
Leadership & Storytelling
Leah Farmer, MA Organizational Leadership – Fall 2021
Welcome to Leadership & Storytelling
Many of my earliest memories include words…the written word or spoken word. I learned about the world, leadership, and my own gifting while listening to my father preach about Jesus or reading books under the covers with a flashlight. I wanted to be Laura Ingalls, Helen Keller, or Grace Hopper because the images that these storytellers cast about themselves were vivid enough for me to imagine myself in their lives.
“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of the entire generation that is to come. “
– Steve Jobs
What Steve Jobs (and so many others like him) knew was that magic happens at the crossroads of storytelling and leadership. If a leader can hone the gift of storytelling, they can captivate a team, customers, the world…and in captivating them, help them to see what the future looks like with whatever solution on offer.
Across my 18 year career, I have seen leaders harness the power of a story to rally the team towards a launch, to soothe a company as it fails, and to generate excitement about what is possible even before the first line of code is written.
This is the crossroads.
This is leadership.
And this is storytelling.
xx,
Leah
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