Archive for the ‘World Class Speakers’ Category

I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.~Jamie Oliver

• Congratulations to Jamie Oliver, as the winner of the 2010 TED Prize. It is easy to see why in this video, in which passion, talent, and mission come together in a profoundly moving message.
• He puts plain facts in sharp focus, showing with a simple graph how obesity and food related deaths far surpass deaths by homicide, making you wonder who the real criminals are. He educates with theatrical passion, dumping a wheelbarrow of sugar cubes to show the actual amount of sugar ingested by elementary school children in school meals over 5 years just in the flavored milk they drink alone. He shows in a video how elementary school children in America could not even identify by name such common vegetables as tomatoes, lettuce, or celery. If they don’t even know what it is, how can they be expected to eat it?
• He shows how much he cares about people by reaching out to the many through the few who represent them, the families and individuals who are literally dying of obesity-related illnesses. How could it be that no one ever told them?
• Although he doesn’t hesitate to cry shame on the industries and policies that have created the problem of obesity, he recognizes that for this food revolution to succeed, everyone needs to be educated and brought in as participants to solve our common problem.
• Jamie Oliver has kick-started a food revolution in America going right to the heart of the problem in homes, school meals, and fast food. He doesn’t just advocate radical change, he makes it easy and fun, educational and entertaining.
• In this presentation his passion is more political than his usual videos about food, which are well worth watching if you want to catch his contagious love for food culture. Plenty of education and entertainment at http://www.jamieoliver.com/
• He is also a social media genius, and you are welcomed right away to join Jamie on the many channels where he shares his passion online and in print, through Jamie’s diary, online videos, TV shows, books, dvds, blog, magazine, social networks, and communities.
  
• He has even got an iPhone App, Jamie Oliver 20 Minute Meals, which is a fabulous way to get started, and get engaged. His energy is contagious, his message is meaningful, and his heart is in the right place.
• Jamie Oliver has much to teach us about food, love, and life itself. Tune in, and get some of the good stuff!

Scientists need to work outside their own areas of expertise to make new technologies that are pertinent to the 21st century and to collaborate, both with other scientific disciplines and the arts and humanities. ~Rachel Armstrong

Rachel Armstrong’s presentation is interesting because it suggests a creative solution to a seemingly insurmountable problem, how to repair architecture that is literally losing its ground. More science than fiction, it also contains the romance of a smart solution.

• Rachel Armstrong begins her presentation at TED on a strong note, by saying that “All buildings today have something in common. They are made using Victorian technologies.” She immediately sets the stage by saying how the one way transfer of energy from our environment into inert structures is not sustainable, and then proceeds to outline a cutting edge solution in progress.
• She speaks with assurance, stays focused on the process, and uses slides just enough to illustrate her ideas and engage our emotions through the problem.
• Although she doesn’t particularly interact with the audience using pauses or humor, her style works because she keeps up the pace, and demonstrates passion for her subject.
• She explains what must be a highly technical subject using captivating metaphors. Protocells contain no DNA, but behave like living matter. Metabolic materials don’t exist, so we we had to create them, and they are vigorously architectural. Terrestrial chemistry works everywhere.
• Her theme of architecture that repairs itself is made immediately relevant through her work in progress, experimenting to create a crystal limestone reef to shore up and reclaim the sagging city of Venice. She engages our imagination by saying that, although it might take time,  eventually the result may be indistinguishable from the work of nature itself.
• She engages the audience locally by referring to the lovely fossilized shells in the limestone brickwork in Oxford, where the TED conference is being held. She engages the audience globally by suggesting that the use of ubiquitous metabolic materials can work in countries anywhere in the world.
• Her message connects architecture metaphorically to the structure of our societies, comparing the top down insulated industrial Victorian approach to the more organic type of architecture of the future, in which buildings could be in constant communication with their environment.
• She doesn’t just talk about technology. She talks about how technology affects people.
• Impressive enough as a TED speaker, Rachel Armstrong has a fascinating bio, as a medical doctor, multi-media producer, science fiction author, and arts collaborator.
  

This is a remarkable presentation by Bill Gates, for three reasons.

1. It reveals some of the massive impact that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation backed by Warren Buffet is having on making our world a better place for coming generations.
2. It shows how much better a presenter can become when he or she is in their Flow and living their legacy.
3. In the Wealth Dynamics Profile, Bill Gates is a CREATOR near the top of the Wealth Spectrum.

Here are some of the amazing things you can learn.

• Bill Gates points out that the market does not drive people to do the right thing. As one of the richest and most successful entrepreneurs in the world, he certainly speaks with authority on that.
• It reveals some of the massive impact that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation backed by Warren Buffet is having on making our world a better place for coming generations.
• It shows how much better a presenter can become when he or she is in their Flow and living their legacy.
• He admits that he is an optimist saying that, “Any tough problem can be solved.” Talk about tough problems, his foundation is tackling malaria, early childhood deaths in poor countries, providing great teachers to people of low income, and by any measure his foundation is making profound and remarkable progress.
• He speaks with passion and dedication about how previous efforts to eradicate malaria have been effective in developed countries, but how much remains to be done in developing countries.
• He uses plain speech, anchors it with numbers and graphical malaria maps we can understand, and then reinforces his point by releasing some (uninfected) mosquitoes into the auditorium, saying that “there is no reason that only poor people should have this problem.”
• He uses a small number of uncluttered slides, in great contrast to his speeches at Microsoft, and resulting in a far superior presentation!
• He uses metaphors to masterfully illustrate the problem so that people get it without any need for explanation. Listen to how he states that there is more money spent on baldness drugs than on malaria, suggesting that baldness is more likely to be an affliction of rich men.
• After explaining the dimensions and solutions to the problem of how to fight malaria and reduce childhood deaths in poor countries, he shifts the focus to how to increase the quality of education for low income people in rich countries.
• He connects the quality of good teachers with the level of innovation that keeps an economy strong, and points out that while less than 20% of people have access to good teachers, while the chances of a lower income child going to jail are much greater than that of being able to attend a 4-year college.
• He tells how his foundation is focusing on the issue of how to reward, retain, model, and widely share the benefits of learning from top teachers, realizing from their research that this is what makes all of the difference.
• His foundation supports KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) , an organization which helps kids from lower income climb the mountain to college, and how in fact 96% of their high school graduates do end up going to a 4-year college.
• He gives us a glimpse of how the teachers in this program are fully engaged themselves, and work hard in team teaching to keep all of the kids involved, particularly those in the critical time of Middle School, grades 5~8.
• He returns to his optimistic note, that now with technology many of the benefits of learning from top teachers can be widely shared, through digital video in the classrooms, team teaching, and making the classes of master teachers available on the Internet and on DVDs.
• He ends with a strong You-Focus, saying that Education is the most important thing to get right, and that the people in the TED audience are not only engaged in a similar mission, but are also in a perfect position to help.
• He ends by presenting all of the people present with a free copy of the book by Jay Matthews, the Newsweek journalist who wrote, Work Hard, Be Nice: How Tow Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America.
• No wonder Bill Gates got a standing ovation at TED. And that is competing against some of the top speakers of our time.

Evan Williams is the Co-Founder of Twitter, the revolutionary 140-character microblog platform that is revolutionizing the way we communicate and do business. BusinessWeek said “Williams has a knack for figuring out how people want to keep in touch, even before they seem to know it themselves.”

While Williams is not a dynamic speaker, in terms of what he has actually done, he makes many platform performers seem like sideshows. In this video at TED, which comes with a translation in Japanese subtitles, he shares some intriguing glimpses behind the scenes of a quiet revolution in communication.

• Note that Evan Williams formerly worked at Google, where he invented eBlogger, one of the major free blogging platforms available.
• He helped launch Twitter as a side project in 2006 while working at Odeo, simply following a hunch.
  
• Twitter is based on what he describes as simple trivial concept, is that people enjoy being connected in real time despite distance.
• Indeed, a Twitter message which he sends out from the TED conference goes out to his 60,000 plus subscribers in an instant.
• Although it was conceived as a broadcast medium, he says that many of its uses were not anticipated, and a number were invented by users of the platform.
• For example, Twitter has been used in emergencies, elections, and events, and has generated over 2000 Twitter applications thanks to API software, so that users help invent, evolve, and shape the system.
• It has been used in a wide range of applications from helping people track good prices at gas stations, communicating with customers, and raising funds online.
• Many speakers now set up Twitter events to match their real events, so that people involved can all participate, wherever they are in the world.
• Some speakers, such as Guy Kawasaki, actually have started speaking in sound bytes as a courtesy to the many people in their audience who are Twittering during his talk, and spreading his message to tens of thousands of people in real time.
• He ends his talk by saying that he has “learned to follow a hunch, but never assume where it will go.” Modest words masking a powerful and practical intuition.
• Here you can read a TED bio of Evan Williams.
  

Barry Schwartz speaks at TED on Our Loss of Wisdom. His message is so engaging that it is easy to overlook some of the reasons that he is able to hold our attention so well.

• He is totally engaging, even though he never leaves the podium and uses only a few simple slides.
• He makes marvelous use of metaphor and story.
• Though he speaks on a profound issue, he is easy to understand, and makes us well aware of the gap between what is, and what should be.
• He speaks about something that every viewer has experienced to some degree.
• Though he speaks from a script, he seldom looks at it, and makes excellent use of eye contact, gesture, and vocal variety.
• He is persuasive and makes both authoritative and playful reference to things ranging from Aristotle to Jazz.
• While alerting us to a serious crisis at hand, he is also reassuring that we can do something about it.
• Though his style is more oratorical, he alerts us to our loss of wisdom, and our loss of the ability to improvise, to think on our feet.