The Secret Every CEO Should Steal from Homer

How a 3,000-year-old poem explains why your PowerPoint isn't working

Growing up, I used to love books. They were portals to other worlds, adventures waiting between worn covers. Being a young man, I was especially drawn to rites of passage stories within fantasy. You know the ones—a young mage discovers by accident his unique gifts, grapples with these new powers he doesn't understand. There are mentors pulling him in different directions. Some nudge him toward service, toward protecting others. Others whisper about power, about what he could take, what he deserves.

The tension was always the same: now that you can bend reality with words, reshape the world through will, who do you become?

I thought these were just stories. Metaphors. Safe explorations of power from the comfort of my bedroom.

Then I spent an afternoon with Tas Tasgal, talking about storytelling in business, and realized I've been watching this exact drama play out in boardrooms for fifteen years. Except nobody calls it magic. We call it "strategic communication" or "change management" or "leadership presence."

But it's the same power. The same choice.

The Spell Hidden in Plain Sight

Tas said something that's been echoing in my head ever since: "Numbers numb us, but stories stir us."

It sounds simple, almost obvious. But think about what that actually means. In business, we've convinced ourselves that data is power. That facts win arguments. That if we just show enough charts, run enough analyses, build enough models, truth will prevail and people will act accordingly.

Meanwhile, in the real world, a well-told story about one customer's experience reshapes entire company strategies. A founder's narrative about "why we exist" moves billions in capital. A single anecdote shared in a meeting changes minds that a hundred spreadsheets couldn't budge.

We know this. We've all lived it. Yet we keep pretending business runs on pure logic.

The Bouncer at the Door

Here's the thing about your brain that Tas helped me understand: it's not the rational computer we pretend it is. It's more like a bouncer at an exclusive club.

Your brain uses 20-25% of your body's energy while being only 2% of your body weight. That's insanely expensive to run. So it's not trying to make the best decisions. It's trying to make the most effortless decisions.

New information shows up at the door. Your brain-bouncer looks it over. "Do I know you? Do you fit with the people already inside? No? Then you're not getting in."

You're trying to convince the bouncer with spreadsheets and logic. You're arguing about why you should be on the list.

But stories? Stories are the secret handshake. When you tell a story, the brain shifts into a different mode entirely. The bouncer relaxes. The rope comes down. And suddenly, new ideas can slip inside and find a seat at the table.

The General's Real Power

Tas helpen me follow the word “strategy” to its ancient roots. Strategos is the Greek word for general. Picture him standing on a mountain, surveying the battlefield below. He sees the enemy's troops, their formations, the lay of the land. That elevated view, that's strategy.

But here's what we forget, what we've sanitized out of our modern conception of strategy: that general's only power wasn't in his tactical brilliance or his analytical capabilities. It was in his ability to make farmers and merchants believe they were heroes. To convince them they weren't just fighting a battle - they were fighting for their children's freedom, for their names to be remembered, for something bigger than their individual lives.

One general might have perfect calculations showing a 67.3% probability of victory based on troop movements and supply lines. Another tells his men a story about how their grandchildren will sing songs about this day.

Who do you think wins?

The strategy isn't the plan.

The strategy is making people believe in the plan so deeply they'll transform themselves to achieve it.

The Lesson We Keep Missing

I've been in strategy consulting and corporate leadership for fifteen years. I've built those models. I've created those 147-slide decks that prove, mathematically, that our direction is optimal. I've presented irrefutable logic to rooms full of smart people.

And I've watched it die. Over and over. Death by PowerPoint. Death by indifference. Death by a thousand "interesting points" that change nothing.

Because we're not actually failing at communication. We're failing to recognize that we're in a storytelling battle. Our competitors aren't winning because they have better data. They're winning because they have better stories. Stories that make people feel something. Stories that make employees believe they're part of something meaningful. Stories that make customers see themselves differently.

Every time we choose facts over narrative, we're choosing to lose. Not because facts don't matter, but because facts alone don't move people. They don't create the energy needed for change. They don't make people willing to do uncomfortable things.

The Power You Already Have

Here's what I realized talking with Tas: we're all already casting spells. Every strategy presentation, every all-hands meeting, every quarterly business review - they're all stories. Most of them are just terrible stories. Stories that say "this doesn't matter enough to make interesting."

The young mages in those novels I devoured - they didn't get to choose whether to have power. They had it. The only choice was whether to learn to use it well.

Same with you. You're already telling stories. The spreadsheet that "speaks for itself"? That's a story about not respecting your audience enough to engage them fully. The strategy deck with 147 slides of bulletproof logic? That's a story about missing the point entirely.

Tas told me about Homer - how the Iliad and Odyssey went viral 3,000 years ago, spreading across the ancient world with no algorithms, no distribution networks, just stories so powerful people had to share them. They memorized them word-for-word, passed them down through generations.

That's the power available to you. The ability to make your strategy feel as essential and memorable as those ancient epics.

Numbers numb. Stories stir. That's not opinion. That's neuroscience.