A pecha-kucha presentation contains twenty slides, each of which appears on the screen for twenty seconds. That’s it. The rules are rigid, which is the point. It’s not nineteen slides or twenty-one seconds. It’s 20 x 20. Presenters make their pitch in six minutes and forty seconds of perfectly timed words and images.
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Each year in the second session of Chip’s “Making Ideas Stick” class at Stanford, the students participate in an exercise, a kind of testable credential to show what kinds of messages stick and don’t stick. The students are given some data from a government source on crime patterns in the United States. Half of them are asked to make a one-minute persuasive speech to convince their peers that nonviolent crime is a serious problem in this country. The other half are asked to take the position that it’s not particularly serious…
In the average one-minute speech, the typical student uses 2.5 statistics. Only one student in ten tells a story. Those are the speaking statistics. The “remembering” statistics, on the other hand, are almost a mirror image: When students are asked to recall the speeches, 63 percent remember the stories. Only 5 percent remember any individual statistic…
The stars of stickiness are the students who made their case by telling stories, or by tapping into emotion, or by stressing a single point rather than ten.
Within each theme, the company lists smaller “Rocks” (column 5 of the OPSP) that need to be addressed in order to achieve the company’s big goal for the next 13 weeks, helping to focus everyone on execution. Though employees do not discuss the themes during daily huddles, which are focused on daily operations, they devote 30 minutes at weekly meetings to addressing progress toward the Quarterly Theme.
8. Employees can articulate the following key components of the company’s strategy accurately.
• Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) – Progress is tracked and visible. Core Customer(s) – their profile in 25 words or less.
• 3 Brand Promises – And the corresponding Brand Promise KPIs reported on weekly.
• Elevator Pitch – A compelling response to the question “What does your company do?
We speak at approximately 115 words per minute, but think at approximately 825 words per minute. My own experience aligns better with an even starker view offered by a psychologist on one of my courses. His working hypothesis is that ‘for every thirty words we say, we don’t say 300’. If he is right, even when I am listening to you beautifully, I don’t have access to 90 per cent of your thinking. So surely we both benefit if you can develop your thinking fully before I speak. At least the 10 per cent I am responding to will be more accurate and fully formed, so my response can be, too.
Coats has argued that every Pixar film shares the same narrative DNA, a deep structure of storytelling that involves six sequential sentences:
Once upon a time ______________________________.
Every day, _______________.
One day _________________________.
Because of that, ___________________.
Because of that, _______________________.
Until finally ___________________.