An imposter cat
In July 2023 my wife posted a video about a cat named Oyen.
Oyen is an orange tabby. During the pandemic he wandered into the capybara habitat at Malaysia’s Zoo Negara as a kitten, presumed orphaned. The capybaras adopted him on sight. He eats with them, sleeps with them, cuddles with them. In 2023 the zoo gave up pretending he wasn’t theirs and put his own signage on the habitat next to the capybaras’. The deputy president has said something close to ninety percent of visitors now come hoping to see him.
The wire-service version of this story is forgettable. Cat lives with capybaras at zoo. End of beat.
Jenn’s version opened with a deadpan reframe: “An imposter cat has seemingly been accepted by a herd of capybaras.” She let the absurdity sit, then turned tender — orphaned kitten, found a family, the capybaras “really don’t seem to mind at all.” The tension was the quiet wait, this is actually real? The payoff arrived with the signage — the zoo, the institution, officially recognizing what the animals had already decided.
The post pulled 31.2 million views. She’s revisited the beat twice since — a year-end recap hit 7.2M, an earlier version 4.2M.
Same story. Different craft. Three orders of magnitude in reach.
That delta is the whole essay. Storytelling is the most important capability a company can build, because engagement and distribution are the only two non-substitutable dependencies of a business, and both run on it.
The substitution test
Run the substitution test against everything a company does.
Product can be substituted. Better versions get built; worse versions get replaced. The product you sell in five years won’t be the product you sell today, and your company can survive the swap if everything else is intact.
Operations can be substituted. Outsource the back office. Buy a different ERP. Restructure the team. Painful, recoverable.
People can be substituted. Operators don’t like saying this out loud, but the proof is in every acquisition that retains sixty percent of headcount and ships better in year two. Roles matter; specific occupants are mostly fungible at the org-design level. Even founders get replaced.
Capital can be substituted. Different round, different lender, different ratio of debt to equity. Money is the most substitutable input in the entire business.
Brand assets — logo, palette, tagline — can be substituted. The number of rebrands that produced no measurable business effect is roughly the number of rebrands that have ever happened.
What can’t you substitute?
You can’t substitute the fact that someone cares about your company. You can’t substitute the channels through which they encounter you. Strip the rest away and these are the two dependencies that hold the rest of the business up. Engagement and distribution. People have to care, and people have to find you.
Almost every other failure mode is recoverable. Lose engagement and distribution and you are no longer running a company. You are operating a service no one needs.
Both run on story.
Brains run on stories
There’s a 2010 study out of Princeton — Stephens, Silbert, and Hasson, in PNAS — where researchers put speakers and listeners in fMRI scanners and watched what happened during storytelling. The listener’s brain activity began to mirror the speaker’s. The coupling was measurable, and stronger coupling predicted better comprehension.
This gets misquoted into a stock photo of a brain with arrows. The actual finding is sharper: story is a transmission protocol. It is the mechanism by which one nervous system’s state is loaded into another. The pattern recognition, the anticipation, the resolution — these are the structure that makes neural coupling possible at all.
When a story works, the craft is doing the same thing every time. Stakes you can recognize. Tension you carry across the gap. A payoff that resolves what the opening set up. Imposter cat → capybaras don’t mind → zoo makes it official. Setup, tension, resolution. The form is older than the species.
Decks, dashboards, and bullet lists are data dumps. They hand the listener a pile of facts and ask them to assemble the connective tissue themselves, and most listeners won’t.
The steel-man: distribution mechanics
The strongest case against this thesis is the infrastructure-platform case.
Stripe scaled with almost no narrative voice. So did Linear. So did AWS in its early decade. Their growth came from API surface area, developer experience, integration availability, and the boring discipline of being reliable. The customer-facing narrative was something like we exist, the docs are good, the SDKs work in your language. No hero’s journey. No founder mythology in the launch posts.
The argument follows: if these companies built generation-defining businesses with vestigial storytelling, then story is decorative for serious operators, and what actually scales is distribution mechanics — paid acquisition, product loops, integrations, time-to-first-value.
The argument is mostly right inside its frame and almost entirely wrong outside it.
Inside the frame: technical-buyer audiences process credibility through artifacts. The README carries the story. The latency graph is the hook. The status page is the trust signal. Peer reputation among engineers — what the senior backend at Shopify says about your SDK at the bar at re:Invent — is itself a story, transmitted in a register that doesn’t read as narrative to anyone outside the room. Hook, tension, payoff. The hook is I tried this on a side project. The tension is the docs were not lying. The payoff is we moved the whole company onto it.
Outside the frame — i.e., for the ninety-nine percent of businesses that don’t sell infrastructure to engineers — the substitution test still holds and the steel-man dissolves. Most companies don’t have a Stripe-shaped audience. They have a people who don’t yet care audience, and the only way to convert that audience is to be the kind of company someone tells a story about.
The end of volume strategy
For two decades the dominant content posture was more at-bats. Publish more, post more, optimize for the algorithm’s appetite. The implicit math: production is the constraint, distribution is the lever, some percentage of attempts go viral, scale beats craft.
This is over.
Production cost has collapsed. A competent model produces an em-dash-heavy LinkedIn post in eight seconds. Three of those, a header image, a carousel — call it forty seconds for an entire content unit indistinguishable from the median post in the feed. The marginal cost of corporate content has gone from one person-hour to one prompt.
Attention is the constraint now.
Open LinkedIn. Scroll. You can feel the homogenization in your jaw. The same cadence on every fourth post — a punchy first line, three bullets, a one-line bow. The same em-dashes. The same fake-vulnerable opener. The same imitation of the format that worked for the last person who tried it. The feed has the texture of a single model producing a single voice from ten thousand accounts, because in some functional sense that is what is happening.
Story survives this — specifically the part of story the model cannot synthesize because it requires the specificity of having been somewhere and seen something. The capybara cat with the official signage. The twenty-two-year-old social coordinator who put a twerking owl on TikTok. The thing that happened to your team last Thursday.
The volume era rewarded competence at producing the average. The story era punishes it.
The Duolingo flip
In early 2021, Duolingo’s TikTok account had about fifty thousand followers and was producing the kind of content you’d expect — language-learning tips, mascot waves, faintly aspirational copy. The default corporate social output of a company that took itself appropriately seriously.
That year a twenty-two-year-old junior social media coordinator named Zaria Parvez was handed the account.
In September of 2021 Parvez had the Duo owl twerk on an intern in response to a comment about Dua Lipa. The video pulled roughly three million views in days. The unhinged Duo persona — horny, threatening, chronically online, weighing in on Taylor Swift and The Bachelor and ghosting users who skipped lessons — locked in. The account crossed five million followers inside eighteen months. It now sits north of sixteen million.
The owl is the trailing indicator. The interesting change happened upstream of the content.
To make the unhinged Duo work, Duolingo decommissioned the approval pipeline for that surface. One person ran the account in close-to-real-time. The legal-marketing-comms chain that produces median-quality corporate content was switched off. The company decided that moving fast and occasionally producing something cringe-inducing cost less than producing nothing memorable, ever.
Duolingo had made a real decision about what kind of company it was going to be. The owl was downstream of that decision; so was the operating model around the social team; so was the willingness to live with the occasional bad-take that comes with running an account in close-to-real-time. The content was just the visible part of a much bigger commitment.
Most companies will continue running their social channels through the same approval pipeline that produces median content, then hire a “head of content” to fix it, and the hire will fail because the hire has no authority to change the pipeline. The pipeline is what produces the content. The content can’t be fixed without fixing the pipeline.
The masthead signal
Look at who’s hiring for editorial leadership right now.
Visa is hiring an Editor in Chief at $153K–$245K. Pottery Barn, a Managing Editor at $125K–$130K. Toast, a Senior Director of Content & Audience. BNY, an SVP for Markets Content. Guy Carpenter, a Director of Content & Thought Leadership at up to $244K. Bunkerhill Health. Profound. Prenuvo. The Anti-Defamation League. The list spans payments, retail, reinsurance, healthcare, AI infrastructure, banking, and advocacy.
Two things are interesting about the list.
The first is the titling. Editor in Chief. SVP Markets Content. These are publishing-house framings being adopted by operating companies that don’t publish anything. The work is being modeled as masthead work — singular editorial authority, durable seniority, organizational permanence — rather than as content marketing.
The second is the comp. $244K at the top of the band is director-VP territory. Companies do not pay that to fill a tactical seat. They pay that when they believe the function decides whether the company works.
What this list shows is companies waking up to where competitive advantage now lives. Storytelling capability is being moved from a marketing line item with a quarterly budget to a senior, durable organizational function with multi-year commitment. The trend is real, and the trend is right. Whether each individual hire succeeds will depend on whether the company rebuilds the operating model around the function — the way Duolingo did — or whether they import the title without making the structural changes that let the work do anything.
Internal storytelling is the same craft
The external version of this argument is the easier version. Engagement and distribution sit outside the company; story unlocks them; therefore story is a function the company must build. Fine.
The internal version is harder to see and does more of the work.
Every meaningful change inside a company requires the same craft. There is a current state someone has to understand. There is a tension — a thing that’s not working, a thing that’s coming that we’re not ready for, a thing we said we’d do that we haven’t done. There is a proposed resolution and a set of stakes if we don’t get there. Setup, tension, payoff. The same form, transmitted internally instead of externally.
Retention runs on this. The reason people stay at companies for a decade is rarely the comp. They stay because they have a coherent story about why they are there, what the work is for, and where it’s going. When that story stops making sense — when the company can’t articulate it, or articulates a new one every quarter, or articulates one thing and operates by another — retention erodes from the senior end first, which is the most expensive end.
Alignment runs on this. OKRs are the artifact. The story underneath the OKRs is what makes them sortable when reality forces tradeoffs. Without a coherent internal story, every priority conflict becomes a political negotiation rather than a clarifying choice.
Recruiting runs on this. Great senior people take a meeting because of the story they’ve heard about the company from someone they trust. They sign because of the story you tell them in the room. Compensation closes the deal; story decides whether you ever got the chance to make the offer.
The companies that do internal storytelling well treat it as one operating capability with two surfaces, not two unrelated marketing functions. The external story and the internal story are the same story, told in different registers, by people across the organization who are fluent in both.
What companies that take this seriously actually do
The companies that treat storytelling as a real capability do four things differently.
They invest in it durably. Senior ownership, real headcount, multi-year horizon — the same operating commitment a company makes to product engineering or finance. The masthead-hiring trend is the trailing indicator. Companies that meant it built a permanent function at the table where capital and people get allocated. Companies that didn’t built a content-marketing pod reporting up through demand-gen, and the work continues to do roughly what a content-marketing pod can do.
They rebuild the operating model around it. Approval chains shorten or get removed for the surfaces where story craft matters. The legal-marketing-comms gauntlet that produces median content gets reorganized. Duolingo decommissioned the TikTok approval pipeline. They did not do this lightly. They did it because the alternative was producing nothing memorable, ever, and they understood that the cost of the alternative was the entire point of having a social channel.
They get fluent across the organization. The story isn’t sequestered in the editorial team. Every leader can tell it. Every salesperson can tell a tighter version. Every recruiter can tell it to a candidate. The narrative is internal and external in parallel — same thesis, different registers — and it stays consistent because every person retelling it knows what the company is for in a way that survives translation.
They commit to specificity. The model can produce competent average; companies treating storytelling as real capability know their advantage lives in the things only they have seen, only they have done, only their customers have lived. They invest in capturing those specifics — in operator interviews, in customer journalism, in the unglamorous editorial work of finding the particular thing worth telling. Then they tell it.
The companies that do these four things own the only two business inputs their competitors cannot substitute. The companies that don’t will continue posting median-quality content into an AI-flooded feed and wondering why the volume math stopped working.
Storytelling is the work, not the wrapper
For most of the past two decades, businesses have treated storytelling as the wrapper around the work — the thing you do after you’ve built the product, run the service, hired the team. Marketing’s problem. Comms’s problem. The agency’s problem. A function downstream of the real business.
That model assumed two things that have stopped being true. It assumed that production was the constraint on reaching people. And it assumed that the default state of the channels — search, social, the open web — was that competent corporate content could occupy them by showing up consistently.
Production is free now. The channels are saturated with model-grade average. The default state has flipped: showing up consistently with competent content reaches almost no one, because everyone is showing up consistently with competent content.
What survives in the new default is craft. Specificity. The thing a model cannot synthesize because it requires having been somewhere and seen something — a capybara habitat with a cat in it, a social coordinator with the freedom to post the bit, a company willing to look slightly cringe-inducing in pursuit of being memorable instead of fine. The companies that treat storytelling as the work itself — as what the business is actually producing, alongside the product or the service — are the companies that will own engagement and distribution. Everyone else is competing for what’s left.
Storytelling is the most important capability a company can build now. Run the substitution test on your own business and see what it tells you.