The season is here for weddings, graduations, and other festivities. Time to tune up your toasting skills. Recently, we coached a client who wanted to welcome their son’s wedding guests, as well as deliver a meaningful tribute to the bride and groom. We interviewed our client...
You probably won’t be surprised that the most well-respected authors at the Santa Fe Literary Festival advocated for the importance of storytelling. But as we listened to their various approaches, we thought of the applications of case studies to our clients’ businesses. For example: “A...
The recent Santa Fe International Literary Festival was a hit. The interviewers and authors were on their game. One remarkable thing we heard was the amount of time each writer put into researching their books. David Grann spent eight years writing Flowers of the Killer Moon. It took Anthony...
When presenting on a topic, most speakers focus on the content. But that’s not the whole megillah. When you are effective, you will likely get questions after your close. How and what you say at this point can make all the difference. However, when you’ve expended...
We often remind our friends that their pets don’t speak English. Yes, everything communicates, but each group of plants and animals have specific alphabets. Recently, teams from the Cetacean Translation Initiative found that the expressivity of sperm whales is much larger than previously thought.Whales are...
We are amalgams of our experiences and education. The challenge is to assemble a version of ourselves that sustains us and satisfies our need for purpose. One thing is certain; how you communicate is critical.Will Rogers grew up when Oklahoma was called Indian Territory. A...
From 1952-1961, Ralph Edwards hosted a hit TV show, This is Your Life. He surprised guests and took them through a retrospective of their lives. The show was broadcast with a studio audience and featured colleagues, friends, and family. The series began with the story...
Researchers say that audiences can retain three to four pieces of information at a time. But what if we’re pitching a product, service, or program containing disparate and complex elements? We must get chunky. Chunking compresses large amounts of data into manageable bits that can be...
In a Greek myth, Ariadne falls in love with Theseus. Off to fight the Minotaur, Ariadne hands him a ball of yarn. When Theseus slays the Minotaur, the thread he strung along the labyrinth leads him out to freedom. How many times have you heard...
Hernan Diaz won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel Trust. On CBS Sunday morning, he displayed his working notebooks bursting with words. He said “There is something about the murmur of the pen on the paper. There is nothing like it for me.” We know many...