The StoryBank

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...

Send us Fan Mail “What gets measured gets managed”, has been one of my steadfast beliefs in both my personal and professional life. Good intentions and goals are not enough on their own. They have to be measured regularly to see if we are indeed on track to deliver. Today’s story is a beautiful illustration of what happens when we not only measure, but make the measure visible on a regular basis....

Send us Fan Mail When people ask me about my success mantras, my answer is simple: luck, discipline, hard work and attention to detail. Attention to detail is a strength I have always been proud of. But early in my career, a boss gave me a piece of advice that stayed with me. During an annual feedback session he said, “I really admire your attention to detail. But I want you to develop another ski...

Send us Fan Mail Sometimes hidden behind the cloak of ambition is something we rarely name, and that is greed. A goalpost that keeps shifting. Because if we can achieve more, then why not? That's when the team stops celebrating wins and starts dreading anything less than the last record they broke. And somewhere in that cycle of achievement, a quiet question stops getting asked: Is this still...

Send us Fan Mail Have you been in a situation where after tirelessly trying to address a crisis you realised that you were addressing the symptoms rather than the problem itself? In today’s episode I will move away from my usual approach of sharing a real story to sharing a parable that has a significant lesson for both business and life. I first read this story in the book ‘Upstream’ by Dan Heath...

Send us Fan Mail What if you're too incompetent to realise your incompetence? We explore this in today's story. We now live in a world where crafting a question takes much longer than getting an answer. You type a prompt and get a polished answer. If it all ended there then all would be good. But it doesn't. You often walk away feeling like you have learnt something, you are now mor...

Send us Fan Mail Sometimes we end up holding onto things for far longer than they need to be held on to. And it may need an outsider looking in to identify that.  This story talks about one such perspective that can be used when one needs to show another how it is of no use holding on when moving on is the right way forward. Listen on. For more #storiesatwork do subscribe to our YouTube channel wh...

Send us Fan Mail Have you ever been under so much pressure that time available seemed to be inadequate? What was your solution? For many people, the answer will be to work longer and harder. But is that always the right answer. Isn’t that mistaking effort for result. Listen on…… For more #storiesatwork do subscribe to our YouTube channel which has two playlists - #StoryBank https://bit.ly/WStoryB...

Send us Fan Mail “Is this really the same guy I shared lunch with in school? How did he turn out this way? Is he really so rabid? Why is he so stupid?”.  Have you read WhatsApp messages on a school group and reacted in this manner. Their views feel so far removed from yours that it’s hard to reconcile the person with the opinion. And if you bothered to question that person’s point of view, he too...

Send us Fan Mail Have you ever blindly followed Google Maps... only to end up somewhere you definitely shouldn't be? I have. That tiny frustration reveals a much larger pattern in business: we increasingly hand over judgment to external “advisors” — data dashboards, predictive models, algorithms, and now AI systems. They’re often remarkably accurate. That’s exactly why they’re dangerous. When...

Send us Fan Mail Answer this question with a yes or a no - Do you believe that intelligent human beings usually take rational decisions? Most business strategies are built on a quiet assumption: that customers behave rationally. For example, we believe that if we make something cheaper, faster, or more efficient, people will naturally choose it. But real life rarely works that way. Human beings do...