#395 mit Bestseller-Autorin und Keynote Speakerin Anne Schüller: Narrative für eine bessere Zukunft

·39 min·3 clips

Why do managers dismiss storytelling as beneath their dignity when it's the key to future leadership?

1. New Work Chat episode 395, recorded April 10, 2026, features Anne Schüller discussing her 20th book 'Narrative für eine bessere Zukunft' with host Gabriel Rath. 2. Anne Schüller is a keynote speaker and business author based in Munich; Gabriel Rath has hosted New Work Chat since 2018 and this is Schüller's third appearance on the podcast. 3. The episode's core thesis is that organisations drowning in negative narratives and data-driven management need to replace 'Zahlen, Daten, Fakten' (numbers, data, facts) thinking with structured storytelling to drive transformation. 4. Schüller traces her focus on internal storytelling to her marketing career, where limited advertising budget forced her to 'build cool stories' for brand-building rather than rely on spend. 5. She distinguishes between Change (improving something existing) and Transformation (becoming something entirely new), arguing product feature iteration can no longer sustain competitive advantage. 6. Her central claim is that AI will take over the KPI dashboards and Excel-sheet work that current managers value, leaving narrative competence as the only irreplaceable human leadership skill. 7. She outlines story competence in three phases: story listening (attending to narratives already present in the organisation), story making (constructing coherent stories), and story telling (communicating them internally and externally). 8. Schüller describes 'self-herding' — a psycho-social pattern where people follow their own past decisions because those decisions previously produced success, blocking openness to change. 9. She argues that organisations currently run 'killer phrases' that silence internal innovators: 'we've always done it this way' effectively kills transformational thinking before it can spread. 10. Using the evolution of human storytelling from prehistoric campfires, Schüller explains that storytellers were the highest-prestige members of early human communities because they stored collective survival knowledge. 11. She draws on neuroscience to explain why statistics are forgotten while stories persist: 'Geschichten bleiben hängen und eine Zahl ist ruckzuck vergessen' (stories stick and a number is instantly forgotten). 12. The Steve Jobs 'Think Different' campaign is cited as a case study where a single narrative, consistently lived through every product decision, allowed Apple to capture 80% of market revenue with only 20% market share. 13. Schüller notes that when Apple's 1984 commercial is discussed she insists on the specific detail that it was a woman who shattered the dystopian uniformity — a nuance she says is regularly overlooked. 14. The book's first section addresses individual 'self-revision' — listeners are asked to name the three-word slogan that sits above their own life story and audit whether they are spreading positive or negative narratives. 15. The book's second section focuses on the Erzählwerkstatt (story workshop), a tool for surfacing honest organisational failure narratives through anonymisation rather than blame-assignment. 16. The 1-2-4-all method has individuals share error stories with one partner, then pairs merge into fours, until a fully anonymised 'prototypical story' emerges that can be discussed in plenary without anyone standing in the fire. 17. Narrative interviews conducted by external specialists are described as a complementary tool: ten employees are interviewed confidentially about a cultural theme, then a composite story — without names — is presented to the board. 18. Studies consistently show 70 to 80 percent of corporate change projects fail, Schüller notes, and this has been documented for 20 years — yet organisations continue using the same approach, which she calls the single greatest inefficiency in business. 19. The episode is a structured, idea-dense conversation with a professorial yet warm register; Rath asks clarifying questions and Schüller delivers extended analytical answers with book references throughout. 20. Best audience is German-speaking business leaders, HR professionals, and managers seeking concrete storytelling tools for transformation; listeners wanting hard data on ROI or financial metrics will find the content abstract.

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