His business card, from the Minneapolis training company Growthworks, is printed on both sides. On one side, his title is Senior Partner, and, on the other side, Chief Storyteller. If I wasn t telling stories, I d be thrown out of the room. For McDermott, stories in presentations are a powerful way to trigger an emotional response and engage an audience s memory. They say that our sense of smell is one of the most powerful memory triggers.
Stories do that too.
They create a context that helps you understand why a point matters. An overhead with a couple of formulas just can t do that. McDermott finds stories everywhere on the news, on the Internet, in everyday conversation. If they mean something to him, he adds them to his repertoire. If they re funny, they can help, and if they have emotional content, that helps too.