The share of LinkedIn job postings that mention “storyteller” roughly doubled between 2024 and 2025. Executives said “storytelling” 469 times on earnings calls in 2025, up from 147 in 2015.

At the same time, the web is filling up with AI-written content (Dead Internet Theory: bot written content written for bots) . One analysis of 900,000 new web pages found that 74% contained detectable AI-generated text. Readers are noticing. Nearly a third of consumers say they’re less likely to buy from a brand that uses AI-generated ads.

What’s the value of content when that content can be generated at close to zero marginal cost? I’d say it will approach zero in the coming months/years.

But there will always be value to human crafted content — or narratives — created for real humans. Whether inside of board rooms, interview rooms, in advertising campaigns, or entertainment.

For students like mine, and other (corporate/knowledge work) job seekers, focus on these two skills:

1. Writing. Even if your medium is video, speaking, or short-form posts, write the idea out first. Writing forces you to decide what you actually think. I call this “writing to think”, and sure sometimes that writing comes after verbal brainstorming.
2. Public speaking. You don’t need to be a great speaker. You do need to be competent and confident enough to stand up, state your view, and move people to act. If you can’t communicate your ideas within your organization, your ideas won’t advance and neither will your career.

And one important caution: Avoid cognitive surrender. Every time you outsource your content creation to AI — brainstorming, first drafting — your creative muscle weakens. I’m not opposed to using AI in the creative process, I use it frequently, but I also continue to train my creative muscle by writing from the blank page, and using AI to pressure test or critique the content.

How are you using AI? And how are you fighting the cognitive surrender?

View the pitch

DraftPOS KioskPhase 1

Version 0.1

Date April 2026

Owner Product

Why Current Kiosks Fail

A skilled cashier interprets “cheeseburger, no onions, add bacon” in under five seconds. A kiosk makes the customer find Burgers → Cheeseburger → Customize → Toppings → uncheck Onions → Add-ons → Bacon. That’s a navigation problem masquerading as a technology solution.

Kiosk menus are organized around restaurant operations—item categories, modifier trees, upsell flows—not around how customers actually order. Customers speak in natural shorthand. They reference items by nickname, bundle customizations into a single phrase, and expect the system to resolve ambiguity the way a person would.

The result: kiosk transactions take longer than counter transactions for any order above baseline complexity. This undercuts the core value proposition of kiosk deployment (throughput, labor cost reduction) and degrades customer satisfaction.

Root Causes

• Menu taxonomy reflects kitchen logic, not customer mental models
• Modifier selection requires multiple taps per customization
• No recovery path for customers who can’t find an item
• Upsell prompts interrupt flow rather than integrate naturally
• No channel for customers to express a complete order at once

02 — OPPORTUNITY

The Hypothesis

An optional natural language voice interface—layered on top of the existing touch UI—lets customers order the way they talk. The system handles disambiguation through guided dialogue, not menu navigation. Customers who prefer touch keep it. Customers who want speed get it.

~40%Est. reduction in order time for complex orders

3–5×More modifiers captured per voice order vs. touch

↑ ATVNatural upsell via conversational prompt

These are directional targets pending pilot data. The primary success metric is order completion time, not revenue—if voice ordering isn’t faster, the feature has failed its core purpose. 03 — SCOPE

Goals & Non-Goals

✓ In Scope

• Voice-initiated order entry at kiosk
• NLP resolution of item names, nicknames, and combos
• Guided dialogue for required modifiers (size, protein, etc.)
• Inline upsell via conversational prompt
• Graceful fallback to touch UI at any point
• Order confirmation screen before payment
• Accessibility mode (optional voice for customers with motor impairments)

✗ Out of Scope (v1)

• Multi-language support beyond English
• Loyalty program integration via voice
• Payment via voice
• Drive-thru speaker integration
• Mobile app or web ordering
• Custom wake word training per brand
• Real-time inventory awareness

04 — USER STORIES

Core Use Cases

05 — FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS

Feature Specification

5.1 Activation

• Voice mode is opt-in; initiated by tapping a microphone button on the home screen
• System greets with a single short prompt: “What can I get for you?”
• Wake-word activation (e.g., “Hey [brand]”) is a v2 consideration

5.2 Intent Resolution

• NLP layer resolves spoken input to menu items using semantic matching (not keyword matching)
• Handles item aliases, common nicknames, and partial matches
• Handles bundle orders (“number 3” or combo names)
• Confidence threshold: items below threshold surface a disambiguation prompt, not an error
• Disambiguation prompt offers 2–3 options max, displayed on screen and spoken

5.3 Guided Modifier Collection

• System tracks which required modifiers are missing after initial utterance
• Asks for missing info in a single compound question where possible: “What size, and would you like that with cheese?”
• Never re-asks for information already provided
• Optional modifiers are not requested unless customer signals interest

5.4 Upsell Integration

• One upsell prompt per transaction, offered after order is complete but before confirmation
• Prompt is contextual: based on order content, not rotation logic (“Want to add a drink to that?”)
• Customer can accept via voice or decline; no friction either way

5.5 Confirmation & Handoff

• System reads back complete order before confirmation
• Customer confirms via voice (“Yes,” “That’s right”) or taps confirm on screen
• Confirmed order passes to existing POS cart; payment flow is unchanged
• Customer can request corrections before confirmation; system updates incrementally

5.6 Fallback & Error Handling

• After two failed resolution attempts on any utterance, system surfaces touch UI for that item
• Voice session remains active for remaining items
• If microphone input drops or times out, system defaults to touch mode and saves current cart state
• All failures are logged with session ID for analytics

06 — UX PRINCIPLES

Design Constraints

The voice interface should feel faster than touch, not more clever. Every design decision is tested against one question: does this make ordering faster for the customer?

• No menus in voice mode. The customer should never hear “say 1 for Burgers, say 2 for Sandwiches.”
• One question at a time. Compound questions only when modifiers are closely related.
• Visible progress. Screen shows cart building in real time as voice is processed.
• Silence is not failure. Brief pauses don’t terminate the session; system waits for natural turn completion.
• Zero dead ends. Any failure state has a graceful exit back to touch without losing cart.
• Latency budget: 1.5s. Response from end of customer utterance to system reply must be under 1.5 seconds. Above 2s feels broken.

07 — TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

System Constraints

08 — SUCCESS METRICS

How We’ll Know It’s Working

Primary

• Order completion time — voice vs. touch, controlled for order complexity. Target: voice ≤ touch at baseline; voice < touch for orders with 2+ modifiers.
• Voice completion rate — % of voice sessions that result in a confirmed order without abandonment. Target: ≥75% in month 1, ≥85% by month 3.

Secondary

• Intent resolution accuracy (% of utterances resolved on first attempt). Target: ≥88%.
• Modifier capture rate — voice vs. touch. Hypothesis: voice captures more optional modifiers.
• Average transaction value, voice vs. touch cohorts.
• Customer satisfaction score delta (voice vs. touch session, via post-order prompt).

Kill Switch Criteria

• Voice completion rate <60% at 30-day pilot review → pause and reassess
• P95 latency >2.5s in production → revert to touch-only pending fix
• Any privacy/data incident → immediate suspension pending audit

09 — PHASING

Rollout Plan

10 — RISKS & MITIGATIONS

Known Risks

11 — OPEN QUESTIONS

Decisions Pending

1. Wake word vs. button activation. Button is safer for v1, but wake word creates a more natural experience. Decision needed before Alpha hardware spec is locked.
2. TTS voice selection. Brand-consistent synthetic voice vs. neutral. Requires brand/marketing sign-off.
3. Transcript retention policy. Legal/privacy review needed. Current assumption: zero retention beyond session.
4. Operator alias tooling. Build custom CMS or surface through existing menu management system? Engineering scoping required.
5. A/B test design for pilot. Voice opt-in vs. voice-default? Need agreement with analytics team before pilot launch.
6. Multi-language sequencing. Spanish is the obvious v2 target. Scoping timeline TBD post-GA data.

PRD — Natural Language Voice Ordering — v0.1 DRAFT April 2026 · Confidential

Business Insider is the most recent publication to confirm what I saw coming, and what we’ve heard from alumni: hiring managers aren’t reading résumés anymore because they can tell so many of them are AI-generated slop.

Here’s where this leaves you as a job seeker.

The résumé may still be required to apply for a job. It’s just no longer sufficient in getting you the interview.

It’s an identifier now, not a differentiator. The document that gets you tracked in an ATS isn’t what’s getting you hired. What’s getting people hired in 2026:

• Work you can show. This is easier for engineers who can point to GitHub repos. For MBAs and other “knowledge workers” the best advice I have is to document your work and your insights on LinkedIn. Post project briefs, case competition decks and other examples of your work from writing, videos, to weekend vibe coding projects.
• People who know your name inside the company. Recruiters are bypassing application portals. They’re sourcing on LinkedIn, tapping their networks, doing cold outreach. 70% of employers now report using skills-based hiring. But before skills get evaluated, someone has to surface your name. That’s a networking problem. Network strategically into your target firms, attend industry events, participate in hackathons, look for ways to demonstrate the value you can bring to any company.

I’ve seen students spend three months blasting applications into portals and getting nothing back. I’ve also seen students get interviews in two weeks because a former classmate or network contact flagged their name internally.

If you’re in an MBA program right now or in an active job search, here’s what this means practically:

• Build something you can point to. One project beats fifty bullet points.
• Then invest in the relationships that get your name into rooms before a job is posted.

The rules of recruiting have changed. Your strategy has to change with them.

Originally posted on LinkedIn, March 3, 2026

Sound familiar?

I’ve coached dozens, if not hundreds of students who find themselves in this situation. They are smart, motivated, and have the experience to do the job—but get stuck in their heads in the days before their interviews. Here’s the advice I often give them.

Minimum Viable Answers

If your problem is long winded and rambling answers crammed with details, aim for tight, focused responses—1 to 2 minutes max. Think: “minimum viable answer.” You want to share just enough to show value and invite follow-up. A minimum viable answer will address the key components of a story called for by the question. For example, “Tell me about a time you delivered an important project on a tight timeline?” The answer will include:

• High level, what was the project
• Why was it important
• What was the deadline?

Save the details for when they ask.

Ditch the Script

Writing out a story can be helpful, but only to a point. Once your stories are drafted, move off the page. Turn each story into 3–5 bullet points. Know the beats. Speak from experience, not from memory. Generative AI can be super helpful here. Sure, you could spend time wordsmithing what you think is the perfect answer, but chances are, it will sound like an essay.

Try recording yourself telling the story a few times, take the transcripts, give them to chat GPT, along with a sample question, and ask the bot to develop a clear story in the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) or CAR (Challenge, Action, Result) frameworks. Then ask for just the key bullet points.  Workshop the story with the bot, ask it to tailor the story to a few different but related questions, ask what follow up questions an interviewer might have.

Use the “RTFM” prompt framework:

• Role: tell the bot what role you want it to play, i.e. Career or Job Interview Coach, Challenging Interviewer, Hiring Manager
• Task: tell the bot what you want it to do, identify the key points in the story; come up with 5 follow up questions; make the story shorter; put the story into an answer framework.
• Format: tell the bot what format you want the output in, i.e. bulleted list, outline, script
• Meta: ask the bot what additional information would be helpful before it runs the prompt.

Practice in Chunks

It’s better to practice one question three times in a row than three questions once. Use tools like Yoodli.aito rehearse, record, and refine. Then get up, go for a walk, and repeat.

Take your prep outside. Put in headphones (people will think you are on the phone) and talk through your stories aloud. Write some behavioral interview questions on index cards and pull one at random as you walk. The goal? Get comfortable thinking and speaking without a “net” of your notes or scripts.

Manage Your Mindset

Think of your interviews as conversations, not an interrogation or a test. You’ve done the work. You have the experience. Show up with presence and confidence. Don’t stress about saying the “perfect” thing—focus on being authentic, brief and clear.

Game Day Strategy

Before the interview: eat, move, breathe. Between interviews: quick self-debrief, note which stories you used, what questions you were asked, and how you can improve for the next interview in the loop.  Then, get up, walk around, go outside quickly if you can, and reset—no scrolling. Use that third or fourth conversation to show poise. “Let me check my notes to avoid repeating myself” is not a red flag. It’s a sign of preparation.

Ask Smart Questions

Come with thoughtful questions. Ask questions that get the interviewer talking about themselves, their experience, insights and opinions—and use the answers as a springboard to connect back to your own experience. That turns the interview into a dialogue. If you are looking for inspiration, check out 38 Smart Questions To Ask In A Job Interview (HBR). Remember, you should be able to easily Google for the answer to your question. Never ask about compensation or benefits.

Final Thought:
If you feel like your performance is getting worse before it gets better—you’re probably in the uncanny valley of preparation. Keep going. That’s where real progress happens.

As a job candidate, it’s up to you to shine the spotlight on the skills and experiences you’ve had that are relevant to the job or company you are interviewing for.

Listen to this article on ConversationsOnCareers.com

Take a moment

It is not enough to have a dozen well-rehearsed stories that illustrate examples in response to the interview questions you anticipate. Invariably, you will get asked a question that you haven’t prepared for. In a few seconds you will have to decide which story fits the question best and start your answer. The danger is that you will tell the story as you’ve prepared it without tailoring it to your audience or the exact question. Interviewers remember when a response doesn’t answer their question. But they don’t remember that you took an extra few seconds before starting your response.

Focus on what your audience wants to hear

The AIM framework from Lynn Russell and Mary Munter is a great tool to employ when preparing any communication, including job interview responses. The acronym stands for Audience, Intent, Message. The audience is the person or people receiving the communication. The intent is both your intent: what you want to happen, and the intent you want to create in your audience. The message is both the delivery mechanism and the content.

When preparing for any interview, take the time to really think about your audience. Are you speaking with the recruiter, or the hiring manager? These are two different audiences, and your intent will be different. For the recruiter, your intent is to communicate that you are a strong candidate with relevant skills; you want to advance to the next round of interviews. The recruiter needs to believe that you are the right choice for the role she is trying to fill. For the hiring manager, your intent is to communicate that you have the relevant skills, right fit with the team, and ability to do the job; in this case, you want to get the offer. The hiring manager needs to believe that you are capable of doing the job, fitting in with the team, and growing to be a valuable asset to the company.

Start with “the end in mind”

Reminding yourself of your intent before preparing, and before your actual performance (the interview) will help you shine the spotlight on the right facets of your experiences and respond appropriately to questions that you did not expect.

This starts with the most common interview question: Tell me about yourself. The interviewer wants to know just the relevant details about what you’ve done that led you to this company and this role at this moment. For example, the fact that you used to build Contact Relationship Management systems for nonprofit organizations may have nothing to do with the work you do today. Your ability to analyze voter data and cut turf for political canvassers? Irrelevant. Scrum Master and Scrum Product Owner certifications? Who cares. But throughout your career, maybe you’ve always been committed to helping the people around you and your clients communicate more effectively. BINGO. I might be talking about myself here…

When answering behavioral interview questions (“Tell me about a time when…”) don’t get sucked into the trap of sharing a very procedural (and generic) explanation of the situation, and what you did filled with every detail you can think of.  Think about your intent: why are you telling this story? What does it demonstrate about how you think and work? What skill or competency does it demonstrate that is relevant to the role or company you are interviewing for?

It’s all about structure and focus

And remember that the human you are talking to is hardwired to look for structure. Stories have a beginning, middle and end. Gustav Freytag mapped out the classic narrative arch: Introduction, Initial incident, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, Resolution, Denouement over 160 years ago. People retain structured information 40% more reliably and accurately than information that is not structured.

When you are answering a question, make sure that the content fits into a structure and is relevant to the audience and the question. There are many interview answer structures or frameworks: STAR is the most common: Situation, Task, Action, Result. But I like CAR: Context (or Challenge), Action, Result. These are not the only two that are out there: sometimes you want to add a learning or a take-away (CARL or CART) at the end, or a summary at the beginning (SCAR).

Consider the level of detail, language and analogies that may be relevant to your audience. For example: if you are interviewing for a data analytics role, you might focus on the part of the story where you extracted insights from data. If you are interviewing for a role that focuses on interaction with customers and clients, you might focus on that part of the story where you determined what your client (internal or external) really wanted to know from the data and how you delivered the insights on-time. If you are interviewing for a role that requires cross functional collaboration, you might focus on how you worked with multiple teams to pull together the dataset you needed.

Think of these as different facets of a multi sided die. The die is the experience or story, but depending on what question you are asked and what role you are interviewing for, you will expose different facets.

That’s how you can shine the spotlight on the parts of your experience that are most relevant to your audience and, ultimately, land the job!

Here is list, in alphabetical order. Sorry I do not have links, nor have I fully categorized it, but I will try to update this post soon. For now you can search the titles in your player of choice.

• Acquired
• All-in
• Babbage
• Connected & Ready
• Economist Asks
• Exponential View
• Freakonomics Radio
• Function with Anil Dash
• HBR After Hours
• HBR IdeaCast
• HBR Women at Work
• Hidden Forces
• How I Built This w/ Guy Roz
• How to Be Awesome at Your Job
• How We Survive (from Marketplace, about the environment and sustainability)
• Marketplace
• Marketplace Tech
• Masters In Business (from Bloomberg)
• Money Talks
• Odd Lots
• Pivot (w/ Kara Swisher from NYT)
• Planet Money & The Indicator
• SwitchedOn – future of energy, transportation and sustainability
• The Intelligence
• The Pitch
• The Prof G Show (w Scott Galloway)
• Why’d You Push That Button
• Your Undivided Attention (w Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology)

While you will probably get better results if you have a friend or family member take the photo, you can also achieve good results with a selfie.  Either way, here are some considerations:

Look your best: pick out a professional outfit that is aligned with the role and industry you are targeting. Look at the profiles of people with that role/industry and see how they are dressed. IE Bankers are buttoned up with a suit and tie, or blouse and blazer, product managers in tech are probably going to be more casual, think collared shirt, no tie. Take care of your personal grooming, hair (including facial hair for men), makeup, jewelry, etc… Make eye contact with the camera and remember to smile! This is another reason having someone else take your photo will likely yield better results, a friend can make you smile and capture multiple shots in a row to capture that perfect moment, and you will be looking at the lens, not your own image on the screen.

Setting, background, lighting: find a place to take your photo where the background is uncluttered and not distracting.  A blank wall is fine, a brick wall can work, so can sky, but trees, or buildings might be more distracting.  Ideally, whatever is behind you will be as far behind you as possible.  You don’t want to be standing up against a wall DMV/passport style. Natural lighting that is diffused (rather than direct sunlight) and is coming from the side of your subject rather than directly in front or above is going to give you the best results.  Artificial light can work, but it to should come from the front/side rather than overhead. For the students I work with at the Foster School of Business, PACCAR and Dempsey Hall both afford some interesting backgrounds and abundant natural light: the dark concrete walls, the slatted wood walls, the PACCAR atrium overlooks, the brick outside, etc…

Camera position and settings: the camera should be at eye level or slightly below. Newer iPhones offer a portrait mode, which you may want to experiment with, it will put the subject in sharper focus and blur the background a bit. If you are using a mirrorless or DSLR camera, an aperture priority mode with the widest (lowest number) aperture will give you the best results. Avoid using a phone or camera mounted flash.

Crop and upload:  you should ultimately crop your photo into a square that includes your head and shoulders and a little background all of the way around.

News and Current Events

• Seattle Now
• Up First
• Consider This
• NPR Politics Podcast
• Marketplace Tech
• Shortwave

Long Form Interview and Though

• The Ezra Klein Show
• Ten Percent Happier
• The Science of Happiness

Business and Industry

• Planet Money
• The Indicator from Planet Money
• HBR Ideacast
• HBR Women at Work
• HBR After Hours
• Masters In Business
• Primed
• WorkLife with Adam Grant
• Think Fast, Talk Smart

Kids and Stories

I listen to alot of podcasts with my son, some of them include

• Myths and Legends
• Stories Podcast
• Circle Round
• Mystery Recipe
• Tumble Science
• Brains On
• Forever Ago
• Treasure Island 2020

• Arhous furniture
• RentFurniture.com
• West Elm
• Curbed.com
• Bruntwood.co.uk
• BEHR (the paint company)
• One Fine Stay (more exotic travel inspiration backgrounds)
• Search Pexels for “Zoom Office Backgrounds”

So why not download a new background and virtually transport yourself to a new room!

Select the “Format” menu, then “Text”, then “Capitalization”, then “UPPERCASE”

The first 4 episodes are out now featuring interviews with:

• Naomi Sanchez, Assistant Dean for MBA Career Management at the Foster School of Business
• Colette Vogel, Sr. Associate Director of Career Management and Corporate Relations at the Foster School of Business
• Dr. Polo DeCano, lecturer at the UW School of Psychology and College of Education,
• Dr. Jane Compson, Associate Professor at UW Tacoma

“Conversations on Careers and Professional Life.” Can be found on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or listen on SoundCloud.

News & Information

• Planet Money (NPR) – I’ve been listening since the beginning. About the economy and business.
• NPR Politics (NPR)
• Freakonomic Radio (NPR/WNYC)

Entertainment

• Think again from Big Think – thought leaders
• James Altuscher Show – interesting guests and he is a good interviewer
• Startup (Gimlet) – deep info-tainment reporting on startups  (not a “news” program, they go deep into a startupeach season while also chronicling their own startup experience)
• Reply All (Gimlet) funny, a show “about the internet”
• Hidden Brain (NPR) – you’ve probably heard segments on NPR, interesting stories about human nature and brain science
• Pivot Podcast – the author of Pivot, Jenny Blake. Some good episodes, but sometimes they are a bit long winded
• How I built this (NPR) feature length interviews with people who have created things (like companies, just listened to the episode about the founder of southwest)
• Twice Removed (gimlet) a show by AJ Jacobs that delves into geneology
• The Eater Upsell – about the food/restaurant industry
• Invisibilia

The podcasts I listen to fall into two other categories: 1) those i listen to every episode of, and 2) those I listen to sporadically.

I listen to nearly every episode of Planet Money, Hidden Brain, Reply All, StartUp.  All the others, I pick and choose, or used to listen to each episode and am now more selective, or have just started listening to and am not sure that I will listen to each episode.

When deciding on episodes to listen to, I often use episode length as an important deciding factor. I want to be able to listen to the entire episode at once, and usually my listening time is on my commute home (25 ~ 45 minutes) or while running errands alone on the weekend (4560 minutes).

But there are still problems with a purple map, and they are detailed in a post from 2014 on medium about the work of an MIT student even earlier. it is based on color theory. TL;DR: human perception of color is affected by adjacent colors. The same purple is perceived differently depending on whether there is red or blue adjacent to it.

The solution: use green to neutralize. Red and blue then desaturated toward gray to indicate the margin of victory.

There is still a problem with a map colored in this way, not that you will find any on popular news sites. That problem is population density.  The map still is a geographically accurate map of the US, as most electoral maps are presented, so vast unpopulated areas are unfairly weighted in the mind of the observer. The map on Gizmodo tries to deal with that by desaturating red, blue, purple by population density, however, then we run into the color perception problem.

Enter the cartogram. A cartogram uses something that is map-like, but then skews the areas so that they reflect some other measure, like population density (2012) and  2016, or in some other cases, electoral vote density, in fact, a number of news sites did start using a variety of different cartograms to represent population, or electoral votes, include the Washington Post and FiveThirtyEight.com, and you can read more about election maps from National Geographic.

Bottom line: Don’t use a data visualization that represents area (a geographically accurate map) to represent other data like popular vote, or electoral college votes. This will skew perception, and doing so over the past decade or more has probably lead to increasing polarization in our politics.

It’s Not What You Say, It’s How You Say It: Advice for nonverbal and verbal delivery in presentations.

Presentation Skills Resources: a compendium of resources that I share with my clients and students.

The Science Of People TED Talk Research

TED Talks: The Official Guide To Public Speaking, By Chris Anderson

Here is the full description for my session:

Whether you are trying to make an impression with an individual or a crowd, crafting and delivering an authentic message is critical to your success. From elevator pitches to interviews, to the board room — your ability to connect with your listeners and build an empathic relationship will dictate the outcomes. After surveying the latest research on body language, storytelling, and verbal communication, Gregory Heller will share what he has learned through working with over 250 MBA students in the last 13 months and years of coaching executives and communications consulting. Attendees will be invited to workshop their pitch during this session.

Today I encountered an article about a topic that interests me, food waste. I didn’t get too far into it before my mind (and fingers) were off on a tangent. Here is the second sentence:

To give you an idea of how much 3,000 tons is, that’s the weight of the new warship USS Little Rock, set to be commissioned later this year.

Do you know how big a warship is? I don’t. Do you want to click through just to find out? I don’t.  Using an analogy to help the reader understand a quantifiable measure only really helps when the analogous thing is something your audience knows about. Otherwise it just means, “really big”. So here are a few better ways to quantify 3,000 tons:

• 1 ton is 2,000 pounds, so 3,000 tons is 6 Million pounds. We all know how much we weigh, and have a sense of a pound of food, we often buy food by weight.
• If it were all steaks, you could serve 12 million 80z New York Strips.
• 3,000 tons weighs just a bit more than 13 Statues of Liberty! (the city that tosses 3000 tons of food daily is NY). But even this isn’t great because we are mixing a volumetric example (people know how “big” the statue of liberty is) with a weight example.
• 3000 tons is about the same weight as 1100 Cadillac Escalades (update: A line of Escalades 3.5 miles long!) This has a similar problem as the statue of liberty example.
• 3000 tons is equivalent to the max takeoff weight of almost 5 Boeing 787 Dreamliners, or perhaps even better: 3000 tons weighs as much as 15 empty 747-400 airplanes, or about 10 Airbus A-380s, the largest commercial airplane flying today.
• 3000 tons of food waste would cover a football field nearly two feet high. You might ask, am I counting the end zones or not, I’m not counting the endzones. In 3 months, that food waste would cover a football field to a depth of 180 feet, or the height of the top row of  nosebleed seats in some NFL stadiums.

I think any of the examples I’ve provided give the reader a better sense of how much 3,000 tons of food waste is.

So here is the lesson, again, when using analogies to contextualize quantities or other measures, be sure you are creating analogies that will resonate with you audience, and add clarity, not create more questions or confusion.

Addendum:

While lying awake in the middle of the night, I wondered, “How did that guy (Alexander Starritt, the article’s author) come up with the warship analogy in the first place? Did he just google ‘3000 tons’?” Yes. Yes he did. When you google ‘3000 tons’ the first thing that comes up (after google’s unit translator) is the article Starritt linked to. There is a big problem here though. As far as I can tell, when a ship’s size is described in “tons” the unit is actually a “long ton” or 2240 pounds, not the 2000 pounds of an American ton. You can learn more about tons on wikipedia. So, not only was Starritt’s analogy a bad one, it was also numerically incorrect.

Via Alberto Cairo’s blog

The advice that follows is declarative, and sometimes unequivocal, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions to these rules.

I’ve split these recommendations into three sections, Nonverbal Delivery, Verbal Delivery, and Content, and presented it in that order because most research shows that is the order in which your public presenting influences your audience’s opinion of you and what you say.

Nonverbal Delivery – Body Language

Humans are attracted to, and thus distracted by motion. This is a survival skill and is innate. You want to minimize or eliminate any motion that would distract your audience from paying attention to your face (facial expressions) and your presentation (content).

Body: Don’t rock, sway, step, pace or otherwise significantly move your feet during short presentations or interviews/networking conversations.  Plant your feet parallel to each other, approximately hip width apart, with both feet flat on the ground. If you need to turn to different people in a small audience, turn from your hips facing your entire body toward the individual(s) you are addressing. Try to avoid turning only your head (like a tennis spectator at half court) unless you are making an “aside” comment. When presenting in front of large audiences, walking on the stage can be used to great effect to keep the audience’s attention, you will see this in many TED talks, for example.

In a seated interview, you should place your feet flat on the ground, and keep your knees together and your back straight. Don’t hunch over, but do lean forward to engage your interviewer.

Arms: Imagine you have a wash cloth tucked in the pit of your arm, and you don’t want to drop it — you can even practice this — and you will get a sense of the range of motion you should have with your upper arms. You don’t want them pinned to your side, but you also don’t want them flapping wildly.  Your forearms can move more, but you should keep them (and your hands — more on hands below) in “the strike zone” in front of you, which is roughly the space from the top of your hips to your shoulder. You can also leave your arms at your sides, or move them there when you have no other gesture.

Hands: In November, the Washington Post  ran a fantastic article, “ What to do with your hands when speaking in public” that is based largely a recent study of successful TED speakers and recommendations by the researcher who conducted the study. It is well worth the (short) read. There is significant overlap from the advice you’ve heard me give and will read below, but their article includes nice illustrations.

Keep your hands in the “Strike zone” described above.  You want them to be in your peripheral field of vision (or completely out of it at your sides) so that they will not distract your audience from looking at your face. You can use your hands to punctuate your presentation and draw the audience’s attention to your face where you will be able to connect with them. You can also use them to “dual code” what you are saying. Using gestures for big and small, and for weighing options, or indicating a progression of time, or numbers less than 5.

Keep a strong alignment from your elbows to the tips of your middle fingers. The idea here is not have your hands flopping and flapping at your wrists, or your fingers splayed outward or curled inward. Try to avoid canned gestures, like the Clinton Thumb (capping a fist with your thumb and jabbing the whole thing at your audience). Try to avoid pointing – it is perceived as aggressive — unless the gesture has a specific and intentional meaning.

• Symmetrical hand gestures tend to be less distracting.

• Deliberate hand gestures are less distracting than random or jumpy ones.

• Try to not cross either hand in front of your body unless in a specific, intentional gesture.

• Avoid clasping your hands tightly whether they are cupped, fingers interlaced, or palms together (prayer).  The jury is out on the “steeple” gesture, but I’d say to avoid it.

• Don’t play with your fingers, or pick at them.

• Don’t put your hands in your pockets.

• Don’t hold a prop like a pen, unless you are planning to write on white board or butcher paper.

• Don’t touch your face, unless there is a specific gesture, like holding your head in anguish.

• Don’t put your hands behind your back. This can convey the idea that you have something to hide.

In a seated interview, you can still use your hands. Keep them on or above the table but try not to fidget with any objects or with your fingers. Don’t pound on the table, keep your hands up, roughly in the space between the bottom of your chin and the bottom of your rib cage, and not much beyond shoulder width apart, unless you are making a specific gesture that needs broader range of motion.

Practice your hand gestures. Over time you will develop a vernacular of hand gestures that are comfortable to you and can be deployed with far less thought.

Face: The way we use the muscles in our face can change the sound of our voice and convey a tremendous amount of information nonverbally. We make, and read micro-facial gestures that can influence other’s opinions of us. Before a presentation or interview you should stretch your face. Seriously. Open and close your mouth, smile, frown, etc… before you enter the room. Just like an athlete (or anyone) would stretch muscles before using them, stretching your face will ensure you have a broader range of motion and expression.

When you are speaking in front of larger audiences (more than a handful of people) it may appropriate to exaggerate your facial gestures.

Smile.

Eyes: Make sustained eye contact. This doesn’t mean you can’t blink, or look away to “find your words” and then return back to your audience (a hard habit to break). It means do not strafe your audience with your eyes by constantly scanning the room. In an interview with one person, start your answers with eye contact, and finish them with eye contact. If, between the start and finish of an answer, you find yourself looking away, bring your eye contact back to your interviewer.

Think of your presentation like a series of short conversations between you and an individual member of your audience. Present a complete idea to an individual audience member before moving on to the next. You want to look at the individual long enough to gather some information from their face: are they paying attention? do they understand what you have just said? are they enjoying/agreeing with what you are saying? Then move to the next person. If you look away from an individual mid-thought, return to that individual to complete the thought.

With larger audiences, imagine a 5 pointed star in the audience, find the individual at the points, and make your eye contact with those individuals, the others nearest to them will think that you are looking at them too.

Try not to close your eyes for extended periods of time (longer than a long blink) and try not to stare at the ceiling, floor, or table in front of you for too long, especially when you are speaking.

Verbal Delivery

Your verbal delivery should be filled with variety. We can all recognize “monotone” speakers, but it is not just variety in tone that makes verbal content interesting, it is also variety in volume, pitch and speed. When most of us speak in conversation with people we know, we have no problem speaking with variety. It is very difficult to describe in writing how to add variety in verbal presentations. The best way to get better at is to practice and record yourself and listen to/watch those recordings, or to practice in front of people who will provide unvarnished feedback. Book a team room, invite some friends, and each practice.

I can’t underscore this enough, practicing is the key to developing the variation in pace, volume, pitch and tone, all of which can be used to emphasize key words or phrases that you want people to pay attention to.  When reading from notes or trying to recall a verbatim speech from memory, it is very difficult to add the variety on the fly. You must practice with the variety so that you are comfortable using it when the time comes to present.

If you are preparing remarks or writing a speech — even if you don’t plan to deliver it verbatim, or read from a prepared script — plan where you will raise or lower your pitch, or volume or slow down for emphasis, where you will use a different tone that is appropriate to the content. You can also practice hand gestures in this way.

Pauses – silent vs verbal pauses or filler words

Silent pauses, even for 1 second, are critically important for your audience to stay engaged. Silence will draw attention and allow you audience to process what you have just said. Silent pauses also signal to your audience that a new thought or idea is coming next.  They give you an opportunity to breathe.

Verbalized pauses, or filler words are the opposite. They don’t draw (the right kind of) attention, provide your audience with an opportunity to process what you have said, or signal a transition or conclusion of an idea, and they do not give you an opportunity to breathe. A short silence may feel uncomfortable to you as the speaker, but will barely be noticed by your audience.

For more see “Your Speaking Voice” from Toastmasters (PDF)

Content

The most frequently feedback I give to people on the content of their presentations is that there are too many of the wrong type of details, and too much prologue/setup. This often happens because the presenter is thinking about their presentation from their perspective, not from their audience’s perspective. The same thing is true for interviews. You need to think about what you want your audience to take away from what you are saying, and this will help you focus on the right kinds of details.

What are the wrong types of details? Names of people that are only used once, or that no one in your audience will recognize.  You only need to actually introduce named characters if your story has enough characters that not naming them will become confusing. If you can instead say, “my wife” and “my boss” and “my coworker,” those will be easier identifiers to remember in a short speech. Details that don’t advance the story or help advance the key message may also be extraneous. These can be trickier to identify, because sometimes they provide the “color” to make the story more credible. Ask yourself, “If I omitted this detail, would my story still make sense, and be compelling to my intended audience?”

When you are answering questions in an interview, you want to make sure that your answer actually does answer the question and does so in a logical way where the elements of your answer build on each other. You may want to review the STAR model for crafting answers (Situation, Task, Action, Results) and prepare actual answers for common questions you can expect will be asked. This does not mean that you should memorize a verbatim answer, but if you are prepared with the anecdote you are going to use, and you understand what the interviewer is hoping to learn about you from your answer, you should be able to provide a clear and logical answer that also comes across as genuine and spontaneous.

Research from the Science of People (the organization referenced in the WaPo article on hand gestures) suggests that people make up their mind about a presentation in the first 7 seconds. You want to start of strong and clear. You also want to finish strong and clear.  Try not to start off a speech or presentation with a vocalized pause (“uhh”), or another filler word like “so” if that use is absent minded. You may have read an article in the NYT or heard a story on NPR (second half of artcile) about the perceived overuse of “so”. Also don’t end your speech with a trailing off, “so…”

I see many people have trouble with organization. You don’t need to tell a story in a completely chronological fashion, but the order in which you tell it needs to be logical. You can start at the beginning and tell it straight through, or you can start at the end, and then back up. You can even start in the middle, then back up, and finally land at the end. But you really don’t want to revisit any part (beginning, middle, or end) more than once (except maybe the middle, but don’t repeat the same things).

Repetition can also be a problem for some presenters. Certain details, or even exact phrases are repeated unnecessarily. Repetition can be used for effect (rhetorically) or to develop a rhythm, but that usually has its place in more formal speeches. You often see this in political speeches. In more informal presentations, or interviews, you want to try to avoid repeating phrases or details.

There are many resources available if you choose to dive deeper into the topic of presentation design, and some of them are available via links both in this article, and on my website.

You may also be interested in my Presentation Skills Resources list

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