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We’ve all experienced a proliferation of startup programs across the geography. With new programs come more mentors. Some are more valuable than others. And we all know this.

There are two sides to mentoring. The advice received and the implementation of that advice. Most mentors will give contradictory advice. This has become the de facto status of our industry.

The other side, the implementation has also many challenges. Following the advice without any processing is a dangerous business.

When you work with startup pitches, you see a plenty of this; “Talking about the team should go first”, “They told us to add the traction here”, “He suggested us to add this table with our numbers”.

Let me be clear, there is no “default” structure for pitching. There is no golden unbreakable rule to talk about this before that. What there is, is a logical mental structure to the pitch.

Each slide should answer the next question the audience has about your company. This creates a loosely structure which can and should be changed and modeled to the one pitching it.

The order of the questions will depend on three factors. How competitive and well known is your industry. How much expertise is there in the room and what exactly are you saying about your startup.

While the pitch needs to answer fundamental questions about your company, the way you narrate it will influence the order. This will create multiple paths you can take to explain the same thing.

Sometimes mentors force certain concepts into the pitch. Some mentors are more forceful than others. What startups need to remember is that, above all else, THIS is your startup. You are the one that should feel comfortable with what you’re saying. Don’t let anyone tell you how to explain something about your project.

Mentors are here to advise you on the “What”, not on the “How”. They might give you ideas on how to say something, but you’re the one that should make it yours.

Stay away from forceful mentors that tell you how to do things and make your pitch, yours. If you don’t feel comfortable with it, change it.

Image credits: Steve Jurvetson / Flickr

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Hello, everyone! We’re very happy to announce that we’re partnering with our good friends from Improvement21 to deliver a new workshop on CultureHack in London!

What is this CultureHack thing? Well, we will be focusing on Change Management, Culture improvement and Storytelling in a business context. So, essentially, how do you change your company’s culture? Some of the goals:

• To inspire participants to believe, they can influence and change their corporate culture.
• To learn useful tools to understand, imagine and improve their company culture, at least on the level of their immediate environment.
• To help them understand how stories are key to do this and to gain practical skills in storytelling

We’ve talked about this before, stories aren’t just for the top brass, but for everyone in the company. A big part of culture change happens when people start believing things are possible. Stories have the power to inspire us and make us believe!

Join us for this two-day workshop in London in December (10th-11th 2015):

Course dates: December 10th 2015 Thursday and December 11th 2015, Friday

Venue: To be determined (central London)

Facilitators: Andrea Darabos and Angel Medinilla – Improvement21 Trainers, Founders and Alejandro Barrera – master storyteller, Chief WOWness Officer at Press42.com

Target audience: Change management experts, program leaders, HR managers, coaches and mentors, people who would like to improve their company culture or learn more about change management through storytelling and continuous improvement.

You can check more information on the Improvement21 site here.

Image credits: Nikos Koutoulas / Flickr

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One of the most powerful aspects of stories is their malleable nature. You can tell a story today and if the story is good enough, it will be told long after you created it.

Sometimes the story is so good, it will be told for generations to come. What is amazing about stories is that they will still keep the major lessons while mutating trough time.

Few communication vehicles are as flexible and resistant to time than stories. Fashion becomes “de-modé”. VHS tapes become obsolete and photographs fade. Good stories get retold, decade after decade with minor changes. Stories change to resonate with that decade’s tastes.

Two major elements are basic for a story. An internal core lesson and a group of volatile settings. The lesson tends to be of powerful philosophical nature related to human existence. Often, you can trace the lesson to thousands of years old proverbs.

Story settings are like an ice cream topping; they change according to the fashion of the moment. The story’s settings are the connectors. The glue that enables the audience to feel empathy with the story characters. They enable the easy digestion and comprehension of the human lesson.

Despite having a great lesson to share, story settings need to be updated to modern standards. If you frame your story in the medieval ages the audience will find it hard to follow.

Now, if the settings resonate with our life, maybe a young manager, ascending through the ranks of a technology company, it most probably will be easier for us to understand and apply the lesson.

Settings are like a parachute. The design will change to adjust it to different atmospheric conditions. Nevertheless, the payload will be the same each time.

This malleable condition in stories makes them very powerful in all set of contexts, especially in the corporate one. You can seed the organization with stories that illustrate the company’s values, mission, vision or strategy. If the stories are good enough, they organization will adopt them as theirs. They’ll change the wrapping, the characters, and the time frame, but the core lesson will remain.

I’ve sometimes heard the same story I’ve told in a company, told by two different teams. Each story is different from the other, but both containing the same key lesson for the teams.

Great storytelling takes time, but it’s definitely worth it. It creates key communication and experimental vehicles that will have long lasting effects in any organization.

Stories achieve what no rulebook or mission statement poster will ever achieve, immortality.

Image credits: Marie Aschehoug-Clauteax / Flickr

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The rise of all things digital is having a massive impact on the traditional newsrooms. A quick look at the previous chart highlights the trend. The newsrooms workforce across U.S. is reaching its lowest level since 1978. The rise of technology creates system efficiencies which allow for smaller workforces. Still, one has to wonder what are we losing in the process while we wait for the new techno-journalists to be created.

Source: Newsonomics: The halving of America’s daily newsrooms

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We tend to give many storytelling workshops, both for startups and to Fortune 500 companies, but even us can’t be more eloquent when speaking about story than our dear Kevin Spacey during the keynote speech at Content Marketing World Conference 2014.

Thanks to Kay Fabella for reminding us how cool this speech is.

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If there is one podcast that illustrates extremely the power of storytelling is Radiolab. Apart from the fabulous topics they pick, what they excel best is at their extraordinary production. People that think that the radio is dead they should definitely check them out as an example of brilliant 21st century storytelling.

The previous episode is worth noting not only as an example of great storytelling in audio format, but because the topic is extremely relevant for most technologists. The story describes the works of the Facebook Trust group and how they engineers emotions through interface changes.

It’s very relevant because too many engineers disregard the human element from their designs, which makes for poor stories and poor communication. Enjoy!

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Reputation is, without a doubt, one of the most valuable assets of any organization. While this has been believed for many years now, it hasn’t been until recently that reputation, and more precisely, digital reputation, has been marked as critical for many organizations.

Reputation is formed by two elements, the beliefs the stakeholders hold about the company (cognitive element), and the feelings the stakeholders have about the company (affective element). These two elements have very important consequences.

The first one is the fact that reputation is different from the notion of image. Reputation is the process and the effect of the transmission of the company’s image, not the image itself. As such, it’s what’s known as a meta-belief, a belief about others’ social judgment of the company.

The second fact that’s critical is the fact that reputation is in the hands of the stakeholders, not the organization. Reputation isn’t what management says it is, that would be their ideal image of the company, but what the stakeholders believe it is.

Reputation has been gaining importance in the last decade and the reason is fully attached to the rise of technology. More specifically speaking, the exponential increase of human mobility and the unprecedented networking capacity we gain year after year.

The fact that our society is increasingly networked, impacts the notion of reputation tremendously. The more networked we are, the more communication we can achieve. The more communication, the easier it is to transmit our personal beliefs about an organization, influencing everyone in our personal networks.

As our social network grows, the impact of reputation also grows. This growth though, isn’t linear, but exponential, which means that the importance of managing a company’s reputation accelerates exponentially every year.

On the other hand, the mobile explosion we’ve been experiencing this past decade has also impacted the notion of reputation. Suddenly we’ve passed from interacting with a company once every month, to interacting with it through several different channels in different situations in a single day.

The fact that we can now Tweet, Facebook, Instagram, Pin, etc. from the palm of our hand, anywhere, anytime, has taken the notion of reputation to a whole new level.

Now, how does storytelling fits in this picture? How can storytelling help a company manage their reputation?

Stories are, and have always been, the prefer vehicle for beliefs. Societies use stories as the cultural glue that keeps everyone in check. From religions to myths and values, they all get communicated through stories.

Even when you dig into how reputation happens, you can clearly see that the transmission of the beliefs of a company is done through stories. How many times have you had dinner with friends and heard some of them complain or praise an organization?

These beliefs don’t tend to get exposed as facts:

“This company sucks because they never answered my emails”.

The tend to be weaved into a story:

“The other day I ordered this product to help my dad with his illness. The store promised it would arrive in two days, but it’s been a month and it hasn’t arrived yet. I got furious and emailed the store, but I was just ignored … “

I would venture and say that despite reputation having a cognitive component, the emotional element takes precedence every single time. Our brains will always resonate much more with the emotional side than the rational one.

This is why, when companies attempt to clench an attack against their reputation, they tend to do a horrible job. The reason? They try to defuse the attack via a rational, unemotional and business-like response. Not only the response is normally late, lets remember our current technology has turn real-time communications into the standard, but the fact that it tries to tell stakeholders what they have to believe about the organization, is a gross misunderstanding of what reputation is about.

The best way to deal with a reputation problem is by using stories. Narratives enable the company to weave a response than, not only resonates with the audience due to its emotional nature, but it also helps it to be shared in the human preferred way, through story.

Stories are also the perfect vehicle because it doesn’t tell the audience what to do or how to think. As we said before, reputation is all about others’ beliefs, not the company’s. A story encapsulates a lesson, giving the audience the choice of taking it or not. This choice is what makes them powerful because it allows the stakeholders to rewire their beliefs about the organization.

There is a great quote that says: Don’t tell me, show me. Stories do just that. They show what happened, they show how the situation came to be, they illuminate on the ulterior motives, the values and the emotions of the protagonists, but above all, it lays the ground for a new reinterpretation of the facts. Not by asserting it, but by inviting you to empathise with it.

Sadly, few people know how to deal with reputation and much less, know what stories to tell in such situation. There are many strategies that one can follow and they’ll depend on the situation but here are just some ideas:

• Preemptive stories: If we know something is going to turn into a media backslash we better prepare ourselves with a set of stories that explain why, how and what happened. People don’t want the facts, that’s what the media will give them. They want the details, the people, and the emotions. They want the backstory. Make sure you have one in store just for them.

• Forgiveness stories: Many times, the organization did something wrong and they know it. This is the perfect time to through in a forgiveness story. Be open, be honest and tell an emotional story about what happened, the consequences and the impact it had in the organization. What values were broken, what process were wrong… shine light over what you did wrong and the audience will grant you forgiveness.

• Wowness stories: Reputation isn’t just about negative beliefs, but also about positive emotions. Make sure your team is digging for amazing stories to tell. Happy customers, surprising situations or over the top service are just several of the ones you can talk about. Reputation is built on not only what the media says but on word of mouth. Put your great stories out there so that your stakeholders can learn of them, enjoy them and share them.

These are just some examples of where story is valuable within a reputation effort. It’s important to notice that reputation not only your external stakeholders, like customers or providers, but it also has a drastic impact within the organization. Storytelling also works internally and sometimes it’s even more important to explain what happened to your employees that to the outside world. The best evangelists of a company are their employees. Use story to manage your reputation with them.

Reputation, especially with the advances in the digital realm, is becoming a very serious field. Despite the new tools we can deploy to try and manage it, there is still a very important need to communicate what happened correctly. The best tool to achieve this is through the use of storytelling.

Take action now, be ready and don’t wait until something bad happens to have your stories in place.

Images: Creative Ignition / Flickr, Pablo OE / Flickr, Matthew G / Flickr 

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We’re recently touring Southern Europe to promote The South Summit and we’ve been meeting many members of different startup ecosystems, ranging from Portugal, all the way to Bulgaria.

This is a brief talk we are giving to help out and give some tips and tricks on what are the do’s and don’ts of getting media attention for your startups. Enjoy!

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