I recently came across Lillipip, a company that creates animated videos about your product, service, or concept. Check them out. They have a simple storyboarding template of four blank squares. In the first, you draw or paste a picture of… Read More »Storyboarding your presentation
He was late arriving and slow getting past the hand-shakers and back-slappers, but President Obama’s State of the Union Address was a new slant on an old trope, at times uplifting (“we do big things”) and at other times evasive… Read More »The State of the Union: Style has substance in public speaking
Harvard and Google got married (NY Times article, Fri Dec 17) and have given birth to a database containing all the words in all the books published between 1500 and 2008 in English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese and Russian. You—yes… Read More »Counting the words that count in high stakes presentations
Many presenters begin their talks like this: “I’d like to take this opportunity to talk a little bit about…” Don’t do this. First of all, what you would like to do at that particular moment is of considerably less interest… Read More »Presenters should avoid this opening phrase
I heard an Indian novelist interviewed recently. Asked what struck her when she first came to America, she said, “I noticed that in America, the rich are thin and the poor are fat—the opposite of my country.” Of course, she… Read More »The rich, the poor, the highly-educated and the tongue-tied
It begins with an agonizing silence–The Duke of York standing at a microphone in Wembley Stadium trying to bring the world’s greatest exposition to a dignified conclusion for the entire British Empire listening on the radio. His stammering and stage… Read More »Movie Review: The King’s Speech