Speechwriters, communicators and innovative thinkers often find inspiration outside their chosen field. HP Innovation kingpin Phil McKinney has an excellent blog and podcast on the creative process required for engineers to deliver the next Killer Innovation. He quotes comedian and author Steve Allen on sources of inspiration:

Good lord, I just open my eyes and ears, and they rush in. Ideas knock you down if you don’t brace yourself. All you need is to be aware, actually aware, of everything around you – sights, sounds, even smells, such as that of perfume stolen from a passing women.

I was reminded of the serendipity of inspiration when reading the Weekend edition of the Financial Times this morning and came across a fascinating interview in the House and Home section with architect and interior designer John Stefanidis, who was born in Egypt to Alexandrian Greek parents, moved to the UK to study at Oxford University and has run a design practice in London for more than 30 years.

Stefanidis comments on the importance of color in his work, and the varied sources of inspiration he finds:

Every colour has an emotive charge. The ways colours contrast, marry, embrace and clash are like life itself. All colours are valid. There are infinite shades of colour in the spectrum, not excluding black, of which there are hundreds more. Every shade of blue is my favourite colour, as well as pink, grey, green and red.

© Nikhil Gangavane

On my first trip to India I took a paper cornet of each coloured powder lined up in conical piles outside a Hindu temple – powders made from petals or leaves and applied to the forehead by the faithful. These cornets contained the colours for the first fabrics I created and have served as inspiration ever since.

© Elena Pokrovskaya

But then so have stones, leaves, flowers, photographs, melodies, shells, magazine illustrations, paintings, scribbles on air journeys and trucks on the freeway.

© Jan Kranendonk

As McKinney, Allen and Stefanidis all show, while inspiration partly relies on serendipity, it’s our responsibility to engage the intentional processes which allow it to happen. To learn the creative disciplines which deliver on the flash of insight. To carry the paper cornets home and keep them close at hand. To nurture our sources of inspiration.

Next time you write a speech you want the audience to remember, search for a colorful phrase or provocative comment in the world beyond your desk.

Speechwriters in high technology companies often face the challenge of communicating complexities in a simple manner which audiences can understand. The universe is a complex machine which no-one really understands. Books have been written on the ways we interpret the evidence of our senses. None of them are easy to understand. Are they?

Then along comes a short video which can take you further down the path of understanding how we perceive reality in five minutes than a dozen philosophy books would in a month.

I found it easy to envisage the techniques employed by this video being used by a technology company wishing to communicate complexity in profoundly simple, even provocative, ways.

Take five minutes to check it out and let me know if you think I’m smoking something or if you agree.

Ready? Steady? Go!

Spotted a fascinating article detailing options for professional speakers to sell spoken advice and support via per-minute phone calls. Think of this as a legit spin on the psychic advice and phone sex biz model.

Four services are highlighted.

Ether

Enables you to sign up for a free Ether (1-888) number, which is forwarded to a phone number of your choice, be it cell, home or work. You then decide how much your time is worth, per hour per minute or per call. Customers will only be able to call you when they’ve prepaid the set rate. Ether bills their credit card and sends you this fee minus a 15% commission. There’s no monthly fees, no setup fees, and no connection fees. It would be your responsibility to advertise this service on your website or blog. Of course 888 numbers are only valid in the USA, so you’re limiting your potential market to 300 million Americans (bummer!).

BitWine

Is a Skype-based directory of service providers which offers “Trusted Advice from Real People”. Ideally for bloggers, there’s custom code to advertise the service on your blog. Rankings are posted so customers can see the reputation of the seller (as on eBay). Sellers charge from zero (free) to $3.00 a minute or more depending on category. Since it is Skype-based your services can be marketed globally.

Wengo

Is an on-line expert community, similar to BitWine except everything I accessed seemed to be in French. Maybe I’m missing something. Is there an English-language version out there somewhere?

Skype Prime

The 800-Pound Gorilla of the online telephony world with 171 million VoIP subscribers has launched their beta service which is similar to Ether. You can create a Skype Prime ‘snippet’ to advertise the service you provide on your blog. Billing and the back-end details are handled by Skype for a 30% commission. But you can market to anyone in the world with a Skype account. The calls start as free, then switch to the paid calling plan, with you charging either by the minute or a one-off fixed fee for the privilege.

These four plans indicate the beginnings of a new business model for professional speakers and information brokers. Right now they’re a nice-to-have experimental way of leveraging your time and expertise. But when Avian Flu hits and the conference halls empty, they might be indispensable.

I’d love to hear from anyone with experience of these services. Good or bad. Please leave your comments below.

Experienced speechwriter Fletcher Dean has launched a new podcast series, hosted on his Speechwriting 2.0 blog. So far there are two postings:

The first podcast raises the question of who owns a speech – the speechwriter or the speaker?

The second podcast draws a parallel between speeches and love-letters. Just as you would not dream of writing a love-letter to a stranger, you should not even think of writing a speech until you know as much as possible about your audience.

Fletcher delivers his podcast in a measured, instructional tone. If you are interested becoming a better speechwriter or public speaker subscribe to these podcasts and learn more about the art of speechwriting from one of the masters.

Thanks to Brady for sending me a link to a thought-provoking YouTube video created by a high-school teacher at the Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado. If you’ve got six minutes to spare click on the link below and ponder the implications:

Teacher Karl Fisch has scrupulously documented the sources for the video and the process he created it (in PowerPoint, natch) on his blog. The video was adapted by Scott McLeod.

As with all run-away successes on YouTube, it’s spawned a number of remixes (one nice mash-up ends with a clip from The Matrix).

I don’t have the skills or time to create a re-mix, but I do have a couple of thoughts to share.

One. The reference to Gilder’s Law 4:37 into the video, where the explosion in bandwidth is highlighted:

Third generation fiber optics has recently been separately tested by NEC and Alcatel . . .
That pushes 10 trillion bits per second down one strand of fiber.
That’s 1,900 CDs or 150 million simultaneous phone calls every second.

reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s prophetic words from the era before glass-fiber sharded the earth in circles of light:

The cable is carrying a lot of information back and forth between Hiro’s computer and the rest of the world. In order to transmit the same amount of information on paper, they would have to arrange for a 747 cargo freighter packed with telephone books and encyclopedias to power-dive into their unit every couple of minutes, forever.

p.20 Neal Stephenson, Snowcrash, 1992 (yes, 1992)

Two. The soundtrack took me back to the west coast of Clare, and old pubs where fiddlers love to play, imagining the text as one half of a conversation between two Irish lads nursing their pints of Guinness on a soft evening with the turf fire lazily warming their shins:

Did you know . . .
No, what, Pat?
Sometimes size does matter.
Get away, why’s that?
If you’re one in a million in China . . .
You’d find it hard to stand out in a crowd I’d imagine. It’s a terribly crowded place, China. So I understand…
There are 1,300 people just like you.
Get away. Imagine that. That’s very mathematical. Cases of mistaken identity must be fierce common.
In India, there are 1,100 people just like you
Really? Who’d have thought there were that many identical Chinese living in India? Do they clone them in Bangalore? Ah. Globalization, ’tis a wonderful thing. Your round?

Professional speakers and information brokers of all kinds can leverage their knowledge into tips booklets and related information products for marketing, motivating and making money.

Paulette Ensign, the Tips Booklet Queen, is the world’s leading expert on the writing, publishing and marketing of tips booklets. She has a full-service website, Tips Products International, filled with proven processes to help anyone create a booklet.

Paulette has sold well over a million copies of her own tips booklet, 110 Ideas for Organizing your Business Life, in 4 languages and various formats, without spending a penny on advertising. Her website hosts over 300 booklets written by others on topics as diverse as 70 Tips To Welcome Your Newly Adopted Cat Into Your Life to 115 Essential Tips For Effective Presentations.

I caught up with Paulette at a seminar she gave in Sacramento this week. Click on the podcast link below to hear her share how she got started in this business and what is involved in producing a tips booklet.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:32 — 1.3MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Enough has been written about the changing fortunes of the major computer manufacturers to fill my hard disk many times over. Analysts have reviewed product mix, features and benefits, distribution models, P/E ratios and more, However, this chart comparing the page views for dell.com, hp.com, ibm.com and sun.com over the past 3 years says it all:

Remember, unlike HP, Dell is a company known for doing most of its business online.

Made to Stick is a must-read for anyone tasked with creating a message people will remember. A message that will stick. You might work on the Corporate Overview for a multi-billion dollar corporation. You might be an independent businessperson who just wants to write an advert people will remember. The challenges are the same. The issues you must face up to include:

The Curse of Knowledge

Happens when you’ve lose the ability, as an expert in your field, to realize how little someone who has never heard of your topic before will grok. You speak in abstractions, all they want is a concrete example. Here’s a case in point:

The mission of the Office of the Chief Financial Officer is to assure the effective management and financial integrity of Department of Energy programs, activities, and resources by developing and implementing and monitoring Department-wide policies and systems in the areas of budget administration, program analysis and evaluation, finance and accounting, internal controls, corporate financial systems, and strategic planning.

Office of the Chief Financial Officer, US Department of Energy

Will you remember that in the morning? Or in five minutes? No way.

Making things too complex

The Heath’s quote a factsheet on the dangers of sun exposure and take the time to craft an alternative message (p.40) that is much simpler. One that eliminates non-essential information. The core of the message is made interesting, unexpected even. Simple messages have a strong core and are compact. Proverbs such “A bird in the hand” are the ultimate in sticky, powerful messages that have spread across the world and survived down the ages.

Being boring and predictable

Repetitive messages can become boring. TV commercials are a case in point. As Roy H. Williams points out, you need to surprise the brain in order to break through the defense mechanisms we have that filters out the predictable.

Fuck!

See, like that Unexpected word. Of course, your challenge in the Multi-Billion Dollar Corporation is to write a memorable message that does not Fuck! with the customers. That’s why they pay the big bucks. And the Heath’s have answers to help.

Giving a message credibility gives it stickiness. Quoting external authorities, using details and testable challenges all work. Create emotional empathy for a specific individual and people will remember what you have told them.

Stories with compelling plot (ones that Challenge, or are Creative or make a Connection) stimulate and inspire the audience, and ensures they will remember what you’ve said.

For an idea to stick an audience must:

1. Pay attention – to the UNEXPECTED
2. Understand and remember – the CONCRETE
3. Agree and Believe – in the CREDIBLE
4. Care – EMOTIONALLY
5. Be able to act – on the STORY

Much of what this book has to offer is useful to speechwriters and professional speakers. Check it out.

Anyone starting out in the speaking business faces the challenge of finding people willing to pay for their services.

Carolyn Millet created a successful speaking business from scratch 12 years ago when she noticed some High School graduates who lacked social graces and decided to do something about it. Her Junior Manners Cotillion now serves the San Francisco Bay Area and helps young people acquire the social skills that will make their transition into adult society an enjoyable and rewarding experience.

Click on the podcast link below to hear Carolyn’s frank and humorous description about how she started out. Marvel at the commitment and determination with which she undertook the challenge of starting a successful speaking business.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:37 — 2.6MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Speaker Bureaus are an important way for Professional Speakers to market their services.

Michael Soon Lee, CSP, spoke to the Pro-Track meeting last Saturday about the advantages and disadvantages of registering with a Speaker’s Bureau. These Bureaus come in all sizes – from those that deal with the famous to those that will work with the speaker who is starting out.

Michael used to manage a Speaker Bureau. Click on the podcast below to hear him share some of his insights and experience.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:14 — 1.5MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS