Making Your Business Message Stick
Chip then distracts the class for 10 minutes by showing a clip of a Monty Python movie. When it's over, he asks the students what they remember about the presentations. "There's this kind of nervous laughter that goes around the room," says Chip. Only 1 out of every 20 people in the class is able to recall any individual number from any of the presentations they heard.
When the speaker told a story, on the other hand, about a personal experience with property crime, two out of three students remembered. "You can take the moral out of a story, but you can't reconstruct the story out of the moral," says Dan. Stories may not fit neatly into a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint, but the more managers rely on narratives—instead of charts and graphs—to share their ideas, the less sleep the rest of us will be getting in their meetings.
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