The StoryBank

Send us Fan Mail When I started StoryWorks in 2013, the hardest part of moving to the vendor side was rejection. In corporate life, I never had 70% of my proposals turned down. Getting used to that was tough. What kept me going was a belief that stories at work would benefit everyone, speaker and listener. What kept me going was purpose. But I had it easy. We were a very small organisation. In lar...

Send us Fan Mail Nearly 2,500 years ago, Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War: “Throw your soldiers into positions whence there is no escape, and they will prefer death to flight.” A much milder version of this often happens in organisations. A new strategy is announced. But the old one continues, just in case. The sales team is told to sell differently. But the old targets and measures remain. We say...

Send us Fan Mail The other day, my wife forwarded me an ad for a phone-locking device. You put your phone inside and it stays locked for a set time. There are plenty of them online. Her message said, "You might want to use this." A few months ago, I had bought myself a basic feature phone to use post office hours. That experiment didn’t work. So when I saw the phone-locking device ad, I...

Send us Fan Mail There’s a particular kind of competitor that can be very intimidating. They have more money, more people, better technology, a bigger brand, and access to expertise you can't afford  So the natural conclusion is: how do we compete with that? Perhaps that’s the wrong question. Because resources determine how much you can deploy. They don’t necessarily determine how quickly you...

Send us Fan Mail Stories At Work is back with our Saturday stories. The StoryWorks Academy Cohort 1 is sold out. Next cohort starts on 10th January 2027. Some seats in that too are taken. Reach out if you want in.  In 2005, Robert Kaplan and David Norton, writing about a 15 year study observed that on average, 95% of a company's employees were unaware of, or do not understand, its strategy. I...

Send us Fan Mail Many years ago, an electric utility ran a simple experiment. It started telling households how their electricity use compared to their neighbours’ average. It worked. Heavy users cut back. But something unexpected happened as well. Households already using less energy than their neighbours saw the same comparison and started using more. If everyone around you is using more, then w...

Send us Fan Mail Like all of you, I have driven through a roundabout a thousand times. One rule makes it work: the driver entering gives way to traffic already moving inside. No stop sign, no one directing you. Just smoother, safer flow. Smoother, in fact, than four traffic lights at a crossroad. I never thought a roundabout could hold the answer to how we tackle Shadow AI. Today's story says...

Send us Fan Mail "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."   Last Sunday, I chanced upon an interview with John Kim, author of the recent book ‘The Tao of Fundraising’, that brought this old adage alive.   Kim, an investment professional credited with raising more than $70 billion over his career, said something that stuck with me: most fundraisers are good at capturing attention and build...

Send us Fan Mail A 1st of July CNBC article titled “Employers who laid off workers citing AI are already starting to regret it” It talks about how automaker Ford is rehiring hundreds of experienced human engineers to work on quality issues automated systems couldn’t address. The same article talk about similar reverses in companies like Commonwealth Bank of Australia and IBM.This is what happens w...

Send us Fan Mail Back in the late 1990s, as a brand manager at Hindustan Unilever, I was in a briefing for a Jai soap ad shoot. The creative person from the agency was describing a beach volleyball scene — “and there’s a man in a hat, umpiring the game.” I sat there quietly thinking, who wears a hat to umpire beach volleyball?  It was only when he pulled out the storyboard that I saw what he actua...

Send us Fan Mail For more than thirty years, I’ve held a belief that most football fans probably disagree with. I think penalty shootouts are fundamentally unfair. Football is the ultimate team sport. Every goal is built by eleven players. Yet when a World Cup final can’t be decided after 120 minutes, we suddenly ask one person to carry the burden of winning or losing for an entire nation. That be...

Send us Fan Mail All of us have met that person. The new leader. The consultant. The expert. The person who has barely arrived but already knows what’s wrong with everyone else’s work. Sometimes we’ve been that person ourselves. The strange thing is that the problem isn’t overconfidence. Fresh eyes are valuable. Organisations hire people precisely because they bring new ideas. The problem begins w...

Send us Fan Mail In the world of business, full of buzzwords like brainstorming, analysis, rationality, is there still a role for instinct and intuition? Today’s story will convince you there is. It’s about a split-second decision, made with zero data and zero time to think it through. No spreadsheet. No team discussion. No “let’s weigh the options.” Just a feeling. A feeling so strong that it ove...

Send us Fan Mail You’ve presented the data. Made the case. Shown the numbers. And still nothing moved. Sound familiar? The reason that happens is that logic and data alone is often not enough.  Canadian neurologist Donald Calne spent his career studying how humans make decisions. In his book, Within Reason, he concluded: “The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to...

Send us Fan Mail In a world that worships the goal-scorer, this week’s story is about the man who made the goals possible. As a Manchester United fan of 32 years, Bruno Fernandes breaking the all-time Premier League assists record didn’t just make me smile — it reinforced a belief I’ve held for a long time. That the most valuable person in any team is not always the most visible one. Watch this we...

Send us Fan Mail A story that touched my heart about a CEO I admire and an act I never expected to happen in a dog eat dog world. Listen on. For more #storiesatwork do have a look the  playlists of stories on our website - https://bit.ly/SW_Stories  Your friends and family can join our WhatsApp group to get copies of our videos. https://bit.ly/SW_WA_11 Our website has a video version of this story...

Send us Fan Mail Is having data and sharing data enough to convince people to take action? Of course not. We need to help people see reality clearly enough that the right answer becomes obvious. While Data Storytelling is a very powerful way to do it, today's example from Tim Harford's book, ‘The Data Detective’, demonstrates an equally powerful and sometimes more powerful method. A stor...

Send us Fan Mail Like many of you, I'm navigating two very different emotions about AI — the excitement of a kid in a candy store and the fear of someone standing at the edge of a cliff. And with every new release, both are intensifying. Many of us are racing to harness AI's power. But are we asking a harder question: do we know how to stop it if things go wrong? Then I came across two t...

Send us Fan Mail Yesterday, Sir David Attenborough turned one hundred years old. No one alive has done more to make ordinary people like me fall in love with the natural world. A man with a microphone and a camera crew and an extraordinary gift for telling stories that made you feel you were right there, in the rainforest, on the ocean floor, at the edge of the volcano. I have been thinking about...

Send us Fan Mail Every good leader knows how to manage change. New processes, new structures, new tools etc. These are hard, but they're familiar. But AI is asking for something far more challenging. It's not asking us to learn a new tool. It's asking us to rethink how work itself gets done. And that's not a process change or a technology change, it's a CULTURE CHANGE. And...

Send us Fan Mail IC has been reading this book by Ethan Mollick called 'Co-Intelligence', and there's this really interesting paradox he talks about. You'd think that now that AI can look up facts, write code, summarise research, basically do all the "boring" foundational stuff, we wouldn't need to bother learning it ourselves anymore, right? Like, why memorize t...

Send us Fan Mail Most leaders I work with assume their teams tell them the truth. After all, they have open-door policies. They say, "Bring me bad news early”. And they mean it. Yet somehow, the bad news comes late. Or softened. Or not at all. Not because people are being dishonest. More often, they're doing something very human. Presenting reality in the best possible light. The system...

Send us Fan Mail Is there a lesson we can learn from the demise of Encyclopaedia Britannica on how organisations should deal with AI? Since its first publication in 1768, until the early 1990s, Britannica ruled the encyclopaedia market. A 32-volume set, sold door-to-door by a salesforce of over 100,000 people at $1,500 to $2,200 a set. Each salesperson earned $500 to $600 in commission per sale. T...

Send us Fan Mail I was talking to Joy Bhattacharjya yesterday about today's story, and it triggered one from his own memory bank. This was around 2008, when Joy was the Team Director of the Kolkata Knight Riders. A recurring problem had emerged: some of the senior cricketers weren't making it to the team bus on time, the one that took players from the hotel to the ground for practice. So...

Send us Fan Mail During my years in the corporate world, a question that had often been on my mind was what makes people want to bring more of themselves to work? Disengagement at work does not always look dramatic. People do not always rebel. They do not argue. They do not resign in protest. More often, they simply retreat into the minimum. They do what is required, avoid what is optional, and le...