This is Moe Abdou. With me today is the legendary Hollywood producer and proud new owner of the soon to be NBA champions the Golden State Warriors– Peter Guber. It’s a real pleasure to have you with us today Peter.
It’s a pleasure to be here. From your mouth to God’s ears, I wish that is what happens. Proud is correct, co-owner is correct, and all the rest other things, their aspirations, they are correct too. One journey ahead but that’s the fun part.
That is the fun part. Congratulations on the Warriors. Congratulations on the forthcoming book “Tell to Win.” Hopefully, the upcoming Oscars that I’m sure you’re anxiously awaiting. What an extraordinary journey for you.
I’ve been banging away at these businesses for a long time. Sometimes they win, sometimes you lose but you keep banging away because that journey is the game.
Peter, talking about stories, I know that stories have been a great metaphor for your life personally, help me understand how they have shaped your life.
It’s the only way you can make sense of your life, any life. Narrative is always lurking. It’s the way we organize elements in music or architecture or food. We organize them through being able to tell them and give them a meaning, an emotional meaning.
When we do that, people metabolize the information as held inside them. Where the restaurant is, how the store works, how the product performs, how the medicine is supposed to help you get well, whatever it is, the secretsauce is that the narrative is a tool to give the whole process and the product and the person meaning. We are wired for that. That’s the way we’re organized.
You know Peter, being in business, one of the common problems business people face is persuasion. What role do you see story having in business as a persuasion tool?
It’s the highest level of persuasion because facts don’t persuade, people persuade. Facts are used by people to persuade. Facts, information and data in it of themselves are cold comforts. They yield little benefit. They are support vehicles and they are important. Make no mistake they are totally important but only when they are embedded in state of the heart technology. The idea that they are not explained, but narrated put into context and content, then the individuals hearing or experiencing them are able to take that information and make it resonant, memorable and actionable. Only then does the win happen.
The idea is it’s a cold comfort, just some numbers in decks and PowerPoints. I think that the idea is: this is not something new. It’s always been this way. It’s been this way for about 80,000 years. And about the last second since we have the written word and the last millisecond since we had the digital word. At the end of the day, we’re still analog folks. We relate heart to heart. We relate emotionally. We may try to take the emotion out of the equation but you can’t take the emotion out of the person.