#KeepItSimple

My wife recently gave birth to our second child, a baby girl born in May. What a blessing… we are grateful every single day to have our new little one with us. Over the course of the last two months, I’ve been thinking a lot (obviously) about family, and when you spend time every day […]

When You Speak Well

Posted On May 18, 2015 BY

Have you ever listened to someone who speaks really well? Who gets to the point? Who makes the point clearly? Who doesn’t waste your time and makes the message valuable? It is SO nice when that happens, right? It is so refreshing when a presentation or a conference call or an important conversation is efficient […]

My son Zach has made a few guest appearances in our blog here. He frequently says or does something that makes me see connections between my work, and my conversations with him. Despite his age, he seems to have a knack for saying the simple little things to inspire me. Anyway… he did it again […]

Your audience will only remember a small percentage of what you say. Some studies suggest it will be less than 20%. Fact. Other studies suggest that the average adult attention span is now about 8 seconds. Bummer. So what do you do about it? Focus on all three aspects of the audience experience: 1. Make […]

How many PowerPoint presentations are given every day? No one really knows, but there is an oft-cited number of 30 million daily that seems to make its way around the internet. But this number has no apparent source, and there really is no way to truly know the correct number. But here is something we […]

The hardest thing for any subject matter expert (SME) to do is to explain his or her area of expertise in simple and clear ways. When we are “in” it, when we are living the topic every day, and when we know a lot about it, it is really hard to distance yourself from it and […]

I hear people refer all the time to a seemingly indisputable fact that we are neck deep in The Information Age. Everything about the way we generate it, consume it, store it, and share it is changing, rapidly. But while those trends are real and will continue for the foreseeable future, there is a bigger […]

This is a topic we have written on before, but it merits another emphatic mention. PowerPoint and slide decks are completely overdone, to the point where the whole concept of the business meeting presentation is often (and accurately) lampooned. But many large organizations still rely on the internal presentation as a primary method of communication […]

I’m writing to you early on a Sunday morning from my hotel room in Perth, Australia, the sun still hiding behind the eastern horizon. My colleagues and I are blessed and grateful to have a client base that takes us all over the world, with active relationships on five continents. And while that means we […]

Can You Make it Simpler, Daddy?

Posted On January 7, 2015 BY

I had an interesting conversation with my five-year-old son over the holiday. He asked me to explain something about sailing (which, of course, made his Dad smile). He doesn’t yet know how to sail on his own, but I’ve taken him out many times, and he loves it. He talks about boats all the time, […]