Picture this: You’re about to give a presentation on your firm’s Q4 performance. And you’ve got a graph up your sleeve that you’re certain will knock people’s socks off. The moment comes and … crickets.

If this sounds familiar, today’s advice is for you—because data alone doesn’t always land the way you’d hope. But throw in a good story, says Kellogg’s Harry Kraemer, and you might just get your message across.

Today we’ll hear from Kraemer. Plus: what the trolls on Reddit can tell us about political discourse. (It’s not all bad!)

The importance of stories

When he was CFO of the medical-supply maker Baxter International, Kraemer started weaving stories about his life into company-wide communications about the business’s cash flow—information for which most employees weren’t necessarily clamoring.

His strategy was effective.

“I did it every month for I think 12 years when I was a CFO, when I was a president, when I was the CEO,” said Kraemer, a clinical professor of leadership at Kellogg, in an interview with The Insightful Leader podcast. “And 20 years later, I’ll be at O’Hare Airport, and somebody comes to me: ‘I remember that story you told me….’”

In one of his company-wide email blasts, Kraemer wanted to stress the importance of incentives, and recalled the perfect real-life dovetail. His son, who was around four at the time, had gotten his hands on a small bead from his sister’s bead set.

“[My son] took one of the beads, and he stuck it way up his nostril—I mean, way up his nostril,” Kraemer said.

He drove his son to the emergency room, but before they went inside, Kraemer had an idea.

“Being the CFO, the cash-flow guy, [I] said, ‘Andrew, daddy loves you very much. We’re going to go in the emergency room. It’s probably going to cost daddy $500—that’s okay! Not a problem! But here’s the deal: before we go in, if you can figure out a way to blow that out of your nose, we’re going to Bakers Square,’” Kraemer said.

He also promised a trip to Blockbuster (pre-Netflix).

“And he blew it out so hard. He almost cracked my front windshield,” Kraemer said.

He detailed all this in his email, and the response was massive: Parents recounted similar experiences. One man sent him the PhD thesis he wrote on removing objects from the nasal cavity, a fun little coincidence. All of this made Kraemer more relatable to his audience while also landing his message.

You can hear more from our interview with Kraemer—where he also talks about how to manage a family business when you aren’t family—here.

Trolls gonna troll

Reddit has been all over the news of late, mostly because of its dramatic IPO.

But here’s a story about the popular discussion forum that you probably haven’t heard. And it involves one of the most Reddit cliches out there: trolls.

Reddit can be a goldmine for academic researchers, allowing them to analyze commenting patterns across diverse topics. And in recently published research, Michalis Mamakos, a postdoctoral scholar at Northwestern, and Eli Finkel, a professor of management and organizations at Kellogg, did just this. The researchers were curious about something many of us are: Why do political discussions always turn so toxic, particularly online?

“It’s usually said that political discourse is uncivil because there are differences either in ideology or in identity. So, if your political group is attacked, you will react,” Mamakos told Kellogg Insight.

But in their study, the researchers observed something quite different. “Our findings suggest that a major reason why our political discourse is toxic is that toxic people are especially likely to opt in,” says Finkel.

Specifically, they found that users whose behavior is especially toxic in partisan contexts maintain the same behavior in nonpartisan contexts, too. What’s more, in nonpartisan subreddits—think r/movies or r/programming—the discourse of people who comment in partisan contexts is ruder and more uncivil than that of people who don’t engage in those spaces.

And the rudest of the rude? Those who comment in both liberal and conservative subreddits. This suggests that the concern that toxicity arises from partisan echo chambers may be misplaced. Instead, it seems to be the case that trolls are gonna troll—and political discourse just makes for troll-friendly terrain.

The researchers see the finding as a hopeful one, as it suggests that political discussions aren’t doomed to turn noxious in a way that other discussions aren’t. Rather, they are noxious in part because they have been dominated by a few loud, rude voices.

“The toxicity we observe in online political contexts is an overrepresentation of the people who choose to opt into them,” Mamakos says. “And these people push out the more agreeable people who don’t want to engage with this kind of conflict. This overrepresentation provides a misleading image of the severity of the divide.”

You can read more about their research here.