What Are You Doing?

I posted an article on LinkedIN yesterday. As a piece of thought leadership, it's just aight. But yesterday's note kind of marked the beginning of something much more exciting.

A friend of mine and I have started a new company. It's called Secret Weapon. It's a presentation company.

You might want to sit down for this. It won't take long. I promise.

In fact, Hemingway says that this should take a 3rd grader 2 minutes and 39 seconds to read. (I think that's what that means...)

Why Presentations?

You're probably thinking to yourself, "Tim, that is just the worst." And, you know what? You're right. We have chosen what we believe to be the most difficult and often thankless work in the world. We are going to make presentations. For other people.

Here's the thing. The way we see it, presentations have become these moments of infinite possibility. In the context of a presentation, something really good happens...or it doesn't.

Employees embrace a new message. Or they don't.

The client buys off on the big idea. Or they don't.

Co-workers and partners embrace the bold new plan. Or they don't.

You get an awesome grade on your super-hard report. Or you don't.

Now, we know that people make decisions in lots of different ways - and that there's more to making great things happen than whipping up some slides.

Decks seem like sales to a lot of folks. In fact, I've seen workplaces divided between people to do real work and people who make presentations.

We believe everyone should be able to share their ideas, stories, plans, and work. We want to give all that amazing work a fighting chance in this big, cynical world. The line between thinking and doing and sharing needs to be blurred. More on that later.

High Stakes Decks

The company's brand new. We're still working on getting it off the ground. Both my partner and I have sizable other roles and freelance work that we're busy still doing. It'll take a little while to fire this thing up. We're just starting to reach out to a few folks we know who might be in the market for what we do. It's going to be a process.

So - you're wondering, "What exactly would you say you do here?"

It might be best categorized as "High Stakes Presentations." We're going to start our journey by tackling moments that determine the future of your work. Design pitches. Sales presentations. Thought leadership talks. All-Hands meetings - the sort of stuff we've been doing for years - sometimes with no slides and just a whiteboard. Sometimes full of videos and memes. Sometimes dead serious - and educational.

Collaborative Knowledge Work

One angle we're excited to help folks with is the whole working together thing. We've seen more than our share of decks blow up when more than like 3 people have to work on it. So. We designed a process to help groups through this process of setting a story strategy. Then we help teams collaborate on content to tell the right story the right way. It's going to change the world, I tell you.

Is that it? Slides?

So, we're just going to make slides until we die? Wellllll....no. Not really. There's something larger lurking here. And, again...it might take a bit to ramp up into it...we think that the world is due a better way to collect and share work. Knowledge work. Education. Training. It's all on the table. Information is not currently designed for humans. There's waaaaay too much content in the world to make use of. Too many sources and levels of truthiness to make sense of. And everytime someone fires up PowerPoint, they CREATE. ANOTHER. COPY. OF. THAT. INFORMATION.

So, over the next year or so, we're going to dive headlong into this world, and test out our frameworks, theories, recipes, and workshop formats. We're looking for big challenges. Large org stuff. Small biz stuff. Academic stuff. Maybe some sales stuff.

Maybe you've got some of that stuff going on. Give us a ring. The company's called Secret Weapon. Someday we will launch humanity's secret weapon against information glut - until then, well...we're it.

In the coming months, we'll be rolling out more "design thinking for stories" and "stories for change" and story maps and all the kinds of stuff you'd expect from a future-y knowledge story company. Stay tuned. Follow along. Take notes. Write comments. Give it to us straight.

Let us try some stuff out on you and your work. Story stuff. With pictures. And videos. Your work is worth that, right?

Let's go,

Tim