The Future

Get a load of this. Remember Tom Cruise's nifty computer where his hands were flying over the screen. Everyone knew Minority Report was set in the future but now it doesn't seem that far away. Presenting suddenly seems like a whole new ball game.

 

SwapYourStuff

A new way of saving the planet and a cool business idea - SwapYourStuff. I have a whole garage full of stuff.

Ouch

The gloves are off. Check this out. 

The Karma Café

Oh, I love this... 

You can pay anything you like at the Terra Bite Lounge in Kirkland, Washington, reports Amy Roe in The Seattle Times (2/6/07). No prices are listed on the menu — it’s up to the cafe’s customers to decide how much to pay, or whether to pay at all. “Does it really matter to any of our patrons … whether they pay a dollar or three dollars or five dollars?” says Ervin Peretz, a Google programmer who scraped together the dough to start a cafe that he says sells “good karma” as much as coffee and snacks. His bet is that “he can finesse the largesse of well-off latte lovers to cover the tabs of the less fortunate.”

Ervin says he got the idea while drinking at a bar in Saigon, and named the place as “a play on the tech term ‘terabyte,’ a trillion bytes, as well as a reference to earth and food.” As he explains: “People want something different. They want simplicity … They want to be taken to a new place, and they want to contribute something.” One patron, Tonja Maciolek, says she likes the idea “because she’s sensitive to price and would prefer to name her own, even it ended up being the same.” She contributed $4 for a bagel with cream cheese and coffee.

Kate Lewis, a high school student, says she’d pay extra for the privilege of setting her own price. "It’s kind of like a social experiment," she says. Which makes Chris Allar, slightly crazy. "It’s always hard to see if you paid too much or too little," he says, admitting to a certain anxiety over that. But Ervin thinks he’s onto something — since opening late last year he’s served an average of 80 customers a day, each of whom has paid an average of $3. He says he needs about 100 a day to break even. If that doesn’t happen, he says his alternative is pretty obvious: "If it turned out that 20 percent of the population were dishonest, we could just put in a cash register," he says. ~ Tim Manners, editor

 

Ignore Everybody

When I first started blogging I stumbled across Hugh as did about a jillion other people. His views are not the cheesy easy to digest view of the world of a regular cartoonist looking at the world through the eyes of a cynical cat or doofus office worker but rather they are little finger pokes in the chest given by your right brain. Sometimes I don't get it and sometimes I get it so accutely it feels like a life-changer.  

The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you. When I first started with the cartoon-on-back-of-bizcard format, people thought I was nuts. Why wasn't I trying to do something more easy for markets to digest i.e. cutey-pie greeting cards or whatever?You don't know if your idea is any good the moment it's created. Neither does anyone else. The most you can hope for is a strong gut feeling that it is. And trusting your feelings is not as easy as the optimists say it is. There's a reason why feelings scare us.

And asking close friends never works quite as well as you hope, either. It's not that they deliberately want to be unhelpful. It's just they don't know your world one millionth as well as you know your world, no matter how hard they try, no matter how hard you try to explain.

Plus a big idea will change you. Your friends may love you, but they don't want you to change. If you change, then their dynamic with you also changes. They like things the way they are, that's how they love you- the way you are, not the way you may become.

Ergo, they have no incentive to see you change. And they will be resistant to anything that catalyzes it. That's human nature. And you would do the same, if the shoe was on the other foot.

With business colleagues it's even worse. They're used to dealing with you in a certain way. They're used to having a certain level of control over the relationship. And they want whatever makes them more prosperous. Sure, they might prefer it if you prosper as well, but that's not their top priority.

If your idea is so good that it changes your dynamic enough to where you need them less, or God forbid, THE MARKET needs them less, then they're going to resist your idea every chance they can.

Again, that's human nature.

GOOD IDEAS ALTER THE POWER BALANCE IN RELATIONSHIPS, THAT IS WHY GOOD IDEAS ARE ALWAYS INITIALLY RESISTED.

Good ideas come with a heavy burden. Which is why so few people have them. So few people can handle it.

Powerpoint (again)

Seth Godin is at it again and as easy as it is to rip this off and beat my chest about how I've been hammering this into companies for years, if this post serves as a lead into the gems distributed by Seth then I with feel less guilty about the cut and paste. Happy reading... 

 

Really Bad Powerpoint

It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to champion at a church or a school or a Fortune 100 company, you’re probably going to use PowerPoint.

Powerpoint was developed by engineers as a tool to help them communicate with the marketing department—and vice versa. It’s a remarkable tool because it allows very dense verbal communication. Yes, you could send a memo, but no one reads anymore. As our companies are getting faster and faster, we need a way to communicate ideas from one group to another. Enter Powerpoint.

Powerpoint could be the most powerful tool on your computer. But it’s not. Countless innovations fail because their champions use PowerPoint the way Microsoft wants them to, instead of the right way.

Communication is the transfer of emotion.

Communication is about getting others to adopt your point of view, to help them understand why you’re excited (or sad, or optimistic or whatever else you are.)If all you want to do is create a file of facts and figures, then cancel the meeting and send in a report.

Our brains have two sides. The right side is emotional, musical and moody. The left side is focused on dexterity, facts and hard data. When you show up to give a presentation, people want to use both parts of their brain. So they use the right side to judge the way you talk, the way you dress and your body language. Often, people come to a conclusion about your presentation by the time you’re on the second slide. After that, it’s often too late for your bullet points to do you much good.

You can wreck a communication process with lousy logic or unsupported facts, but you can’t complete it without emotion. Logic is not enough.

Champions must sell—to internal audiences and to the outside world.

If everyone in the room agreed with you, you wouldn’t need to do a presentation, would you? You could save a lot of time by printing out a one-page project report and delivering it to each person. No, the reason we do presentations is to make a point, to sell one or more ideas.

If you believe in your idea, sell it. Make your point as hard as you can and get what you came for. Your audience will thank you for it, because deep down, we all want to be sold.

Four Components To A Great Presentation
First, make yourself cue cards. Don’t put them on the screen. Put them in your hand. Now, you can use the cue cards you made to make sure you’re saying what you came to say.

Second, make slides that reinforce your words, not repeat them. Create slides that demonstrate, with emotional proof, that what you’re saying is true not just accurate.

Talking about pollution in Houston? Instead of giving me four bullet points of EPA data, why not read me the stats but show me a photo of a bunch of dead birds, some smog and even a diseased lung? This is cheating! It’s unfair! It works.

Third, create a written document. A leave-behind. Put in as many footnotes or details as you like. Then, when you start your presentation, tell the audience that you’re going to give them all the details of your presentation after it’s over, and they don’t have to write down everything you say. Remember, the presentation is to make an emotional sale. The document is the proof that helps the intellectuals in your audience accept the idea that you’ve sold them on emotionally.

IMPORTANT: Don’t hand out the written stuff at the beginning! If you do, people will read the memo while you’re talking and ignore you. Instead, your goal is to get them to sit back, trust you and take in the emotional and intellectual points of your presentation.

Fourth, create a feedback cycle. If your presentation is for a project approval, hand people a project approval form and get them to approve it, so there’s no ambiguity at all about what you’ve all agreed to.

The reason you give a presentation is to make a sale. So make it. Don’t leave without a “yes,” or at the very least, a commitment to a date or to future deliverables.

Bullets Are For the NRA
Here are the five rules you need to remember to create amazing Powerpoint presentations:

1. No more than six words on a slide. EVER. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken.
2. No cheesy images. Use professional stock photo images.
3. No dissolves, spins or other transitions.
4. Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have. If people start bouncing up and down to the Grateful Dead, you’ve kept them from falling asleep, and you’ve reminded them that this isn’t a typical meeting you’re running.
5. Don’t hand out print-outs of your slides. They don’t work without you there.

The home run is easy to describe: You put up a slide. It triggers an emotional reaction in the audience. They sit up and want to know what you’re going to say that fits in with that image. Then, if you do it right, every time they think of what you said, they’ll see the image (and vice versa).1

Sure, this is different from the way everyone else does it. But everyone else is busy defending the status quo (which is easy) and you’re busy championing brave new innovations, which is difficult.