Category Archives: Business

Robin Hanson cites a recent study relevant to anyone who gives presentations. The study examined how well students retained information about the cold virus. In one experimental group the students read a packet with various peripheral details that were not very interesting; the other group read a packet with various interesting details. Conclusion:

In other words: Interesting but not-quite-essential details distract from understanding the core point.

One of the classic books in the field of multimedia cognitive theory is Richard Mayer's Multimedia Learning.

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Speaking of presentations, I'm giving a free talk on January 14th at 12 noon at Foothill College (Appreciation Hall) in Los Altos Hills in the Bay Area. If you're local, come! No RSVP necessary. Email me if you have questions.

In the last year in the United States:

Men are down 1,069,000 jobs. Women are up 12,000 jobs.

Holy catfish. Tom Peters explains:

The principal reason is the continuing demise of male-dominated manufacturing jobs, and the continuing rise of service jobs. In particular, healthcare, where women constitute 80% of employees, has added 400,000 jobs during the period in question.

(Net: It is increasingly a women's world, called the global rise of "Womenomics" by one European observer. Another accelerator is the stunning rate at which women are eclipsing men on the education front, again pretty much worldwide—from primary school to Ph.D. programs.)

A few friends have told me they want to get on the speaking circuit. While I do some paid speaking on the side, I’m not a “professional speaker.” As always with this blog, lack of qualification doesn’t stop me from offering thoughts! Here are some assorted nuggets for those looking to pursue public speaking in a professional capacity:

1. Wanting to do paid speaking is similar to wanting to write a book: it sounds like paradise until you become familiar with how the industry works. My friend Penelope Trunk wrote a great post called 5 Reasons why you don’t need to write a book. Many authors echo her advice. A similar dynamic holds in the speaking industry. To outsiders it sounds glamorous — you get paid a bunch of money, flown first class to an exotic city, speak in front of thousands of people. For the top tier it’s like this. But most start at “free” and over several years work their way up to $2,500, then $5,000, then $7,500, and maybe $10 or $15k a speech if you’re good but still relatively unknown. Your clients will mostly be in small towns and your mode of transit will be regional jets that fly once a day.

2. Paid speaking rarely exists on its own. If you write a book, speaking is the natural follow-on. Or if you have some other product to sell, speaking works in tandem. Or if you are a consultant, speaking can help drive business to your consultancy. The point is it’s unusual to do paid speaking on its own — it’s usually a single product in a portfolio of products and services.

3. It doesn’t scale. You don’t scale. You can only be in one place at one time. This creates a ceiling on how much money you can make. If money is driving you, this should represent the greatest drawback.

4. The best speakers “do” something by day. People who speak for a living (ie, full time) don’t do anything else day to day which makes them less credible and interesting. They are usually “motivational speakers.” Standing on stage and issuing opinions is not very hard. By contrast, if you’re a professor, or run a business, or otherwise have a professional job that requires you to interact with the world on a regular basis, and then allows you to draw upon such real world experience in your speaking, you are more credible.

5. There are speaking bureaus and agents. Here’s how most work. They field phone calls from event planners looking for speakers and then, in reactive fashion, propose a few speakers from their database. The event planner will pick one and the Bureau will handle some of the ensuing logistics. In return for it all they take 15-25% commission off the speaker’s gross fee. (As a speaker you don’t pay the bureau unless they book you.) It’s easier to get listed with a speaking bureau than be represented by a literary agent, but it’s not a slam-dunk. Bureaus receive 15 speaking proposals a day and only choose to “represent” (ie, list on web site and reactively offer to event planners) a small portion of those. Note that some bureaus represent speakers exclusively. Others will represent you non-exclusively, meaning that you can work with other bureaus or book engagements yourself. Unlike literary agents (with whom you have a high likelihood of selling a book) with a speaking agent there’s no guarantee you’ll be booked for anything. Literally all it means is you show up on their web site.

6. Before you can do paid speaking, you gotta do free speaking. Unless you have some extraordinary professional experience that will make you instantly in demand on stage, you must establish a track record of inspiring or provoking audiences successfully. Then, slowly but surely, you can begin asking for expense reimbursement and then charging for the keynote itself. Like anything it takes time to work your way up the ladder. Subjugate your ego. Volunteer yourself at schools. Gather friends in a conference room and do your spiel. Are you in it for the long term?

7. The thrill of being on stage. I don’t mean to be too negative. There is an undeniable thrill of being on-stage, the center of attention, with 60 minutes to articulate your ideas and messages. An in-person presentation can move people in ways text cannot. The skills you learn — how to establish a kinesthetic connection with an audience, how to craft slides that are visually appealing, how to organize ideas, how to field questions — are hugely valuable. Plus, it’s fun!

8. Toastmasters. I’ve never been, but I have friends who swear by Toastmasters as the single best way to improve your public speaking.

Is the world of business intellectually stimulating? This is something I’ve struggled with and continue to contemplate.

How about a more concrete question: If you wanted to give your brain a work-out and also have a good time, would you rather hang out with professional academics or professional business people?

In an email exchange, Arnold Kling, who’s been both an internet entrepreneur and an academic, writes to me:

I think that business people live more interesting lives. They face more interesting decisions. They deal more directly with incentive systems. They have much more challenging interpersonal issues. They have to handle a wider range of people and issues. The have to adapt more quickly. They make more frequent and dramatic changes.

Academics also tend to hyper-specialize, and hyper-specialists tend to be less interesting.

If you had to put me in a cocktail party, I’d opt for a group of business people who have unusual range and intellectual curiosity over a group of academics who are unusually grounded in real world events.

The Onion is consistently hilarious. For those who don't know, The Onion is a spoof newspaper with satirical headlines and a few paragraphs of fake quotes and commentary.

The radio show This American Life recently reported on how The Onion does what it does. Bob Sutton picks up on this interesting factoid: to get the 18 quality headlines needed for each week's edition, the writers have to propose 600 headlines in total. That's pretty refined filter, and as Bob notes, not unusual for a successful creative operation. At IDEO's toy group only 3% of proposed product ideas survive.

To come up with good ideas, you need to turn off the self-censor and crank out as many ideas as possible. Most of them will suck. But that's part of the process.

For the more visually inclined, here's what creativity at The Onion looks like: