Leading High Performing Remote Teams
How can leaders ensure that performance remains high in remote or hybrid-work environments?
Content Marketing
In this course, you’ll learn how compelling blogs, videos, podcasts, and other media can reach customers and drive sales. You’ll also learn steps for creating an effective content marketing plan, and some important ways to measure its impact and success.
Content marketing is a essential digital marketing strategy for companies looking to provide relevant and useful information to support your community and attract new customers.
Get started on your content marketing journey today.
Sustainable Innovation in Times of Disruption: Choices for a Better Society
There are opportunities for progress all around us. The key is to innovate on these opportunities sustainably.
To help identify most effective path forward, you'll need to gain a global perspective to these challenges in an open discussion. How can Japan and the world take action to create a more sustainable, innovative world? Where do you fit in?
It's time to find out.
Social Media & Digital Communications: Impact on Global Public Opinion
Social and digital media have dominated the communications industry for decades. But it's no secret that social media has the power to sway public opinion, and the way in which many companies use these platforms could be seen as manipulative.
What do companies need to be aware of when utilizing social and digital media? How can these mediums be used to better communicate strategically with the world?
Discover what top media and communications experts have to say.
CAGE Distance Framework
Want to expand overseas? The CAGE distance framework can help ensure you're constructing a solid global strategy in four areas: cultural, administrative, economic, and geographic. Learn how to leverage useful differences between countries, identify potential obstacles, and achieve global business success.
Servant Leadership
There's more to leadership than driving a team to profit. In fact, there's a word for looking beyond self-interest to prioritize individual growth: servant leadership. Try this course for a quick breakdown of what that is, how it works, and how it can lead to organizational success.
Strategy: Creating Value Inside Your Company
Have you ever wondered why certain companies are more successful than others? The answer is strategy: internal processes that control costs, allocate resources, and create value. This course from GLOBIS Unlimited can give you the tools you need for that strategic edge.
Strategy: Understanding the External Environment
To plan strategy on any level, you need to understand your company's external environment. In fact, your level of understanding can impact hiring, budgeting, marketing, or nearly any other part of the business world. Want to learn how to do all that? This course from GLOBIS Unlimited is the perfect first step!
Using Japanese Values to Thrive in Global Business
Japanese companies have unique cultural, communication, and operational challenges. But they also have values that have led to remarkable longevity. Check out this seminar to hear how these values help earn trust from overseas head offices and develop employees.
Marketing: Reaching Your Target
Every company works hard to get its products into the hands of customers. Are you doing everything you can to compete? In this course, you’ll find a winning formula to turn a product idea into real sales. Follow along through the fundamentals of the marketing mix and see how companies successfully bring products to market.
Basic Accounting: Financial Analysis
Want to compare your performance vs. a competitor? Or evaluate a potential vendor? Then you'll need to conduct a financial analysis. This course will teach you how to use three financial statements and evaluate financial performance in terms of profitability, efficiency, soundness, growth, and overall strength.
Career Anchors
What drives you to be good at your job?
Career anchors are based on your values, desires, motivations, and abilities. They are the immovable parts of your professional self-image that guide you throughout your career journey.
Try this short GLOBIS Unlimited course to identify which of the eight career anchors is yours!
Leadership with Passion through Kokorozashi
The key ingredient to success? Passion.
Finding your kokorozashi will unify your passions and skills to create positive change in society. This GLOBIS Unlimited course will help you develop the values and lifelong goals you need to become a strong, passion-driven leader.
In 2016, an artificial intelligence taught me how storytelling is moving from a “nice-to-have” to a “must-have” skill in the workplace.
A few months ago, a TEDx talk I gave was analyzed by a deep learning system, an AI, developed at the University of Tokyo. The feedback and insights I got from the AI system were really interesting (it benchmarked and evaluated my talk against the database of all publicly rated TED talks), but it also made me think about how tools like this AI could help make us all better public speakers and presenters.
And it’s not just with speech feedback that AI is helping out. In my previous article, I described how startups are already selling services which use AI to create presentation slides for us, and they’re getting better at it all the time.
What struck me about technologies like these is the implications for us as business professionals.
In a world where machine learning systems and AI assistants can help everyone create professional, polished content, how do we differentiate ourselves? How do we each stand out and compete with what machines can do, better?
Automation will affect all jobs, not just manufacturing. While AI is not likely to replace any one job in its entirety, it will replace specific skills and activities. There are many activities and skills which knowledge workers base their careers on, but which can be done better, cheaper, and more quickly by machines.
So if some parts of our work can be replaced by AI, our skill-set needs to shift.
We need to get better at doing what machines can’t do, at what humans are uniquely good at. One thing that we excel at, and which machines cannot replicate, is telling emotion-driven stories. What we can do, and AI can’t is communicate with an audience and resonate with them based on our understanding of them. We can read each other, pivot, and deliver presentations in real time. In short, storytelling.
Why Storytelling Matters
Storytelling is the ability to use narratives, to deliver our personal experiences or the stories of others, delivered with emotion and with passion, in a way which will resonate with your audience. It is wrapping data with emotion, it leads to better recollection, empathy, connection to the speaker, what you need to inspire others to action.
It’s something that is already a necessary skill for business professionals and distinguishes great leaders from good leaders. Story-driven presentations which merge fact and emotion are what drive TED talks—it is why TED curator Chris Anderson calls presentation literacy a “superpower” and a “core skill for the 21st century.”
Why is storytelling so powerful? Because humans have evolved for it. We are wired for it. We’ve been sitting around campfires telling stories for tens of thousands of years.
Those stories told around long-ago campfires taught us lessons which our lives depended on: which plants are safe to eat, which animals are dangerous, how do we craft tools. They entertained us. They build connections and communities.
There’s a lot of science behind why storytelling is so powerful. Studies using MRI and sampling hormone levels have shown how the brain is impacted when we listen to a story.
Hormones such as cortisol, oxytocin, and dopamine are released in our brains and boost memory, trust, and empathy towards the storyteller. As our brains listen to a story, they also try to relate it to our own experiences by running a kind of simulation of the story we are hearing. That causes us to use the same parts of our brains that the speaker is using, so our brains and the speaker’s light up in what is called “neural coupling.” This may sound like the Vulcan mind meld from Star Trek, but it is fact, not fiction.
Storytelling is, in fact, what makes fiction like Star Trek and the Vulcan mind meld so effective, it’s why marketing campaigns which rely on storytelling are far more effective. It is our superpower. Storytelling is a must-have skill now, and it will be even more so in the future.
It is also a skill we need to get better at.
The Skills Gap
Multiple studies looking at the most in-demand skills by US employers show communication skills as one of those most lacking in new graduates and current professionals. This is true in the manufacturing sector, but it hits knowledge workers, too. The Bloomberg Job Skills Report of 2016, a survey of 1,251 recruiters, identified communication skills as both the most important and one of the hardest to find in new MBA graduates.
And these are the gaps now, even before AI made a significant impact on knowledge workers. Looking ahead, the World Economic Forum forecasts that future workers will need more soft skills like empathy and communication skills to persuade others, to be good at what machines cannot do.
But is storytelling enough to give us the edge over AI? We need to go beyond just storytelling. We need to be able to really focus on what machines will never be able to do. We need to show empathy for our listeners when we present or give a speech. We need to read the mood in a room, understand how the audience is reacting to our words. Is our message resonating? Are the audience members engaged? How do we need to change our words, tone, and body language?
We need to show narrative intelligence.
Narrative Intelligence
Think about emotional intelligence. It’s not enough to just be able to express your feelings honestly. You need to be able to read and react to others. Emotional intelligence is two-way, and so is narrative intelligence.
Being able to turn on a dime, to pivot to a new direction based on understanding how the audience is feeling, is what narrative intelligence is all about. It’s being able to react during storytelling and adjust your message in real-time to better engage your audience. It’s two way storytelling.
Steve Denning, who consults on narrative intelligence, says, “The ability to think narratively—that is, narrative intelligence—reflects a recognition that the narrative aspects of the world matter because human goals matter, and narratives encapsulate human goals.”
Great storytellers are the ones who know how to react and adjust to their audience, they know how to guide the audience, adapt to their mood, pivot as needed. Great storytellers are the ones who show narrative intelligence.
Narrative intelligence will always give us the edge over artificial intelligence. It’s one skill that is immune to automation. It is the one skill which can future-proof your career.
This article originally appeared on LinkedIn. Photo by Mike Erskine