Jeremy Connell-Waite’s Post

Here's a FREE 146-page book I created to help you tell better stories. Updated for July 2024, it's a collection of all my one pagers and the Linkedin post that I wrote for each one. 🙌🏻 🗺️ 61 One Pagers 📖 44,000 Words It's all my favourite storytelling advice, a few photos of my process and an overview of how I work. It's about 4 years of work packed into one little PDF. (Well, it's 456MB since the drawings are in HD - so not that little!) Should be enough storytelling information to keep you going for a while! LINK IN THE COMMENTS to download the PDF for FREE. No cost. No signup. No data capture. Just lots of storytelling goodness. Enjoy! 💙 ** If Linkedin flags the link with a warning - it's only because the BetterStories site is receiving so much traffic at the moment 🤯 so you might prefer to copy the URL into a browser! **

I built an AI-powered dashboard today that can quickly analyse presentations to provide some useful insights about what may (or may not) make them so good.   I built this in just under 5 hours using a few elaborate prompts on Meta’s Llama-3 Large Language Model (LLM) via IBM’s watsonx platform. 🎛️   I thought it only fitting that the first talk I should test is Ray Kurzweil's recent talk about AGI arriving as soon as 2029 from TED Conferences in Vancouver! 🤣   Seems to be taking shape nicely.   With the speed that technology is advancing at the moment it’s definitely hard (and getting harder) to keep up. 🤯   Who knows where this will take the art and science of business storytelling over the next few years?!? 🤷🏻♂️   Interesting times…

"We make the world work better" could easily be a catch-phrase from the brilliant parody TV show Silicon Valley but in IBM's case, it's what the company has been doing for over a century. In a rare corporate post (I hope you don't mind), I wanted to share this lovely 90-second TV spot created by Maxime Razimbaud and Matt Chandler - 2 super talented creatives working for IBM in the UK. 💙 🇬🇧 It's hard for any business leader to talk about their impressive corporate history and for it to not come across as ego-centric, chest-thumping or nostalgic - and in IBM's case - sounding like you're just remembering the "good ole days" back when you were bigger than Microsoft, Apple, Amazon or Nvidia! 🤷🏻♂️ Truth is IBM has reinvented itself 5X over the last 60 years (getting close to bankruptcy on a few occasions) but coming back bigger and stronger each time... From mainframes and personal PC's, to software, consulting, AI and quantum - no other company has been in computing for as long as IBM has. 💻 Today, we've got the world's largest fleet of quantum computers, more patents in generative-AI than any other company and a team of 3,000 research scientists who (with a budget of almost $6Billion a year) are obsessed with inventing new technologies that make the world work a little bit better. Did you know that 6 Nobel prize-winners have even come out of that research team!? 🏅 🤯 It's not ego-speaking when it's true (?!) - but there is a fine line between being proud and just showing off! 🤷🏻♂️ And nobody likes a showoff. BUT... It's also good to CELEBRATE THE COMPANY YOU WORK FOR. 🙌🏻 🎉 🍾 We don't do it enough... Especially across the UK and Europe where we're not usually very good at wearing our heart on our sleeve (unless it's related to football!? *Thanks Jude!* ⚽️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿) So congrats to Maxime Razimbaud and Matt Chandler for putting this showreel together and reminding me (and thousands of other IBMers) why we work where we do. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are” is arguably one of the best pieces of advice ever given. That wonderful quote by Theodore Roosevelt inspired me to make these notes. I’m always inspired by people who start small and scale fast; using whatever limited resources they had available at the time. That’s why I drew this one pager. It features a few of the people I’ve been reading about recently, who personify that philosophy. People like Jane Austen, the author who spent 15 years writing Sense & Sensibility, but decided to self-publish when nobody else would. The 750 copies she printed soon sold out, making enough to pay herself a salary of £35 a year (£3,500 today) to write Pride & Prejudice. I love Cedric Villani - the eccentric French mathematician who “accidentally” won a Field’s medal (the Nobel prize of maths) by re-writing a school text book that he thought was wrong. Emily Dickinson was an amazing poet who couldn’t afford paper, so she wrote verses each day on the back of used envelopes to get started. Or what about Taylor Swift? The 13 year old soon-to-be-billionaire pop star who learned to sing the national anthem at sports events, when she didn’t have an audience of her own. Or Sara Blakely - the entrepreneur who became the world’s first self-made female billionaire, after launching SPANX with $5,000 she saved from selling fax machines door-to-door. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 They say the best time to get started was yesterday. The 2nd best time is TODAY. I regularly see business folks who are waiting for the perfect conditions to launch their business idea, non-profit campaign or dream job; but many seem to keep waiting for a “better time”. The ICF (International Coaching Federation) estimate that the average business executive only works to about 40% of their potential. 🤯 Perhaps that’s because they spend too much time waiting for conditions to be perfect… instead of doing what they could with what they have? 🤷🏻♂️ Maybe we can all do a little bit more with what we have, even if it is a little bit less than we would ideally like? ⬇️ “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” Mark Twain

Just minutes ago, Nvidia leapfrogged Apple & Microsoft to become the world's most valuable company with a $3.32Tr market cap. This image showing Nvidias 262% year-on-year growth, shows some of the stats behind the story driven by demand for its chips and an investor frenzy over artificial intelligence. The AI race started in the 1950's but now things are really hotting up. Hold on to your hats folks.... If you think things are disruptive right now, this is probably nothing compared to what will happen as we approach AGI. (Somewhere between 2028-2029?) ⬇️ "Things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could." Rudi Dornbusch 📈

Later today, SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, deploying an Astra satellite which will provide higher quality broadcasting signals for TV’s across Germany, France & Spain.   As IBM celebrates its 113th birthday this week 🎉 , I’ve been going back through the archives of our work with NASA to update some projects I’m working on.   One of the items I found was this wonderful short story about the Apollo space program, so today seems like the perfect day to share it.   It’s a lovely 4-minute clip about the career of Homer Ahr, a programmer who worked for IBM on the Apollo missions, and how he just wanted a job that made a difference. 🚀

In a fireside chat at Sundance Film Festival recently, MIT lecturer Sandra Rodriguez suggested that AI should be rebranded “SALAMI” (Systems Automated Learning and Machine Inference) to make the topic feel less threatening! 🤣   Like all great storytellers, Sandra understands that LEVITY is important, and having a fun anecdote to begin any difficult conversation is always a good idea.   But that’s not just why I posted this short clip.   If you get the chance, you should check out the whole conversation because it could help you to strengthen your own point of view around AI.   The full 80-minute session was titled “Let’s Rebrand Artificial Intelligence”.   It featured 4 documentary film directors who discussed the battle for new ideas between art and AI - and how the words we use to describe a technology can be both POWERFUL and DANGEROUS.   It’s an important conversation for us to have, because whether you’re a business leader, a developer, a consultant or a coach, aren't we all just "commercial artists" who are trying to CREATE something meaningful in one way or another?   If so, maybe we need to think a bit more like artists if we’re going to get the best out of any artificially intelligent model? 🤷🏻♂️   Sidenote: One interesting trend I'm seeing at the moment is the increasing demand for people educated in social sciences and liberal arts, rather than computer science. 📈 ⬇️   A few topics discussed in this fascinating conversation from Sundance 2024:   🎨 Why artists need a “disruptive understanding” of how AI works (along with all its biases).   ⏱️ If AI helps with the economy of time and means (an artist’s main revenue stream) then how should artists use AI to improve their craft? And should commercial artists really strive to save time & money anyway?   🧬 Can AI ever be truly creative when it is designed to look for historical patterns that are predictable?   💬 How do you get AI to have a unique voice and not just give you “a bunch of cliches”?   🎙️ Can you train an AI to have a personality? (One example discussed tested GPT-4 by making it a Dolly Parton fan!)   💡 Efficiency is not good for the creative process: AI’s like Netflix’s algorithm are not good if they only show you what you liked last time; because HUMANS NEED SERENDIPITY to be able to continually learn from new people (and ideas) that they might not be familiar with.   Worth a watch.   [Link in the comments]

60 years ago IBM created an internal communications "Poster Program" to inspire employees, and remind them what matters most. These are 8 of my favourites (designed by VSA Partners 10 years ago) because they seem as relevant today as they were when they were first published. Based on IBM’s 9 "practices" these posters were inspired by the belief that "Good Design is Good Business". I love these posters because they're a good reminder for business leaders everywhere, that we are here to serve our clients... build a business... make things that matter... change the world (in some small way)... and HAVE FUN! 🙌🏻 “Treasure wild ducks! The wild ducks are the creative ones. They’re the restless explorers who are always looking for a new angle on a big problem”. Thomas J. Watson Jr. 🦆

EVERY (business) story should begin with an OUTLINE. It doesn’t matter which outline you start with, just make sure that you have one!   Story OUTLINES are like tools. Different ones make different things.   Which is why if you want to be a good story teller, it’s important to have a well stocked story “tool box” for when you need it.   🧨 Warning: Some story coaches might have you believe that there is ONE “best” way to tell a story. (Maybe they’ve even trademarked it?!) 💥   But there is NOT one “best” way.   There are many ways you can tell a story.   And many different outlines will help you get the job done.   Different ones work for different people, you’ve just got to find the one that works best for you.   Some people like chisels. Some people like chainsaws?! 🤷🏻♂️   These are some of my notes from a storytelling class I gave last week, featuring a few of my favourite story structures. (We were training AI large language models to identify which structures would work best for different business applications, but that’s a whole different post!)   💬 Need to give a speech to influence or inspire an audience? Cicero’s 5 Canon’s or Kennedy’s “4 Words and 5 Lines” might work.   ⭕️ Showcasing a transformational project? Try using Aristotle’s Poetics or Dan Harmon’s Story Circle.   💥 Pitching to a CEO and you only have 10 minutes? A “Mission Critical Script” or Minto’s Pyramid is a good plaxce to start.   🎬 Hosting a 90-minute workshop? That sounds like the length of a movie! Try structuring it in “Beats” like Blake Snyder’s “Save the Cat”.   Different outlines create different outcomes. Not sure where to start?   ⬇️   To help you out, I’ve put all the links to the different outlines on my BetterStories website (with videos, tutorials and free PDF downloads).  🙌🏻   “If you’re going to have a story, have a BIG story or none at all.” Joseph Campbell 🗺️