VisualStory training at Duarte

I am wasting a few hours at Sydney airport before boarding a plane a plane for San Francisco. I just downloaded Nancy Duarte’s book Resonate which some are saying is the first interactive business book created for iPad using iBooks Author – something that I am keen to do also one day. 

Oopppps! Forgot to bring earphones!!

I haven’t read Nancy’s earlier book Slide:ology BUT I am taking Duarte’s VisualStory training next week in California and the book will be a good primer. I am also curious to see how the Duarte team, famous for tweaking TED powerpoint presentations,  have fudged the pixels around for the iPad. 

You might ask why am I enduring a 2 day training in story presentation when I am ALREADY such a KICK-ASS, Powerpoint Demolisher!!!

1. Well, actually, I am NOT really a kick-ass Powerpoint Demolisher, despite what my mother says.

2. The last time I gave a powerpoint presentation, a 20 minute presentation to business and foundation leaders entitled “How to Resource Missional Entrepreneurs without creating charity cases” [Slideshare], I failed royally to connect emphatically and emotionally with my audience and realized afterwards that I needed some help.

3. Wolfgang Fernandez and I, [both of us are taking the training this week] believe we have a story to tell. We managed to hook up in 4 continents last year to research and resource some of the sharpest cutting-edge movements of the global missional enterprise and we feel that there is a better way to change the world, going beyond our current efforts which tend to be wonderfully nostalgic but are rarely sustainable, let alone reproducible. I have tried a few times to share my thoughts on this but it often [but not always] comes out negative, or skeptical, or cynical. I need to sharpen my story, streamline my message, figure out what it really is that I am trying to say. And since Wolfgang and I are writing a book together, we both need some help in beating our story into shape.

4. You don’t need a good excuse to go to San Francisco.

Anyway, now to read da book and catch da plane.

Update: Check out my first day at VisualStory