Last month was a busy one for Jeff Bezos:
· He announced that he will officially step down from his role as the CEO of Amazon.
· Amazon acquired MGM for $6.5 Billion
· Simon & Schuster published Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, an appropriately titled biography.
The biographer, Brad Stone, tweeted an excerpt from the book in which he called out Bezos' “characteristic ability to…reduce complex issues down to their most essential essence” with this list of “the ingredients of epic storytelling”:
· A heroic protagonist who experiences growth and change
· A compelling antagonist
· Wish fulfillment
· Moral choices
· Diverse worldbuilding
· Urgency to watch the next episode
· Civilization high stakes
· Humor
· Betrayal
· Positive emotions
· Negative emotions
· Violence
In what is apparently an effort to fortify Amazon Prime’s intensifying battle against Netflix, Disney, YouTube, and Discovery, newly-spun off from AT&T, all aggressively vying for streaming media dollars, Bezos is going Hollywood. As he put it in a shareholder call about the MGM acquisition, “we can reimagine and develop that IP for the 21st century.”
He is also going in the right direction by simplifying and codifying storytelling. After a year in which the world has been stuck at home, reliant on streaming media for entertainment, it’s quite clear that the platform’s bloated content is in desperate need of radical surgery. Some of the programming feels as if any given show contains every one of the The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, an 1895 book that many writers turn to in search of plotlines.
That same bloating often affects business stories—which are further weighed down by dense slideshows that complicate and distract from the narrative. The solution does not lie in Bezos’ “epic storytelling” options because businesspeople, who bristle at all things dramatic, would be hard pressed to create “a heroic protagonist” or “a compelling antagonist.”
Instead, for concison look to the enormously successful bestseller, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. In choosing “Seven” (widely considered a symbolic or lucky number) in his title, author Stephen Covey also reduced complexity by simplifying and codifying his content.
Using a numbering approach—think Top Ten, Five Favorite, Three Best—provides an organizing structure that is often completely nonexistent in the welter of slide-heavy business presentations. While there are several other organizing structures available, the numbered approach is the go-to Swiss Army knife.
Say you’re preparing for the launch of a new a product and marketing gives you a spec sheet with six new features. When you look at all of them, there is no apparent hierarchy. Each of the features is of relatively equal value. The sequence is fungible.
As matter of fact, if you look at the sequence of Covey’s seven habits and you’ll see that they, too, are fungible. I’m sure that, as accomplished a writer as Covey is, he had a specific rationale in mind when he wrote his book in 1989. They could readily be listed in a different order and still provide the same set of invaluable lessons for millions of readers. Either way, the numbering coheres them into a unified structure.
Find the main themes in your presentation (max at six, or it gets too complex), put them in a common envelope, assign a number, and then count down during the presentation.
Follow the yellow brick road.
"Hollywood" - Google News
June 01, 2021 at 10:44PM
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Jeff Bezos Goes Hollywood - Forbes
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