The PowerPoint Slide that Changed the Course of My Career

Toward the latter part of my long tenure as Cranium’s “Keeper of the Flame”—still hands down the best job I could ever hope to have—I led a new cross-functional initiative to extend the brand into the dicey territory of preschool learning. It was ambitious and exciting and extremely complex.

 We had multiple internal teams contributing games, toys, books, and puzzles to the line. We brought on partners specializing in kids’ TV and publishing and industrial design. We had a board who wanted updates and a design agency and a packaging agency and product illustrators. We had teams of content and art developers and educational experts all working in different time zones, under a tight schedule.

 I was creating the materials to explain the core tenets of the brand to all of these far-flung partners. At Cranium we had a very clear and well-defined brand, grounded in Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, but brevity was not our strong suit. We had accumulated years of fantastic anecdotes and catch phrases and customer stories, but things had gotten messy. I needed to get everybody on the same page, fast. Getting things down to a single page? Practically impossible.

See the slide that changed everything for me on the Vitamin C Creative blog.