The Clean and Green Club

I picked this book up expecting it to be a book about using storytelling to achieve a business purpose. It is that, but it’s so much more. It’s really a book on how to change the world through the power of telling the right story to the right people.

Sure, many of the sources are business leaders: Howard Schultz of Starbucks, Steve Jobs of Apple, Richard Branson of Virgin, John Mackey of Whole Foods, Paul Polman of Unilever, Elon Musk of Tesla, Kate Cole of Cinnabon, Sheryl Sandberg who taught us to “Lean In” (and yes, among those profiled who were known first as business leaders, white males dominate, as they do in the subset I listed here—I see this as a weakness in an otherwise strong book).

But many others we know first outside the business world and this list is far more diverse: activists like Malala Yousafzai, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks; entertainers including Oprah Winfrey, Sting, Bruce Springsteen; and public figures who used their platform to create sweeping change: Pope Francis, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy. And numerous ordinary people who made a difference.

One of my favorite stories is about Adam Braun, founder of Pencils of Promise. After an encounter with a boy in India who desperately wanted a pencil. He started a charity with just $25, and that charity has gone on to build and fund schools that have served 30,000 impoverished children.

Gallo’s format is to open each chapter with a story, often rooted in the protagonist’s difficult early years—and he suggests we open all our talks with a story. He has consciously chosen to present much of the material either through the seven-part Pixar formula for successful storytelling:

1. Once there was a ______
2. Every day he ______ (I think he could have said “he or she”)
3. Until one day ______
4. Because of that______
5. Because of that ______(emphasis added)
6. Until finally ______
7. Ever since then ______

Or the three-part formula used by J.K. Rowling and others: Trigger/Transformation/Lesson

These are two of many storytelling tools Gallo shares with us to help us amplify our own message by telling it more effectively. Some are common knowledge if you read many books on speaking, such as the vastly stronger appeal of emotional connection over a recital of facts. But some were new to me, such as the biological research that shows why this is so, and the conclusion that if your story is going to succeed, 65 percent or more of the content needs to hit the emotions. He looks at why such devices as analogy and repetition have so much resonance for us (because they turn the content into something more emotive), why so many stories follow “the rule of threes,” and how to develop a “success-destiny mindset.” (Note that the previous sentence is an example of the rule of threes.)

Successful stories involve the protagonist overcoming obstacles, and often require a villain. Every hero needs a “worthy adversary.”

And all these techniques have a goal of moving the listener or reader—he uses the word “transporting.” When you transport your audience, you have the chance to change their point of view.

I’m going to play with that insight myself. Not all of my talks have villains right now, and I am going to experiment with whether adding them makes the speech demonstrably stronger. This might be a challenge in my “Making Green Sexy” speech, where the closest thing to a villain is the abstract notion that green products and services have to be boring. While it’s not a human villain, “Impossible is a Dare” does have two opponents: apathy and disempowerment—but even that may not be clear-cut and personal enough. Reading this book caused me to put up a new speech topic that starts with a very clear villain: the stranger who grabbed me on the street and raped me when I was 11. And that is right there in the talk title: “From Child-Rape Survivor to Champion of Social Change: A Personal Journey.” We’ll see what kind of interest it attracts (and meanwhile, I welcome your feedback on this idea).

Sometimes, great storytellers harness behavior that diverges sharply from the proper and expected. Great storytellers harness our discomfort and break us out of our patterns—like the time Bill Gates, discussing malaria deaths, unleashed actual mosquitoes.

Meanwhile, let me share a few insights (there are far more than I can include here):

• In cultures with a rich storytelling tradition, the approach is multimodal: including gesture, tone, etc.
• Learn passion from Steve Jobs’ question, “what makes your heart sing?”
• Adversity and failure become empowering when we learn from them
• Storytelling creates a bond that Gallo calls “neural coupling” between teller and listener
• Stories take complex subjects and convey them in manageable chunks—especially when told in accessible language
• Stories of hardship and failure say “I’m just like you”; they see themselves as able to do what you’ve done—but never let yourself be defined by those failures
• Often, the business storytelling successes—and the business successes they lead to—are also driven by a need to change the world: “We’re not retailers with a mission, we’re missionaries who retail,” as John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods, put it—or, in the words of Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly, “we exist to connect people to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel”
• Visuals do enormous work in helping us retain a message, boosting recall from 10 percent all the way up to 65—but never get so dependent on your slides that you can’t deliver without them

Gallo ends the book with an awesome quote from Walt Disney: Storytellers “instill hope again, and again, and again.”