Welcome to the Story Rules Content Hub – the second best resource to learn all about storytelling techniques for work (after ‘Story Rules‘, my comprehensive book on the topic!).
In this Hub, Here’s where you get rich storytelling examples, analyses, viewpoints, interview nuggets, visuals, quotes, and much, much more. To find out how you can make the most of this resource, please watch this 12-minute video.
You can explore this (for now free!) resource in four ways:
For many startups, soon after the initial launch euphoria, comes the first trough. A series of daunting, crazy challenges, when the founders end up wondering: Is this what I really signed up for? Akansh Khurana, the thoughtful, articulate CEO of THB (India’s largest clinical data intelligence platform), reached that juncture fairly early – within just 8 months. But Akansh and his team persevered, pivoted and within 2 years had gotten investor validation of their achievement: a $2.1M fund raise in February 2018. How did they do it? I decided to find out. Over a long phone conversation with Akansh, I discerned five key …
Ram is the earnest, go-getter CMO of an exciting agri-tech startup. His was one among 10 promising ventures being mentored by Agri Udaan, a leading Hyderabad based agri-business accelerator. An ‘accelerator’ is a program that speeds up a startup’s evolution, and gets it ready for the next stage. In such programs, a key milestone is typically the ‘Demo Day’. On this day, the Accelerator gets folks from about 30-35 funds in one room and provides the startups with a rare opportunity – to tell their story to a large set of potential investors at one go. But here’s the challenge – …
You may or may not appreciate Kapil Sharma’s brand of humour, but there’s an interesting lesson in his comeback attempt. His is a classic rags-to-riches-to-rags case (in terms of reputation at least). His meteoric rise was followed by an equally meteoric fall. How could he even attempt a comeback after the last set of negative stories had left his reputation in tatters? One option could have been to ignore all those tales (many of which would’ve been malicious rumours) and just announce, “Hey guys, guess who’s back!”. But if he’d done that, it would’ve meant ignoring the ‘anti-stories’. Introducing: The Anti-Story When you make …
Prologue Nitish Saxena* is a typical corporate senior manager. He runs a multi-crore business unit for his company, which is in the travel space. Like most of his colleagues, Nitish is conscientious, target-oriented and professional. But there’s something different about him – his drive to learn is unparalleled. And it would really help him in an upcoming competition. But first, the context. Client context Nitish’s company (let’s call it Vayu) is India’s leading player in its space and belongs to a highly-reputed group (part of the Fortune-India 100). Vayu is led by Sam*, a genial, smiling CEO with twinkling eyes …
Writer’s block Do you sometimes sit to write an email or an appraisal note and struggle to find the right words? You aren’t alone – all of us face the writer’s block. On the other hand, sometimes you may find yourself writing in full flow, only to discover later that the words are all over the place and not conveying the intended message. This post will help you with that most basic task in creating a data-story: choosing the right words. Building blocks Think of a data-story as a completed house. Components such as walls, ceilings, windows, doors etc. are …
A cheesy line? Or an inspiring one? “I think it’s pointless to be hopeless. If you are hopeless, you waste your present and your future.” If you hear someone saying this, what are you thinking? Your reaction is probably: “Yawn, boooorrring… please don’t ‘give gyaan’ – I get enough Whatsapp forwards and FB posts already…” . But what if I told you this: There’s a young girl who’s been through some fairly traumatic experiences in her life, and is now engaged in improving the lot of girls across the world. She was asked, “After everything you’ve seen, how do we keep from being …
#LeaderStories: The Customer side In the previous post (Part 1 of this series), we had looked at i2e1 (a successful B2B startup in the area of internet provision and WiFi analytics) and its approach to investor storytelling. In this post, we explore the customer side. Over the last 2.5 years, i2e1 has grown from just a concept to a thriving startup with 3,500+ paying customers! These customers are typically retail stores, restaurants, hotels etc. – and i2e1’s pitch to these stores is to provide WiFi services to their end consumers (the shoppers and visitors) – in order to enhance their experience, increase footfalls and the …
#LeaderStories: A new series This post marks the beginning of a new series for me: #LeaderStories – in-depth interviews with inspirational startup founders, investors and corporate professionals, who have shown tangible impact with their storytelling. The impact may have been a successful fund raise, winning a major customer account or even convincing a community – essentially a practical, real-life demonstration of the storytelling skills that we discuss on this blog. To be fair, there are many factors underlying success, and effective storytelling is just one of them. In this blog however, we will focus on the storytelling aspect (duh), with …
#LeaderStories: A new interview series As mentioned in the summary insights post, this article marks the beginning of a new series at Story Rules: #LeaderStories – in-depth interviews with inspirational startup founders, investors and corporate professionals, who have shown tangible impact with their storytelling. The first interview in the series is with Satyam Darmora, the affable co-founder and Catalyst (as he simply calls himself) of i2e1, an exciting startup with a mission to provide internet to everyone, using an innovative business model. Satyam and his other co-founders started i2e1 in mid-2015 and it has come a long way since then. It has achieved great …
The answer is V. SARALe. Confused, especially about the ungainly extra ‘e’? Read on. Even if you aren’t a scientist or technologist, ever so often, you may find yourself presenting your work containing complex, technical concepts to a layperson/non-technical audience. Suddenly all that jargon that you comfortably threw around, becomes a bottleneck; and you get blank looks and fidgety fingers. Instead of your audience’s minds, their smartphones start getting unlocked and before you know it, you’ve lost them. In such a situation how can you ensure that, not only does audience get your message, but they are also engaged and …
