In communicating your strategy, you need to both appeal and inform, as I wrote in Strategy = Execution. More likely than not, your sharply delineated and fully enriched strategy is dull and boring. Despite all the hype about storytelling, most companies are still fairly clueless about how to sell their mission, vision and strategy to their own organization and beyond.

That sad state of affairs is even worse in Rhineland than in Anglo-Saxon countries. You won’t believe how ill-prepared some huge corporations and executive committees are to address large town hall meetings. They fumble their way through far too many PowerPoint slides, hopelessly ignorant of the three-minutes-per-sheet rule. Their projected 20 sheets per 30 minutes is guaranteed to make them go 30 minutes over time. It’s that simple. And that doesn’t even address the other rule of thumb—that a quarter of the available time should be reserved for questions and debate.

Veil of mystique

A good strategic story doesn’t magically appear. The veil of mystique that surrounds storytelling needs to be pulled away. Turning a strategy into an appealing story requires a sequence of steps. Granted, some things can’t be planned, like some leader’s eureka moment about the best peg, metaphor or example that hits them during their Saturday morning jog. But you can’t do without a systematic approach (see Figure 1). Figure 1 lists the main storytelling imperatives and checkpoints. “This is hard work, too,” one senior manager said. “Remember, it’s all about perception, not about what you actually say.”