If you want to grow as a company, you have to do it organically, not by following trends. Ask your customers what they want and then build from that. Stop anticipating the next trend and just work on your core business. Be creative and original. Join your host Bob Roark and his guest Dr. Angus Fletcher as they break down how you can lead your business to grow organically. Angus is a Professor of Story Science at Ohio State’s Project Narrative. Discover Angus's love for both neuroscience and storytelling. Come and join the conversation on how you can grow your company in a world that's so different from before. Be open to change and anomalies so that you can grow. Feed your creative brain so that you can grow. Grow organically today!

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How To Grow Your Company Organically In This New World With Dr. Angus Fletcher

Our guest is Dr. Angus Fletcher. He is a professor at Ohio State University's Project Narrative. He is a polymath with dual degrees in Neuroscience and Literature. He received his PhD from Yale, taught Shakespeare at Stanford, and published two books and numerous peer-reviewed articles. He has consulted with Sony, Disney, Amazon, and the Army Command and General Staff College. He is the author and presenter of the Audible Great Course Guide to Screenwriting. He was awarded the Rodica C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring 2020. Welcome to the show.

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Angus Fletcher, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show.

Thanks for inviting me. I'm honored and excited.

In the pre-interview here, I was doing homework. The more homework I did, the more I knew I was lacking. I talked to another good friend of yours, Ken Long. He had some input too and he says, "Maybe he has this." We will narrow down the discussion as to how it might apply to the business community and narrative. What I was fascinated with is you have literature and neuroscience. It's like chicken and egg. Which one came first?

I started in neuroscience and that continues to be the bedrock of everything that I do as a young neuroscience researcher. I was in the lab where, like every other lab in America, everyone thought the brain was a computer. They thought that the brain is operated by taking on data, storing it into memory, and then processing that data to make decisions logically and that the brain program has this thing called emotion. That was how everyone was working on the brain.

I started to notice the human brain didn't work as a computer at all. First of all, human brains are much worse at doing logic than most computers. Human brains can't take on the same amount of data. Even when we do, we are much more irregular in how we process it. Humans are a lot smarter than computers in certain situations. Humans are much better at low-data decision-making. We are much better at figuring out what to do when there's not a lot of information. That's a situation where AI goes completely haywire.

Humans are also better at being creative. Even though AI can be better at predicting the future, humans can be better at making the future and making it in ways that AI can't predict. That got me thinking, "What is this secret thing that's going on in the human brain that's different from what is going on in computers? How is it that we can have these other kinds of intelligence?"

That started me on this very unusual career, where I went to Silicon Valley and Hollywood. I have a PhD and all these kinds of names, which I'm sure your audience doesn't need to know about. It has brought me into working with the US military, traders, and other folks to bring out some of the insights in terms of how the machinery of the human brain can do things that are different and sometimes smarter than what computers will do.

Part of the reason why I was here to talk with you is I think about the business community. They go to business school, get an MBA and start a business. You find that there are gaps. In the media-focused world, social media, video, LinkedIn, and all the others, I think about the challenge that the business community faces in either communicating properly with their existing client or ideal client. You have done screenplays and movies. You got three minutes to hook them in your video. What does a business owner do to take your skillset and apply it to media creation?

[bctt tweet="If you want to build trust with your audience, you have to give them something about yourself, which is true and difficult to reveal." username=""]

First of all, this whole thing about the gaps in MBA programs is true. Every business owner goes to an MBA where you have some of the smartest teachers in the world and they expect they are going to teach you everything. They are paid very little most of the time. Part of that is because so much of modern business theory is based on rational choice theory, economics, and all these kinds of things, which are logical and they are not creative. They are also general and not specific.

The key to being a successful small business owner or getting a business off the ground is being specific and having a unique, original story that has not been told before but immediately connects and hooks people. I’ve got a story at the beginning of my career. I became fascinated with William Shakespeare for reasons that most people are not interested in.

When I went to school, everyone was like, "Shakespeare is the greatest poet of all time. He is so wonderful." You read it and you're like, "This is hard and weird." It has taken me a long time and not a lot seems to be happening here. I remember the first few times I tried to read Shakespeare at school. I couldn't even get it good. I started to realize the history of what was going on.

What was special about Shakespeare is he invented new stories. He was coming at the end of the Middle Ages and people had been telling the same stories over and over again. Those stories reinforced the way things worked in the Middle Ages. It's the feudal system. When Shakespeare helped start the Renaissance by saying, "You could invent new stories. When you invent a new story, that invents new narratives, heroes, choices, actions and everything," I started to think to myself, "How was it that he invented these new stories?"

A simple example is Henry V, which is the genesis of movies like Die Hard or anytime you have a story about an individual who shakes his world as opposed to the world, shaking the individual. The idea that a person could change the world wasn't something that people thought in the Middle Ages or even in the ancient world but Shakespeare says, "Henry V changed history. He wrote history. History didn't write him."

I said, "How do you come up with a new story? Even more than that, how do you get audiences to buy that story?" What was special about Shakespeare is he wrote new stories. Anyone can make a new story but then who listens to them? Shakespeare made up a ton of new stories and it got a big audience. This was when I was at Stanford. I was sitting at Stanford in this room thinking. I said, "How do you do that? That seems to me to be the secret to life, to create a new story and then get people to connect to that story."

I was thinking and I couldn't make any progress on it. I realized across the bay for me was a little company called Pixar. Pixar at that time made a movie called Up, which I don't know if your audience has seen. It's a weird movie that won a ton of awards and made hundreds of millions of dollars. In other words, it was a Shakespeare. It was a very original story that connected immediately with a big audience. I thought to myself, "They must know something. I'm going to go hang out at Pixar."

I spent a lot of time hanging out at Pixar, talking to them about Shakespeare. I discovered that Pixar has this vault of unmade outtakes of Pixar movies, where they came up with different endings for Toy Story and they animated them. They tested them and it didn't work. This is a big experimental secret storyline that they have under there. I took away a ton of stuff and you can find that stuff throughout my research. The simplest core thing that I learned is that Pixar, at its inception, was founded by Steve Jobs.

[caption id="attachment_6018" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Organic Growth: Storytellers always focus on themselves in the present. What they should be doing is reverse-engineering the user experience. Instead of asking "Who am I?" ask "What do I want to accomplish?"[/caption]

 

Steve Jobs brought into the company the same kind of engineering mindset they used to found Apple. At the core of that is this idea of reverse engineering from the user experience. You say, "What do I want to do? How do I work backward to do that?" In other words, what most people who are storytellers do, which is different from Pixar and Shakespeare, is they start by focusing