Great stories aren’t owned – they are share. Brand owners ignore this at their peril.

One of the defining qualities of a truly powerful story is that others want to retell it. In the act of retelling, stories inevitably change. They are adapted, embellished, and localised. This is one of the strengths of storytelling.

We see this in myths and legends. Stories travel across cultures, changing as they go. For instance, many societies have flood myths with strikingly similar elements – angry gods, chosen survivors, and the release of a bird to test whether the waters have receded (often referred to as the ‘bird scout’ motif). The core idea persists, but each culture makes it its own.

I often see this at conferences, where a story told on stage at one event is retold later, often with different details. One example is the story of the angry father who learned of his daughter’s pregnancy via the product recommendations she received – a story that most likely started out only as a hypothetical, before being translated into an ‘event’.

A story becomes more powerful precisely because it is no longer fixed – it is alive.

Fiction creators understand this. The popularity of a story is often measured by the fan fiction it inspires. Countless tales have been written about Sherlock Holmes that were never penned by Conan Doyle, including less obvious ones such as the TV series House (the clue is in the name – geddit?).

Entire fictional universes, from science fiction franchises to fantasy sagas, have expanded far beyond their original authors because fans wanted to continue the story. Were it not for E. L. James’ love of the Twilight novels we would not have 50 Shades of Grey (who do you think Mr Grey was based on …?). The worlds of science fiction are especially ripe for this phenomena, as seen through the thousands of stories that fans have written in the universes of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who.

Brands are no different.

Two decades ago, the rise of user-generated content clearly showed how brands were no longer controlled solely by marketers. Today, thousands of creators and influencers tell brand stories every day, through videos, reviews, memes, and social media.

This creates a paradox for brand owners: they are not really in control, yet they are still responsible.

In reality, a brand exists only because people believe in it. A brand with no fans is just a name. A brand with millions of fans is a cultural force shaped as much by its community as by its originators and legal owners.

For anyone building a brand, the notion that others want to tell you story for you is not something to control – it is something to nurture and celebrate – and learn from. Third party stories are in some ways a better reflection of the brand than its owners themselves might see – it is a representation of the brand as others see it.

Understanding how the brand story changes through retelling can provide a clear indication of what parts of the story work most strongly, and a good indicator for areas of further development.

Letting go of control is hard for marketers. It requires courage, and careful stewardship. While brands cannot own their stories, they can influence them by clearly articulating their values. These values become the brand’s “canon” – the principles that guide how the story should evolve.

When brands betray that canon, fans notice, and react fiercely (search for the term ‘Holdo Manoeuvre if you’re keen to dive into a rabbit hole for how fandoms respond to such transgressions).

Fans are loyal, and brands crave loyalty. But loyalty is not a transaction – it is a relationship. Take it for granted, and you will discover that a betrayed fan can become your most relentless critic.

Yet when brands stop trying to control the story and instead choose to listen, learn, and participate in it, something extraordinary happens. The stories told by customers, creators, and communities often illuminate the true meaning of a brand far more clearly than any boardroom strategy ever could.

These third-party stories reveal what people actually care about, what they cherish, and what they are prepared to carry forward. They are not noise – they are the brand in its most authentic form.

So the task of brand building is not to lock the story down, but to set it free with intention.

If people want to tell your story for you, that is not a risk to manage – it is the highest form of success.

Because great brands don’t just make customers. They create fans.

And it is fans – not marketers – who turn brands into legends.

Why? Because every presentation should be judged from the audience’s point of view, and 15 seconds is about as long as you can reasonably assume someone will give their attention for free.

If your presentation doesn’t give them a reason to listen beyond the first 15 seconds, why would they?

At that point, for them, it’s already over.

Great presenters are ruthless about how they use those opening moments. In the first 15 seconds, the job is simple: establish value.

Some do this by stating the value exchange directly – their knowledge for your time. Others open with a question or a challenge that pulls the audience in. One of my favourite techniques is to make a promise – something specific the audience can hold you to.

Whatever the approach, it must earn the next 15 seconds. And then the next. And the next – until the presentation is done.

A lucky few can afford to burn precious seconds before delivering value, because their reputation has already done the work for them. This is most often the case for big name speakers, where the value lies as much in entertainment as it is in knowledge exchange.

In their case, the value is established long before they stepped on stage. But that still doesn’t mean they will have everyone’s attention at the 16 second mark.

For everyone else, there is no shortcut. It’s the hard grind of testing ideas, refining openings, and practising delivery until something consistently works, and then evolving it again.

This also means that if you have something important to say, you’d better say it early. The first 15 seconds are the only time you can be confident everyone is still listening.

Good presentations are exercises in holding attention. If you want the audience with you at the end, it’s far easier to keep them with you along the way than to win them back after you’ve lost them.

Yes, every presentation has highs and lows, and contrast matters. Even Mad Max movies need quiet moments so the audience can breathe.

But if that quiet moment comes at the beginning, you may never gain the momentum you need to carry your audience through to the end. Miss the first 15 seconds, and your presentation is effectively over before it’s begun.

Every presentation lasts 15 seconds.

Why? Because every presentation should be judged from the audience’s point of view, and 15 seconds is about as long as you can reasonably assume someone will give their attention for free.

If your presentation doesn’t give them a reason to listen beyond the first 15 seconds, why would they?

At that point, for them, it’s already over.

Great presenters are ruthless about how they use those opening moments. In the first 15 seconds, the job is simple: establish value.

Some do this by stating the value exchange directly – their knowledge for your time. Others open with a question or a challenge that pulls the audience in. One of my favourite techniques is to make a promise – something specific the audience can hold you to.

Whatever the approach, it must earn the next 15 seconds. And then the next. And the next – until the presentation is done.

A lucky few can afford to burn precious seconds before delivering value, because their reputation has already done the work for them. This is most often the case for big name speakers, where the value lies as much in entertainment as it is in knowledge exchange.

In their case, the value is established long before they stepped on stage. But that still doesn’t mean they will have everyone’s attention at the 16 second mark.

For everyone else, there is no shortcut. It’s the hard grind of testing ideas, refining openings, and practising delivery until something consistently works, and then evolving it again.

This also means that if you have something important to say, you’d better say it early. The first 15 seconds are the only time you can be confident everyone is still listening.

Good presentations are exercises in holding attention. If you want the audience with you at the end, it’s far easier to keep them with you along the way than to win them back after you’ve lost them.

Yes, every presentation has highs and lows, and contrast matters. Even Mad Max movies need quiet moments so the audience can breathe.

But if that quiet moment comes at the beginning, you may never gain the momentum you need to carry your audience through to the end. Miss the first 15 seconds, and your presentation is effectively over before it’s begun.

In corporate storytelling, no one cares about your story as much as you do, so if you want it to influence an audience, your story must be clear, concise, and deliver value quickly.

That sounds simple, but clarity is fragile – especially when a story is shaped by a group. Each contributor arrives with their own priorities, messages, and details they want included. Before long, a once-focused narrative is buried under conditions, modifiers, and explanations.

The result isn’t engagement. It’s friction.

Instead of drawing people in, excess detail gives them reasons to switch off.

Good storytelling is an exercise in brevity. It demands ruthless focus on a single objective – influence – and a willingness to question whether every element genuinely supports that goal.

This can be an uncomfortable process. Cutting material often means disappointing people whose contributions don’t make the final edit. But if those elements don’t help achieve the outcome, they’re not helping the story anyway.

The rule is simple:

Do these words help me achieve my outcome?

If yes, they stay.

If no, they go.

Use this test the next time you’re crafting a narrative – especially when internal resistance appears and the urge to keep adding starts to creep in.

I spend a lot of my time walking from one place to another, and have found this time to be incredbly valuable for listening and learning. So in the spirit of the Season, I’ve curated a list of my 12 favourites, ranked in alphabetical order. This list covers everything from linguistics and etmology to astro and quantum physics, including a fair dose of folklore, mythology and narrative theory, and even a fair coverage of reseach into ancient relgious texts.

These YouTubers have not only been invaluable to me as a source of knowledge, but they have often reshaped my thinking, and proven highly entertaining too. If you want to master storytelling, you need to understand not just the role it plays today, but the role it has played in shaping history, and how storytelling has engaged the human psyche over the centuries.

And if you want to know how I managed to link the non-cannonical Gospels to the Star Wars Expanded Univese and 50 Shades of Grey, you might find some the answer in one or two of these videos ….

Language, Thought & Persuasion: How stories get encoded into words

languagejones: Dr Taylor Jones has a PhD in linguistics and is not afraid to use it – at high speed, and across a massive number of topics relating to how we speak (his dissertation on the Gen-Alpha ‘6-7’ brain-rot phenomenon is eye-opening). He explores the complexities in slang and dialects and is not afraid to call out spreaders of false information, or explain how language is used to shape opinion. His most recent exploration of how language shapes engagement on YouTube should be essential viewing (for both manipulators and the manipulated).

RobWords: A fun channel for anyone who has wondered why a dog is called a dog (sadly, no one really knows the answer to that one). Rob Watts delves into the history, etymology, quirks, idioms and word origins of the English language in a way that is quick to curry favour with word enthusiasts (and I recommend you look up the origin of ‘curry favour’). If his channel doesn’t expand your vocabulary, it will at least give you a stronger sense of why you might choose the words you use.

Myth, Meaning & Belief: The oldest stories

Crecganford: An unparalleled authority on mythology and history, with a focus on Indo-European mythic traditions. It takes a scholarly approach to mythology and is brilliant in its exploration of how stories transfer from one culture to another, and the motifs they take with them. One of his latest videos, on whether or not Neanderthals were storytellers, brings rare context to the idea that at one time there was more than one species of human on the planet and raises the question of whether humanity’s abilities as storytellers played some role in our rise to hominid supremacy. Grab a cup of tea and settle in for some amazing explorations of ancient lore from the earliest days of human storytelling.

Esoterica: Dr Justin Sledge has created a wealth of content exploring the esoteric in history, philosophy, and religion. His explorations of everything from mysticism and the Kabbalah through to the occult and witchcraft are both thoughtful and thought-provoking and provide rare insights into the origins of many of the narratives that influence our lives today.

Dan McClellan: Dan is a scholar of the Bible and religion, and while that might initially seem to be an odd choice for me, his examination of ancient texts provides an excellent perspective from which to understand some of the oldest stories still told today—their origins and their influence. Most importantly, he brings a highly critical perspective to both the texts and how they are interpreted, and he is exceptional in his use of scholarship to dismantle many of the dogmatic perspectives that exist within religious communities today. In doing so, he provides a host of examples of how reason and evidence can be wielded to support arguments against even the most fervent believers. And when you begin to understand that the behaviours of those writing ancient texts were not so dissimilar to those of many storytellers today, his channel becomes mandatory viewing.

Fiction as a mirror: Stories we invent to understand the world we live in

Feral Historian: This creator manages to find the political, social, and economic theming in even the most seemingly banal of science fiction worldbuilding, and his ability to relate fictional constructs to the real-world ideas that birthed them is enlightening. By teasing out the narratives and their underpinning philosophies, Matt offers up something both for those who want to understand fictional worldbuilding, and how fictional worldbuilding can reflect and even influence the world that birthed it.

Money, power, and systems: Stories of why the world is the way it is

Patrick Bolye: The king of the deadpan takedown, Patrick covers everything from rogue trading and crypto-bros to the Epstein Files and the financing of Saudi megaprojects (his videos on NEOM and the Epstein birthday book are really worth a watch). Sceptical without ever being mean-spirited, critical but with an insider’s knowledge of how things happen the way they do, Patrick is my number one source when trying to make sense (or quantify the insanity) of global financial markets.

EconomicsExplained: This Australian economics education channel is a brilliant resource for understanding the economies of different countries and how they work (or why they don’t), while also looking into issues such as the impact of taxation and monetary policy. A great example of data-driven storytelling, the channel offers something for both the casually-curious and seasoned geopolitical hacks.

How Money Works: US-based former investment banker Darin Soat is terrific at explaining the complexities within the financial system and at articulating problems that most are willing to ignore. His exposition of the fragility of the Australian economy ruffled a number of feathers but was no different to the type of analysis he brings to a wide range of economies and topics.

Wall Street Millennial: My favourite channel for regaining a sense of sanity after diving too deep into the goings-on of the innovation investment market. Another YouTuber who isn’t afraid to call ‘bullshit’ on the utterances of Sam Altman, Elon Musk and others, and who brings a critical eye to business deals often long before other sources start to look into them.

The Universe and Reality Itself: Stories that are bigger than any of us

Sabine Hossenfelder (Science News): German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is a voice of reason in the increasingly crazy world of academic research, providing in-depth analysis of the latest news, and not being afraid to call bullshit on specific papers and press releases, or on the fundamental flaws in the academic research community. Her news spreads across a wide range of topics from climate change and energy through to particle physics and the nature of the universe.

Anton Petrov (Wonderful Person): A tireless science communicator who strives to make the complex clear in fields such as astrophysics, mathematics, and quantum physics. Anton’s short videos are easy to digest and will keep you up to date with what’s happening both close to home and in the furthest reaches of the visible universe (literally).

No one in your audience knows what you meant to say. They don’t know the line you forgot, or that the sentence you just delivered wasn’t delivered with perfect cadence.

And yet the pursuit of perfection remains one of the biggest stumbling blocks I see speakers struggle to overcome.

When we watch someone on stage, we are almost never witnessing the “best” version of their presentation. We’re simply seeing the latest version, which may skip a detail, underplay a key point, or trip over a phrase.

But if the core message gets through – if it is clear, memorable, and compelling – then perfection becomes irrelevant, because you have achieved what you set out to achieve.

A presentation only needs to be good enough to be effective. Not flawless.

In fact, many great presentations are great precisely because they aren’t perfect. There is something deeply engaging about watching a speaker stumble slightly, then recover. It reminds us they are human – not a polished, faceless, corporate automaton.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in a failed demo. A flawless demo is impressive, but recovering from a failing demo is unforgettable.

This is not an argument against preparation. You should rehearse. You should test everything. You should stack the odds in your favour.

But you shouldn’t rehearse yourself into sterility, or catastrophise the moment something slips.

It’s worth remembering that when you’re on stage, you’re not reciting Shakespeare. You don’t need to be word-perfect.

So don’t strive for perfection.

Strive for effectiveness.

There’s a simple mistake that derails countless presentations, and most speakers don’t even realise they’re making it. They talk to an audience – as if communication flows one-to-many. But that’s not how audiences experience a presentation.

When I’m sitting in a room—whether it’s ten people or a thousand—I’m not thinking, “I am part of an audience.” I’m thinking as an individual, with my own priorities, questions, hopes and frustrations. The people around me are irrelevant to my needs in that moment.

For me, the communication is one-to-one.

So if the speaker isn’t saying something that matters to me, I switch off. I’m not engaged, and I’m certainly not influenced. Which is why every presenter needs to remember this:
An audience is not a crowd. It’s a collection of individuals—each with their own wants, needs, pressures and fears.

And they’re all asking the same silent question: “What am I getting out of this?”

To answer that question, you need to know them. Really know them. Who are they?
What do they do? What do they already understand? What are they struggling with? What are they hoping for—and what are they afraid of? And most importantly, what do you have that can help them?

If your goal is to influence thinking or drive action, the worst thing you can do is deliver the same presentation to every room without doing this work. Because if you speak to a faceless mass, you’re not speaking to people.And if I’m in that room, I will very quickly feel like you’re not talking to me.

And once I feel that—why should I keep listening?

Of all the sectors we studied for the TAFE NSW Evolution of Skills report, none demonstrated the same requirement for leaps in skilling that we saw as being necessary in trasport and logistics.

The high level of human dependency in this sector (think delivery drivers, or warehouse pickers and packers) has already seen it become the subject of intense speculation (and investment) regarding the role of automation (think driverless cars and trucks, or automated warehouse environments such as those operated by China’s JD.com).

In Australia we are really only at the early stages of automation in transport and logistics, starting with driverless trains and some warehouse automation projects, such as those undertaken by the ecommerce retailer Catch Group (I suspect it this company’s investments in warehouse automation – and the lessons it has learned – was a strong factor in its acquisition by Wesfarmers).

But as automation takes hold, the sector faces a significant challenge in terms of ensuring it can develop the skills necessary to operate its new systems and processes. As Catch Group has learned, there is a big difference between managing a standard warehouse and an automated one, and hence a wide delta between the skills that managers posess today and those they will need in the future. Across the sector, roles are becoming more complex, and often require skills from different disciplines. Srong change management programs will be needed to transition workers into new delivery models and with skills acquisition.

It’s a big challenge, but one that must be met if organisations in this sector are to keep up with customer expectations. You can read the complete findings in the sector report, downloadable from the TAFE NSW website.

If you’ve noted the repeated references to skills in my recent posts and other work, you might be interested in knowing where this thinking stems from. In early 2019 I was asked by TAFE NSW to help with the creation and writing of an indepth report looking into Australia’s future skills challenges and the strategies that might help organisations to avoid them.

The result is the report The Evolution of Skills, and it has yielded numerous findings, ranging from the universal requirement for not just digital skills in the workforce, but also for soft skills such as problem solving, collaboration and systems thinking. It also demonstrated the trend towards specialisation in many roles, and the challenge this presents in finding people with the requisite expereince to do the jobs that will emerge in the next ten years. Conversely, it also showed how many roles will require a blend of skills from multiple disciplines, creating the need for cross-skilling of a large segment of the workforce.

The key conclusion of the work was that the employment market simply won’t be able to supply the workers that Australian organisations will need to succeed through this decade. This will in turn arise the need to identify those workers who are best suited to reskilling and then invest in the programs that will get there where they need to be.

Interestingly two of the best examples or organisations thata are taking a strong stance on reskilling are both publicly-owned organisations – Sydney Water and Service NSW, and you can read their stories in the Infrastructure and Government sections of the report.

This content has become a key component of much of current public speaking work, and has also informed my ongoing investigations in the attributes of transformative leaders.

A quick shout out the team at Open Forum for posting up my latest musings on the connection between skills development and long term competitiveness. Skills (or more specficailly, a lack of skills) is quickly emerging as a risk factor for many businesses in terms of impacting their long term plans. It is something covered in detail in the Evolution of Skills report I worked on for TAFE NSW, and a topic that I hope to give some voice to in the emerging debate regarding Australia’s future resilience.