Business Storytelling: Why the Best Idea Loses

00:00 · Why even great ideas fail without effective storytelling

There's a moment every founder knows. You've done the work, you've built the thing, the strategy is right, the numbers are there, and the idea is genuinely good. Well, while you walk into that room or into that call, and you lay it all out, and you get blank stares. Not hostility, not disagreement, just nothing. My guest today has spent 30 years figuring out why that happens. And, more importantly, what to do about it. He started his career building submarines and artillery systems, discovered that the best engineering in the world couldn't move people on its own, and rebuilt his entire career around the one thing that could.

Gavin McMahon is the CEO and co-founder of Fast Forward, a leadership and storytelling consultancy that's worked with Fortune 500 companies across tech, defense, and finance for over two decades. His new book, Story Business, came out in September of 2025, and is one of those rare business books that actually changes how you think. The central argument, it's not the best idea that wins. It's the best told ideas. And today, Gavin's going to show us how to close that gap. Welcome to the Dream Dividend. I'm Kevin Patrick. Let's get into it. Gavin, welcome. We've been looking forward to this one. Playing tag a few times, but here we are. We've made it.

So, welcome. Finally, thank you. Yeah, it's great to be here, Kevin. So, I want to start with where your book starts. Not with the storytelling, but before it. Right? You were are an engineer, proper one, not one of those phony ones. Uh you worked on sub you know, submarines, artillery systems, steel plants. That that is a world built entirely on precision and logic. Yeah. What what was the actual moment that you realized that precision and logic weren't enough to move people? I don't think there was a single moment. I think there were many and maybe it's cuz I'm a bit slow. Maybe I should have realized it the at the first time.

Um but I think one I I distinctly remember was I was working in Africa. We were building um a factory and and for for various reasons, I ended up running this factory. I was probably about 26, 27 at the time. And we had our auditors come around and they were doing the audit and I had engineering training. I knew kind of how the factory worked, but the whole management thing was a bit strange to me. So these guys from Coopers & Lybrand came around and they started counting things, which made sense. Audit sounds like counting, so I took them through the various stock rooms and they were you know, showing them all the various parts and packages that we had in the factory and they got to this big box of bolts, I think it was and there were meant to be maybe a thousand bolts in this package and they said, "Okay, that's fine." And I said, "Well, do you not want to open the box and count them?" No, no, no, this is roughly right. So I think that was when the scales started to come from my eyes because I had this you know, for me as an engineer, I'd be like, if this says a thousand bolts, we should bolts, we should check that there's a thousand bolts and and there are the these other strange professions where they just start to do things differently. And maybe that was one of the first times.

02:37 · Gavin's transition from precise engineering to impactful leadership

Yeah. Some of it. Close enough. So it and I actually that starts me on that that path where I was like there's a whole different side to managing people that that is different. And then over the years I you know, I worked in the publishing industry. I worked for Gartner. And it's always you know, you can have a great idea, but it's always convincing people that this is a great idea or even listening to other people's great ideas and kind of developing them. And and I think that's so hard for most people. And yet pretty much all businesses are built on the success of ideas and how well people make decisions inside that business. So, I think the better people can tell stories, the better they can influence each other, the better ultimately the decisions of that business makes and the better for the business.

04:15 · The critical importance of packaging stories over perfect ideas

Right. So, here here's something I found genuinely fascinating in your background that doesn't get talked about much, right? Um while you were doing this defense engineering Mhm. what it was at Vickers, I believe, designing real weapon real weapon systems, right? You were also serving in the army simultaneously. Uh for those that are American, that is the UK equivalent of our National Guard, I believe. Yep. >> So, you're living two completely different cultures at the same time. The engineering culture and the military culture. Yeah. What What does that do to how you see authority, leadership, and why people actually follow? That's a That's a really good question. I think well, Well, there's a story I tell from from my time in the army, which is when I was doing um basic training, officer training. So, I was at Sandhurst, and we were on an exercise.

05:33 · Engineering lessons from Africa reveal managing unpredictability

And the way they teach you, so the army's big on leadership. And hopefully, you know, if you're in the army, if you're in any kind of military branch, then hopefully 99.9% of what you do, maybe 100% of what you do is the is the training side of it. Not the actual what you're there to do side of it, cuz that that that can get I think pretty scary. I was always a peacetime soldier. But uh anyway, we're on exercise on Salisbury Plain, and the and we were basically attacking a a trench or attacking a fortified position. And the way the army works is they're they're they'll put you in various positions.

So, I was a squad commander, seven people. And there's a there's a manual they give you, which is how do you you know, uh what's the all of thinking you have to go through before you give orders. So, you're getting orders down from on high, and you you're now in charge of these seven men attacking this position. And I can remember freezing and not really understanding or thinking not knowing what to do next. And the manual says you should consider all these things, like uh your cover, and what the disposition your troops are like, what the weather's like, what your supply chain is like, all a whole big list, and same for the other side.

And I can remember thinking it's way too much stuff. My brain froze, and I didn't know what to do. Fast forward, I I ran a I was a platoon commander in an infantry regiment, and I had a section commander working for me, Corporal Gray. And I spoke to Corporal Gray later on, and I said, "How do you make this decision?" He exactly described the same scenario. "How do you make that decision?" He said, "That's easy. You only ever have three options. You can go left, you can go right, or you can go straight ahead. So, I I left that conversation thinking Corporal Gray was an absolute genius cuz he boiled this really complex problem that I didn't get down to these three things. And because again, I'm a bit slow, I came back uh a few weeks later and said, "Okay, so how do you choose between left, right, and straight ahead?"

07:25 · The influence of military decision-making on leadership storytelling

And Corporal Gray said, "Well, that's easy, sir. I always go left." >> >> Which I had the same reaction. And like I say, we were both peace-keeping soldiers, so this is never tested. But I find that very similar. You know, we talk about the the military being different. The military is a is a great learning organization and a great training organization. And they're really good, even though there's a lot of command and control, they're very good at giving people autonomy to do what they need to do because the people on the ground generally know best. That I find is very is almost the opposite of the way a lot of large corporations, especially the ones we work with, work work. And their equivalent of kind of the general giving orders is the strategy coming down from the CEO and being cascaded down. And everyone then has to interpret it in the same way that I did and the same way that Corporal Gray did.

And I think most people do what Corporal Gray did and what I did. They either freeze the way I did, or they do what Corporal Gray did, which is they choose to go left. Now, the equivalent the civilian equivalent of choosing to go left is I'm just going to do what I did yesterday. I am not going to change because I didn't understand, I don't want to, all the various reasons that people are going to resist change. And I think uh you know, I I definitely learned that when I was in the army. It's a It's a story that's always stuck with me. I can still picture him saying that. Um but I think it's so true. It's just human nature.

Yeah. That's uh I don't know that I'd want to be next to Corporal Gray in wartime, but hey, you know, you know, >> >> what are you what are you going to do? So, you touched on it. Um you were eventually you eventually landed Gartner, you know, which is one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world. You're VP of web strategy. Big job, right? Huge responsibility. And then you and Rose Fast leave to start FastForward in 2001. What did you both see that nobody else was solving? When you ask that question, it makes us sound super smart and I I don't think I don't think we are that super smart. I think a lot of people that start >> >> A lot of people that start companies, I'll tell you what we did. I don't know if it's the same for everyone else, but I think a lot of people that um for whatever reason leave leave their employer go and hang up their own shingle, you start talking to people and you start talking to people about what they're dealing with, what their problems are, what their issues are. And if you're smart enough, you'll turn around and say, "Well, I I think I could help you with that." And so, Rose and I, mostly Rose to be honest cuz she was good at this, would have a lot of conversations about what people were dealing with and what they needed help with and we were good enough and lucky enough to be able to be in a a few right places and and help people with that.

>> >> Okay, so let's get into the book, right? The central the central claim, and I want to make sure I quote you here, right? Is it it's not the best ideas that win, it's the best packaged ideas. Is that Do I that right? You do. Okay. So, that's a bold statement, right? It suggests that companies with genuinely inferior ideas or products can beat better ones. I mean, say it's not so, but purely through how they tell the story. And by the way, I did uh Audible your book. I'd like to say I read it, but I'm lazy. I Audible it. Uh so, it was nice to hear your voice for a couple hours, but uh yeah, well, so we're going to get into the story thing here in a little bit.

Um So, give me a real example, you know, ideally one that stinks a little where a great idea lost because it couldn't tell its story. Well, I'll give you I'll give you a couple. I'll give you a couple of of the winning and the and some from mine of the of the losing. I I was uh Okay, so the the classic example of a an inferior product winning uh versus a superior idea, there's a there's a lot of them. We all have QWERTY keyboards in front of us. QWERTY keyboards were designed to slow typists down, to slow the actual entry of the words down because old-fashioned typewriters have mechanical uh levers, and they clashed with each other. So, literally the letters are spaced apart, so it's actually not that easy to type, but we're all used to them. There is another kind of keyboard called a Dvorak keyboard, which is invented, I guess, by a guy called Dvorak, or I don't know. Um but you can type a lot quicker on those keyboards, but we've never used them because for various reasons, market forces, et cetera, they they you know, we've gotten so used to the one we've we've got. Um VH VHS tapes and Betamax, you'll be old enough to remember them. I certainly do.

12:18 · The divergence between organizational values and actual culture

Um, I do. >> Betamax was a was a superior technology by all accounts, but VHS, because it had better marketing, got out there and told a better story, was out there. And I think conversely, there are, you know, products that really struggle because people don't understand it. Um, I think blockchain is a great example. A lot of tech people will for years have been talking about blockchain and how it's going to change the world, and most people don't understand it. And it's one of those things that kind of languishes on the Gartner hype curve of something that will be great, but it didn't quite get out there.

14:00 · The misconception: data vs. narrative in decision making

I personally, when I when I was at Gartner, we were developing websites, and one of the first things we had, um, in a in a site that I managed, was kind of a basically a CRM system before CRM was even a thing. A a salesperson could go and demo this website. This is back in the mid mid-90s. Could demo a website where I could give it to you, you could play with it, and the the system itself would email you, "Hey, your demo's started. Hey, the time's up." It would send me, the salesperson, report back of what Kevin did. All of that stuff. It was a great idea. I could not package it and get it sold inside the company or or anything else. So, there's there's always, and I think everyone's been through that moment where they think they've had something that was a brilliant idea, but they couldn't get it past whoever that next level of approval was.

Right. Um, Okay. So, let me let me push on something here because >> Mhm. I think a skeptic listening to this would say, "Hold up. Hold up. Isn't this just teaching people to package bad ideas more convincingly? Isn't this a manual for manipulation? How would you answer that? Um I think manipulation doesn't last. I mean, I hope it doesn't. I think I think there are are moments and times where it has its day in the sun. Um but eventually it it you know, it's like a house of cards, it will fall down. I think the classic example is Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, right? She had a brilliant idea.

She was And the idea was a really good idea, and she packaged it really well, but she couldn't deliver technically on the idea that she had. So, the idea that you could somehow, you know, take a blood sample really easily and understand all sorts of illnesses and ailments from that really quickly. Still, I mean, if you could make it so, it would be would be great. She just could >> wouldn't have been the billion idea or the billion-dollar idea she said it was. Right, but she she packaged it really well. But again, I think um that's positive in the book. I You know, I talk about value storytelling, and the numbers and the narrative have to line up. And if they don't, if you can't prove out what you're talking about, it you know, people will give you so much space, but they won't give you infinite space to to keep saying stuff.

Um I do think the the kind of information ecosystem we live in is allowing people to stretch out the packaging and and live longer than than you used to be. You used to have to prove out uh whatever you were saying a lot quicker. I think, you know, now it it seems that they there's more room to to give yourself more runway and just package and package and package, but eventually people will sniff you out. Yeah. Agreed. So, you break you break storytelling in business down to six genres. Value, product, brand, sales, leadership, and culture. Yeah. Which one do founders and small and mid-size business leaders most consistently get wrong?

17:14 · Real examples of inferior products winning through storytelling

I think product storytelling, I would say. But and I think they're lucky or unlucky about value storytelling, which requires me to explain both. So, I'll I'll explain value storytelling. Value storytelling is answers the human question, is it worth it? So, you know, if you're going to buy Apple stock, your question would be, is it worth it? If you're going to buy a new pair of shoes, your question would be, is it worth it? How you answer that question is not very rational. It's really deeply rooted in your sense of self. And if you understand value storytelling as a founder of a small company, you can understand what are all the narratives around you.

Because as a small company, you there's no way even a even a huge company like an Amazon um or a or an Apple can only influence the narrative so much. The There are so many things around us that we have to glom onto. So, the best way to a good way to think about that is to say, if you're um Nvidia is a good example. The the bigger narrative, bigger than Nvidia, which is by the way the biggest company in the world, is AI is a gold rush. First of all, the biggest narrative is AI is a thing. Now, how you describe thing, good thing, bad thing, gold rush, arms race, whatever you describe, arms race is a definite narrative, gold rush is definite narrative.

19:02 · Manipulation vs. storytelling - why authenticity endures

That narrative is super valuable for Nvidia because the story that people tell themselves is who makes money in the gold rush? It's not the miners, it's the people that sell the pickaxes and the shovels to the miners. Who is that in this gold rush? That's Nvidia. So, if you're a startup, you should be thinking, what's the bigger narrative around me, the space that I'm playing in, and how do I kind of glom on to that space, and how do I prove that what I'm doing is part of that narrative? And then, very quickly, to your earlier point about proving it out and being authentic to it, you have to live it fully as well, or not.

Um So, you write that culture is a story an organization tells itself, right? >> Mhm. I think that's one of the most precise things I've I've read about or listened to about culture in a long time. Like, right? Like, this is who we are. Yeah. So, he here's what I consistently or here constantly with founders I work with, there's the culture story on the website, the values poster in the break room, and then there's the actual lived experience of the people inside the company. Yeah. And those three three things are usually um pretty vastly different. Yeah. What happens to an organization when those things diverge, and how do you close the gap?

I think so, I I I use a very fairly general definition of culture. It's how we do things around here. But when But I I really focus in on the word do. Because strategy is what I intend to do. Leadership is maybe what I'm trying to inspire people to do. The results that we have are the are the results of the things that we've done. So that word do is super important. It gets used a hundred times in a hundred different ways inside a company. And if you think about culture as how we do it, how we do what we do is either going to help us or hurt us.

So let's let's start from that starting point. So culture is a lot more important than most people think. And what it does, a good culture, is going to give you a lot more intrinsic effort from everyone that that works there. They're going to generally line up in the right direction. They're going to generally give people the benefit of the doubt. They're going to generally give leadership the benefit of the doubt, and they're going to put a lot more effort in than they normally would considering the compensation and the pay and everything else that they they've got lined up. So culture is a huge thing. And I think again, people are not stupid. They They can sniff out what you know, what the principles on the wall and how you actually behave, and they can really easily see very quickly that they're different.

22:19 · The narrative of AI commoditizing knowledge and its implications

So if you think about it as culture is what you do, then it's it's not a big set to think about culture as a set of collective habits. And if your collective habit as an organization is a good one, and it helps you in your strategy, that's really useful. If it's a bad one, it doesn't work. I'll give you an example. So a lot of companies will go on about innovation. And innovation might be one of the you know, shiny words on the wall that you say we're innovative as a company. But innovation requires a lot of things. It requires you to question a lot of things. It requires you to celebrate not set not failure, but it requires you to celebrate the learning from failure.

23:07 · How to craft a compelling hook that captures attention

And you see that in the collective habits. And a great example is SpaceX. If you watch a rocket launch from SpaceX and they have, you know, they'll stream it on YouTube. And they'll have SpaceX people covering the launch. They get excited when the rocket blows up. Now, that to an outsider is weird. Because like I thought you just spent a million dollars on this rocket or more and it's blown up and you're excited. Yeah, millions and millions. And but they're excited because it's what they call a RUD. So, part of their language, part of their culture is this idea of a RUD. A RUD is a rapid unscheduled disassembly, meaning for us civilians it's blown up. But they're excited cuz they're going to learn and they've got that next stage where they can do better. That's inbuilt as a collective habit in the whole organization.

If you put innovation on the wall and you don't get excited when the rocket blows up then your two things are not lining up and you don't have collective habits. You just have a set of shiny letters on a wall. Right. Right. Which is most, I'd say. Yeah. More often than not, right? Yeah, sadly. So, there's a belief that's deeply embedded in the business world, especially among young founders who've come up through analytical disciplines that data is credible and story is soft. Yeah. That if you lead with numbers, you're serious. And if you lead with narrative, you're marketing. Yeah. You are arguing the exact opposite, Yeah. So, walk me through why data first backfires and what you do instead.

Or what should you do instead? >> I don't think data first backfires, but I think it's not the it's not the holy grail people think it is. All right. First of all, there's no such thing as pure data. It's always selected and it's always edited. It just by definition it has to be. There's no way that you can comprehend all the data that possibly impacts whatever decision you're going to make. So, you you've got to think about that. Secondly, you've got to look at the way the way humans make decisions. And then this gets into what I call the motive triangle, which is hope, fear, and reason. So, somehow in business world, we always go to the bottom of the triangle and we always think about reason. There's got to be a rationale.

There's got to be an ROI. If I invest this, I will get this return. That that's perfectly reasonable, but it's not the way people make decisions. People make decisions based on hope and fear. Is this going to make me look good? Hope. Is this going to make me look bad? Fear. So, you actually need to triangulate that triangle and think about hope and fear because you want someone to make a decision and then give them a reason because they probably need to explain it to somebody else. So, if you're a founder and you're trying to sell whatever it is you're selling, you need to appeal to appeal to hope and fear and have to go along with it. So, for example, if you're speaking to an investor, the investor is probably looking at two or three things.

You know, is this an idea in a space that's hot? That gets back to the value storytelling I talked about earlier. Because I don't I I want to invest in what I think is a hot space. Now, you may not control that, but that that's what the investor is going to look for. Another thing they're going to look for is is this person in front of me credible? Now, credible is going to be they've exited five times before successfully. You know, their first five businesses may have been marshmallows, baking, and something else. And now they're coming to you with an AI, but at least they know how to do how to grow and exit from a business.

So, it's like are they credible? That's a very different set of things. It is a very different story, by the way, to the story that you're going to sell to your first customer or your first employee. And they're they're all slightly different versions of of a story. And and people react to stories. The The best example I came up with, and it's in the book, is Buffett's million-dollar bet. And so, he made a bet with a a Wall Street guy, hedge fund, that said, "You know, all these people that invest in hedge funds really, you know, they're they're just enamored by the market. They don't know what they're doing. I can make more money just by putting a thousand dollars on a on an index fund that tracks the S&P."

And so, he took up this bet with this guy, Ted Seides, I think his name was. And for a while, Buffett was losing the bet, but they let it run for 10 years. And over time, uh Buffett's money overtook the other guy by about 30%. Yeah. And it was because humans are making the decisions about what they think is valuable. And humans are fallible. And so, what that tells you is that humans fall for narrative. And if you're selling something, then it and you don't have a narrative to wrap around your numbers, then you are seriously missing something. Yeah. See, I mean, for sure. So, I want to bring something into the conversation from my own world because I think it connects to yours in a way I find really compelling.

The methodology I work with is called the dream is called dream management, right? Developed originally by Matthew Kelly at Floyd Consulting. I think you and I have talked about this in the past. But the core idea is that when you, you being the company, help the people inside your organization connect to their own personal dreams, not just the company's goals, but their own, everything changes. Retention, performance, culture, all of it. Yeah. And I I've been thinking as you've been talking, is is that a story problem? I think story >> speaking selfishly, right? Cuz I run my business on the dream management side of things. Is there a story problem that people buy or don't buy dream management or is dream management itself a story problem or both?

>> Uh both. Um I'll answer it this way. I think there's a word I love and a word I hate. Um the word I hate is empowerment. And the word I love is agency. So I think this is very associated with what you think about dream the dream the dream stuff. Because agency is giving people enough room to bring their best selves to work, to do their best work, to feel like they have skin in the game, to do what they need to do, which sounds like the the dream side of things. Empowerment is to me the fake dream. It's basically me asking you politely to do this thing that I'm going to tell you to do anyway. And by the way, I'm just telling you you're empowered because I don't want to be bothered with it.

But you, if it goes wrong, we'll see how empowered you really are cuz I'm going to come back and check on whatever you do. So I that's the reason I don't like the word empowerment, but I think if people are given agency, that's an awesome thing because they will they will do their absolute best work. But if all you do is give people agency, you just create chaos. So, you have to put alignment around the agency. You have to have aligned agency, and I wish that was a sexier name. Maybe dream management is a sexier name for it, but aligned agency, I think is is the ultimate you're looking for in any size of business because you want let's say you have a thousand people working for you or 50,000 people working for you with CEO of a Fortune 50 company.

You you want those 50,000 people or those thousand people all roughly lined up and pointed in the same direction, all roughly roughly doing the same thing. Not only that, you want them, you know, if your average effort between a Monday and a Friday is something like 60% 70%, you want them at the high end of that average effort scale, which is a agency. So, you want those two things, and I think people default to command and control, they default to telling. And as soon as you start telling people, that's when people will, you know, not bring their best selves to work. That's when they will do their bare minimum, and that's when they will turn around, and they will say, "I'm just going to do what I did yesterday.

I'm going to go left." All the thing All the things that people will do to, you know, not not to buck the system necessarily, but because you're not you haven't got them vested, and you want people vested in whatever it is whatever direction you're going. Yeah. So, follow to follow up on that, if culture is a story the organization tells itself, Yeah. >> and people need their own story to have room inside of that. What is the leader's job specifically, which is I think what you were just talking about around agency? I think a leader's job is all is is >> >> is that shared context. So, I'm all the time I want to share context. So, let's say I have a strategy and then I have somebody, you know, I realize this is a podcast and I'm doing a lot of hand waving, so I don't know if this will translate. So, It's visible. We're we're on camera. I have a strategy at the top of the house and then kind of three or four rungs down, I've got a team that's doing something. Maybe it's a product development team, whatever it is. You hope that that what they're doing aligns to that strategy. And the way most companies do that is they'll just cascade the strategy down and they will not translate it.

And you need to translate it at every level because the the the grand strategy of we're going to penetrate the European market more with product X means not a thing to a person in a call center in Duluth because it doesn't make any It's nothing to do with them. And so, every leader every level needs to share context and translate strategy and that really is all about storytelling. That is about packaging an idea, putting emotion around it because if you just tell it in a very clinical way, if you just say if you just put all the big words around it of empowerment and synergy and leverage and whatever else you see in a strategy document, people are like, "Okay, thanks. I heard it. I won't remember it past the end of the end of the presentation and I'm going to go back to do what I did yesterday." So, you've always got to get people somehow vested in what you're doing, understanding what you're doing and lined up in that direction and that's where that's what a leader's job is. I find it very strange that we s- you know, if you if you get hired as a VP of engineering somewhere in a big company or a VP of marketing, it doesn't matter.

Pick the function. Most of it you may let let's say you have 100 150 people working for you. Most of the questions about what you know about marketing or what you know about engineering and they're very few to do with what you know about getting 150 people to do something. But that's actually where your job is. So I don't get it. Yeah, and indeed. Yeah, I mean we could we could end the interview right there, but we're not going to cuz that's just a mic drop moment. So have to ask you the AI question, right? Cuz it's impossible to have a conversation about storytelling in 2025 and not go there.

The tools that exist now can produce a passable story in seconds. They can write brand narrative, generate sales sequences, draft leadership communications. And for a lot of founders running lean operations, it's genuinely useful. Mhm. But here's the question. Does that commoditize storytelling or does it actually make the distinctively human elements more valuable? >> Mhm. So a couple of things. First of all, every all our work and every conversation we have right now and for the past, honestly, 2 years is all been about AI and what do we do with that? And I think people think about it as a technology problem and I don't think it's a technology problem. I think mostly it's a people problem.

36:11 · The leader's role in translating strategy through storytelling

Um to be very specific about where is it where is AI in this mix and what can I do with it? I think about AI as something that is commoditizing knowledge. So if you go back to the end of the '80s, beginning of the '90s, there was the whole thing about the knowledge economy and it was the idea that the uh everything that's valuable about our company is leaving the door, going out the door at 5:00 and they disappear until night. So somehow we have to capture this knowledge and there's books written about it. Consulting firms made oodles of money out of the knowledge economy. It was all a big thing.

But AI essentially, you can get any answer you like about pretty much anything. I could ask it how to do brain surgery on you and it would probably give me a pretty good answer. Now, I wouldn't have any idea whether it was a good answer cuz I don't know. And you, Kevin, would not trust me at all to do the brain surgery on you. So I think the the value of knowledge goes down and the uh the the value of know-how goes up. So the application of knowledge, that's important. And the application of knowledge is knowing whether I can trust this thing, I can do this thing.

Another way to look about to look at that is to think about um the desktop publishing of the early '90s when the when the first Macs came out. So in the in the '70s and '80s, there were great posters for bands and and movies and everything else, but they were done by specialists who were really good at doing that thing. Once Photoshop came out and InDesign and all those other products that allowed anyone to do it, the the the the quality bar didn't raise. It what it meant was that the people that were really good at creating movie posters or creating band posters could could explore lots of different directions that they couldn't do before. And they actually maybe got a little bit better in terms of the range, but the quality didn't get better. But the the entry level got massively widened. So anyone could create a movie poster or a band poster.

And generally the the level of crap that was produced was just available to everyone. So that that's the AI slop part of the story. So I think if you're a founder what you should think about is what are the things that are really important to my business that are really going to help me that I need humans behind. What are the things that are really fun for humans to do? What are the things that humans only can do, like build relationships? And I want to put humans behind that. And then all the other stuff okay, how much of that can I outsource to AI or can I get done through AI? That's a that's a good question to ask because it it does allow you to scale your capabilities. But you've got to be aware that you know, if you don't know exactly how what you're getting is probably you know, B minus C minus type work. But B minus work work for a lot of stuff is okay.

Yeah, I mean especially now with the models changing. I mean, I listened to a you know, I'm not embarrassed to say it. I listened to an article Oprah podcast with the with the founders of Anthropic. And it was um fascinating. Like just just to hear just to hear their story and what they think about it. I mean you you know, they they very well know it could be the cause of farmageddon if not if not put in the right hands. Right. Um but you know, so so I yeah, I'd say take a listen to that. You might enjoy that story. Yeah, I will. So you talk in the book about shaping a hook, right? The thing that grabs someone before they can decide not to listen. And I'll tell you I'm I'm constantly working on the hook to try to get people to listen to the podcast. So this is this is this is a good one.

What what makes a hook actually work? Not in theory and practice. Like what are the components? Well, I think if you have a good hook, it does a couple of things. It gives people a sense of what's coming, but it doesn't give them the whole thing. It's just a just enough. And it also gets people leaning forward and paying attention. And so you you actually want to engage a lot of people's curiosity to do that. It's just a that sense of what's coming. So questions are really good hooks. Why are they really good hooks? Because they engage people's brain in the answer, in filling in the gaps.

Provocative statements are really good hooks because either you you have an emotional reaction to that provocative statement. You either strongly agree with it or you strongly disagree with it and therefore you want to kind of look more. So powerful visuals are really good hooks because same reason you've got that emotional reaction to it. So you a good hook gives you a feeling. And that feeling keeps you going to the next thing and the next thing and hopefully you're you're taken all the way through. I the the hook that I always think of is the line a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Because I I saw that line in blue in a movie theater when I was, I don't know, a teenager. Yeah, I'm older than you. >> >> And um and so, yeah, I I and it just but it was intriguing because it was like, "Hang on. I'm I'm coming to see a a science fiction movie, and I know that science fiction movies occur in the future. So, how can this be a long time ago?" And and that just got me leaning forward. And then, this huge spaceship came over over my head, and the and the whole theater was rumbling, which it never done before. And now I'm even leaning forward even further. I mean, that was a $10 billion hook that George Lucas had with that just one little line.

Yeah. Yep. So, I'm going to ask you something uh more personal before we close, if that's all right. Mhm. Um you spent 30 years teaching other people how to still how to tell better stories. Yep. But you had to make some significant pivots yourself, engineering to business, corporate to entrepreneur, practitioner to author. When you did that, what's the story you've had to tell yourself privately um in the hard moments to keep going when the work wasn't working? Um yeah, this relates to the idea that >> >> I think the story you tell yourself is very um foundational to who you are and what you think you can do.

And for me, I I've always had a a bit of a gene of I I can figure it out, and I've always had a little bit of a a stubbornness to me, which means I'm not going to I may not win, but I'm not going to lose. Um and so I think underneath all that, what I've learned over the years, is to really lean into the idea that you can learn. Because if you if you think you can learn, you can, and if you think you can't, you definitely won't. And and so when you're stuck, the best thing to do is learn. And then figure it out from there.

Yeah. So last real question before we close. There's there's a founder listening to this well, not right now because it's just me and you right now, but you know, later who has a meeting in 5 minutes, a client who's on the fence, a team that's disengaged, and a pitch that hasn't landed yet. What is the single story move they can make right now before they walk into that room? Make it about them. Right. Period. Yeah. You know, we're we're all we love ourselves. And if if you come in saying that you love yourself, that's a big mistake. If you come in and you're all about them, whatever it is they want, their their itch, their villain that they're dealing with, then you win.

Yeah. Well, Gavin, this is uh been exactly what I hoped it would be, even though we delayed it a couple times. Um so thank you for the generosity of how you think through this. The book is again story business, why stories rule the world, and How They Can Reinvent Your Business. It came out in September 2025, and it is genuinely worth your time. Whether you're building a company, leading a team, or just trying to get your ideas across the table to someone who matters. You can find Gavin at fastforward.com. The book is everywhere books are sold. Uh Gavin, anything you want to leave uh listeners with?

No, I just hope uh if anyone does read Story Business, and they and they find it useful, they in some way it triggered or sparked another idea. I I always love to know about that. I I love to see how it lands with people and and what works. So, please be in touch. Got it. Well, that's it for the Dream Dividend for this week. If this conversation moved something in you, share it with someone who needs it. That's how stories work, I'm told. I'm Kevin Patrick. We'll see you next time. >> Mhm.