Corporate Bankruptcy Word Cloud
Here’s a free word cloud maker: www.wordle.net
Simply copy-paste your text or give Wordle an RSS feed and let it work its magic. When it spits out your custom image, you can play with the layout, fonts and colors to your heart’s content.
I took the two (so far) responses to “Corporate vs Personal Bankruptcy Attitudes” and fed them through Wordle and got this result:
Financial Word Clouds
Catching up on reading this weekend and came across two great word clouds in Pat Allen’s Rock The Boat Marketing blog.
For those new to my blog, I post word clouds because they’re valuable whole-brain communications tools; a brief glance tells you what’s important to the author. Use them in presentations, websites and white papers.
Tell me, please, where you’ve employed a word cloud.
Fidelity’s July US economic update
Oppenheimer’s Weekly Market Review
“I loved the way he used PowerPoint”
The anti-PPT bandwagon doesn’t have room for another rider. My only addition to the chorus is that a bad PPT-based presentation is like a bad dog — blame the owner!
PPT isn’t inherently bad, but, like a Rotweiller, can be placed in the wrong hands and do real damage.
I generally agree with the authors of Real Leaders Don’t do PowerPoint: How to sell yourself and your ideas, “You are the message. Who you are–your character, experience, values–shapes the message your listeners hear.”
Dan Ariely, PowerPoint master
Last year I heard Dan Ariely, bestselling author and professor at my B-school (Fuqua — Duke) speak on behavioral economics and his first book Predictably Irrational.
In staccato diction, he regaled us with tales of our irrational behavior — like why we won’t pay $3000 for a leather couch in the family room while we will pay the same amount for a leather interior in our family car — and he did it with the delivery skills of any comedian’s aspiration.
If he’d been a rock star we’d have whipped out our cigarette lighters and stomped our feet until he gave an encore.
And yes, he used PPT, including a slide with an x-ray of Homer Simpson’s brain. See? I remembered that one.
In defense of PowerPoint
Recall a time when someone gave a terrific, memorable, actionable presentation WITH PPT, as Professor Ariely did.
I’ll wait.
OK, I can’t wait all day.
If you did have the good fortune of attending such an event, you’ll recall that PPT didn’t make it great — it was great because the speaker had something to say and said it with conviction; they knew their stuff cold, engaged the audience, told stories and stayed ON POINT. Did the PPT help? Maybe, after all, who knows how it would have gone without the screen?
Reasons for PPT:
- Leave-behind for those who couldn’t make it to the live event
- Guided handout for taking notes
- Satisfies the need for visual stimulation
- Illustrate points graphically
Bottom line: No one says “I loved the way he used PowerPoint;” but if you’re a good presenter they’ll say “I’d go see him speak again.”
Malcolm Gladwell speaks
A friend of mine had the good fortune of attending The Foundation for the Carolinas’ annual meeting. You can hardly drag me to one of those, but I wish I’d gone to this one. Why? Bestselling author and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell did the keynote.
According to my friend, Gladwell took a wireless mike and roved the audience, telling stories about a town in (I believe) Pennsylvania and how and why it prospered and failed. My friend, a public relations pro who is not easily impressed, was awed.
Just the opposite of Ariely, Gladwell is soft spoken. Where Ariely is irreverent, Gladwell is earnest. Both can bring the house down.
I’m not a qualified speaking coach — my specialty is the content — but to me this is the bottom line: You don’t have to be “dynamic” to get your message across. The book mentioned earlier, Real Leaders Don’t do PowerPoint: How to sell yourself and your ideas, got good reviews and the website and book Presentation Zen is chock full of great stuff. And I’m always here to help.
It’s easy to bash PPT, and you’re welcome to bash away in the comments section. I’d really like to hear from you about a presentation that thrived WITH the visual support.
Play Piano, Outrun Mean Dogs: All in your Brain
Turns out my parents could have saved the money they spent on a piano. I could have learned to play almost as well in my imagination.
In a chapter of The Brain That Changes Itself, I learned about an experiment where a “mental practice” group sat in front of an electric piano keyboard for two hours a day and imagined playing a sequence of notes and hearing them played, while the other “practice group” actually played the music on the keyboard.
Both groups had their brains mapped before the experiment, each day during it, and afterward. When each group played the sequence of notes they’d been imagining or practicing, the computer measured accuracy.
By the third day, the imagined group played as accurately as the practiced group. By the fifth day the practiced group made gains, but those gains were overcome by the imagined group with a single two-hour physical practice session.
What this means to business communicators
This goes way beyond the so-called power of positive thinking. The book reported on a study where the subjects who did physical exercise of a sort increased their muscular strength by 30% while those who only imagined the same exercises increased theirs by 22%.
This has real implications for business communicators. For example, if you were selling widgets or sports drinks to kids in tough neighborhoods, instead of making general claims like “Widget will make you run faster & jump higher,” you should try “Buy Widget to outrun mean neighborhood dogs — even while jumping trashbags and open manholes.”
Not only would more kids try Widget, the visual image of them navigating the urban obstacle course might convince their brains they could do it.
What’s next for Widget? Maybe the kids would start a viral marketing campaign…
Beware the Fart Joke
We are a collection of "selves"
Catching up on reading this week at the beach, including past issues of my favorite magazine, The Atlantic.
The November 2008 edition carried a fascinating article that touched on neuroeconomics, or the neurophysiology of economic decisions. I love this stuff.
According to Yale professor of psychology, Paul Bloom, “…remembering something is easiest while you are in the same state in which you originally experienced it. Students do better when they are tested in the room in which they learned the material; someone who learned something while he was angry is better at remembering that information when he is angry again; the experience of one’s drunken self is more accessible to the drunk self than to the sober self. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”
Bloom’s research underscores why effective business communications need to take people to an emotional place in order to cement the message. Warren Buffett did this well in his 2009 annual letter to shareholders when he drew a parallel between derivatives and venereal disease: “Participants seeking to dodge troubles face the same problem as someone seeking to avoid venereal disease: It’s not just whom you sleep with, but also whom they are sleeping with.”
If that gives you a creepy feeling, the Oracle from Omaha met his objective; he hates derivatives.
More Buffett bon mots:
- Tony and I feel like two hungry mosquitoes in a nudist camp. Juicy targets are everywhere.
- By year end 2007, the half dozen or so companies that had been the major players in this business had all fallen into big trouble. The cause of their problems was captured long ago by Mae West: “I was Snow White,but I drifted.”
- If merely looking up past financial data would tell you what the future holds,the Forbes 400 would consist of librarians.
- The tennis crowd would call my mistakes “unforced errors.”
- Upon leaving, our feelings about the business mirrored a line in a country song: “I liked you better before I got to know you so well.”
- Investors should be skeptical of history-based models. Constructed by a nerdy-sounding priesthood using esoteric terms such as beta, gamma, sigma and the like, these models tend to look impressive. Too often, though, investors forget to examine the assumptions behind the symbols. Our advice: Beware of geeks bearing formulas.
Advice for speakers
Back to Paul Bloom in The Atlantic story, “Good smells, such as fresh bread, make people kinder and more likely to help a stranger; bad smells, like farts (the experimenters used fart spray from a novelty store), make people more judgmental. If you ask people to unscramble sentences, they tend to be more polite, minutes later, if the sentences contain positive words like honor rather than negative words like bluntly. .. All of these studies support the view that each of us contains many selves-some violent, some submissive, some thoughtful-and that different selves can be brought to the fore by different situations.“
Next time you’re delivering a presentation, keep this in mind. The oft-repeated advice to open with a joke should be tempered by what you just learned about neurophysiology — don’t make it a fart joke.
Set the Hook
What’s she* talking about?
Women are faking it in bedrooms all over America.
“When my husband says, ‘Can you believe how much better this is?’ I say, ‘Yes, honey, it’s amazing,’ ” one woman told me. “I really don’t see that much difference, but he’s so happy, I just pretend to.”
Answer: Hi-def TV
“As an explosion of pixels hits our TV screens this weekend, with the digital and high-def revolution, my unscientific survey shows women are less excited about high-def than men.”
According to a quoted source, “Men are all about the bigger, better, more…and sports are infinitely better in high definition.”
Compel and propel
Good writing starts with an irresistible hook that compels the reader to find out what’s on the other end. Good writing propels the reader through the piece, oblivious to the passing of time.
I couldn’t care less about HDTV and wouldn’t have read a column about TV without a hook that compelled. I stayed with the piece because it propelled, focusing on the gender gap, a topic that interests me. Compelling while propelling is easy on the reader — and unless it’s your private diary, writing is all about the reader.
On a whole-brain-communications note, this hook resonated as possibly salacious. Our brains are wired to be piqued by the possibility of pleasure.
More Word Cloud Love
As a student of whole-brain communications I love a good word cloud.
Here’s one from today’s presidential speech in Cairo.
Visualizing the Mortgage Meltdown
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo
Whole-Brain Communications
This 10-minute video effectively encapsulates the mortgage bubble and subsequent financial meltdown. Using site, sound and simple graphics, this whole-brain approach is a case study of effective presentation.
One thing struck me as funny, though, and that is how to depict “irresponsible homeowners” graphically. Mr. Jarvis chose to do it in contrast to the “responsible homeowners” who had one child and a dog. The irresponsible ones had a load of children, smoked cigarettes (or something) and no pets. I’m still running that through my politically correct filter.
Where credit is due
I ran across this on the excellent FLOWING DATA site which “explores how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists are using data to understand ourselves better – mainly through data visualization. Money spent, reps at the gym, time you waste, and personal information you enter online are all forms of data. How can we understand these data flows? Data visualization lets non-experts make sense of it all.”
The site is run by Nathan Yau. “In a previous life I was an electrical engineering and computer science student at Berkeley, but now I’m a UCLA PhD candidate in Statistics interested in data visualization. Data analysis is great and all, but for me visualization is just so appetizing, it’s irresistible, and if done right, provides results for everyone — not just the statisticians and/or scientists.”
I just became Nathan’s follower on Twitter.
Disassembly Line
Closed after 60+ years in operation
The April, 2009 edition of The Atlantic featured a two-page schematic on “The unbuilding of an auto plant” near the Hartsfield-Jackson airport in GA.
The story says, “Closing an auto plant is neither quick nor simple, and for a time, the very process of closure creates its own small economy; ultimately, closures can make way for new beginnings. Immediately after the Hapeville plant was formally idled, about 250 workers returned to begin deconstructing the site; more than two years later, demolition and environmental cleanup are still continuing.”
Don’t I know it. The story of course ties into raging headlines about the shrinking US automotive sector, but it also took me back to my recent past as an owner of an environmental cleaning company where I earned “blood money” closing down Carolinas-based textile plants. Blood money? Yes, according to dictionary.com it’s defined as “Money gained at the cost of another’s life or livelihood.”
I have to say, sometimes plants were at their most environmentally compliant during their final shutdowns. They often skimped on compliance when they were running full bore, but in order to get certificates of occupancy for the next tenants they had wind down the right way.
Writing Prompts: Financial, Consulting, Environmental, Services
- With uneven environmental regulations around the world, reflect on operations you’ve seen move to a less-regulated environment and the environmental degradation that ensued.
- If you are involved in any winding down operations now, how are prices holding up for machinery, equipment and scrap? Do the locations of the buyers say anything surprising about shifting capital across the globe?
- The Ford plant in this story will be replaced by a mix of retail and office space, with some airport parking and hotels. Is this usually the type of development that moves in? Should it be?
- What do you observe about the role of local tax and zoning incentives on 1) retaining businesses and 2) influencing re-development that occurs in situations like this in GA?
Smelling your Content
According to Dr. John Medina, “Smell is unusually effective at evoking memory. If you’re tested on the details of a movie while the smell of popcorn is wafted into the air, you’ll remember 10-50% more.”
Book by BY LYALL WATSON
Makes you rethink the food and beverages you offer at presentations, doesn’t it?
And how about doing reconnaissance on the meeting room itself? Giving a presentation in a stinky room might associate you with “stinky” content.
That said, kicking the sales team in the pants while they whiff the cafeteria’s burnt offerings might subliminally reinforce your point to get going or get burned.
But before you break out the room freshener, do some research. Men and women prefer different smells and certain smells perk us up while others have a sedating effect.
