Inside Microsoft's storytelling engine room with Steve Clayton

What comes to mind when you think of Microsoft? Perhaps you’ll think of one of the company’s iconic products, PowerPoint or Word. If you’re a corporate user it might be Office or Teams. If you’re a gamer it might be Minecraft or Xbox. And what about Skype, LinkedIn and Github?

And that is both the challenge and the opportunity for Microsoft’s Steve Clayton and his team. Steve is Chief Storyteller based at the company’s HQ just outside of Seattle. “Part of the challenge is the breadth of the portfolio of products and services. And the breadth of the customers and the audiences that we serve means that they don’t always have the full view of the company,” he says.

As a business storyteller I have always been curious about how Microsoft approaches storytelling. So last week I jumped on a call with Steve - via Microsoft Teams, natch - and we taped a conversation for my Meet The Storytellers series. We talked about how Microsoft uses storytelling not only to communicate about its products, services and customers, but also about the company itself and the people who work there.

We touched on where personal stories sit in our professional lives: how CEO Satya Nadella has been comfortable sharing stories of his family life, and why Steve himself chooses to reveal his personal passions and reflections via his ‘Friday Thing’ email and LinkedIn post. 

“It’s a pretty rich landscape to play in for a storyteller,” he told me.

Snapshots from the conversation

“There are so many stories to tell. It’s all about having a sense of curiosity and wonder about the things that go on inside the company and the impact it’s having outside the company.”

“My role is to be a translator. The technology industry can be baffling. My job is to say, how do I take these complicated and abstract concepts and make them interesting and real for people through the medium of story.”

“When I started in this role one thing I was keen to do was to bring people into the house of Microsoft. One of the philosophies I had was that we’re going to tell stories that are a rich mix of people, places, products and process.” 

“When I was in the UK I used to get the train past Microsoft’s Thames Valley Park campus and I’d see our five buildings there - five big grey buildings, five grey boxes. And I thought maybe that’s how people saw the company. So I wanted to show people what’s inside the grey box. There are amazing people doing incredible things in incredible spaces be they laboratories or workshops, engineering labs.”