Scale the "You"

by Jerry Weissman

If you’ve ever tried to have an important conversation on your mobile telephone from a busy airport terminal, a crowded restaurant, or a noisy street, you’ll appreciate the solution developed by Audience, Inc., a Silicon Valley company. Using sophisticated software algorithms and integrated circuits that mimic the dynamics of the human ear, Audience’s technology separates the background noise from the human voice and transmits conversations with crystal clarity. Investors appreciated Audience’s technology—and the 316% Compound Annual Growth Rate of their revenues—when they went public last week. The stock was priced above the anticipated range, and then rose 12% higher on the first day of trading.

Investors related to Audience as end users of mobile devices, but they also related in their primary roles as investors because Peter Santos, the company’s CEO, made the connection for them in his IPO road show. After describing Audience’s revolutionary solution—with a simple but dramatic demonstration of Audience’s technology enhancing a mobile conversation on a noisy street—Mr. Santos punctuated his presentation by scaling the “you.”

If you or billions of other mobile phone users want to have not just narrowband calls but wideband calls, to be able to have video in addition to voice calls, want to be able to enter addresses or search strings using your voice instead of typing it on a keypad, and if you want to do all these things in a noisy mobile environment, you have a much higher bar in terms of acoustic signal processing….Audience has solved those problems.

Because Mr. Santos scaled from the single “you” of a mobile phone user to the implied multiples of “you” represented by the “billions of other mobile phone users,” he demonstrated the large market potential for Audience’s technology. But he didn’t stop there, he went on to widen the opportunity for that same technology to address several other applications and several other markets; all of which is music—as clear as an enhanced mobile phone call—to investors’ ears, music accompanied by the sound of a ringing cash register: Ka-Ching!

Scaling the “you” was a lot easier for Mr. Santos than it was for the CEO of a medical device company whose product treats diabetes victims. In her IPO road show, the CEO could not address the investor audience as individuals for two reasons: less than 10% of the population has diabetes and, far more important, she might have made her audience feel uncomfortable by associating them with a debilitating disease. In her road show she went right to the big market by describing the 25.8 million children and adults in just the United States who could be helped by her company’s product. Ka-Ching!

The CEO of another medical device company whose product is a minimally-invasive surgical tool, had it a bit easier. I coached his IPO road show and role-played a potential investor in our sessions. During the final rehearsal of his presentation, he held up his minimally-invasive surgical device, looked at me and said “With this device, you can make a better incision.”  I shook my head and said, “I don’t make incisions.” He thought for a second, held up the device again and said, “So you can see, if tens of thousands of surgeons want to make better incisions, they’re going to have to buy this device from us.”  Ka-Ching!

Do the calculations for your audiences and add value.

Scale the “you,” and listen for the happy sound of Ka-Ching!

Britannica and Brainstorming

by Jerry Weissman

One of the early lessons we all learn in school is how to make an outline; how to create that waterfall of Roman numerals, capital letters, Arabic numerals, and lower case letters that cascade down to the bottom of the page, if not dozens of pages of interminable term papers. Thus we are forever programmed to arrange our ideas in a hierarchical order—in sharp contrast to what our brains do naturally: generate ideas in random order.

To demonstrate: as I sit writing this blog, I glance at a ball point pen on my desk. The logo on the pen reminds me that I got it at as souvenir at a business conference. I remember that I met a man at the conference who told me about a book on presidential politics. This reminds me that I had been planning another blog on the same subject, and so I open a file with the notes on that subject and…. you see where this is going. I’m sure that if you were to track your own thought patterns, you would discover the same winding, random path. That’s the way every human mind works: unstructured.

And yet, when business people sit down to develop a presentation, they immediately start to apply structure, in either a hierarchical outline form or by organizing a set of existing PowerPoint slides to create a new “deck”—each approach forces structure onto unstructured ideas.

In a prior post about how Woody Allen creates, you read that he and other artists let their random ideas flow unimpeded, note them as they occur, and then lay out the notes in a panoramic view. Mr. Allen tosses scraps of paper onto his bed, other film directors use storyboards, architects make papier-maché models, military officers use wall size maps, and businesses encourage employees to doodle their creative ideas on whiteboards during product development or strategy sessions. The Wall Street Journal reported that sales of IdeaPaint, a paint product that turns a wall surface into a whiteboard, have doubled since 2008. For your presentation development, you can do your brainstorming on a whiteboard, a computer screen or Post-it Notes as you generate your ideas, but what is as important as the free flow is that you see the ideas you generate in a panoramic or landscape view.

The simple reason for this part of the creative process is that our eyes are set side-by-side in our heads, making the landscape view more pleasing and open than the portrait view. If you start with an outline, the constricted view imposes a ranking sequence too early in the process. A panoramic view allows you to see the conceptual relationships among your ideas.

  Even the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica has come to understand the importance of visual thematic relationships. The publisher of alphabetized—sequential rather than conceptual— reference works for almost 244 years, discontinued its print version in March and went digital. As part of the transition, they included a link map feature, shown above, that looks like a brainstorming session you might do on a whiteboard.

Walter S. Mossberg, the author of the Wall Street Journal’s “Personal Technology” column, reviewed the new feature and wrote that the publisher, which “has always been expensive, and a bit stodgy...[in] order to make itself more relevant in a Wikipedia world…has produced a slick app…Perhaps the coolest feature is the link map, triggered from an icon at the top of each article page. This generates a spider web of icons representing other articles related to the one you were reading.”

The 35,000 foot view shows patterns that lead to clear stories; an outline traps ideas.

Take the high road.   

"Get on with it!"

by Jerry Weissman

Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate for president in 1964 infamously said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” This misguided view of political policy became a major factor in Mr. Goldwater’s landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson, but it also serves as a warning lesson for presenters. Extremism in any pursuit can overshoot the mark and result in the opposite intent of the pursuit.

One of the most frequently repeated pieces of advice for presenters is to “Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, and then tell ’em what you’ve told ’em.” In fact, I offer the same advice in my own coaching practice and writing. The intent is to impose and maintain a clear narrative flow in presentations and speeches; and the reason it is repeated so often is that most presenters and speakers, who regularly crank out long, rambling, pointless patchwork pitches, desperately need reminding. The Triple “Tell ’em” is one solution. However, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing; a sword can cut two ways.

Bruce Eric Kaplan, a cartoonist who appears regularly in the New Yorker magazine as BEK, skewered the excessive Triple “Tell ’em” earlier this month with a panel that showed a presenter in front of an audience, saying, “First, I want to give you an overview of what I will tell you over and over again during the entire presentation.”

We’re also painfully familiar with presenters who impose a narrative laundry list on their bullets by saying “First, I’d like to talk about…” then move on to the second bullet saying, “Next, I’d like to talk about…” and then proceed through every bullet the same way until the end, when they say—wait for it— “Last but not least…”

Some presenters push their extreme handholding even further, by utilizing their slides to do the tracking. As in the figure above, they insert copies of an agenda slide between the sections of their presentation, progressively shifting the highlighted bullet to “Tell ’em what they’re gonna tell ’em” in the upcoming section. This technique can be useful in long tutorial presentations, but if there are only one or two slides between the variations of the agenda in short presentations—and short presentations are obligatory in this 140-character day and age—the audience, feeling patronized, will react with a big Duh!

Presenters are not the only perpetrators of such deliberate continuity devices. Geoff Dyer, who writes the “Reading Life” column the New York Times Book Review section, considers excessive tracking a “basically plodding method.”  In one of his columns, he criticized art historian Michael Fried, whose book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, takes “the style of perpetual announcement of what is about to happen to extremes.” Mr. Dyer said it is “like watching a rolling news program: Coming up on CNN . . . A look ahead to what’s coming up on CNN.”  Concluding his critique, Mr. Dyer wrote, “I kept wondering why an editor had not scribbled ‘get on with it!’ in huge red letters on every page of the manuscript.”

To keep your audience from thinking “Get on with it!” apply the Less is More rule, not just in your slide design but in your content. As you read in the prior posts, “Kill Your Darlings,” and “How Long Should a Presentation Last?”:

• Edit the amount of material you present

• Be brief AND concise

Then, with a shorter and more succinct story, look at your presentation from a 35,000 foot view—as a storyboard—in the Microsoft PowerPoint Slide Sorter view, or with the Power Presentations Storyboard form in the accompanying figure. It’s downloadable from our website: www.powerltd.com by clicking at the bottom of the home page.

Just as television and film directors use storyboarding to see the full scope of their stories, look at your slide show in this panoramic view to see your flow. Then rehearse your presentation aloud, moving from frame to frame. Do this several times. Along the way, you’ll find that you might want to add, delete, or shuffle slides. As you proceed with your iterations, you will develop verbal connective links for your narrative.

Ultimately, you will have a presentation in which The Triple “Tell ’em” is transparently implied. You will have a story that will be easy for you to deliver and, more important, easy for your audience to follow—without a laundry list, without CNN-style teasers, and best of all, without those patronizing agenda slides.

Get on with it!

This post appeared on hbr.org

You MUST Respond to All Questions

One of the lessons I learned early on: never say never. Never, never, never. Never say never. And secondly, never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you. And quite frankly, I follow that rule. It's a very good rule.

COOPER: Governor Perry, the 14th Amendment allows anybody. A child of illegal immigrants who is born here is automatically an American citizen. Should that change?

PERRY: Well, let me address Herman's issue that he just talked about.

COOPER: Actually, I'd rather you answer that question.

PERRY: I understand that. You get to ask the questions, I get to answer like I want to.

KING: What is the biggest misconception about you in the public debate right now?

ROMNEY: We've got to restore America's promise in this country where people know that with hard work and education, that they're going to be secure and prosperous and that their kids will have a brighter future than they've had. For that to happen, we're going to have to have dramatic fundamental change in Washington, D.C., we're going to have to create more jobs, have less debt, and shrink the size of the government. I'm the only person in this race --

KING: Is there a misconception about you? The question is a misconception.

ROMNEY: You know, you get to ask the questions want, I get to give the answers I want.   

At first glance, the only Greek in Guy Kawasaki might be the most recent dinner he had at Evvia, the popular Palo Alto restaurant, but after reading his new book, What the Plus! Google+ for the Rest of Us, I’ve decided that he must be a distant relative of Aristotle. The classic Greek philosopher established the ground rules for rhetoric 2300 years ago, and Guy has brought them roaring into the 21^st Century at a gallop.

Aristotle proposed that, to be persuasive, a writer must provide the holy trinity of Ethos, or credibility, Pathos, or benefits, and Logos, or evidence.

• Ethos. Guy, whose new book positions Google+ in the social media space, posts five to ten times a day himself, and so he knows whereof he writes. If that were not enough, he runs Alltop and HolyKaw, two popular social media sites. And of course, his legacy as the Chief Evangelist at Apple Computer gives him the ultimate in credibility; think of it as Cred+.

• Pathos. The book is loaded with helpful advice for anyone who wants to be current and successful in today’s online—social and business—world.

• Logos. The format is studded with illustrative screen shots, tables, and examples. As a crowning touch, Guy kick starts each chapter with a clever but pertinent epigram.

Taken together, What the Plus! provides a clear comparison with Facebook and Twitter, and forms the basis for a valuable manual in the art and science of social media.

Coincidentally, on the day I read Guy’s book, I also decided to sign up for an online music service. I tried one and found it so complex and daunting that I abandoned the effort after two frustrating hours—especially when I was unable to reach customer support. I tried another service, logged in instantly, and then had some questions. They responded to my email query in less than five minutes with full, clear, and authoritative answers.

The experience was a perfect metaphor for Guy’s new book: swift, helpful, and thorough or, as his undoubtedly long-lost ancestor Aristotle would say, Ethos, Pathos, and Logos.

“Message sent is not the same as message received.” 

“Telephone,” the traditional party or children’s game—in which a phrase or sentence is whispered from one person to another around a dinner table or room—provides a valuable lesson in the lost art of listening. Inevitably, at the end of the cycle, when the last person speaks the message aloud, the phrase has taken on a completely new meaning. The phenomenon has the positive effect of stimulating conversation and interaction in the game, but in other walks of life—particularly business—the outcome can be a failure to succeed, let alone communicate.

Influential venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, whose five-second rule of slide design you read about in an earlier post here and Forbes post, is a keen observer of all aspects of communication. Another of Mr. Khosla’s cardinal rules is “Message sent is not the same as message received,” an eloquent statement of the obligation of all presenters to assure that their target audience has received the intended message. Fulfilling that obligation requires a full court press that can be described, with all due respect to Stephen Covey, as “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Presenters”:

1.  Analyze your audience in advance. Just as sales people qualify their customers, presenters must qualify their audiences. In your preparation, gather as much information as you can about who they are, what they know, and what they want to know; identify their concerns, fears, and hot buttons.

2. Develop focused content. Armed with your thorough analysis, create content that addresses your audience’s interests. An essential part of this process is to eliminate irrelevant information—easier said than done because most presenters operate under the assumption that, for their audience to understand anything, they must tell them everything. Wrong! Tell them only what they need to know.

3.   Offer multiple benefits. Here, too, a basic sales practice provides a lesson. Most sales persons sell features rather than benefits—and so do most presenters. Infuse your pitch with benefits. Find multiple points in your presentation to insert a sentence that begins, “The reason this is important to you…” and then concludes with a benefit to your audience.

4.   Customize, customize, customize. In today’s high pressure, high stakes business world, presenters—who have become road warriors—try to save time by making a one-size-fits-all presentation. Wrong again! Use the information you collected in your preparation and make frequent references to it throughout your presentation to keep it fresh and specific.

5.  Track your progress as you present. The importance of eye contact in presentations is a given, but most presenters merely scan their audiences and see nothing. Read your audience’s reaction to your story. Look for their head nods.

6.   Adjust your content. If instead of head nods, you get frowns or puzzled looks, pause in your narrative and add a brief explanation, or ask your audience if they have questions.

7.   Respond to all questions in full. Whether you get questions during or after your presentation, you—unlike politicians—must respond. This is not to say that you must reveal strategic or confidential information, but that you should address the issue in every question and give a reason when you cannot. Respond you must. Never evade.

Although Mr. Khosla applies his cardinal rule to the presentations of his existing portfolio companies—and those who aspire to become one of his portfolio companies—he represents every member of every audience of every presentation you will ever give. If you aspire to succeed, make sure that every message you send is received—loud and clear— by every audience.

Follow the Action

By Jerry Weissman

oes this large, illuminated letter look familiar? It should. The style has been around ever since medieval times to mark the beginning of a new document. It has continued on into modern publishing where an enlarged first letter marks the beginning of chapters in books and the beginnings of articles in magazines and newspapers. Now it becomes a factor in how we view computer screens.

EyeTrackShop, an eponymous Swedish start-up company, does exactly what its name says: track eye movements to, as their slogan puts it, “identify where people look, for how long and in what order.”  Using webcams to follow and record how viewers perceive images, the company’s technology helps advertisers create effective ads and web designers create effective web pages. By understanding the dynamics of how viewers perceive ads and web pages you can create effective graphics for your presentations.

One of EyeTrackShop’s projects studied how users viewed the homepages of Facebook and Google+. The results, shown in the “Fixation Order” charts below and reported in the Wall Street Journal, found that in both cases, “Users’ eyes head straight for the big status column in the middle of the screen, then over to the list of categories on the left side, then hop across to alerts on the right.”

Those movements are driven by forces more powerful than the images on the Google and Facebook sites, two forces that drive the eyes of every human being:

Nurture: In Western culture, because we have learned to read from left to right, our eyes always start reading at the upper left corner of documents

Nature: The optic reflexes in all human eyes impel them to take in new images, and so, having started at the upper left, readers’ eyes naturally—and involuntarily—move to the right. 

As a result, human eyes do essentially what the eyes of the subjects in the EyeTrackShop study did: after centering on the full image, they move to the upper left to start reading, and then sweep across to the right to continue reading. Therefore, whenever you click to a new slide, your audience’s eyes start reading at the upper left of the screen and sweep across to the right.

If your slide is densely packed with images, numbers, and/or text, your audience’s eyes will not see the entire image on the first rightward move; they will have to come back to the left and go back to the right again. The denser the slide, the more times your audience’s eyes will have to traverse the screen, the more traverses they make, the less they will hear of what you are saying.

Do you see where this is going? Back to the familiar Less is More principle, and this new added corollary: Reduce the number of moves your audience’s eyes must make to understand your slide.  

Apply this basic approach to the two most common slides in presentations today: text and bars.

• Avoid wordwrap in text

• Eliminate left axes in bar charts.  

You saw these principles applied in a prior blog, but they’re worth another look:

Feel how your eyes naturally take in each slide: they start at the left and swing to the right.

Do the same for all your presentations. Design effective slides by reducing the number of eye moves your audiences must make.

Minimize the processing their eyes—and their brains—must do. Let them spend their energy and time focused on you.

This post also appears on Indezine.com 

* Fixation Order Courtesy of EyeTrackShop, All Rights Reserved.

by Jerry Weissman

During his campaign to become the Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney has taken many lumps for being rich. His opponents and the media have exploited the contrast between his personal wealth and the economic struggles of much of the electorate. Mr. Romney hasn’t helped his cause by making several awkward statements about the subject. Yesterday, the day before today’s critical Michigan and Arizona primaries, the ABC News OTUS site ran a twelve-page post titled, “Is Mitt Romney out of touch?” which included the following assertions:

• He likes firing people
  
• He  “isn’t concerned about the very poor”
• The $370,000 he earned in speaking fees is “not very much”
• He offered to bet Rick Perry ten thousand dollars during their debate

The latest gaffe came last Friday in a speech Mr. Romney gave in Detroit, during which he said, “I drive a Mustang and a Chevy pickup truck,’’ but then went on to say, “Ann drives, a couple of Cadillacs, actually.’’ The statement wound up on the first page of the ABC News post.

On Sunday, however, Mr. Romney reversed gears by turning the gaffe into an asset. During an interview on Fox News, Chris Wallace asked, “Governor, could you understand why some voters could be put off by those things?”

(video clip requires Microsoft Windows Media Player)

Mr. Romney replied:

I can't be perfect, I just am who I am and I can tell you this with regards to the cars that was talked about last September and people ask us what vehicles we own. We have a car in California; we have a car in Boston. And so that's the way it is. If people think that there is something wrong for being successful in America, they should vote for the other guy. I have been successful.

Mr. Romney didn’t equivocate or evade as so many politicians so often do. In the parlance of the middle America he is trying to win over, he “told it like it is;” in the parlance of effective communication, he was being open and direct. But being even more effective, he added one more sentence to his answer:

And I want to use that success to help the American people.

That single sentence represents both a benefit to the electorate and a declaration of his qualifications to provide that benefit. This is a technique called Topspin; taken from the tennis term for a power stroke, it adds power to answers. You can read more about Topspin in my book, In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions—and can get a FREE Kindle copy now on Amazon.

History Repeats

by Jerry Weissman

Going into last night’s debate among the four candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination, Rick Santorum had the wind at his back. Having swept the contests in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado two weeks ago, he surged to the head of the polls for next week’s primary election in Michigan—the home state of Mitt Romney, the presumptive favorite—a potential bump in the latter’s road to the nomination. CNN moved Mr. Santorum to center stage for the debate, a promotion from his wing position in the previous 19 televised debates. However, being the front runner also means being in the cross-hairs of the other candidates and, as expected, Mr. Romney, Ron Paul, and John King, the CNN moderator, as any moderator would, went after Mr. Santorum.

KING: We take a question now from cnnpolitics.com. You can see it up on the screen here: “Since birth control is the latest hot topic, which candidate believes in birth control and if not, why?”

SANTORUM: As Congressman Paul knows, I opposed Title X funding. [Title X Family Planning program, was enacted in 1970 as part of the Public Health Service Act.] I've always opposed Title X funding, but it's included in a large appropriation bill that includes a whole host of other things, including the funding for the National Institutes of [entity display="Health" type="section" active="true" key="/health"]Health[/entity], the funding for [entity display="Health" type="section" active="false" key="/health"]Health[/entity] and Human Services and a whole bunch of other departments. It's a multi-billion-dollar bill… So while, yes, I -- I admit I voted for large appropriation bills and there were things in there I didn't like, things in there I did…

KERRY: I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.

Now flash forward to the current campaign and Mr. Santorum’s repeated accusations of Mr. Romney’s flip-flopping. As philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” After last night’s debate, NBC News/Marist released a new poll that showed Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum “locked in a statistical tie” in Michigan.

This post also appears on Forbes.com

“I” versus “You”

by Jerry Weissman

There’s an old joke about the opera diva who receives an adoring fan in her dressing room after a performance. The diva goes on and on about how magnificently she sang every one of her arias, about her dramatic acting, her expressive gestures, and her fabulous costumes. After about half an hour, the diva says to the fan, “But enough about me, what did you think of my performance?”

Joe Dator, a cartoonist for New Yorker magazine, did a variation on the diva joke. In his sketch, a man is speaking to a woman seated across a table. The caption reads, “Enough about me, but nothing about you just yet.”

This is no laughing matter in most other walks of life where self-centeredness is an obstacle to communication. In presentations, self-centeredness is manifested by a lack of relevance to the audience, and in sales by the lack of benefits for the customer. But to fully understand the negative impact of such one-way communications, let’s take a more universal view by focusing on self-centeredness in conversations, a social phenomenon otherwise known as “Having a ’versation.”

We’ve all been trapped by party bores who emulate the opera diva by delivering monologues all about themselves. One of the early indications that the one-way street is heading for a dead end is the ratio of declarative statements to questions. Bores speak with no question marks on their verbal keyboard.

Another indicator is the ratio of how frequently bores say “I” to how infrequently they say “you.” That simple metric serves as an early warning for you to excuse yourself to head for the bar and refresh your drink. But the role of pronouns in communication extends beyond chit chat into interpersonal relationships.James W. Pennebaker, a University of Texas at Austin psychologist, studies the connections between the frequency of words and feelings. In his book, The Secret Life of Pronouns, he writes:

Pronouns (such as I, you, we, and they)…broadcast the kind of people we are…By looking more carefully at the ways people convey their thoughts in language, we can begin to get a sense of their personalities, emotions, and connections with others.

Mr. Pennebaker conducted a variety of research projects ranging from Craigslist ads to Twitter messages to prove his point. One of the most revealing was a study on speed-dating which, according to a report in the New York Times, “found that couples who used similar levels of personal pronouns, prepositions and even articles were three times as likely to want to date each other compared with those whose language styles didn’t match.”

This post is not meant to help you improve your results at speed-dating, but to urge you to match closely with your listeners, to focus on the “co-” in communications, to have a conversation, not a ‘versation.

When you present, be mindful of your audience by offering them benefits; when you converse, be mindful of the other person by balancing your “I” to “you” ratio. When in doubt, err on the side of the latter.

Note: Mr. Pennebaker offers an opportunity to assess your compatibility with a friend by tracking your word usage in this online exercise: secretlifeofpronouns.com/exercise/synch.