GUEST COLUMN
not rejecting learning. They are, however, tiring of education that feels abstract, impersonal and disconnected from lived reality. They want to know why something matters before they master it. They want to see themselves in the material. Stories provide that bridge. They situate theory inside human struggle, trade-offs and uncertainty. They answer the unspoken question that hovers in every lecture hall: why should I care? For institutions, this means starting where Steve Jobs insisted that we start: with the learner, working backwards from how insight is absorbed, remembered and acted on. It means designing courses where stories are not illustrative extras but the organising spine. Where case studies feel less like post-mortems and more like lived dilemmas. Where faculty are valued not only as experts, but also as interpreters of experience. The action point is simple, if not always easy. Stop asking how efficiently content can be delivered and start asking how deeply it can land. That famous fishing parable – less teaching how to fish, more telling stories about a well-fed fishing community – was never really about technique. It was about sustenance, community and survival. Perhaps the task now is not to teach ever-more sophisticated ways of fishing, but to tell better stories about why feeding ourselves – and others – has always mattered.
An illustration from A Groundhog Career , part of a series of books co-authored by Oxley, which explores avoiding career traps and staying aligned with your convictions
A Career Carol, another book in the aforementioned series, outlines how best to successfully navigate a career spanning 30-40 years
AN INVITATION, NOT A PRESCRIPTION
and retention compared to traditional, lecture-heavy approaches. In education, this exposes a deeper truth. Many learning systems were designed primarily for the convenience of the deliverers, as well as for standardisation and mass production. Historically, universities emerged in contexts where rote memorisation made sense, often tied to religious instruction and limited access to texts and where scarce resources prevented faculty from contemplating other systems and approaches.
The implication for business schools and universities is not cosmetic; it is structural. The challenge is not to add a storytelling module to an otherwise unchanged curriculum, or to open a lecture with a jokey anecdote before returning to slides and citations. That is decoration, not redesign. The opportunity is to reimagine education as an experience that earns attention rather than demands compliance. Younger generations are
David Oxley is a career expert and the co-author, along with Helmut Schuster, of Artificial Death of a Career , the latest in a series of professional advice books. Oxley holds a doctorate in organisational change from Cranfield University and an MBA from the University of Notre Dame
Business Impact • ISSUE 1 • 2026
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