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Have you really given your Audience their WHY?

With the most powerful tools of persuasion in the Universe?

Stories

Evidence Based
Evidence Based

The most convincing stories are backed by research and reason: facts, evidence, and the solid arguments interpreting their meaning and import in favor of your desired conclusion or outcome.

Emotionally Resonant
Emotionally Resonant

Mere narratives - this happened, and then that - will not and cannot evoke an emotional response in your audience. Only the three-act structure of story can make your audience feel, and only feeling can make them act.

Character Grounded
Character Grounded

The most powerful and memorable stories feature relatable protagonists who overcome challenges and obstacles to achieve meaningful results.

Meaning Rich
Meaning Rich

Well-constructed stories begin with meaningful challenges that, when overcome, offer the audience a new way of thinking about what matters, or even a way of living and working with purpose.

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You don’t have to wear a squirrel suit at work to get into Flow.

The science is in: you can achieve the peak experience of Flow by exercising your strengths in the course of any work you find personally meaningful.

Ready to make the leap to find out how?

Employers

Learn how we’re reinventing talent - from the bottom up:

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  • Why prioritize hiring for the Flow state over prior experience, skills, academics, and other keyword thinking?
  • How to unearth Flow potential with the technology of Story in interviews
  • Nobody wants to read undifferentiated job descriptions - our marketing-powered Opportunity Pitches bring better, longer-lasting candidates faster
  • Show candidates the real benefits of any job - as a major opportunity in life, career, and meaning
  • How to prevent employee-interviewers untrained in cognitive error and implicit bias from killing the productivity and diversity of your hires

Supercharge Your Recruiting Now!
Subscribe now and  get all the book’s secrets months before they're published!

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Founders

Startup Storytelling

We offer the world's only Hero's Journey storytelling system for startup founders. Take investors and customers on an emotionally convincing journey powered by the timeless technology of persuasion already used from Hollywood and Bollywood to Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley!

Ready to shift your startup into a higher gear?

  • Learn how to make your pitch actually tell a story, with a relatable character and arc, for maximum persuasion!
  • Find out if your startup idea fundable by professional investors - and why not
  • Develop a solid go-to-market plan for your MVP
  • Learn why almost no one gets their Pain, Solution, and Competition slides right

Start with our popular free guide, How to Craft a Startup Pitch Investors Want to See aka The Deck of Decks . . . and then keep getting additional best practices in your inbox!

Get the Deck of Decks!

High Performance Story

30 Minutes

Schedule atime for a phone call to discuss your pitch -- and how we can help you improve both your pitch and its underlying business model and strategy to optimize your funding chances.

What Our Clients Do That's Different

Hire for Flow over “Prior Experience”!

Our clients have ended the disastrous hiring practice of  filtering candidates by counting clumps of keywords. Instead, they're optimizing for candidates’ ability to enter and sustain the Flow state in the role.

Solution: hire for strengths and the candidate’s capacity to sustain meaning in the role. Only these are proven to move the needle.

Market Every Role as an Opportunity!

Your job descriptions are the source of many of your recruiting and retention problems.

Our Role Opportunity Pitch combines marketing savvy and copywriting chops to create differentiating benefits candidates actually care about: purpose and meaning, learning and development, career path and autonomy, mastery, and the quality of the boss.

Interview for Story!

To ascertain strengths and the capacity for meaning that spells Flow, our clients interview for Story: a relatable character presented with challenges who uses transferable strengths to achieve a positive outcome.

It’s the ultimate behavior-based interview. And we teach your interviewers how to understand the elements of Story and draw them out of every candidate.

End the Overmanaging Epidemic!

Managers have the potential to spark the greatest performance improvements, but companies too often hire managers based on tenure or experience in the work of the managed.

Managers can be the single biggest drag on productivity and retention. Learn to hire and train managers who can get the best work done with the least management.

See HPS Founder Cameron Powell's explosive speech, on these best practices and more, at the Silicon Valley DisruptHR conference!

High Performance Story is a virtual accelerator for startup founders, a maximizer of highly creative and productive teams, and the world's first firm to optimize all of talent management for the super-productive Flow state.

We’ve helped founders to refine business models, talent strategies, go-to-market plans, and investor pitches to raise over $350 million in capital and grants. Our clients hire better talent faster, and the employees we help them hire are more productive and stay longer.

Give us the opportunity to demonstrate, with evidence, why we're confident that a stronger understanding of Flow, strengths, meaning, and Story will dramatically improve every relevant metric in your organization.

 

 

StartUp Stories

  • Craft your Ur-Story - your foundational story from which you can carve off your tributary stories for investors, journalists, customers
  • Develop the founder origin story that's catnip to investors and journalists
  • Own the room with your own Hero's Journey investor pitch
  • Storify your marketing to customers
  • Attract cash, top employees, and free media
  • Brand yourself as a credible thought-leader
  • Improve every aspect of your business strategy and how you communicate it
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Employer Brand Stories

Get the most powerful story-based employer brand

  • Why your HR function needs a shotgun wedding with marketing
  • Increase productivity, profits per employee, and retention with greater self-management
  • Cut employee acquisition costs by at least 25%
  • Enhance psychological safety, the #1 predictor of high-performance teams
  • Slash your cost of acquiring customers too!

Policy and Communications

Our hyper-creative team of technologists, entrepreneurs, and public policy experts helps clients navigate complex policy landscapes to translate the intersection of law, policy, and market research into lean/agile product development of complex technology.

  • Develop, establish, and manage clients’ federal government affairs strategies to drive business priorities. 
  • Strategize and create external strategic communications for diverse audiences: members of Congress and staff, C-suite executives, regulators, media.
  • Maximum persuasion: rapid responses to draft legislation (with revised language), speeches, briefings, and talking points, media responses, action alerts, white papers, op-eds, blog posts, policy proposals, comments on regulations. 
  • Coach executives in the power of story to deliver speeches and talking points with mastery.
  • PR training and crisis management
  • Strategic relationships with stakeholders - agencies, trade associations, coalitions, competitors, congressional staff - to achieve common legislative goals.
Government Affairs Public Policy Photo by Kyle Mills on Unsplash

From the High Performance Team featured in...

Founder Cameron Powell - startup pitch coach

"I argue for the primacy of talent and broad experience, for the well-rounded and the well-read, for the liberal arts and for the Jacks and Jills of many trades (and master of several) who are the innovators and wisdom-holders among us. I hold that the Flow state is what we should all be optimizing for in our career searches and our hiring alike."

-- Cameron Powell, Founder

Our founder's latest journey to find and make meaning through story . . .

"Pure Joy!"

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Read it now on Kindle or hardcover

A terrifying diagnosis. An unbreakable bond. And one unforgettable journey.

Cameron Powell has always struggled with goodbyes. On the day his marriage ends, he finds out his mother's cancer has returned-and this time there may be no escape. Faced with the prospect of more chemo and surgery, his German-born mother, Inge, vows to conquer a 500-mile trek across Spain, and Cameron pushes aside his fears to walk by her side.

Joined by a misfit band of adventurers - a politically incorrect Spaniard, a theatrical Frenchwoman, a teenager who's never been far from home - Cameron and Inge write a fierce and funny travelogue about the rocky heights and hidden valleys of the Camino de Santiago.

As a Camino memoir in the tradition of James Hitt or Bill Bryson, Ordinary Magic delivers. But the hardest stretch comes three years later, when Inge's health declines -- and Cameron, ready or not, must accept the challenge to remain as present to his mother as he can.

Cameron begins to record, in still more chiseled prose, his real-time impressions of life's most difficult voyage. What he created has become one of literature's great love letters -- and a uniquely unflinching insight into how we all truly can create love and meaning in our lives, even amidst the fear and sadness we’ll all face from time to time.

“Powerful, inspiring —and, amazingly, almost impossible to put down.” - Mary Dearborn, Hemingway: A Biography

Propelled by the searing immediacy of Cameron’s own fear and sadness, this deeply-felt memoir opens up new insight into what it means to be a man, and takes us - with wisdom, humor, and an overflowing tenderness - into one of the most challenging journeys true friends can ever take. If you like candid mother-son relationships, humorous tales from the trail, and in-the-moment insights on living a life of resilience and purpose, then you'll love Cameron Powell's luminous, inspirational true story about pilgrimage, presence, and letting go.

Ordinary Magic is the love story, lifelong inspiration, and soulful laugh and cry you need in your life right now. Pick up your ebook today - or get the gorgeous hardcover!

"Studded with gems of spirited observation and wit . . . of the most fond and loving sort, and Inge, Powell’s mother, emerges as an indelible heroine. Powell is a writer to watch." -- Mary Dearborn, Hemingway: A Biography

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

How did the story begin?
Mom and I blogged while on the Camino de Santiago. Readers loved the travel writing, and said our journey was inspiring and hilarious. But when the Camino ended, I stopped blogging. I started again when Mom's health began to decline, because I just had to write. My decision to share my path with others, on the blog, was one of the best I’ve ever made. The love was overwhelming, a light in my darkness.

What surprised you most about readers’ reactions?
People saw the humor in it all. And they kept saying the posts were “beautiful”. I realized people have a real hunger for what really matters.

What makes this memoir different?
As a story of a mother through the eyes of her son, it’s so rare as to be overdue. Readers have really responded to the sheer grit of my mom. And because I have a lifelong fascination with the human mind and heart, I saw a way to make my mom’s psychological resilience something every reader can learn from.

Watch the extraordinary book trailer