Humanity’s strange, ardent love affair with story has always fascinated me. To explore our enthrallment and explain the science behind it, I wrote a book – The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. The book appealed to a predictable audience of English literature types as well as avid readers of popular science. But it also attracted an unanticipated audience of business professionals. As a professor of literature, I hadn’t known that a wide spectrum of professions was embracing storytelling as a uniquely powerful form of messaging, that they had discovered that far from being a soft, touchy-feely skill, storytelling was a powerful form of witchery. A great storyteller waves her pen over paper like a wand. She casts a spell that allows her to enter minds and change what they feel, which allows her to change what they think, which allows her to influence how they act. Companies were flocking to story because they wanted a piece of this power.