Menu
Every journey that is successful has culs-de-sac and speed bumps. I carry a wisdom gene through my life through the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Use state-of-the-heart technology online and offline to turn listeners into viral advocates and customers into raving fans.
Language is a more recent technology. Your body language, your eyes, your energy will come through to your audience before you even start speaking.
I think any new technology that helps connect and create social cohesion is great. But at the end of the day, you and I are analog creatures. We have to take ‘oohs and aahs’ and convert them to 0s and 1s and then convert them back to ‘oohs and aahs.’ Narratives that work in social networks are the exchange of stories that are told well.
At Casablanca we did ‘Midnight Express,’ ‘Flashdance,’ and ‘The Deep.’ My willingness for risk has always been my strength.
Social cohesion was built into language long before Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter – we’re tribal by nature. Tribes today aren’t the same as tribes thousand of years ago: It isn’t just religious tribes or ethnic tribes now: It’s sports fans, it’s communities, it’s geography.
The idea is, we’re still a society where we recognize and see and even sometimes seek members of our own tribe, whatever that tribe is. It could be ethnic, religious, geographic, political.
Think about all the great leaders. Think about Obama. Think about Clinton. Think about Nelson Mandela. Think about all the people that we know who are very successful in business, in politics and religion. What are they? They tell purposeful stories. They move people to action by aiming at the heart.
Most young people haven’t used their storytelling skills since they were 8 or 9 or 10 and wanted to persuade Mom and Dad to take them to the ball game.
My mom used to tell me stories at night, read books to me – and I read ’em over and over and over again. And you know what I learned from that? I went back and looked at everything – Why do I like reading the same stories over and over and over again? What, was I some kind of nincompoop? No – the narrative gave me connection with my mom.