A vast majority of employees in high-tech companies are Subject Matter Experts. In the training world they are known as ‘SMEs” (rhymes with please). They are engineering and technical staff with a deep, hard-won, specialist knowledge of one aspect of technology. Without SMEs there would be no high-tech. They are, for many companies, “the noble sinews of our power” (as Shakespeare’s Henry V termed the soldiers he marshaled at Agincourt). They are Archilochus’s quintessential Hedgehog’s who know one big thing better than anyone else.

The challenge for the communications professional is to:

a) Get them to summarize their vast body of knowledge into a sound-bite or elevator pitch which can be included with the data from a dozen other Hedgehog’s into a few remarks by the CEO.

b) Encourage them to talk to each other and share their specialist views of the world with colleagues in different disciplines. Only connect. Develop synergies between them.

One approach to these tasks is discussed in a useful article by Liz Ryan in the September 16 Business Week. She counsels that the communications professional with the ear of the CEO can synthesize the input of multiple SMEs and, by encouraging communication between them, “create an informal in-house council of thought leaders”.

In career terms the person who functions as the nexus must be sure to give full credit to everyone who contributes.

Light relief from the inane world of corporate PowerPoint in this delightful European satire on graphics gone wild:

The video is inspired by Jessica Hagy’s wonderful Indexed blog.

Media trainer and speaker, TJ Walker, warns against cramming too many points into a speech. “The bigger a corporation or organization you are in, the harder the pull will be on you to add more and more points to your presentation. There won’t be anyone advocating for you to have fewer message points. Everyone will be making a forceful and compelling case to add more messages. There is only one little flaw with this strategy—it doesn’t work on audience members.”

Walker advocates no more than 5 points in a speech, which means the writer has to learn how to decline the request from the marketing director for 15 points, the sales director asking for 10 points and legal wanting some other clauses or conditionals added. Adding points to a speech is the easy option. No tough decisions to make. Pleases everyone in manamgement, but puts the audience to sleep.

TJ outlines the way a professional should approach this:

“Instead of setting yourself up for failure, you need to list all of your message points in a numbered fashion and then go though them all and put them in priority. Isolate your top five ideas. Those are the ideas you should speak about. All of the other ideas you can give in a handout, email people in a slide format, give them a t-shirt with the bullet points on it—whatever! Just don’t talk about more than five in your actual spoke presentation.”

Sound advice. Read the full article.

My blog has featured dozens of podcasts, from informal 3-5 minute interviews to recordings of full-length presentations. I’ve podcast from the convention floor, the corner store and the podium.

I’m amazed that more professional speakers, trainers, workshop leaders and people with a message don’t podcast. It’s fun. It’s easy. It’s happening now.

And it’s time I shared with people just what is involved in creating a podcast.

So I’ve scheduled three podcasting workshops between September and February.

Podcasting 101 for Small Business Owners

Thursday September 18 from 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM
SBA Entrepreneur Center, 455 Market St., San Francisco.

As part of the Gizmology series being offered by the Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association and the San Francisco Small Business Association I’ll be teaching a FREE evening workshop in podcasting.

We’ll start the evening with a discussion about the advantages of podcasting. Do you want your voice heard around the world? To have people tune in and hear you without any extra travel? Podcasting does this. Simply by putting an audio recording on a Web site and then letting people subscribe to a “feed,” you’ll have a powerful way to build a worldwide listening audience. The highlight of the class with be a hands-on demonstration. I’ll record some of the discussion and show everyone, step-by-step, how to make this into a podcast which we’ll access from iTunes. It should be a lot of fun.

Although the event is offered for free, you do need to register.

BizTechDay – Technology Day for Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs

Saturday, October 25, 2008 from 08:00 AM – 06:00 PM
Hilton Hotel, 333 O’Farrell Street, San Francisco.

This all-day workshop includes the same class I will teach on September 18, and more. BiztechDay is a packed with educational seminars, workshops and panel discussions by top technology and business experts (like me!) all focused on how to grow your business using the power of the Internet & Web 2.0 technologies. Check out more details.

Registration before Sept 15 is $149 / After Sept 15 is $249 – so what are you waiting for?

Click here to register.

The 2009 Ragan Speechwriters Conference

Thursday, February 11, 2009 from 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM
The Mayflower Hotel, Washington DC

Yes, in the very hotel that ex-NY Governor Elliott Spitzer chose for the tryst which ended his career and just a few blocks from the White House where President Richard Nixon recorded every conversation in the Oval Office (although I’m not sure he planned to use them as podcasts!) I’ll be giving a workshop titled Get more mileage for your work: Repurposing a speech for new media as part of the annual Speechwriters Conference.

This stellar event features keynotes by legendary JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen and Robert Schlesinger, author of the excellent history of Presidental speechwriters White House Ghosts.

The conference runs Feb 11-13 and my talk is part of the Advanced Speechwriting track.

How I became a magazine publisher

I never thought that a chance meeting on a Boston bus would lead to me having anything in common with Steve Forbes, Oprah Winfrey and Jann Wenner. But, like the publishers of FORBES, O and Rolling Stone, I’m now a magazine publisher.

It all began the day I met Udi Chatow, part of the MagCloud project team at Hewlett-Packard. We were attending the annual HP TechCon symposium. Udi told me how MagCloud enables anyone to publish a magazine. The team were looking for non-profit associations to test the service. As the President of the non-profit Northern California National Speakers Association I knew our association needed a showcase for members’ articles about public speaking. Within a few short weeks we had selected five articles, sourced some illustrations from a stock photo website and, with design help from Meghan Kennedy in HP Labs, created the inaugural edition. Professionally Speaking is a 20-page color magazine that’s available for purchase from magcloud.com. Best of all, there was none of the up-front cost associated with printing.

We announced the Summer 2008 edition of Professionally Speaking on June 13, 2008. Our Fall 2008 edition will be published in September.

MagCloud: the future of magazine publishing

MagCloud is a new business incubation resulting from collaboration between HP Labs and HP’s Corporate Ventures team. It’s where the world wide web meets the world of printing. MagCloud offers publishers the ability to take digitized magazines and economically promote, sell, print and fulfill them on demand.

It costs you nothing to publish a magazine on MagCloud.com. The service lets you upload a high-resolution PDF and MagCloud takes care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management and more. The MagCloud website functions as a virtual newsstand, where readers can browse and, using PayPal or a credit card, order publications. The publisher specifies a markup on each copy sold, which MagCloud collects and pays the publisher at the end of each month.

MagCloud uses HP Indigo digital press technology to custom-print each issue when it’s ordered. Printing on demand means no big print runs, which means no pre-publication expense. The resulting magazines are in gorgeous full color on 80lb paper.

This is a breakthrough for niche publications – the small ‘zines’ which form the long tail of the magazine publishing world. It’s also an interesting opportunity for large publishers. They are now free to experiment and create riskier products and see if they can find an audience.

The New Economics of Magazines

The MagCloud development team is looking at much more than printing technology. They are researching the fundamental economics of magazine publishing. Team member and economist Kay-Yut Chen states:

“MagCloud is enabling a completely new kind of print economics. It is reducing the distance between the publisher, the subscriber and the advertiser compared to traditional magazines. In the traditional model, someone who wants to run an advertisement in, say TIME Magazine, has to engage in a labor-intensive negotiation with high transaction costs. The automation we’re building into the MagCloud system means even a very small publisher and small advertiser can do business cost-effectively.”

By simplifying all aspects of the publishing process MagCloud benefits publishers, subscribers and advertisers – making a whole Print 2.0 ecosystem much more efficient than the existing model.

MagCloud’s Guiding Principle

The guiding principle of the project is that anyone can be a publisher. What they will do as publishers remains to be seen. “MagCloud is an enabling platform,” states Udi Chatow. “People are finding new opportunities that did not exist before. We don’t want to second guess what they will be.”

MagCloud Today

The project is still in early Beta stage. What this means in practice is that anyone can register on the site and browse and purchase magazines. Publisher capability is by invitation only, though rumor has it that invitations are distributed liberally. The reason is the development team is seeding a new market. They are looking for publishers who serve specific niches.

The world first heard about MagCloud when a couple of blogs broke the news in mid-June. Since then literally thousands of requests to publish have been received. They come from an astounding variety of organizations – from juggling associations to Stanford University athletics; from cartoonists to photographers.

SFentrepreneur visits HP Labs

Following a June 24th visit by 20 members of the Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association to HP Labs, SFentrepreneur founder Edith Yeung organized a visit by 40 members of her organization on August 21st.

The evening visit took in a talk by Udi and a tour of the Indigo printing press and a panel session where magazine publishers shared insights. I spoke about the experience of creating Professionally Speaking. Edith gave every member of the audience a complimentary copy of SFentrepreneur.

There was an incredible level of interest by these entrepreneurs. Many saw how a magazine could serve their niche.

The highlight of the evening was when the MagCloud team surprised us with a special 8-page souvenir magazine of photographs of the event they’d taken during the reception and tour. This is a great example of how MagCloud extends the boundaries of publishing. Training program managers and conference organizers can create just-in-time magazines for events.

What’s unique about MagCloud

Publishers can repurpose and monetize online and user-generated content. Printing costs are lower for small magazine and promotional runs of a few dozen, a few hundred or even a few thousand copies. There are automated web based ordering and print management services to take the headaches out of production. Financial transactions between buyers and the publishers are handled automatically to ease the flow of money to the bottom line. The site also offers a unique demand creation vehicle that publishers can showcase. It all adds up to the pleasure and prestige of seeing yourself in print at very low cost. It’s the people’s printing press.

Finally, it solves the back-issue problem for publishers. Virtual magazines never go out of print and readers can order any copy at any time from any where as long as it remains posted to magcloud.com.

Readers are free to enjoy a virtual magazine newsstand in the cloud. They can access a wide array of specialized and unique content in a printed magazine format that is not readily available elsewhere. If they find something they would like to order, it’s printed on demand and delivered directly to their mailbox.

Green Magazine Publishing

By taking advantage of print on demand, magazines are only printed by people who actually intend to read them.. This is much more environmentally friendly than the current magazine industry where an incredible 60% of the 3.8 billion magazines delivered to news-stands in the USA are never sold (or read). That’s over 2.3 billion wasted magazines that end up in recycling.

Variable print technology and future of MagCloud

This online marketplace of digital magazines holds the same promise as iTunes for music lovers. It allows readers the opportunity to sample content and purchase only what they need to read. iTunes means you no longer buy a whole album to just listen to a song or two. MagCloud means publishers have the opportunity to offer readers the option to just purchase the one or two articles they are interested in from any issue.

Imagine a future magazine marketplace where readers are free to create ‘mash-ups’ of content from a wide variety of sources. Magazines will be tailored from news articles, blog postings, book excerpts, event schedules, even friends’ recommendations for music, movies, books and more. The magazine is personal again.

No amount of marketing analysis can predict where MagCloud will go. Expect the unexpected. Variable print technology allows the freedom to experiment. “Every page can be different,” says MagCloud engineer Wei Koh. “A publisher is no longer limited to designing only one magazine. They have the option to personalize copies for each subscriber. This has exciting possibilities. We’ve only just scratched the surface.”

Consider a few options:

• Targeted advertising by zip code give national publications the option to insert low cost ads from regional companies.
• Editorial pages geared to certain consumers. A restaurant review for your town inserted in a national food publication.
• Photographs of subscribers on a one-off cover (Congratulations! You are Person of the Year.)

Your call

If you’ve read this far you are obviously interested in MagCloud. You probably have interests, hobbies, association colleagues or an attic filled with grandfather’s photographs which could be digitized and published. Perhaps your kids soccer team needs an end of season souvenir with articles and photographs. Or you could thrill your relatives at this summer’s family reunion with a magazine of the clan. Or perhaps you want to launch a magazine to support your neighborhood or other political campaign. What are you waiting for? Simply go to www.magcloud.com, and complete the request for a publisher invitation.

There’s a publishers guide that walks you through the process.

It’s available as a free download from the site, or for purchase as a printed magazine. What else did you expect?

Wimbledon tennis has concluded for another year, the Tour de France is rolling through the French countryside, the boys of summer are playing on baseball diamonds and the world awaits the start of the Olympics in a few weeks. Sport is filling the airwaves and, as I’ve noted before, is a common topic in business circles.

The proclivity for senior executives to attribute their success in business to lessons learned as a team sports player is discussed by Lucy Kellaway in Monday’s Financial Times.

Kellaway reports that a recent survey of British business leaders found that

Nearly half of the chief executives of the biggest British companies have won awards for their sporting prowess – twice as many as have any academic trophies. Most of them were captain of football or rugby at school or at college and quite a few went on to play for their county.

Executives credit the teamwork learned on the playing field for later business success.

Kellaway is not convinced. In her view, sports encourage delusions of grandeur, a stifling conformity and an inability to communicate clearly:

Sportsmen and CEOs also both make a hash of the Queen’s English. Each generates its own jargon and then feels compelled to borrow the jargon of the other. Sport is responsible for some of the most grating phrases in business, including ballparks, level playing fields, stepping up to the plate, bench strength, getting to first base, raising the bar and playing hardball. Footballers, meanwhile, are starting to talk like management consultants: David Beckham now says “going forward” every time he opens his mouth.

Finally, she points to the problems women have getting ahead in the business-world being exacerbated by the jock culture of boardrooms dominated by the ethos of the locker room.

I’m not a sports fan myself. And look, I’m not a CEO. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

The saving grace for businessmen using sporting cliches is that they are marginally less offensive than military ones. Despite the fact that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.

I’ve had a lot of fun working with The Singer’s Gym, a San Francisco based group of musicians and voice coaches who are dedicated to inspired, connected singing. They work with professional and non-professional singers in an environment that allows each singer experience full involvement, spontaneity and vitality in the practice and performance of vocal music. They call this their Gym. They work out in their gym, challenge people, who get stronger — at singing.

Now, as someone who is tone deaf and never been able to carry a tune for more than a couple of bars in my life (maybe why I like singing along with Bob Dylan?) I was not working on my vocal chords with them.

Rather, I helped Ben and the team craft a Vision Statement Movie to express the essence of what they are, and what they offer. I used the technology developed by Malcolm Cohan and the Rocketship. We call it Consensus – offering any group a way to communicate their vision and inspire others to share it. The result is a Vision Statement Movie created by a group. The participants hold a positive vision for a specific outcome, or when a challenge is resolved, or an endeavor realized. Participants volunteer a Brave Statement of their own vision, and the movie is written, compiled and produced as the result of a simple hour-long meeting.

The result can be seen below. Take a look. Compare it to the usual ‘mission statement’ organizations and teams offer to the world. If you like what you see and you’d like to discuss how your team can develop a movie like this, drop me a line.

The New York Times reports that the typical U.S. executive still wastes six weeks a year searching through paper piles and e-mail! Got better things to do with your time?

Since 1988, Eve Abbott has pioneered brain-based productivity systems for executives, managers and business owners. A Brain New Way to Work gets teams working at least 25% more productively through lively programs and practical consultations.

Eve is the author of How to Do Space Age Work with a Stone Age Brain ™. She earned her degree in Sociology and Psychology from the University of California and holds a Lifetime Adult Teaching Credential.

Eve is a popular guest on TV and Radio. Her expertise appears in The New York Times articles and she writes the ‘Business Wise’ column for the nationwide Business Journals.

When speaking, Eve combines her sense of humor with the latest in brain research to guarantee a fun and practical program for conferences ranging from Builder/Architect to Women Leaders 2008.

Eve says “My personal mission is saving every working person in America an hour a day so they have more time for life. My professional objective is converting the 12% of productivity wasted from information overload to your enterprise’s profits, where it belongs.”

S. C. Johnson & Son, Inc., Lotus Construction, Nixon Peabody, LLP and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency choose A Brain New Way to Work’s seminars for solutions to their employee’s challenges.

Watch Eve

As she introduces her topic in this video:

Listen to Eve

As she tells me about her work and how the NSA/NC Pro-Track class is helping her.

To hear my interview with Eve, click on the icon below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 4:28 — 1.0MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

I’m delighted to have helped publish a new magazine from the Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association (NSA/NC). This full-color magazine is a first for an NSA chapter.

The inaugural edition features articles by prominent members of NSA/NC. Our Chapter members are experts in many areas, from performance skills coaching to negotiation tactics, speechwriting, life balance, teambuilding and more.

Why Professionally Speaking?

First, let me say I did *not* name the magazine after my own blog! The name was taken from the last printed newsletter the chapter produced in 2003.

The intended purpose of the magazine is to showcase our chapter as an association of experts. It gives members a professionally produced vehicle in which to publish. The magazine helps us to build connections to key decision makers in the meetings industry and our affiliate associations.

Buy your copy today

We plan to make Professionally Speaking a quarterly publication. It will be distributed free of charge to chapter members. Costs will be covered by sales to non-members and by advertising. Copies are available for purchase at $4.50 + postage. Go to www.nsanc.org and buy a copy right now!

Publishing your own magazine

The opportunity to produce and print this magazine arose unexpectedly in mid-May when we were approached by Hewlett-Packard (HP). They were interested in finding a small association to help test their new “MagCloud” technology for print-on-demand. HP offered us support to help produce the magazine, but we had to go to press by early June when they announced MagCloud to the world (www.magcloud.com.)

Print on demand will revolutionize the magazine industry

MagCloud opens up the ‘long tail’ of magazine publishing for small associations like NSA/NC (we have 120 members) or even individuals. It represents an interesting new business opportunity. The MagCloud system from HP allows anyone to create and publish a high-quality color magazine with very little in the way of up-front costs.

HP’s innovative MagCloud system makes magazine publishing available to anyone with a message to share. This describes most of the members of the National Speakers Association. Until now many color magazines have been printed on traditional offset litho presses which, like books, require costly set-up and a large minimum print run. HP’s commercial digital printing technology makes it economical to print a single copy of a magazine whenever a subscriber orders one.

This means people who currently produce ezines or online newsletters can now consider offering content to their audience in the form of a printed magazine. Many of us are finding it increasingly difficult to grab people’s attention online. There’s value in a color magazine delivered to the door.

Make money with your own magazine

MagCloud allows you to focus on creating the content for your own magazine. All you have to do is upload a PDF and MagCloud takes care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management, and more. There’s none of the hassles with distribution, bulk mailing and minimum print runs. Charge subscribers a mark-up above the production cost to earn a profit on each copy sold. Carry advertising for yet another source of income.

(Full disclosure: I work as a speechwriter in the executive communications department at HP and support the director of HP’s research labs, where MagCloud was developed.)

MagCloud is currently open to publishers by invitation only.

Sooner or later all good things come to an end. Winners stumble, the mighty are fallen. People are at the top of their game for only so long. Companies that are the biggest, bestest, fastest growing one year are in the toilet the next.

Literature is filled with stories that teach this lesson. Shakespearean tragedies like Lear and Macbeth detail the challenges faced by those in positions of power.

In contrast, the message of the motivational speakers and books in the modern business world teach how to win, win, win. It’s all upside, baby. They ignore, or minimize, the downside.

So it is refreshing to read Stall Points: Most Companies Stop Growing–Yours Doesn’t Have To by Matthew Olsen and Derek van Bever. This book examines the fundamental reasons why revenue growth often stalls in successful companies. They identify four main reasons:

1. “Premium position captivity” – when a market leader fails to respond to a low-cost competitor.
2. “Innovation Management Breakdown” – where new product development fails to deliver an ROI.
3. “Premature core abandonment” – where growth opportunities in the core franchise are not exploited or new competitive challenges are ignored.
4. “Talent bench shortfall” – where a company withers due to a lack of leaders and staff able to execute strategy.

It’s interesting to review the history Silicon Valley companies and spot candidates for each of these mistakes. I would suggest that, in turn, we can see Sun Microsystems’s failure to anticipate the effect of Linux (#1); Xerox PARC’s famous inability to capitalize on everything from the mouse to the GUI (#2); MicroPro’s failure to hold on to the WordStar franchise in the 1980’s (#3); HP’s decision to go outside the company for the last two CEO’s (#4). In the latter case it can be argued that the stall resulting from the actions of the first candidate has been amply rectified by the actions of the second. The company Board learned from their mistakes.

(Full disclosure: I have not worked for Xerox PARC; at the others I had a ringside seat.)

What’s fascinating to consider are some of Olsen & van Bever’s prescriptions to avoid these all-to-common errors. These include:

• Being willing to review “belief’s that are so obvious and accepted that it is no longer politic to debate them.” Something most business cultures are loath to do.
• Writing a “pre-mortem analysis” – a newspaper account five years in the future describing why the company succeeded, and another account detailing why it failed. Not a prescribed activity by the power-of-positive-thinking brigade.
• Setting up a high-level “Shadow Cabinet” to discuss alternatives to current strategy and look for red flag indicators.

These are challenging ideas. One wonders if the mainstream American attitude of winning at all costs can stomach the process. In many organizations it’s considered career suicide to point out when the Emperor has no clothes. Think the DoD and Department of State. Likewise, East Coast financial institutions at the core of the current credit market melt-down seemed to lack anyone with this ability. They don’t hand out no stinkin’ bonus packages down on Wall Street for pointing out how things could go pear shaped. But at least they have the option to short the future and make a dime in the process.

Fortunately, it’s more in the nature of Silicon Valley to encourage and reward disruptive innovation. Out here, companies don’t stall as much as crash and burn. Out of the ashes, new ones are built. In the current wave of consolidations around the high-tech landscape there’s plenty of people making a good living catching the guys who are in stall mode and revving up the engines. In doing this, they often implement many of the solutions Olsen and van Bever proscribe: reviewing core assumptions; testing alternatives; scenario planning; zero-sum budgeting.

Driven by the relentless pace of technological change, business models learn from failure and reinvent. This is the competitive advantage of Silicon Valley.