Steve Clayton – Head of Storytelling at Microsoft
Steve is Microsoft’s Chief Storyteller and manages Microsoft’s Innovation, Culture and Stories team. It didn’t start that way – he joined Microsoft in 1997 as a technical pre-sales guy, talking tech to big companies and began to realize he could translate geek into something non-geeks could understand. That took him around the world, talking to audiences large and small about the magic of technology.
And then he discovered blogging and setup “Geek in Disguise” – a blog to tell the story of Microsoft from where he sat – inside Microsoft. A few thousands posts and a few awards later, Steve was invited to bring that storytelling to Microsoft’s HQ near Seattle and take on the Chief Storyteller role. That’s the abridged version of the story.
Today, Steve works with teams across the company to help the world understand who Microsoft is and the impact it’s technology and people have on the world. Steve was the architect of the acclaimed “88 Acres” story that heralded a new direction for Microsoft’s corporate storytelling with the Microsoft Stories site and wrote Modern Design at Microsoft. Since then, Steve and his team have influenced everything from CEO keynotes to the coffee cups at Microsoft – all with a goal of transforming the culture of a 130,000-person company through storytelling.
