In my quest to put a financial number to the value of storytelling, to hold stories up to an ROI calculation, I often get the pushback that putting a number to the value of storytelling will somehow strip storytelling of its magic, that somehow it will kill the romance.

Amazingly, this pushback comes most often from storytelling trainers. That puzzles me to no end. I’ll never understand it. How on earth could someone, someone who makes his/her living from storytelling nonetheless, think the romance in stories is so weak that assigning a numeric value to the romance is going to kill it?

In the book “How To Measure Anything: Finding The Value Of Intangibles In Business,” Douglas Hubbard addresses this point quite well. He says that assigning a number to something doesn’t remove or supersede the evaluations you already do, it just helps you understand them better.

That book was recommended to me for years, and I’m just now reading it. I should have listened to the advice years ago. I highly recommend that book to anyone who hears “you can’t do that” and immediately thinks “hold my beer, let me show you it getting done.”

BTW, I am well aware that the phrase “hold my beer” is often used when about to undertake something foolish, but I’ve basically been using that phrase my entire life. In the right hands it doesn’t mean “this is foolish,” it means “now I will show you how it isn’t.”