Stories That Lead

Jeremy Lang puts four words at the top of his website: "I make people care." On Stories That Lead, he explains the test behind them. He built it on a newspaper copy desk: what about this story would make my mom, my partner, and my best friend care? Jeremy is a communications leader and consultant. He has carried that question from headline writing into bank marketing, the homepage of a new intranet for 350,000 employees, and in-store copy for Nike Basketball. In this conversation, he takes it apart for communicators: - Why the first question he asks inside any organization is "How do we make money?" - What Bill Hader taught him about stakeholder feedback: the note is right, but the suggestion is wrong. - Treating LinkedIn as a channel for your own employees, not only your marketing team. - The quarterly survey he built to measure whether employees understand where the company is going and their role in it. - Why AI-written comms can be empty calories, and the three examples he wrote by hand that got an AI to 90 to 95% of the way there. - Acting authentic versus being authentic, and what a mayor's Knicks bedtime proclamation says about it. Find Jeremy on LinkedIn (JeremyLang1) and at jeremylangwrites.com. Stories That Lead is the podcast where we focus on revelation instead of conflict. Hosted by Vernon Ross. storiesthatlead.co

The people who read Christina Frantom's writing can walk to the factory floor and check every word against what they see on their own shift. Most communicators never work under that kind of audit. My guest chose it, and she came prepared. Christina has been building this exact skill set since childhood: land in a new place, read the audience, learn its language, earn its trust, repeat.

Rosemary Cassie, a senior communications leader, points out how being a fly on the wall of a room you're not in. As communicators, with or without AI, we've always had to absorb what's going on without being directly involved.

Maximilian Conrad built Hypecast to solve a distribution problem he lived firsthand at L'Oreal. In this conversation, we trace the company's journey from a two-person idea to an enterprise platform, and get to the insight that changed how Max thinks about what they're actually selling.