 Good evening. I'm thinking about how to start. You know, when I was a kid, I used to stammer quite a bit. I used to stammer, I used to stutter, I used to trail off mid-sentence. And as a result, I was very shy. I was very reserved. I used to stay more indoors than outdoors. And I had this fear that, you know, words would form at the back of my head, but I would not be able to express myself fully. Those of you giving me sympathetic looks, I had a very happy childhood. It's just that I was more indoors than outdoors and spent more time in the company of books, but not reading math or science, otherwise I'd have been somewhere else. You know, like somewhere else. But I was more into stories. And with a view to help me overcome my speech disability, my mom, you know, at some point of time enrolled me into speech therapy and illocution and debate and drama and poetry recitation and extracurricular activities, essentially comprehensive damage control strategy. And I hated her back then, but I'm very grateful to her now. All of these things helped me quite a bit, especially speech therapy and theater. And I fell in love with theater. And the more and more I did, the more I wanted to do more work with theater. But you know, when you grow up in middle class India and you're raised by a single parent, who's a teacher and you know, so I'm saying that because most of you would know teacher salaries, then you don't choose a career in theater. You maximize your revenue potential and do business administration or IT or something like that. But I never lost touch with theater. So I did business administration, worked in advertising and marketing and consulting, but I had a track going on in theater and poetry and cinema and photography, all forms of narrative. But in advertising also, our in marketing, our in consulting, the work that I was doing was also working with narratives. So that's what I've done for a large part of my life. And working with stories, I could see that stories are powerful, but we don't leverage them as much as we can in our everyday work, in our everyday lives. And I wanted to explore how we could help teachers become better storytellers so that they could teach in classrooms using stories and how to work with leaders and help them become better storytellers. Because I've always believed that great stories happen to those who can tell them and no matter what business we are in, we are all in the business of storytelling. The moment we are in business, we are in the business of storytelling. And a lot of times, here's what happens. The work that we do is up here, but the story that we tell of our work is here. And to me, good storytelling is about bridging the gap between the two. We're creating it here, but just bridging the gap between the two. So that our story is authentic and so that it is an alignment and therefore the perception of our work is an alignment with the reality of our work. And when that doesn't happen, it's a disservice to the work that we all do. So that's just to set context, but I'm going to start this with... I'm going to treat this like a workshop, workshop, and less like a talk-talk. Now, workshop basically means that you guys do some work. So we're all going to do some work. I'm trying to go and do this in a manner in which I can pass on some of the storytelling chops to all of you. And I stand here before you not as an expert in storytelling, but as a student of storytelling. The more and more I learn about storytelling, I have figured that a lifetime is not enough to learn it. And I'm just an elementary grade student of stories. And I stand here before you also in the spirit that someone said that, you know, if you want to learn something, try teaching it and you will go further learning it. So I stand here before you in that spirit. Let's start off with a game, a quiz. You must have seen a TV show called Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The Indian version of that is called Kon Banega Karot Patri. So we'll play a quiz round. The fastest finger's first version. So I'm going to put up a question here. If you know the answer, raise your hand immediately. But the way to do this, my friend, is not to bluff and not to raise your hand to impress everyone. Because I promise you if you raise your hand, I'll call you on stage to answer the question. So raise your hand if you know the answers. And let's dive into this. But please don't help each other. No talking, no helping each other, no cuspus. So can we start? Okay, here's the first question coming your way. How many of you can come up on stage and explain the Pythagoras theorem now? Please raise your hand. The Pythagoras theorem. Seriously, are we at the Selenium conference? These are all IT professionals? Okay, like I said, no cuspus. Does it sound familiar when I say the Pythagoras theorem? Does it sound familiar? All right. Like Shah Rukh Khan says sometimes in his movies, Rahul, naam to suna hoga. Pythagoras, naam to suna. Does it sound familiar? Okay, let's do another one quickly. How many of you can come up and explain the Archimedes principle? Archimedes? Does it sound familiar? The Archimedes principle? No? All right. Okay, let's move forward very quickly. This is pretty embarrassing so we'll go. I'm not looking. How many of you can come up and explain gravity? Gravity? Gravity? All right, let's change this. I don't think this is going somewhere, anywhere. So let's do this. Do you guys believe in magic? That's what you guys do, right? You do magic. How can we not believe in magic? So do you guys believe in magic? Yeah? Okay. What if there was a magic wand and if somebody just waved that and all the answers came rushing back to us? Well, it seems that's possible. All you have to do is just shake your shoulders. So just go along with me. Shake your shoulders a bit. Yeah, give them a good shake. Yeah? All right. So let's do this all over again and hopefully we'll land in a better place. Hopefully. How many of you remember the hair and the tortoise? The hair and the tortoise? I feel really sad for you. Neither Pythagoras nor the hair and the tortoise. Sir, blue shirt. Raise your hand very quickly. Correct the damage. Hair and the tortoise. Of course you know it. The thirsty crow. The monkey and the capsular. Yeah? What have we just learnt through this simple exercise? That we remember stories. That our brain is hardwired by thousands of years of evolution to remember stories. We forget facts. We forget data. But we remember stories. Now if you want the story of your work to stick, you have to tell it like a story. Otherwise, you know, nobody is going to remember it and nobody is going to remember you as well. So we need to make our work. We are in the service of our work. We need to make it memorable. If you need net promoter score, if you need word of mouth, if you want people to come knocking at your door and say, hey, here's a specialized skill. I would love to work with this guy. I would love to work with this team, this organization, this business. Then people need to refer you. And they will be able to refer you only if you leave a story then. Come to think of it, even the concepts that I just spoke about, I'm sure you remember some stories there. You may not be able to explain gravity, but you remember a story about a man sitting under a tree and an apple falling on his head. And you may, some of you may not yet remember the Archimedes principle, but you all remember a guy who filled water in the bathtub and when he sat down, a certain amount of water spilled out. And he looked at that water and his body. And when he got the connection between the two, he ran down the street naked saying, Eureka! Eureka! Now you've got it. I knew it. When I say the naked man, you will get it. Now, you know, we forget that, you know, we remember the naked man, but we forget the fact that he taught us buoyancy. The such an interesting idea that you take a very light object like a safety pin and you put it in water and sinks. But a heavier object floats and the entire idea of buoyancy, right? So even here, we remember the stories. That's how powerful stories are. Now that we've learned that through a simple experiment that, you know, stories embed content in memory, how are you going to use that to talk about your work, to talk about the products, solutions or services that you offer to build your personal brand in an authentic way? Now I'd like to move forward and get into this, precisely this, but I know some of you are still not with me because some of you are still thinking, all right, we've got a story for gravity and we've also got a story for Archimedes. What about Pythagoras? I still haven't cracked that in my mind. So let's quickly get that out of the way and then move forward. Like I said, this is a workshop, so I'd like all of us to do some work. If in order to learn stories, the best way to do that is to tell and receive stories. So I'd like all of you here quickly to get into a pair. The best way to do that is to look right or left and turn to that person and say, you are my partner for this exercise and no trials, no trials, only pairs. So you've got five seconds to do that. Can you quickly pair up with someone and sit close to that person? Five, four, three, two, one. Now can I brief you on this exercise? Who's single? Please raise your hand. Now don't get ambitious here, please. That's not what we are doing. It's just a story exercise. Now here's what we're going to do. I'd like you to share a story with your partner and receive a story from your partner. Let's get started. Should we work with a business story? Should we work with a personal story? Do you think there's room for personal stories at work? Why? Well, trust. We work not just for organizations. We work for people, which is why when great bosses quit, we feel like following them no matter where we go. We don't just work with vendor organizations. We work with the person who services our business and that person quits the vendor organization, joins another organization. Sometimes we give business to that guy. Leadership is autobiographical completely, which is why even in 100-year-old organizations like GE, when Jack Welch quits and Jeff Immels joins, everything changes. At some level, culture is very strong. It should not change, but lot changes. So the personal story is very important. So let's then get started by sharing a personal story with our story partner and receiving a personal story. And if that seems like wide open, let me narrow it down for you. These are the four elements of the story I'd like you to share with your partner. I'd like you to talk to your partner about the place that you grew up in. But if you grew up in Indore, don't just say, I grew up in Indore. It doesn't sound like a story. So bring a live Indore for your partner. But don't do tourism advertising because that's what it is. So let me explain this. If there are two of you, both of you grew up in Indore, your experience of that place is very different from your experience of that place. So bring the personal into the story. And some of you may have grown up in different places and that may have shaped you. So when I say the gift of the place you grew up in, what I mean by that is, how has that place shaped you in being and becoming who you have become today? Let's talk about the gift of the place. For example, I grew up in a place which was so small by Indian standards that there were only 5,000 people in that place. And I was there for 21 years. I was born in a Gram Panchayat hospital. A Gram Panchayat exists in a place which is smaller than a town, city, municipality, or a district. Just 5,000 people. And I was there for 21 years. Now when you grow up in a place like that, everyone knows everyone, which is not a great idea. Because when you get into trouble at school, parents don't have to wait till PTA. They get to know the same evening. When you start growing older, you hold someone's hand and walk and everyone gets to know. So I grew up in a place like that. The gift of that place for me is that, no matter where I go, I feel I've been infected with this lifelong virus, the need to make a personal connection with people. And even if I'm sitting on a plane, I turn right to the person who's sitting next to me and start talking to them. So that's the gift of the place for me. Similarly, talk about your parents. Talk about the inheritance. Don't talk about their job descriptions like my father was a banker, my mother a homemaker. Talk about the inheritance. There's a lot of friction in that relationship. There's also gifts, values, traditions being passed on. So what's your net inheritance? Talk about that. Third, talk about what are you a student of? You know, you could be a student of technology, of testing, of management, of human behavior, of dance or music. But what is it that you study lifelong? Of photography? Talk about that. What are you a student of? And bring that story to a close by saying, why you do what you do today. Now before you start off, there are three very, very clear instructions. Number one, I'd like you to turn towards your partner. So can you all turn towards your partner? Thank you. Now, here's the second instruction. I'd like you to figure out... Yeah. I'd like you to figure out what your partner's story is anchored in. So when you're listening, try to see if it's possible your partner's story is anchored in A or B or C or D. But it would be all of them. When I say anchored in, what's significant for them? What's more important for them? Try to make a mental note and see. You'll get a clue in their voice, in their eyes. You know, the eyes may light up. You may, you know, feel an emotion in their voice. Body language may, you know, the shoulders may form up with pride. So make a mental note. Here's the last instruction. We live in a world where people have less and less time to listen to each other's stories. Have you heard of elevator pitches? We are trying to, we are going to do this in an elevator pitch style. So you've got 90 seconds to tell your entire story. Now the way to do this, 90 seconds for you and 90 seconds for you. Yeah. So the way to do this is don't treat this like a competition or a race. If you finish in 90 seconds, don't give each other high fives. You haven't won a race. And if you're not able to finish in 90 seconds, that's also fine. Let's just give it a shot. Let's just try. So the spirit in which we're going to do this is, I may not have done this before, but let me give it a shot. I'll keep time and I'll pace you. So you start when you hear me clap and I'll give you a heads up at 70 seconds. I'll say, guys, 20 seconds left. I'll give you another heads up at 80 seconds, guys, 10 seconds left at 90. When I ask you to stop, please stop irrespective of whether you finished or not. You start when you hear me clap. I hope you've decided who's going first. Please start. 20 seconds left. 10 seconds left. Please stop. All right. Let's switch roles so the teller becomes listener. Listener becomes teller and you start when you hear me clap. 10. Please stop. All right. Now here's, stay with me. Here's what I'd like you to do without overthinking this, you know, and very quickly, can you please change your partner without disturbing the room too much? Just pair up with someone else and wait for my instruction. We are not doing the same thing again. We're doing something similar. So just change your partner. Find a new partner to work with. Five seconds. You've got to do this. Five, four, three, two. All right. Everyone's found a new partner. Anyone single? No, don't get ambitious. Meet me later. Okay. Here's what we're doing now. We are doing the same thing, but slightly different. So what you're going to do is the brief remains the same. You've got to share your story with the new person that you're paired up with and see if you know you could figure what their story is anchored in. Make a mental note about that. But here's what we are changing. You've got 30 seconds less now. So you've got 60 seconds to tell the story. Feel free to use any strategy that comes to your mind in order to do this in the lesser time provided to you. However, there's one thing you cannot do. You cannot go like a bullet train. Blah, blah, blah, blah. You take ownership of your story. It's your story. Think of it like an expensive crystal glass. If you throw it at the other person, it's likely to break. So take ownership of your story. Also take ownership of the listener. It's not about you finishing the story. It's about them getting the message. So take ownership of the listener, but you've got 60 seconds. Here's what I'll do. I will pace you. I'll give you a heads up at 45 seconds. I'll say, guys, 15 seconds left. I'll give you another heads up at 55 seconds. I'll say, guys, 5 seconds left so that you can wrap up your story and you start when you hear me clap, which is now. 15 seconds left. 5. Please stop. We switch roles and the teller becomes listener. The listener becomes teller. You start when you hear me clap. 15 seconds left. 5. Please stop. All right. You know, we've just done something twice over with different partners and more importantly with different time slots assigned to you. What are your quick thoughts and observations on what you've just done? I'd just like to hear from one or two. Yes, ma'am. Second time was better and faster and you were able to pace. You were able to structure it better. I see a lot of heads nodding. So I'm assuming that it would be similar for many of you, sir. And constraints are really powerful. And you all became editors the second time round. You edited that which was less important and focused on that which was more important. I saw, apart from this, having done this many times over, I'm sure our individual experiences of this exercise are unique and different. But what I have found common for many people are these three or four things. Number one, many of you could not finish your story in 90 seconds, but you were able to do that in 60 seconds. And some of you with a few seconds to spare its second time round. Is that true? Yeah. The second thing that I saw is that a lot of you, in your second time round, were answering questions. You were actually looking at the screen. And your story was coming out like bullet points. Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. The second time round, you weren't doing that. You knew what was to be said. And you were familiar. And therefore, you were looking into the listener's eyes and telling the story as it should be told. And it was coming together less like bullet points and more organically fusing, just about fusing like a coming together, just like a story. The third thing I saw is that many of you, you had a unique Indian expression of regret, which goes something like, after the first time. And, you know, basically that means that, oh my God, I spent too much time on the first two, but I didn't get enough time for the last two. But you corrected for that the second time round. And what that basically means is that, you know, and the fourth thing that you did was, of course, that you edited out the less important stuff. You know, I will be surprised to, you know, I am surprised even today. We started Story Valar six years ago. We get called in for a lot of high stakes presentations. I'm sharing a secret here with you. A lot of times, and we charge a decent fee, a lot of times what we do to make presentations better is just edit and remove the unnecessary. And stories become better. Now, you must have felt after a presentation, a keynote, or sometimes after an interview, actually always after an interview, that if I got a second chance, I could do this much better. But what have you just learned from this exercise? That the audience actually deserves the second version of the story. They are giving you time. And if the second version of the story is better, then that's the version of the story that you should tell the first time round. So there's no trick to better storytelling. The trick is hard work and practice. If you ask me what makes a better chef more time in the kitchen? What makes a better storyteller a better storyteller? There's nothing like a natural storyteller. It's a big myth. Have you heard that phrase? Storytelling comes naturally to this guy. It's a big myth. We are all born crying. And for two years, we all struggle to speak. So what does it mean when you say a natural storyteller? It's as big a myth as the other thing that we've all heard. Born leader. Have you heard that? Born leader? Think about it for a minute. What does that even mean? Somebody comes out of the mother's womb and says, where's my team? What's a born leader? You learn leadership as you... Maybe you were a class monitor, grade fourth, and you had to report a friend, your dearest friend, and you had to choose between duty and friendship. And maybe you were a cricket captain, grade seventh, and you gave the ball for bowling, not to your best friend, but to that irritating guy, because that was aligned to the overall objective. And you explained and you communicated that goal, and you built alignment towards that. That's how you learn leadership. Nobody's born leader. Similarly, you learn storytelling through practice. And the audience, my big takeaway from this is, you know, audience deserves the better version of the story, the second, third version of the story. And so we need to put in that hard work. The best orators in the world, they put in that kind of hard work. The second thing I asked you to do is to figure out what your partner's stories were anchored in. Could you figure that out? What was important for them in their stories? Could you figure that out? Now, it's possible that for many of you, you could get a sense of what was important for them in 60 seconds or 90, just by listening, by doing focused listening. And in the world of storytelling, oratory is overrated, but listening is underrated. And it's listening that makes a better storyteller. It's listening that makes a better leader, even a better spouse or partner. You're laughing. I know I can feel your pain. But it's listening, you know. It's when we listen that we know, you know, which story to tell to someone else. And I've been listening not just in the oral sense, but in the metaphorical sense of listening, which is researching the audience, doing the hard work, preparing for that. So if you're getting into a call, and I know that many of you work at organizations where you get into calls, you don't do face-to-face presentations. You do presentations in front of a black box called a conference call machine. And if you're presenting to Tom and Martha and Stewart, have you actually found out, you know, how old is Tom? Where is Martha from? And what matters to Stewart? What do they look like? Most of you don't, you know, so many times I've gotten into calls where I ask people, you know, how old is Stewart? And people have no idea and say, how can you be presented to somebody where you don't know how old that person is, what he looks like. I'm just using this symbolically to say that you haven't researched your audience. And that's what I mean by the larger metaphorical idea of listening. And the third big takeaway from here is that if you could tell your story, there's no engineering product that is more complex than you. If you can tell your life story in 90 seconds, how difficult is the work story? Think about it. You know, you are the most complex product. So elevator pitches are not that difficult. We just have to think what is the core message and then adapt to different environments. And the idea is not to tell it very quickly, but the idea is not to put everything up there in your story and bombard people with it. Rather excite people to a point where they ask you a question. And when they ask you the question, you'll be ready with the details. But don't dump the details on people. Don't start with that. And that's the key difference to good storytelling. And all good storytellers do that. So let me ask you, you know, when you hear the word storytelling, coupled with business or technology, and in the technology domain, in the business domain, who do you think, what are the big names, you know, who do you rate as great storytellers? And I will show them to you that they are not natural storytellers. They all put in hard work and practice. What are the names that come to your mind? All right, Steve Jobs. Let's work with that. Let's work with Steve Jobs. Let me show you how much hard work Steve Jobs puts in. I didn't plan these guys who said Steve Jobs. I promise you. But Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Satya Nadella, Azim Premji in India, Nanda Nilankini, fantastic data storyteller. Look at them. They all put in a lot of hard work. Let me show you the hard work. This is an extract from the launch of MacBook Air, the thinnest and the lightest laptop in the world at the time of the launch. He spoke for about an hour at that conference. This is 60 seconds long clip. I am going to interrupt your viewing pleasure of this clip by pausing it again and again to deconstruct this for you. Let's take a look at this. Kind of notebook. It's called the MacBook Air. That's what he is launching, the MacBook Air. Look at how relaxed he is. Look at the way he uses his hands to chop to emphasize the way... You know, he's so relaxed right now. It seems he's at a water or a Stanford talking to a bunch of college kids. He should have 6,000 butterflies in his stomach. Not because he's on stage. He's talking about stage fright and presentation skills here. I am talking about what's at stake. What's at stake? Three years of R&D, millions of dollars in investment, hundreds of thousands of banners gone into developing a product. If this product launch fails, all of that goes down the drain, right? That's at stake. For a company that makes 6 or 7 products where every product goes on to contribute potentially 12 to 15 percent of revenues. That's at stake 12 to 15 percent. He should be nervous. But he's not. And that kind of confidence comes from only two places. Confidence in the product and confidence and that comes from practice and rehearsal. So over the next 45 seconds of this clip, I'll show you the amount of rehearsal that has gone into this. It's called the MacBook Air. It's so thin, it even fits inside. He just used an adjective here. Adjectives are words we use to describe things like tall, short, heavy, light. What's the adjective he used just now? Fin. That's an interesting one. Have you seen laptops on laptop comparison sites? Like two laptops and you compare them for weight, processing power, capacity, other things. Now this feature that you see here, this feature is called the thickness, right? And so far the industry had referred to this feature as thickness. Now if this is 5 mm thick, I can call this 5 mm thick or 5 mm thin. 5 mm will remain 5 mm. It doesn't change. But when I choose to call it thin, which is the first guy referring to this feature as thin, not thick, you are defining the frame of reference for the audience and how the audience should look at it. You're not leaving that to chance. You're differentiating the language from the competitors and saying let me guide you how you should look at this 5 mm. That's one of the big takeaways that you can make a note of which is are you controlling the frame of reference when you are talking to audience? You may be talking about the same thing as somebody else but how are you making them look at it? Thick or thin? Safe or unsafe? Fast or slow? These are all choices. Now I can describe something as fast as slow as secure or less secure. These are all options. So how do you talk about what we are presenting? That's a choice that we make. He made that choice. He was defining that for the audience. It's so thin it even fits inside one of these envelopes that we've all seen floating around the office. Really? Did you just hear what he said? He said it's so thin that it fits into an envelope that you may have seen float around the office. Has that ever happened in your office? Envelopes don't float around the office because they have ghosts in office. How would you say this? We've all learnt English. If you were to say this like a normal man speaks English, how would you say this? It's so thin that it can even fit into an envelope that you may have seen lying around an office. But he's not saying lying around the office. He's saying float around the office. Why? What's he launching? Is it syncing in what I'm trying to show you 19 seconds into a 60 second clip from a 60 minute speech. Every word he's saying here is deliberate. It's choreographed. He's leaving no stone unturned. He's saying I will never get a second chance for first impression. This is my opportunity to launch this product. I must max it. It looks extreme poor. Because it has been crafted to that level where it looks extreme poor. But it is not. So he's working hard. It's so thin it even fits inside one of these envelopes that we've all seen floating around the office. Now if you made the thinnest laptop in the world essentially you've broken a world record. If earlier the record for thickness was 5mm you have possibly made the world's first 4.678mm laptop. That's what you've done. He should be going to town saying this is the world's first 4.678mm laptop. Why isn't he doing that? Why isn't he throwing the number at people? Because he's figured out, just like we all figured out that people don't remember Pythagoras, Archimedes and 4.678mm. You have to give it to them in terms that people will remember. So if you were at that launch and after the launch you met a friend at a pub and a friend would ask you where were you? You would say I was at the launch of the thinnest laptop. His next question would be how thin? And you wouldn't remember 4.678mm but you would say as thin as, now that's a powerful device as dash as simile metaphor analogy. A storyteller's best friend is Sam simile analogy metaphor that's what people remember. So wrap your fact in a hook that embeds it in people's memory so that people talk about it. So when you say as secure as what? As fast as what? Wrap that fact in a hook so that we make it easier for people to remember as fast, as cheap, as efficient as secure as whatever your as is. Make it easy for people to remember that. Let's go further. And so let me go ahead and show it to you now. You see now he's playing with the audience he says let me go ahead and show it to you but he's not showing it to them. What's he doing? He's building anticipation. Do you build anticipation before you give away the solution? Why is anticipation important? Because when you build anticipation you are making the thing that's going to come out of the envelope more valuable for people. Now you worked hard on the solution. You worked hard to get your product service solution to this place. Are you just going to give it away like that? Or are you going to build anticipation and make people value what you do? It's a very key technique in storytelling. And the best tech presenters do that. They build anticipation towards what they're going to reveal to people. It doesn't have to be a new product. It could be a simple solution. It could be a fix. It could be a patch. It could be an update. Let me take it out here. Now you see something is very interesting is going to happen now. He is holding the laptop at his belly level. In front of his belly. He's going to take the laptop out of the envelope. There's no way you can hear the laptop coming out of the envelope. Actually you are going to hear that sound. You'll hear the sound of the laptop coming out of the envelope. How's that possible? He's wearing a collar mic like I am wearing one. If I snap my fingers you can hear it through the mic. If I snap my fingers here you won't be able to hear it through the mic. You'll hear it through the air here. You feel the difference? How is it that you can hear the sound of a laptop coming out of the envelope? They put another mic there. And that's to accentuate that mic there and that sound sort of works. This is the ribbon-cutting moment. Now it's going to come out. So he wants people to... he wants to drop and people to go and he's extracting that. This sound works just like canned laughter in comedy shows. That's how it works. You'll hear that sound. It comes out. Let me take it out here. This is the new MacBook Air and you can get a feel for how thin it is. Did you see what he's just done? In five seconds he takes the laptop out and pulls it up on three or four fingers like you've never held a laptop before. And that's the moment it could have fallen from his hands and that clip would have gone viral on YouTube, on social media. Let's see what happened at the launch. But that doesn't happen. And the reason it doesn't happen is because he has practiced that move a hundred times because he's figured that's the best angle to showcase how thin it is. That's the amount of rehearsal he was putting in to his storytelling. How much hard work do you put into your storytelling? Now he believed that I owed to my R&D guys, to my testing guys, to my product developers and designers that I go out and tell a fantastic story. The worst takeaway that we can take away from here is that he had a lot of time and nothing else to do but tell stories. Around this time they were fighting 50 patent wars with Samsung. Six weeks ago you read the newspapers. The courts ordered Samsung to pay millions of dollars too. So they were fighting that battle. Around this time trouble had broken out in a factory called Foxconn in China and a negative PR was spreading around the world and he was fighting that PR disaster. And around this time now we know doctors had broken news to him about his health. And in the middle of this this guy goes and puts so much work into storytelling. Why? Because he believed that you know that my customers who are buying products from me they take pride in these products. I owe it to them that I tell a fantastic story so you owe it not just to your customers and other organizations. More importantly I say you owe it to yourself because you spend one hour with your kid in the morning and one hour with your spouse. We spend our entire day doing what we do. We owe to ourselves that we tell a fantastic story about the work we do. And the best way to get there is to use some of these techniques. So that's all that I wanted to share with you that storytelling is not science, is not tricks, it's not techniques, it's putting in the hard work, recognizing that the audience deserves that more importantly when we put in our blood and sweat into doing what we do then we might as well tell a fantastic story about it. Now a lot of work that you do also deals with numbers and data and some people think numbers are numbers and stories are stories and they are like chalk and cheese which is really far from the truth because the best business stories are built on the foundations of data. So how to weave numbers into narrative? Well it's very simple we'll figure that out that it's not what you say but how you say that makes all the difference. So I'll just share a simple case study with you and you tell me and that's one big principle on data storytelling. It's not what you say but how you say that makes the difference. Now there's a study that Amnesty International an NGO carried out some time back that said 30% of women in India have faced sexual harassment. It's a very wide term that includes stalking, flashing, eve teasing, cat calling to the most extreme violent behavior that one can assume. If you've grown up in India, you would know that the actual number should be higher than that but whatever 30% is the number that they found. They wanted to socialize the number, take it to CEOs HR heads so that they could make companies safer places for women. To mayors and corporators so they could make cities safer places for women. They wanted to take it to media to consumers to talk about it. Now I'm asking you you tell me what is a good way to talk about it I'll give you 3 options 30% of women in India have faced sexual harassment. 3 out of 10 women in India have faced sexual harassment or 1 out of every 3 women in India have faced sexual harassment. Which one would you choose? A, B or C if most of you have chosen C it's a much better way but you see factually they are all right they are all the same why do you choose C then? because C makes an emotional impact here so when you work with numbers that's what I meant it's not just what you say but how you say it so somebody may give you the numbers but are you working with that and saying how do I present this so that it makes an impact when you go through that you've gone through a storyteller's journey now with the one of the best data storytellers that I have seen in India and one of the best in the world is Nandan Nillakini and if you want to see a good example of data storytelling you should just look at a YouTube video where he talks about financial markets disruption so the keywords if you search is Nandan Nillakini of course and financial markets disruption it's a 30 minute video he's throwing numbers and numbers at you but he's weaving all of that into a single narrative look at that video and don't look at it just to be awed by his presentation style but see how he weaves data into narrative and when you spend two minutes reflecting after that that's all you need to do in order to become a better data storyteller but that's not how we told the story for Amnesty International so I'd just like to leave you with two large very big principles to add on over and above what we just did the next principle is that you know when you work with numbers and I showed you that 30% 3 out of 10 and 1 out of 3 they're all the same one makes more impact sometimes what makes more impact is choosing between working with percentages or absolutes in this case we work with the absolute so 1.3 billion half of them are women 30% of them it's a large number 200 million, 250 million whatever that is do the math in your head now that number if I say 250 million doesn't really come alive for people unless I compare it with something so what should you compare it and comparison is one of the most powerful principles of data storytelling your numbers don't come alive unless you compare just give you a simple example if I say a farmer's income is 6,720 rupees now you just replace this farmer's income with you know tests that you run with variables the errors that you are whatever you know number you are presenting it doesn't come alive till you compare it with something in this case the farmer's salary is 6,720 bucks does it make sense high low you don't know what if I told you that the the bus conductor in a BMTC bus makes 22,750 every month but the farmer's income is 6,750 so without comparison numbers don't come alive so whatever numbers you are working with compare now going back to the amnesty international example we said 250 million or 300 million if that's the number of women who face sexual harassment in India what you compare it with is important so you 300 million is close to the population of US so we just reframe the story and if you reframe the story here's what it sounds like every individual living in the united states of America today a child who is 6 months old able bodied or disabled black or white or brown or yellow doesn't matter every adult every senior citizen who is alive on wheel chair or able to walk 90 or 95 years old every one of them has faced sexual harassment what if I told you that that's the situation we will be in the middle of the third world war that's the number of women who face sexual harassment in India we're still working with 30% but you just brought alive that with the power of comparison so when you work with numbers use the power of comparison it's not just the number that we present but how we present it that makes all the difference I wanted to share some of this with you and hope that this rubs off and each one of you is able to take some of this back and tell a better story about the work that you do may each one of you be a fantastic storyteller more importantly may each one of you be a better listener because when you listen you will tell a better story may yours be a fantastic one and I close here I'm happy to take questions and happier if there are none thank you for being here they all make me happy let's take the one at the back first sir and I'll come back to you in a moment so let me take that sir I'm an engineer by profession but I also do tell stories in my company too my heart goes out to you actually it's good why did you start by saying I'm an engineer we're all engineers here that's the context so a company just does not have only engineers there are people who are not engineers so the question I have for you is I think I'm good at telling stories to engineers that kind of understand their mental models but I really struggle to tell the same story or even like convince somebody who is not an engineer probably like somebody in an operations how do you solve that problem thank you for that very interesting question in our work we work with a lot of start-ups so I work with a lot of start-ups and accelerators I work with the Cisco accelerator and a lot of start-ups in the technology space who are doing something that has never been done before and it's not easy to explain that to investors who are not necessarily engineers so you see that most of the start-ups or many of them are doing something interesting in the energy space, fintech space disrupting businesses with new models and new technologies and they are pitching to people who are not necessarily from those backgrounds that's the test of good storytelling that you are able to be complicated to explain it to people and that's where metaphors come handy so when you work with metaphors and say let's go back to Jack Ma and today a lot of start-ups will say I am building this and people say what is this and they will say it's the Amazon of the grocery business or we are the Amazon of the logistics business or we are the aggregators who bring together partners but what if you were building a business where no Amazon existed what would you say? That's what Jack Ma had to do he was building a business where no parallel existed and he had to explain that to the investor the investor was Masa Yoshison the founder of Softbank so Masa Yoshison was in India some time back and people asked him how did you end up investing in Jack Ma and Paytm and Ola and all of these companies much ahead of anyone and Masa Yoshison says I look at the founder of the story they are telling and are they able to tell it without PowerPoint are they able to tell it without the aid of anything and if they are able to tell that I invest because I am not just investing in ideas I am also investing in the founder and their ability to tell a story because if the founder doesn't have the ability to tell a story how will they attract investment how will they scale how will they get people to quit Google and work for them and all of that so quit leave the PowerPoint see if you can sort of simplify it and you need to build vocabulary for that and when I say vocabulary I don't mean Sashi Tharoor vocabulary because that complicates things for people for me great vocabulary is you know take difficult subjects like machine learning, artificial intelligence cryptocurrency, bitcoin and there were people who were simplifying it way before Thiruvalluvar Thiruvalluvar any Tamilians here Thiruvalluvar the great Tamil poet was simplifying religion which is more complicated than machine learning and he was simplifying it in people's language Kabir the great Hindi poet was simplifying spirituality which is more complicated than bitcoins to people in layman's language so we need that metaphorical language to communicate technology Sam, Simili's analogies metaphors are an engineer's best friend when speaking to non-engineers may that power be on your side there are many examples of that if you want to look that up do write me a mail here's my email id and I'll be more than happy to to guide you to some of these examples and Dex which look at sort of converting technological stories into metaphors that make it easy for people to get that but that's the key use a metaphor so that's what you were asking he's a mind reader well thank you so much have a nice evening and stay back for the next session there's no more session there's food and alcohol outside that's what I meant stay back for the alcohol alright thank you it was a pleasure having you