Carmine Gallo. Five Stars: the communication secrets to get from good to great. St. Martins Press. New York: 2018.

• Interview on Read to Lead podcast

• "Complacency breeds failure"

• "Communication is lubricant of execution"

• Read. Adopt. Advocate. Leapfrog.

• Presentations need:

  • brevity, language, pictures
  • 18 minutes maximum length
  • introduction, climax, conclusion
  • conversational tone
  • [some level of novelty]

• R and C: reading, writing, arithmetic, creativity, collaboration, communication, coding

• Convincing about what matters in fewer, simpler words

• Distill complexity into simple words, directions, instructions

• Know, feel, do

• Tesla's best question for interviews: tell me the story of your life, the decisions you made along the way and why you made them

• Duarte: if it takes longer than 3 seconds to understand the gist of your slide, it's too complicated

• healthcare example, CICARE: connect, introduce, communicate, ask permission and anticipate, respond, end with excellence

• inspiring leaders, SCARF: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness

Method:

Persuasion needs Pathos, an appeal to the audience's emotion

1. Replace bullet points with pictures

2. Make the audience laugh

3. Share personal stories

4. Make presentations easy to follow

   • State one headline
   • Use the rule of three
5. Promise your audience that they will learn something new

Kinds of stories worth telling

• about personal experiences
• about real customers or clients
• about signature events in the history of a brand or company

Elements of signature stories

1. It's a story: beginning, middle, end

2. It's intriguing

3. It's authentic

4. It includes details

5. It reveals a surprise

6. It introduces emphathetic characters

7. It has conflict and tension

Three-act storytelling structure

1. The Set-Up - current state, overview, introduction

2. The Confrontation - obstacles and solutions to overcome them

3. The Resolution - the product, service, or strategy that solves the problem and helps the company or industry thrive

About your stories

• Keep your audience in suspense and alert by including hurdles to overcome

• Oxytocin can be stimulated from a dramatic arc with tension, struggle, and a happy ending

Great presentations have one theme and all else supports that message

• treat your message like a "logline": encapsulate your idea in one sentence

• introduce your one big idea within 15 seconds of starting your presentation

Keep to 10 minute maximum (to limit tuning out):

• use simple words (eighth grade) and short sentences: edit, edit, edit

• analogy is beauty in speech, learn homiletics?

Keeping original:

1. Connect ideas from everywhere
2. Find your theme song

3. Read more books to become a better speaker

   • Very few problems are new
   • Reading builds ability to create powerful emotional rhetoric to galvanize a team
   • Reading good, crisp, well-written prose improves your writing
4. Take a trip to the unfamiliar -- even a little change in environment

Put yourself in a creative space and think through the narrative elements before creating slides or documents.

Remember two ways to limit stress and boost confidence:

1. Reappraisal: reframe the way you think about yourself and events in your life

2. Repetition: practise your presentation

Logos. Ethos. Pathos.