Thanks to Sociological Images for an eye-opening display of vintage ads for cocaine and opium products.

This is normal today

That was normal back then

They note that what is considered socially “acceptable” changes over time:

..it’s no secret that products with cocaine, marijuana, opium, and other now-banned substances were at one time sold openly, often as medicines. The changes in attitudes toward these products, from entirely acceptable and even beneficial to inherently harmful and addicting, is a great example of social construction. While certainly opium and cocaine have negative effects on some people, so do other substances that remained legal (or were re-legalized, in the case of alcohol).

I found one of the most enjoyable things about watching Mad Men was seeing the outrageous behavior of “normal” people in the early 1960’s – women who were 7 months pregnant sipping martini’s and smoking to “calm their nerves”; driving without seat belts; the treatment of women and minorities in the workplace.

What will our grandchildren find shocking about everyday aspects of our world, when they look back 100 years from now?

Will they be wondering why we drove private automobiles that ran on fossil fuels and killed 1.2 million a year worldwide in traffic accidents; or ate meat which sucks up plant food that could feed five times the number of people; or tolerated a world where the richest 1% of the globe own 40% of all wealth; or watched TV for an average of 151 hours a month; or allowed commercial TV stations to show 3 hours of advertising for every 10 hours of programming; or lived in a world with a stockpile over 23,000 nuclear weapons.

I wonder what, apart from all of that, will our grandchildren find surprising or shocking about the way we live now?

What do you think?

Jack Sramek is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and a former Marine Corps Fighter Pilot. He flew 125 combat missions in Vietnam as a member of the famous “Blacksheep Squadron” and served as the personal aide to Lt. General Lewis W. Walt, commander of all Marines in Vietnam. Upon leaving the Marine Corps, he continued flying as a pilot with Trans World Airlines, completing a 30 year career.

In parallel with his position at TWA, he obtained a California Real Estate Broker’s license in 1974. Remembering his parents’ experience as owners of a 50 acre farm near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which they sold at retirement for 100 times more than they had initially paid for it, he began a career in Land Banking. He watched Orange County and the San Jose area go from agricultural land to what they are today, as urban growth multiplied land values. Bob Hope, Gene Autrey, Roy Rogers and others built huge fortunes by buying and holding land in the path of growth.

Strategic land banking has been the best kept secret in the investment community. Few people are aware of how, why and where to take advantage of this simple supply and demand option or the fact that they can use their IRA, 401(k) or other investment funds to acquire pre-development land.

With one out of every eight people in the United States living in California, Jack is on a mission to teach people how to use this vehicle for diversification, college educations, retirement or general wealth accumulation. He frequently speaks professionally on the subject, is honing his skills at Pro-Track and is presently completing a book on how to use land banking to “hatch a million dollar nest egg.”

Jack can be reached at Jack@StirlingSP.com
His website is www.StrategicLandBanking.com.

To hear what he told me about his background and his reasons for enrolling in Pro-Track, click on the podcast icon below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 4:50 — 1.1MB)

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“I think heckling is something the people of Britain can well be proud of…” – Joseph Strick, documentary film maker, 1966

A BBC documentary film caught priceless moments in the 1966 British election. Politicians mixed it up with vocal members of the electorate who have no compunction about joining in the debate from the audience in the time honored tradition of “heckling”.

There’s a marked contrast with the recent “Tea Party” interruptions in the US. Back in 1966 Britain, the dialog, however robust and vocal, involves a shared understanding of the rules of the game between the speaker, the heckler and the audience. Save for the anarchists, the protesters often relish engaging in dialog. Even when it becomes violent the policemen have smiles on their faces and let the protesters finish their cigarettes before bundling them into the police car. In the US it was mere confrontation, with none of the repartee displayed by heckler and speaker in some of the scenes in this fascinating documentary.

Combining the wit of a stand-up comedian with the vocal variety of a fairground barker, these British politicians show how effective public speakers can deal with interruptions by working the bond with the audience and appealing to their supporters, who intervene on behalf of the speaker to silence dissent.

It’s a long-gone world of duffel coats and briar pipes, when everyone seemed to be having a bad hair day.

Read the BBC blog and watch the fascinating 40 minute video.

Nancy Duarte (whose company designed the slides in “An Inconvenient Truth”) did a riveting analysis of Steve Ballmer’s Windows 7 launch speech transcript.

She color-coded Apple campaign references; unnecessary filler words or phrases; confusing words, phrases or statistics; Ballmer’s references to himself; upgrade fixes problems, and bold statements with no supporting information.

Nancy’s analysis is a useful technique for all professional speakers to critique their own presentations and see where there is room for improvement.

(Thanks to Rebecca Morgan of SpeakerNetNews for flagging this!)

No sooner had I posted the announcement about going to the 2010 Ragan Speechwriters Conference than word came from the organizers that the event has been canceled due to the snowstorms that have hit the Washington DC area.

I was looking forward to presenting at the event and meeting colleagues. Seeing the city under a blanket of snow would have been an added bonus.

Photo: Katja Schulz

I assume this will be rescheduled for later in the year, if we’re lucky it’ll be in cherry blossom season.

Photo: gin soak

I’m off this week to the 2010 Ragan Speechwriters Conference in Washington DC. It’ll be my fourth conference and the second one at which I’ve presented. As in 2009, I’ll be podcasting interviews with attendees and presenters and grabbing some video with my Flip video camera to post to YouTube. It all fits with the theme of my own presentation, scheduled for 8:30amFriday:

Using social media tools to magnify the impact of your speech

Do you want to augment the power of your client’s speech before, during and after the presentation? Social media tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and blogs offer exciting and effective ways to boost mindshare–if you leverage them correctly. The online audience for a talk can be many times the size of, and as important as, the audience in the room. Ignore social media at your peril.

• Ways to create “buzz” in advance of a speaking event using blogs, Facebook and Twitter
• How to easily record the audio and video of a speech using low-cost, portable equipment
• The risks and rewards of engaging an audience in an online conversation— while the presenter is on-stage
• How to leverage the viral power of podcasts and video to reach a global audience
• The power of integrating Social Media tools to wow your Internet audience

A full preview is available at this Presentation Home Page.

Follow the conference on Twitter at #ragandc

Candid Camera

Springwise reports that a wearable camera has been developed in the UK which can document a person’s life. Promising “Memories for Life” the Vicon Revue has been created as an aid for people with memory loss.

The device can operate either on a timer—taking photos every 30 seconds—or it can be set to take photos automatically when triggered by internal sensors, which can detect body heat as well as changes in temperature, light and motion. Along with images, the camera also stores a time-stamped log file that can be enriched with GPS traces. Its 1GB of flash memory can typically hold around 30,000 images, or approximately 6 days’ worth of capture.

The appeal of the Vicon Revue is expected to broaden from Alzheimer’s patients who need a photographic record of events they might otherwise forget to anyone narcissistic enough to want to record as much about every moment of their life as possible.

So, if you were to stick one of these devices on a newborn and they lived to be, say, 70, then 4.3TB of disk storage would hold their entire lifetime in pictures. You can actually buy that much storage for around $700. What are you waiting for!

Life Caching

Springwise terms this emerging trend Life Caching and notes:

Thanks to the onslaught of new technologies and tools, from blogging software to memory sticks to high definition camera phones with lots of storage space and other ‘life capturing and storing devices’, an almost biblical flood of ‘personal content’ is being collected, and waiting to be stored to allow for ongoing trips down memory lane.

One possible future is that all of us will soon have enough of our lives recorded that no-one, least of all ourselves, will have the time or inclination to review the data we’ve collected. If you cache 100% of the life you lead for 24 hours, and proceed to review it, then the next 24 hours would be a cache of you reviewing your cache. Our lives would recede like reflections in a hall of mirrors, as we viewed ourselves viewing ourselves. Our self-obsession would become magnified.

Technology is already causing this to happen to some of us. I’ve collected 27 days worth of music on my iPod, most of which I’ll probably never listen to. I have countless folders filled with digital photographs I never look at and a blog with over 500 articles that I hardly ever read.

So what’s your point (of view)?

The end-game of this technology might well be a time when each of us holds a cache of our separate lives and yet is unable to make any more sense of it than we do of our unrecorded life. In fact, if everyone did this, life would become infinitely more confusing.

What would it be like to play back all the images from even a half-dozen lives, lived wearing a Vicon Revue? Imagine a group of people in the same family or people who worked together all recording their separate points of view. What would this tell us? How would we even begin to make sense of it? Imagine they spent time together in the same room—what would it look like?

Not knowing what anything IS

This question has been addressed by Avatar Adi Da Samraj, who writes:

If each person’s “point of view” were replaced by a camera, and you collected photographs of all those “points of view” in the room—up, down, sides, all different orientations—and if you put them all together, you would wonder what you were looking at. Ten such photographs would be enough to make the room unrecognizable. In any case, no single photograph represents the room in its totality. Any single photograph is a portrayal (or an abstract representation) only—and the same is true of your perception. Your perception is only a portrayal (or an abstract representation) of the room. Your perception is not the room As it Is.

— The Way of Zero Bargaining, The Aletheon, p. 1590, Avatar Adi Da Samraj.

Adi Da discusses the profound implications of this fundamental truth. He explains that neither a single room, nor the whole universe, can be accurately described, since “knowledge” about anything is limited by a “point of view”:

“Point of view” defines everything about conditional “knowledge”, whether it is “knowledge” of “self” or “knowledge” of the universe. That is the purpose served by “point of view”. That “knowledge” is the power of “point of view” – its presumed ability to escape bad luck, misfortune, confinement, death, bad results, negative destiny, and so on. That presumed power (or ability) is the purpose of the effort of introversion. It is also the purpose of the effort of extroversion. It is the purpose of all seeking.

— The Aletheon, p. 1591-2.

Understanding Life

So, perhaps a better option than obsessive life caching and a concern with squirreling away the minutia of every moment, is working to develop an understanding of life as it really is; not as an archive of separate images, but as a totality that transcends all possible “points of view”.

How to augment your live presentation using social media

Effective public speaking is a challenge for many executives. They must prepare interesting content, overcome stage fright and deliver a speech that will hold the audience’s attention. As if that wasn’t difficult enough, they are increasingly likely to find themselves looking out at a sea of faces illuminated by the glow of laptops and PDAs. Social media is invading the auditorium, and rather than tuning out while a speech is delivered, people are turning on laptops and cell phones to send out text messages, broadcasting to the world their opinions of a presentation.

Changing presentations forever

In his new book, The Backchannel: How Audiences are Using Twitter and Social Media and Changing Presentations Forever, Cliff Atkinson explains how these new forms of online communication are shifting the rules of engagement between audiences and presenters. Instead of sitting politely until it’s time for Q & A, people are going online during the address to swap comments and opinions via an electronic backchannel.

At the very least, Atkinson claims, speakers and their communications support staff need to be aware that there is likely to be a backchannel in the room and learn how to monitor it or be left out of the conversation. Beyond this basic awareness, he encourages communicators to take the initiative and employ social media as an integral part of any executive’s presentation.

Practical advice

Atkinson’s book covers a lot of ground, from how to open a Twitter account to advice on expanding the conversation with the audience. He details how social media can transform a presentation from a one-off information dump into a longer-term relationship—one that starts before you step onto the podium. His advice includes:

• Breaking a speech into “Twitter-sized chunks” to make it easier for people to post 140-character sound bites. One measure of success then becomes how many of these summary statements are posted and reposted online.
• Using Twitter as a vehicle to extend your ideas to people outside the room, giving them a “virtual stage pass” to the event.
• Creating instant polls using tools, such as Twtpoll and Poll Everywhere, to involve the audience.
• Publishing a Presentation Home Page using wiki software. For example, I was inspired by Atkinson’s book to create http://execcomms.wikispaces.com/ listing my past and future talks. A Presentation Home Page is a convenient archive for reference material; blog postings; a Twitter feed; bio and contact information and more. This shifts the burden from overly busy PowerPoint slides as the sole way to communicate information. Also, by implementing a page like this prior to an event you initiate a backchannel that involves the audience, letting you gather comments and suggestions before you deliver the talk. After the event, the page becomes a repository for evaluation responses, blog postings, reference material and a transcript.

Double-edged sword

Atkinson acknowledges there are both risks and rewards involved in the backchannel. It enables people to connect online and become part of a shared community, but at the risk of leaving out those who are unaware of what is happening. It gives the speaker a way to reach a wider audience, but at the risk of distracting the smooth delivery of material. It provides an archive for comments and opinions, but a series of 140-character notes can lack context. And there’s the very real risk that the comments people make on Twitter might lack civility and shock presenters with their sometimes brutal honesty.

A two-way conversation

Though this approach is not for everyone, Atkinson describes a potent way in which social media allows a (frightening?) new level of transparency that speakers can use to transform a one-way stream of communication into a dialogue with the audience—before, during and after the speech.

The Backchannel might not bring welcome news to presenters who are wedded to the old school ways of controlling audience response and involvement, but is clearly shows how you can magnify the impact of a speech using social media.

So, in the spirit of the book, what do you think are the risks and rewards of a social media backchannel? Leave your comments below or tweet them with the hashtag #backchannelbook.

This review was originally published in ragan.com.

In order to gain a competitive edge it is essential for professionals to strive for both professional and personal excellence. Frauke Schorr’s work focuses on professionals who struggle and need outside expertise to bring their careers, businesses, and teams to the next level.

As part of her PhD in Organizational Psychology Frauke interviewed highly accomplished entrepreneurs and leaders on their experience of becoming successful. She found that the most successful leaders hold the mindset of a Centered Leader™ – They had a continuous curiosity to learn something new, challenge themselves, and stretch their boundaries while being grounded in a frame that was uniquely build on their personal values, beliefs, and passions. They also had the distinct ability to translate this frame into a company culture. They were, as Frauke describes it, leading from the inside-out.

Frauke uses this framework in her company, Centered Leadership™, a corporate training and executive coaching firm dedicated to developing business leaders on all levels of the corporation. It supports clients in defining and developing their careers and business, making successful career transitions, and becoming visionary leaders who engage and motivate others to achieve desired results.

Frauke can be reached at (650) 539-5553 or via email at frauke@centered-leadership.com.

Pro-Track Profile

I met with Frauke at the kick-off meeting of the 2010 National Speakers Association Northern California Chapter year0long Pro-Track class. She told me something about her business and why she was investing Pro-Track training. To hear what she told me, click on the podcast icon below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:32 — 839.7KB)

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One of the best, free, resources for speakers is the weekly SpeakerNet News email newsletter sent each Friday to more than 9,000 professional speakers, consultants, trainers, and authors.

Each issue features items sent in by the newsletter readers, including:

• Tips on subjects like sales and marketing, travel, technology, great resources, saving money, PR, conducting better presentations, and other topics key to the speaking business.
• Requests for information and advice.
• Want ads (equipment and other items for sale).
• Services and products of interest to speakers.

There’s an extensive series of compilations of past tips on topics ranging from How to Handle a Noisy Audience to suggestions on Bartering with Hotels and Recommendations for PowerPoint Designers.

SpeakerNet News is run by long-time NSA Northern California Chapter members Ken Braly and Rebecca Morgan.

They host a series of Teleseminars featuring well-known authorities such as Randy Gage on Transforming yourself from Speaker to Information Entrepreneur, Michael Soon Lee on Becoming an Industry Expert…In A Week and James Malinchak on Making Six-Figures Annually Speaking to Colleges.

I recommend subscribing to the teleseminar series which slashes the cost of each recording from $25 to a mere $10.