ETL 29: Evan Schwartz on the Power of Storytelling

Transcript: Evan Schwartz and Alan Alper

Alan Alper: Well, let’s start with the state of thought leadership … and its importance in the corporate marketing mix. It seems to us that every company in almost every sector wants or needs to convey its problem-solving expertise to win the hearts and the minds and the pocketbooks of its target market. You’ve been around here almost as long as I have. How has the profession changed since you entered the space? And how do you see it progressing in the near term?

Evan Schwartz: Well, we both started in the world of journalism. And before the internet, really, there were some rarefied publications. I was at Businessweek. But essentially, there’s a glut of information online … Thought leadership shows the actionable insights. How do you make sense of everything that’s being reported? And what are you going to do to take the information and use it for your business and for your life?

Alan: Absolutely … But how has it changed? I mean, in the early days, I think there was this kind of focus purely on longer form reports, which are still very important in the overall marketing mix. But today you’ve got a variety of vehicles to provide thought leadership points of view that represent a company’s expertise and problem-solving abilities that drive recognition in the marketplace and hopefully business as well. How has it changed from the time that you got started?

Evan: Attention spans are getting shorter, and people don’t have as big an appetite for longer form reports. Essentially, if they’re reading something on their computer screen, the format I prefer these days is like a PowerPoint presentation that’s very heavily graphics oriented. Each page gives you one big insight that’s illustrated and makes an impression. And then you go to the next page and there’s no limit to how many pages. You could have a 50-page report that is pleasurable to scroll through.

Rather than a sit back reading experience on a sofa, I think most people are reading now on their laptops. Sometimes it’s on their phones. So, you really need to make it work visually for a smaller screen as well.

The Power of a Protagonist

Alan: Absolutely. Creating something that is visually exciting to look at is really important, no question about it. But you still need to have great storytelling and a narrative that really brings the facts and figures to life. I mean, in our view, very often you see a lot of these PowerPoint-esque kinds of thought leadership report and they lack the voiceover. It’s hard to read meaning into the data points or interpret them.

I don’t disagree also that the long form is a challenge for a lot of people, no question about that. But I think if you make it visually stimulating and you weave in some great storytelling, it can be very powerful. And I think today, in our very “facts optional” world, people are looking for research-driven insights, things that really show the evidence behind the point of view. And to me, this is important in the overall thought leadership mix when it comes to B2B marketing.

Do you have a point of view to share?

Evan: Well, sure. As you know, storytelling has been my big purview for 20 years now. And you can see that people are really starting to get it. That if you have a report that’s just heavily chart-based or, you know, facts and figures or presenting conclusions up front, you’re giving away the ending. What you want to do is entice people with a protagonist. It could be a new venture leader; it could be the company brand itself if it’s an iconic company. Present what those challenges are to the protagonist, what they’re up against.

You get people invested in the story, and then you take them to the conclusions and the takeaways. This [approach] has much greater impact. So storytelling, which is adapted from movies and television, can absolutely apply to the business world. And I think that’s what’s really exciting about this field now.

Alan: Absolutely. The facts and figures then become the accent points, the proof points of the hypothesis or the point of view you’re trying to share with your audience. And, you know, very often what we find — and I’m sure you’ve come across this as well — are reports that are just a recitation of data. Here’s all the data we collected and here’s what we kind of think it means, but draw your own conclusions, please.

Evan: Exactly, I just finished a project on corporate venture capital. And the standard industry report just starts out with these pie charts and bar charts of all the deals. And it’s kind of overwhelming and not that interesting in my view. I would rather focus on a company like, [say] Johnson & Johnson or Boeing. These are iconic brands; what are they doing? And make the corporate venture capital leader into a character and show what they’re up against and bring it all the way to the conclusion of launching a successful venture in the marketplace, in healthcare or aerospace.

That’s really exciting. I mean, venture capital entrepreneurship really gets your adrenaline flowing if you tell that story correctly.

Business Books in the Short Attention Era

Alan: We talked a little bit about how people sometimes get intimidated by longer form content, the form of reports at least, but you spent a lot of years writing books. In our attention deficit syndrome age, how do you put together a compelling book that is going to inspire people to read and to stay with it and to glean as much insight and value from all the hard work you put into it?

Evan: I think it has to be based on a big idea. There’s so many “me too” books out there. How many books about artificial intelligence are coming out now? And so many books on leadership and management and innovation that you have to have something that distinguishes you. One of the marquee books that we did with the partners at Innosight is Dual Transformation. And that’s a big idea that we pioneered through articles in Harvard Business Review:  the idea that if you want to transform your company from one business model to another, or one brand image to another, one product set to another, you really need to create two different processes.

One is to adapt your current core business. The other is to launch new ventures that are outside your core. And that’s a completely different team, completely different set of insights. And it serves as a really useful framework. We believe that was a big idea and that kind of thought leadership was really valuable for Innosight, growing the firm, and for our thought leaders like our author Scott Anthony. We were just very pleased to see that that book helped propel him into the top ranks of thought leaders in the world, to the point where he’s in the top 10 on the Thinker’s 50 list now.

So it’s big ideas like that that can really get above the clutter.

 Alan: Can you talk a little bit about the ideation process and how that all came together and how you used HBR? I assumed you seeded the grounds a little bit with the HBR articles to see how it was going to play. You didn’t just launch out and write a book once your articles were published, correct?

Evan: That’s right. You know, the whole thing started with one of our board members named Clark Gilbert, who was reinventing a newspaper in Utah. He was showing that you could still publish a newspaper, but you have to completely do it differently and reposition it. At the same time, you want to create a digital operation that’s a completely different team, different business model, and you want to keep them separate. And the CEO has to arbitrate between these two efforts over many years.

And that case study became a cornerstone of a Harvard Business Review article. We brought in other examples of other companies that have done this dual transformation, and it caught on to the point where we were collecting enough cases and stories and insights where it could become a book. Scott Anthony really took charge as our lead partner and brilliantly wrote this book called Dual Transformation and it became a marquee framework for many of the firm’s consulting engagements.

And companies used it in their own language. So, the thought leadership spread to our clients, and they took off with it. And that’s what we love to see where new language and a new way of thinking can really ripple out to the global economy because some of these clients are some of the biggest companies in the world.

Alan: And when you spoke at our “Profiting for Thought Leadership” event last year, you made the point that it had the 3X effect. It tripled revenue to $60 million for the company, tripled employees to 100-plus people. And the company was then acquired for triple the revenue. That’s an incredible return on thought leadership investment.

Evan: I think it’s a proof point because, as you know, in the consulting world you often can’t predict what your revenue is going to be three to six months from now, because these are all monthly or short-term engagements. But what endures are your ideas, your insights, your thought leadership. And that’s essentially what was purchased — the impact we have, the impact stories, the ideas, the frameworks, and the legacy of someone like Clay Christensen, who was the co-founder of Innosight.

As we know, disruptive innovation has become one of the great business frameworks and buzzwords, unfortunately, for our time.

Writing a Seminal Climate Action Book

Alan: So why don’t we fast forward a little bit and talk about your involvement with the book, Speed & Scale, which you worked on with John Doerr and his team over at Kleiner Perkins. How did that come together and what role did you play in helping those stories be told?

Evan: Well, after leaving Innosight, I started working for John Doerr, the legendary venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins. He’s famous for investing first in Amazon and Google, but he was very, very obsessed, you could say, with climate investing, starting in 2006-7 when he first saw the Al Gore documentary [An Inconvenient Truth]. He brought Al Gore in as a partner to the firm and started investing in these companies, learning so much about how to solve some of these gnarly problems in carbon emissions.

When visiting him in Silicon Valley, I saw a binder on his desk about his venture investments and his plans for investing in policy ideas for climate solutions. And I said, you have to write a book about this. You have to adapt your framework of objectives and key results, which was the centerpiece of his first book, Measure What Matters, which was a number-one New York Times bestseller on the business list. And he thought it was a great idea, so he put me to work with a team focused on creating a global framework and a set of solutions and stories about how we can solve the climate crisis and get to net zero emissions by 2050.

Alan: It’s a great book. I mean, the framework in and of itself, while it is complex, it’s easy to wrap your head around and very clearly presented, and the book is very well designed. But to me, it’s the entrepreneurs who are trying to go out and help solve this crisis. Those stories are really powerful. And you and the team did a wonderful job … showing that there is there is a way to get there from here if we stay the course.

Evan: Yeah, and some of those stories emerged from questions, such as: When you were younger what did you think you wanted to do when you grew up? How did that change? And when did you first have that epiphany that climate is the area that you want to spend the rest of your life on? And everyone had that epiphany. And It resulted in powerful stories. And these people are very driven. We had people starting great climate companies startups like Sunrun and Enphase, but also people like Laurene Powell Jobs (Steve Jobs’ widow) and people who have great fortunes and tell us why they are investing, giving away all their money to solve this existential problem.

Alan: From a Kleiner Perkins perspective, how has this experience played out? Are they happy with the results? Has this helped them to understand where they should be placing their bets, or has it elevated the firm’s recognition in the financial community and whatnot as to their commitment to helping to solve the climate crisis?

Evan: I think so. I think they’re known as marquee climate action investors, both on the technology and startup front, but also in the policy realm and basically getting the public engaged. It’s very exciting for them, but it’s hard. I mean, for every advance three steps forward, there’s two steps back. It is brutal. I think we’ve had some influence in the policy realm. The book was endorsed on day one by Obama, by Al Gore, by John Kerry. We know senators read it; the Secretary of Energy read it.

We think the (U.S.) Inflation Reduction Act was partly influenced by some of our suggestions and frameworks in Speed & Scale. But it’s tough; as you know, we’re not on track. But this message of speed and scale still resonates because we know how to solve climate, but if we do it by 2070 or 2080, it’s not going to make much of a difference. We’re going to have a runaway catastrophe. We have to do it on this time laid out by the scientists in the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change).

Website and Documentary Spinoffs

Alan: The book evolved into a website and I think a documentary film as well. How has that process gone in terms of making sure you’ve got fresh content, fresh points of view, and how has it performed over time? Is Kleiner Perkins happy with the amount of visibility they’re getting on these related properties?

Evan: I think so. I mean, the climate tracker that we did, which was based on the set of key results on the Speed and Scale website, got recognized by the World Economic Forum. Various publications like Cass Commmunity wrote about it. And it’s really like a dashboard to see if we’re on track for key goals. I think everyone’s really proud of that. It’s going to be the basis for more going forward, maybe a second edition of the book.

Alan: Well, stay tuned!

Evan: And John Doerr is an absolute great advocate for this. And he made a huge donation to Stanford and started a climate studies school, the first major new school at Stanford in decades, one of the biggest donations to a university in history. And I think it’s going to really have a lot of impact over a long time.

Alan: Why don’t we transition to other forms of storytelling, more visual forms of storytelling? I know you’ve worked in documentary films in the past. You’ve written a screenplay on the topic of climate. Can you tell me a little bit about how, from a personal perspective, that transition has gone for you and why you’ve embarked on that journey?

Evan: Well, as you know, I’ve written books, historical narratives, a book about the birth of television, a book about the original creation of the Wizard of Oz biography of L. Frank Baum.  I moved to Los Angeles last year in 2022 in order to develop some of these for TV and movies. And I got inspired through my climate work to write a screenplay about climate solutions. We’ve never really seen a movie about climate solutions, so it’s a climate fiction rom-com. And It’s a form of thought leadership because I don’t believe the public is engaged in solving climate.

Everyone’s cynical that it can be done. People are on the verge of panic and apocalyptic thinking. And I don’t think television and film has really caught up or been ahead of this. I’m working with a producer. We’re getting the script out. It already placed in the Austin Film Festival competition. The film is called Sea Changers and we’re hoping to get it made.

Generative AI and Storytelling

Alan: Good luck; we’ll keep our eyes peeled. So given your perch at the intersection of innovation and storytelling, I can’t not ask about the role and the impact of generative AI in storytelling, in thought leadership development, whether it’s research, whether it’s data analysis and synthesis, or whether it’s actually writing something. What is your view on the role it will play and how’s it going to play out?

Evan: I think generative AI is an exciting area. I mean, there’s a lot of misunderstanding. I don’t think  AI is going to achieve general intelligence anytime ever. Humans have to keep evolving and stay ahead of it. Sometimes I think we’re devolving. But I think it’s a great tool. At InnoLEAD, where I’m research editor now, Scott Kersner and the team have taken all the research reports we’ve done and put them into a knowledge base so (clients) can query it and ask questions (through a ChatGPT interface).

What’s the best way to launch a new venture? And all kinds of things that involve improving the performance of innovation at companies? I think you’ve done something similar to that. And I think that’s a really great tool to have. And these specialized databases, where you could query and really get intelligence, will be essential because as you know, it’s garbage in, garbage out. There’s plenty of things that you search on ChatGPT that’s misleading.

Alan: Or outright wrong!

Evan: So, you have to be careful. And that’s why I think there’s a lot of AI leaders who are sounding the warning bells because like almost every technology from the past, it’s gotten ahead of us and it’s moving faster than we can understand it.

Alan : So, you don’t see it as replacing human, creative, constructive thinking? You see it as a productivity tool that can help to maybe enhance or accelerate thinking and provide good inputs that can maybe stir and stimulate more evolved perspectives on things, but it still needs human oversight and it needs process governance, correct?

Evan: I recently queried ChatGPT and asked for examples where AI has generated thought leadership. It basically punted on that question. It says, we don’t have any examples. We’re only updated through 2021, but these are the firms that are selling these tools, which wasn’t very helpful. And I don’t think it could take the place of human thought leadership because no one wants to read sort of gobbledygook stuff that’s regurgitated from what already exists. What we want are new insights, fresh insights, and stories, and only human writers can do that.

And, as we were discussing earlier on the Writers Guild strike, this was one of the issues. No one really wants to watch a movie or a television show written by AI. It’s not going to be good. And we should not go down that road.

Alan: Yeah, I would agree. I’ve seen a lot of fairly decent writing from generative AI tools, but it just sounds like it’s artificial intelligence. It doesn’t sound like it’s got a human (empathetic) perspective. It just seems like something going through the motions.

Evan: That’s right. They call it artificial for a reason.

Alan: That’s right. But I still do believe it is a good productivity tool. It can accelerate and enhance a process for developing ideas. But it can only make good thinking a little better. It can’t take bad thinking and make it good. You’ve got to start with human insight and perspective. Otherwise, we’re heading towards a very bad ending with this story.

Advice for New Thought Leadership Professionals

Alan: So, given your career arc, what advice do you have for folks who are starting out in the thought leadership profession? What skills are going to be needed to succeed? Where can people find jobs and opportunities? What kind of sage counsel can you give them so they can achieve their professional ends?

Evan: Well, I think almost any company that wants to differentiate in the marketplace needs thought leadership. Software companies, or any company that’s selling a product, you can get a job writing for one of those companies, their website, and you’re learning key skills such as synthesizing information, coming up with actionable insights and telling stories. I think there’s a lot of opportunity, and in a way writing in general is turning away from the sort of journalistic “who, what, where, when, why” — which is very much a commodity — into the thought leadership model that we talk about.

Alan: So there’s going to be need for human beings with empathy and constructive and creative thinking. I don’t think these jobs are going away. There may be fewer, but they’re going to be just as important, if not more so, in a marketplace where you’ve got to win on the quality of your ideas and your breakthrough thinking.

And if you’re going to be “me too,” and just try to do as well as your competitor, you’re not going to succeed in the marketplace. Let me ask you this question. When you graduated Union College way back when, did you think you’d be in the position you’re in today? If not, where did you think you were going to be? And how has your career gone compared to your expectations over time?

Evan: Well, that’s a great question. No, I could not have imagined it. I majored in computer science and basically minored in journalism. My dream was to become a journalist, but I never thought you could make a living at it. I was going to get into the computer field and sort of moonlight as a writer, I couldn’t bring myself to do that. So, I started writing right away about technology, and eventually about innovation. My dream early in my career when I was in the trade magazines with you was to get to the big leagues like at Businessweek or The Wall Street Journal, or The New York Times.

And I did go over to Businessweek. I think my aim there was to stay in that field. But I got the bug to write books and embark on writing thought leadership as well. And I think that was a turn I never expected. I remember doing my first thought leadership pieces for a now defunct company called CSC Index. And (it worked out) seeing how it was a completely different kind of writing. It was more valuable to me because I was getting paid more; and it was valuable for the company and its clients. And that gave me a real critical set of skills that I’ve been able to evolve since then, especially with the storytelling piece, because the whole narrative mindset from my books about history, I applied to thought leadership as well. I think they really dovetail together.

Alan: Well, that’s inspiring. And it’s also good to hear that you found your way. It was fortuitous, I think, that you studied computer science way back when. Little did you know that it was going to be a guiding light to your career, not only because you were you a good communicator and storyteller, but also because you actually understood the concepts and the constructs around information technology.

Evan: I remember, early on at Businessweek, I would be sitting across from Bill Gates, interviewing him one-on-one. And when he found out that I had a degree in computer science, he had a little bit more respect for me because that was very rare among tech. In the day.

He felt comfortable to go off on the bits and bytes.

Alan: That was very helpful to him because when a “blue screen of death” (error) occurred while he was doing a demo, he could say, “Oh, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” And nobody would know the difference.

This has been a great discussion that not only goes down memory lane, but also looks a little bit out over the horizon as to where thought leadership is heading and what people should be doing to take advantage of the opportunities. And at the end of the day, while technology is sometimes scary and intimidating, if you embrace it, it doesn’t mean that you have to worry about it eating your job.