That was nifty!

[bzarcher]

I sometimes give the impression that work is one big pile of pain and screamings.

This really isn't the case - it's just that people would be very bored by "I went to work, did my job without any big SNAFUs, had a quiet lunch, and read a bit" in my journal every day.

However, we did have something really neat happen yesterday that I thought I'd mention.

We're kicking off a new product and doing a big launch at our Customer Connection conference this week. For the first time, everyone in the company who wasn't at this conference was asked to go to an auditorium in their area, watch live on satellite, and get a free lunch out of the deal.

What makes this more than a big corporate feelgood was that the keynote speaker was a guy named Bran Ferren.

Bran happened to be a really, really captivating speaker, and while at the moment he's just a "consultant" and head of a company called Applied Minds, he's probably better known (if you've ever heard of him, which honestly I hadn't until they gave us a blurb about him) as having been the head of Walt Disney Imagineering for quite a few years.. Listening about how big ideas work, and this really neat tangent about how technology grows and evolves, and how to take advantage of things, was a lot of fun.

His big theme that he (kinda) wrapped his keynote around was that meaningful communication of any kind revolves around telling stories, and that's what drove invention of things like Language, Writing, and things right up to the Internet that "Changed Everything."

He also had a lot of big goofy whiteboard stuff, and made the arguement for why Powerpoint should be banished to the plane of Leng, so that was pretty awesome.

I'm rambling, but so did he, and it's very hard to put a 2 hour keynote and distill it down. Hopefully work puts out a video of it that I can youtube or something, because I think a lot of you would enjoy watching it.

Comments

[dania-audax.livejournal.com]

hear hear for banishing power point.

I hate it when people type out their presentation into 50 slides and then read it word for word.

Of course, the managers here want a print-out of everything, so I especially hate dark blue backgrounds that waste ink and mess up the printer.

It's all so useless.

Cheers!

[bzarcher.livejournal.com]

Yep. He made the excellent point that PPT generally "Stifles any urge you have to think independently. Want to see workplace morale go up by leaps and bounds? Uninstall it!"