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Is it time to stop telling business stories?
Addressing 2 criticisms of storytelling (which are at least partly justified).
Business owners have been told, “Go find a good story.” Now some consultants and coaches are saying, “no — stop! Don’t tell more stories!”
In an earlier article, I asked the question, “Is business storytelling a fad?” Now I want to delve more deeply into 2 criticisms that are popping up all over the media, both social and print.
Criticism is good because we’re forced to focus on why we do something. We use criticisim to uncover weaknesses in our strategy…and in responding we often emerge with stronger convictions about what we do.
People do make a lot of mistakes in storytelling —and I discuss the top three here.
But sometimes we go deeper than mistakes to question the value of storytelling in the first place.
1 — Companies use business stories to create fake images of themselves as kind, warmhearted, and caring.
This is where you need to distinguish big company vs small company stories.
A big company like Budweiser beer will tell stories about cute puppies on a farm. One story goes like this:
