Why the Best Leaders Treat Storytelling as Strategy

Storytelling is having a moment.

Job postings on LinkedIn mentioning “storyteller” have doubled over the past year. It’s a sign, says the company’s editor-in chief, that in the age of AI, clarity and judgement are in more demand than ever.

Chris Foster, CEO of Omnicom Public Relations, the world’s largest PR portfolio.

For Chris Foster, CEO of Omnicom Public Relations, the world’s largest PR portfolio, storytelling has never been more important. Yes, AI can generate a story in seconds, but it isn’t a storyteller.

“Storytelling really is the ultimate differentiator,” he told the audience at the 10^th annual meeting of Darden Leadership Communication Council (DLCC). “We know that creativity impacts and shapes storytelling, and storytelling is not just evolving, it’s being disrupted.”

That disruption, he argued, isn’t just about technology. It’s about a deeper shift in how stories are created, who gets to tell them and what makes them stick.

Foster’s message to the roomful of more than 100 leaders from business, media, education, government and civil society was simple: stop confusing attention with impact.

Most of what passes for storytelling today isn’t storytelling at all.

It’s coverage.

“Think about the last story you worked on — did it drive culture or coverage or both?” he said. “At the end of the day we seek oftentimes to drive coverage, because that’s what our clients are asking us to do, but stories have always built commerce, they’ve influenced and built culture and connection.”

Think about it. The twenty-four-hour media cycle is unrelenting. A headline lands. A segment airs. A campaign trends for a day or two. For a moment, it feels like success. Then comes the inevitable follow-up from a client: What’s next?

“Coverage is a moment in time, it fades,” Foster said. “Connection lasts.”

What lasts, in his telling, are stories that tap into something deeper than visibility — stories that tap into culture and connection.

He pointed to “Lucky Yatra,” the 2025 Cannes Lions-winning campaign for Indian Railways that transformed train tickets into lottery entries, drawing on the country’s widespread lottery participation.

The creative execution wasn’t the point, according to Foster. The brilliance lay in the simplicity of the message — the story.

“They turned a chore into an opportunity,” he said, noting the campaign captured “hope, imagination and chance” and ultimately changed behavior.

That, for Foster, is the standard: storytelling that moves people, not just metrics.

More than that, he argued, the best stories do real work. “Stories solve business problems,” he said — by changing behavior, shaping culture and driving outcomes that extend beyond any single moment of coverage.

“When you think about creativity, it’s not always the beautiful objects. Creativity oftentimes starts and exists in the strategy,” he said.

It’s a subtle but important distinction. In Foster’s view, the most powerful stories don’t decorate strategy, they are the strategy.

“Stories just don’t explain strategy,” he said. “They’re how we execute strategy.”

He pointed to familiar examples. Nike didn’t just sign Michael Jordan; it built a narrative around grit and defiance that became a cultural force. Apple didn’t just market products; it told a story about nonconformity that shaped everything from its design to its stores.

In both cases, the story endured because it was embedded in the business itself.

Technology, meanwhile, continues to reshape how those stories are told, but not why they matter.

Foster, who graduated from the University of Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in 1992, was candid about his own thinking on artificial intelligence, admitting he once overstated its potential to replace jobs. Now, he sees it differently.

AI is “changing the speed and the scale and the scrutiny with which we tell stories,” he said, but it doesn’t replace the human elements that make them meaningful — judgment, timing and emotional depth.

His analogy: AI is like a grand piano. It can play every note perfectly. But it cannot create music people remember.

“The algorithms haven’t figured that out yet,” he said.

If anything, the rise of AI raises the bar for human storytellers. In a world flooded with content, what stands out is not volume but meaning.

That puts new pressure, and new opportunity, on communicators.

Foster argued that the field has been too modest about its role, too focused on outputs such as media placements rather than outcomes like reputation and behavior. In reality, he said, communicators are “architects of meaning” and “defenders of reputation.”

“We don’t just shape perceptions, we shape outcomes,” he said.

To do that, he urged the audience to think differently about their work and their value. Not as support for strategy, but as a central driver of it.

“We’re the most important tool in a CEO’s toolbox,” Foster said, referring to communicators. “As a CEO, of course, I need a general counsel, I need accountants, and I need marketers and the like, but I need my comms team. And our stories just don’t inform — they move people, and that’s the goal, right?”

His closing framework was straightforward: the most effective stories share three qualities.

“When your stories have clarity, you can be heard. When your stories have creativity, they’re remembered. And when they have consequence, they are powerful. I believe we are more powerful as a network of communicators than we’ve ever been before. We just have to believe it and seize the moment.”

Storytelling may be having a moment. But as Foster made clear, the real challenge isn’t telling more stories.

It’s telling ones that matter.

The Darden Leadership Communication Council (DLCC) was co-founded by professors June West and Steve Soltis and includes more than 100 leaders from business, media, education, government and civil society sectors.