It's funny. It's actually a prequel to my first book, Slideology. What happened was I thought the biggest business need right now was that people didn't understand the visual display of information, 'cause you can't... you're not really trained in that in business and once people start to preempt their slides, I realized there was a deeper systemic problem with the actual content and so then I created this book to address the content.
(0:22) I think it's kind of fun that Slideology came out first, so it's kind of like Star Wars. I know my brother-in-law, sharing it with his kids, and he's having them watch it in the same order that they did. So, I don't know, I'm so familiar with Slideology, I don't know if it is better to read Slideology first, or Resonate first, but definitely, if your building that deck, you have to go through Resonate first, because you can't create your slides if you haven't created your content, and it would be a shame for this book to be out and not have the principles applied, and have you just applying great design principles to content that's not really sound and solid using story frameworks.
(0:54) I... I initially set out to figure out if presentations have a shapeliness to it. So, in (um) classical music, you would say, "oh, this piece is shapely," or you would say a story has a story arc. And so, I set out to see if there was an inherent structure to the presentations that are riveting. Sometimes you can sit in a presentation, your hearts racing, you're engaged, you're involved, and the time passes really quickly, and it's really rare. So, I wanted to study the lives of the communicators that actually had riveting presentations and what I found out pretty quickly is that they all have this underlying story framework to all of them. And not just as simple as a beginning, a middle, and an end which Aristotle would have, but there... I actually found an actual shape that they have, and a rhythm and a... kind of beats to them, to keep the audience engaged and excited to be listening to content.
(1:42)
You have to be pretty committed in your commitment to be a great communicator and the people featured in the book have their (um) traditional calling that they're doing, yet they... part of their success was the fact that they had to be able to communicate their calling in a really compelling way. So, what has to happen as communicators or as inventors are... companies like Cisco and a lot of our clients, are inventive in nature, and you can invent all day, and it's going to stay in your head. If you cannot somehow put it out there, your ideas out there for the world to contend with, they'll always stay hidden, and so it's really important, to make an investment in your role as inventor, but also as your role as communicator, 'cause they are two very different skills and both will need to be developed.
(2:23) For years we were known as the "slide people." I was known as the "slide lady." Like, "here's our slide lady." And (um)... and that always bothered me, so about five years ago we set to really change it and we started to only really accept work where we got to actually help shape and frame the stories. So it was really fun. (Um). A couple weeks ago, I called fifty of my clients to ask them, "how are we doing and what... where do I need to innovate in the future?" And a lot of them associated our name with story telling and content development which was delightful to hear, so hopefully I'm not just the slide lady anymore. And it's been a nice shift... shift modernization, we're doing smarter work, it's more exciting and we're getting to meet really fun, world changing people.
(3:02) And so, when I wrote Slideology, I thought I just wrote a book, and the phone started to ring right away for people for... to be trained in it. And so, now, you know, we came up with the first book, now we have a whole training program, and then the second book, and we have a training program that will support that, and we host them here right in our office, (um) and then we also go into organizations and corporations and also host regional workshops, so it's been... it's very... (it's a) kind of exciting way to be pioneering again,
'cause the... the business model for training organizations is different than for design firms, so that' been fun.
(3:30) I'm... I'm getting that question a lot, "is there a third book?" Because presentations are a trilogy. There's the content, the visual aid, and the delivery. So, the next natural book would be to do one on delivery, but there's tons of books about eye-contact and gestures and credibility, and I think that there's this new wave of remote presenting, where there are no eye-conta... there is no eye-contact or gestures, and there... we're put in all these different environments, so yeah, I think there will be a book on delivery, but it's going to be very different from any book that's out there so far.
(3:58) <music>
Thanks friend.