For the past six months, it’s been anything but business-as-usual around here, and here’s why. In March of this year, our attention got swept away by a development that originated in Bentonville, Arkansas. My friend Donna, who has been a bigSTORY client at her previous two companies, [...]
I’m lying awake in a hotel room in Milwaukee at 2:30 AM, wondering why someone hasn’t called us back who’d promised to call us back weeks ago about a significant piece of business. Even as I run scenarios in my mind, my noisy, nosey mind, I know I’m barking up a fruitless [...]
Early in my career, as as a senior staff publicist for Disney, there were two words I avoided in any press material or script I wrote: Magic and Wizard. I wasn’t in a position to make policy about such things, and I’d have been an idiot to try to erase that language from [...]
The Next Act for HR is the theme of our first 2016 conference. It will be a half-day experience in downtown Los Angeles that will look at the evolving organization, and HR’s changing role in it. The centerpiece of the event will be an immersive theater performance. Attendees will find [...]
In a speech to high school counselors at a conference at Wheelock College in Boston this week, bigSTORY co-founder Jeremi Karnell posed this provocative question: How much meaning can we liberate from a student’s narrative? What he said in response: Collaboration is important. Your students [...]
Our friend, Lee, who’s a researcher at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda MD, visited us in L.A. last week while she was in town on business. We were socializing one evening when I mentioned that my father was a farmer from Indiana who dreamed of being a cowboy movie star. And Lee [...]
It’s not that far away. 2020. The year we get blinded by all the references to perfect eyesight. Seriously, people, it’s one undergrad degree away from being sci-fi-turned-reality. Year 2020. If you are a continuous learner, as one ought to be, given all the learning resources available [...]
As a professional storyteller, you are familiar with what it takes to tell an effective story. You have a good grasp of the fundamentals of character, plot, emotional stakes, theme, conflict. Of narrative tension and dynamics. You can rattle off the stages of the Hero’s Journey like a [...]
Google makes a compelling case for what they call the “Micro Moments” that influence clicks and transactions. The idea, as Brian Solis and other social conversationalists point out, is to engage customers in as many of these micro moments as possible. Solis writes in Forbes: [...]
An attorney friend of ours wrote to us: “I just spent four days at the trial lawyers college using psychodrama techniques to discover story and then being coached in how to tell the story. The coolest stuff. Invigorating truly.” The training included a presentation by renowned Hollywood [...]