6 of the Most Accomplished Business Storytellers Dissect Signature Stories in This Podcast Miniseries
Signature Stories is a miniseries inside Unthinkable where world-class business storytellers dissect a single story together with us. We analyze what makes it work, how they built it (and how it’s evolved), and how they use it to support their brand and serve the audience.
You can find every episode wherever you get your podcasts.
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Too often, when we try to learn from our favorite storytellers, we hear generalized advice, only getting fleeting glimpses inside the crafting of their actual stories. It’s not their fault. The places they appear around the business world are mainly concerned with broad trends, or else the interviewers on those shows have no desire to focus on the minutiae of making stuff. But that’s exactly where all the magic happens and the most powerful lessons lie.
If we want to learn to become more effective storytellers, we can’t merely acquire someone else’s process. The workflow, tools, and techniques we use to guide the work can be handed to us. But they don’t uniquely require us. That’s when the other two elements of mastery kick in: our practice and our posture.
In this series, we endeavor to put those two things on display. Forget the generalized advice around what “one” should do to tell better stories. What do THEY do? Let’s examine their actual practice, and let’s witness their posture as a storyteller, as both the actual act of crafting a story AND their vision, taste, confidence, and general humanity are the two things we most need to understand ourselves.
We’ll do this NOT through a general backstory interview, but by asking these individuals to dissect ONE signature story more closely than they’ve ever done publicly before.
There’s an old quote from Ira Glass: “Great stories happen to those who can tell them.” Of course, what he’s NOT saying is, “Worthy experiences to share only happen to people who know how to share them.” What he IS saying is what any effective storyteller will tell you:
Great stories aren’t simply found. They’re made.
To enjoy this series, find Unthinkable in your preferred podcast player:
In this series…
Melanie Deziel
Author, Prove It and The Content Fuel Framework
Cofounder, the Creator Kitchen
Formerly: The New York Times, HuffPost, TIME, Inc
Michael Bungay Stanier
Author, How to Work with (Almost) Anyone and The Coaching Habit (“a classic” - Brene Brown)
Over 1.5 copies sold
Host, 2 Pages with MBS
Jenny Blake
Author, How to Work with (Almost) Anyone and The Coaching Habit (“a classic” - Brene Brown)
Host, Pivot and Free Time podcasts (more than 2m downloads)
Former Career Development Program Manager at Google
Amanda Natividad
VP Marketing, SparkToro
Writer, The Menu newsletter
Formerly at Fitbit and the LA Times
Simone Stolzoff
Author, The Good Enough Job
Writer, The Atlantic, Wired, NY Times
Former at IDEO
Jay Baer
7x author (latest: The Time to Win)
Hall of Fame Keynote Speaker
#2 most-followed tequila teacher in the world (non-celebrity division)