This is the single most powerful thing any business can have

The one thing that would transform any business on the planet is the one thing 99% of them simply don’t have.

Not only do they not have it, they don’t even think about it.

It’s not capital.
It’s not talent.
It’s not technology.
It’s not even strategy.

(Though that is contained within it…).

No, it is this:

A story.

A story about the business, where it’s come from, where it’s going, what it’s fighting, and what it is doing in the world.

In this era of “storytelling” and all the rest of it, this probably sounds quite glib. “Oh, yeah, a story, sure”. But it’s actually much more significant than you think. Not many people realise that our entire understanding of what we call “reality” is shaped by stories. They determine what we pay attention to and what we don’t. How we react in one scenario, and another. Much greater minds than me have commented that there is no “objective reality”, because it is all a product of consciousness, and the narratives of consciousness shape it.

That’s all a bit heavy, so let’s just leave it at this: reality will bend to a story.

And so, if a business has a story, its path through the world will be shaped by it – and the world will make space for the story to come true.

More prosaically what this means is:

• A story will attract talent.
• A story will attract investment.
• A story will attract customers.
• A story will give identity.
• A story will give differentiation.
• A story will give focus.
• A story will give direction.

When you close your eyes and imagine a visionary founder, you are not imagining the most attractive founder. Or the most charismatic. Or the one with the most money. No, invariably, you are imagining the one with a story. The one who could get up on a stage and tell what amounts to a thrilling TED talk about their business.

These stories have a beginning, middle, and end. They have heroes and villains. They have obstacles to overcome. They have a narrative arc with a hook upon which the narrative turns. They have all that basic stuff.

It’s just they are about a business, not a person.

Now, keen-eyed among you will have realised that my belief in writing your strategy as a piece of convincing prose is the beginning of such a story. It’s not just one data point; it’s a sequence of information and thus is already well on its way to being a narrative.

A strategy creates the “core” of your story, since it should:

• Pick a thing you want to change (a villain)
• Explain how you are going to change that thing (the hook)
• Explain what that means to the customer (the value)

However to pad it out into a story, with extra reality-bending power, it needs other bits too, such as an origin story, a belief, and a compelling vision.

Roughly speaking I think the overall flow should be something like:

1. Origin story
2. Introduction of the problem
3. Your belief about the problem
4. How you are going to overcome it
5. What this will mean for customers (i.e. individuals)
6. What this will mean for the world at large (i.e. larger vision)

Let me give you a flavour by sketching this out for myself:

1. (Origin Story) After a career in advertising, I got sick of “putting lipstick on the pig”, and wanted to work on the “pig” itself, creating businesses that are inherently interesting and easy to sell. So I stepped out as a consultant trying to sell these services, without even realising that what I was doing was “strategy”. Over time the truth dawned on my however, and I discovered that this was already a “thing” – and I was quite disappointed because I wasn’t half as clever and original as I thought. But then I noticed something…
2. (Introduction of the problem) If I, a “strategy consultant”, knew nothing about about strategy, then no wonder my clients didn’t either. There was something about this discipline that was secret. Hidden from view. Something that led to it being locked away in corporate ivory towers – too complex and technical to be grasped by the people who really needed it, founders and CEOs. A tragedy, in my view, because this wisdom can be truly transformative. How could we fix this…
3. (My belief) Well, an advantage of my ignorant background was that I always saw things in very crude terms. And this meant I could see something a lot of strategy experts couldn’t – that strategy is actually very simple. This is obvious when you consider that the greatest strategists of all time did it naturally, without studying it in a formal way. So why couldn’t the simple principles be implanted in the brains of every founder on the planet? That’s what gave me my idea…
4. (How I’m going to overcome the problem) What if I boiled strategy down to its essentials – the 20% of knowledge that makes 80% of the difference – and packaged it in such a way as that it would be maximally digestible for the largest number of people? This would mean simple provocative language, bite-sized pieces, and modern media practices (social etc.). Done right, this could make a big difference…
5. (What this means for customers) For individual founders and CEOs, they would be able to start making slightly more strategic decisions, and unlocking far more value with their businesses – as well as stopping making the dumb un-strategic mistakes that are holding them back.
6. (What this means for the world) And more widely, this “mass upskilling” could result in an explosion of value for the world at large. Because a strategic business, by definition, is a business that is delivering value. So, in the macro, everyone wins

That, for the time being, is the story of my business. You can see that the strategy is embedded within it (all the Starbucks stuff about “raising the floor, not the ceiling”), but it’s been narrativised to a further level that makes it more complete and inspiring.

I’d venture to say that this would be semi-interesting even to people who don’t care about the “strategy industry”, because it has sticky story-style parts that make a piece of communication interesting. And… maybe… reality shaping.

The last thing I want to stress here is that many businesses (although still not enough) have a marketing story. A story to sell their thing to their customers. That is essential too, but it is different from this, because it’s restricted only to the stuff that matters to the self-interested customer.

This is a fuller story, where the business is the protagonist, not the customer. Think of it in terms of the difference between Apple’s Think Different ads (marketing story) versus the stuff Steve Jobs said in his inspiring talks (business story).

The latter is what you need, because the latter gives birth to everything else.

This is why you’re bothering.
This is why the damn thing exists.
This is why it matters.
This is why the world should bend to your wishes.

And if you have one, bend it will.

So critically analyse yourself. Could you stand up on stage, and tell this? Could you hit the beats? Could you have people enraptured? Or at least mildly diverted?

Probably not. Or at least, not yet…