304. Rethinks: Craft Compelling Communication

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: The ability to pitch an idea or product well can often mean the difference between success and failure. My name is Matt Abrahams, and I teach Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to this special Rethinks episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. When I first met famed pitching guru Guy Kawasaki, I learned so much. That's why I wanted to bring Guy's advice back for all of you. And since he provided so much value, we're sharing the extended version of my conversation. Enjoy.

[00:00:36] 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. 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. 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. 

[00:01:23] Guy Kawasaki: Well, I hope we can exceed what we did there. 

[00:01:26] Matt Abrahams: Well, thank you so much. Shall we get started? 

[00:01:28] Guy Kawasaki: Yes. 

[00:01:29] Matt Abrahams: So you wear many hats. The one that intrigues me most is your role as chief evangelist. You were a chief evangelist at Apple, currently at Canva. What does a chief evangelist do, and, and how do you know if you're successful? 

[00:01:42] Guy Kawasaki: So it comes from a Greek term that means bringing the good news. That's evangelism. And so what an evangelist does is bring the good news. And so what is good news? Good news is when you make the world a better place. With Macintosh, we made people more creative and productive. With Canva, where I'm chief evangelist now, the good news is that Canva has democratized design so that people can be a better communicator. So arguably, the chief evangelist is the chief cheerleader of the good news. 

[00:02:16] Matt Abrahams: So in that role, you spend a lot of time thinking about what's the value that we bring to our clients and our customers, and how do I champion that?

[00:02:24] Guy Kawasaki: To be honest with you, if you are really evangelizing a great product, you don't need to spend a lot of time thinking about what the value is. It should be very obvious. If I had to spend a lot of time thinking about the value of a Macintosh or a Canva, that kind of says that maybe it's not such good news. Good news should be obvious. A lot of people tell me, "What's it take to be a great evangelist?" And I'll tell them, "90% of it is the product." 

[00:02:51] Matt Abrahams: One of the things that I know you're very passionate about, had a lot of thoughts on, is storytelling, and I'd love to get your advice and guidance for our listeners on how best to craft stories that can be memorable and actually move people in the direction you want them to go in.

[00:03:05] Guy Kawasaki: Well, I can tell you, like, in the last two years, there's been something that truly has helped storytellers. Um, two years ago or three years ago, you would have to have a very broad knowledge of stories, constant reading, constant watching, always on the alert looking for good stories. You have to be really aware that if you're in an airport and you see somebody throw a bag down, and you know what happens. And it takes a lot of awareness.

[00:03:33] And I think that there's this story about how some, I can't remember which hamburger joint did this, but they introduced a third pounder, and they wanted to have more sales, obviously, than the quarter pounder. But many people thought that because four is bigger than three, a quarter pounder is more meat than a third pounder, which mathematically is wrong. But it's a great story to use in a speech about being aware and not assuming that the audience understands what you're saying. I mean, there's a lot of lessons in that story alone, and I think that ChatGPT would've easily given you that story. 

[00:04:15] Matt Abrahams: Part of a good story is finding content that resonates and is appropriate. When you craft stories, and you are an expert storyteller, when you craft a story, what are the things that you are thinking about in terms of the sequencing, how you start, how you end? What, what's your thought process? 

[00:04:33] 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 wanna 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 gonna pull it off. 

[00:05:25] 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. 

[00:05:57] Guy Kawasaki: I bet you if we had 100 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?" It'd be like zero. 

[00:06:12] 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, 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.

[00:06:36] 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?

[00:06:51] Guy Kawasaki: The problem with most pitches, it, 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 use 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.

[00:07:44] That's problem number one. 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 hosts, they keep going and say, "Yeah, I'm looking for a 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 gotta convince them that I have a world-class team."

[00:08:29] So the CEO stands up in this pitch and spends 15 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, 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 dot net class." And like 15 minutes later, like, "What the hell do you do? Is it hardware, software, or whatever?" So what I tell people in a pitch is you gotta think.

[00:09:12] 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 ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. And 1.9 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 30 seconds you say, "My name is Guy Kawasaki. I'm chief evangelist of Canva. Canva's a, 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.

[00:09:56] 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 the prize. It's just 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.

[00:10:19] There's a lot of build-up, and I think that's really important. I also think, and I, 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. 

[00:10:40] Guy Kawasaki: After you give the pitch about 20 or 30 times, every time you're gonna hear one different thing, and you go back to your office and then you make that fix. And after you do this 20 or 30 times, you take back your presentation and you start from scratch. And you let the, the 20 things that you've heard and you're trying to add, somebody said, "I wanna know about the patent structure," so you added a patent page. And somebody said, "I wanna 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 it. 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. 

[00:11:28] 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. 

[00:11:43] Guy Kawasaki: I think if you think it's hard to get a yes in a pitch, I would say it may be even harder to get a no. Because the positive way of saying it, it takes someone who's very frank and someone who is willing to confront you, and not everybody is. And so when people are asked, "Are there any improvements or something?" No one except me is gonna say, "You just suck. Just get out of my sight." They're gonna say, "I found your story about your patent strategy a little missing." 'Cause they wanna have something to say, something intelligent as an objection. And then you're going to hear that, they say, "Oh, man, if I only had that patent thing in a slide, I would've gotten this deal." So you go and add the patent thing, and then you're going to have 20 more objections. You're going to have 20 more slides. Now you have a 30-slide deck. 

[00:12:37] Matt Abrahams: So what we really need is to get feedback that's direct.

[00:12:40] Guy Kawasaki: That's so hard.

[00:12:42] Matt Abrahams: It is. But if we can find trusted others or those who can give it to us, it can make a difference. 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 10, 20, 30 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?

[00:13:10] Guy Kawasaki: Being a big David Letterman fan, I figured out that 10 is about the magic number. And I would make the case that if you think you need more than 10 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 10 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 50 minutes you're talking about the demo and you never get to slide 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 because people are so entranced by your demo.

[00:13:52] That's a very good sign. So that's kind of where I'm coming from there. So anyway, the 10, 20, 30 rule is maximum 10 slides. You should be able to give those 10 slides in 20 minutes. I mean, there have been like Nobel Prize winners give 18-minute TED Talks. I'm giving you two more minutes than them because you're not a Nobel Prize winner. But in 20 minutes, you should be able to explain anything. And then the 30 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.

[00:14:37] 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 by 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 Jobs' font size was like 190 points. You and I, we're not Steve Jobs, so that's why I'm saying 30. 

[00:15:29] Matt Abrahams: Ah, interesting. Yeah, it's almost a heuristic. Yeah, the number of words on a slide implies how, how well-prepared they are. So 10, 20, 30. 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 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?

[00:15:45] Guy Kawasaki: Again, it comes back to the fundamental question. People who put a lot of text on a slide think it's because they're gonna use shock and awe to get wiring instructions. Again, that's a false assumption. 

[00:15:57] 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? 

[00:16:06] 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? 

[00:16:39] Matt Abrahams: I'm gonna 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?

[00:16:53] 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 wanna 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. 

[00:17:31] Matt Abrahams: Carol's work is really important because a, a lot of people get locked into that fixed mindset and they limit themselves.

[00:17:37] 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. 

[00:18:09] Matt Abrahams: Before we end, I 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? 

[00:18:16] Guy Kawasaki: Fire away. 

[00:18:17] 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? 

[00:18:33] 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 wanna be in fitness. I wanna 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 60, which is 55 years too late. I started at 60. 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 is like surfing is the most fun you can have legally.

[00:19:33] 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? 

[00:19:42] Guy Kawasaki: There's nobody you could admire more than Steve Jobs. I saw him speak several times or many times actually, and 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? 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 is the work of Angela Duckworth, which is the grit mindset. And I would say that the flip side of the growth mindset is the grit mindset because if you're gonna grow, you're gonna face failure, so you need to persevere in failure, which is grit.

[00:20:47] Matt Abrahams: Final question for you, Guy. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

[00:20:55] 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 wanna write a book." And I say, "Why do you wanna write a book?" He say, "Well, I wanna position myself as a thought leader and a visionary, and I wanna build credibility. I wanna increase consulting. I wanna increase speaking. That's why I wanna write a book." You write your book when you have something to say, not because it's gonna help position you. So I, I think that's the number one thing. That's 95% of the battle. You have something to say. 

[00:21:43] 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. 

[00:22:17] Guy Kawasaki: My pleasure.

[00:22:20] Matt Abrahams: Well, there you have it. Pitch perfect every time. Thank you for joining us for this extended Rethinks episode.