hi i am here with paul andrew smith, Paul Smith is one of the world’s leading experts on organizational storytelling. He’s one of Inc. Magazine’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers of 2018, a storytelling coach, and the author of three Amazon #1 bestsellers: Lead with a Story (now in its 11th printing, and published in 7 languages around the world), Sell with a Story, and The 10 Stories Great Leaders Tell; in addition to Parenting with a Story and his newest work, Four Days with Kenny Tedford. He’s a former executive at The Procter & Gamble Company and a consultant with Accenture prior to that.

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Ari Gronich 0:07  

Welcome back to another episode of create a new tomorrow. I'm your host, Ari Gronich. And I have with me Paul Smith. Paul is a former Procter and Gamble, employee with consumer communications and research. He's one of Inc magazine's top 100 leadership speakers in 2018. His work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company time, Forbes, and Success Magazine, among others, is a an MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, best selling author, and he leads with a story and I'm gonna let him kind of get into what it is that he's going to be doing and talking about, because he's an incredible storyteller. And he talks about leadership with that. So Paul, why don't you kind of give us an update of background on why you became who you are? And and what you have to offer people that is absolutely needed in in the world at the moment? Yeah, I

Paul smith 1:10  

think our what you just covered was my my background up until about 2012. So at that point, I was 20 some odd years into my professional corporate career. And along that path, I just got fascinated with this concept of storytelling. And, and that kind of frustrated me, because, you know, they they didn't teach me about storytelling at the Wharton School, they didn't teach me that when I joined Accenture, they didn't teach me that when I joined the Procter and Gamble company. But yet I was I was beginning to recognize how important of a skill set that was to be successful in the profession that I was in, or in business in general. And so I started interviewing leaders whom I admired and thought were particularly good at it first inside the company, and then outside the company. And I mean, at this point, I'm up to around 300 or so like individual one on one face to face two hour long interviews I've conducted with these CEOs and executives from all over the world, like 25 countries around the world. And pretty quickly in that journey, I realized that you know, if I want to know this that badly, probably other people do as well. And so it stopped being my own little selfish learning journey, and became an idea for a book. And so that that's what led to my first book lead with a story which came out in 2012. And then that led to another and another and another night, my my fifth book just came out a few months ago. And so what I ended up doing was pretty quickly, leaving my corporate career and becoming a full time author and speaker and trainer on the subject of storytelling for leaders or for salespeople, I've got one of my books is on, you know, sell the story for salespeople, why there's one for parents, you know, a couple of them are for for leaders.

Ari Gronich 2:54  

So do you think that storytelling has become a dying art? As far as practice? Or do you believe that it's going to have a resurgence? Because I know that, for me, at least, my cultural history is all about storytelling. You know, if you look back, it's like, you know, what happened back then? Because that person who is they're told their grandfather, you know, told their kid who told their kid who told their kid who told their kid and, and that's how, at least in my culture, we, we learn. And so, but in a lot of cultures, it's not that way so much as dictatorial. Here's what you do, but there's no context of the story behind it. So how does how does that play out in in modern world? And why is it that it's such a fascinating thing, we all love to hear people's stories?

Paul smith 3:59  

Yeah, so I think, personally, you know, in people's lives, I think storytelling has always been, you know, an important part of human socialization and family and things like that, in the working world, what my, what I've learned through my research in this is that I think storytelling was actually important, even in the business world, you know, or the, the world of commerce for centuries. But then I think there was a period of time in the early 1900s, where it fell out of favor. And that's when you started to have professional business schools, you know, you know, Harvard and Wharton and, you know, etc, training people to become professional business people, which before that really wasn't a thing, right? If you a professional was a lawyer or a doctor or something, but a business, anybody can be a business person, right? Just go start a company. Well, in the early 1900s, we started to credential eyes and professionalize business. And if you wanted to be viewed as part of the avant garde part of new business? You You, you probably didn't do a lot of storytelling, because that seemed old school. Right, you know, a new business leader would lead with a bunch of spreadsheets and, and like you said, dictatorial, you know, methods of leading and and, you know, having a very clear vision and using a bunch of management techniques and things like that, and storytelling wasn't one of them. And so I think it fell out, I think you asked is storytelling, you know, falling out of favor. I know, I think it did fall out of favor 100 years ago, and about 20 or so years ago, I think it started to make its resurgence.

Ari Gronich 5:37  

Okay, sounds good to me, because I again, I really like having stories be part of, at least for me, my business itself. You know, why? everybody always asks, Why did you become this performance therapist, and I have to tell them, you know, I, I started out as an athlete, I was five years old, I was playing, you know, three years old, doing gymnastics, five years old martial arts, playing baseball, doing all these things, and I kept getting injured. And so I had to figure out how to heal myself. And you know, that story is kind of the repetition that I play out when when somebody asks, I know, a friend of mine is doing these things called the story of your business and their books about why you started your business. And they're like coffee table books and things. And that's starting slowly to build. So how do we build that momentum? so that it becomes second nature, again, for people to be storytellers? And do we need our population to actually connect together again, because, you know, lock parties, same thing, people are so separated, that it doesn't occur to them? Maybe? So is that a possibility to rebuild that culture? And do you think that the storytelling will bring us together versus separating us apart? Yeah,

Paul smith 7:13  

so there are a few things in there to unpack First of all, about that coffee table book about the story of your your business. That typically, I would call that the main story, there is the founding story. And, and I think that's a very important story for businesses, for people, for leaders to be able to tell about the company they work in. And in fact, I think it's the first story you need to be able to tell. But it's not the only one. And, in fact, when people say, the story of our business, they often make the mistake of assuming Well, we just have one story. Like, you know, in fact, companies will hire me to, hey, we need you to come and help us tell our story better. And the first question I asked them, when I get on the phone with them just to plan the event is when you say our story, what what do you mean? And then they say all these things? Oh, well, you know, we've got this really unique process of innovation. And, you know, the way our the way the company started was really unique. And our strategy is is, is really interesting, and the first product that we've ever made. So yeah, we want you to tell us tell that story. You realize you just rattled off like five different stories. I mean, you don't have one story. I mean, that would be a novel, right? If you were to write your one story, and nobody in a business conversation, has time to listen to a three hour story. They don't have time to listen to a 30 minute story, you know, you need these are three or four minutes stories that you would tell.

Ari Gronich 8:39  

So is this something that that you would recommend like nowadays, everything is online. So should this be something that that we do online is like a video as well as, you know, a written version of it, that people can really feel the energy of the person when they're telling that story? Or

Paul smith 9:02  

I think video is a video is a fabulous medium to tell stories, right? Because it's so much richer than just the written word on a piece of paper or on a blog post or something like that. So yeah, I definitely encourage people in fact several of my clients you know, after we go create a story with them, they'll go hire somebody to help produce a video in fact, I'm I'm now starting to partner with somebody I've got a call with him right after this with a production studio in California to do exactly that to take stories from idea to concept to story scripting, and then all the way to having it you know, produced into a final video. I think that's a fabulous way and it's easier to tell it then because you don't have to be there face to face every time they can just they can go watch the video,

Ari Gronich 9:46  

right? Absolutely. Yeah, I have a friend's company that does the videos. And another friend who does books, which is really interesting ones in Miami. One's a nomad at this point, traveling Nomad. In those stories, there are certain elements that people would probably want to highlight and accentuate, you know, so what are the kinds of elements that somebody who's watching the video would want to hear or see or feel based on what's going on in that story? So what are like, the basic elements?

Paul smith 10:29  

Yes, well, the first and most important thing for the person telling the story to understand is, what's the lesson that you want the audience to learn? You know, like, in fact, what do you want them to think feel? Or do the three things I coach people like you need to you need to have an objective in your mind, you shouldn't just be telling people stories to entertain them, right? You're telling them for a reason you're trying to accomplish something, you're either trying to get somebody to think, feel or do something different than they are today. So start, you start with that. And then once you have that end in mind, then you go pick the story to tell that will accomplish that objective, right? So then you got to go find something that actually happened in the world and your experience and your business and your personal life or whatever, that will motivate somebody to do that to either think, feel or do something differently. And then you craft that into a story. And so but you start with the end in mind, right? What do I want people to think feel or do differently, go find a story that will convince them of that, then you craft the story. And there are little things that you'll want to do to make the story effective, like, have the right structure to the story. These are just like I said, three or four minutes stories. So you know, you need to have a tight structure. And I teach a very specific structure, the eight questions your story needs to answer and in this particular order for the story to make the most sense. And there are specific techniques that you can use to create the right emotional engagement in a story.

Ari Gronich 11:52  

Okay, reciprocal conversation. Awesome. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with the audience? Something that, you know, tips tricks? I mean, you've you've been dropping a lot of actionable steps already. But I always ask, Is there two or three, four actionable steps that somebody can take to learn to learn this skill skill? Because now we went now we know kind of some of the formats, but the concept is not implementation. So what are some things that implement this skill set?

Paul smith 12:31  

Yes, I'll give you one more is how to create a surprise ending. And you can do it with almost any story. And it's important that you do by the way, not just because it makes the story more interesting or entertaining, it does that. But in in business stories or parenting stories, your goal is to affect change, right? You're trying to get people to do something different. And it's important for them to remember the story that you tell them because the lesson is embedded in the story. A surprise ending literally physiologically makes the story more memorable. Because when somebody is surprised, there's a little bit of adrenaline that's released in their system. And studies show that when you've got more adrenaline in your system, your memory process works better or more efficiently. So you literally your memory is improved, while that adrenaline is still kind of coursing through your your system so and a surprise triggers that so there's a practical reason to put a surprise into a story like this. And you can put you can you can make a surprise ending out of almost any story and I'll just I'll illustrate it for you right now. So there's a young boy named James nine year old kid. He's in the kitchen with his mom and his mom's sister. So while mom and Auntie are sitting at the kitchen table, having a cup of tea, James is standing at the stove, watching the tea kettle boil, and he's just fascinated with it. Right? He's watching the jet of steam come out of the top of the tea kettle and he's gonna get a spoon and he holds it up there into the jet of steam and watches little drops of water condense on the spoon and trickle down and drips into a cup. He's yellow cup sitting there to catch the water and he's just watching the cycle go over and over and over again. He's fascinated with it. Eventually, his mother gets tired of him in the kitchen and she just barks them she's like James, like, go do your homework, read a book, ride your bike, like, Aren't you embarrassed just wasting your time staring at the tea kettle boiling? Well, fortunately, young James was undaunted by his mother's admonition because 20 years later at the age of 29, of course, and in the year 1765. James Watt reinvented the steam engine, ushering in the industrial revolution that we of course, all benefit from today, and all based on that fascination with steam that he developed at the age of nine in his mother's kitchen. All right now, the first time I read that story, was in a book titled James Watt, right Is it a story a biography of the inventor of the steam engine, right. So Of course, it was no surprise to me at all that the story in chapter one about nine year old James was a story about the inventor of the steam engine, of course, right? The whole book was about him. But to you and the people listening unless you happen to be a history buff, that was probably a surprise at the end, when you realize, Oh, that was James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, right? And why was it a surprise? Simple, because that didn't tell you his last name until the end of the story. Right? presto, surprise ending. So the technique is, you take something that belongs at the beginning of the story, the main character's name, right, it's a question number three out of the eight questions is who's the main character? most human beings expect to know who the main character is? Early in the story? It's, it's natural. So you're breaking that natural expectation, take something from the beginning of the story, and move it to the end of the story. Presto, you've created a surprise that you do with almost any story.

Ari Gronich 15:59  

Nice. Thank you so much for all of that. And I really enjoyed this interview. How can people get ahold of you if they want to work with you?

Paul smith 16:10  

Yeah, thanks. Probably my websites, the easiest, which is leadwithastory.com is the name of my first book. I guess it wasn't more creative with naming websites after that. But yeah, leadwithastory.com it's got links there to all my books and training courses and my contact information and all that.

Ari Gronich 16:26  

Awesome. Thank you so much. And we really appreciate you being here. There's been some great actionable steps. Remember to like, subscribe, and review rate and review. This podcast. We want to be able to get it out to you and give you all kinds of tips and tricks on how you can make your business and your life a success and how you create a new tomorrow today. I'm your host, Ari Gronich and we will see you on the flip side next time. Thank you so much.