Nuggets
It is going to start out messy. Andy Raskin captures this in a Linkedin post.
Like it or not, your brain loves it.
You’ve got a signature story. The trick is to distil it and craft it.
Videos
"We're living in a world where we have too much information. And because of that, we're even more susceptible to great story. It's what helps us to decide what to believe in" - Jennifer Aaker (from 2013, and even more relevant today). "There is signal and there is noise. How do we reduce the noise? Story."
NYU Stern valuation expert Aswath Damodaran talks about his book Numbers and Narratives and the difference between storytellers and number crunchers in is address to CFA Society Switzerland. [7 November 2018]
Working across Economics, Medical Sociology and Psychoanalysis, David Tuckett focuses on using psychoanalysis to understand behaviour in financial markets and the economy. He has developed new approaches to decision-making under deep uncertainty: conviction narrative theory. [14 April 2016]
In his new book, Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events, Professor Robert Shiller explores a typically overlooked driver of economic events, stories.
Insights from the sciences of brain and mind that make us better storytellers and can help us understand our selves and our lives in new ways. TedX Manchester [Uploaded 20 May 2018]
Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.
American social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, New York University Stern School of Business professor, and author of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018), acknowledges that facts do not change minds. Stories change minds.
Books
The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr
“Story is what brain does,” says Will Storr in The Science of Storytelling. In this highly accessible Sunday Times bestseller, he explains how we all - as a biological and evolutionary necessity - experience the world as a story in which we are the plucky hero at the centre. And there’s nothing we can do about it.
Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller
In his 2010 book with long-time collaborator George Akerlof (post-Nobel), Bob Shiller (pre-Nobel) wields the term first used by the inimitable John Maynard Keynes (“rhymes with brains” he would remind people). Our animal spirits do worship narratives ahead of numbers.
Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events, Bob Shiller
Already hailed for his work on asset prices that earned him the 2013 Nobel Prize for Economics, Bob Shiller has founded novel field of narrative economics. In short, this is an economic lens that takes narrative seriously. Shiller has used analysis of popular narratives to demonstrate how the stories we tell each other drive markets.
Narrative and Numbers: The Value of Stories in Business, Aswath Damodaran
Known affectionately as Wall Street’s “Dean of Valuations”, Aswath Damodaran is a self-confessed “quant” who had to learn the value of stories in business. The New York University Stern School of Business professor outlines the difference between price and valuation, and describes his process of building company valuations using narratives and numbers.
Academic articles
In his presidential address to the American Economic Association in 2017 Bob Shiller of Yale University explains the fundamentals of narrative economics, explains how this lens adds to our understanding of the Great Depression, and outlines how narratives travel like viruses. [Published January 2017]. Read here.
Aswath Damodaran of NYU Stern School of Business and Bradford Cornell of UCLA Anderson School of Management describes our tendency to overvalue companies in or entering large markets, why we do it and how we can avoid this pitfall. [Published December 2019]. Read here.
A lot of brand content online remains unobserved due to a lack of storytelling. In this paper Luca Visconti and Tom van Laer provide managerial guidance on the good, the bad and the ugly of brand storytelling in digital conversations. [Published in 2016]. Read here.
David Tuckett and Milena Nikolic build and explain their framework of conviction narrative theory (CNT) in this 2017 paper in the journal Theory and Psychology. The pair conviction narratives as the enablers for “actors to draw on their beliefs, causal models and rules of thumb to identify opportunities worth acting on, to simulate the future outcome of their actions, and to feel sufficiently convinced to act”. [Published in 2017]. Read here.