Ever hear of Ze Frank? He’s the creator of this bizarre web series that once you see you won’t forget. And that’s its magic. Facts About Nature delivers serious educational content by not taking itself remotely seriously. It focuses on being entertaining, and thereby it educates. Your mind marvels at the visual, as these horrendously strange creatures crawl, cling, climb and cat about. Then Frank and Freeman take you on an auditory joy ride with some of the silliest and thought-provoking prose you’ll ever encounter in education. Here’s an example from this 3-minute documentary.

The Aye Aye’s nipples are inguinal, meaning they are located on the lower stomach, sort of the groin area. This is why the Aye Aye does not wear pants. Don’t judge. You try pulling a pair of pants up to your nipples and taking a jog through the forest. That’s a recipe for chaffing.

And the Aye Aye is only the beginning. Check out Facts About The Tapir… The Sea Pig… and The Angler Fish. These creepy and unforgettable species are so interesting, it made me wonder why the more mainstream channels, like National Geographic and Discovery, haven’t covered them? Could it be that they think the public is only interested in your typical lions, and tigers and bears, oh my?

Facts About Nature works for me because it celebrates the oddities in life by placing them center stage and caring enough to write hysterically entertaining narration that bathes our brains with story. These segments are some of the best examples of how you turn data into drama, which allows you to educate while you entertain.

I think it might even raise the heart beat of the sloth.

The sloth has razor sharp claws on its fingers, and it would be the world’s most deadly predator, but only if the world slowed way the f#@k down. As it is, the sloth mainly eats leaves, because they tend not to run away.”

Don’t even ask me about the Naked Mole Rat.

I’m a sucker for studio tours, because I love to see how the ingenuity and creativity comes together to produce the movies we love. So we spent a couple of hours on Saturday touring Paramount. On our ticket was the above quote by Cecil B. DeMille that I think is as apropos for the business world as it is for the movie business.

Today, I am happy to launch the first podcast in my series of 10 interviews with legendary screen writing coach Robert McKee. I’m calling every Monday for the next 10 weeks, “McKee Monday – The Business of Storytelling.” He will share with you his insights on how business leaders can use storytelling to ignite the growth of people and organizations.

In our first interview, you’ll learn how McKee became one of the most sought after screenwriting coaches and story doctors for film studios around the world. And he will discuss the difference between the fictional stories we all enjoy and the purpose told story that businesses need to tell to propel their missions.

Robert McKee is hosting a one-day Story for Business seminar in Los Angeles on September 26. I highly recommend it for business leaders who want to learn how to nudge the world in any direction they choose with the power of storytelling.

I met McKee in February when my son and I attended his famous four-day screenwriting workshop called STORY. No, I’m not looking to be his 50th Oscar winner. However, for the past seven years I have been researching and learning all I can about why storytelling works on our minds and how the proper story structure can move people and mountains. Here are 10 screenwriting tips I gleaned from his STORY seminar to help marketers with brand storytelling.

McKee is starting a new lecture series on Story in Business on September 26, 2013 in Los Angeles, CA. The one-day seminar will cover what McKee calls crafting the purpose told story for your organization. He and I spent three hours together examining what Hollywood knows that every business leader should know about how to craft and tell compelling stories.

Starting this Monday, I will feature a series of podcasts from the interview every Monday for the next 10 weeks. You will meet the man who has helped writers from Broadway to Hollywood to HBO create some of the most epic TV shows and movies, including The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, King Kong and more.

McKee is now turning his attention to helping business leaders become powerful storytellers. I find that his insights are easily adapted to business stories so that c-level managers can become leaders by owning their audiences, from the CEOs and stakeholders in the boardroom, to the staff and employees in the break room, to the consumer in the living room. Another great example of how McKee’s wisdom fits business in found in an article I wrote for Sustainable Brands, What Every Chief Sustainable Officer can Learn from Screenwriting.

Listen to the master beginning on Monday right here and learn. I know I did.

Are you using storytelling to your greatest benefit in your business? If so, how?

He announced that he will not go to the bathroom until the world water crisis is solved. Here’s his faux news conference that launched his Strike With Me campaign.

Damon’s potty campaign is for his 20-year-old charity Water.org that helps bring clean water and sanitation to some of the poorest African countries. Although the world water crisis is deadly serious, Damon and his celebrity pals are educating by entertaining. His unique and funny approach to storytelling cajoles the viewer into participating in his, ahem, movement, while communicating the urgency of the cause.  He has even solicited the likes of Sir Richard Branson, Olivia Wilde, Jason Batemen, and the Jesus of all celebrity social causes, Bono, to join in the fun and poke fun at themselves and the celebrity practice of taking themselves way too seriously when they’re out saving the planet.

That should be enough firepower to propel any big-hearted social cause. But it’s not for Damon. He and his water cronies announced that the fundraising campaign goal must be met by November 19, 2013 for their self-proclaimed  World Toilet Day. Damon figures that the one invention that has saved more lives than any other should have it’s own special day. What better way to bring attention to the water and sanitation crisis than to give the thrown its own thrown?

There is a lot to like about Damon’s Strike With Me campaign. It makes the critical issue of clean water approachable and embraceable. The campaign doesn’t take itself seriously at all, which ironically underscores the seriousness of the issue. I particularly appreciate the shots Damon takes at the media, the media takes at Damon, and his celebrity friends that dismiss him as just another star trying to save the world.

Now, juxtapose the Strike With Me entertaining humor to the emotionally wrenching and excruciatingly maudlin Sara McLachlan animal cruelty public service announcement, and you can see why I’ll strike with Damon.

Sure, animal cruelty sucks, just like filthy water that is being fed to hundred of millions of people. However, we can take on these issues with a heavy heart and a tear in our eye, or we can go to battle with optimism, humor, and by telling entertaining stories that educate and motivate individuals to action.

Which way do you prefer?

I saw a lot of these forest service towers growing up the in the Pacific Northwest. Can you imagine having the place burn down on your watch as you vigilantly survey the miles of evergreens through your binoculars while your chicken noodle soup boils over and short circuits your hot plate setting your post ablaze? Talking about not seeing the forest for the trees.

Humankind’s survey of space, with our rockets that go up and our telescopes that look out, focuses on the forest of interstellar bodies in our universe. However, one forward looking NASA project called Landsat, a network of surveying satellites launched in 1984, turned the observation lens back toward Earth. Over the past 30 years, Landsat has recorded the impact the human species has been having on our planet.

Google has recently worked with NASA to clean up and stitch together the satellite photos, and created videos to give us all a visual journey of the entropy we’re causing to our environment. TIME magazine has created this remarkable immersive storytelling experience to show us all what is difficult to see from our individual perches.

“These Timelapse pictures tell the pretty and not-so-pretty story of a finite planet and how its residents are treating it — razing even as we build, destroying even as we preserve. It takes a certain amount of courage to look at the videos, but once you start, it’s impossible to look away.”

Whether or not you believe we’re heating up the planet, devouring our natural resources at unsustainable rates, or expanding beyond our planet’s capability to house us all, it’s a sobering experience to see the actual footprint we’re leaving on Earth.

“For governments and environmental scientists, there is a lot of arcane data to extract from the maps and movies. For everyone else, there is something subtler but just as important: perspective. We tend our own tiny plots on Earth, our houses and yards often taking up less room than that infield-size pixel. It’s only when we get above ourselves — say, 438 miles above — that we can see how we’re changing our planet and begin to consider how we can be better stewards of it.”

Let’s hope the US government continues funding Landsat so that we can all keep an eye on the health of our home  – our lonely outpost in the cosmos.

There is a foolproof way to bring meaning to every pitch. It is the universal story pattern discovered by American mythologist Joseph Campbell called the monomyth, or the hero’s journey. This is the best animation I’ve seen that quickly takes you by the hand through the hero’s journey.

Ted- What Makes a Hero? from Wonder Boy Audio on Vimeo.

This same formula that makes stories epic can make your presentations transcendent. I know that sounds like B.S., but it works. The hero’s journey creates a universal structure to your message and transformative meaning to your ideas.

After all, in our communications saturated life, what most people hunger for and rarely get is meaning in the stories they consume. Provide your audience with meaning, and you will propel your mission.

The microphone greeted me like an angry goose craning its head from atop the wood podium. Beyond it, stark silhouettes of parents in a dark and sweaty St. Brendan’s gymnasium peered up at me. I sensed they were eager to watch their particular student play their part in the annual Christmas pageant, and that I was just another speed bump in the production. It was a tad overwhelming for this fourth grader.

Poised on the stage behind me were the popular eighth graders playing Joseph, Mary and the wise men, with some younger kids dressed as livestock and a camel. They surrounded a plastic baby Jesus in swaddling clothes. All I had to do was deliver three short lines – my 30 seconds of anointed fame. It was going to be great because I had rehearsed relentlessly the week before.

The spotlight hit me like headlights on a raccoon. I froze. Twitched. Went mute. The entire gym was a still life of anticipation witnessing me quietly implode. Somewhere out in the crowd a man cleared his throat as if to prod me along. I looked down at my notes to gather myself when it happened: an involuntary “Sheeeez” curled out of me and into the microphone. The audience, to my regret, had heard something entirely different. Following a pause as pregnant as Mary had been, they spontaneously combusted into laughter.

My mind raced. What had I just said? What had they THOUGHT I had just said? I turned toward the manger players with my palms raised and a look of, “What?” Their mouths hung open and their brows drawbridged above eyes that asked, “Did he just say what I think he just said?”

Then it hit me. I had choked in the most important show of the year before God and everyone. And if that wasn’t enough humiliation, I had punctuated my collapse with the most inappropriate exclamation ever. My sneakers made a hasty retreat stage right, and thankfully I was in them. Tears erupted. I was mortified, thinking I had ruined the entire Holiday season for all. I swore off public speaking and to never again place myself in such a precarious position.

But life is funny. It turns out that I was a hit, the most memorable part of the show. Looking back at that moment, and too many like it throughout my career, I have learned that the most captivating stories reflect the daring goals, honest struggles and exhilarating accomplishments we experience in life.

So now I find myself on stage often, helping people and teams craft and tell compelling stories to nudge the world in any direction they choose. And I would like to do the same for you and your organization. If you’re interested in learning more about high performance storytelling, here’s what I can do for you.

The Power of Story Part I: “How Stories Sell” from ParkHowell.com on Vimeo.

I do storytelling workshops for smaller groups of up to 100 people. This is a recent presentation I made to Creative Mornings in Scottsdale.

Creative Mornings with Park Howell from CreativeMornings/PHX on Vimeo.

I am a guest lecturer at the W.P. School of Business and the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. I show soon-to-be grad students how NOT to become an MBA zombie sucking the life out of boardrooms by using the power of storytelling to captivate their audiences.

How NOT to Become an MBA Zombie from ParkHowell.com on Vimeo.

Or, I can work on the storytelling prowess of your executive team and/or your internal marketing group. If you’re looking for a quick storytelling fix, visit our site for resources and a downloadable version of our storytelling workbook: http://www.parkandco.com/landing/the-power-of-story/

What’s your story?

I led with my “Got Green? and 10 Other Brand Curdling Clichés of Green Marketing” rant just so the audience understood where I stood on what I see as a profound lack of creative storytelling in sustainability these days. Then I showed them how to easily create novel stories for their clients and brands that have meaning. Meaning makes their messages matter to their audiences. And when the story matters, movements are ignited.

Creative Mornings with Park Howell from CreativeMornings/PHX on Vimeo.

You can download the storytelling workbook I handed out and went through with the Creative Mornings crowd. Use the nine steps in the book to craft your story, any story, and feel free to email it to me. I will be happy to review your work and answer any questions you have about becoming a more powerful – and sustainable – storyteller to help you nudge the world in any direction you choose.

To avoid the most popular green cliché land mines, take the “Got Green?” quiz before writing your story. I’m sure you’re not prone to “Creative Reuse,” but it doesn’t hurt to double check.

We judge everything in milliseconds. We can’t help ourselves. And if you’re responsible for telling the story about a brand, than you had better sweat the details. It is in these tiny story morsels where our customers make snap judgements about our offering, and they don’t even realize they are doing it.

I finally got around to reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, and from it I realized that our stories are often told in a blink of an eye: that all-important first impression. And despite popular belief, fast decision making isn’t necessarily bad decision making.

Gladwell writes about the adaptive unconscious where our snap judgements are made.

“It is a kind of a giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings… The adaptive unconscious does an excellent job of sizing up the world, warning people of danger, setting goals, and initiating action in a sophisticated and efficient manner.”

Although we are innately suspicious of our rapid cognition abilities, Gladwell has found that decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately. Why? Because our subconscious is working from the decision tree that we have planted, fertilized, pruned and nurtured throughout our lives to pick the most fruitful course of action on our behalf, typically without us even knowing.

We do judge books by their covers. We often leap before we look. Think on the run. And haste doesn’t always make waste. But beware brand storytellers, because even the little things can throw your story into a tailspin.

My adaptive unconscious delivered me a humorous irony when I was at Universal Studios with my family. I turned around and was face-to-face with a ferocious velociraptor poised to pounce from the tropical foliage. My eyes immediately scanned from his jaws filled with ivory spikes downs its scaly skin, past its stiletto claws to the warning sign: FRAGILE PROP, Please Don’t Touch. An involuntary laughed triggered within me. My brain deduced in a wink that describing a velociraptor as fragile is like pulling back the curtain to reveal the great wizard of Oz was a mere mortal. It was a swift buzzkill to the story Jurassic Park had spent hundreds of millions crafting in my mind.

What Blink underscored to me is that you must pay attention to every little and seemingly inconsequential detail in the brand story you tell and live. We humans are too good at deciphering bullshit on the run.

Curiosity is like your dog – you should take it for a long walk every day.

Seven years ago, I committed myself to understanding story structure and how we can use storytelling to nudge the world in any direction we choose. I’ve studied what Hollywood knows about creating epics, muscled through the premiere screenwriting workshop in LA, researched scores of books on why our minds are suckers for story, and we’ve practiced storytelling at our agency.

Now I’m in the throes of writing a book on what I’ve learned: how brands, nonprofits, internal communications departments, sustainability professionals and individuals searching for a new career path can use Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey as a road map to success. In chapter six of my book, where I explore how brands are mentors in the hero’s journey of their customers, a funny phenomenon enabled by Facebook struck me.

When Mark Zuckerberg stole/started Facebook in 2003, his vision was to create an online community that would help students at Harvard connect. His viral hood couldn’t be contained. Facebook has grown to hundreds of millions of users worldwide, and it has become a veritable pulpit for people to share their views on life. I’m not talking about the hyper-babble rants on politics, gun control and same-sex marriage. What intrigues me about Facebook is how it gives voice to our insatiable need to spread our version of wisdom through memes so high-minded and polished that they should make Hallmark blush. By meme, I mean an image, picture, message, or video that captures and succinctly communicates a cultural idea and transmits it. Richard Dawkins describe memes in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, as a unit of cultural transmission. An idea virus this is only as effective as it’s human host is in conveying it.

You’ve seen the memes quoting everyone from Aristotle to Cher, breathtaking landscapes with equally verdant prose, dog thoughts and cat flix as metaphors for life’s mechanics. In my yearning for sap-free immortality, I too create and post memes to help followers get through the day.

I believe Facebook has become the almighty altar for campy metaphysical messages because people sincerely want to help and mentor others. This need to share how we believe life works is one of our most fundamental callings as social beings, and it is a uniquely human trait that has insured our survival over the millennia.

How does your brand act as the meme or mentor to your customer? What is its promise that fulfills their emotional needs. What is it’s gift? And if you could pick an archetype for your brand’s character, which would it be?

I will cover these, and nine other steps to building an heroic brand when my book comes out this fall. In the meantime, please let me know how you use the power of story to nudge the world in any direction you choose.