Curious to know what winning teams look like. Read my guest article on Next Big What  by clicking here .

Yesterday I was watching the starting 15-20 minutes of the iPad and iPhone launch. Both were revolutionary products at the time of their launch. But how was it launched by Steve?How will you sell a new idea or concept to people?  We will learn from how Steve started and structured his talk. 1. Build expectation Steve jobs built audience expectation right at the start. He uses words like 'revolutionary technology' and raises their hope. If you are selling a new concept or idea, you might want to start with raising the hopes of the audience. Choose your words carefully and tell the audience about awesome this thing is. The audience must be told that you are really onto something new and interesting. If you will not tell, who will? 2. Share your excitement with the audience Steve Jobs had a child-like excitement about his products. Listen to this from his talks. He says, "It is so wonderful" when he talks about 50 million visitors to 284 Apple stores. "I d...

You are a engineer or a scientist or you work in R&D. You work on cutting edge technology and you are talking to 'managers' (who are not engineers) who do not understand all this. This is a communication challenge and you need to simplify your talk for it to make any sense to the managers. Melissa Marshall in her 4 minute TED talk addresses this issue head on and offers 6 tips. I have added my thoughts as well. 1. On every slide, ask yourself "So What?" This is what the audience is thinking as well. How does it relate to me? Why does it matter to me? How is this relevant and useful to me? 2. Remove all jargon from your talk. Jargon is only known to people in your domain. And jargon will not make you look any smarter. 3. Simplify the talk. Bring down complex concepts to a level which your audience can understand. You cannot make the audience smarter in 15 minutes. But you can definitely make your content more understandable to them. 4....

You have received an appointment to present to a potential customer or an investor. The prospect asks you to email the deck (slides) beforehand so that they can go through it. What will you do? Do not email the deck that you are supposed to present. When you email the deck - the slides need to stand on their own. You will not be there to speak along with the slides. Hence, this deck will have more words. When you present the deck in person - the slides will support your talk. Here you should have more and more visuals, photos and less and less of text. Just a few words per slide will do. One slide can simply have one chart and the story will be communicated orally. Declutter the slides to increase the impact on your audience. If you present the slides which have everything written already, what real value will you add? Change your slides depending on the way it is going to be presented. Will the slides be read by the audience or will you be presenting it in person?

The two biggest challenges facing every communicator are - Comprehension and Credibility . Comprehension is all about whether your audience understands you. Credibility is about belief. Do they believe you? Today I want to talk about increasing comprehension. There is one tool which can help you improve the comprehension of your written text (and by extension, the spoken word too). Flesch–Kincaid Readability Score You have written your email or content on your slides. Before you press send, why not check what your readability score is? The higher the score, the more readable (and comprehensible) your content is. Scores usually range between 0 and 100. Click here to visit the site. Copy paste your content and you get the readability score. Let us see how it works. I will copy paste parts of Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk . His TED talk is the most watched TED talk ever. Here is a short story from his talk: I heard a great story recently -- I love telling i...

In October, 8 agri-business startups had their Demo Day in Mumbai. I was invited by my alma mater (which had incubated these startups) to help these startups with their pitches. In this post I share what I learned from first, helping these startups and second, by seeing them pitch live on Demo Day. Before you begin preparing for your demo day, you need to ask the following questions: What are my constraints? What does the investor expect from me? What do I expect from this pitch? What were the constraints? Time was the only constraint. Each startup was given only 8 minutes. The organizer stopped the presenter when the time was up. This was followed by a Q&A of 5 minutes in which 4 or 5 investors asked questions. Actually this was a good constraint to have. The more you speak, the lesser the audience will remember. Even with 8 minutes, the investors had to listen for 64 minutes (8 x 8). That's a lot of new information about 8 new startups. They can ha...