Stories Mean Business - Nick Warren

Some thoughts on The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis ... and the use of Anchoring by mattress salesman.

Episode home:

https://StoriesMeanBusiness.com/podcast/785:-The-Undoing-Project

If you listened to episode 781, I'm about to eat some humble pie.

Episode home:

In Succession, the HBO series, the characters are self-centred, mean, greedy, petty and uncaring. And yet, the quality of the writing and acting keeps me (and millions of others) glued to the screen. Here's why.

Episode home:

Somewhere around 10 years ago, we gave a client a bag of coffee... because not all stories need to be blockbusters.

Episode home:

https://StoriesMeanBusiness.com/podcast/782:-Small-Stories-and-Coffee

Every so often, I come across Michael Simmons Blockbuster Mental Model for Viral Content, and kick myself that I haven't done it ... yet.

Maybe this time will be different, but I also cut myself a little slack...

Episode home:

https://StoriesMeanBusiness.com/podcast/780:-The-BIG-Idea-(Again)

In his book The Four Hour Work Week (and later in Tools for Titans), Tim Ferris set out his simple, practical method for taking big swings.

Imagine the worst case scenario in detail.

He called this Fear-Setting, based on the Stoic idea that we should inhabit the worst case from time to time. (Seneca supposedly spent days wearing rags and going without food.)

In Ferriss's case, the dream, was a trip around the world despite the fact that the company he'd created consumed all his time (and joy).

But he imagined the very worst that could happen (bankruptcy, theft of assets, stuck in a foreign country etc) ... and the imagining gave him the chance to design solutions.

He made plans. If this, then that.

The plans unblocked him, and allowed him to take the leap.

We aren't all Ferriss, but we've all made big decisions in our lives ... and will all make more.

Your future stories rest on your abilities to take action ... and fear-setting is a powerful tool for enabling that.

Give it a go. The results may surprise you.

Episode home:

https://StoriesMeanBusiness.com/podcast/779:-Fear-Setting

In many ways, Stories Mean Business is an ongoing argument for depth.

Yesterday, Wendy and I went to see Magic Goes Wrong, a show by the Mischief Theatre Company ... but co-written with Penn and Teller!

As in all their plays (so far) the audience is treated to actors playing ... actors (or in this case magicians) who are putting on a show that is falling down before their eyes.

Often literally.

And as things fail, in funnier and funnier ways, what we get is ... depth. The sense that we are looking through the surface of something into the truth below.

The very human truth.

Which is pretty close to how I feel about storytelling in business. When we break out of the bullet-point mindset, we get the chance to go deeper, to create a connection, and to build trust.

And trust is rocket-fuel for business (as I may have mentioned before).

Episode home:

https://StoriesMeanBusiness.com/podcast/778:-Magic-Goes-Wrong-(and-right!)

A couple of day's ago it was the anniversary of the battle of Agincourt, where the battered English army of 6,000 defeated a French force of five or ten times the size.

But how?

Episode home:

https://StoriesMeanBusiness.com/podcast/777:-We-Few-We-Happy-Few

Why do people buy your thing?

Commonly, we point to our ’sales funnels’ – our ads, and landing pages and check outs.

But is that really why they did it?

There's a myth in business that we can map the "sales cycle step by step." Usually, this is visualised as a funnel. We pour a load of traffic in at the top, and the proportion that come out at the bottom is your Conversion Rate. The stages in between – which we track via analytics - are the points where prospects are 'leaking’ out.

So we go to work fixing those leaks.

And sometimes, it works... especially if there is an actual problem with that step of the process.

But outside that, in my experience, not a lot changes.

Which it turns out, isn't that surprising, because the forces that cause someone to buy are often complex, random and ineffable.

In my case, I've just made a sale ... and there's no way you could design a funnel for it.

Episode home:

https://StoriesMeanBusiness.com/podcast/776:-This-Funnel-Doesnt-Exist