The Friday Thing #698

The Friday Thing 698 brings us to the fourth P from the book, Once Upon A Time – The art and craft of storytelling. This week’s edition is personal. 

When talking about the fourth P I have a go to story. I covered this back in #690 but I’ll add a bit more detail here with some of the back story.

 Several months before the Skype Translator demo I gave at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in 2014 alongside Satya Nadella I had a chance to see the nascent technology that Peter Lee, Gurdeep Pall and a group of Skype and Microsoft Research folks were developing.

As with any good story, I remember precisely where I was when I first saw this technology and, in an instant, I knew it had the potential to change my life – and that of many others. A month or so after that first sighting, Satya saw the tech and asked that the teams accelerate their work with a view to showing this in front of 16,000 Microsoft Partners a few months later. That was an audacious goal and had a high degree of risk. What’s more, Satya wanted to show it to a smaller but highly influential audience a month before this event – at the annual Code Conference in California where other guest speakers included Sergey Brin of Google. My team along with Gurdeep and Peter’s had our work cut out to put together a demo that could not fail in front of the influencers who attend Code, and our Partners a few months later.

Gurdeep delivered to demo at Code and despite a few risky moments – such as when the interviewers decided to almost participate in the demo – things went well, and Twitter lit up with admiration for the demo, and the technology. Gurdeep remains a demo hero of mine. 

As we shifted our attention to Partner Conference, for reasons I can’t remember, I was selected to deliver the demo this time. As I considered the audience and I felt that something was missing from our first showing at Code. We needed a bit of context – a bit of the “why”. I decided to share a story about that first sighting I’d had of this technology.

You see, my wife’s family is of Chinese heritage and despite knowing them for a very long time, I had a language barrier with my mother-in-law – because she spoke a small amount of English, and I don’t speak a word of Chinese. Thus, when I saw this technology, I saw magic and knew it had the potential to change my life. Perhaps more importantly, it had the potential to change the life of my kids and give them the potential to talk with their grandmother in their respective, native languages. Given we live five thousand miles away from our family, Skype was already shortening the distance between our family via weekly calls – but now it could remove the very real language barrier.

During one rehearsal for Partner Conference, I mentioned this story to Satya, and he seized upon it and encouraged me to tell the story before delivering the demo. I believe the demo would still have been well received without this story in advance – but this was a key difference in how I would have delivered this demo in the past. As a fan of technology and somewhat of geek, it’s easy to get carried away with the technology – and there is some remarkable AI at work to have Skype Translator do its thing. Yet, this personal story set the context for what they were about to see by sharing the challenge before the reveal of the solution. It was a great lesson for me in rethinking how I did demos from there on – by letting the technology fade into the background and building suspense through a personal story with tension. The demo went well – and the audience reaction remains one of the highlights of my career. I was proud to see this story included in Satya’s book, Hit Refresh, and enjoy retelling it seven years later. 

Today’s edition was going to end here but I read another personal story today I feel compelled to share with you – from my colleague, Greg Moore. He published a story yesterday titled “How Science Reunited My Family”. Greg uses the backdrop of World Immunization Week and his own work leading Microsoft Health & Life Sciences to share a beautiful story about his family – and the work that Microsoft and the scientific community is pioneering to make our world a better place. I hope you find time to read and share Greg’s story.

It's obvious when you think about it that the best stories are personal – because they’re real and they’re told with heart, emotion, and passion. They move us. But they’re not without difficulty as they require a level of vulnerability – whether you’re telling the story to one person, a crowd of 16,000 or via a platform like LinkedIn. My challenge to you is to sit back, digest all of this and find your story. Notice yourself telling a personal story and notice how it impacts the receiver. Is there a way to connect it with your work? Or simply to share it because it’s worth sharing because it will make the world a better place?

As the author Sue Monk Kidd said - “Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.”

That’s all for this week. One more P until I share the PDF of the book.

Happy Friday,

-Steve