>> Deb Crawford: Thank you for coming, my name is Deb Crawford and I am
please to welcome Carmine Gallo to the Microsoft Research Visiting
Speaker series. Carmine is here to discuss his book Talk Like TED: The
9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World's Top Minds. TED talks are the
golden standard for public speaking, both in tapping the most
interesting people and ideas and for providing techniques that will
make any presentation more dynamic.
Carmine has broken down hundreds of TED talks to reveal secrets that
anyone can use to create an engaging, persuasive and memorable talk.
He is a communications coach for many brands including: Intel,
LinkedIn, and others and an author of 7 books including The
Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. He is the president of the Gallo
Communications Group and has been featured in several publications
including: The Wall Street Journal, The New York times and writes for
Forbes.com. Please join me in giving him a very warm welcome.
[clapping]
>> Carmine Gallo: Thank you. All right. Thank you and good afternoon
everybody. I am so excited to be around so many people who have
amazing ideas. And that’s what I would like to talk about today is
ideas, because I think ideas are the currency of the 21st century. In
the information age, the knowledge economy you are only as successful
as your ideas and yet communicating your ideas is much more challenging
than ever. I believe the ability to communicate your ideas
persuasively is the single greatest skill that will help you accomplish
your dreams, advance your careers and certainly move the brand forward.
Famed venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, who I interviewed for one of my
Forbes columns just a couple of weeks ago said, “Storytelling is the
most underrated skill, especially for entrepreneurs and management
level employees.” He said, “Your story is your strategy.” and when I
asked him what he meant by that he said, “If you cannot clearly tell a
story then you don’t have a well thought out strategy.”
So today I want to talk to you about communication skills and
storytelling. It’s not just me who believes this and it’s not just Ben
Horowitz, billionaire Warren Buffett believes in the power of
communication and public speaking. Listen to this video clip when
Warren Buffet was speaking to a class of business students. I believe
it was a Columbia University. Listen to the value that he placed on
communication and public speaking in the workplace.
[audio begins]
>> Warren Buffett: Right now I would pay 100,000 for 10 percent of the
future earnings of any of you. So anybody that wants to see me after
this is okay.
[laughter]
[clapping]
>> Warren Buffett: Now if that’s true then you are a million dollar
asset right now, right, if 10 percent of you are worth 100,000. You
could improve the value, many of you, and I certainly could of when I
got out, just in terms of learning communication skills. It’s not
something that’s thought --. I actually went to a day Carnegie course
in terms of public speaking, but if you improve your value 50 percent
by having better communication skills that’s another 500,000 in terms
of capital value. See me after the class and I will pay 150.
[laughter]
[clapping]
[audio ends]
>> Carmine Gallo: So why does he say that? Why is he willing to pay
someone a premium because they are a good communicator? Because, as
Daniel Pink who has also been here for the speaker series said, “Like
it or not, we’re all in sales now.” That means we are constantly
pitching ourselves, and our ideas, and our products and services, both
to internal and external audiences. So you have to look at yourself as
a brand and you have to think through, how am I telling the story
behind my brand, my ideas? Yeah, we have a challenge because we live
in a multimedia generation. So how can we sell our ideas persuasively
when we communicate in photos and videos in 140 character Tweets?
One organization that has done a really good job of bringing together
the world’s greatest presenters and business leaders, in fact leaders
in a wide variety of areas is TED of course, having recently celebrated
its 30th anniversary. How many of you have seen TED talks, most of you
probably online. Great, this is awesome, because I don’t normally get
that many hands going up. I do get a majority of hands, but this is
pretty much everybody. So this is awesome because I think you will be
able to tell some of the methods that I’m extracting from these TED
talks.
And what I want to do today is help you apply what the worlds greatest
presenters do to your everyday business presentations and the way you
communication the vision behind your own ideas. How do we do that?
Ideas that spread have three components. Now this is based on a lot of
research. It’s based on watching 500 TED talks and not all of them are
great. It’s about 150 hours worth of TED talks. I have interviewed
the worlds leading neuroscientists and researchers who study the
science and art of persuasion and I have also interviewed personally
many of some of your favorite TED speakers.
So I got a little behind the scenes look at what they do to make their
TED talk so inspiring. I found that ideas that spread have 3
components: they all have to be emotional, you need to touch my heart
before you reach my head, they need to be novel, ideas that spread
teach me something new and they are memorable; they present content in
ways that I will never forget.
So let’s breakdown each one: emotional, and again I am going to tie it
into your business presentations. Ideas that spread are emotional.
Above all you have to be passionate. Passion is everything when it
comes to persuasive communications. You cannot inspire unless you are
inspired yourself. Dr. Larry Smith, who many of you might recognize
because he gave a very famous TED talk several years ago said, “Passion
is the thing that will help you create the highest expression of your
talent.” Well, when I interviewed Dr. Smith about passion, he has been
studying passion for 40 years as an instructor, I asked him: How do you
define passion? What does it mean to be passionate? And he pointed me
to an expert from his now very famous and viral TED talk. Here is Dr.
Smith’s definition of passion, probably the best one I have come
across, let’s listen.
[audio begins]
>> Larry Smith: Passion is your greatest love. Passion is the thing
that will help you create the highest expression of your talent.
>> Carmine Gallo: He is very frustrated.
>> Larry Smith: Passion, interest, it’s not the same thing. Are you
really going to go to your sweetie and say, “Marry me; you are
interesting”?
[laughter]
>> Larry Smith: It won’t happen, it won’t happen and you will die
alone. What you want, what you want is passion; it is beyond interest.
You need 20 interests and then one of them might grab you, one of them
might engage you more than anything else and then you may have found
your greatest love in comparison to all the other things that interest
you and that’s what passion is.
[audio ends]
>> Carmine Gallo: So you can tell that Dr. Smith is really frustrated,
he’s agitated and I asked him about that. I said, “You sure look
frustrated and annoyed in this video, are you always that angry?” and
he said, “Wasted talent is a talent I cannot stand and that’s what
happens when people don’t tap into what their passion is.”, but I love
that line “Passion is your greatest love.”
Now, how does that apply to us as entrepreneurs, business leaders and
as communicators? Let’s think about this carefully. When I say you
have got to be passionate as a communicator it doesn’t mean that it’s
all, rah, rah and hey I am really excited and raise your voice. That’s
not what I mean by being passionate. When I say passion I mean tapping
into your greatest love. What is it about your product, your service,
your idea that you really love and don’t be afraid to share that.
So for example when I interview entrepreneurs for my Forbes columns or
my books, let’s say I interviewed Richard Branson and I ask Richard
Branson, “What is your greatest love?” You will not hear that his
greatest love is getting people from point A to point B on an airplane.
That’s not his greatest love. His greatest love is disrupting the
status quo. His greatest love is elevating the customer experience.
That’s a much more interesting and inspiring conversation than I am in
a company that builds airplanes.
When I interviewed Tony Hsieh, the founder and the CEO of Zappos.com,
one of the great customer service stories in eCommerce. His greatest
love is not shoes; in fact he doesn’t even like new shoes. He wears
old shoes until they are pretty much worn out. It’s not about the
shoes. His greatest love is delivering happiness. How do I make my
employees happy? How do I make my customers happy?
When I interviewed Howard Schultz several years ago this was a big
revelation for me. This completely changed the way I look at
communication, because I interviewed Howard Schultz for almost 2 hours.
He was not the first person to bring up the word coffee, I was and he
said, “Yes, Carmine, coffee is what I make as a product, but that’s not
the business that I am in.” That blew my mind when it comes it comes
to communication, because I realized that the worlds most inspiring
leaders are not passionate about the product. They are passionate and
excited about how that product can change your life.
So when you talk to Howard Schultz you realize it’s so much more than
the coffee. He doesn’t even talk about the coffee. He talks about
creating a workplace that treats people with dignity and respect, a
workplace that elevates the engagement that employees have with their
management. He talks about the romance of the coffee culture, but it’s
not so much about the coffee. After I interviewed Howard Schultz he
appeared on CNBC. I want you to watch this short clip from the
interview that he gave the host on CNBC. The host had exactly the same
reaction that I did when I interviewed Howard Schultz. The host had to
stop him in mid sentence and say, “Wait a minute, are we talking about
coffee or are we talking about something else?” Watch.
[audio begins]
>> Howard Schultz: Starbucks in a sense has become the quintessential
experience brand and the experience comes to life by our people. We
have been able to, I think, create a system of attracting and retaining
great people, building a training system that replicates what we do and
I think the only competitive advantage and this is an anathema compared
to tech company is we have no patent, we have no secret sauce
whatsoever.
The only competitive advantage we have is the
relationship we built with our people and the relationship they have
build with the customer.
>>: You mentioned competitive advantage; you haven’t mentioned the word
coffee.
>> Howard Schultz: Not yet.
>>: Your competitive advantage is not your coffee.
>> Howard Schultz: Well I will get to --.
>>: You just said your competitive advantage, I agree with you, is the
relationship with your people and the people with the customer.
>> Howard Schultz: And in fact if you ask me what business we are in,
we are in the people business. We are not in the coffee business, of
course we are as a product, but we are in the people business. 135,000
people hiring 300 people a day serving 40 million customers a week,
it’s all human connection, it’s a sense of humanity in the sense of
community that we built in our stores. So at the end of the day what
we have been able to do is crack the code on being able to create an
environment where people are treated well, they are respected, they are
valued and customers come in and they recognize that this is a
different kind of environment, almost an oasis.
[audio ends]
>> Carmine Gallo: “Almost and oasis”, is he talking about coffee or is
he talking about something else? So you need to ask yourselves, “What
business am I really in?” “What am I really trying to pitch?” And ask
yourself deep down, “What am I truly inspired about?” And by the way
passion is contagious. Researchers at the University of Minnesota are
studying passion and they are finding that if you meet someone who is
genuinely and authentically excited, enthusiastic about their idea it
will change your perception of that person and that’s person’s idea.
Passion really does rub off; passion is contagious. But, I think you
really need to dig deep and identify, “What is it though that I am
passionate about?” And then, “How do I transmit my passion to you?
How do I transfer that passion?”
The easiest most effective way is through mastering the art of
storytelling. We have to start telling stories, stories inform,
stories illuminate and stories inspire. In business very few people
tell stories and I can say that confidently because I work with some of
the most well known executives and brands, certainly in America and a
lot of global brands as well. They rarely tell stories and yet when
you expose them to this concept they get it, they get it immediately.
I just don’t think they have really been exposed to it. Remarkable
things happen to your brain on stories. Research out of Princeton
University is finding that when I tell you a story the same areas, the
same regions of our brain light up. We are literally in sync.
Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook COO, recently learned this. How many of
you are familiar with this movement that she started that encourages
young women to achieve their goals in business? What is the name of
that movement? Everyone knows the movement then.
>>: Lean In.
>> Carmine Gallo: Lean in. I argue that none of you would have heard
of Lean In if it hadn’t been for the power of story. In 2010 Sheryl
Sandberg gave a TED talk, an 18 minute talk, just a conversation about
why we have too few female leaders. That conversation went viral, it
lead to a best selling book, which lead tot he movement. However,
right before she gave the TED talk, true story, she was ready to give a
conversation and a presentation in her words that we chalked full of
data and no personal stories. All data, she is a data person; she was
ready to talk about all the data that shows how women are being kept
down in the workplace, a lot of data, no stories.
Right before her TED talk, and I would not recommend this, because I
recommend practicing before any mission critical presentation, but
right before a TED talk a friend said, “Sheryl, you seem a little out
of sorts, what’s going on?” and she said, “Oh, it’s just been a rough
trip, right before I came out here my little daughter was pulling at
me, screaming saying, ‘Mommy, mommy, don’t go’ and the friend said,
‘Why don’t you tell that story to everybody when you get out there?”
And Sheryl said, “In front of people, you actually want me to tell that
story in front of an audience?” She was very skeptical about it and
then she realized, she had a brainstorm and she realized, “Ah, wait a
minute, this is how I can connect with my audience because I am going
through some of the same things that they are and I can connect with
them on an emotional level.” So this is how she started her TED talk
in 2010.
[audio begins]
>> Sheryl Sandberg: Now at the outset I want to be very clear that this
speech comes with no judgments. I don’t have the right answer. I
don’t even have it for myself. I left San Francisco, where I live, on
Monday and I was getting on the plane for this conference and my
daughter whose 3, when I dropped her off at preschool, did that whole
hugging the leg crying, “Mommy, don’t get on the plane thing”. This is
hard, I feel guilty sometimes. I know no women whether they are at
home or whether they are in the workforce that don’t feel that
sometimes. So I am not saying that staying in the workforce is the
right thing for everyone. My talk today is about what the messages are
if you do want to stay in the workforce and I think there are 3: 1 sit
at the table, 2 make your partner --.
[audio ends]
>> Carmine Gallo: I let it run long because I want to get back to this
rule of 3 that she used and by the way she also reinforced each point
with a story. So again it’s the personal stories that resonate with
people. They don’t always have to be personal stories about your
daughter or your child. It can be a case study, it can be a story
about your experience with another brand, and those are all stories. I
have found after analyzing 500 TED talks that if we go back to
Aristotle, the father of persuasion, I am a real communication geek so
I really get into the research behind it, 65 percent of the content of
the best TED talks fall under what Aristotle called Pathos, emotion,
storytelling, 25 percent data, statistics, the data to backup and to
reinforce your argument and about 10 percent ethos or establishing
credibility.
Meet Brian Stevenson, Brian Stevenson received the longest standing
ovation in TEDs 30 year history. He is an attorney; Brian Stevenson is
a civil rights attorney who successfully argues cases before the US
Supreme Court. That means that he knows how to talk really, really
well and he is very persuasive. He told 3 stories in his 18 minute
presentation. When I asked him, “Why did you tell a story about your
grandmother?” He goes, “Oh, I always tell a story about my grandmother
Carmine. Why, because everybody has a grandmother. It get’s people to
like me; I connect with them.”
Now the story did reinforce his theme of course. You can’t just tell a
story out of the blue, but the point is he is always thinking, “How am
I going to connect with this particular group on an emotional level?”
How many of you like to consume organic fruits and vegetables?
Organic, okay, so may of you, many of you are into organic, that’s
good. You have this woman to credit, her name is Myra Goodman. Myra
Goodman started Earthbound Farm. Earthbound Farm today is the largest
grower of organic fruits and vegetables in the world.
I have known Myra for several years. I live in California, I do a lot
of work with technology companies and over the last several years I
have really been doing a lot of work with Agribusiness as well, who are
really into technology. So there is a carryover. Myra Goodman had to
give a very prestigious TEDx event, she had to give a TEDx talk in
Manhattan that is an annual event that’s all around food and
agriculture. It’s a very prestigious event in New York and they wanted
her to be one of the key speakers.
So she knew that I had written this book, she contacted me in October
or so and I suggested, “Myra”, I told her, “You have got to tell
stories. I want you to tell the story of when you started Earthbound
Farm in a 2 acre raspberry field in Carmel California with your
husband. I love that story.” And she said, “Yeah, but I always tell
that story Carmine.” And I said, “Yeah, you tell it to internal
people, but most people outside of your world have never heard the
story and that’s how you are going to connect with people. And when
you tell the story Myra, I don’t want to see any words on the screen.
I don’t want to see any text on your PowerPoint. I want to see
pictures that reflect and reinforce the story. It’s like a movie,
think if it like a move, telling the story, showing the video or the
pictures behind you. This is how she started her TED talk, which she
just sent me an e-mail, I think last week or two weeks ago it was voted
the number one talk of this entire event.
Here’s the back story just between us, she doesn’t really, she’s not
very comfortable with PowerPoint. She is a farmer, she doesn’t give
power points and yet she knocked this one out of the park. Here’s how
she started:
[audio begins]
>> Myra Goodman: I have been a passionate advocate of organic farming
for 30 years. I can still remember the exact moment when I knew I
didn’t want to use chemicals to grow our food. It was just 2 days
after my husband Drew and I moved onto our original 2 and a half acre
raspberry farm in Carmel Valley and I was standing between two rows of
raspberries, near a little orchard of fig trees, surrounded by the
gorgeous green mountains and the miracle of what was happening around
me was stunning. I was 3,000 miles away from my 11th floor apartment on
East 86th street here in Manhattan, but I felt like I had finally come
home. I just knew in my heart that we shouldn’t try and conquer this
beautiful earth with dangerous chemicals. Drew felt the same way so
right from the beginning we made the commitment to learn to farm
organically.
Back when we started Earthbound Farm Drew and I were 2 small faces of
small organic.
[audio ends]
>> Carmine Gallo: So here what you see is passion, in fact she used
that word as soon as she walked out, “Here’s what I am passionate
about” and you saw stories. That’s how you connect with people
emotionally, emotion is number 1, and you have to touch people
emotionally before you reach their intellect. Ideas that spread are
also novel. They teach me something new, something entirely
unexpected. I love this quote by a neuroscientist who I know at
Berkeley, “Our brains are trained to look for something brilliant and
new, something that stands out, something that looks delicious.” This
is the way our brains have evolved. We are constantly looking for
something new, fresh and exciting. When the brain detects something
that is new or maybe an unexpected twist on an old idea it releases
dopamine into the system which acts as your brains natural save button.
For part of my research on TED I interviewed someone who gave an
astonishing TED talk. This gentleman, Robert Ballard gave a TED talk
with about 57 slides, no texts on the slides. We will talk about
visual representation in a minute, but he discovered a little boat
called Titanic in 1985, 2 and a half miles beneath the surface of the
Atlantic and he said, “Carmine, your mission in any presentation is to
inform, educate and inspire, but you can only inspire when you give
people a new way of looking at the world in which they live.”
So a new way of looking at the world. That’s why people like Steve
Jobs, for example, could introduce a new phone and completely blow away
your expectations on what a phone should be. But, when he delivered
the presentation on the iPhone for example it was new and unexpected.
Not just the product, but the way he delivered the news. Does anybody
remember or seen on video Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone in 2007? A
few of you, you, what do you remember? Do you recall the one way that
he introduced the phone that just was really memorable?
>>: He introduced it as something that did 3 very definite things, an
internet communicator, an iPod and what was the third thing? But he
kept saying those three words over and over again.
>> Carmine Gallo: A phone, a phone, a phone.
[laughter]
>>: A phone right.
And he said, “Do you get it yet?”
>> Carmine Gallo: So he walked out, nobody get’s that question wrong,
they always go right to that part. That was a 90 presentation.
>>: It’s like it was yesterday.
>> Carmine Gallo: And you remember the one part where Steve Jobs said,
“I have got 3 products to introduce to you: a new iPod, a phone and an
internet communicator.” And then he repeated it several times and
pretty soon he said, “Aren’t you getting it? No, these aren’t three
products, they are all in one.” That was an emotionally charged event,
which I will talk about in just a second. It was a way of creating
something new, unexpected, fresh and surprising. Taking an old problem
and repackaging it into something completely unexpected. This is what
neuroscientists call an emotionally charged event.
So when you experience something that is so fresh, surprising and
unexpected they say it creates a heightened sense of emotion, which
literally stamps the message on your brain. Who has been doing this?
Somebody you all know really intimately, Mr. Bill Gates has been doing
this really, really well. Bill Gates has studied communication, and
knows communication and has been radically improving the way he tells
complex stories, especially with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
So when he gave his TED talk, his now very famous TED talk, I think it
was in 2009, on the causes of malaria what does everybody remember?
>>: The release of the mosquito.
>> Carmine Gallo: The release of the mosquito. That’s what,
neuroscientists who have seen that said, “Carmine, that’s the part that
connects with everybody because that is what is called an emotionally
charged event.” You do not expect Bill Gates delivering a PowerPoint
on the causes of malaria to open a jar of mosquitoes in the middle of
the presentation, completely jarring, unexpected, and fresh. So here
is how it went down:
[audio begins]
>> Bill Gates: [indiscernible] your money put into baldness drugs that
are put into malaria. Now baldness, it’s a terrible thing --.
[laughter]
>> Carmine Gallo: He was also funny, which was really interesting.
>> Bill Gates: And rich men are afflicted and so that’s why that
priority has been set. But, malaria, even the million deaths a year
caused by malaria greatly understates its impact. Over 200 million
people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t
get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things
back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitoes, I
brought some here just so you can experience this. We will let those
roam around the auditorium a little bit.
[laughter]
There is no reason only poor people should have the experience.
[laughter]
[clapping]
Those mosquitoes are not infected.
[audio ends]
>> Carmine Gallo: All right. Thank you Bill, thank you. That
audience, the reaction of the audience was interesting, first it was
shock, what is he doing? So it was quiet and then some people kind of
starting to laugh when he made the joke about not only poor people
should get the experience and then they started applauding, and
cheering and they realized that they had been had. They realized,
“Wait a minute, we are seeing something that’s extraordinary. This is
so different, so new, so refreshing; it’s a novel event.” And Bill
Gates, ever since then has been improving his presentations to where
they are really, really powerful presentations. They are fun to watch.
Even the displays, the presentations, the design of the presentations
are very, very compelling. I am going to show you some examples later.
How many of you have heard of this lady named Amanda Palmer? Maybe
some of you have seen this TED talk. She is a performer and a
musician. I actually don’t know how to label her work, maybe some of
you do. I don’t know if she is an indie artist, some people call her
cabaret rock or punk, the point is she brought down the house at TED
2013. Her video has been seen over 5 million times. She asked more
than 100 people for feedback on how best to present her story and the
story had to do with the music industry and why they should embrace
alternative models of distributed music. She started with something so
startling, so unexpected, so novel that it caught peoples attention and
they couldn’t stop talking about it through the rest of the conference.
Here’s how she started:
[audio begins]
>> Amanda Palmer: So I didn’t always make my living from music. For
about the 5 years after graduating from an upstanding liberal arts
university this was my day job.
[laughter]
[audio ends]
>> Carmine Gallo: And here I paused it here, but her day job was one of
those living statues and now she is going to tie in her day job with
her experience in the music industry and why they should build a new
model of music, completely unexpected. Now I am showing you extremes.
I do not expect you to get on a milk crate. I don’t expect you to
release mosquitoes, that would be a bad thing, but you do have to think
about and it can be something as simple as what Steve Jobs did in 2007.
How do I take, how do I package content, and messaging and information
in a way that shocks people? That jars them out of their preconceived
notion of what they expect me to deliver? Novelty, the brain cannot
ignore something that is delivered in a new, refreshing or unexpected
way, so novelty is very important.
But, none of this matters if I don’t remember anything you told me. So
let me give you some very specific techniques that work. These are
proven; they work really, really well, techniques that you can use
today for your very next pitch or presentation. Almost guaranteed,
almost guaranteed, in fact I will guarantee it. Your message will be
remembered if you use some of these techniques. Now, I can’t guarantee
that they will always be acted upon in the time line that you wanted
those acted upon, but if you structure your message or idea like this I
guarantee that it will be remembered because these always work. There
is science behind them, they always work. First we are going to stick
to the 18 minute rule. Every TED talk, and most of you know this, is
limited to, what, no more than 18 minutes.
So it doesn’t matter if you are Bono, or Bill Gates, or Sheryl
Sandberg, you only get 18 minutes. There is science behind this. The
TED organizers have found that 18 minutes is about the right amount of
time to have a serious discussion on something and not put your
audience asleep, to keep them alert. If you look at all the academic
research out there depending on what you read there is a point at which
people are going to lose their attention and that’s typically between
10 minutes, again depending on the research, to 18 minutes.
So I guarantee that many of you, some of you, like this gentleman here
who has taken a lot of notes, he is obviously engaged, in fact he is so
engaged he doesn’t know I am talking to him right now.
[laughter]
So you are taking a lot of notes, but I guarantee that after about the
first 10 minutes of the conversation your brain probably started to
stray a little bit and you were thinking, “Gee, what am I having for
dinner tonight or you know I have got a meeting after this and I am not
fully prepared for it.” It’s just a natural way. He is obviously
engaged, he is taking notes, but after about 18 minutes you have to reengage, you have to bring people back. How do you do that? I am
trying to give you some videos. So I am introducing another voice,
another character. That’s one way of doing it, stories, and demos,
don’t wait 30 minutes before your demo. Introduce your idea and then
demo in the first 10 minutes. 18 minutes, it works really, really
well. That does not mean that your presentation is only limited to 18
minutes, but try to re-engage people within 10 to 18 minutes.
By the way, a lot of great things can happen in under 18 minutes. John
Kennedy inspired a nation in 15 minutes. Steve Jobs gave what many
consider the greatest commencement speech of our time at Stanford
University in 15 minutes. And it took Martin Luther King a few extra
minutes, up until 17 minutes to outline his vision for racial equality.
So, if these folks and Sheryl Sandberg launched a movement in 15
minutes. If all of these folks can get their idea across in under 18
minutes, that’s probably plenty of time for you to get your idea
across. So think about that, re-engaging people within 10 to 18
minutes.
Also, this is so powerful in communication theory that I want to spend
a few minutes on it. It’s called the rule of 3. The rule of 3 simply
means that in short-term-memory you are only going to remember about 3
or 4 points of information. Somebody sent me this info graphic which
shows the rule of 3 pervades every aspect of our society. Even slogans
like Just Do It or Yes We Can, certainly in literature, The Three
Musketeers, The Three Little Pigs, The Three Bears, the rule of 3.
Great writers know this, directors know this, movies know this, movie
directors understand this, and comedians often break up their comedy
sketches or their jokes into 3. If great writers know this why can’t
we incorporate them into our presentations and our pitches?
Remember Brian Stevenson? How many stories did he tell in 18 minutes?
Three, three and he received the longest standing ovation in TED
history and as I suggested because he successfully wins Supreme Court
arguments he knows how to persuade and he likes to break things into 3.
Who else likes to break things up into 3: The Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation. How many of you read the annual newsletter for 2014?
Three Myths, three myths that block progress for the poor, they were:
poor countries are doomed to stay poor, four and eight is a big waste
and saving lives leads to over population. Those were the three myths
that they tackled in the newsletter. Why not 19, why not 19? It’s
easier to follow and it’s easier for people to pick up on that in
conversations.
When Bill was on the Jimmy Fallon show Jimmy was like, “Hey, tell me
about these three myths that people have about poor countries.” He
knew it, it was easy, “I have got 5 minutes and Bill’s got 3 things he
wants to tell me.” So it leads the conversation. All of the headlines
on blogs, newspapers, magazines, that covered the newsletter looked
like this, these are real headlines: 3 myths of global aid, Bill Gates
debunks 3 myths of global poverty, 3 big poverty myths, the rule of 3.
I do a lot of what’s called media training. So I actually train
executives before CNBC or other high profile shows. We do this all the
time. If you have only got about 5 or 10 minutes to pitch your idea,
your product, give me 3 reasons to back your idea, not 22. I will
forget them all; 3 is really, really powerful and it works in most
situations. If you have a presentation, if you have only got a 20
minute pitch or presentation break it up into three.
And finally think visually, pictures are more memorable than words.
Now this is very, very well known in the academic literature. How many
of you give PowerPoints? Like quite a few, you know I am like daily
PowerPoints, weekly PowerPoints. It’s very, very important whether
your use PowerPoint or Prezi now, a lot of people use Prezi or Apple
Keynote. I don’t think, you know sometimes the tool, PowerPoint is
demonized, death by PowerPoint. It’s not PowerPoint, it’s not the
tool. I have seen stunning PowerPoint displays, beautifully produced
and designed PowerPoints. I have seen horrible PowerPoints. I have
seen gorgeous Apple Keynote presentations and really bad Apple Keynote
presentations. It’s all about thinking visually. How do we do that?
Everybody within academic circles who study this they realize that if I
deliver information to you verbally you will remember about 10 percent
of the information. If I add a picture retention goes up to 65
percent. So if somebody asks you tomorrow, “Yeah, you know you went to
that Microsoft speaker series and you saw that guy who wrote the book.
What did he say about pictures? How much content do you retain if
there is a picture associated with it?” Most of you would remember 65
percent because you are hearing it from me and you are seeing this on
this beautifully designed graph, which I had a professional design and
that’s okay too. That’s certainly okay. The average PowerPoint has 40
words. In the best TED talks and the best presentations I have ever
seen, whether it’s TED or whether it’s in business today it’s hard to
find 40 words in the first 10 slides. So why are we cluttering our
PowerPoints with too many or excessive words?
Bill Gates is doing a lot of this to. When he wants to focus on 1 word
or 1 theme that’s all you will see on the slide. This is a real slide
from a Bill Gates TED talk called Innovating to Zero. It was about
reducing carbon emissions. He said, “It’s a simple formula. The more
CO2 we create temperature increases, which leads to really bad things.”
That’s a simple slide; in fact there are more words on that slide than
there were on most of the other slides there. But, what Bill Gates
realizes and what a lot of great communicators realize is that the more
complex your idea the more complex the discussing the simpler the slide
needs to be. Otherwise you are literally overwhelming and taxing the
person’s brain and you are asking people to multitask and we can’t
multitask as well as you think we can. So we can’t listen to something
very complicated and read 100 words on a slide at the same time.
So think visually and that’s how you make things more memorable. Ideas
that spread are emotional, novel and memorable. They have all 3, they
have to have all 3, and you can’t have 1 without the other. I want to
end with this though: I believe all of you have the capacity to move
people, to educate, to electrify, to inspire. You have ideas that are
meant to be heard and it’s your ideas that will move this company
forward, that will catapult your career and quite possibly change the
world. So you really need to focus on how you tell your story and how
best you communicate you ideas to really inspire your listeners and to
move people to action.
Thank you for inviting me here to share my ideas with you today, I
appreciate it, thank you.
[clapping]
I would love to sign some books, but before we do are there any
questions that you think might benefit the rest of the group? Yes
ma’am?
>>: Do you have resources to use that help people learn to tell a good
story?
>> Carmine Gallo: Resources to help people tell a good story?
>>: Learn how to tell a good story?
>> Carmine Gallo: I have often referred to a couple of books, but there
aren’t that many. If you have resources I would love to hear what
those resources are. Storytelling is a pretty broad area right now.
What I like to tell people is: all of you have a story to tell. When I
went to North Western for journalism school, I got a masters at North
Western for journalism, I remember a professor screaming at me when I
came back from a shoot and he was yelling at me and his blood vessels
were popping, because I walked back and I said there was not story, I
had nothing because there was not story and he said, “Carmine, there is
always a story” and I will never forget that.
So the way I look at it is everyone has a story to tell. You just need
to think about what is the story behind this idea? What is the story
behind this product? There are three different types of stories. It
can be a personal story. How did you arrive at this idea or maybe it’s
a personal story of somebody you know who had a problem that this idea
solves. It can be 30 seconds, that’s a story. It can be a story about
brand success or brand failure, another company, another brand. It can
be a story about other people who have a particular problem. So the
way Steve Jobs used to introduce a product he always told a good story
behind the product. He never just started by introducing the product,
he only spent maybe 2 minutes outlining the problem before the product
introduction. That’s a story, that’s introducing a villain, the
problem, before the hero. You don’t have to make storytelling too
complicated, just introduce the villain before the hero and the hero is
of course your idea or your product.
Yes ma’am?
>>: When you present I hear a certain tone that you use.
>> Carmine Gallo: A certain tone?
>>: A tone, almost musical, like you go up and down, up and down, up
and down and I think most of the presentations I have been to bore me
to death. It’s not because the visuals are not good or the story is
not good, it’s also the presenter just keeps on talking like this, like
this, like, it puts me to sleep. So when I hear that the passion that
you are giving on not only the ideas that you are giving, but also I
hear a tone.
>> Carmine Gallo: Yes, right.
>>: I don’t know how to say it in another word, but you bring this up
and down and I wanted to see if you can share if that important,
representation or not, and how to --.
>> Carmine Gallo: Absolutely, most people underestimate the power of
the verbal ability and their body language and their gestures. They
don’t think about that. They spend most of their time making sure the
font on slide 32 is just right.
>>: You say the font.
>> Carmine Gallo: Yeah, instead of, you know what you have to do? And
I know this sounds counter intuitive, but I have an entire chapter in
this book on practice. Most people don’t practice for important
presentations. Again, they spend most of the time on the slide and
then they just sort of internalize it and say to themselves, “Oh yeah,
I know what I am going to say when I get there”, but most people don’t
practice. If you practice and you internalize your content then it
frees you up. It frees you up to start thinking about: How am I going
to deliver it? What body language am I going to use? What gestures am
I going to use? The greatest presenters were the ones who practiced a
lot ahead of time, much more so than you would think. Dr. Jill Bolte
Taylor is a very famous TED talker. She gave the second most
successful TED talk of all time. She told me that she practiced 200
times, 200 times. Most of us have never practiced 200 times in our
entire careers.
[laughter]
So, I am not suggesting that you have got to practice 200 times for
every presentation, but if you have a mission critical presentation
internalize it about 10 times, so that you can really focus on: How am
I going to deliver this now? And you don’t have to really worry about
what comes next. I think you had it, did you have a question?
>>: I just wanted to share that a really great forum to practice --.
>> Carmine Gallo: A good, a good, if you could speak up, a good forum
to practice in is what?
>>: Toastmasters.
>> Carmine Gallo: Is toastmasters.
>>: Have you ever heard of toastmasters?
>> Carmine Gallo: Uh huh.
>>: Okay, there are clubs internationally and we actually have several
here on campus. So you can find them online if you go to
toastmasters.com and it’s just a great forum to practice speeches and
public speaking.
>> Carmine Gallo: And I write for Toastmaster magazine quite a bit and
so I am a big fan of the organization. I did not know that they
actually had Toastmasters groups on the Microsoft campus.
>>: I actually came from one right before.
>>: Several.
>> Carmine Gallo: Oh, okay, multiple, okay great, excellent.
Yes sir?
>>: Do you believe that your approach can be applied to highly
technical presentations where you have to actually explain how
something works?
>> Carmine Gallo: I love that question. I get that question all the
time. The question is: Does this approach apply to highly technical
presentations? I would argue that it must apply to highly technical
presentations because they are so complicated. The more complex the
idea the simpler the story has to be behind it. I am very, very
confident that this approach works for the most complex communication
and I may not have been able to say that up until a couple of years
ago, true story, I am in New Mexico and I was working with the toughest
group of people I have ever come against. It was a very, very long
difficult day and it was a nuclear scientist at Sandia National Labs.
I know that what we do here at Microsoft is complex; nothing is more
complicated than nuclear science.
And there was a lot of push back, a lot of push back. “Oh, this will
never work for us Carmine, it’s too simple”. Okay, so by the end of
the day some people were coming around because I offered the science
behind it. Two weeks later the woman who had organized this particular
group and it was a safety group, said that they had an internal safety
presentation and she said, “Carmine, as you can imagine, knowing where
our nukes are is a really important presentation”. So she said that in
this safety presentation, the gentleman who was in that workshop
applied pretty much everything we talked about, he wanted to give it a
try and it was the best safety presentation they had ever seen.
Everybody was engaged the whole time rather than tuning out after the
first few minutes, but you have to have a balance.
If you walk into your bosses office and you give a presentation with
nothing but pictures, that’s not good, right. So there has to be a
balance of things. But, when Bill Gates says, “Look, this is a very
complex area and I want to simplify it for you”, the slide has to be
simple too or maybe there is one statistic that he wants everybody to
know. Why clutter the slide with 50 numbers or statistics? Why not
just put the one statistic that you think is the most important for
that presentation? Those are simple steps to take rather than blowing
up the entire culture. You can’t do that, so I understand there has to
be a balance. I am showing you extremes, these are extremes and now
you have to kind of pull it back to where you are comfortable.
Question over here?
Yes, sir?
>>: When I was young I did a lot of practice before I presented a
story.
>> Carmine Gallo: You are still young I am not sure how young.
[laughter]
>>: Younger than I am right now.
>> Carmine Gallo: Okay, when you were younger than you were right now.
[laughter]
>>: Yes.
>> Carmine Gallo: You did a lot of practice.
>>: And then I went before, and then something happened when I
presented, something changed and I got really lost because of practice
and after that I just told myself I will just be confident when I talk
and not really practice a lot.
>> Carmine Gallo: Okay, so you said, “I am not going to practice a
lot”. Now different things work for different people and this
gentleman, what’s your first name?
>>: Watson.
>> Carmine Gallo: Watson, all right. And Watson said that now he
doesn’t practice and he feels he is more effective. That’s fine, but
you also mention an important word: confidence. You are confident, so
somehow you are getting yourself into a state where you are really
confident about your presentation and your message. For most people,
for most people, practice and rehearsal raises confidence levels. So
that’s why for most people, maybe not you, but for most people the more
they practice and internalize the more confident they are.
I actually worked with a CEO of SanDisk, the pioneers of flash memory,
the cards that you have in your cameras. The CEO of SanDisk was
introducing a new product at CES, this was several years ago and he
practiced for weeks and he thought I was crazy. I said, “You have got
to practice this everyday, everyday you are going to be doing this.”
He thought I was nuts. Halfway through the presentation it goes down,
the computer locks up, they can’t get it back, without missing a beat
he goes through the rest of it and just has the conversation with no
visuals behind him and later he said, “Carmine, if I had not practiced
I would have froze. I would not have known what to do next, but I was
so comfortable and confident that it helped through the rest of the
presentation.” And nobody knew any better they just thought that was
the end of the presentation.
So I think practice leads to confidence.
go back and forth. Yes sir?
Let me go over here.
We will
>>: One, I appreciate the simplicity of your masters, so thank you for
that. A lot of TED talks incorporate great questions in the beginning,
throughout and the end. Can you talk a little bit about the power of
weaving in those questions throughout?
>> Carmine Gallo: Okay, so he said that great TED talks weave in these
awesome questions throughout. That speaks to novelty and
unexpectedness. So the number 1 TED talk of all time is Ken Robinson,
who is an educator, and the title of his TED talk is: Why Do Schools
Kill Creativity? So that’s unexpected, it’s surprising. Well wait a
minute; aren’t schools supposed to foster creativity? So that, by
starting with the question: Why do schools kill creativity? All of a
sudden within the first few seconds you are intrigued, you want to hear
more and he uses that question throughout the presentation. So I think
that’s what you are talking about. So sometimes a great presentation
can begin with a question. A question that people don’t necessarily
expect or they want to know the answer to that question. So that’s
another great method.
There are different methods of engaging people, different methods of
engaging people, but I think that regardless of the method it has to be
emotional, it has to be new and unexpected and it has to be memorable
in some way.
Back here, yes ma’am?
>>: How do you think this method applies to if you are trying to sell
something to our external customers on our website? Maybe we are
selling a product or we are engaging them for support or help. Do you
think that something like this applies real easily?
>> Carmine Gallo: How does this style apply to external customers?
Most of the brands that I work with use this style for external
customers. Edmunds.com is the number 1 automotive retail research
site. They have completely changed the way that they do their stories
to external customers based on this type of method. The very clean,
uncluttered slides, very visual, breaking it up every 10 or 18 minutes,
breaking up the presentations into threes and there is no question that
their customers are saying, “We like this”. They don’t even know why
they like. They just like it because they see 10 marketing
presentations a week from different vendors and then in comes Edmunds,
completely different and it’s new, it’s refreshing, it’s unexpected.
People don’t even know why they like it, but they like it.
We did this with Linkedin too. I worked with Linkedin before they went
IPO and it completely changed the way they tell their external story.
And I didn’t get any shares from that IPO, darn it.
Yes ma’am?
>>: You may have addressed this at the top of your presentation, which
I missed the first few minutes, but how effective is this framework in
delivering your pitch if it’s written or to this lady’s point if it’s
on a website or is this framework only to be applied if you are
delivering your pitch verbally?
>> Carmine Gallo: Oh, no, the question is: How does this framework
apply to an e-mail pitch or on a website?
A few things that I didn’t really go into, but number 1 would be the
rule of 3, the rule 3. So in an e-mail what I would expect you to say
is, “Here is the most important thing I want you to know”. So there
has to be a headline, just like a great newspaper article, there has
got to be a headline. What is the one thing I want you to know about
this product supported by 3 ideas. Now if you go to the Apple website
the Apple website is beautifully created, because they really study
communication. And Dr. Pradeep, actually the gentleman I showed you,
is someone who helps design websites with persuasion in mind and I
notice that when I went to the examples he showed me on websites there
is like 1 product and then 3 reasons why you should buy the product.
So it is very uncluttered as well. So you have to think about: How am
I going to reduce the clutter? How am I going to reduce the clutter on
the site, in marketing material and in an e-mail? An e-mail that’s too
long is not going to be read. An e-mail that has space in between and
maybe 3 bullets and maybe a story or a supporting point is much more
likely to be read than just a string of words. All right. Just like a
good PowerPoint presentation.
Yes sir, let’s go way in the back.
>>: Are there any cultures around the world where this is less than
optimal for them, this approach and secondly when you are giving a
presentation and it’s being translated and there is a bit of a lag do
you have to do anything differently?
>> Carmine Gallo: Okay, I love the first part of your question which
is: Are there any cultures where this approach may not work as well?
Funny you say that, I was speaking in Japan years ago, several years
ago and in Japan they do the opposite of this. There PowerPoints are
very, very dense and very cluttered and after I presented to many, many
workshops in Japan after every workshop people came up to me and said,
“We really like the American style of delivering presentations.” and I
didn’t quite understand what they were saying, but it was the whole
Steve Jobs, more visual, more passionate, more engaging, more
storytelling.
But, I reminded all of them that it’s not just, it’s not every American
who does a great style of presenting. You know, you can find great
presentations in every culture and every country. There are plenty of
bad presentations here as well, we all know that, but they liked the
style. They didn’t know what they liked about it, they just liked it.
I wrote a column for Forbes last year, Japan won the 2020 Olympics, I
think the summer Olympics, they won the bid. And how did they win the
bid? They actually created what they call, even the Japanese called a
very un-Japanese like presentation to reach a global audience.
I talked to the people who designed the presentation. I talked to the
people who delivered the presentation and I actually included slides
from the presentation. It was unlike anything most people have seen.
They all had to tell a story, each one of the presenters had to start
with a story of why the Olympics were so important to them and so
important to the country. It was very visual, it was very
storytelling, they practiced. They practiced their verbal delivery,
they practiced their body language. It was unlike any other
presentation that the other countries gave, and it blew away the judges
and they won the 2020 Olympics. That’s not the only reason of course
that they did, but it certainly persuaded the judges in a big way.
So that taught me and there is always something that you can learn
about communication and that taught me that anybody, any culture,
anyone can learn how to communicate more effectively. And some of
these models that we are talking about are very transparent and are
very consistent across cultures, because our brains sort of process
information in the same way. We speak different languages, but it
still process information largely the same. So I am finding that this
model is working in many countries. And look at TED, TED talks are in
145 countries and they have a very similar model to this.
So let’s do this folks, it is 1:35, I appreciate everybody coming out.
I need to sign some books so I can get you on your way and you can go
out there and get back to your daily business, but thanks again for
coming out. Thank you, thank you.
[clapping]