11/13/07 - Part One

Dan Heath

Made to Stick

Six building blocks to give your ideas a long, powerful life.

Some ideas go in one ear and out the other. Others change minds and alter lives. There are secrets for avoiding the former and achieving the latter, and Dan Heath knows them.

His research shows that there are six building blocks for creating and communicating ideas that stick. Even though the building blocks are simple, leaders still botch them up, for two reasons: first, they think they're using them when they're not, and second, they emphasize the wrong ones at the wrong times.

He has authored ten Harvard Business School case studies and he co-founded Thinkwell, a company that creates interactive multimedia college-level teaching materials. It was at Thinkwell, while working with the country's most inspiring professors, that he began realizing that all the best communication grows from the six building blocks. He is the author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. He won the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest in 2005, beating out 13,000 other entrants.

Part Two
 
Carr Hagerman

Juicing the Jam and Other Secrets of Top Performers

How to capture and hold attention as though your life depended on it.

For a couple of decades Carr Hagerman, PSP, could only make a living if he riveted people's attention and made his pitch unforgettable. PSP? That's "Professional Street Performer." After mesmerizing public audiences with his unique blend of humor, wisdom, and unicycle-riding for a couple of decades, he has directed his skills over the past ten years to delivering important messages to leaders at corporations that include American Express, Royal Bank of Scotland, Time-Warner, Wells Fargo, Unilever, and Cisco.

His brilliant presentations transformed FISH! from a collection of good ideas into a worldwide business phenomenon, and now, together with FISH! creator Steve Lundin, he's written a book called Top Performer. He will delight you with his lessons for adding pizzazz to anything you do or say, showing how you can, in his typically memorable phrasing, mine the mess, juice your jam, and claim your pitch.