10 Things To Check Before Every Presentation

Posted on July 27, 2010 by D. Mark Jackson

There’s a lot to remember when giving multimedia presentations. PowerPoint or KeyNote presentations involve the complex interaction of your computer, your software, the presentation file, a display screen or projector, your remote, and the audio system. And increasingly, presentations are given as webinars, where the presenter (i.e. you) may be in charge of an even greater scope of technical requirements, including gadgets in your office that can interfere with your presentation. Not to mention that co-worker who barges into your office without knocking. A lot can go wrong.

So how can you minimize the risk of technical problems? Don’t spend valuable mental RAM thinking about the little but important things you might forget. Here’s a simple checklist:

  1. Screen saver………………………………Disabled
  2. Power settings……………………………Never turn off (all modes)
  3. Multiple displays (for webinars)……..Disconnected
  4. Email notifications………………………Turned off
  5. Other popups and notifications……….Disabled
  6. Ringers (cell phone, office phone)……Turned off/DND
  7. Sign on door (for webinars)……………Displayed
  8. Glass of water……………………………..Filled
  9. Outline……………………………………..On podium/desk
  10. Presentation……………………………….Open/slides loaded

This is a work in progress and I welcome your comments. And for any particular presentation, there may be more to add to your list. Also consider having multiple backups of your presentation ready to go, as detailed in this excellent post.

Now go knock ‘em dead.

D. Mark Jackson

Posted in Life Hacks, Technology | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

To Be Profitable: Focus On The Customer, Not Profits.

Posted on July 23, 2010 by D. Mark Jackson

(updated below)

I finally had the chance to watch the Steve Jobs presentation on the iPhone 4 antennae issue. You can watch it here. I was impressed by this statement in Job’s opening remarks:

We want to make … all our users happy.  If you don’t know that about Apple, you don’t know Apple. We love making our users happy. That’s what drives us to make these products in the first place.

Look, everyone has an opinion about Apple. And I have no special insight into how things actually work inside the organization. But it’s fair to say that Apple’s customers tend to be a very happy and devoted bunch. And its huge profits are clearly the result of staying customer-driven, by consistently turning out products people want.

As a result of focusing on the customer, rather than directly on profits, they’re very profitable. Students of Lean will understand that this is not, in fact, a paradox. For long-term success in Apple’s particular market, “Customer Focus” cannot be just an empty marketing slogan.

Stephen Covey alludes to this in Principle Centered Leadership. Businesses focused on profits will, in the long term, cease to be profitable. Businesses focused on higher principles – the reason they’re in business in the first place — will thrive. Apple seems to be a good example of this in practice.

Bonus Steve Jobs: To follow up on an earlier post about creative problem solving, I noticed when he said: “We want to find out what the real problem is before we start to come up with solutions.”

Update:  Is buying Apple a mythical experience?  See this interesting post from Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic.  (via Kottke)

(Photo credit: Apple Store)

D. Mark Jackson

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The World’s Got Talent

Posted on July 23, 2010 by D. Mark Jackson

Among the many ways the web has changed the world, I’d like to add one more. For me, at least, it’s engendered a greater appreciation for the variety and extent of human ability.

Sure, some of what gets posted to the web is of questionable taste (or worse), but I can recall dozens of times reading someone’s writing or watching a video and being, not just impressed, but surprised a fellow human was even capable of doing that.

David Letterman used to have a segment called Stupid Human Tricks, and maybe he still does. For the most part, they were, in fact, pretty stupid tricks. The web is full of those too.

But what I’m referring to is genuine talent: artistic and creative, athletic, literary, and intellectual. Okay, so the slip ‘n slide video wasn’t real.  But the web is a massive repository of human ability. And it’s easily accessible through a computer and phone.

In doing this, it’s helped me to realize that “ordinary” people can do “extraordinary” things. The world is full of talent. Human ability is everywhere. And never underestimate human potential.

On that note, please enjoy this video:

D. Mark Jackson

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Psychological Techniques For Boosting Creativity

Posted on July 19, 2010 by D. Mark Jackson

Looking for ways to increase creativity, methods grounded in actual research?  Take a look at this two part series on psychological techniques to boost creativity.  One of my favorites:

People often jump to answers too quickly before they’ve really thought about the question. Research suggests that spending time re-conceptualising the problem is beneficial.

Mumford et al. (1994) found that experimental participants produced higher quality ideas when forced to re-conceive the problem in different ways before trying to solve it. Similarly a classic study of artists found that those focused on discovery at the problem-formulation stage produced better art (Csikszentmihalyi & Getzels, 1971).

◊ For insight: forget the solution for now, concentrate on the problem. Are you asking the right question?

So many knowledge workers — lawyers in particular  – rush to solve problems, because that’s what they’re good at. But stopping to thoroughly examine the problem not only serves to identify the real issues at stake.  According to these studies, it also helps apparently stimulates creative thinking.

(via Kotte)

D. Mark Jackson

Posted in Good Lawyering, Life Hacks | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

How A Burglar Changed Gravity

Posted on July 14, 2010 by D. Mark Jackson

The New York Times has an interesting article about a new approach to understanding gravity led by physicist Erik Verlinde. Rather than treating gravity as a separate fundamental force, it can be seen as a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. Basically, gravitational attraction is the result of the universe’s natural tendency toward disorder, or entropy. This makes no sense to me, since I think of gravity as an ordering force, coalescing mass and maintaining the proximity of objects in space. But apparently I’m in good company — the idea is pretty controversial among scientists.

Besides its radical nature, however, what I found interesting was how Verlinde came up with the idea:

That inspiration came to him courtesy of a thief.

As he was about to go home from a vacation in the south of France last summer, a thief broke into his room and stole his laptop, his keys, his passport, everything. “I had to stay a week longer,” he said, “I got this idea.”

Up the beach, his brother got a series of e-mail messages first saying that he had to stay longer, then that he had a new idea and finally, on the third day, that he knew how to derive Newton’s laws from first principles, at which point Herman recalled thinking, “What’s going on here? What has he been drinking?”

When they talked the next day it all made more sense, at least to Herman. “It’s interesting,” Herman said, “how having to change plans can lead to different thoughts.”

So the next time you’re forced to change plans, or otherwise bumped off your routine, it may be an opportunity for a breakthrough idea. Try to create some time and space for creativity. And be sure to capture any imaginative sparks so they can flash over later. For more on routines and creativity, see this interesting post from Jack Cheng.

D. Mark Jackson

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Is Law Practice More Like Russia or Poland?

Posted on July 9, 2010 by D. Mark Jackson

Salon has a fascinating interview of Clay Shirky in which he lays out his Russia-Poland Theory:

Which is: one of the reasons Poland did better than Russia after the collapse of Communism is they’d only had one generation under the Communists, so there were still people who could remember that it had been different. Whereas, under Russia, no one alive remembered what life was like in 1916. When people go through two generations of stability, it’s easy enough to adopt an attitude that it has always been this way. So for somebody entering the book publishing business in, say, the year 2000, some 23-year-old just out of school, it has always been this way. No one in the publishing industry has known anything but the postwar landscape. What you get when a situation like that happens is that one word comes to stand in for a business, a production method, a product, a cultural signifier — the whole range of it is all compacted into that single thing.

For more about what this means for writers, books, and literature generally, definitely treat yourself to the whole piece.

As for lawyers, is there any doubt we’re still at the early stages of the digital revolution? The radical re-working of how we share and value information has just started, really.

And is there any doubt the Western and international legal system more closely resembles Russia? The answer is hewn into the name plates of essentially every major law firm.  (Literally, are there any lawyers alive who remember the profession being fundamentally different in structure from ours today?) Were Abe Lincoln still around, he’d have no trouble returning to practice.

As Shirky goes on to explain, those able to work across disciplines — people capable of seeing truth residing in the center of human inquiry and beyond the leading edges of specialities — are well-suited for the change ahead. So, set aside that Blackstone-esque treatise this afternoon. Go begin reading and thinking broadly. Endeavor to free information from organizational silos. And explore the world outside your comfortable office.

Maybe, just maybe, this revolution could be fun.

D. Mark Jackson

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5 Things Science Tells Us About Motivation

Posted on July 7, 2010 by D. Mark Jackson

What does science tell us about motivating people to do good work?  Here’s an interesting ten minute video combining illustrations with a Daniel Pink lecture, and discussing five key findings:

  1. For rewarding simple straightforward tasks, money is a good motivator.
  2. When a task involves more than rudimentary cognitive ability — some conceptual, creative thinking — monetary rewards actually result in poorer performance.
  3. If you don’t pay people enough, they won’t be motivated to do a job.
  4. The best way to motivate people is to pay them enough to take the issue of money off the table.  Allow them to think about the work, rather than the money.
  5. Three factors lead to better performance and personal satisfaction: (1) Autonomy, (2) Mastery, and (3) Purpose.

Watch the video for a full explanation of the three factors and some examples involving real organizations.  This reminded me of the ideas underlying Google’s “20-percent time.”  And for a great example of these ideas in action, I highly recommend checking out Netflix’s presentation on its “Freedom and Responsibility Culture.”

(txs, Elan!)

D. Mark Jackson

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Presenting on Ethics and E-Discovery at U.S. Open

Posted on June 18, 2010 by D. Mark Jackson

(updated)

I’ll be presenting at the U.S. Open golf tournament today.  The topic is ethics and electronic discovery.  My thesis is that lawyers need to adapt in two ways in the age of electronic discovery:

  1. Better understand technology, because evidence today is likely to be in electronic form. (the duty of Competence)
  2. De-emphasize the adversarial duties of Diligence and Confidentiality and re-emphasize the cooperative duties to Expedite Litigation, Candor Toward the Tribunal, and Fairness to Opposing Party and Counsel.

(cross-posted at California E-Discovery Law)

Update: Monica Bay over at EDD Update (Electronic data discovery news and analysis) and The Common Scold read my post and writes:  ”OK, I guess I’m clueless but what’s the nexis between golf and EDD? Perhaps he’ll jump into the comments and ‘splain it all to us.”  My attempt at an explanation in comments over at her sites here and here.

D. Mark Jackson

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Turn Failures Into Breakthroughs

Posted on June 18, 2010 by D. Mark Jackson

Is that unexpected result a stupid mistake, or an expression of the truth?  Don’t resist anomalous information because it might lead to an epiphany. Jonah Lehrer has the the following advice:

Check Your Assumptions: Ask yourself why this result feels like a failure. What theory does it contradict? Maybe the hypothesis failed, not the experiment.

Seek Out the Ignorant: Talk to people who are unfamiliar with your experiment. Explaining your work in simple terms may help you see it in a new light.

Encourage Diversity: If everyone working on a problem speaks the same language, then everyone has the same set of assumptions.

Beware of Failure-Blindness: It’s normal to filter out information that contradicts our preconceptions. The only way to avoid that bias is to be aware of it.

Or as Stephen Covey might say, if things aren’t working well, consider whether your paradigm is incomplete on incorrect.

(via Above and Beyond KM)

D. Mark Jackson

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An Overflowing Inbox Is Not A Kanban System

Posted on June 17, 2010 by D. Mark Jackson

From David Allen (no link available):

It is a residue from the industrial and agricultural world, I think, when the things to be done were much more physically self-evident. The “piles” in most offices nowadays seem just meager attempts to reproduce the self-evidence of the crops, the machinery, the things to be made and moved of bygone times. But self-evidence is not forthcoming without more discrete focus and more self-directed thinking.

From a lean perspective, I think what people are looking for is a kanban system and visual controls to manage their work in the office. When the inbox starts to overflow, time to sort through it. When the mailbox gets overloaded with email, and the anxiety level gets high enough, time to scan the messages.

But these are emotional rather than rational cues.

Better to have cues built on an optimal worklow.  This means emptying all the buckets on a daily basis, and using your organizational system to cue when to take action on items. Get the mailbox down to zero three times daily, even if this means putting some of those emails in an @Action folder, until you have time to fully process them. Then cue up the work based on deadlines (i.e. customer demand) and maintaining continuous flow.

Overflowing buckets also indicate excessive inventory and poor processes. Time to rework your system.

And your inbox usually operates as a push system, rather than a pull system.

The point here is to use real cues instead of the artifical and misleading physical cues that emerge in an office environment.  The height of paper stacked on your credenza doesn’t (or shouldn’t) tell you what to do and when to do it.

D. Mark Jackson

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