Also a Storyteller

The line opens “Why entrepreneurs are storytellers”, a post Richard Branson published on the Virgin blog in February 2016. He qualifies it in both directions in the next two sentences: “it is no use being a good storyteller if your product or idea is rubbish”, but “it is not enough to create a great product; you also have to work out how to let people know about it”. The rest of the post explains the “Today”: he used to rely on “creating a splash and making the front pages” to launch Virgin companies; with social media, he says, it is “easier to be a storytelling entrepreneur now than at any other time in history”.

Branson’s first business was Student Magazine, and he dates his fascination with the overlap between storytelling and business to it. The storytelling he has in mind also points inward: it is a way to “work out new ideas”, and a subject he is pondering “becomes a lot clearer once it is down on paper”, which he counts among the reasons he blogs so much. His closing lines add the hard constraint: people see straight through storytelling that is “false, staged or cynical”. The story has to be true, and the product has to be worth one.