Thanks,

Don.

Storytelling to me is centered on authenticity.

And so whether you're looking at storytelling for a current message or a current initiative, a current product or service, or you're looking at an organization's heritage or an individual's heritage, their legacy, the central theme is authenticity because if the narrative is created properly, and then signed off on by people who are also going to be in the mix of telling that narrative.

It's the central idea that nobody else can copy.

And so the power in storytelling for a business is identifying the ideas that resonate with different stakeholders, different audiences.

and then making sure that those messages reverberate around the organization.

If you are working with someone that is looking to rebrand, what are some of the questions, right? that you ask them before you as a communications expert can really advise them? What things do you need to know before you can even chart their path with them?

But I'm interested myself of like when we actually start putting it together.

Yeah, that's great.

And thanks, Jason, for hosting us today.

I seem to remember there was a group of us at Workplace Options.

And so at the time when this all started melding together, Don and I were both at Workplace Options.

And there were a group of us that were all thriller readers.

And Don and I were having lunch one day in his office.

Can you talk about the thread there, business and then this novel?

What actually moves a person from known to liked and from the liked to trusted? What's the specific thing that does the work there?

Yeah, I'm going to add some context before answering the specific question, because what we know from research is that company reputation overall is tied to CEO reputation.

And we know that because we see it every day in the press, kind of superstar, quote unquote, superstar CEOs who are attached to great companies.

And there's a reason for that.

We also know from research that 92% of people trust fellow individuals versus what a company says.

And so if you kind of sandwich those things together, you have a situation in which my business perspective is being driven by how people feel about me as a human being.

And again, we go back to internally and externally.

Bob, how does an executive find a point of view worth owning and what stops them from claiming it once they found it?

So you're telling us there's a lot of that in The Great Gatsby?

Yeah, yeah.

If you look at Jay Gatsby as an individual, and that's the really, the reason I wrote The Gatsby Code.

I wrote, um, a book that came out in, I think it was around 2013, 2015, called Gatsby.

It was a cultural history of the book.

So I treated the book like it was a person, and wrote the book's biography, the rollercoaster ride that Gatsby took as a novel.

And so a couple years ago, um, there is a biography conference.

Mm-hmm

Then if the employees don't know, well, why am I here? What is the point? And the bosses don't know, how do I run a business like this? Where do we go from here?

Well, I think that it hinges on trying to create a Spaces for psychological safety, probably at the team and individual level.

Like, I don't think companies do great when they try to mandate across a giant organization, even if it's a company with 100 employees, 1,000 or 10,000.

I think that the work should really be done at the person-to-person and person-to-team level because people generally hate their boss or dislike their boss.

but they usually like their colleagues and their teammates.

They may not like all of them, but they like most of them.

So I think that the real change is creating psychological safety so that people feel they can be their authentic selves.

Also, different countries, it seems like, had different issues too, didn't they?