Speaker
Author
Business Storyteller

MEET YAMINI NAIDU, CSP
Captivating leaders as the world's only economist turned business storyteller

For over 15 years, Yamini Naidu has been at the forefront of business storytelling Australia. Through her books, her masterclasses and her transformative speaking keynotes, Yamini has been connecting, engaging and inspiring audiences in the areas of business storytelling and leadership.

Why Storytelling?

Business storytelling helps us to stop wasting time on the unnecessary (more PowerPoint-heavy presentation stacks, overloading our audiences with ever more information).

Storytelling gives us a different strategy that is fresh and relatable in business, so we are not condemned to putting in the hard yards and wondering why it’s not working.

And storytelling helps us avoid the drunkard's search: it is not the most obvious or easiest place to look, but it will give us the richest rewards

What is the drunkard's search?

A police officer sees a drunken man intently searching the ground near a lamppost and asks him what he is looking for. The man replies that he is looking for his car keys, and the officer helps for a few min- utes without success. Then the police officer asks the man whether he is certain he dropped the keys near the lamppost.

‘No,’ comes the reply, ‘I lost the keys somewhere across the street’. ‘Why look here then?’ asks the surprised and irritated officer. ‘The light is much better here,’ the intoxicated man responds, as if stating the obvious.

Abraham Kaplan, the first philosopher to examine behavioural sciences systematically, referred to this as ‘the principle of the drunkard’s search’, a type of observational bias that occurs when people search for something only where it is easiest to look.

Yamini is an economist turned business storyteller and works with leaders and business professionals helping them craft, find and share stories that connect, engage and inspire. Whatever you are trying to achieve in business, storytelling can help you get there faster… guaranteed!

BUSINESS STORYTELLING FOR LEADERS

WORK WITH YAMINI

KEYNOTE SPEAKING

How to entertain, inform and inspire any audience. Yamini Naidu, CSP is not just a speaker, but a transformative experience.

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MASTERCLASSES

Immersive, Experiential and Participatory. We immerse you in the world of storytelling and then we get you to actually do it!

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X-FACTOR

When you hear the words X factor – you immediately start to wonder
What is my X factor? Do I even have one? What if I don’t have one?

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WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Yamini took our team through a high energy set that had everyone fully engaged from start to finish. Through practical examples and workshopping, we experienced the power of business storytelling, with a combination of both tears and belly laughs as staff shared their stories across the team. An incredible learning experience and one we would highly recommend for capability development and commercial impact.

Bridie Swatton Née Cowell, Innovation Director at Bega Cheese Limited.

Yamini spoke at our 2019 conference in June and the feedback overwhelmingly indicated that Yamini should have been a keynote! To address this, we invited her on our August lunch roadshow around Australia and had our biggest numbers in all locations. Yamini’s engaging and humorous style made her stories memorable, complimented by her warm and friendly nature. Her session on storytelling, with examples woven throughout, helped association professionals realise the potential stories can have including demonstrating the value of being a member.

Toni Brearley, Chief Executive Officer, Australasian Society of Association Executives

Yamini attended our all-company meeting and showed us not only the importance but also the impact of storytelling. She engaged the whole group from start to finish. She did it in such a wonderful way that had us all thinking hard about how we could tell our own stories; after all, we all have an interesting story to tell!

Allison Rossiter, Managing Director Roche Diagnostics Australia

We brought in Yamini Naidu into AHI because we thought we could build storytelling skill... although for many of us, to be truthful, we didn’t quite believe we had the ability. In less than 2.5 hours, Yamini convinced us otherwise. She helped us take a nar rative of nearly nothingness and help us make it extraordinary. She showed us the beauty of a good story and the science that drives it. It is a skill that will now sit with all of our participants forever... it will help us in our work, it will help us commu- nicate with our colleagues...and it will help me get my teenage children to clean their room. With great thanks, Yamini.

Mark Henderson, Chief Executive Officer, AHI (Australasian Housing Institute)

Yamini is a wonderful storyteller, mentor and human being. Her wisdom and charisma are infectious and she is guaranteed to bring light into any gathering.

Tania de Jong AM, Entrepreneur, Speaker, Soprano at Creative Universe, Creativity Australia, MindMedicine Australia & Creative Innovation

I have been privileged to have a long association with Yamini. She brings a positive spirit and infectious energy to her work and always leaves behind a lasting impression. More than 10 years on, people from my old team still comment on Yamini’s engaging educational sessions, with great content and challenging fun exercises that have made a real difference to their ability to connect with people in their lives.

John Burgin, Chairman ICT Committee, ANZ India Business Chamber