How Anyone Can Tell to Win, Hollywood-Style

Blog, Books — December 28, 2011 at 18:52

Whether your job is to encourage employees to perform a task, shareholders or business partners to believe in your vision or customers to buy your product, Hollywood executive Peter Gruber says we’re all in the emotional transportation business.

In his new book, Tell To Win, Gruber demonstrates how purposeful and emotional storytelling is the catalyst to propel people to act.

Gruber has a very colorful past, having produced blockbuster films (i.e. – Batman, Flashdance, The Color Purple, among others) for the past three decades and his films have earned more than 50 Academy Award nominations.

Developing these films along with some of the biggest egos in the movie industry serve as a backdrop to many of the stories he uses to vividly show rather than tell in this book. The basic screenwriting formula can be used to tell an inspiring story in a business setting:

Story building blocks:
1. Open with a challenge for the main character
2. Show how the character struggles through this challenge
3. Resolution: What was the result of the character overcoming this challenge

Gruber also outlines five core points in telling a great story:
1. Motivation: Contrary to what you may think, this point doesn’t center around motivating your audience, but rather knowing what motivates you, as the storyteller, moments before you speak to your audience. Gruber says you need to “get in state” before speaking the first word.
2. Audience: Render an experience to move them
3. Goal: All storytelling is purposeful. You are trying to create a relationship with the audience, not a transaction.
4. Interactive: A speech is not a monologue, it’s a dialogue. You want the audience to be a participant, not just a passenger.
5. Content: A story puts all key facts into an emotional context

This is part of a series of blog post running until the end of the year on business books in 2011 that can enhance the way you do presentations, improve the way you tell stories, engage with your audience, or market your business through social media or other channels.

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Using Videos in Your Presentation

Blog, Books, Keynote Tips, PowerPoint Tips — March 16, 2010 at 23:50

March 16, 2010

Incorporating video to your presentation has many powerful benefits to keep your audience engaged. It’s a great way to illustrate a point, or even show visually rather than only tell how something has occurred.

In fact, it’s a great way for “businesspeople… to show new stores or products in action or to show interviews with customers,” notes design guru Garr Reynolds in his new book, Presentation Zen Design, which is sort of sequel to his 2008 best-selling book, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery.

Reynolds says adding video to a long presentation is especially useful to break up the pace, since research shows audiences’ attention tend to drift after about ten minutes, unless some aspects of the presentation are altered.

If you are a Mac user, embedding video (from your movie folder) onto a slide in Keynote 2009 is a simple drag and drop process (see video tutorial).

PowerPoint 2010, which is expected to be released in June as part of Office 2010, promises to include the ability to embed videos. A beta version is already available from the Microsoft site.

Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations includes other great tips on designing effective presentations that contain text, graphs, color and images.

Reynolds first book, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, provided the framework for planning, putting together and delivering presentations.

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How to Prepare a Presentation in Half the Time

Blog, Books — April 12, 2008 at 16:59

April 12, 2008

If you are starting the preparation of a presentation in PowerPoint, or Apple’s Keynote, you are making the creative process far more challenging than it needs to be. Many business people and college students make this mistake.

Presentation design guru Garr Reynolds says that most professional designers – even those who have grown up on computers – do much of their planning and brainstorming on paper first.

In Reynolds’ new book Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, he notes that he spends a lot of time working out of his office in coffee shops, on park benches and on trains. Even though, he has a laptop with him nearly all the time, he prefers to use a pen and paper to privately brainstorm, explore ideas, make lists and sketch out his ideas.

“I could use the computer, but I find – as many do – that the act of holding a pen in my hand to sketch out ideas seems to have a greater, more natural connection to my right brain and allows for a spontaneous flow and rhythm for visualizing and recording ideas,” Reynolds writes.

If he’s in his office, he sketches his ideas on a whiteboard, because it allows him to freely brainstorm on a large scale. This allows him to step back and imagine how it might flow logically when slides are added later.

He says the advantage of a whiteboard or chalkboard is that it allows you to use small groups to record concepts and direction. As he jots down key points and assembles and outline and structure, he can draw quick ideas for visuals, like charts or photos, that will later appear in the slide.

He says this saves time compared to going straight into PowerPoint. That’s because if he started in PowerPoint, he would have to constantly switch from normal view to slide sorter view to see the whole picture. And by doing that, it would disrupt his natural flow of creativity in simplifying his message in his head.

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