I'm Back Again...

It's been a crazy two months:

• My home pc died in late October. I played with it for about a month. I got it to breathe again, but never got it to work with the internet. I finally gave up last week.
  Good news - I was able to save all my files.
  Better news - I have an excuse to buy a new computer in March.
• I graduated with my Masters in Adult Education and Training. I wrote my action research paper over the last 10 weeks. I learned that I like learning a lot more than I like recapping my learning.
• Work picked up. Suddenly, in September, our classes started filling up. Budgets are back. I've been teaching at least three days a week, which is great.
• slide:ology exploded onto our scene at work. I've been leading at least one workshop a week. The Duarte approach is changing our culture.
• I've got a two-month Tour of Asia coming up. More about the trip later, but planning that hasn't been easy.
• My Training. I attended Decker Made to Stick Messaging, Leadership Challenge (where I 'slideologized' their deck), and Influencer. I would recommend all of these. I'll write more about them in the next week.
• Projects. We're working with Rick and Mary Gilbert of Power Speaking on "Speaking to the Big Dogs 2.0", and with Ed Muzio of Group Harmonics on "Make Work Great". Randy Emelo and I have also released the first four installments of our six part series on the Mentoring Conversations Model.
• Thanksgiving? Christmas? New Year? Yep, dealt with all of those - plus a nasty cold that put me down for about 72 hours during the holidays.

Apologies to any and all that I've neglected during this time.

All-in-all, it was a hectic end to a pretty great year, but I'm back again.

I love it when a plan comes together...

Brent Bloom and Nancy Duarte allow me to join them

Yeah, that quote gives away my age, but who cares?
I've been working with Nancy Duarte - author of "slide:ology" - since last September, building "slide:ology@kt".

"slide:ology@kt" is a day-long workshop, based on her excellent book, that is customized to our environment at KLA-Tencor. Nancy and her whole team at Duarte have been amazing to collaborate with. They are smart, fun, and very, very cool.

All of our work came to fruition this past week, as Brent and I delivered the workshop to thought influencers and leaders in KT. One senior executive who was holding an all-hands meeting the next day put these principles into immediate practice. He told us the difference was clear and powerful!
How great is that?

It's interesting, though... I've never been a long-haul kind of guy.
I'm a 'high I' in DiSC profiling: creative, energetic, with the focus of a butterfly: cruising from flower to flower, drawn by whatever grabs my attention.
This is one of the longer projects I've ever stuck with. It wasn't hard to stick with, because the project has been endlessly interesting. I've learned so much from Nancy's content and approach.

On one hand, the process has been energizing and rewarding. On the other hand, as soon as we finished Thursday's session, I crashed. I've been flat-out exhausted for the past 48 hours.

That's why I had to tweet, "I'm tired... but it's a good kind of tired."

slide:ology @ KT

The incomparable Nancy Duarte at KT

Today was a very cool day.

Brent and I delivered the slide:ology workshop to a select audience of executives and influencers at KT. The turnout was great and the buzz was amazing.

Slide:ology author Nancy Duarte was in the house.

Duarte Senior Designer Eric "The MacGuyver of PowerPoint " Albertson was in the house.

A bunch of my favorite colleagues and internal clients were in the house.

Pizza... was in the house. What could be better?

Have you ever seen a lightbulb go off over someone's head?

Well, I saw 40 of them go off today. It was awesome.

We shared the principles of slide design. We looked at the results of an internal team that saw an 1800% improvement in slide design (yes... 1800%!!!).

We practiced a new way to create slides. We saw a change.

So, get off your butt. Buy slide:ology. Take the class.

Change your slides. Change the world.

Now (if not sooner).

The Six Disciplines of slide:ology

Wow... it's a busy time.

I've got three major programs going on at work.

I'm just finishing the 10th class in my Masters program (out of 13).

I'm proofreading a buddy's book.

I'm co-writing a series on Mentoring with another buddy.

And I'm finishing my first book proposal.

I'd consider saying no to one or two of these projects, except that every thing I'm working on informs every other thing I'm working on. Does that make sense?

An example:

I've been working on a project to introduce slide:ology into our company. I want (no... need...) to change our corporate culture around presentation skills.

So, we've worked with the amazing team at Duarte Design to build a slide:ology program that completely kicks butt.

I've also been working with my colleagues on strengthening the learning process in our company. We want to see learners practice and reinforce the skills they acquire in our classrooms. A few months ago, we brought in Cal Wick from Fort Hill to lead us through the Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning. It was a great day, and coincidentally occurred one week before the first slide:ology workshop.

I put the 6D's into action. We had slide:ology attendees send us 5 slides as pre-work for the workshop. I then graded the slides on the slide:ology criteria.

We used those slides as the content for the workshop and guided the attendees through exercises to improve their slide design.

Then, we opened up a 6-week window to support and reinforce the learning. Each attendee could send me 5 new slides. We coached them through this entire process.

The result? How about an 1800% improvement against the criteria? How about raves from executive review? Pretty cool, huh?

Slide:ology is awesome. The 6D's are amazing.

Mixed? Two great tastes that taste great together!

Like Long Island Iced Tea and and Filet Mignon...

Top 5 Training/Business Books

I am often asked to recommend books.

It's tough... 

Do I tell you my favorites?

Or the ones I think are the 'best'? Whatever that means?

Instead, I'll tell you the 5 books that I have most often picked up and read - or at least referenced - in the past year.

1. slide:ology by Nancy Duarte 
   Hands down, this is number one.
   If you want to know anything about slide design, this is the bible.
   There's a lot here I didn't understand a year ago, but as my skill has grown, so has my understanding.
2. Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko
   Whenever I want to think 'out of the box', I turn to this outstanding reference.
   Michalko captures more innovation exercises than you can ever need. 
3. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
   The word 'bible' can be applied to four out of these five books.
   McCloud has definitely written the bible for anyone who wants to understand comics.
   Since I've been working on a manga-workbook for one of my classes, this book has been my constant companion. 
4. Don't Shoot The Dog by Karen Pryor 
   It may not be a popular thing to say, but we can learn a lot about training people from dog and dolphin training. Concepts like shaping, reinforcement, incompatible behavior, and successive approximation should be part of Training 101 - but aren't.
5. Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni 
   Not much to say about this except that it's clear and effective.
   We use it with teams constantly.

The Modern Art of Presenting: Presentation Reboot

Nancy Duarte shows the power of design grids

Last week, I attended "Presentation Reboot" - an event that featured Nancy Duarte (author of Slideology) and Garr Reynolds (author of Presentation Zen). Nancy and Garr are the two leading proponents of a new and quickly growing school of presentation design.

If you don't own their books, you should buy both immediately.

Nancy discussed her passion for story before having us do an audience analysis and then determining our story arc. Story is the root for most design decisions, in Nancy's view, and I agree.

Cognitive science show us that the brain loves story. In fact, the brain loves story so much that it will make one up if it doesn't exist. 

Think about that - if you don't determine your story, your audience will... and it might not be the story you want!

Garr Reynolds models Presentation Zen

One look at Garr Reynolds' slide set tells you that he isn't your usual business presenter. Garr lives and works in Japan and has clearly embraced the aesthetics of the culture.
Having spent 8 years in Japan myself, Garr's work resonates with me. I've read his blog for a few years and loved his book. Seeing him model the principles he preaches energized me and the rest of the audience.

While Garr isn't an ideologue, he definitely comes from the "Tee-shirt" school of presentation.

The "Tee-shirt" school says that a slide should look like a tee-shirt - one sentence, one picture.

My table mates practice the art of contrast

The folks at the workshop were buzzing from the start and kept buzzing to the end.

We did a number of exercises that allowed us to practice some of the principles that Nancy and Garr covered.

My key takeaways:

• Any presenter can connect with any audience, if they try (as our exercise showed - yes, even Richard Simmons with Mafia hit men).
• That slides, like billboards, should be a 'glance' media.
• Slides are slides - not 'slideuments'.
• A grid system will add power and coherence to a presentation.
• The importance of 'naked' presenting - both Garr and Nancy share themselves on the stage, and their presentations are much stronger for that.
• See more at presentationzen and duarte design.

Book Review: slide:ology

"slide:ology" is a recent release by Nancy Duarte of Duarte Designs - one of the worlds leading presentation design firms. Her team put together the presentation for Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth".
It's a beautifully designed book, as one might expect.

Title: "slide:ology"

Author: Nancy Duarte
Genre: Business, Communication, Design, Presentation

Summary: The book is subtitled "The art and science of creating great presentations". I would be more comfortable summarizing it as "the art of creating great presentation graphics".

Favorite Quotes:

• "Data slides are not really about the data. They are about the meaning of the data."
• "To succeed as a presenter, you must think like a designer."
• "Help them see what you're saying."

Strengths:

• I love the mindmapped 'Acknowledgments' page!
• There's a great section on conceptual diagrams.
• Plenty of case studies and 'before and after' examples.
• Some fantastic suggestions for creating powerful movement in your slides.

Weaknesses:

• Audience Analysis again gets the short end of the stick (4 pages out of 275). I haven't found a book yet that really addressed audience analysis properly.
• There is quite a bit of information that would be considered esoteric by most business presenters (color wheels are one example)

Conclusion: Easily the best book available on slide design. Be aware that this book focuses more on visual presentation skills than on personal presentation skills. If that's what you're looking for (and trust me, you should be - I've seen your presentations or ones like them) then this book will definitely help you.

I'll be attending a seminar at Duarte Design tomorrow to practice these principles. I'll let you know how it goes!

Post-it Flags: 10 flags

* Each time I find an interesting quote, model, image, or idea in a book, I mark it with a Post-it flag. The more flags, the more value I found in the book.