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    StoryPilot: Navigating from Idea to Story For More Effective Presenting and Selling
    StoryPilot: Navigating from Idea to Story For More Effective Presenting and Selling
    StoryPilot: Navigating from Idea to Story For More Effective Presenting and Selling
    Ebook134 pages2 hours

    StoryPilot: Navigating from Idea to Story For More Effective Presenting and Selling

    By Robert Z. Chew

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    About this ebook

    StoryPilot takes readers through the important second step in great presenting: creating a strong story. StoryPilot takes readers through three storytelling techniques for business presentations: the Chronological, The Spatial, and The Inspirational. This is a step by step guide for beginners and pros alike looking to dramatically improve their presentation and selling skills. This is part two in The BoldPoint Now Technique of powerful communicating.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateFeb 1, 2013
    ISBN9781624889097
    StoryPilot: Navigating from Idea to Story For More Effective Presenting and Selling

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      Book preview

      StoryPilot - Robert Z. Chew

      Resources

      Chapter 1

      Why Story Matters

      I am not a natural-born storyteller. Perhaps you too are not a natural. I was always the one listening, thoroughly immersed in the story being told by someone else. Some are gifted storytellers. I am not one of them, but I changed. I learned how to be a storyteller, and so can you.

      I am in awe of those who can spin yarns with ease, comfort, and humor. It is easy to fall under the spell of an expert storyteller, and that is why story has played a starring role in the human experience. Maybe you find it heart-poundingly difficult to get on stage, or behind a podium, or to speak up at meetings when it seems all the eyes of the world are bearing down on you. The fear can be paralyzing.

      Ironically, and haphazardly, I have made a career out of telling stories. Of course, I did not know this when I started on my journey, but thirty years later after being a reporter, magazine editor and publisher, public relations executive, management consultant, and author, it finally came to me that this is what I do: I tell stories and I use stories to engage people, to have them see my point of view, and to enable them to look at things in new ways – and even help them sell ideas or products.

      If I trace it back to my beginnings, I suppose my enchantment with stories came from watching movies and television, movies such as Bridge on the River Kwai and Saturday morning Charlie Chan mysteries. Other then comic books, I wasn’t much of a reader, although some books hooked me instantly, like treasure hunting books and World War II stories. When I was fourteen or fifteen my mother bought me a sleek, portable electric typewriter, an Olivetti. It was as high-tech as anything imaginable for a kid in 1968.

      I popped the locks and opened its black plastic case and there it was, a beautiful engine for thinking, with cool multi-colored buttons for each letter and number. I plugged it in and turned it on. It purred. I slid a piece of yellow paper between the rollers. Clack. Clack. This was when it started, telling stories. What else do you do with a typewriter? You type out words and phrases and then sentences and before you know it you are writing little stories about your friends, your sister and your little brother.

      Soon, I found myself writing full-on short stories. The stories came out of me from who knows where, but it occurred to me then that there was no better job in the world than writing stories for a living. Imagine, you just sit there and make stuff up and you get paid!

      Of course, other things came along, like college and sports and girls, but somehow the idea of writing stayed with me. Later, at the University of Southern California, after struggling with being an architect (failing miserably at trigonometry) and finding macroeconomics as dull as anything man ever created, I discovered my major, English. I had no interest in being an educator. I wanted to learn about writing. I wanted to learn about storytelling, too, but it was really about putting beautiful words together one after another in long gorgeous strings that would wow people, and would wow me.

      Ironically, much later, I ended up teaching writing and communications at USC’s crosstown rival, UCLA, in the extension division. And so, unknowingly, I found my career take a new direction down the path of storytelling. Later, I would get a degree in creative non-fiction writing from Ohio State University, I would get a job writing a column on advertising for Advertising Age Magazine in Chicago and New York, I would become an editor-in-chief of two business publications, and I would start a regional consumer magazine. I was all of 27 years old and didn’t have a clue as to where this would all lead.

      That was not exactly true. I imagined living in Paris and writing like Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. But that was ridiculous. Instead, I shifted to increasingly better paying jobs to keep me in food and rent money in what was (and still is) a very expensive New York City. It was then I got a job for one of the big Madison Avenue advertising agencies, Young & Rubicam, and began working for its Burson-Marsteller public relations division, at the time the largest PR firm in the world.

      It was a great eleven-year run working there, even if my writing career was on hold. I learned ways of selling ideas and packaging them up for clients like GE, Coca-Cola, DuPont, and RCA. My father was a magazine ad space salesman and a publisher in Cleveland, so I knew something of the patter, the tricks of the trade, and how to speak to what clients wanted -- and not to what we wanted to sell them.

      My father always used to say, Nothing happens in this world until somebody sells something to someone. It was a line from IBM’s Thomas Watson, but it stuck with me. I was not a natural born salesman, either. I was, deep down, just that 15 year-old kid clacking out stories on my Olivetti. But I learned the hard way. I failed and failed at presenting and selling and standing up in front of crowds and embarrassing my bosses and myself. I stammered and felt disconnected to what I was saying, as if there was a delay in the time-space continuum from my brain to my lips. After all, none of the words were really mine, it was a presentation by committee and I was just one of the parrots showing I could squawk.

      Of course, in the 1980’s there weren’t any PowerPoint templates or Internet or iPads or personal computers or Kindles. Instead, we used clear sheets of acetate paper placed one at a time on a boxy overhead projector that displayed our tiny typed-out words and bullet points on a screen. More colorful visuals were shown on easels or in hand outs.

      If we had the budget for Kodak slides, it was a big deal. Slides were expensive to design, create, and change. A 100-slide presentation could cost several thousand dollars while acetates where cheap and fast, even if they just consisted of lines and lines of small black type displayed on a wall. You made up for this dullness with animated talk. Everyone was used to it. It was state of the art for daily presenting back then. It was the first form of Death by PowerPoint -- Death by Acetate.

      The idea of creating story structure for these presentations was never considered. Maybe there were some natural story elements in our pitches, or a built-in drama that led up to the Big Idea we saved for the end, but as far as I can remember the idea of story just never came up.

      Despite the primitiveness, it still worked and we had the best client list in the industry and the company grew annually by over 50 percent for many years to follow. It was all achieved with details, words, imagination, exacting budgets, and timelines, and client relationships. The big, flashy sales pitches were staged by the mother-ship advertising agency down the street, at Y&R. They had real money, money for slides, film (this was pre-video), and music. They had money for storytelling and razzle-dazzle that we couldn’t even dream about, since their stakes were much higher, hundreds of millions of dollars in television ad buys versus our puny hundreds of thousands of dollars for press releases.

      Today, everybody can afford razzle-dazzle.

      The visual technologies available today are so easy to use, so powerful, and so inexpensive a single person can stand before a crowd of thousands and, if they know the techniques of point of view, story structure, and high-impact design, they can change the world.

      At the very minimum, one can take a typical Death by PowerPoint presentation and make it

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