Last week, I interviewed Bruce Poon Tip, founder of travel company G Adventures and author of the new book Looptail: How One Company Changed the World By Reinventing Business (Business Plus, 2013).
Tip’s book is a deeply personal story of his long journey from fired McDonald’s employee to the founder of one of the most innovative travel companies of all time. The book is a New York Times best seller and is being lauded by CEOs and business thinkers across the board. And yet, the glowing forward to the book is written by none other than the Dalai Lama. I’m not sure many books can claim both those distinctions at once.
The interview itself was so interesting and wide-ranging that I thought I would give Book Scan readers a special sneak preview of the full article, which will appear in our Last Word section at REALTOR® Magazine online. So here are two questions from the interview that have a little more to do with the new book, though it’s clear the driving force behind Tip’s success is pretty uniformly inspiring across the board. And stay tuned for the full interview on REALTOR® Mag online very soon.
What advice do you have for real estate professionals who want to tell their company’s story with authenticity?
That’s a big part of leadership, and another part of my book. I’m trying not to shamelessly promote my book [laughs], but as you know, in the book I talk about how the best leaders of our time are always the best storytellers. For me, I’m laughing because I’ve spoken at all these literary festivals, but I’ve never fancied myself a writer by any stretch. But here I am, talking to you about a book I wrote. I’ve always said I’m a good storyteller, but that doesn’t mean you can write a good book. Continue reading »
I read a lot of press releases. Whether it’s from a brokerage boasting about a great second quarter, a tech company angling to get their new doodad into our Cool Tools section, or an author pitching their latest book, most of them fail on a really basic level: They’re not telling me a story.
Credit: Scottish Libraries. This image originally appeared on the front cover of Scottish Libraries Jul/Aug 1990 (No. 22).
Author Nicolas Boillot aims to help you fix that problem when it comes to marketing your business. His newest book (and first foray into the business section), I Killed a Rabid Fox With a Croquet Mallet: Making Your Business Stories Compelling and Memorable (HB Books, 2013), breaks down the elements of a good story into their simplest components. He then explains the relationships between these components. For example, you can spout the values of your business all day long. And you can tell me all you want about how amazing your fourth quarter results are. But can you connect the two? If so, you’re on your way to starting to tell a story.
But that’s just the beginning. Here are some of Boillot’s key points to telling a great story about your business:
Know your audience. It may seem like an obvious point, but that’s just because you remember it from grade school. Things are different now: You’re trying to tell a company’s story. And yet they’re also the same, because you’re trying to tell the story to people. News flash: People don’t want to hear about companies; they want to hear about people. The good news is that your company is full of fascinating people that will tell your company’s story better than it, as an organization, can.
Don’t always follow the leader. Even if it’s you. Boillot reminds readers that while leaders often have a compelling story to tell, “sometimes they have enormous egos, want their stories told, and no one around them has the courage to suggest it’s a bad idea.” Boillot then talks about how he diplomatically helped a CEO see that a video all about how awesome he is would not make for a compelling story, and how he helped the guy introduce some conflict (and other characters) into the tale.
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