PowerPoint Bullets Kill Comprehension

Garr Reynolds has a good summary of the newest PowerPoint controversy started by this article in the Sydney Morning Herald that describes a study suggesting speakers who essentially read their bullet points from their slides are ineffective communicators.  The study's author suggested:

It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.

Another way to Bill for E-Mail

Postful is a pretty ingenious service that creates and sends written snail-mail correspondence from e-mails forwarded to the service for just $0.99 each.  This could be a KILLER application for lawyers, especially if confidentiality issues, firm branding and other details could be worked out.  Imagine being able to send real honest-to-God letters from your blackberry, without secretarial help.  Very Cool!

Getting Less Done With a Messy Desk?

Not sure if there is any scientific basis to extend this study to productivity, but people eat less when they can see how much they've already eaten.  When there were visual cues (an un-bussed table) of how much food study participants ate, they continued to eat less.

This makes me wonder:  If we can see how much work we've already done (a long timesheet, for example), are we less likely to do more?  The same goes for a messy desk.  If we are surrounded by cues of work we've done, do we work less?

Ultra-Rapid Focus Group

Kathy Sierra talks about an Ultra-Rapid-Design Party with some great brainstorming tips that I'm going to shamelessly steal for my Idea Markets and Innovation Retreats.  Here's how she describes it:

Forget focus groups. Forget endless meetings and brainstormingsessions. Throw an ultra-rapid-design party, and do it in a single day.This approach exploits the wisdom-of-crowds through a process ofenforced idea diversity and voting, so no consensus, committee, or evenagreement is needed. And it's way more fun.

The Product Design Dinner Party takes 9 people, a pile of diverse"inputs", and has each of the 9 people voting on--and pitching--oneanother's ideas to continuously reconfigured groups of 3 people,letting the best ideas rise to the top. The process is a littlecomplicated, but it's derived/modified from an existingrapid-prototyping design I'll talk about later in the post.

Go to the post for a step-by-step guide.  Definitely worth a try.

How to "Black Out" During Your Next Presentation

Bert Decker has a great (and easy) tip to improve your next presentation:  Use Black Slides.  According to Bert, a blacked out slide (as opposed to justing hitting the "B" key) accomplishes three things:

1. Clear the screen.  Once you’re done with the picture, graph or supporting information,you want to remove distraction, and go to a black slide so you canamplify, tell a story, or make an additional point, etc.

2. Black out the screen.  Simply put, so you can walk in front of the projector. Almost allmeeting, board and conference rooms are poorly designed so that theyhave the projector screen right in the middle of the room or stage. Itshould be at the right or left, so YOU can be in the middle. After all,YOU should be the center of your presentation, not your slides.

3. Totally change your mindset.  Change he creation and emphasis of the presentation. This is by far the most important of all, and needs it’s own paragraph.

Who is Going to Pay for Those 18 Minutes?

NYT article on the perils of multitasking.  The money quote:

In a recent study, a group of Microsoftworkers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks,like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incominge-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messagesor browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites.

There are some other good studies mentioned in the article.  Worth a read -- if you've got the time.

Presentation Inspiration

If you want to see some best-in-breed presentations, check out Slideshare's World's Best Presentation Contest.  Slideshare is an online, presentation sharing application.  Worth a look.

Building the Perfect Innovation Retreat - Call for Help

Readers, I need your help.  I'm designing an intensive, two-day, innovation-focused law firm retreat that I can sell to medium and large firms.  Before it goes "live" I need to do it at least twice to iron out the kinks and make it hum.

Here's what I'd like to do:

• Do the retreat for a firm of 10-20 lawyers, their staff and selected clients (yes, I said clients).  The cost to the firm will be my travel, lodging and retreat materials.  I'll also ask the firm to pay me an amount commensurate with the "value" of the retreat to the firm -- but only if they thought it was the best retreat they'd ever done.

• Assemble a group of 10-20 small firm or solo lawyers for a two-day innovation retreat here in St. Louis in early June.  Because most solo and small-firm lawyers don't get the benefits of a law firm retreat, I want to bring several of these lawyers together to collaborate with one another and to bring innovation into all of their practices.  Also, I want to see if the concept of a solo/small firm "retreat" will work.  If I get enough people, I'll set the fee at an amount sufficient to cover my costs (probably at $250 per attendee or so).  Each attendee will be on their own for travel and lodging.

Let me know if you are interested.  You can e-mail me at Matt@LexThink.com if you or your firm would like to participate.  Thanks.
 

Start Wine-ing in Your Business

Hugh at Gaping Voidingvoid recaps some "lessons learned" in his first two years of working with Stormhoek winery.  Just a few of his points should resonate with anyone (including lawyers) trying to build an amazing business:

14. We can make this as lucrative and as intellectually stimulating as we want to. The ball is in our court.

16. What's driving innovation and sales on our end is not a technological issue, it's a cultural issue. Get the right culture going, and the tech looks after itself.

17. When I started working in the advertising business as a young buck in London, back in the late 1980s, Bartle Bogle Hegarty were considered the best game in town, even if they were not the biggest agency. Every young advertising student aspired to have a gig there one day, everyone daydreamed of one day having John Hegarty return their calls. The were considered the Praetorian Guard. Within two years from now, I want every smart, driven young person in the wine trade to be thinking the same way about us. That to me would be a far more worthy definition of "success", than how many cases we sell.

Techshow Blogger Bar Crawl

ABA's Techshow is just around the corner, and we need to do something to get the bloggers together.  Since there's nothing formal planned for us, I'm organizing the First Annual Techshow Blogger Bar Crawl.  We are going to meet in the Sheraton Hotel's lobby at 7:00 pm on Thursday, March 22nd and head out on a walking (and drinking) tour of the neighborhood.  I'll have more info on the places we'll be soon, but expect to hit between three and five bars.  I will enforce the schedule, so if you can't make the beginning of the crawl, join us along the way.

I've set up a Techshow Bar Crawl page here to register.  Cost is free.  See you next week!

Office Motivation Hack: Complete a Puzzle

Here's another fantastic Parent Hack that could work wonders in an office setting:

My 7 year-old son can be particularly stubborn and no matter howmuch we beg, plead, or reason with him, he stands his ground. SometimesI resort to bribery. He likes puzzles so I came up with puzzles to helphim do certain things.  It started the summer before Kindergarten -- healready knew how to tie his shoes, but claimed that he “forgot” howover the summer since he wore sandals all summer.  So I found a pair ofrunning shoes that he wanted online (I used Zappos.com)and printed out two full-sized  pictures.  One was in color and theother black and white.  I then decided that I wanted him to tie hisshoes for two weeks on his own before I would buy him the shoes hewanted so I cut the colored picture into the appropriate number of“puzzle” pieces.  Then every time he tied his shoes on his own heearned one piece that he could tape onto the black and white picture inthe correct spot.  When the puzzle was complete we ordered him hisshoes.

What are the goals for your office, and what is an appropriate reward when the goals are met?  Can you make a huge "puzzle" for your workers to complete as they reach appropriate milestones?

Cool Client Giveaway

If you are looking for something cool to give to your clients, try to find someone who makes this (courtesy of Autoblog).  It is a feature on the new Renault Twingo, and may not be for sale, but if you can find it and give it away, you'll be the talk of the conference.  I know I want one.

Does Your Firm Have the Guts to Seek Anonymous Client Feedback?

Mike Arrington posts about The Gorb, a online reputation monitoring service:

Gorb allows, even insists on, anonymous comments and ratings about anindividual. Like someone? Hate them? Tell Gorb all about it, usingtheir handy Ajax slider to rate them from 1 - 10 in their professionaland personal lives, and leave written comments as well.

According to Gorb:

The professional marketplace in general is inefficient when it comesto distributing information about a person's reputation. Many of usoften make daily decisions based on relatively few inputs, some whichare poorly validated. When these decisions begin to form the basis forour perceptions about others that we don't know, it should be nosurprise that there's a hit-and-miss nature to this "off-line" system!

Onthe other hand, many of us also use people that we know very well asreferences to gather information and make decisions about others. TheGORB aims to leverge reliable professional references and personalopinions to provide a balanced and widely adopted "online" ratingsystem, that allows us to gauge the reputations of one another.

What do you think?  Would you or your firm tell your clients about The Gorb and ask them for an anonymous review of your services?  Why or why not?  What are you afraid of?

Buy Your Clients a Virtual Lunch

My friend Scott Ginsberg (who has some really cool things up his sleeve, BTW) shares this really great way to connect with someone who doesn't live or work close by.  I'll let Scott tell the story:

A month ago, I got a surprising email from a woman named Lena West.

Lena lives in New York, which explains why I was so surprised.

See, she invited me to have lunch with her.

A VIRTUAL lunch.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Well, I buy you lunch from your favorite delivery place. Then we eat while chatting on the phone for an hour.”

Hmm. Cool idea.

So, last week we did it.

And our Virtual Lunch rocked.

Lena and I had an enlightening, energizing conversation for over an hour! We talked about websites we loved, books we read, places we traveled, you name it. Other than the obvious physical limitations, it was really no different than having lunch in person.

I challenge you to buy your best, non-local client lunch this week.  Let me know how it goes.

Actual, Actually.

I came across this article on Honda from an old issue of CIO Magazine and really liked the part about Honda's focus on an interesting Japanese concept:

The collaborative environment at Honda is a byproduct of the company’s emphasis on the Japanese concept of the three actuals—go to the actual place, work with the actual people or part and understand the actual situation. Although it might seem unnecessary or impractical, adherence to the concept helped facilitate the efficient design of the ’98 Accord. When the designers weren’t sure whether a part they were designing could actually be welded, for example, they’d drive over to the manufacturing plant to ask a welder directly . A visit to the site about a specific problem not only prevents engineers from becoming detached from the actual process, it often yields insight into a completely unrelated and unforeseen issue, says Shriver.

I'd highly recommend implementing the same concept when working with clients:  go to their actual place, work with the actual people, and understand the actual situation.

Can Your Firm Offer a "Genius" Bar?

Thanks to 37 Signals for pointing out a great article in CNN/Money about Apple's retail stores.  The article talks about the inspiration for Apple's amazing "Genius" Bars:

When we launched retail, I got this group together, people from avariety of walks of life,” says Johnson. “As an icebreaker, we said,‘Tell us about the best service experience you’ve ever had.’” Of the 18people, 16 said it was in a hotel. This was unexpected. But of course:The concierge desk at a hotel isn’t selling anything; it’s there tohelp. “We said, ‘Well, how do we create a store that has thefriendliness of a Four Seasons Hotel?’” The answer: “Let’s put a bar inour stores. But instead of dispensing alcohol, we dispenseadvice.”...”See that? Look at their eyes. They’re learning. There’s anintense moment – like when you see a kid in school going ‘Aha!’

There are two things about this quote that really hit home:

First, how many law firms ask the same question the Apple store designers did (Tell us about the best service experience you've ever had?), and actually modeled their firm on that best-in-breed service experience? 

Second, how could a "genius bar" be implemented at your firm?  Could you open that "bar" at your firm for walk-in clients?  What if they paid an AppleCare-like fee to avail themselves of that service?

 I bet you could make it work.  Let me know if you need help.

Cure (Brief) Writer's Block

Having a hard time writing that brief that's due next week?  Here's a great list of tools, toys and inspirational sites to get you from your Statement of Facts all the way to your Table of Authorities -- or at least inspire you to write some poetry or the next great American novel.

Ask Your Clients for Ten Ways You Can be Better

Guy Kawasaki shares a study by Craig R. Fox (pdf) that compares two groups of students, each asked to evaluate an MBA course:

One group was asked for two ways to improve the course; the other wasasked for ten ways to improve the course. The group that was asked tolist ten ways showed a higher level of satisfaction with the course.

So, when will you start asking all of your clients for ten ways to improve your service?

Footprints (and a toll-free number) in the Sand

Do you practice near a beach?  Here's a great marketing idea (hat-tip to Church Relevance) that just might get your firm noticed:  environmentally safe ads that are imprinted in the sand.

Of course, it may be hard to "save" the advertisement for those pesky bar advertising rules.

Join Me March 8th for a Teleseminar

I'd like you to join me for a teleseminar on March 8th, titled: Think Real BIG -- Ten Creative Strategies for Building an Innovative Law Practice.  It is part of the online-only Career & Practice Development Conference. 

I will share ten unique and easy-to-implement strategies to help you create an innovative, service-centered law practice that you'll love as much as your clients do.

The teleseminar takes place from 1:00 - 2:00 pm EST and the cost is $59.00.  You can register here.