A Presentation on Compelling Presentations

If you want to learn more about how to make compelling presentations that ‘tell a story’ and uses pictures rather than bullet points, check out the presentation on this link.

There is a great version of Little Red Riding Hood done in Powerpoint in the presentation. Fast forward to Clip 3 to see it but do take the time to watch the whole presentation.

My First Drawing From Back of the Napkin

So I’m reading Back of the Napkin and I get to chapter 2 where the author asks how I would ‘explain more precisely what my company does’. So how do I draw that? We are a consulting company!

So I thought, rather than attempting to draw what we do I’d draw who we are. So this is what I came up with my first back of the napkin drawing.

Why Read The Cluetrain Manifesto?

The following is the email sent on May 22, 2008 to tk-all introducing The Cluetrain Manifesto:

Good afternoon/evening all!

We are hoping that Tacit Reads will become an important part of our lives at Tacit. Here’s why. At Tacit we have a culture of sharing and learning that we want to continue to cultivate. But as we grow it is going to be harder and harder to have an environment where these things just happen spontaneously across the company. So with that in mind, we need to put some lightweight structures in place to continue the momentum of our sharing and learning. That is where Tacit Reads comes in.

So why are we starting with The Cluetrain Manifesto? There are two answers to that. First of all, it’s important to recognize that we are not just a software development company. We are consultants and therefore we are often expected to consult our clients. With our business mostly revolving around the web we need to understand the fundamentals of web business development perspective and to also be aware of trends in the web space. The Cluetrain Manifesto will definitely help there.

But the second reason for selecting The Cluetrain Manifesto is more important than the first. A couple of weeks ago I asked Chris to recommend a book for me to read that was influential is his understanding of the web and was responsible for his motivation in starting Tacit. This was the book that Chris unhesitatingly recommended. As you may have seen today in Tacit Talk, Chris is very knowledgeable in this domain and he has a lot of passion for it. It’s what drives this company.

We will also be asking Manish and Scott for similar Tacit Reads recommendations so we can all get a balanced view of the passions that our company is founded on.

So with that in mind, I hope that you all get on board the train…the Cluetrain that is, and encourage others in your offices to participate.

Thanks!

Azita, Jay and Tom
Teaming on Tacit Reads

The Tacit Knowledge Reading Blog

Welcome to the Tacit Knowledge Reading Blog.

A couple of months ago several of us at Tacit Knowledge thought it would be fun to be reading the same book so we could share our ideas and what we are learning. So in April ‘08 we decided to read The Cluetrain Manifesto and to invite others within Tacit Knowledge to read it and share their thoughts. This was the perfect book to get started with because:

• It was one of the books that the founders of Tacit Knowledge read when the started the company in 2002 so it help formulate what they wanted Tacit Knowledge to become;
• The book promotes conversation, discovering your voice and keeping the voice of the organization a human voice. This helped establish a great launching point for this blog.

So, we are going to try out ‘reading seasons’ where we individually select books to read over the next three months and share what we are reading in this blog. There are no boundaries on what is read and blogged on. For example, suggested titles for this season have incuded Leadership and the New Science by Margaret Wheatley and The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. We even encourage people to blog on more than what they are reading. It’s about learning, sharing and conversations.

We do expect to find emergent themes as we learn and share online that we hope will facilitate interesting conversation at the end of each reading season.

Thanks for your participation!