Gavin McMahon is an engineer by training who has worked across the defense, automotive, and publishing industries. He served as VP and Director of Web Strategy at Gartner and is now co-founder of Fassforward—a 25-year-old leadership and communication consultancy recognized on the Inc. 5000. All of their work, Gavin says, comes down to two things: leadership and storytelling. The double S in the name honors his business partner, Rose Fast.
Interview Highlights
Mark describes Story Business as a book with “zero fluff”—packed with mental models, frameworks, and heuristics for anyone who needs to influence, persuade, or promote. This conversation hits many of the book’s biggest ideas through rapid-fire examples and real-world application. Below are the topics we covered:
- Gavin’s favorite stories of all time and his favorite storyteller.
- Gavin’s reason that anyone can become a storyteller without needing to be a Rory. Sutherland or Don Draper.
- Gavin’s response to Mark’s favorite definition of a story.
- “Humans are hard to figure out.”
- The meaning of $25 trillion.
- The hero’s formula and limiting beliefs.
- Hooks, meat, and payoffs.
- The T-Leaf and theater of the mind.
- Revisiting Nightengale’s Coxomb illustration and why it matters.
- The reason Mark dislikes the overuse of McKinsey chevron symbols.
- A few rules for using pictures.
- Old words to describe new things.
- The six genres of storytelling.
In Story Business, Gavin McMahon explores a powerful but often overlooked truth: success isn’t just about having the right idea—it’s about how that idea is communicated, understood, and believed.
Key Concepts
Defining Story
Gavin offers an elastic, two-part definition:
- Story = a piece of information wrapped in emotion
- Storytelling = framing the way people look at the world, moving them to action
He also cites Jonathan Gottschall’s sharper formulation: a trick for sneaking information into the fortified citadel of the human mind. Both definitions point to the same idea — the goal isn’t beautiful prose; it’s influence.
“I have a very elastic definition of storytelling. It can equally apply to an Oscar-winning movie and a meme.”
Can Anyone Become a Storyteller?
Yes—storytelling is a basic human condition. But quality depends on technique and practice. The key insight: even the best storytellers (Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Jobs, and Rory Sutherland) practice in small venues, refine stories over time, and build on what already works. Authenticity matters — trying to be someone else is too hard and never lands.
The $25 Trillion Argument
Gavin makes a back-of-napkin case that storytelling underlies an enormous share of economic activity: media and entertainment, marketing (4–9% of revenue at most companies), sales, and even product development. He cites an OpenAI engineer’s estimate that only 20% of an engineer’s job is writing code—the rest is communication. His conclusion: Storytelling isn’t a soft skill; it’s a core business function.
The Hero Formula (We Bring X to Y to Deal With Z)
This deceptively simple formula—attributed to Gavin’s colleague Peter Watts—is one of the book’s most actionable tools:
| Element | Meaning |
|---|---|
| We | The company |
| X | Your product or service |
| Y | The customer (the real hero) |
| Z | The villain—the problem the customer faces |
The most common mistake: companies make themselves or their product the hero. The customer must be the hero. Look at your website or your next deck and ask, “Who is the hero of this story?”
Hook, Meet, Payoff
A three-part structure for any presentation or communication:
- Hook—grab attention immediately; think movie trailers as a model
- Meet (the meat) — answer the three things your audience actually wants to know, not just what you want to say
- Payoff — the resolution that earns the story
Mark’s practical tip: start with the payoff, then work backward to find the hook.
The Tea Leaf Tool: A simple two-column exercise to fill in the meat — on the left, what you want the audience to feel, know, and do; on the right, what they want to feel, know, and do. The overlap is where great content lives.
Narrative Constellations (Robert Shiller)
For any single story, there is always a cluster of larger stories surrounding it. Companies win when they identify which narrative constellation they naturally fit into and then deliberately align everything (naming, messaging, and proof points) to that constellation.
Examples from the episode:
- NVIDIA—positioned itself inside the “AI gold rush” narrative: Who makes money in a gold rush? The people selling picks and shovels.
- Supplements brand — should choose between “longevity,” “organic,” or “conscious consumer” constellations, then make every naming and story decision reinforce that choice
- Banks—the ones that grow find a lane that already exists in culture and exploit it (example: a UK challenger bank that organizes Gen Z savings into “pots”)
“Strategy really is story.”
Old Words to Describe New Things
Innovation fails to spread when its language is inaccessible. When innovators use familiar words to frame new ideas, adoption accelerates. Examples:
- ChatGPT—”chat” is instantly understood; “GPT” is opaque, but the combination makes AI feel approachable
- Horseless carriage vs. Electrobat—in the 1880s, the carriage metaphor stuck; the battery metaphor didn’t
- Charles Babbage called the CPU a “”mill”—the language of his era
Gavin’s rule: if your innovation requires more than one sentence to explain its name, you have a storytelling problem, not just a marketing problem.
The Evidence Stack
Borrowed from Gavin’s Gartner colleagues Simon Levin and Joel Wexler, this framework ranks credibility from least to most:
- Claims and hyperbole (“now with more magical ingredients”)
- Jargon and numbers (blinding with science)
- Well-presented data
- Borrowed credibility (the NSA uses our software)
- Live demo/proof in use
Most companies live at levels 1–2. The goal is to climb.
Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory
You don’t need to say everything. What you don’t say is often stickier—because the audience fills in the gap themselves. What the audience imagines is more powerful than what you tell them.
Adapt Your Story Over Time
Stories should evolve with the diffusion of the innovation curve:
- Early adopters: “This is new — want to try it?”
- Early majority: “This is working — want to join the crowd?”
- Late majority: “Everyone else is already using this. Why aren’t you?”
Pushing the same story to every stage is a common and costly mistake.
The Six Genres of Business Storytelling
Gavin divides business storytelling into six disciplines, each with its own rules:
- Value storytelling
- Product storytelling
- Brand storytelling
- Sales storytelling
- Leadership storytelling
- Culture storytelling
Visual Storytelling: Pictures and Words
A story has three components working together: structure, pictures, and words. Remove any one of them, and you have a bad movie. Key no-nos in visual storytelling:
- “Holiday snapshot” images — decorative clip art that isn’t connected to the point
- Placing the most important image next to the least important point (images signal hierarchy)
- Clichés—in language and in visuals. A cliché was once a great way of saying something; it became a cliché because everyone copied it
- Consultant chevrons on PowerPoint slides
Florence Nightingale is invoked as an early master: she changed British military healthcare policy after the Crimean War, not through argument alone but through compelling data visualizations.
PowerPoint
“Mostly sucks.” — Gavin McMahon
All Invention Is a Remix
Drawing on the Soviet rocket scientist Genrich Altshuller’s principle that there is nothing new under the sun, great product people are “inveterate magpies”—they collect ideas from everywhere and recombine them. Innovation is recombination, not creation from nothing.
OKRs and Strategy
Strategy without storytelling defaults to inertia. Gavin’s Sandhurst story: when overwhelmed by options, people default to what they did yesterday (“going left”). OKRs should be complex enough to translate strategy and simple enough to actually do — and they need a story to activate them.
Book Recommendations from Gavin
- Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield — leadership told through the battle of Thermopylae, narrated by a Spartan slave
- The Fort by Bernard Cornwell — the Penobscot Expedition in the Revolutionary War
Where to Learn More
- Book: Story Business by Gavin McMahon
- Website: fassforward.com
- Companion PDF: A free 44-page visual companion to the book is available on the Fassforward website
Episode Pairings
If you liked this episode with Gavin McMahon, consider the following for your next listen:
- The Power of Analogy with John Pollack
- Gaining Media Attention with Katrina Cravy
- Practical Performance Measurement with Stacey Barr
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