"And he gave a very (interesting) thought experiment. He said, go to your Facebook, remove all your school friends, remove all your relatives, remove all your college friends, work friends. And, if you're able to get 10 people after removing all of this, then probably you're lucky. Okay. I think that had a very profound impact to say that, you know… It was true, right? You know, because all the people that I knew, we're all from the same college, same school, same town, blah, blah, right? You...

This is a different type of podcast episode: one where I'm the one being interviewed! “So, as a storyteller, you have three things in your hand to make an appeal right, you've got the data or the logic. You've got the emotional appeal to your audience. Most importantly, you've got your Ethos, your reputation, your credibility.  And if you make a series of wrong recommendations based on quick (assessments, thinking), 'I'm very, very sharp and I have got this great intuition', it may go on...

“When I do the corporate workshops, most people start from this point of view. They are about 35 to 50. They are probably in the peak of their career-related progress, they are doing well, they can easily get their next job. It's not a big deal. They are very well connected offline or online. They’ve networked well, they attend industry events; perfect. Everything is going swimmingly well. My only concern or the only point that I start with is, think of personal branding as insurance. When...

“Some amount of anchoring and mooring toward identity is important. But that’s the word – your identity should be a mooring: it tells you who you are and from there you can depart to wherever you want. It tells you where you started and which direction you want to go in. But if instead of being a mooring, it becomes a straitjacket – you are held together and your mooring is also a radius beyond which you cannot move, then it becomes naturally constraining.”  That is Nitin Pai, founder of the...

“Oftentimes people try to demonstrate how hard they have worked, so they try and show activity. You are expected to do that activity! If you didn’t do the hard work, don’t keep telling me “I met so many people” and so on. That’s at a very Senior level. Which is why, when you’re talking to people at a very senior level in Consulting like CEOs and others, their time is very precious. They don't want to know all the activity you have done or if your numbers are right, because they have to be...

“And then something amazing happened – what I heard from the audience was, “Ohh!” and then right after that, all of my conclusions started coming out of their mouths. And after that, all my recommendations started coming out of their mouths. I never drew my conclusions, or made any recommendations, but every one of my recommendations got implemented. It was the most effective presentation (that) I (had) made in the whole 20 years at Procter and Gamble” Paul Smith is the bestselling author...

“Whether It’s a start-up or not, narrative building is important. I think of it in terms of ‘lines, not dots.’ Whenever you see someone do a great presentation, sell a great story, etc., I don’t feel there’s an overnight success; that person has put in a lot of work to shape something (from nothing). Typically, the people who have (good) narrative skills, (are the people who) are using it all the time. They would have had preliminary communication going out; they would have articulated it;...

“The only thing I would say is ask fundamental questions; ask stupid questions; insight lies in interrogating the obvious. It lies in asking the obvious. It’s not new knowledge, it’s in the old knowledge. It’s in asking 'why' to the most basic questions. The most basic questions are the ones that I think will give the most interesting answers.” That is Santosh Desai - a leader who wears many hats. Santosh headed an ad-agency, currently heads a brand consulting firm, is a published author...

“No data exists on its own; there has to be a story, or a theory, or a hypothesis which connects that and everything else that we know about the world or the subject matter of your story. When you say that these two states in northern India have developed, is it reflected in the GDP per capita numbers? Is it reflected in the unemployment numbers, that government data itself is collecting? Is it reflected in the other development indicators?” That is Pramit Bhattacharya - the ex-Data Editor...

"I think the message that I wanted to leave people with was “Can you swap anxiety with curiosity?” This is something I’ve been trying to do for myself: when you’re in an anxious situation, can you take a curious approach and say “What is going on? What can I learn from this?”, whether you can postpone the anxiety to when it is more useful to be anxious, is something that I was keen to get out in this piece" That is J Ramanand, the Co-Founder and Upleveler at Choose to Thinq, which enables...

Often at work, when I would get bored, I would press CMD-Tab on my Mac and head off to drown myself in the joys of the internet. Movie reviews on Rediff.com, Sports writing on Cricinfo, and funny videos and trailers on Youtube. (Of course I was doing all this to learn the art of storytelling). And on Youtube, while I would watch videos by a variety of creators, perhaps the group that I enjoyed the most was All India Bakchod (or AIB). For the uninitiated, AIB was a comedy collective which...

“And their stories would suddenly be much more powerful than the story I triggered their thought with. So that's how I started speaking to women and collecting these stories.  And the whole idea behind it, which seems to be working so far, is that you can deny opinions, you can question studies, but you cannot deny real experiences of real people.” That is Mahima Vashisht, the incredibly talented writer of the 'Womaning in India' newsletter. (You haven't subscribed yet? Off you go and sign...

“I'm in the boardroom, he's in the middle; (There are) Managers around, listening to my presentation; I get to the slide with this insight or observation that I had found, and he tilts his head, looks at it, and then blurts out “B******t!”  At that moment I was like, 'Oh crap, I have just stepped in it. I am not going to be one of the MBA students hired now. I am in trouble here,' and I was a little bit flustered.  I wasn't expecting that reaction; I was expecting 'Oh, that's interesting,...

“So, I have this concept which I call ‘Listening to Ignite’, which is, you're listening for things that can really light up the other person. So, it's about what your curiosity clicks into. And can you ask a question that allows them a launchpad to show the best of their skill, their experience, their expertise, their background? And I think in that occasion, when you're thinking of those questions, when you're thinking of something you remember, not being present with that person is almost...

“You have to woo the reader. You have to persuade the person, first of all, to read what you have written that's the very first thing. If you have failed there then you've already failed. It doesn't matter what are the gems of wisdom. So the notion that you have to woo your reader was important.” That is Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar, aka Swami, the legendary and long-serving columnist for the Times of India and one of the foremost chroniclers of the India economic story. Growing up in...

“So the best way to address this, I thought, is the tip I give any aspiring public speaker just whatever your fears are, tell them that. Put it out there. If you're thinking "Oh my god I'm gonna have a disaster tonight and I can't believe all your faces are looking extremely ugly and it's making me even more anxious", tell them that. Yes, it'll take them a minute to second or two to process and be shocked, but then the brutal honesty of the connection that you're doing there will take you...

The guy with the most productive Friday evening in journalism My most anticipated email of the week arrives every Saturday at 10 am. It's a weekly newsletter called The Nutgraf and it's written by Praveen Gopal Krishnan (COO at The Ken, India's foremost subscriber-driven business-news publication).  The Nutgraf is an indepth, 10-min analysis of a crucial topical issue - one that goes far deeper than the typical banalities and cursory analysis that make up for 'opinion pieces' in major...

You know Deja Vu. But do you know Vuja de? “…there is deja vu. Where you see something new but you find it familiar, and you go to a place for the first time and you say wow, doesn't this remind me of (Something).... or you meet somebody for the first time and you say, doesn't he look like (someone)... and this attempt to try and take the new, and, and put it in boxes which are old and familiar for us - that's deja vu.  And ... what can work for us is Vuja De which is the opposite of that....

"So I used to tell her these fairy tales also, like Cinderella and Rapunzel and somehow when the story got to the part when Cinderella had to be rescued or Rapunzel had to be rescued, I would find myself changing the story because I didn't like it. I didn't want my daughter to grow up thinking that she needs to wait for some boy to come and rescue her and that she is going to be this passive person who doesn't take charge of her life..."  That is Sowmya Rajendran, a brilliant, thoughtful...

"So when I would start writing every day at 10:30-11 am, the first two hours would just be spent on rewriting, and editing the previous day's work.... So it was not just once, I think I would have edited my own work at least 12-13 times" 12-13 times. Gosh, that can be tiring. But when you toil to this extent, the results are bound to be good. And they were. Mihir Dalal, a business journalist who's been with Mint, Reuters and CNBC - wrote his first book ‘Big Billion Startup - The Untold...

"If you write something, it just clarifies your thinking. When you put pen to paper and you do it hand on your heart, and dig up data and try to make the argument robust why you're buying or selling the stock. I think it just clarifies your thinking … there're so many stocks which I did not invest in because I started writing the rationale." Welcome to the Story Rules podcast with me, Ravishankar Iyer, where we learn from some of the best storytellers in the world, find their story and...

"I went from not having written anything to just starting a publication" - This is Shrehith Karkera, the co-founder - and you could say Chief Storyteller - at Finshots. The Finshots newsletter reaches 400K subscribers daily - a staggering number,...

In the middle of an engagement, the CEO of Instamojo says this: ”You know Mohit, we have been running this business for seven, eight years, but it's only now we have understood what we really do” Mohit Bansal is the Founder of Deck Rooster, a Chandigarh based company that conceptualises and creates startup pitch decks. Decks that get high praise from clients: “Don't waste two per cent on a Banker, these folks at Deck Rooster rock!”  - Ravish Naresh, CEO, KhataBook. “Deck Rooster...