 The power to change the world, inside each person in the room, is the single most powerful device known to man, and that's an idea. An idea can create a movement, and it can rewrite our future. My family, we collect these vintage European posters based solely on the fact that they convey a single idea. So whenever we go to vacation in Hawaii, we go to the dealer there, and they're huge, and he puts on these white gloves, and he really carefully turns the pages and tells the story of the single idea on the page. I was flanked by my two kids, and they're on either side of me, and the guy very carefully turns the page. He's got his little white gloves on. And just as I leaned forward and said, oh my god, I love that poster, both my kids jump back and said, oh my god, mom, it's you. I was like, oh, I didn't know whether to be delighted or terrified that this is my kid's image of me, but I love, love this picture. Because here's this woman, you know, she's the standard bearer headed out to war. It's a French poster. So she's in the front line of battle, and she's running out there, holding this thing, you know, ready to give life and limb for this glorious thing that she's willing to fight for. And that little thing she's fighting for is Suavito's Baking Spices. This little tiny pack of spices she's willing to risk her life for and really put it out there. So if you were to replace that little pack of Suavito's with communications, I guess this is a picture of me. I'm really passionate about presentations. I was really crazy about presentations long before it was cool to be crazy about presentations because I really feel like there's so many times when average ideas are adopted and run with and brilliant ideas die solely based on how they're communicated. So I'm really passionate to get people to communicate their ideas in a really compelling way. And one of the most powerful ways to communicate is through story. Story is amazing. There's something about story as a container for information that helps us to communicate and pass information along. For thousands of years, stories have been communicated from culture to culture and generation to generation. Illiterate generations could pass on the stories almost completely intact just because it had a story structure. One of the things that makes story powerful is it makes you feel. You just kind of feel when someone's telling a story. You know, your heart can race. Your eyes can dilate. You get a little chill down your spine. These are physical reactions to a story. And I realize for some reason when you put a slide in the mix, everything flatlines. So somehow people go from storyteller. Just tell me a story and they're comfortable. And you go from presenter and you're like, you know, you just become stupid for some reason we do. And so what I did is I spent two years, the last two years of my life, studying story because I wanted to figure out how do you incorporate stories into presentations so we get that sensation of being excited. Now, we do that here because you're at an Inc conference and this is all about fantastic presentations. But most of the presentations out there really suck. So I studied story just like crazy. And I want to go through some of the findings along the way and then unveil to you how it is you can incorporate story into your presentations. So the first most obvious thing is to start with Aristotle in Poetics where he says every story should have a three act structure, which is a beginning, a middle, and an end. So as seemingly simple that is, you would be shocked at how many presentations don't even have that most simple structure. So when I started to get into hero archetypes, that started to get kind of interesting. So if you look at the hero, I thought in a relationship, when the speaker has a relationship with the audience, I thought the speaker's the hero. I'm the one on the stage, all the lights are on me, I'm doing all the talking. So clearly in the archetype situation, I thought I'm the hero. The more I started to study it, I realized really quickly, you know what? You're the hero, the audience is the hero, not me. When you're trying to persuade someone, if I put an idea out there and I want all of you to latch onto it, if no one latches onto it, my idea dies. It may as well have stayed inside of me. I may as well have not put it out there for you to contend with because it'll die. So in reality, you're the hero of my idea. So if each of you don't leave here today, holding my idea as dear, my idea dies and you're my hero. So then when you start to get into Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, he was such a brilliant student of mythology and you look at how the hero starts in an ordinary world. That's what the audience does. You're in your ordinary world. And what happens is you get a call to adventure in the movie. Sometimes this is an inciting incident where suddenly the hero has to contend with something. It's like, oh my gosh, I have to deal with this because my world just came out of balance. And then the next thing that happens is they initially, they're resistant and they refuse the call and they're like, I don't want to be part of this. It doesn't relate to me. And then they meet a mentor and that mentor helps them cross the threshold from an ordinary world into a special world. So in reality, in this particular scene, you're not Luke Skywalker, you're Yoda. You're the one that's gonna help your audience move out of their normal ordinary world and into the special world of your idea. And there's real insights there. The most basic story structure is three parts. There's a really likable hero who has a desire and then they encounter these roadblocks and the desire might not, they might not be able to get what they are desiring and then ultimately they emerge transformed. So if you're gonna just tell a very simple, simple story over dinner, this is the story construct that you would use. The reason this is important is because humans love to observe transformation. We love to go to the movies to watch somebody transform and to watch them change. We're fascinated with it. But when I came across Gustav Freyteg's dramatic pyramid, I got really excited. He was a German dramatist. He not only wrote drama, but he studied it like crazy. And he drew this shape in 1863 and to him, a really great story. He had a five act structure. Basically he had an exposition, a rising action, a climax, a falling action and what's called a denomah, which is the unraveling or the resolution. So what excited me about this was it's a shape because I'm visual, I love that it was a shape. So I thought, you know what? If presentations were a shape, what shape would they be? Great presentations. I was like, well, I don't really know. You know, Gustav, he was following just one single protagonist through a story and you could kind of, well, yeah, he does this and then it resolves. But I knew presentations were a bit more complex than that. So I'll never forget the Saturday morning I sent my hubby out to golf and I knew it was there because I'd studied story for two years and I had done 22 years of presentations for some pretty brilliant people and I knew I was really pregnant with the solution. So on a Saturday morning I drew a shape and I thought, you know, if this shape is true and this is the shape of great presentations, I should be able to overlay the shape over two great presentations and I randomly picked Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, which is a very beloved speech. in my country and I picked a commercial example which was Steve Jobs's 2007 iPhone launch presentation and it worked. I'll never forget I fell on my knees, cried a little, thank God. And then I'll show you that shape. Isn't that earth shattering? Yay. I know your eyes are dilated, your heart is racing. The cool thing is that the shape has a clear beginning and middle and an end. So the very beginning of a great presentation starts off with what is. You know, here's what is. Here's what we know is true. Here's the past, here's today, but this is what could be, this is our future. You say, here's our roadblocks, but this is the roadblocks removed and you compare it. You say, you know, this is status quo. This is the commonplace of our common status quo, but this is the loftiness of my idea and you didn't make sure that gap is really, really clear. This is the call to adventure in mythology. It's where the audience has to contend with, hmm, do I agree with this? Do I want to jump into this or do I not want to agree with her? You have to make that moment very, very clear in your presentation. Now the middle traverses back and forth between what is and what could be. What is what could be as a structural of device because what you're trying to do is lure them away from where they currently are and lure them towards your idea by constantly contrasting what is with what could be. You're actually drawing them towards your utopian future of what could be. So I love that it goes back and forth here because as you're on the way to change the world, people will resist. They're not going to be all excited. They're going to refuse the call per se. So you have to build that contrast in and I liken it to sailing. When you're sailing against the wind and there's wind resistance, the boat has to tack back and forth. Otherwise it won't move forward. So that's what happens with wind resistance. When you have audience resistance, you have to do the same thing. You have to move back and forth. Here's what you know is true. Here's what I say is true. Here's what is, here's what could be and you have to build that in. And there's this really cool physics phenomenon that happens. If you set your sail just right and capture the wind just right, your boat will actually sail faster than the wind itself. So by building this contrast into your presentation, you've actually lured the audience towards your destination faster, which is really cool. So this last turning point in a presentation is the call to action which every presentation should have, but a lot of presentations end there with this laundry list of to-dos that the audience needs to do. So I contend that the greatest presentations, they end by describing the new bliss. What is the new norm? What does the utopian world look like with your idea adopted? How is your idea gonna change the world into a better place? And that's how a presentation should end. So once I drew the shape and I knew it was true, I realized I could use it as an analysis tool. And I started to go nuts. Every script that came out, every presentation I could find, every old speech I could find, I was like transcribing them all and analyzing it to the form. So I'll show you Steve Jobs' 2007 iPhone launch and how that turned out visually. Now this is a guy who changed the world. He changed personal computing. He completely utterly changed the music industry. And he's well on his way to changing the mobile device world. So he's pretty world changing. And this is his 90 minute, 2007 iPhone launch. Perfectly follows the form, starts with what is, moves back and forth between what is and what could be, and he ends describing the new bliss. There's another little piece of data that's fascinating about Mr. Jobs. What he does is he actually gets the audience to laugh a lot. Now that's that physical reaction I was talking about as a good storyteller, you evoke that physical reaction. So each one of these vertical tick marks is every single time the audience laughs, then he also gets them to clap. Every one of those tick marks is them clapping. That's a lot of physical reaction in a 90 minute spot. So he goes on about what is, talking about how the market's performing and talking about old product upgrades, and then he jumps to what could be. And he says, this is a day that I have been looking forward to for two and a half years. So he's known about the iPhone for two and a half years. It's not new news to him. But check out this next tick mark. This is how many times he marveled at his own product. He's like, oh my God, isn't it awesome? It's beautiful. Isn't this cool? He actually marveled himself at his own product that he's known about for two years, more than the audience laughed or clapped combined. Yeah, so he's modeling for us the actual emotion he's wanting you to feel. Isn't it cool? Yeah, it's cool, Steve. It's really cool. So then he starts his what could be with every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. And the phone did change everything, right? So he moves through his speech. We'll scoot along here. They're still laughing and clapping and he's moving up and down. After he revealed his product, every time he dipped down, he was covering how sucky the competitors are. Here's our product. Here's the sucky competitors. And then at the end, he makes a promise to his fans that Apple will continue to make revolutionary new products. That's the new bliss. Don't we all want them to keep making revolutionary new products? So he ends his presentation with the new bliss, which is that there is an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love, I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been. We've always tried to do that at Apple since the very, very beginning. And we always will. It's a promise of future revolutionary new products. So let's, what about Martin Luther King? Does he map to this shape? Yes. He did a 16 minute presentation at the mall in Washington DC, and it mapped perfectly to the form. Now we call it the I have a dream speech, even though Martin Luther King had a different name for it because of this section right here. You can see the frequency, if they were sine waves, it gets tighter and tighter right there. And that's where he was actually moving along at the phrase level. I have a dream that one day, I have a dream that one day, he was moving back and forth and actually breaking phrases between what is and what could be. Well, that was fascinating to me. So I thought, are there any other presentations that are famous that are here in India? And one of the things that made Martin Luther King so successful in his civil disobedience was the fact that he studied Sachegraha from Gandhi. So I wanted to analyze, since I came here, I wanted to analyze Nehru's twist with destiny speech that was delivered in August 15th, 1947 when you were freed from British rule. And do you guys think it maps this great brilliant communicator? Do you think he maps to the form? Yeah, I'm so happy, because it works internationally now officially. So here's the shape of Nehru's speech. Now, while I was analyzing it, I found it pretty quickly that the beginning is actually the most quoted part. He moves back and forth at the phrase level like Martin Luther King did. And so he starts off long years ago, we had a twist with destiny and then he moves to now, hold on, I have to pull out my nose. I tried really hard to memorize this for you guys. And now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge. Now I'll come back to that word pledge again in a second. But he moves from when we shall move out from the old into the new. And then he says, and when an age ends and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance. Now interestingly, the very beginning most quoted part of this speech is a presentation form in itself. So that's why it feels a little bit complete there. But what he does, the next part that's brilliant is he moves into phrases. What is is India's long quest. He covers the long quest of your history that there's an opportunity for great triumph. That's the contrast, what is, what could be. And then he moves to acknowledging all the pain and sorrow. And then there's gonna be an end to this suffering with what could be. That the country was fragmented, but look, now it's joined. And then he goes into the past that's clinging to us, but now hope rises. And then it's a difficult problem to solve, but we're gonna face it with a spirit of discipline. And that Gandhi held the torch and now we are gonna carry the torch and it will not blow out. Interesting, the last what is, he covered the suffering, all the suffering, the people who died and also the brothers and sisters that were outside of the borders. It's good that he ended there because it's the most dramatic part of the speech. Now interestingly, he'd actually mentioned several times through the speech that we're gonna make a pledge or that we've broken our pledges and that we need to redeem our pledge that we've told. So at the end, his call to action and his final new bliss, he actually does a couple things. He starts with a rhetorical question, which is the future beckons us, where do we go and what shall be our endeavor. And then he actually says the call to action, which is say this pledge with me, we're gonna bring freedom, we're gonna fight, we're gonna build, we're gonna create so that we can bring the fullness of life for every man and woman. Those are powerful, aggressive verbs that are in that pledge. And then he reminds us that you know what, the reality is it's gonna be hard work for freedom and democracy. There's not gonna be any resting for any of us. And that we're gonna live up to this new high standard, this new bliss. And then he ends it with a very, like a salutation. And he says, into India are much loved motherland, the ancient, the eternal, the ever new. We pay our reverend homage and we bind ourselves afresh to her service. Jai Hind. Thank you.