Storytelling Workshop with Justine, Oren, and JD

In our last session before the presentations of our final brand audit project, we got support from some experts in storytelling: Justine and Oren Jacob (CTO/Pixar), and JD Schramm (Senior Lecturer of Management at the GSB). The class was divided in different rooms with 2-3 project teams per advisor. Each team held a short presentation of what they wanted to show next Monday, and our experts commented on it, asked clarifying and supportive questions, and gave advice and tips. It got immediately clear that for a presentation that is beyond of reading out loud powerpoint slides, even 5 min can be a lot. Especially resonating with me:

• Show the expected in an unexpected way!
• Show strength as a presenter and don’t apologize for “what you really wanted to show…”
• The hardest moments are the transitions from one presentation style to another (e.g. from showing a movie to integrating the auditorium)

All in all, still a lot of work left for the next two days until the dealine of the project, but we left the workshop with a lot of new ideas what we can do better.

On Happiness

I wanted to share two websites that seem to post interesting pieces on the topic of happiness with fair regularity. First is TED, the conference that brings together the best of “ideas worth spreading”. Just search on the term “happiness” at ted.com and you can get links to some of the world’s best minds sharing their research and thoughts on this topic. Here’s one talk on how we “synthesize” happiness:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html

Second, the New York Times is running a blog happydays.blogs.nytimes.com, a blog about “The Pursuit of What Matters in Troubled Times”. It brings together musings and reflections on this topic by world renowed writers and scientists. Be warned that most of these folks are way beyond the 26 – 30 year age range. And from yesterday’s class, you now know what kind of happiness they will talk about .