Category: Professional

The Identity Philosophers Song

With all due apologies to Monty Python and specifically Eric Idle here’s the identity industry’s version of the Philosophers Song. Many thanks to everyone who helped this effort and huge thanks to Eve Maler for all her work on this. What follows is meant with much love and respect to everyone in the industry (mentioned or not). And with that… maestro please:

Jeremy Grant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable
iglazer, iglazer was a boozy beggar
who could think you under the table
Blakley whom could out-consume
Madsen, Bradley, and Dingle
Pat Patterson was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Cahill
There’s nothing Wilton couldn’t teach ya’
Bout the raising of the wrist.
Cameron himself was permanently pissed…

George Fletcher, still, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Nishant K could stick it away;
Half a crate of whiskey every day.
Patrick Harding, Patrick Harding was a bugger for white lightning
Nash was fond of his dram,
Really Dick Hardt was a drunken fart
“I drink, therefore I am”
Yes, Cameron himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he’s pissed!

 

And if none of that made sense to you, here’s the original which also might not make much sense either.

My 9 Step Process for Building a Presentation

“How do you build a presentation?” I’ve had the question asked of me a few times recently. And I’ve had enough flights recently to spend some time thinking about the answer. As I mentioned, before I could actually answer the question I had to write this other post about clarity and empathy. Go read that and then come back. With that as context, here is my stripped down process – my 9 essential steps to building a presentation.

1 – Find the nucleus

I start with a few pithy quotes or few, very few, key points. In the case of my “Killing IAM” talk, all I had was the phrase “Behold the comma.” For my more recent “No One Is An Island” what I had was “Hierarchies and our love for them is the strange love child of Confucius and the military industry complex” and “Treating people like just nodes just rows in a database is, essentially, sociopathic behavior. It ignores the reality that you, your organization, and the other person, group, or organization are connected.” What you need is just enough to grow a talk upon.

2 – Build an outline

Next up – I build an outline. The top-level items will become the sections of the talk. Under each top-level item I add just a few bullets, the essential points for that section. I’ll also add cues for visuals where I can. Sometimes I have a strong image in my mind how to illustrate a certain point, or there’ll be a joke I want to tell that requires a visual. Don’t stress over not having visual cues; they’re nice to have but by no means required to proceed to step 3.

3 – Write the speech

Yup. I write out my full talk. All of it. Write out the story that you want to tell. Hit each top-level item from the outline; make them headers. Weave the associated bullets into full sentences. Paragraphs grow from there. I will also put in parenthetical notes to myself for visuals, staging, and other things I want to remember when I present. I’ll also put in the quotes and ideas that served as my nucleus.

You might be surprised to learn but I don’t spend a ton of time of the actual writing. It takes me about an afternoon or so to write a speech. Your mileage may vary.

The text should flow. If it doesn’t, then you aren’t ready to write it. Go back to your nucleus and ask if it inspires you. Go back to your outline and look for weaknesses and holes.

As for length, I find that each page of single spaced text is about 3 to 4 minutes of talk. To get a sense for how long your text is, fire up text to speech. Time how long it takes the computer to read the text. This will give you a sense if you are in the right neighborhood lengthwise. Continue reading My 9 Step Process for Building a Presentation

Waiter – there’s no (more) identity in my blog

Sorry to interrupt you attempting to set you Facebook privacy settings, but I have to tell you something. I’ve got me a new blog over at Gartner. You can get all my rambling goodness on identity management related stuff over there. As for the rants about privacy, they are likely going to stay here, but you never can tell.

Also, I am thinking of building a new version of Privacy Mirror to use the graph API. Any one have feature requests?