Storytelling Presentations: Bullet points are such a bad idea

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Storytelling Presentations: Bullet points are such a bad idea
Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and most of the world’s most inspiring speakers, do not use bullet points. Why don’t they use bullet points? If you have bullet points, you are making the audience listen to you and read the bullet points. That creates cognitive load. *University of Washington biologist, John Medina, has done extensive research into persuasion and…
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Data Storytelling: Story Before Suggestions

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Data Storytelling: Story Before Suggestions
Sam and his team, having worked hard to find an insight from data that they have received from their ecommerce team, finally find a meaningful insight after weeks of slicing and dicing the data. Excited, they walk in to a presentation to share the insight. Their presentation is structured like this: – We are here to make the following suggestions for an…
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Storytelling: The Sad Story of Dell Inc

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Storytelling: The Sad Story of Dell Inc
In B2B, the biggest story one aspires to create is, my boss is happy and shareholders are happy. It’s the need to create this same story that sometimes leads the CFOs to emphasise on cost cutting, because they need to make sure that the boss and shareholders are happy. Cost cutting can improve short-term profits and boost the current share price, but…
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Data Storytelling: 5 short, free tutorials…

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Data Storytelling: 5 short, free tutorials…
Words have always been the most natural way to tell stories. However, the rising importance of data has created a new need for us, which is to tell a story with numbers. Something that doesn’t come naturally to us. We have always presented an analysis of numbers. Hence, we are great at analysing the data but not so great at being able…
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Change Storytelling: Super Smart People Need a BIO Story

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Change Storytelling: Super Smart People Need a BIO Story
Karen is responsible for Change Management in her organisation. Every time she announces a change initiative, there is group of people who would hijack her presentations. They question everything and anything which usually dampens the little enthusiasm that exists for change. This group of people are super smart people. Karen’s biggest worry, for a long time before any change announcement, was this…
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Storytelling: What do you do when you see a crying baby?

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Storytelling: What do you do when you see a crying baby?
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft tells the story about his first round of interviews at Microsoft about 25 years ago. An up-and-coming Microsoft manager named Richard Tait asked Nadella a question. The question had nothing to do with coding or solving an engineering problem. Instead, Tait asked: “Imagine you see a baby laying on the street, and the baby is crying. What…
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