Guy Kawasaki

I just heard Guy Kawasa­ki speak at Straight Talk, a mar­ket­place min­istry host­ed by Men­lo Park Pres­by­ter­ian Church. He uses humor well. For instance, he was offered a job in Atlanta but “could­n’t take a job where they call sushi bait.”

I real­ly appre­ci­at­ed his intro:

When I was younger I used to go to a lot indus­try con­fer­ences, and I learned that most CEOs suck as speak­ers. And the only thing worse than lis­ten­ing to a speak­er who sucks is not know­ing how much longer they’re going to suck. So I’ve adopt­ed a sim­ple rule: all my pre­sen­ta­tions are in a top-ten for­mat. That way, if you decide I suck you at least know how much longer I’m going to do it.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I know a few preach­ers who could use his advice. 🙂

His talk was The Art of the Start, based on his book. It’s a talk he’s giv­en in a lot of dif­fer­ent venues. You can find the notes online. He did a pret­ty good job of cus­tomiz­ing it for the con­text of the meet­ing (Chris­t­ian busi­ness pro­fes­sion­als and their guests).

In hon­or of his speak­ing advice, here are ten things I learned about Guy Kawasa­ki:

  1. He’s a Chris­t­ian.
  2. He went to Stan­ford (where he majored in “the eas­i­est major I could find–psychology.”).
  3. He sec­u­lar­ized the term evan­ge­lism while at Apple. Good for him–the word could real­ly use a facelift.
  4. He loves Apple and dis­dains Microsoft. “DOS was a moral wrong.”
  5. He finds evi­dence for the exis­tence of a per­son­al God in the con­tin­ued sur­vival of Apple. He fur­ther con­cludes that God real­ly likes dig­i­tal music and wants you to pay for it.
  6. He went to law school and dropped out after ten days, “there­by inher­it­ing 2,000 years of pent-up Asian guilt.”
  7. He loves to play hockey–it sounds like an obses­sion.
  8. He is a CSI addict and is eager­ly await­ing the day that they release CSI: Men­lo Park.
  9. He loves first-class in Sin­ga­pore Air­lines. In fact, that’s his work­ing mod­el of heav­en.
  10. He thinks iStockPhoto.com rocks–he went out of his way to plug it at the end of his pre­sen­ta­tion and claimed to do so with­out any finan­cial incen­tive (“I’m not an investor or any­thing, I just love their prod­uct.”)

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