185. Say Less, Mean More: Craft Compelling Communication

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: Getting to the point is critical in all communication, but especially storytelling and pitching. My name's Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. 

[00:00:17] Today I'm excited to speak with Guy Kawasaki. Guy is a renowned author, speaker, and entrepreneur. He was chief evangelist for Apple in the late 1980s and early 90s. Currently, Guy works for Canva, which he co founded. He hosts a podcast and has authored many books including his latest, Remarkable: Nine Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference. 

[00:00:39] Guy, I had a great time chatting with you on your remarkable podcast. It's such a fun conversation. I'm looking forward to our conversation here. 

[00:00:47] Guy Kawasaki: Well, I hope we can exceed what we did there. 

[00:00:50] Matt Abrahams: Well, thank you so much. Should we get started? 

[00:00:51] Guy Kawasaki: Yes. 

[00:00:53] Matt Abrahams: When you craft a story, what are the things that you are thinking about in terms of sequencing, how you start, how you end? What's your thought process?

[00:01:03] Guy Kawasaki: It starts with the awareness that you have to entertain your audience. I think too many people as speakers, they think, oh my god, I need to inform my audience and I need to like get my pitch across. I need to get my story across, you know, my people are telling me these are the three key points. And so what happens is you're working from forward from what you want to do. I want to get my three ideas across, my three key selling points across. And what you have to do is you have to understand that it's not about you, it's about them. And if your audience wants to be entertained, which is basically every audience, I think if you entertain people, you have a chance of informing them. But if you, all you're trying to do is inform them and not entertain them, you're not going to pull it off. 

[00:01:55] Matt Abrahams: First and foremost, what I hear you say is that stories are natural and lean into just the comfort and natural way in which we tell stories. And second, thinking about your job is to engage and entertain the audience and through that you can inform them. And deciding the appropriate level of information. A lot of lessons in that has to do with reminding yourself what your purpose is, which is to engage and entertain and make sure that you just tell the stories as you normally would. Conversation much better than formal presentations.

[00:02:27] Guy Kawasaki: I bet you if we had a hundred CEOs or CXOs out there and we said to them, how many of you believe that the top priority in a presentation is to entertain? They'll be like zero.

[00:02:41] Matt Abrahams: Well, just as a personal story on that front. When I was coming up in the academic world learning how to be a teacher, one of my mentors recently passed away was Phil Zimbardo. And he pulled me aside and said, as a professor, your job is to transmit knowledge and information, but the way you do that is by entertaining. You have to connect, be relevant and engaging, and then the students want to learn. And that makes it so much easier, and I think the same is true in storytelling and business. I want to switch our gears here and talk about a form of storytelling, which is pitching. And I know you spend a lot of time coaching people on pitching. What is the advice you find yourself giving over and over again about what makes for a good pitch? 

[00:03:21] Guy Kawasaki: The problem with most pitches, it starts off with the fundamental idea that the purpose of a pitch is to get a check. And so, people have this fantasy that I am gonna just, you shock and awe, this is gonna be Desert Storm Three. They're gonna just be so shocked and awed, they're gonna ask me for wire transfer instructions. And right there, you're wrong and that screws up the rest of your pitch because the purpose of a pitch is not to get the money. The purpose of a pitch is to stay in the game and not get eliminated. So you, as long as you're not a no, you still can be a yes. A pitch is a path to the next step, which is due diligence. So just don't get eliminated. That's problem number one. 

[00:04:16] Problem number two is that, I think in every entrepreneur's life, they have gone to some panel or watched some YouTube video where there's a panel of venture capitalists. And some moderator who says, so what do you look for in a deal? And every venture capitalist says, I look for a world class team with a world class product in a world class market. And then the panel goes, they keep going and say, yeah, I'm looking for really great team. And we stand by our team. We believes in our team. We stick with our team. And so everybody hears this and they think, oh my god. So I got to convince them that I have a world class team. 

[00:05:00] So the CEO stands up in this pitch and spends fifteen minutes telling his or her life history, that my great grandfather came over in the Mayflower, he landed in Connecticut, he created this hardware store, which became ACE hardware, and he made a ton of money. So he endowed a chair at Dartmouth and I got into Dartmouth and from Dartmouth I had a summer intern at Goldman Sachs and the next year I had an internship at McKinsey. I came out west, I worked for Google, then I worked for Microsoft, I took my .NET class and like fifteen minutes later, like what the hell do you do? Is it hardware, software, whatever. 

[00:05:40] So what I tell people in a pitch is you got to think there's two kinds of airplanes. One airplane is a 787 and the other kind of airplane is a fighter jet. So if you're at SFO and you're in a 787, you have two miles of runway. You can just go buh buh buh, and one point nine miles later, you're up in the air and the miracle has occurred. Guess what kind of pilot you need to be in a pitch? You need to be Tom Cruise, right? So in the first thirty seconds, you say, my name is Guy Kawasaki. I'm chief evangelist of Canva. Canva is in the business of democratizing design. We're an online design service. So you can create graphics faster than you can boot Photoshop. That's the Tom Cruise explanation. 

[00:06:26] Matt Abrahams: Two things. One, have the right goal. The right goal is to just get to the next step. It's not to get to the check. It's not to get to the prize. It's just to get to the next step. And then second, get there quickly. It's not about building up all the credibility and explaining everything. It's really about what's the value you bring and get it out quickly. I think that's great advice, not just for pitching, but for communication in general. A lot of people take a long time. There's a lot of buildup. And I think that's really important. I also think, and I believe you believe this too, that a lot of pitching is listening to understand what is needed and what's important to people. It's not just about coming in and saying all of this. The other thing I recommend I'd like to get your opinion on is a lot of people create one pitch and they just deliver that one pitch across. All different audiences, you have to tailor it. 

[00:07:10] Guy Kawasaki: After you give the pitch about twenty or thirty times, every time you're going to hear one different thing and you go back to your office and then you make that fix. And after you do this twenty or thirty times, you take back your presentation and you start from scratch. And you let the twenty things that you've heard and you've trying to add, somebody said, I want to know about the patent structure. So you added a patent page and somebody said, I want to know about the legal repercussions and trademark implications. So you put that page in and then somebody said, how are you on DEI? So you put a DEI page in. And pretty soon you've covered every objection. And now you're not Tom Cruise anymore. Now you are flying a Pan Am 747 cargo jet.

[00:07:58] Matt Abrahams: I think that's really an important point for people to think about. If you continually build, change, build, change, build, change, you can end up with something that's not what you need. And sometimes it's, let's just start fresh with the input and information that we had learned and that helps. I want to shift gears to even be more specific. I know you have very strong beliefs on slides and how slides should be designed. You've actually become very famous for your ten, twenty, thirty rule. I'd love for you to share a little bit about that specific rule. But in terms of when you think about slides or things that we add to support our communication, how should we be thinking about that to be effective and not distracting?

[00:08:37] Guy Kawasaki: Being a big David Letterman fan, I figured out that ten is about the magic number, and I would make the case that if you think you need more than ten slides to convince someone you have a viable business, that means you don't have a viable business. Ideally, you could convince people in one or two slides. I think the ideal pitch is you have ten slides ready to roll. But you get to the second or third slide and you say, would you like a quick demo? And you start a demo and the next fifty minutes, you're talking about the demo and you never get to slide three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, because people are so entranced by your demo. That's a very good sign. 

[00:09:21] So that's kind of where I'm coming from there. So anyway, the ten, twenty, thirty rule is maximum ten slides. You should be able to give those ten slides in twenty minutes. I mean, there've been like Nobel prize winners give eighteen minute TED talks. I'm giving you two more minutes than them because you're not a Nobel prize winner. But in twenty minutes, you should be able to explain anything. And then the thirty points is because I think people use much too small a font and they put complete sentences and whole paragraphs. And when you put a sentence or a paragraph, it's because you don't know your material well enough. If you need that much text, you don't really know your material, which is your problem.

[00:10:04] So Nancy Duarte, one of my heroes from Duarte Design, she has something called the glance test. And the way the glance test works is you put up your slide, people glance at the slide, and then they look at you and if you put up a slide and they're like the strategic focus of my company is to enable shareholders to receive a reasonable return on equity while enabling employees to self actualize their goals. We're providing a patent pending, curve jumping, paradigm shifting solution to the problems at hand while killing as few whales as possible. And now I'm back to the speaker. Steve Job's font size was like a hundred and ninety points. You and I, we're not Steve Jobs. So that's why I'm saying thirty. 

[00:10:55] Matt Abrahams: Ah, interesting. Yeah, it's almost a heuristic. Yeah, the number of words on a slide implies how well prepared they are. So ten, twenty, thirty. Ten slides. twenty minutes, thirty size font. I often say the mantra should be what's the least amount of information I can put on a slide to add value. 

[00:11:12] Guy Kawasaki: Again, it comes back to the fundamental question. People who put a lot of texts on the slide think it's because they're going to use shock and awe to get wiring instructions. Again, that's a false assumption. 

[00:11:24] Matt Abrahams: So, words versus images. Do you find images, graphs, charts can be as valuable, more valuable than just having words, bullet points? What are your thoughts on that?

[00:11:32] Guy Kawasaki: I believe I agree with that. However, I would say that the danger here is that, like everything else in pitching, less is more. And some people think if I put four images up, it's better than three. Three is better than two, and two is better than one, but you will flunk the glance test. Because if there's four images, like dolphin, there's a picture of a seagull, there's a picture of Steve Jobs, and there's a picture of the sunset, oh, what were you saying again?

[00:12:05] Matt Abrahams: I'm going to switch gears. You also do what I do. You host a podcast. It's a great podcast. You've had wonderful guests. What are one or two things that you have taken away over all those interviews that you've done, in terms of a learning that you've had or some insight that you've gained as a result? 

[00:12:19] Guy Kawasaki: I think one of the most, if not the most, insight I've gained from my podcast is from someone who has an office about a mile from here. And her name is Carol Dweck. So Carol Dweck wrote the book Mindset. And it's all about the growth mindset. You can have a growth mindset and believe you can learn new skills and do new things. Or you can have a fixed mindset and believe you can't. And that was a fundamental book in my life that, you know, yeah, I want to be on the right side of that dichotomy. And everybody who's remarkable has a growth mindset. There's nobody with a fixed mindset who's been remarkable. 

[00:12:58] Matt Abrahams: Carol's work is really important because a lot of people get locked into that fixed mindset and they limit themselves. 

[00:13:04] Guy Kawasaki: Carol Dweck's work was great as it is and then Mary Murphy just put the icing on the cake because Mary Murphy's insight is yes, a growth mindset is primarily in your head. But if you have a growth mindset in your head, but you're in an organization that has a fixed mindset, it ain't going to work. So you need to have a growth mindset in a growth mindset organization for it to be optimal. I think even Carol would say that was a brilliant insight that added to her theories.

[00:13:36] Matt Abrahams: Before we end, I'd like to ask all my guests three questions. One I make up just for you and one is similar across all. You ready for that? 

[00:13:42] Guy Kawasaki: Fire away. 

[00:13:43] Matt Abrahams: I know you have a passion for surfing. I'm curious, how do you use that passion to help you be better at what you do? I think all of us should have some kind of physical activity that we use or have that helps us focus and channel. I'm curious, why surfing and what does it do for you? 

[00:14:00] Guy Kawasaki: Surfing is not a means to an end. It is the end in itself. So if you said to somebody, why do you do CrossFit? They will say, I want to be in fitness. I want to lose weight or whatever. Um, why do I surf? Because I simply love surfing. It's not a means to an end. It's the end itself. So that's number one. And what I love about surfing, and I started at sixty, which is fifty-five years too late. I started at sixty. Surfing is the most difficult thing I have ever tried to learn because there are so many variables. There's the water. The speed of the wave, the direction of the wave, the shape of the wave, the other people in the water, the reef, the kelp, the wind, the tide, and it is both anaerobic and aerobic, and it requires great balance, and you're out in the ocean at dawn, and it's like, surfing is the most fun you can have legally.

[00:14:59] Matt Abrahams: I appreciate that it's something you're passionate about, and I love that you took it on later in life. Let me ask you question number two. Who is a communicator that you admire and why? 

[00:15:09] Guy Kawasaki: There's nobody you could admire more than Steve Jobs. I saw him speak several times, or many times actually. He had such a way of telling a story. Talk about passing the glance test. You could look at his slide for half a second and come back to him. He could really do a demo. He had a sense of timing and pace and, you know, he could sense when the audience, you know, wanted to hear this or that. He was truly magical. I think it's kind of like the story that if you hear that Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant always took more free throws than anybody else on the team, you would say Kobe and Michael are naturally endowed. Why did they have to take more practice shots? 

[00:15:49] I don't know which comes first. If you're naturally endowed, you practice more or you practice more so people think you're naturally endowed, but addition to the growth mindset, there's the work of Angela Duckworth, which is the grit to mindset. And I would say that the flip side of the growth mindset is the grit mindset, because if you're going to grow, you're going to face failure. So you need to persevere in failure, which is grit. 

[00:16:14] Matt Abrahams: Final question for you, Guy, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? 

[00:16:21] Guy Kawasaki: I will tell you that the most important thing is, duh, you have to have something to say. Because not everybody has something to say when they try to create a communication strategy. So you need to have something to say. And you know, at an extreme example, I talk to a lot of people and they say, I want to write a book. And I say, why do you want to write a book? They say, well, I want to position myself as a thought leader and a visionary. And I want to build credibility. I want to increase consulting. I want to increase speaking. That's why I want to write a book. You write your book when you have something to say, not because it's going to help position you. I think that's the number one thing. That's ninety-five percent of the battle. You have something to say. 

[00:17:10] Matt Abrahams: And I heard you say earlier that making sure that it's entertaining and engaging. And that it's relevant to the audience, when we were talking about pitching, you talked about that. And I think, but first and foremost, you have to have something important to say. And certainly Guy, you did. You shared with us many concepts that I think are really important. Be present for your audience. Tell the story as naturally as you can. Make sure that when you use slides, that there's a purpose to those slides, and you're not just throwing a lot in. And an important point also is, be willing to start fresh, to start new. And that's a really important lesson I need to take. Thank you for your time. 

[00:17:44] Guy Kawasaki: My pleasure.

[00:17:46] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about slide design, please listen to episode 82 with Nancy Duarte. To learn more about pitching, please listen to episode 47 with Stephanos Zenios. This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. And check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks, Ask Matt Anything AMAs, and much more at fastersmarter.io/premium.