Category: presentation

Innovation, communication, and the Errors Tour

An important lesson: sometimes our efforts to connect with an audience fall flat.

It was great to be back on the Missouri S&T campus earlier this week to give the keynote talk for the university’s first Innovative Communication Conference. (Huge thanks to Dr. Jossalyn M. Gale, director of S&T’s Writing and Communication Center, for inviting me to speak.)

In my talk, I wanted to expand on the idea of the conference theme — “Innovation Requires Communication” — to emphasize the importance or storytelling in communication and innovation. I also wanted to impress on students the importance of embracing failure, and I needed a catchy title, something that would resonate with the mainly Gen Z audience, so I decided to borrow from 2023’s biggest pop culture event, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and call my presentation “The Errors Tour (Andy’s Version).”

Reactions to my cover slide were mixed. The older folks in the audience (read: faculty and staff) appreciated the wordplay. The students either smiled politely or remained expressionless. It seems they were over 2023 and all things Swift.

But …

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Friday Five: Weekend reading for…

studio-shot-of-reading-glasses-on-book-vstock-llcAfter a long and unplanned hiatus, Friday Five is back with a short reading list that includes something for everybody.

Well, something for five types of readers, anyway.

Here we go:

For presenters: Why I think about ‘Star Wars’ whenever I make a PowerPoint, by Seth Dotterer. Seth emphasizes the importance of storytelling in our presentations.

For policy wonks: How Republicans can improve higher education. This Washington Post op-ed by Ramesh Ponnuru and Yuval Levin suggests that the new GOP majorities in the House and Senate “begin by focusing on practical problems that concern large numbers of voters and could be greatly alleviated by a straightforward application of conservative and libertarian principles. Perhaps the foremost example is higher education, which has never been prominent on the conservative agenda but should become so now.”

For data geeks (and content marketers): The best-of-class Nonprofit Content Marketing Report, a Slideshare presentation filled with data, charts and numbers on how nonprofits budget and benchmark their content marketing efforts. A lot to dive into here. Thanks to Chris Syme for sharing the presentation on her valuable blog.

For planners, especially those of the strategic variety: The Art of Not Executing On Your Strategic Planning. This post by Karol Król on Spin Sucks urges a balance between strategic planning and executing on that plan. “Success comes not from having a bullet-proof strategic plan, but from learning to adjust your plan as you go to account for these external factors.”

For list-lovers (and presenters): 10 tips for improving your presentations and speeches, from Garr Reynolds. Step 1: “Turn off the computer.” Good advice for all of us as we head into the weekend.