2414 - Transforming Everyday Work Stories into Leadership Lessons with Storyfire's Neal Foard

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0:46Visit podverify.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, Neil Ford. Neil, you are the founder and CEO of Storyfire. You found on the web at storyfire.net. You've worked with a number of huge brands, including AstraZeneca, Lexus, Merrill Lynch, Kaiser Permanente, Pacor, many others. Neil, it's so great to have you. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, Josh. This has been a kind of thrill for me. What your audience doesn't know is I reached out to Josh because I was such a big fan and God bless him. He has agreed to have me on. So this is a real treat for me.

1:29Delighted to have you here. Before we get going, kind of talking about your superpowers, Neil, I always love hearing what high level leaders are doing for fun, what to get a kick out of, what they enjoy, what they geek out on. And you are, we talked about this just briefly before we hit record. Do you want to share one of your favorite activities? Yeah, yeah. My sort of ongoing hobby, Josh, is I love to send people packages. Now, it doesn't necessarily, it's not just the friends that I have. It's sort of strangers and people I've just met. And I don't mean just packages. I mean the most interesting box you will get in a year.

2:13So I take enormous pains to decorate these things with real energy and love. It takes me hours and hours. And then I will fill these boxes with all kinds of interesting little artifacts and stories and cartoons and news items that I've come across. It's a real kind of care package. Do you remember going to summer camp and your parents would send you a care package sort of halfway through the experience? and it's an emotional care package. In the age of everything digital, everything AI, everything where we live addicted to our devices, this is a way to reach out to somebody and say, I'm thinking about you, I care about you, I've put so much energy into this that you understand this does not scale.

2:57This is just for you. And I get, I think, as big a kick out of this as the person who receives it Because you know that feeling when you've ordered something online and then it's coming to you in the mail? And all that time, from the time you've ordered it till the time it arrives, there's a sort of Christmas Eve sensation. Well, when I send one of these boxes, that's the feeling I have. I cannot wait to hear back from them like, I got your crazy box. What the hell? And I don't know. You probably had the experience, Josh, in your own life of when you send an actual letter through the mail to thank someone or do some other gesture, it's really disproportionate the return of emotion that you get for the effort you put into it because it's so rare.

3:45It's so rare that we take the time to get the stamp, to pull out the stationery, to handwrite our sentiments, to address it and pop it in a mailbox. Because email is so easy that when you make an effort like that, people really feel the human being on the other side of any transaction. Yeah. Well, and I think especially in an era where, you know, AI obviously can replace all of that. And, you know, I work primarily as a fractional CRO in big B2B sales. And, you know, my philosophy is that, you know, in that world, you know, these are very relationship-oriented processes. And so I believe in having smart systems, smart processes.

4:35But if the other person just feels like a cog in the wheel, they don't feel special. Well, they can get that. I can go feel not special anywhere. Right. Oh, my God. That needs to be a quote in Wikipedia that I can feel not special anywhere. Yeah. So the paradox is because you're so organized, because you have so ordered your systems, because you understand the limits and the capacities of automation. The paradox is that you understand better than most the value in the human outreach, the extra effort necessary to make somebody sure that you have a relationship with them. I believe that as we move forward and AI constitutes an even larger part of our outreach and so forth, that people are going to isolate and go, you know, we need to make a special budget and a lot a special time to demonstrate that we're being human beings on the other side of this.

5:30And I think humans are craving it. You know, we look toward, and I think historically we've been trained to, you know, maybe look for that through social media. And I think largely a lot of that ends up feeling a little bit artificial, just like the AI. And unfortunately, that's a lot of what's getting promoted in those algorithms too. It's less about those, you know, personal moments and those intimate moments of people sharing memories and that sort of thing. And it's kind of more slop, more news, more kind of influencer content. And I know I've talked with other leaders and I myself kind of feel this way.

6:09And, you know, it's kind of like that old saying that, you know, it's like the most human brand wins, the most human, you know, if you'll go there, then, I mean, you'll have deep relationships. And I think at the end of the day, we crave that. We crave connection. And that's kind of what you're talking about. And obviously, Neil, this is a huge part of the work you do. Yeah. It's funny because my brand, Storyfire, whoops, sorry, which is, the brand itself was, the name comes from the idea that we're sitting around a campfire telling stories, which is a hundreds of thousands of year old human system of how we exchange information and meaning in our lives.

6:53Every gesture that we do tells a story. This is why I take such extra energy to put together a box to send to a friend, is because that gesture tells the story. What's the story that it tells? This person cares about you enough to carve hours out of their week just Just to let you know they care about you. Now, when you are being more human, as you suggest, that tells a story, too, about somebody who hasn't lost touch of what's important, who doesn't look at you as just a sheep to be fleeced. Yeah. And that quote of yours just now, which I am going to quote you on that, I can go anywhere to feel not important.

7:35And have you ever had this experience? I'll bet you do a lot of flying. I used to do a lot of flying, and I wound up being a diamond status flyer on Delta. And as soon as you crack that diamond tier, they gave you a phone number, like, so that whenever you needed anything, you called that number. And it was always a person on the other end of the line. And not only was it a person, but as soon as you dialed that number, they would say, oh, Mr. Ford, what can I help you with? And you're going, oh, my God, they know who I am. Oh, Lord. You know, I mean, that's the way it used to be. But now that human touch is at such a premium that any gesture that you make out there in the world that demonstrates your humanity, it really earns premium status.

8:21And so what I teach people to do, executives especially, is I want to help you be more human in your job by explaining things better, by explaining things in a way that will resonate with people emotionally, by explaining things in story form, because stories are vastly more memorable than bullet points. And I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about. You know how it goes. You go into a business meeting and they put up six slides and each one of the slides has like four or five bullet points on them. And they sit there and they read you the slide. And by the end of the presentation, I doubt you would remember a single bullet point.

8:55But it's probably been about 15 years, Josh, since you've heard the story of the tortoise and the hare, or more, or David and Goliath, or Goldilocks and the Three Bears. And yet you not only can repeat those stories to me, you can tell me what the moral is. And in other words, I wasn't able to just remember the information. I can remember what it meant. so in a business meeting if you want to encourage people to return to office you don't just say here are the 15 reasons you come back in the office you paint a picture of what it's like to have a mentor in an office environment and how you're going you're not going to get that you're not going to have those wonderful emotional relationships that you would build if you're out there than if you were inside the walls.

9:47And when a president paints that picture, all of a sudden return to office doesn't look like something they're foisting on you. It looks like you're missing an opportunity to gain the life experience and the institutional knowledge of older workers who crave the idea that they would have a protege. So the difference is so gigantic between communicating with stories, which is the default operating system for human beings, and communicating by memos and data. The gap is so wide that the people that I coach and train, they really say, oh my God, you're not charging enough for this. Imagine, Josh, you're on an earnings call.

10:32You have a company that's publicly held, and you're about to do an earnings call, and you are so compelling and so well rehearsed, and you have just the right anecdote in order to illustrate your points, that every journalist, every financial journalist on that call, the impression they leave with is this company is in very good hands. That's worth millions of dollars in the reportage that they leave afterwards. Because you've left them with an emotional memory, a feeling, a sensation that everything is going to be okay. A great quarterback does that. They just make you feel like you're going to win.

11:13They say that Tim Tebow used to do that when he was at Denver. He had this awful, he had this awful capacity for throwing balls, you know, 12 yards outside the window. And he was not a gifted thrower, but he had a way of convincing everybody we're going to beat Pittsburgh. And, you know, it's not logical, but he had that capacity. He could make people feel like they were going to win. And that's when a president or a CFO especially can tell a great and compelling story. It makes people believe. It feels honest in a way that numbers can sometimes be used to deceive. Neil, and I don't know if you can answer that in just a couple of minutes, But how can we get better at just remembering to communicate via stories when it often feels far more efficient to just answer the darn question?

12:13Well, answer it in a memo or a Slack response and move on. You know, absolutely. Memos have absolutely have their place. But unfortunately, we often treat meetings as though they were the place to use a memo. You know, you've heard that cliche, which is this meeting could have been a memo. And they're correct. The reason this meeting could have been a memo is because the way you're conducting the meeting is as if it is a memo, as opposed to the reason I've gathered you here is so that we can have a conversation. and I'd like to communicate and the way to remember it is almost like Steve Martin used to say that whenever he saw a comedian come out on stage and say something like how's everybody doing he immediately put them in the category of amateur because the first words out of your mouth should be something funny like don't spoil the beachfront real estate of the first 10 seconds come out and grab that room.

13:10And a great, great company president or founder, if they want to be thought of as the person with vision, then the first words out of your mouth should be something along the lines of, I'd like to tell you about something that happened to me two weeks ago. Or can I tell you my favorite brand? Like imagine going into a business meeting in which you're going to be discussing a new initiative. And instead of going right to an announcement, we're all here to talk about a new initiative. And here's the agenda slide. Instead of that, the chairman gets up and he says, I'd like to tell you about something that will never go out of style.

13:55Right? And as soon as you start that way, everybody is 100 % invested in finding out what you're about to say. Nobody's doodling. Nobody's eating their donut. Everybody's putting their cup of coffee down because all of a sudden they can't wait to hear. They cannot wait to hear about this. And when you start with a story, you do a few things at the same time. The first is that you communicate that a human being is talking to you. And therefore, automatically, you feel a little bit less nervous about what this meeting's about. You feel a little bit more welcome. You feel a little bit more like you're part of a tribe.

14:44You feel a little bit more confident that the leader knows what they're doing. Because starting a meeting with a great story is something that requires a little bit of rehearsal. It isn't you just going into one of nine meetings that day. It's, I prepped for this. I prepared for this moment. I'd like to share something. There's also, if you are good at it, if you're good at telling a compelling story, and your story is apropos to the moment, it's appropriate, it's apt, it's insightful to what the rest of the meeting is going to be. Wow, you get 20 % more IQ points everybody gives to you because they go, this person is really charismatic.

15:27And I have a feeling that if whatever it is they're arguing in favor of, they've thought it through. This is not somebody who showed up unprepared or dubious. And the choice of story is very important for communicating what kind of person you are. I'll give you an example of an experience that I had. I tell this story a lot because to me, it just threw into such fine relief the difference between two people based entirely on what they choose to talk about. Not how they say it, but what topic they choose to discuss. So I blew out two tires on the same corner one day, and I was in a terrible mood going, damn it, I can't exactly pull over to fix it because I blew out two.

16:10So I only have one spare. What am I going to do now? Now, as it happens, I was only 100 feet from a tire store when it happened. So I had those mixed emotions. You know, I'm ecstatic that I found a tire store and completely depressed that now I have to buy two new tires. There I am in the waiting room of the tire store experiencing this seesaw of emotions. And there are two women on either side of me that look very similar, have a very similar haircut. Their wardrobe is very similar. Everything about them is they vote for the same people. They eat the same food. You get the idea. Now, one of them is on her phone and she is complaining loudly into her phone about a bad experience she had at a restaurant that morning.

16:52And she is saying that she's pretty sure that the waiter got her order wrong twice on purpose. And so she's very incensed and she complains to the manager and tries to get the waiter fired. And the manager isn't going to fire the waiter. So I think a mimosa got thrown in this story. And then she says, I'm going to leave a scathing Yelp review. And she's probably going to put up signs on telephone poles all around the restaurant to discourage people from going there. So eventually, she hangs up mercifully. Fifteen seconds later, the other woman leans into me and in a quiet voice says, I had a wonderful experience at a restaurant this morning.

17:30I was enjoying my coffee. And a cute girl comes walking by the window with a big dog. and I was so taken by the, that made me laugh how she was so petite and the dog was so big and then I noticed that she was noticing an elderly gentleman who was about to cross the street but was very reticent because it was a big boulevard and I think he didn't think he was going to make it before the signal turned green again. So he's hesitant. This young woman goes right up to him, says a few words and then the two of them walk arm in arm across the street while the big dog patrols in front of the cars, make sure nobody gets any fancy ideas.

18:08They get to the other side and they continue their conversation. And then this is my favorite part. The two of them just walked away together, still arm in arm with the dog. Isn't that wonderful? Yeah. And I went in a very loud voice. I go, that is wonderful. Now, my question to you is who would you rather spend the day with? right and it's obvious now a a president or or a vice president that stands in front of a room and says something upbeat and positive and signals that there's reason for hope and makes you feel good like we're not all lost this kind of person it's fun to be around them and agreed but whereas if somebody goes in there and all they do is moan about you know things they're just farting their grievances into your life and subconsciously and consciously you find you have an aversion to that person so it's really important that a president at any senior executive go into a meeting prepared to say something upbeat positive even when things are bad right because we all have negative experiences like that woman no doubt had some negative things happen.

19:25But it can be, I mean, to tell her story a different way, it would be like, oh, I had a terrible experience at a restaurant this morning. And you know what it made me, what it reminded me of is when you find a really good waiter, you really do need to over tip because it's so, they make it so much more pleasant. Can I tell you about a great waiter I had? That's somewhat of the same story. It was the same stuff that happened, but she reacts to the world differently. And a great leader will do the same thing. They will find a reason to still have hope. They will give you a reason to work hard despite the fact that we're losing.

19:59You know, great, great coaches are geniuses at spotting what motivates you as an individual, not us as a group. They're really good at understanding each individual needs a different version of this. And so, go ahead. Neil, I'm so sorry. We've got one minute left and I want to make sure I honor our, I know I've been captivated by your storytelling. But listen, you've got courses on your website. So folks that want to learn these skills, you also, as a speaker, you've done a lot of very, very notable speaking. Your website is storyfire.net. When somebody goes there, what would you recommend they do?

20:41Well, what's nice about it is you can explore the courses. and I have great little samples of how it works. The whole course is sort of six-minute videos. There's about 25, 27 of these six-minute videos. So it's very bite-sized. It's the sort of thing you can watch when you're waiting for someone or you're having pancakes or whatever. And what they'll do is they are the encapsulated and accumulated wisdom that I got from 30 years of making business presentations and learning what works and what doesn't work. and if you go to www.storyfire.net, what you can do is you can sort of see little samples of what it's like and then there are different levels that you can go and just explore the course.

21:22I love it. Awesome. Neil Ford, storyfire.net. Neil, it's been so great having you. Thank you for a great segment. I really appreciate our conversation. You need longer episodes, baby. This has been fun. Thank you. Truly, I do. Thank you so much. All right.

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