
just throw money at him.
By using storytelling in this way, companies
avoid painting an overly rosy picture of reality, which "doesn't
ring true" with employees or investors. Telling of the problems
you've encountered, and how you've overcome them (or need to)
actually inspires people to believe you, "because you're
more truthful." Fundamentally, McKee says, "If you
look your audience in the eye, lay out your really scary challenges,
and say, 'We'll be lucky as hell if we get through this, but
here's what I think we should do,' they will listen to you."
Editorial note
We should remember that the need to employ
such a skill is not limited to company executives. Anyone who
must find ways to communicate effectively with others -- particularly
those who must make presentations in challenging settings --
will similarly benefit. The key is simple: draw on one's own
experience to illustrate the issue central to the presentation.
This is particularly true when a supervisor works with a team
and must help them understand the importance, for example, of
finding a solution to the backlog of supported employment placements
of interested individuals. One way to begin the discussion might
sound like this:
For the past two years there has been on
average 17 individuals each month for whom we have not found
placements. Just this past week there were 23 such individuals.
In fact, during the past six months the average has increased
every month by at least .5.
Compare that description of the problem
with the following:
Yesterday morning I was eating dinner at
the Main Street resdience with Sally. She is such an energetic
young woman. At one point in the dinner she looked really said.
She had a tear in her eye. When I asked her why she appeared
sad she told me that she was told that she would have to wait
for at least a month to be placed in a community job. She dropped
her fork and look me right in the eye: "I want to work like
my friends. I want to go to work."