Business Book Review: Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins by Annette Simmons
Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins is a permission slip to make business personal. Using storythinking to, not replace, but complement objective thinking in business.
My Rating: ★★★★
Length: 236 pages
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Released: 2015
Key takeaway for personal branding
In Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins, expert storyteller, Annette Simmons, challenges the business world to adopt ‘storythinking’.
Over decades of experience, Simmons’ storytelling savvy has been engaged by leading business leaders. From the Pentagon to Microsoft.
As Simmons acknowledges, thinking in stories is not always easy for the average business mind. Which often prefers to think in facts and numbers.
The pitch is to not abandon objective thinking, but complement it. To give facts subjective context.
Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins provides a bank of inspiration for adding storytelling to your personal brand as a leader.
This is less about storytelling formulas and more about paying attention to the types of stories you’re telling.
Key stories Simmons outlines are:
Who-I-am stories: Build trust
Why-I-am here stories: Explain what qualifies you
Teaching stories: Demonstrate how new behaviours change results
Vision stories: Reframe present difficulties to ‘worth it’
Value-in-Action stories: Demonstrate what the value means
I-know-what-you-are-thinking-stories: Build trust by sharing secret suspicions, and dispelling objections
For authenticity-in-action, Simmons also recommends four story types:
A time you shined: Communicates integrity, compassion or learning
A time you blew it: Shares vulnerability to build trust
A mentor: Expresses gratitude and humility, and likely highlights your own values
A book, movie or current event: Those involved have done the hard work for you. Explain what it means to you and connect its relevance.
Favourite Quotes
Unless you bring a beating heart to your message, it is dead.
Most personal stories are perfectly appropriate whenever the discussion involves “persons”.
By contrast, stories invite people into your perspective and allow them to draw their own conclusions.
If you are so professional and so private that no one really knows you, you are making it twice as hard for others to trust you.
Who taught you what was truly important in this world?…When you tell a story that paints a loving portrait of your mentor and demonstrates that you paid close attention to his or her actions, you reveal as much about yourself as about the person in your story.
While training courses in active listening may teach you the pragmatics of holding eye contact, nodding, leaning forward, paraphrasing back, and making reassuring noises, they don’t teach you to actually listen. They teach us how to fake listening.
“PowerPoint doesn’t kill presentations, people do.” My main concern is that PowerPoint lets you think you communicated when you didn’t.
In Whoever Tells The Best Story Wins, Simmons challenges you to see business storytelling opportunities everywhere. In your successes as well as failures. In your favourite movies and books. And in your mentors. Because storytelling begins with paying attention.
Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins: Available on Amazon.
