Where Were You When I Needed You, Guy?

February 2, 2009 by Jerry

Last September, Guy Kawasaki, The Entrepreneur Extraordinaire, sent me an email that read, “I’d like to show you my latest project: Alltop. Alltop is a website that functions as an ‘online magazine rack’ with the latest from a wide variety of news sources and blogs covering ‘all topics.’”

The email arrived just as I was barreling down the homestretch toward the completion of my latest book, The Power Presenter, with a featured chapter called, “What Every Speaker Can Learn from Barack Obama.” With all the drama of the presidential election, my attention was swiveling frenetically between the manuscript on my computer screen and the dynamic events of the campaign on the tube, so I parked Guy’s email in a pending file. On the other hand, Guy, indefatigable workaholic that he is, found the time to provide an endorsement for the book. In his patented Guy-lingo, he wrote, “This book will help you bring out your natural charisma. It’s like a bottle of turbo-charged personality. Take a swig, and you’ll kick butt.”

When the manuscript was done, I moved on to redesign my company’s website to coincide with the book’s publication. Given Barack Obama’s decisive victory, I decided to blog about his charismatic speaking style, the best advertisement for power presenting to come along since the Sermon on the Mount. Obama’s high profile Inaugural Address was for oratory, as they say in the military, “a target-rich environment.” There were so many opinions and analyses being spouted in the media and on the Internet, I found enough resource material to write five consecutive blogs on various aspects of the speech. Once again, I found myself swiveling frenetically between my computer screen and the tube to access the geysers of copy.

It wasn’t until after I finished the fifth blog that I had occasion to turn to Guy’s Alltop, by now brimming with well-organized content. One of the aggregated pages was an Obama Inauguration Watch that had all the resource material anyone could need, all in one place. No frenetic swiveling or net surfing needed.

Kinda makes a guy (um) think he might want to do five more…

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