Guy Kawasaki of How to Change the World

Nancy Duarte knows how to make killer presentations. She and her husband, Mark, founded Duarte Design, Inc., a firm that helps everyone from Google to Al Gore master the art of captivating audiences. Her recent book is called slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations. In this interview, she shares the secret to great Powerpoints and tells us how to avoid some of the most common presentation pitfalls.

Question: Why do most presentations suck?

Answer: Most presentations suck because:

1. The presenter has not given the audience any idea why they are there or what the content means to them; messages are disorganized and there’s no unifying story line.
2. The presenter uses the slides as a document or teleprompter and reads their slides with his/her back to the audience. This makes the audience feel like the presenter is slow or not very smart.
3. The presenter is not passionate or inspired and has not connected to the audience in a uniquely human way.

Did you notice that presentations suck solely because of the presenter? Great speakers like you can get by without much visual support. Emotive qualities are the greatest assets in a live performance.
read more

As a small business owner, how’d you like to get a billion dollar lesson for the price of a book? Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui provide this gift in their new book, Billion-Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years. Carroll and Mui examine some of the great business fiascos to provide help you avoid the same fate. I caught up with Chunka recently and asked him to explain the lessons of their research.

• Question: What are the primary causes of failure for mergers and acquisitions?

  Answer: The short answer is bad strategy. Some 46% of the 750 failures we studied in detail occurred because of a strategy that could have been seen as ill-conceived at the time–in other words, not because of crummy luck or bad execution, even though conventional wisdom seems to be that good execution can make any idea work. If you dig a little deeper, here are the main issues:

  read more

Here’s how most entrepreneurs approach venture capital funding raising. I call it Plan A. It’s a plan and an outcome that no one talks about but happens all the time. I’ve been on both sides, so I should know.

• Step 1: the entrepreneur cogitates: “Let’s raise $1-2 million so we can focus on programming and marketing and not worry about raising money. We’ll hit all our milestones and then go out for another $5 million in two years and get acquired or go public soon after that.” Believe it or not, many companies raise the $1-2 million and sometimes more because venture capitalists compete for the deal.
• Step 2: the entreprenur fantasizes: “Our most conservative forecast is one million users in the first six months. We need to scale to prepare for this, and the reason why VCs gave us money is that they want us to scale and win the land grab.”
• Step 3: the product is late, and the dogs don’t eat the food. After six months, there are 10,000 users, not one million. The company has scaled up its expenses but for no reason. Money is tight, but the VCs are still clueless and accustomed to initial projections being off by orders of magnitude.

read more

A mantra is three or four words that explain why your product, service, or company should exist. A mission statement is a fifty-word tome that no one can remember or believe that’s supposed to impress readers of your business plan. Unfortunately, most people work for an organization with a mission statement. Who among us has not had the horrible experience of a management offsite to build teamwork and to craft a mission statement? The offsite went like this:

• Day 1: Teambuilding. First, form cross-functional teams so that engineering has to work with sales. Then tolerate a day of exercises such as, “Each of you will come up to the front of the group, turn your back to the group, close your eyes, and fall backwards into the arms of your colleagues. This will teach you to communicate with and trust your fellow employees.”

• Day 2: Crafting the mission statement. In a hot, crowded room with a pad of white paper and a facilitator who knows nothing about your business, you are going to collectively craft a mission statement. Everyone who is director level and above in the company is there—that’s sixty people. You each figure you get one word, so at the end of the day you have a sixty-word mission statement that is good for the customers, shareholders, employees, whales, and dolphins: read more

David Eraker started a company called Mindsite to help people who are searching for answers about mental health. I found out that the DSM-IV is the go-to guide for diagnosing mental health issues, and Mindsite is the first company to publish this resource online for consumers to read directly. I know lots of people who are searching for mental health information–they’re called “disgruntled employees,” so I asked David to help me help you figure out if your boss is crazy. Here are the main personality disorders from the DSM-IV as they relate to your boss.

Narcissistic

If your boss shows arrogant behaviors or attitudes, has a grandiose sense of self-importance, and takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends, then your boss may be a narcissist. This is the loudmouthed CEO with a Porsche parked out front and a Rolex who is always claiming that he’s doing “the next big thing.” He frequently needs an entourage of yes-people who suck up to him. Support groups for the employees of narcissists are some of the most active online. Continued interaction with them can be downright toxic though because they can turn you into a spineless puppy dog or a powder keg of anger. (For more information about the narcissistic personality disorder, go here.)

read more

In a perfect world, you’d make a product that’s so great that marketing doesn’t matter, and your marketing is so great that the product doesn’t matter. This isn’t a perfect world. The reality is that marketing does matter—although it can only do so much good (or damage). This is a compilation of silly and stupid ways companies hinder adoption of their products and services in the real world. read more

In simple terms, there are three kinds of business books:

In my experience (and I get a book a week to review), books in the third category appear once a year or so. One such book is “Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive” by Noah J. Goldstein, Steven J. Martin, and Robert B. Cialdini. This book ranks in the top 10 business books that I’ve ever read. The book is a collection of 50 short chapters that document an experiment—usually in social psychology—and then the ramifications of the findings. In a nutshell, the book truly does explain how to persuade. Here are some illustrations that you can probably immediately use in your business. read more