We’ve never had so much corporate communication, yet so few messages that leave a lasting impact. Chief executive officers (CEOs) have more channels, more production budget, and more AI-assisted drafting power than any generation of leaders before them, but the gap between what gets announced and what gets done keeps widening. Gavin McMahon, author of Story Business, argues the measurement is wrong. The question is not whether the CEO communicated the strategy well. It is whether anyone can repeat it, in their own words, once the CEO has left the building. “I believe executive presence is a little like gravity, and a little like an echo,” he says. “Gravity is how you influence people when you’re there. The echo is what happens when you’re gone.” That distinction reframes storytelling from a soft skill into an operating discipline, and it exposes how much executive communication is effectively weightless.
The Packaging Problem Nobody Wants To Admit
McMahon’s starting premise is uncomfortable for leaders who pride themselves on analytical rigor. “I’ve worked with some extraordinarily smart leaders. People with brilliant ideas, sound strategies, and compelling business cases,” he says. “And I’ve watched those ideas go precisely nowhere.” His conclusion is blunt: it is not the best ideas that win, it is the best-packaged ones. That is not a case for spin. It is an acknowledgment that an idea nobody can hold in their head cannot be acted on, and an idea that cannot be acted on has no commercial value no matter how sound its underlying analysis.
Where transformation programs usually break is in the choice leaders make between describing the destination and describing the journey. McMahon says both are required, and that most executives pick one. The future-state picture inspires but leaves people with no idea what Monday looks like. The implementation plan exhausts people before they ever see why it matters. “People have to see themselves in the picture of the future you’re describing,” he says. “Then they need to know what it will take to get there. And that includes what they’ll have to give up.” That last clause is the part most strategy decks omit, and the omission is why employees read optimism as evasion. Compounding it is the churn problem. A new slogan, new metaphor, and new program arrive before the last one was understood. Repetition is not a failure of imagination. It is how a story becomes something people can own and act on without supervision.
Where The Story And The Reality Part Company
Credibility collapses at a predictable fault line. McMahon describes sitting in executive meetings where the first agenda item was a cost-cutting program: travel restrictions, headcount reductions, and economy class for everyone. The next item was a new corporate jet. “You couldn’t make it up,” he says. “Although, apparently, somebody did.” The failure in that room was not communication. The communication was flawless. People understood exactly what was being said, and they understood exactly what it was worth.
Every organization carries two stories – the one leadership tells and the one employees experience – and employees are reliable judges of which is real. A CEO talks about innovation and punishes failure. Promises empowerment, then approves every decision. Declares that people come first while behaving as though the quarterly numbers are the only thing that counts. The first rule in McMahon’s framework is “Truthtelling, not fabletelling,” and recovery begins nowhere else. Acknowledge what went wrong, explain what will change, then do it, and keep doing it. “Trust isn’t rebuilt with a better town hall or a beautifully crafted CEO message,” he says. “It’s rebuilt through repeated evidence that your words and actions match.” His warning to leaders tempted by a communications fix is worth sitting with: “People will forgive mistakes. They’re much less forgiving of being taken for fools.”
Why AI Makes Judgment The Scarce Asset
Boards increasingly treat stakeholder trust as a tracked metric, and McMahon pushes back on the instinct to measure it through reputation scores. A CEO’s personal story is not what they say about themselves. It is what other people say about them. He cites a story about a senior Verizon leader who walked into an employee bathroom, found it filthy, took off his jacket, and cleaned it himself. “Nobody needed a PowerPoint explaining his values,” he says. The story traveled, and it told people what the standard was. That is lore, and lore shapes collective habit more reliably than any values statement.
The measurable version of that asset sits in questions most engagement surveys already circle. Can employees explain the strategy? Do they speak up when something is wrong? Do they believe leaders will keep their promises? The sharper signal, McMahon suggests, is whether people make the right decisions when nobody is watching. Which brings the argument to AI, and to the skill he thinks executives must now protect. As AI generates more and more content, he says the most important storytelling skill is the ability to think clearly. “If you outsource your thinking to ChatGPT, it won’t be long before you’re not thinking,” he says. He uses the tools constantly and finds them useful for research, for challenging assumptions, for exposing holes in an argument. What he will not hand over is judgment. “I want it to assist my intelligence, not replace my judgment.” The CEO still has to decide what they believe, which demands personal experience, conviction, taste, and accountability when things fail. It also demands listening, because a good storyteller starts from the stories already running through people’s heads: what they hope for and what they fear. His prediction for the next few years should unsettle any leader currently automating their internal communications. “I worry that AI will give us an avalanche of competent communication, beautifully structured, grammatically impeccable, and utterly forgettable. The CEO who stands out will be the one who has something worth saying. And, more importantly, means it.”
Follow Gavin McMahon on LinkedIn for more insights on leadership storytelling, executive communication, and Story Business.
