An incredibly easy guide for creating simple, powerful presentations.
JUST ADD WATER™ is a powerful idea whose time has come.
32,000 years old, the cave paintings in southern France still represent the gold standard for simple, powerful communication. What went wrong? Where did all the “Power” go in PowerPoint?
There is no shortage of “how to” books on communication skills but they share many of the same drawbacks:
• too complicated
• overly technical
• non-visual
Michael Baldwin, who has spent more than 35 years as an advertising executive, award-winning copywriter, actor, and branding consultant, has developed a better way.
His talents in these areas are what make JUST ADD WATER ™ the first of its kind and unlike anything else in the marketplace. It isn’t hypothetical or theoretical — it is a distillation of a proven, successful one-day program that Michael has been delivering to Fortune 50 companies for the past five years; a program that has produced dramatic results for every single participant.
Michael possessesa unique ability to:
• breakdown complexity into basic concepts
• simplify key concepts so they can be easily understood
• shorten the learning process using cognitive shortcutting
THE PROBLEM
PowerPoint slides have become thecenter of gravity in presentations today, not the presenter. Everywhere you look, the tool that promised to make presentations exponentially better, is facilitating just the opposite: turning slides into dense pages that belong in an appendix, and creating a global competition to see just how much information can be crammed onto a single slide. With approximately 30 million PowerPoint presentations given every day, is it surprising that audiences are either confounded or anesthetized by presentations that are incoherent or incomprehensible? And the people creating these presentations are frustrated because they don’t know how to make them better?
THE SOLUTION
JUST ADD WATER ™ is dedicated to reversing the trend, one person at a time. Putting the focus - and the power - of every presentation back where it belongs: with the presenter. It is are discovery of how to transform dense, ineffective presentations into ones that can actually inspire: clarify thinking, improve the quality of decision-making,and close deals.
In the time it takes to fly from NewYork to Denver, a reader can discover how to:
• Create a logic flow to improve persuasion
• Use imagery to improve comprehension
• Use story to improve retention
According to Daniel Pink, author of the best-seller, A Whole New Mind, our world is evolving from the “Information Age” to the “ConceptualAge,” one formed around emotions, concepts, metaphors, humor, images, and stories.
JUST ADD WATER ™ leverages all of these concepts with a unique teaching method called cognitive short-cutting: leveraging known concepts to shorten the learning process. It is an “illustrated guide” designed to be so simple and direct that any reader can absorb the key concepts and put them into practice immediately.
Twitter redefined our expectations on how to communicate —140 characters or less. JUST ADD WATER™ is the publishing world’s equivalent, combining expert content with unique visual language, in 140 pages or less.
All the surprise, delight, and discovery that we expect in the best children’s books, designed into this unique, illustrated guide for adults.
The energy, sense of humor, and unique visual language of Michael Baldwin are what ultimately distinguish JUST ADD WATER™; his ability to strip away complexity, and reveal the simplicity of communication, making it possible for anyone to become a powerful speaker.
With the funds raised, we will print the book in quantity and fund the PR and marketing efforts to promote JUST ADD WATER™ globally.