Eric Staples

Eric Staples is a catalyst—he sparks equal parts enthusiasm, creativity, and practicality, giving listeners things they can immediately apply to their professional (or even personal) life. He came to the world of marketing from chemistry. Although he happily left the world of mixing chemicals in windowless rooms, his mindset and approach essentially remained the same: take complicated things, break them down to their component pieces, examine them for deep understanding, and then build them back up in ways that make them more useful and usable for the people who need them.

Eric’s break-it-down-to-build-it-up approach led him to co-architect StoryCraft, an upskilling program that companies like Mars-Wrigley, McDonalds, Best Western, Target, and many others around the globe use to teach their people transformative mindsets. StoryCraft’s tools increase employees’ influence, elevates their effectiveness, and drives impact in their teams and organization. Or, as one workshop participant bluntly put it: “StoryCraft helps to both dial up the gain and dial down the pain of actually getting s**t done.”

That dual-sided value can show up in a lot of ways, even though the core StoryCraft content always remains the same. For a U.S. subsidiary of a German candy company, who was struggling to make headway in getting alignment from their overseas leadership on the right direction for the market, it looked (in part) like helping them understand that the very notion of “right” meant dramatically different things to them than it did to their audience; they had been figuratively speaking the wrong “language” all along, and an eye-opening perspective flip helped the team close that gap. For the data and analytics arm of a leading global quick service restaurant, StoryCraft flipped the team’s default stance from, “This is what my audience needs to hear, they should listen!”, to one where they now ask, “What will my audience need to do with this, and what does that mean they need from me?” StoryCraft then equipped them to answer those questions with confidence.

StoryCraft is far less about having the right content to create a sizzly storyline, and much more about having the right clarity to drive an effective exchange—which is why StoryCraft has much more in common with a masterclass in negotiation than it does with storytelling tropes and tricks. Grounded in behavioral psychology, and aimed at provoking decisions, actions, and outcomes, there is good reason why the most common feedback Eric has heard in every single StoryCraft workshop since its inception eight years ago is: “This is the best training I’ve ever been to!”