Freytag made me understand the need to bring in both successes and reversals in a business story, since narratives without these are flat and boring. Campbell’s structure highlighted the importance of characters in the story and how audiences relate to the key narrator’s troubles and triumphs, a lesson that, in young companies at least, the story is as much about the founder or the person running the business as it is about the business. Finally, this version of the story brought home the realization that stories connect with audiences because they feed into all-too-human impulses.
