Rod Dunican is an accomplished senior manager and trainer, whose entire career has been centered on delivering exceptional results with a positive, “can do” attitude. With more than 25 years of experience, Rod shares his thirst for learning, managing and personal growth to help individuals and organizations thrive.

Professionally, he has served in the roles of Director of Project Management, Director of Operations and Chief Operating Officer. In 2003, he began Rod Ventures, an organizational learning and development company specializing in management consulting, training and project management. He recently led a team to complete a successful, two-year $1.25 million project for Wikimedia—the non-profit that guides and runs Wikipedia.

Having provided training for start-ups, non-profits and Fortune 500 companies such as Chevron, Gap, Cisco and Wikimedia, Rod continues to be fascinated by existing and emerging organizational cultures and their affects on the people within those cultures. Since experience has taught Rod that business is always personal, he often uses the workplace as a starting point to coach individuals.

As a speaker and trainer in the U.S. as well as internationally, he has engaged audiences in conferences, universities, and corporate settings. His low-key, fun approach to the insanity of work, life and parenting has led to seminars that include: “We Need to Talk: The Perils and Challenges of Speaking in Public”, “Presentations Skills for Introverts” , “Relationships, One Man’s Perspective” and more.

Pro-Track Profile

I caught up with Rod at a National Speakers Association (NSA) Northern California Pro-Track class and asked him about his work training academics and others on behalf of Wikimedia. We wondered if there was a Wikiepdia entry for the NSA. There is, although members could probably contribute more content to make it a richer resource. Finally, Rod shared what attracted him to enroll in Pro-Track.

To hear what Rod told me, click on the podcast icon below.

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I was interviewed earlier today on the “People Make a Difference” show hosted by Danny Brassell from California State University, Dominguez Hills that showcases the positive contributions of people in various communities . I met Danny in late 2011 at a National Speakers Northern California Chapter event and he invited me to be a guest on his show.

We discuss my work as a speechwriter in Silicon Valley and the aspects of the job that I enjoy most.

Timothy Tosta is a cancer survivor, a seasoned hospice volunteer and a widely acclaimed speaker and lecturer. He is the author of two books and a featured columnist of the Daily Journal, California’s leading daily legal newspaper. Tim is an executive coach to legal and business communities. He also is recognized as one of California’s leading land-use and environmental attorneys.

Tim has spoken at annual meetings, conferences and conventions of, among others, the American Bar Association, American Institute of Architects, American Planning Association, California State Bar Real Estate Section, California State Bar Trusts and Estates Section, National Association of Real Estate Editors, Practicing Law Institute, California Association of Appellate Lawyers, Urban Land Institute, California City Managers Foundation, Association of Corporate Counsel, and California Coalition for Compassionate Care. In addition to the topics of planning, development, sustainability and the environment, related to his legal career, Tim is a frequent speaker to legal and business gatherings on topics of human potential, fulfilled living, and conscious dying.

Transformative Listening

Tim’s currently most requested talk is Transformative Listening, in which he describes how one of the most fundamental human competencies in establishing and maintaining relationships – listening – has become a lost art. Tim shares what he has learned about listening from his experiences as a 37 year veteran of law practice, a 20 year cancer survivor, a parent and husband and an eight year hospice volunteer. Tim demonstrates how to build listening skills that allow you to break through communication barriers that separate you from authentic relationships and fulfilled living.

Author and Blogger

Tim is the author of #DEATH tweet, Book 01 – A Well Lived Life through 140 Perspectives on Death and Its Teachings and #DEATH tweet, Book 02 – 140 Perspectives on Being a Supportive Witness to the End of Life. He currently is writing his third book, with his wife Nancy, #DOG tweet – 140 Perspectives on What Our Dogs Teach Us About Being Human. In addition to his monthly columns for the Daily Journal, Tim also blogs on life and death issues at Coaching Counsel.

Pro-Track Profile

I had a chance to talk with Tim at a recent Pro-Track 2012 class. I asked him about his background as a native of the Bay Area, his legal career and life since he was diagnosed with cancer 20 years ago. He told me about his work with the dying in hospices and what career professionals can learn from this. To hear what he told me, click on the podcast icon below.

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I help edit SPEAKER Magazine for the National Speakers Association (NSA). Each month I curate the Relevant Resources column – a list of time-saving tools and technologies.

The January/February edition lists books recommended by NSA members as inspiration for the New Year.

Go Ahead and Laugh: A Serious Guide to Speaking with Humor, by Rich Hopkins

Having trouble finding your funny bone? Go Ahead and Laugh takes a unique approach to understanding how to add humor to any speech and enhance your message. Hopkins provides a step-by-step breakdown of 11 different speeches, along with a few bonuses, to get your audiences laughing. If you want to be funnier, implement techniques to make your speeches more effective, or just see great examples of humor in action, this book is perfect.

The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, by Christopher Booker

People spend a phenomenal amount of time listening to stories, and we respond strongly to well-told stories. This monumental 720-page book reveals the seven basic plots latent in the minds of any audience. Knowing these archetypes and how they operate, allows speakers to craft presentations that spur action.

World Wide Rave, by David Meerman Scott

Jam-packed with brilliant insights and practical ways to propel a brand world-wide. Check out this book if you’re looking for the latest approaches to help clients or audiences powerfully position or expand their branding presence in the marketplace. Scott shows you how to use new media/social media to build a “rave” following by applying his six dynamic “Rules of the Rave.”

The Millionaire Messenger, by Brendon Burchard

Want to uncover the strategies successful people use to position themselves as experts? Burchard’s advice is especially important to professional speakers, as he covers how to package your message, deliver value to your audience, and build a profitable business as an industry expert. His story resonates with new and veteran speakers, and he provides invaluable suggestions to help you get ahead in today’s competitive marketplace.

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, by Dan Roam

Can drawing on a humble napkin be just as powerful as or more powerful than using PowerPoint slides to communicate your ideas? This visual thinking is a great tool for working though complex business ideas and brainstorming to help you think outside the box. In his book, Roam demonstrates that everyone is born with a talent for visual thinking, even those who swear they can’t draw.

Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences, by Nancy Duarte

Nancy Duarte wrote Slide:ology and became the Queen of PowerPoint. In her latest book, Resonate, she explains how to understand audiences, create persuasive content and structure a talk before firing up PowerPoint. By leveraging techniques typically reserved for cinema and literature, you’ll learn how to transform an ordinary presentation into an engaging journey. Check out her unique analysis of presentations using ‘Sparklines’ and see how you measure up.

On Apology, by Aaron Lazare

Popes, politicians, powerful executives, professional speakers–we all need to be fluent in the most graceful and profound of all human exchanges; a genuine apology. Lazare analyzes apologies—both effective and ineffective—and explores how a sincere apology can heal and serve “not an end but a new beginning.” On Apology includes insightful stories from people around the world, current events, literature and history.

Get Rich Click! The Ultimate Guide to Making Money on the Internet, by Marc Ostrofsky

This book will change how people think about the role of the Internet in business and how to make a profit online. Ostrofsky introduces readers to the reality of online business and offers tools to succeed. Some action items are easy as double-checking how your website is structured; others involve big-picture strategy. Get Rich Click! covers everything from saving money to making money with your social media efforts, AdWords, SEO, affiliate marketing, mobile apps and Internet video.

You can subscribe to SPEAKER magazine on the NSA website.

I download podcasts and listen to them on my drive to work. Today, driving my 16-year-old car which has any number of replacement auto parts keeping it on the road, listening to a 3-year-old Apple iPod, I heard two stories which described how electronics and auto parts are manufactured in China and America. Apart a clearer understanding about where the things I use in my daily life are made, I was struck by the diametrically opposed nature of Chinese and American manufacturing. Really, it was night and day. Click on the links below and listen to the podcasts for yourself. Both stories make for very compelling listening.

This American Life: Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory

Mike Daisey was a self-described “worshiper in the cult of Mac.” Then he saw some photos from a new iPhone, taken by workers at the factory where it was made. Mike wondered: Who makes all my crap? He traveled to China to find out.

He visited the Foxconn assembly plant in Shenzhen, a city of 14 million that did not exist 30 years ago, the third largest city in China that almost no-one in the West has heard of. It’s where, Daisey says, “all our electronic crap comes from … Shenzen looks like Blade Runner threw up on itself.”

What he found there was the “back to the future” nature of Dickensian-style labor-intensive assembly plants where all the PCs, laptops, cell phones, tablets and MP3 players come from. These vast assembly plants employ tens of thousands of people in each building:

… a creature of the first world, I expect a factory making complex electronics will have the sound of machinery. But in a place where the cost of labor is effectively zero, anything that can be made by hand is made by hand. No matter how complex your electronics are, they are assembled by thousands and thousands of tiny little fingers working in concert. And in those vast spaces the only sound is the sound of bodies in constant, unending motion.

Daisey concludes:

How often do we wish more things were hand-made? We talk about that all the time, don’t we? “I wish it was like the old days, I wish things had that human touch…” But that’s not true. There are more hand-made things now than there have ever been in the history of the world. Everything is hand-made. I know, I have been there, I have seen the workers laying in parts thinner than human hair, one after another after another. Everything is hand-made.

NPR Planet Money: The Transformation Of American Factory Jobs

In American factories nothing is hand-made. Lacking cadres of rural migrants willing to work 16 hour days and sleep in cramped dorms, companies that are still manufacturing Stateside have replaced people with machines.

A decade ago, life in Greenville, South Carolina was organized around the cotton mills. Each mill had its own village, its own church, its own bar. These places were abandoned over the past decade as mill after mill went out of business. In the old Greenville the mills ran three shifts a day, and, as in China today, people with minimal education could work in a factory and make a living.

That was then, this is now.

There are still factories in Greenville, such as the Standard Motor Products plant that makes replacement parts for car engines. NPR reporter Adam Davidson expected to find a motor parts factory filled with big, noisy machines stamping out parts and spewing oil. Instead he saw workers hunched over microscopes. It looked more like a science lab than an assembly line.

The workers need an encyclopedic knowledge of metals and microscopes, gauges and plugs. They manage machine tools that create items like fuel injectors, which require precision engineering.

The few unskilled workers, in contrast, are trained to run the automated machines in minutes and can be replaced if the cost of “human capital” exceeds the capital cost of the machine.

The question is, can the 11 million unskilled manufacturing workers in the U.S. acquire the training they need, or will they have to take a slow boat to China to find work?

Adam Davidson explores life in Greenville in more depth in The Atlantic magazine.

Alexandra Watkins is the Founder & Chief Innovation Officer at Eat My Words, a San Francisco based creative naming agency known for creating unforgettable brand names. The following post originally appeared in her blog and is reposted here with her express permission.

Announcing the most frightful brand name of 2011… the Head Scratcher of the Year goes to…

Ironically, the global search for Eat My Words’ annual Head Scratcher of the Year winner produced the disastrous mash-up of those very two words global + search: Glearch. This trainwreck of two perfectly good words is without a doubt, the worst brand name of 2011. Honorable mention goes to Qwikster (died a quik death), Helishopter (what the heli were they thinking?), and Fooducate (so similar to fornicate, it sounds like something you could be arrested for if you did it in the aisle of your local Safeway).

The unanimous response to Glearch is it conjures up terrifying images of Lurch, the freakishly tall and ghoulish manservant from the Addam’s Family, who never spoke, using only grunts, sighs, or simple gesticulations. This is never a good thing. Glearch also reminds people of the word, lurch, which has many unfortunate definitions. And it’s hard to spell… Glerch, Glurch, Glurruch… you shouldn’t need a search engine to find Glearch. Duh.

We admit that Glearch is actually a pretty cool tool. It lets you search by country, language, and/or by search engine. Clearly someone very smart created it. Unfortunately they were not as skilled when it came to creating the name. As with past Head Scratcher winners, including Xobni, Speesees, Shwowp, and Shryk, we suspect Glearch was the result of a drunken Scrabble game. Tip: Just because a domain name is available on GoDaddy for $9.95 does not mean that is what you should name your company.

As the winner of Eat My Words’ 2011 Head Scratcher of the Year award, Glearch will receive a freakishly tall gold plated trophy. (We’re also happy to give them some complimentary name consulting should they decide to glearch for a new name.)

Special props go to super sleuth Charles Knight, of AltSearchEngines, who tipped us off to the name Glearch, along with dozens of others clunkers, over the past few months. Charles suggested a new definition for Glearch: a verb meaning, to turn something wonderful into something terrible. We submitted “glearch” and its new definition to the Urban Dictionary, where you can now find it listed.

Please continue to send us bad names for our 2012 Head Scratcher contest. And if you want to make sure the next brand name you come up with doesn’t win that freakishly tall trophy, take the Eat My Words SMILE & SCRATCH name evaluation test to see if your name sucks. Of course, please contact us right away if your name does indeed suck. Operators are standing by.

Larry Dodd is a proven financial leader, consultant and trainer who applies an innovative, people-centered approach that helps the teams that he serves turn problems into business opportunities.

His professional career includes CFO roles with Robert Half’s CFO Services (consulting); Signature Properties and Meritage Homes. His client experience ranges from startups to established companies with revenues in excess of $1 billion. Larry’s industry knowledge spans health care, agriculture, auto racing, high technology, Major League Baseball, manufacturing, professional services and real estate development. His diverse array of clients are linked by a critical need to make a change in their business.

In 2011 Larry returned to his entrepreneurial roots by founding OpenPlaybook™, a consulting company specializing in change management consulting, management training and leadership coaching. OpenPlaybook helps companies and the people that lead them turn adversity into success, one team at a time. OpenPlaybook provides the leaders of change with the tools they need to unite the right team with the right vision; to discover and share individual team member strengths; and to provide a clear playbook outlining individual responsibilities and their impact on the team’s mission as a whole. The result is an effective team committed to the transformation process and to each other in a spirit of mutual accountability.

Pro-Track Profile

Larry honed his speaking and training skills by serving as an Instructor for Dale Carnegie Training where he taught hundreds of business people how to become more effective leaders and communicators by strengthening their human relations and public speaking skills. He is also a polished public speaker and management trainer. His topics include transforming organizations with strong, people-centered values; building stronger interpersonal relationships; developing and maximizing leadership skills; the business of running a Major League Baseball team and changing careers. In addition, he has served as a guest Instructor on Leadership for the University of San Francisco’s MBA in Sports Management Program.

To hear more about Larry’s background and what attracted him to the 2012 NSA Northern California Pro-Track program, click on the podcast icon below.

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Laura Stack is a personal productivity expert, author, and professional speaker. Her mission is to build high-performance productivity cultures in organizations by creating Maximum Results in Minimum Time®. She is the president of The Productivity Pro®, Inc., a time management training firm, specializing in productivity improvement in high-stress organizations as well as the current president of the National Speakers Association.

Laura brought the spirit of Cavett Robert alive on Saturday for the 100 members and guests of the Northern California chapter who were lucky enough to attend an awesome meeting to kick-off 2012. “The spirit of Cavett is”, Laura said, “all about making the pie larger, and which other association would have members who openly share their best trade secrets with everyone else?”

And Laura shared, boy, how she shared!

Laura has built a successful business as The Productivity Pro® with clients such as Microsoft and DayTimer as well as a growing number of individual fans. Her 14,000 followers on Twitter receive a tip of the day listing “Time Management Skills for Maximum Results in Minimum Time”.

In fact, when the 2008 recession hit and her corporate business dried up, Laura actively sought out consumers and has focused her website around sales of consumer-friendly $39-$79 price-point downloadable audio and video products that have made her a quarter-of-a-million-dollars in income since then.

Here’s how she did it.

Build a website focused around online products

In addition to offering the usual speakers menu choices of keynote, seminars and coaching services, Laura’s website focuses on webinars, video training is, and courseware that can be ordered online. Here’s her step-by-step guide on how anyone can duplicate her success using these methods.

The secrets of selling on-line webinars

• Become a subject matter expert in your chosen topic.
• Choose a package like GoToWebinar or WebEx.
• Find companies or associations who will promote your events to their lists. Expect that only 50% of those who sign up will actually attend. Give an Association discount of 20% and kickback 20% of the registration fee to the Association. Make sure you keep the e-mails of all those who register for your own list.
• Charge $39 for an individual webinar and offer a series discount of $119.



• Guard against multitasking by the audience with a vast number of graphically compelling PowerPoint slides. If your topic would typically use 35 slides in an auditorium, plan on having 125 slides for a webinar. Make use of polls, encourage audience responses in the question monitor and deliver at a fast pace to keep the audience’s attention.
• Avoid specific references to your slides in the webinar. This allows you to strip out the audio and sell it for $7.99 as an MP3.
• Never, ever, distribute the PowerPoint source files. Only send out PDF to prevent people bootlegging your seminars.
• Keep track of any comments and questions as a source of topics for future webinars.
• Set up a shopping cart on your site to take money from customers for the webinars. Laura uses Cyberstrong – a one-charge chart that does what she needs.
• Charge a $390 site license if multiple people at one location if would like to take the webinar. A $1,390 licence covers multiple locations. A $2,500/hr fee for custom webinars.
• Don’t distribute the link for the webinars. Instead once people register, enter their name and e-mail into the system and have it generate a reminder for them to login— this prevents people sending the login to their friends.
• Take the raw video file from the webinar and turn it into a product for people who are unable to make the live event. Post the video on Vimeo — invest in a $200 Vimeo Pro license so that you can password-protect the screening download which you tag as private. Put that password-protected link in a page on your site available from an e-learning drop-down menu.

For me, that last tip was worth the price of the whole day!

Make money from home selling video training

Laura’s second major money-spinner uses a green screen studio at home to record compelling video tutorials. Again, she shared a step-by-step guide.

• Purchase a green screen backdrop or paint the wall of your spare room with the appropriate paint.
• Make sure you have a suitable HD digital camera and tripod and a 64-bit desktop computer.
• Sign up for a community college class so you qualify for the student edition of the Adobe Premiere or Adobe visual communicator software package.
• Purchase a GoSpeak portable microphone system with a wireless transmitter for a lapel mike. (You don’t need the speakers, they are an added bonus for your next podium presentation.)
• Hire a designer from elance or fiverr.com to create custom backgrounds for your green screen.
• Place posters with cartoon faces around the room you record in so that you have an “audience” to relate to.
• Record your video training: stand in front of the green screen, plug the wireless mic into the camera which feeds audio and video to the PC where the Adobe software records a timeline of the presentation. In post-production you add lower thirds and a suitable backdrop. Leave pauses for group activity and learner response.
• Distribute these large video files to customers who purchase via YouSendIt.com or, if they require, burn a DVD and mail it.

I’ve just come across Alexei Kapterev’s 2007 slideshare presentation that has attracted over a million hits. Take a look:

Kapterev will be presenting on February 23, 2012 at the UK Speechwriters’ Guild London Spring Conference.

Dona M. Wong’s slim volume
is a beautifully printed guide to “The Do’s and Don’ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures”. As a former graphics director at the WSJ she set standards that made sense of complex data for readers. As a student of well-known PowerPoint critic Edward Tufte she takes the theories of the author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information out of the realm of academia and applies them in the world of modern finance and content-rich, data-intensive charts beloved of subject matter experts in the corporate world.

The book is a series of tutorials on all aspects of presenting data, from the choice of color and font to the correct way to align numbers and represent proportions in pie charts. It’s all deceptively simple – a simplicity which so often evades the grasp of the engineering or financial professional who is at a loss to communicate the essence of their data in a way people can understand and avoids burying the audience in detail:

Examples of confusing, misleading, and ineffective graphics are everywhere today. Many charts have sophisticated and intelligent underlying information , but the presentation fails to convey the intended message.

Each page of Wong’s book serves as a ready reference on the right way to communicate information.

Three essential elements of good information graphics

Wong states that good graphics are built on three elements:

1. Rich content – to bring meaning to the graphic.
2. Inviting visualization – that interprets the content and highlights the essence of the information for the audience.
3. Sophisticated execution – that brings the content and graphics to life.

Essential steps to create effective charts

The basics on which the book is based are worth memorizing as an antidote to clients who feel a need to do a data dump on an audience. In summary:

Start with authoritative sources … identify your key message … filter and simplify the data … choose the right chart type to present the data … review the outcome against the sources … let the data speak for itself … create the right comparisons … supply a reference point to frame the data … follow basic rules of legibility.

Do’s and Don’ts

The bulk of the book is a series of Do’s and Don’ts that examine each type of chart in turn. For example, with pie charts, Wong makes it clear why the largest segment should always be placed to the right of the 12 o’clock position:

It’s astonishing how often graphics designers ignore this simple rule and print counter-intuitive charts, as in this example published in the FT on Saturday December 17 (p. 12):

Low-hanging fruit

In fact, finding charts to improve is not a problem. Go browse the PowerPoint archives or visit the financial and engineering web pages in your organization. Armed with a copy of this book you’ll find lots of low-hanging watermelons to perform a makeover on, and score some brownie points with the VP of Communications in the process.