I emphasize to C.E.O.s, you have to have a story in the minds of the employees. It's hard to memorize objectives, but it's easy to remember a story.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
By the time you get a job, you know how to behave in a meeting or how to write a simple memo.
I like a good cliche because it reminds you that much of management practice boils down to things you need to do but often forget or fail to do often enough.
Neurologists say that our brains are programmed much more for stories than for abstract ideas. Tales with a little drama are remembered far longer than any slide crammed with analytics.
A story is how we construct our experiences.
I like the story writing process. I usually use someone who has been trained for structure to take the story that I actually want, place those elements in the right places.
My stories are very compact. I want them to say the most complex things in the simplest way.
Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.
It's about communication. It's about honesty. It's about treating people in the organization as deserving to know the facts. You don't try to give them half the story. You don't try to hide the story. You treat them as - as true equals, and you communicate and you communicate and communicate.
In general, when I'm writing, I concentrate on the story itself, and I leave it to other people, such as agents and publishers, to work out who it's for.
I never work from an outline, and often I don't know how the story will end.