Transcript

Power of Stories | Sankalp Kohli | TEDxIIMRanchi

So uh before I begin, how many of you have ever lied? So uh the point is what you do when you speak a lie. You speak another lie and then another and then another. So you keep on speaking lies until and unless you frame a story around your life which is easily sold to your listener right. So remember when you were like really young you used to go cycling have races with your friends and one finder used to fall down while racing and you used to come back home and tell your mother that I fell down because a puppy ran into me and not because we are uh we were racing. So the stories are very important and we all have been uh storyteller all through our life. It's just that we don't realize the power of stories and today I'm just going to talk about how powerful these stories are and make you guys realize how important it is to tell stories. So before we start so there are some facts which I think we all are smart people we all should be able to answer. We must be uh coming across them very often. So 10th prime minister of India value of pi uh when was the battle of pliy fought etc etc and I'm sure you would have got it right no so okay now what about these stories these were some stories which were taught to us like when we were really small toddlers three little pigs story of that thirsty crow etc etc but these are the stories I'm sure you wouldn't be remembering no you remember them all. So why this uh different behavior? You don't remember things which you should but you remember things which were taught like really back and uh you still remember them. The thing is that they were all taught in form of stories and the facts were not taught to us in form of stories. We remember the stories. We remember the information when it is given to us in form of mesh of information and we don't remember the facts when they are provided to us in isolated form. So I I'll I'll tell you a story about uh Harvard girls. So there was a small little guy in town of Brooklyn. His name was Harvard. So he belonged to a not so uh wellto-do family and none of his family members were ever educated. They were really weak financially. But he want to he wanted to go for education. He knew that education was a way forward. He had one little thing which none of his family members had. He was good at football. Using his football skills, he got a scholarship from University of Michigan and ended up studying there. After studying there, he got a job like all of us. And then he switched some of the jobs and finally landed up in a company named Hammer Blast which used to make coffee makers at that point in time. So when in that company he was uh in the position of sales director, he saw a lot of sales coming from this small little store in Seattle. So he thought why not I make a visit there and see what's happening. He went there and uh he fell in love with that whole place. He fell in love with the culture of that company. He fell in love with the way the owners used to take all the pain and weave out beans and then serve it to the customers. So he thought this is the place where I would like to work and then he spent one whole year convincing the uh the owners to hire him and they hired. Supposed that once he was in Hammerlast he saw that there was lot of demand for coffee makers coming from Italy. He thought why not I make a visit to Italy. He went there and he saw he was completely confused. There were cuh there were coffee shops at every nook and corner of Italy. He thought how can Italians be so crazy? They are drinking so much coffee. Is it even possible humanly? But it was later he understood that actually it was a home away from home. These coffee houses were a place where oldies used to hang out where youngster used to come and plan their outings where families used to hang out. So he thought that he has stepped into a gold mine. He went back he told his owners that this is a idea which I would like you all to invest into. And the owner said thank you but no thank you. We are not going to invest into your idea just for the heck of it. We are totally happy doing what we are doing. Heartbroken as he was he resigned from Starbucks. He went down the lane and opened a coffee house named Jonali. He came back and bought Starbucks. So the store I was talking about was Starbucks in Seattle. He came back and bought Starbucks for $3.4 million. Now there's one small little things which Howard would always say which I think is the success of that particular guy. He says Starbucks is not into coffee business serving people. He says Starbucks is into people business and it so happens that we are serving coffee. Today we all are living into this people business. Day in and day out we are interacting with people as a manager, as a sales guy, as a interviewer, as a interviewee etc etc. We all are into this people business and hence it is very important for us to interact with people and stories can help you do that because facts tell but stories sell. So how many of you have actually heard about M Ram Chandra GI and Krishna Bhagwan from Ramayan and Maharat? All of you right? But how many of you have actually met them? So the question is how do you know about them if you haven't met them or maybe someone in your family met them? No. But these all things are stories which have been passing on from one generation to another generation. Maybe they were no Ram and no Krishna. They were just fictional characters created so that certain ideologies were uh given to youngsters given to the next generations. So what's the story? Actually story is a sequence of events which starts when a event is we when an event happens which throws your life off balance. So in case of Ramayan story was created when Lakshman chopped off nose of uh Chuknaka in case of Maharat story was created when Draadi laughed when Duryodhan stepped onto a puddle of water in case of thirsty crow a story was created when the crow couldn't find water. So that's when a story is created and stories are powerful. So talking about this multi multi-touch technology which iPhone came up with there was this technology which existed long back. It was not a new thing which uh Steve Jobs or Apple invented but Steve Jobs just came on board bought fire fingerworks and sold a story to the audience around multi-touch technology and that story was so powerful that they it not did it did not even help uh Apple master sales and succeed. It killed a whole big giant like Nokia. Then coming on to Napster, uh Sean Fennings, co-founder of Napster, told a story around his software which was filed uh peer-to-peer file sharing. He told the story that music isn't bought. He told the story that music is always shared and we bought that story. Today we buy books, we buy movies, but we never buy music. So now I would like to talk about various things which storytellers often use while communicating with the audience. They often uh I I'll give you some tips to success mantras of storytellers and I would like to take reference from of Steve Jobs who is I think the biggest storyteller of our times. So the first thing is you should give bigger picture before details. Whenever you are going to present something, maybe it it is a sales pitch, maybe it is a paper, a presentation or an examination paper, you should give the bigger picture before details because people are not looking forward to the details which you are capturing in there. People are looking forward to a bigger thing. People are looking forward to how much trust or belief you have in your own idea. So when Steve Jobs came on board to present uh the audience MacBook Air, he didn't talk about how thin it was. He didn't talk about how light it was. He didn't talk about the processor speed it had. He just pulled it out of an envelope and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, here I present you the thinnest notebook in the world." And that's what people were looking forward to. They never wanted to know what all things can a laptop. They already knew what all things a laptop can do. They only wanted to see how thin it was because that was the selling point. So big picture before details. Then as an engineer, as an MBA, as a human, we are so much into numbers. We just want to talk about numbers that we forget the whole the whole thing around it. People today are up to eyeballs till they uh up to eyeballs with numbers. They don't want more numbers. They want to see what help can you provide to them through a particular product. So when uh iPod was launched by Apple, Steve Jobs just came on board and instead of telling that this device now has 2 GB of storage data etc etc he just said this device now can carry thousand songs in your pocket. So that's what people were interested in. That was the whole uh thing people wanted to hear. Then coming on to the third thing which is very important that you should highlight a problem before offering a solution. No matter how big invention you have done, no matter how good a technology is, people only want to know how can that technology help you help them. Even if a technology is going to leaprog mankind by a decade, it's it does not interest me. It does not interest me as an audience. I want to know what can it how it can solve a problem of mine. So Steve Jobs came on board with iPhone being when iPhone was being presented and he talked about the querty keypad. He made the audience realize how bad that querty keypad was and what all problems they were facing because of that. People were actually very happy using Nokia querty keypads until and unless Steve Jobs told them how bad it is for them to use that and then he introduced iPhone. So before introducing iPhone it talked about the problem which they were suffering and then by iPhone introduced the solution. The big thing here is you should know how to create a story. Stories are present all around you. Just you have to look here and there and they are there. You must know how you can unite your facts with emotions because that's when you create the maximum impact on audience. That's when you actually bridge the gap between the right hand side and the left hand side of the brain and hence make the maximum impact. So when Steve Jobs came on board and started talking about iPhone before the launch, he just told them story of how I how Apple had changed the history of computing then history of music industry and hence they were the right fit to change the history of telephoning as such. So Rodiat Kipling once said that if history was taught in form of stories, it will never be forgotten. And I took it a bit seriously. So I started teaching maths in form of story. So for my students when I'm teaching maths, trigonometry is not sin theta cos theta tan theta. Trigonometry is much more than that. Trigonometry is more of a story of how sin theta and cos theta met to form tan theta and pythagoras theorem no longer is sin square plus sin square is equal to hypotenous square it's more of combination of how these sides combine to form hypotenus hence creating more uh impact on the students and they don't forget these things they don't forget these stories so to end it all I would like to say that as a writer Writer reads voraciously to come up with new thoughts. An artist goes on in the nature to come up with various inspiration for the new work which he has to uh make. As a storyteller, we should be very alert and should be looking out for various stories which are going around us because these are the stories which we can use in our daily life. These are the stories which we can combine with various facts and emotions to form the maximum impact. And to end it, there's a saying which I would like to quote. What is truer than the truth? It's a story. If you can tell something in form of a story, likelihood of getting challenged is very less. That's it. Thank you.