This blog delves into the intricacies of aligning the C-suite around compelling narratives to achieve unprecedented success.
Chief Strategy Officer/Executive Creative Director
Messaging Won’t Save You
It was 4:45 a.m. on a Monday, and I hadn’t really slept since Friday morning. Neither had the CMO, the head of product, or the Chief Digital Officer, who kept drifting in, along with the CEO’s Chief of Staff. At 6:00 a.m., we were live—first on national news, then in front of analysts.
The slides had to be flawless, the talk track airtight. Instead, we were still picking through word salad, stumbling over messaging that should have been nailed down months earlier. There was no narrative blueprint to guide us—just a sprawl of decks, “marketecture” diagrams, and product facts.
That morning, we got lucky. We hit a home run. But then we did it all again, rewriting and re-messaging for months afterward. Not because we loved the punishment, but because that’s just how it was done.
That was more than a decade ago. Today I know better. There’s no virtue in running teams into the ground over half-finished stories. Still, I’m certain someone reading this just staggered out of their own 4:45 a.m. war room.
I say this with love: some of my favorite clients come to me with the same challenge—not fixing a slide deck, but solving for a story that actually works. Because differentiation isn’t optional.
It rarely looks dramatic from the outside. It shows up as a mess of sales decks, marketing decks, microsites, product pages, and tens of thousands of SKUs—a sprawl of artifacts that are supposed to tell the story, but never quite do.
Untangling that knot isn’t for the faint of heart. Instead of fixing the foundation, companies often reach for the quick fix: another round of messaging. And while leaders recognize the problem, they don’t always have the tools, mandate, or time to solve it. So everyone hunkers down and makes things happen—until the same problem reappears.
That’s how “story debt” accumulates. It’s the invisible tax companies pay when they keep rewriting the message without addressing what lies beneath. The waste of time, money, and opportunity is staggering. And most leaders don’t even realize they’re carrying it.
Deck Chaos in Real Life
One global company I worked with had so many versions of their story floating around that no one could agree which deck to use for a critical meeting. The solution? Stitch the “best parts” together. A week of work became two months, and the result was still a placeholder—but had to be called “good enough.”
Another client had a global sales force of 30,000 people and one primary sales strategy. How many sales decks did they have? More than anyone could count. That’s a tale for another time.
The point is this: story debt looks like wasted cycles, missed opportunities, and a brand that comes across as confused and unreliable.
Why Leaders Default to Messaging
Executives aren’t blind to the chaos. They see it. But they’re under relentless pressure to deliver.
When the stakes are high—closing a deal, swaying an analyst, launching a product—messaging feels like the fastest fix. And sometimes it works. But the minute the market shifts, competitors react, or customers evolve, that messaging no longer holds. The cycle starts again.
The Story Industry (and Its Limits)
There’s an entire industry built to feed this instinct.
They package frameworks, certify storytellers, and now, with AI, churn out funnels, emails, and landing pages at speed.
To be fair, many of these tools are genuinely useful. They provide structure. A clean arc. And when they work, content creation at a speed. For leaders under pressure, that’s tempting.
But frameworks alone don’t align strategy, teams, or categories. They give you words—not the operating system underneath to make those words last.
That’s why I so often hear: “We hired Agency X, we followed their bulletproof framework—it was a great experience, but we’re still missing what we need. Can you help us?”
I feel bad when I hear that. But I’m never surprised.
When Story is reduced to messaging, you get artifacts: a tagline, a hook, a feature list, a deck, a campaign. They look good—until the market shifts, and they collapse.
Story (proper noun)
Sto·ry \ ˈstȯr-ē \
The nucleus of the Story at the Center® operating system—composed of Vision, Category, and Narrative—serving as the structural core that aligns organizational purpose, guides decision-making, and drives market differentiation.
But when it’s done right, Story isn’t theater. Story is infrastructure. It’s the system that turns strategy into belief — and belief into advantage.
Why the Words Keep Breaking
Messaging breaks down because of:
Messaging matters. But in a vacuum, it always expires.
The Three Envelopes (aka The Corporate Playbook)
There’s an old joke. You’ve probably heard it, or something like it.
A new CMO walks into their office and finds three envelopes from their predecessor. Each one is numbered and marked: “Open when in trouble.”
Six months in, things go sideways. First envelope: “Blame your predecessor and rebrand.” New logo, new colors, new tagline. Morale improves, the press picks it up, the board claps. It works—for a while.
Another crisis. Second envelope: “Reorg.” Org chart shuffled, new lines drawn. It feels like progress. Until it doesn’t.
Final envelope. Third crisis: “Write three letters.”
It’s funny. Until you realize you’ve seen it play out in real life. Again and again.
Rebrands, messaging refreshes, reorganizations—they often aren’t solutions. They’re reactions. Moves we’ve mythologized as strategy, when really, they’re just stall tactics. And in that same folder of false fixes? Messaging without a strategic narrative.
The Expanding Job of the CMO
This is why today’s CMO has one of the toughest jobs in the C-suite.
Once, CMOs were measured on awareness and leads. Now, they’re expected to integrate across the business—aligning with product, sales, finance, and technology—while staying grounded in the customer. Forbes recently suggested the CMO is really becoming the “Chief Market Officer.”
Meanwhile, strategy itself is accelerating. Deloitte reports that 68% of CSOs say refresh cycles are speeding up, and 55% say execution timelines are shrinking. In that environment, messaging without a durable foundation is doomed to break.
What Leaders Need to Understand About AI
AI supercharges the cycle—for better or worse.
AI makes it look like you can fix the problem with scale. But scale without alignment just accelerates the debt.
The Simpler Path Forward
There is a way out of story debt.
It begins with a strategic narrative foundation: the north star for how your company communicates its value.
Then codify it into a Unified Narrative Framework® (UNF)—the system that cascades the narrative into clear, repeatable messaging across marketing, sales, product, investor relations, and more.
When that foundation is clear, every artifact—deck, campaign, pitch—flows from it. When it’s missing, you’re stuck in the cycle.
What Executives Can Do Now
If you’re responsible for growth, here’s where to start:
Final Word
Every great story is about intention and obstacle. Somebody wants something, and something formidable stands in the way.
Executives want growth, alignment, and credibility. The obstacle is story debt—the endless cycle of messaging fixes without foundation.
Eliminate the debt, and you don’t just get better decks. You get story equity—the kind that compounds into belief, differentiation, and market leadership.
Because once the foundation is set, everything else gets easier: faster, more coherent, more human.
The Story at the Center blog shares insights and strategies that have helped organizations—from startups to Fortune 100s—harness the power of storytelling to navigate complexities and dominate their markets.
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