About this episode

Gabrielle Dolan shares her journey of teaching business storytelling and the importance of authentic stories in a corporate environment.

What do you do when you've found a powerful idea — but the market thinks it's silly? Gabrielle Dolan (known to almost everyone as "Ral") noticed something in the corridors of corporate Australia: the leaders who moved people, who made change land, who made ideas stick — they all told stories. The data nerds and slide-deck merchants were losing the room. The storytellers were winning it. So she did something that seemed a little mad at the time: she left a senior role at National Australia Bank to teach business storytelling professionally. The reaction from the market? Something between skepticism and outright dismissal. Clients who hired her asked if they could quietly call it "influencing skills" instead — because saying "storytelling training" would guarantee no one showed up. In this conversation, Bill Sherman draws out the full arc of Ral's journey — and it's one every thought leader building something new should hear. There were nearly nine months with no clients. A business partner she eventually parted ways with. Years of revenue that barely registered. And then a turning point she still can't fully explain, when sales quintupled in a single year — triggered, in part, by…

People in this episode

Host: Bill Sherman

Guest: Gabrielle Dolan

Topics covered

• storytelling
• thought leadership
• business
• corporate culture
• authenticity

Keywords

• storytelling
• business storytelling
• thought leadership
• corporate communication
• authentic stories

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: National Australia Bank

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