What is your corporate story

Storytelling 1: Stories, Personal or Corporate, don't necessarily have to be true to contain truth
Storytelling 2: In the end, storytelling comes down to two things: connection and engagement

1. Explain Origins
2. Define Individual and Group Identity
3. Communicate Tradition and Delineate Taboo
4. Simplify and Provide Perspective; Reduce complex problems to a series of easily digested principles
5. Illustrate the Natural order of Things
6. Concisely Communicate Complex History
7. Communicate Moral and Ethical positions and the transference and preseratoinof Values
8. Illustrate Relationships to, and with, Authority
9. Describe appropriate responses to life or model behaviors
10. Define reward and details the paths to Salvation and Damnation


Eleven tips on Telling your corporate story

1. Try to make your story as human as possible. Make it the story of people, and let their human faces become the face of the company.

2. Tell your story - not your story you wish you had. It's alright to be aspirational about the future, but it's dangerous to be aspiration about the past

3. It's a story - feel free to make it colourful

4. If you stuck for a plot, consult the classics.

5. Whenever possible, let your customers help tell your story for you. Nothing is more authentic than the voice of the economically disinterested.

6. Remember that you are telling this story to an audience that either
     a/ hasn't heard it
     b/ doesn't know the players involved
     c/ doesn't really care about it until you give them a reason to care
     d/ is skeptical
     e/ is flat out hostile to you
     or f/ any or all of the above

7. Keep your story refreshed. History is fine, but not at the expense of contemporary touch points.

8/ Be conscious of opportunities to tie your vision statement and related corporate declarations (mission statement, corporate video...) to your story. The Unilever story is in reality an argument for go-to-market continuity over time.

9/  Don't get so carried away embellishing your story that it becomes a target for your critics. Your words can always be turned against you if you aren't careful.

10/  Like any god storyteller, remain constantly aware of the audience - always remember who they are and how they prefer to be addressed. And never forget that your corporate audience is both internal and external, including employees, potential investors, analysts, media, competitors, customers, prospects,... people you might want to hire, and on a bad day, the government.

11/  Finally, if you are not comfortable telling your own story, hire someone to till it for you. Make sure that whomever you hire has the tools needed to effectively frame your story and enough passion for it that they approach it as more than an academic exercise or routine fee-for-service assignment.