Managing
The most useful business storytelling examples are not brand campaigns but the stories people tell inside organisations every week: the project update, the budget request, the change announcement, the customer story in a pitch, the data story and the failure review. Each works the same way: a specific person in a specific moment, what went wrong and what it costs, and the decision you need. Below are eight of them, each shown weak and strong, then three well-documented company examples and a fill-in template.
Search for business storytelling examples and you mostly find advertising: personalised bottles, sportswear campaigns, brand films. They are good stories, but they are marketing, made by agencies for millions of strangers. Most people who search for business storytelling have a different job: getting a decision from a manager, a budget from finance or commitment from a team, usually in five minutes, often in an email.
Every example below uses the same three-part shape, explained in full in how to structure a business story: context (one person, one moment), tension (what went wrong and what it costs), resolution (what changes and what you need decided).
Weak: The migration is 70% complete. Some integration challenges have emerged, and the timeline is under review.
Strong: On Monday our largest client tried to export last year's invoices and could not. That is the integration we have not finished, and four other clients use it at month-end. We can hit the 30th if we pause the reporting work for two weeks. I need a yes or no on that by Thursday.
Why it works: a real moment instead of a percentage, a cost the listener cares about, and a decision with a deadline.
Weak: We are requesting additional headcount to improve support capacity and customer satisfaction.
Strong: Last quarter, Meera answered 1,100 tickets on her own during the overnight shift. In the two weeks she was on leave, response times went from four hours to two days and we lost a renewal. One more hire on nights removes that single point of failure. The cost is less than the renewal we lost.
Why it works: the risk has a name and a date, and the cost is framed against something already lost.
Weak: As part of our ongoing transformation journey, we are restructuring into product-aligned squads to drive agility.
Strong: Last month a customer waited eleven days for a fix that took two hours to write, because it needed sign-off from three teams. From next month, the people who build, test and ship each product sit in one team, so that fix would take two days. Here is what changes for you, and what does not.
Why it works: it starts with the problem the change solves, and it answers the question everyone is silently asking: what does this mean for me?
Weak: Our platform delivers best-in-class efficiency gains across the order lifecycle.
Strong: A distributor much like you was re-keying every order from email into their system by hand. Two people, all day. After eight weeks with us, orders flowed in automatically and those two people moved to chasing late payments, which had been nobody's job.
Why it works: the buyer sees themselves in the first sentence, and the result is a picture, not an adjective.
Weak: a dashboard with fourteen charts and the title Q3 Performance Overview.
Strong: one chart, with the title Repeat orders fell after we changed the delivery window, the line highlighted, and one sentence underneath: If we restore the evening slot, we expect to recover most of the drop within a quarter.
Why it works: the title says what the chart shows, so the audience does not have to find it. More in data storytelling for business presentations.
Weak: There were some communication gaps, and lessons have been learned.
Strong: At 4 pm on the Friday, Arjun saw the error rate climbing and messaged the channel. Nobody owned the channel that weekend, so the message sat until Monday. The process worked exactly as designed, and the design had a gap. From now on, alerts go to a named person on call.
Why it works: it blames the system, not the person, and the resolution is specific enough to check.
Weak: Our vision is to become the leading customer-centric provider in our segment.
Strong: Three years ago customers chose us because we were cheapest. Today two competitors are cheaper, and our best customers stay because we answer the phone. So we are going to stop competing on price and become the company that is easiest to reach. That means fewer products and more people on support.
Why it works: it shows the change in the world that makes the strategy necessary, and it names what the organisation will stop doing.
Weak: three paragraphs of background, with the request in the last line.
Strong: first line, Can you approve a two-week delay to the Pune launch? Then the story in three sentences underneath for anyone who wants it. In writing, the decision goes first and the story supports it, the principle behind the pyramid principle.
Why it works: busy readers decide from the first line whether to read on. In a room you can build to the ask; in an inbox you cannot.
Same facts, different order. The strong versions do not add information. They put a person, a cost and a decision where the listener can see them.
Reading examples is easier than writing under pressure. The free business storytelling check puts sixteen real work situations to you, from a dashboard to a CFO email, debriefs each answer, and then asks you to rewrite a message of your own on the spot. The written report names which of the four skills (structure, the number that matters, the one line, and moving people who do not report to you) to work on first.
Jeff Bezos has described replacing slide decks in Amazon's senior meetings with narrative memos of up to six pages, read in silence at the start of the meeting. His reasoning, in a 2004 email to senior staff that has since been widely published, was that the narrative structure of a memo forces better thinking than slides, which let a presenter skip over how ideas relate to each other. He described the practice again in his 2017 letter to shareholders. What to copy: if you cannot write your recommendation as a short story with a beginning, a problem and an ending, you probably have not finished thinking about it.
At Macworld in January 2007, Jobs announced three products: a widescreen iPod, a mobile phone and an internet communicator. He repeated the three until the audience caught on, then revealed they were one device. Before showing it, he spent time on the problem with existing smartphones and their fixed plastic keyboards. What to copy: establish the tension before the solution, and give the audience the satisfaction of working something out a moment before you say it.
The story spine is an improvisation exercise created by Kenn Adams and widely shared by former Pixar story artist Emma Coats in her list of storytelling rules: Once upon a time... Every day... One day... Because of that... Because of that... Until finally... What to copy: it is an excellent structure for a change story. Every day is how things work now, one day is what broke, and until finally is the new way.
Fill it in for your next update before you write anything else. If you cannot complete step one, keep following the problem until you reach a person it happened to. If you cannot complete step five, you have an anecdote, not a business story.
Stories also help you lead people who do not report to you, the subject of influence without authority. For the definition and the history, see the glossary entry on business storytelling. When the story has to be told live, our storytelling techniques for presentations cover the delivery.
Tour De Force runs this as live, experiential training for teams worldwide, online and in person. Talk to us, or play The Weekly Challenge from our gamified learning apps to see the method in ten minutes.
Questions
A project update that says: on Monday our largest client could not export their invoices; four more clients will hit the same problem at month-end; if we pause reporting work for two weeks we can fix it by the 30th, and I need a decision by Thursday. It has a specific moment, a cost and a decision, which is what turns information into a story.
The most common at work are the project update, the budget or resource request, the change announcement, the customer story in a sales conversation, the data story, the failure or post-incident review, the strategy story and the short written request to a senior person. They differ in audience and length but share one shape: context, tension and resolution.
Start with one specific person in one specific moment, show what went wrong and what it costs in terms your audience cares about, then say what changes and what you need decided. Keep it under a minute when spoken. In writing to a decision-maker, put the ask first and the story underneath.
Amazon is the best-documented internal example: Jeff Bezos replaced slide decks in senior meetings with narrative memos of up to six pages. Apple's 2007 iPhone launch is a classic presentation example, and Pixar's story spine is widely used as a template for change stories.
Rewrite your next update using the five-line template: who and when, what went wrong, what it costs, what changes, and the decision you need. Then test yourself on realistic situations; the free Tour De Force business storytelling check gives you sixteen, each debriefed.
Keep reading
Sixteen real work situations, each one debriefed, then rewrite a message of your own.
GuideContext, tension, resolution: the shape behind every example on this page.
GuideHow to choose the number that matters and build the story around it.
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