Storytelling Guru Robert McKee to Present STORY-IN-BUSINESS Seminar in New York City

One-day event shares actionable story knowledge and ready-to-use tools to enhance your business communication and persuasion skills

Storytelling guru Robert McKee will present his STORY-IN-BUSINESS Seminar in New York City on September 26, 2014. This exclusive, one-day event will show business leaders how to create and use stories that persuade, inspire and engage their customers and employees. Find more information and registration at www.mckeestory.com/business-story -- and receive a free audio book of STORY by Robert McKee when you register now using promo code DG14!

At the STORY-IN-BUSINESS Seminar, participants will learn how to combine emotion and logic to create compelling stories that capture the hearts and minds of their audience – whether they are creating a one-minute commercial, a 60-minute presentation, an investor pitch, a strategic plan, or an in-depth training program.

McKee, who authored the international best-selling book, STORY: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, teaches the importance of using story to connect with your audience’s emotions and minds alike. Data and facts do not engage a customer’s mind, but well-told and compelling stories do. At the STORY-IN-BUSINESS Seminar, participants will discover how to create stories that work for their organizations.

Harvard Business Review describes McKee as “the world’s best-known and most respected screenwriting lecturer” and for the last 25 years he has been helping writers tell powerful stories through his legendary STORY Seminar and book. More than 100,000 students have completed his course, including numerous Academy Award, Emmy Award, Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winners. Now he’s helping business leaders from companies like Microsoft, HP, Siemens, Mercedes-Benz, and the Boldt Company use story to persuade, engage, and communicate more effectively with their employees and customers.

In the STORY-IN-BUSINESS Seminar, McKee shows what story is and why it’s important in today’s workplace, how to design and execute a purpose-told story that moves people to action, the difference between face-to-face storytelling and storytelling at a distance, and why leaders need to use story to author the future. These concepts can be applied to marketing and branding, sales, start up and investment, management and human resource training, and other aspects of business where communication and persuasion drive success.

Find the complete agenda and register at mckeestory.com/business-story -- plus, receive a free audio book of STORY by Robert McKee when you register now using promo code DG14!


Event partners include:
AIGA Connecticut - connecticut.aiga.org
Metro DC Chapter of ASTD - www.dcastd.org
Organization Development Network of New York - www.odnny.org

Creativity Book - Cult-ure: Ideas Can Be Dangerous

Check out this new book by Rian Hughes ... visually appealing ... imagination provoking ... creativity inspiring. Read it and view it to challenge yourself and learn something new.

Oliver Sacks says: This Year, Change Your Mind

... One does not have to be blind or deaf to tap into the brain’s mysterious and extraordinary power to learn, adapt and grow. I have seen hundreds of patients with various deficits -- strokes, Parkinson’s and even dementia -- learn to do things in new ways, whether consciously or unconsciously, to work around those deficits. That the brain is capable of such radical adaptation raises deep questions. To what extent are we shaped by, and to what degree do we shape, our own brains? And can the brain’s ability to change be harnessed to give us greater cognitive powers? The experiences of many people suggest that it can. ... Neuroplasticity — the brain’s capacity to create new pathways — is a crucial part of recovery for anyone who loses a sense or a cognitive or motor ability. But it can also be part of everyday life for all of us. While it is often true that learning is easier in childhood, neuroscientists now know that the brain does not stop growing, even in our later years. Every time we practice an old skill or learn a new one, existing neural connections are strengthened and, over time, neurons create more connections to other neurons. Even new nerve cells can be generated. ... Whether it is by learning a new language, traveling to a new place, developing a passion for beekeeping or simply thinking about an old problem in a new way, all of us can find ways to stimulate our brains to grow, in the coming year and those to follow. Just as physical activity is essential to maintaining a healthy body, challenging one’s brain, keeping it active, engaged, flexible and playful, is not only fun. It is essential to cognitive fitness. [31 December 2010 - New York Times - By Oliver Sacks - More]

How Aha! Really Happens

The theory of intelligent memory suggests that companies relying on conventional creativity tools -- such as brainstorming, where people are encouraged to turn off their analytical left brain and turn on their creative right brain to produce new ideas -- are getting shortchanged. [4 January 2011 - strategy+business - By William Duggan - More]

Engaged in What You Love - bell hooks on writing

It's the birthday of writer and activist bell hooks, born Gloria Jean
Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky (1952). Her father was a janitor, and
her mother cleaned homes for white people. She went to a segregated
school until she was 10. ... She said: "Writing is my passion. It is a
way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word
ecstasy—'to stand outside'—comes to me in those moments when I am
immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything
else, even flesh, falls away." [25 September 2010 - The Writer's Almanac]

Building an Innovation Zone

[4 May 2009 - 1TO1 VIDEO] Thomas Koulopoulos, author of "The Innovation Zone: How Great Companies Reinnovate for Amazing Success," talks about the systemic changes companies have to make to innovate and survive during economic uncertainty. More

ON CREATIVITY, EDUCATION AND CHANGE

Those interested in creativity, education and educational change might also be interested in this new book, Education is Everybody's Business: A Wake-Up Call to Advocates of Educational Change (Rowman & Littlefield Education). It's by educator Berenice Bleedorn ( http://www.creativityforce.com ), who was the gifted consultant for the Minnesota State Department of Education, a professor of creativity in the business and education schools at the University of St. Thomas, has taught creativity to inmates in the state prison, is a colleague of the Creative Education Foundation, and writes and speaks about creativity throughout the world.

This book really makes the case for the deliberate teaching of thinking - creative and critical - in education. It also links the importance of education to a thriving democracy. A great idea in the book is that "democracy deserves the best thinking possible" - which offers a great place to begin one's thinking about any number of political issues in the world today. Some other good quotes from the book include:

• Children and youth are all much smarter than we think. They are smarter than the standardized test scores tell us. They have a longer tomorrow than adults, and most of them think about it more than we realize. Students have a right to understand what is happening to the world that they are inheriting. 
• The hope is that educational programs will become better designed to make the best possible use of the natural power of the human mind to grow and develop and to be significantly active in service to a cause beyond oneself. 
• There are no limits to the intellectual resource of the human mind when it is provided with an atmosphere for personal growth. 
• The idea that `Creativity=Capital' is not a facetious one. The capacity of the human mind for creativity and innovation is unlimited. Harvesting the creativity in a business translates to money in the bank. 
• Creative thinking can be taught if learners can practice the art of being serious and playful at the same time. 
• The educational problem of a disparity between average achievement scores of white students and black students may have some of its origin in the nature of schooling that neglects programs that identify creative talent and fails to provide for its appropriate expression in problem solving and other creative thinking activities. 
• Educators have not only an opportunity but an obligation to open the "doors of perception" for all students. The enduring purpose of education is to provide students with a perception of the outer reaches of their talents and possibilities and, ideally, to give them a reason to continue to learn and contribute to their society for all of their lives. 
• The mandate is undeniable. The future of the environment can be guaranteed only with the determined effort of all the players in the world drama in every society, and there is no time to lose. It is a perfect project for the integration of schools and society, the community and the education profession. It is a time for personal action and resolve. 
• Initiatives from concerned citizens and business interests have a vital place in developing educational outcomes that can be competitive with the rest of the developing world and can continue to contribute to a better life for all. 
• Paradoxical thinking is a prerequisite for a society and world steeped in a diversity of cultures, religions and ideologies if we ever hope to achieve a more sane and peaceful world. If complex thinking were taught, practiced and modeled during the process of education everywhere, the people of the world would understand more and fight less.