Rainmaking Secrets

It’s easy to forget that not so long ago, Al Gore was the “butt of all jokes.” Then he dusted off an old PowerPoint slide show and became an ecological superstar.

Fast Company reports that as late as May 2004, few people paid much attention to Al’s reworked 1989 slide show on global warming.

Timing is everything.

Now, aged 59, he is an Academy Award winner, a best selling author and a front runner for the Nobel Prize. At this years Grammy Awards, Gore was a bigger, more anticipated star than the rock stars on show.

Gore now commands a $175,000 speaking fee for delivering his PowerPoint’s. When I was looking for a title for my book Power Points! How to design and deliver presentations that sizzle and sell, I originally wanted to subtitle it, Speak Like Churchill, Present like Spielberg.

Perhaps a more relevant subtitle would have been Speak like Churchill, Present like Al Gore.

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David Myers, Professor of Psychology is an expert on the psychology of fear.

Psychological science, Myers tells us, has identified four factors that drive up our perceptions of risk.

1. We fear what our ancestral history has prepared us to fear. Thats why we fear snakes and spiders.
2. We fear what we cannot control. We feel more in control when we are driving a car than we do flying an airplane.
3. We fear what is immediate. We are more concerned about the risks of taking off in a plane than the risk of dying from cancer.
4. We fear threats readily available in memory. We easily recall the 9/11 images and they make us hesitant to fly. Our brains are not designed to easily recall the fact that, mile for mile, we are 37 times more likely to die in a passenger car than on a commercial flight.

No wonder our fears drive so many behaviors.

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“Those who continue to live by the sword will get killed by a guy with a gun,” says William Watkins, chief executive of Seagate.

Watkins manages a $11.4 billion disk-drive industry which is commoditizing at breakneck speeds. Seagate has no choice. It has to change or face oblivion. Just recently Seagate lost Apple’s iPod business to flash competitors in 2006.

Watkins can see the writing on the wall. Consumers don’t give a damn where their storage comes from - flash or a disk drive.

Seagate is now producing new look backup drives packaged in sleek aluminum cases called Free Agents. These spunky new Free Agent drives come with up to 750 gigabytes– big enough to store 200 movies.

Will Seagate transform itself into a content solution company?

Will Seagate’s die-hard scientists and suits be prepared to make a seismic shift in their thinking?

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I have always been fascinated by how experts make decisions.

Take chess.

After a quick glance at a chess board, chess masters (who have 50,000 patterns stored in their memory) can play fast “blitz chess” with minimal loss of performance.

Experts, it seems, can rely on intuition because years of experience has given them the abilities to read the “patterns” of whatever game they are playing.

As a result, when we teach negotiators, marketers or salespeople in our seminars we are always teaching to read the patterns. We’ve found showing learners how to “read the patterns” significantly accelerates their learning and mastery.

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