The Wall Street Journal had an article about how Companies Are Desperately Seeking Storytellers. In some cases this seems to be a re-titling of social media, public relations, marketing, podcasting, etc., roles. In other cases, it seems to roll all of these up into one.
Microsoft’s security organization meanwhile is recruiting a senior director overseeing narrative and storytelling, described as part cybersecurity technologist, part communicator and part marketer. Compliance technology firm Vanta this month began hiring for a head of storytelling, offering a salary of up to $274,000. Productivity app Notion recently merged its communications, social media and influencer functions into one 10-person, so-called storytelling team.
The WSJ article takes a skeptical tone about these efforts, noting that there are often trends of rewriting job titles and descriptions to give them an added luster and excitement.
While the heyday of technology gurus, developer ninjas, SEO rockstars and at least one digital prophet have long since passed, calling salaried communications professionals “storytellers” and the practice of storytelling appears to only have picked up in popularity.
[…]
“People who actually tell stories, meaning people who write novels and make feature films, don’t see themselves as storytellers,” said designer Stefan Sagmeister in a 2014 interview. “It’s all the people who are not storytellers who…suddenly now want to be storytellers.”
Job descriptions using “storyteller” have surged in recent years and the phrase has frequently popped up in earnings calls according to the WSJ.
To a large degree, this reminds me of the frequent citation of studies showing that leadership of big corporations want their employees to be more creative, but also don’t feel comfortable with the uncertainty, risk, and lack of quantitatively measurable outcomes that entails.
I suspect that unless some of these companies are willing to loosen the reins and not require the sign-off of the HIPPO there isn’t likely to be much of a change and someone will decide the company can get the same results and save a lot of money farming out the work to AI.
(For those who aren’t familiar with the “Let Him Cook” meme referenced in the title)
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