A client engaged us recently to architect a brand-new signature presentation. So we got out our very sophisticated tools: some markers, flip charts and a whole bucket of post it notes. But we find the questions we ask at every step aren’t so simple: What insight can you reveal? So what? Why will your audience […]
The heavy lifting is yours Read More »
Everyone has their pet peeves. I have my pet loves. Among them, really awesome opening hooks. As in, how do you grab your audience from the first words out of your mouth. That means, ‘Thank you for having me,” or, “I’m here to discuss an idea…” are no where to be heard. This week at TEDGlobal, among
Last week during one of our Influential Storytelling trainings, a participant was proud of herself for using an analogy to get a point across to the COO of her company. It was the week the Mavericks beat the Heat, and if you aren’t into sports, that meant that the basketball season was over and LeBron lost. Just
You sure you got the right analogy? Read More »
Make no mistake about it, presentations and public speaking is in my blood. I’ll just caption these two images to demonstrate my point. Exactly 100 years ago, a local club was founded – inspired by a simliar club in England founded in the 1700s. Part literary society, part salon, part bonding just for the
One of my clients called me yesterday to share how her recent presentation went. We’d spent about 6 hours together reviewing, practicing, taping, testing, editing and more. It was a 45 minute talk to a consequential group in her industry. She couldn’t retain her excitement. “So I started with that story we practiced – where
What it takes to be successfull Read More »
I was at a meeting recently with a local township official, and when I asked about what highlights we should know about his community, he left the room. He quickly and enthusiastically returned with a huge power point deck titled “State of the Township.” All I could see was page after page of bullet points.
Bullets are for guns. Read More »
Do you ever wonder why ESPN Classics became so popular? We want to know why those games were so great. We don’t see how the play is developed until the second time around. So — when watching a great talk, do you ever wonder, what made it so great? Sometimes it’s hard to understand why
The second time around Read More »
Experience Columbus, our travel and tourism bureau, invited articulation to help curate their “keynote address” for their annual meeting. These five dynamic people pictured above ended up being the participants in what became a ‘fam tour’ — five short stories that wove a larger story about how Columbus is a great destination for tourism and
One Keynote, Five Parts. Read More »
To kick off this year’s TEDActive conference in Palm Springs, the TED staff held a special workshop day for TEDx organizers. I gave a brief presentation on speaker preparation to my peers and I’ve included the slides (with notes) below. The irony of these slides is that they weren’t seen at the workshop — the tech
Live from the Desert. Read More »
So she sat looking suspicious at me from the middle of the room. I was pretty sure she didn’t ‘buy’ what I was selling about the need to have your own signature story. After all, this is a group of highly motivated, intelligent and soon to be MBA’s from the Fisher College of Business. There it
Everyone needs a story Read More »
