Rohit also teaches marketing and storytelling at Georgetown University, and he says it’s important for leaders of any business to embrace storytelling without worrying that they have to be Ernest Hemingway.
“Ultimately what storytelling means is that you’re not focused on the facts and the bullet points” he says. “Telling a story is kind of the opposite of that person who says, ‘Just give me the facts. Just give me the numbers. That’s all I care about.’ We hear people say that to us all the time, especially when it comes to financial advice. The problem when you start to do that is that there’s no context for it. If everything is decided based on a number on a spreadsheet, then a bigger number is always better.”
Hopefully this idea is ringing some bells for you.
Rohit is touching on that tension between the quantifiable and the unquantifiable that we’ve all been struggling to solve. Storytelling is one way to bridge that gap between your client’s spreadsheet and that client understanding how those numbers are going to help him or her live a more fulfilling life. Again, that circles back to advisors having the tools and the skills that will help them collect those stories from clients during discovery, and then build those stories into a larger narrative that’s going to carry through the life of the financial plan.
Robot Renaissance vs. The Human Touch
Rohit Bhargava noted a sharp contrast between the soothing “retro” Super Bowl ads and the tone in ads featuring technology and robots.
“If you just look at the way robots were portrayed in the Super Bowl, that was a disaster for anybody who is working in a robotics firm,” Rohit says. “Robots were portrayed as these scary, inhuman, gross, creepy things. We are in a period of discovery about how we’re going to relate to these robots and what we’re going to want them to do or allow them to do and what we’re going to need them to do.”
Obviously, this has been another hot topic in the financial industry. Much of the panic about “robo advisors” and diminishing fees has died down, in part, because most investors still want some level of human interaction.
It’s become pretty clear that what we as advisors want “the robots” to do is automate some behind the scenes tasks so that we can have more quality face-time with clients. Even some robo platforms offer a premium tier of service that connects clients with a real live person they can talk to.
“There is a basic underlying fact that humans prefer humans,” Rohit says. “I do think that humanness is one big piece for financial advisors. The face-to-face interaction is something that we continue to value as humans. I think that in a world where we can do so much work in collaboration virtually, it’s easy to forget the positive things that happen when you are able to get together in person. There is a huge value to that that really isn’t replaced by anything else.”