Consider the impact of the spoken word. What would happen if you read a story only for the quotes?

Quotes tell the story at Michael Graves' studio

Years ago my first editor shared a bit of advice I’ve never forgotten: Fill your story with quotes. She suggested a reader experiences the essence of any article from whatever transpires between quotation marks.

It was a challenge I embraced. Back then, as a journalist, I relished the opportunity to write human interest stories. I looked for the human face behind even the most tedious hard news issue. I knew a strong interview can break a story wide open. When people talk about what they do and why they do it, there’s often a subtle invitation: “Come closer, I have more to share.”

I was reminded how the human side of a story connects us in unexpected ways when hearing Tim Girvin speak recently. Girvin notes “every brand is for a human. Brands are made by humans for humans.”

Consider Michael Graves. His brand is rooted in architecture. It shows up through products sold at Target and Disney World. It is expressed now in art where we come to know Graves more intimately. His story unfolds in a recent New York Times profile through quotes from the subject and his observers:

“The paintings just go on and on.”

“I think it will surprise people. There’s his beautiful color sense, but it’s also interesting how his space is almost cubist, rahter than going back in classical Renaissance perspective.”

“I thought it would be interesting for me to arrange my buildings in a landscape that would be not unlike [Giorgio] Morandi rearranging his bottles every week to paint them.”

“These are my memories of things seen and reinventions of things seen and understood.”

“Quite a few architects have painting up their sleeves … and for Michael, because color is so important to him, it’s especially appropriate.  At the same time, his architecture has become hugely popular on the global scene — he’s achieved a measure of international fame that, quite honestly, takes him out of the architectural sphere altogether.”

“When you’re painting, you start with the sweep of the landscape, but then as you start to recompose it and fill it in, you often find yourself painted into a corner.  The escape from the corner — that’s the best part of it, the most exciting moment.”

Listen for how people describe the value of the work they do. Listen for the quotes that tell the story. At the beginning and end of every thing made is a human. What happens in between is a story. Keeping the story human makes it worth telling.

Promoting a single product attribute is a gamble. Last week I opened the morning newspaper to find a full page color ad about tomato soup, of all things! Campbell’s was touting its use of a sea salt so “naturally flavorful” that it could reduce the sodium in its iconic product.

Bento box - Haruo Iida via Flickr.com

I questioned the relevance of the nutrition claim. And considered a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup – my favorite comfort foods – for lunch. My nostalgia for the brand was stronger than the potential benefits of a natural sodium booster.

What makes proof palatable? I vote for a variety of essential ingredients to make a compelling story. Let’s call it the Bento Box Effect.

Making a bento meal, imaginative food displays in sectioned boxes, goes back centuries in Japan.  National contests are held in the craft of creating a colorful box lunch in a container about the size of book. Deciding what colors, textures, flavors to feature must be a big part of the design challenge.

Kenya Hara, who designed the opening and closing ceremonies of the Nagano Winter Olympics, weighed in on the beauty behind bento box lunches.  While the Japanese are known for an aesthetic sense, Hara notes they also have an incapacity to see ugliness:

We have a special ability to focus fully on what’s right in front of our eyes. We tend to ignore what is not an integral part of our personal perspective.

We ignore that our cities are a chaotic mess, filled with ugly architecture and nasty signage. And so you have the situation where a Japanese worker will open a beautiful bento box in a stale conference room or on a horrendous, crowded sidewalk.

Each compartment of a bento box presents a different taste sensation. Collectively, the compartments add up to an alluring and satisfying diversion. A story with the right ingredients has the same appeal for routine business dialogues.

What if you packed a bento box of proof to enliven today’s conversations?  Here are three ingredients sure to bring a richer dimension to an otherwise mundane communication:

• A dose of humanity — Tell a story from the point of view of a real person who matters to your company’s success.

• Genuine differentiation — Share the truth about one thing you’re doing better than your closest competitors.

• Winning practices and principles — Your company is strong. Describe a company practice that makes you proud.

Too often we rely on statistics alone to support marketing and sales messages. Numbers make an impact but they’re difficult to digest quickly. Try packing a bento box of proof that’s real, true and strong. Add the points to your next presentation, conversation or collateral draft. That’s enough to make anyone pause right in the middle of their tuna sandwich.

Lately I’ve been obsessing about how to make a big story very small.  Specifically, I’m planning to shrink a mountain of information to three pages in an industry presentation. And use pictures not words to tell the story.

Ha! Good luck, you may think. Well, with my antennae up for a plausible approach, I’m inspired by people who’ve “been there, done that” in this mission of creating the incredible shrinking story.

An executive from Levi Strauss once shared a parable at the national conference of Business for Social Responsibility, now known as BSR.  Still early in its development, BSR was struggling to define its itself. Though the organization had a singular focus on making the world a better place through sustainable business practices, the needs of its constituency ranged widely. The little guys didn’t necessarily have the same agenda as the big corporations. Hearing a parable about a king who persists in having his messenger cut his life’s story in half, over and over, until it fits on one page was a worthy lesson for the task before the membership. (Years later, it’s interesting to see that BSR references itself only by its acronym — that’s taking shrinking to the extreme!)

And then I found a soulmate in Josh Silverman, President of Skype. He shared his career path in the New York Times article, “Learning in Business by Following the Heart.” Silverman’s first  job on Capitol Hill taught him a lesson or two in leadership communication:

In Washington, no matter how complex the issue, you have to boil it down to one page. That’s an invaluable skill for a leader.

The process of distillation isn’t easy. I recall one CEO telling me to “cut it in half” after presenting a positioning statement that was already half the length of every previous articulation of the company’s value proposition.

Done.  Two sentences. Now, back to those three pages I mentioned earlier.