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Ever wonder what inspires a Pixar storyteller and animator? How about growing up in a toy store? If you’ve ever seen Matthew Luhn, one of the original Pixar Storytellers, speak on storytelling or creativity, you’ve heard his story about growing up in his family’s toy stores and the wild creativity it birthed in him.

Luhn came from four generations of toy store owners: his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents all owned toy stores in San Francisco, dating back to 1938 when the first family store opened (which was technically a five-and-dime store back then). In 1966, they were officially named Jeffrey’s Toys, after his uncle Jeffrey.

However, Luhn’s father did not want to be roped into the next generation of toy-store owners. As Luhn tells it, his father “got pulled into the toy store to run them very similar to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, who wants to be a pilot but his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru said, ‘No, we need your help on the farm.”

According to Luhn, his father “wanted to work for Walt Disney and be an animator.” When his father saw at the age of three that Matthew could draw, he decided to live his animation dream through his son and give Matthew all the experiences necessary to inspire his art.

Luhn said, “He took me to museums, animation festivals, along with pulling me out of elementary school once a week to see movies during the day. He exposed me to art, sculpture, films, animation, and most importantly storytelling.”

After being “home-schooled” in art by his father, Luhn later went on to get a degree at the world famous school for animation, CalArts, created by Walt Disney.  After his first year at CalArts, Matthew was hired to work as an animator on the 3rd season of The Simpsons, before finally landing an animation job at Pixar.

You can see some of his toy store-inspired animation work in Toy Story, where he animated the army soldiers along with Woody and Buzz. After 20 years at Pixar, Luhn now spends his time speaking about the importance of storytelling in business and how to inspire creativity in the workplace.

As for Jeffrey’s Toys, the stores are still family-owned and operated by the Luhn’s to this day. On October 27, 2017, Matthew’s dad, Mark Luhn—who still runs the toy stores—opened up the newest store location on 45 Kearny Street in San Francisco.

Inside, you can get a glimpse of the life that inspired storyteller and animator, Matthew Luhn, while picking up a toy, game, or comic, and supporting a local business.

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Kyle Crocco is an East Coast native and content creator for Big Speak. His career has taken him from authoring the Heroes, Inc. series, to living and teaching abroad in France and China, to completing his Ph.D. in Education at the University of California-Santa Barbara. He is also the lead singer for Duh Professors, a local Santa Barbara band.

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Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is a hot and evolving topic. Find out the current EQ workplace trends and how they will affect you and your career.

Soft skills becoming more valuable

With automation taking over many hard skills—such as data entry and processing, and certain physical jobs like machine operation—soft skills are becoming much more valuable to employers.

Soft skills include managing and interacting with people, decision making, planning, and creative work. Basically, all skills that require a high EQ. Technology futurist Erica Orange predicts, “As smart machines relieve us of tedious manual tasks, they may allow us to spend more of our time being creative…skills like relationship-building, collaboration, empathy, and cultural sensitivity will become top currency.”

EQ as a competitive advantage

While hard skills like experience, machine operation, and computer program efficiency are easier to quantify, soft skills are proving to be a competitive advantage.

During the hiring process, when all things are equal among competitors, EQ expert Bill Benjamin says, emotional performance “counts for twice as much as technical and intellectual skills combined.” This is because it’s often easier to teach hard skills. While soft skills like patience or teamwork can be taught, they often take longer to develop (though that still doesn’t stop companies from offering EQ training!).

Emotional Intelligence training in workplace

Recognizing the value of EQ growth, employers are offering Emotional Intelligence training to employees.  

Google’s “Search Inside Yourself” two-day course is similar to a leadership course that centers around teaching the tools of mindfulness and Emotional Intelligence. The course was started by engineer Chade-Meng Tan—employee number 107 at Google—who wanted to train people to be more aware of their emotions and to be more capable of workplace collaboration and relationship building. Specifically, the course focuses on five components of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.

Collaboration is on the rise

Finally, as workplaces diversify in gender, race, and age, the ability to work collaboratively as a team towards a common goal has become more valuable.

In the new book The Best Team Wins by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton, the authors teach two important strategies to make team collaboration more effective.

First, it’s important to be transparent about collective team challenges. This involves everyone understanding their role, what problems there are for the team, and how the team fits into the larger picture of the business.

You can help establish this transparency by asking yourself questions like: “Do my employees have a say in setting goals that are important to their jobs?” and “What avenues do my team members have to voice their ideas and concerns?”

Second, it’s important to make the meaning of the work clear to team members. In order to get the most out of teams, team leaders must define a clear and compelling “why” for the work. This might be a mission statement that explains the purpose of the work and each person’s role, or a simple sentence that shows how the team can make the world a better place through their efforts.

To determine your team’s purpose, ask questions like: “Why do we exist as a team?”, “What job do we do for customers?” or “What gets you excited to come here every day?”

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The content writers at BigSpeak Speakers Bureau are Experts on the Experts. They hold doctoral, masters, and bachelors’ degrees in business, writing, literature, and education. Their business thought pieces are published regularly in leading business publications. Working in close association with the top business, entrepreneur, and motivational speakers, BigSpeak content writers are at the forefront of industry trends and research.

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Robin Givens, author, actress, and motivational speaker helped raise $310,000 for the Newhouse Domestic Violence Shelter last night at their annual gala, House Party: Dreaming of a Bright Future.

Event sponsors attended a meet and greet with Robin, followed by an auction, live entertainment, dinner, and closed with a dance party. The event surpassed their original goal by $110,000. They are using this money to create brighter futures for those seeking safety and comfort from domestic abuse.

Robin opened up in an interview with Fox News about surviving an abusive relationship with heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson in the late 80’s. She was the first woman to publicly speak out about the domestic violence he inflicted on numerous women. She stood as a model of strength and courage for women enduring similar cruelty.

She spoke genuinely about the fear and shock she felt when she realized that she was caught in an abusive relationship. She thought she would “never be one of those women, then all of a sudden, you wake up one morning and you realize, ‘oh my God. I think I’m one of those women.”

At the gala event, Robin praised society’s strides towards supporting survivors of domestic violence. She recalls that during her battle with abuse there was a stigma associated with victims who came forward. Often times, women’s stories were discounted and ignored. Recently society has become more accepting and supportive, as seen in the social media trend #MeToo, where women bravely identified as survivors of sexual harassment.

With a commitment to the cause, nonprofits like Newhouse Domestic Violence Shelter hope to change the way we view domestic abuse. They partner with motivational speakers like Robin to not only spread awareness, but also rid society of stigmas that trap women in these unsafe situations.

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Jessica Welch is the Content Marketing Associate at BigSpeak Speakers Bureau, holding a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature and Anthropology from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Her business thought articles often appear on Business 2 Community, Born 2 Invest, and YF Entrepreneurs.

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Founding executive of Netflix, Mitch Lowe, spoke about his newest project, MoviePass, and its effect on the movie industry at the alumni meeting for the EAE Business School in Madrid, Spain.

MoviePass is a subscription-based, movie-ticketing service that allows users to pay a monthly flat rate of $9.95 in exchange for unlimited trips to the movie theater. This change for the movie industry is modeled after Netflix, and so far, it has received the same backlash as well.

While larger companies like AMC have critiqued MoviePass for their surprisingly low rates, Mitch recalls similar criticism accompanying the launch of Netflix: the online subscription movie rental service. He stands by his belief that no startup can destroy an industry if the established players are listening and adapting to their customers’ demands.

When MoviePass was launched in 2011 the profitability of it was unclear. The service was created in response to the falling theater sales and a lack of innovation in the movie industry. However, subsidizing America’s movie watching is no cash cow. Instead, the company is losing money in exchange for data. As people jump at the deal MoviePass gains more and more information about their consumer.

Mitch plans on using the data he collects from the current MoviePass users to help develop the service into its final product. MoviePass will give the industry greater insight into the patterns of movie-theater goers as the entire process of when, where and what movie to choose is compiled into one service. The information will also be used for advertising and marketing purposes.

Bernadette McCabe was recently hired as MoviePass’s senior VP of exhibitor relations with the duty of turning the data into profit. Mitch believes that “Bernadette’s proven track record will allow her to step right in and help exhibitors realize the power of our data, create partnerships designed to help the industry benefit from these insights, increase attendance and ultimately have a tangible impact on their business.”

After the theaters see the boost in business this service creates, a world of opportunity and development opens for MoviePass.

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Jessica Welch is the Content Marketing Associate at BigSpeak Speakers Bureau, holding a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature and Anthropology from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Her business thought articles often appear on Business 2 Community, Born 2 Invest, and YF Entrepreneurs.

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Robyn Benincasa has gone above and beyond to ensure the success of everyone she works with. Through her nonprofit, Project Athena, she strives to help women who have suffered medical or traumatic injuries live an adventurous life with no limits. Southwest Airlines has recognized her fight by naming her November’s A-Lister.

Robyn is noted for using her Rapid Rewards points to safely fly the participants of Project Athena to their next adventure, furthering their paths to recovery. It’s creative applications like this that allow Robyn to spread her inspiration across the country. For a woman who sees no boundaries in life, roadblocks just mean it’s time to fly.

Click here to read the full article on Robyn Benincasa’s award.

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You can’t change your IQ but you can increase your EQ in the workplace. Improving your EQ isn’t just a valuable asset to your professional career, it can also come in handy during the upcoming holiday season when you reunite with family over the long weekend.

Emotional Intelligence, or EQ, is defined by the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others. According to Daniel Goleman and Richard E. Boyatzis of the Harvard Business Review, there are four domains (self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management), and 12 competencies of emotional intelligence (emotional self-awareness, emotional self-control, adaptability, achievement orientation, positive outlook, empathy, organizational awareness, influence, coach and mentor, conflict management, teamwork, and inspirational leadership) that you can master or work on.

Having a well-balanced array of EQ capabilities can include obvious traits like empathy, a positive outlook, and self-control, but it can also prepare a leader for tough challenges, like driving change, exerting influence, and giving difficult feedback to employees.

To improve your emotional intelligence, start practicing these tasks today.

Self and Social-Awareness

Ask yourself “why”

The EQ competency of empathy rests on the question “Why?” “Why does this person feel that way?” “Why do I view the subject differently?”

“Why” questions seek to understand the point of view of others and also where your own emotions stem from. This boosts emotional self-awareness and empathy competencies.

Self-Management

Take a mental and emotional “pause” whenever possible

Our emotions often affect our judgment, and once a judgment is made, it can be difficult to change. In order to change the way we feel about a situation, we must first change the way we think about it.

When you feel a situation escalating, pause for a moment to assess your emotions before responding or making a judgment. This can also be a mental pause when you are thinking through a situation alone.

For example, if someone cuts you off when you are driving, instead of thinking that person is rude and retaliating in kind—take stock. Maybe the person did not see you because you were in their blind spot or they were in hurry because of a medical emergency.

Taking stock helps to reduce negative emotions, encourage a positive outlook, and develop self-control competencies.

Relationship Management

Listen and ask, don’t tell

The Harvard Business Review notes several studies that have found a strong association between EQ and driving change and visionary leadership.

Listening shows people you value them and what they have to say. The same is true of asking rather than telling. A recent Inc. article on boosting people skills explains, “When we ask people, we show them respect; it also changes the tone in which we ask. When we tell people, it’s much more like a command, and no one wants to be commanded.”

This positions you as a mentor and inspirational leader and encourages teamwork.

Still need help working on your EQ? Check out our Emotional Intelligence Speakers.

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The content writers at BigSpeak Speakers Bureau are Experts on the Experts. They hold doctoral, masters, and bachelors’ degrees in business, writing, literature, and education. Their business thought pieces are published regularly in leading business publications. Working in close association with the top business, entrepreneur, and motivational speakers, BigSpeak content writers are at the forefront of industry trends and research.

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People remember more and for far longer when they are engaged. However, most events tend to be the same—same booths, same swag, same PowerPoints with a list of too many bullet points. After a few days, a person’s only memory of your event will be the name badge they didn’t throw away yet.

If you want to make your event stand out and be remembered for a long time, make it an experiential event.

What is an experiential event?

Like experiential marketing, an experiential event is a method to engage your audience with your brand. The idea is to engage attendees with events that are interactive, participatory, and hands-on.

There are three ways you can engage your attendees for an experiential event: Use multi-sensory experiences, have more human interaction, and use social media.

Creative examples of great experiential events

However, if you want to get really creative, you can be inspired by three of these 20 great experiential marketing ideas at events around the U.S.

At SXSW 2017, Oreos combined Twitter, 3D printing, and an oreo cookie to create a unique experience. The 3D printer created a personal oreo cookie made for the attendee from whatever flavor was trending on Twitter at the moment. This method made the experience hands on and interactive.

HBO used the popular idea of the Escape Room to engage other attendees at SXSW 2017. Each room was designed after one of their popular shows, such as Game of Thrones. There’s nothing more engaging than having attendees work together to solve a problem—and get a reward for doing so.

At the 2014 US Open, American Express engaged attendees by giving them RFID-enabled wristbands that recorded the attendees on-site experiences and sent them a personalized email. Fans could also interact in the text cafe and charge their phones at the same time.

Experiential keynotes and speakers

Gifted and inclusive keynote speakers can also make your event an experience. These dynamic speakers use technology, interactive demonstrations, and audience participation to get people involved.

Take top innovation speaker Tan Le, for example. She uses interactive technology to add a hands-on element to her events. Le gets the audience members involved—and focused on innovation —by using her Emotiv headset to give a live “mind reading” demonstration.

Top cybersecurity speaker Kevin Mitnick , on the other hand, likes to offer a customized keynote to give his audience an experience. Using pre-arranged questions from the client, Mitnick gives a hacking demonstration to illustrate the key answers and event messaging.

If you’re looking for an experience without technology, look no farther than top-5 after-dinner speaker Adam Christing. Christing’s specialty is using humor, magic, and improve games to get audience members on stage and involved and having fun.

But don’t worry! You don’t always need high tech to be experiential. You just have to make your event interactive. You can add games, such as a simple low-tech roulette wheel to get attendees moving and participating in your brand, or have a speaker use storytelling and theater techniques like Chic Streetman to get audience members involved.

Whatever it is, make it fun and unique and people will remember your event for a long time.

Also See:

How to Create an Experiential Event

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Kyle Crocco is an East Coast native and content creator for Big Speak. His career has taken him from authoring the Heroes, Inc. series, to living and teaching abroad in France and China, to completing his Ph.D. in Education at the University of California-Santa Barbara. He is also the lead singer for Duh Professors, a local Santa Barbara band.

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New to our roster of speakers is Jonas Kjellberg. Jonas is the co-creator of Skype and served as its managing director from 2003-2007.

A serial entrepreneur, Jonas thrived and then survived the dotcom boom, founding several tech companies such as Campuz Mobile, which was acquired by Vodafone, and Player.io, which sold to Yahoo. He has also been Vice President of Bertelsmann for Lycos Eurpose, CEO of Wyatt Media Group, and Chairman of the Board of iCloud.

When not speaking to businesses, Jonas lectures at Stanford University and Stockholm School of Economics on the topics of entrepreneurship and creating a winning sales culture.

He is the co-author of several books on starting and running a business: Gear Up: Test Your Business Potential and Plan Your Path to Success and Business Creation: Based on the Gear Up Framework

Jonas’s keynotes address questions like:

• How to delight the product user?
• What needs to be done to secure the innovation intent?
• How can sales be built into the product, so that your customers will be part of your sales force by sharing their stories of delight?
• How can you as an organization increase the frequency of that message to create a friction free story?

Listen to Jonas tell his entrepreneurial story and talk about his game changer method:

 

For more information on Jonas Kjellberg or to book him for your next keynote, email us at Info@BigSpeak.com

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The content writers at BigSpeak Speakers Bureau are Experts on the Experts. They hold doctoral, masters, and bachelors’ degrees in business, writing, literature, and education. Their business thought pieces are published regularly in leading business publications. Working in close association with the top business, entrepreneur, and motivational speakers, BigSpeak content writers are at the forefront of industry trends and research.

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We’ve all seen bad swag before—pens, keychains, and baseball caps with big logos we wouldn’t be caught dead wearing. And don’t get me started on large or heavy items like paperweights and backpacks that are bulky to carry around or take up too much space in our luggage.

On the other hand, there is the good swag that everyone likes, such as mints, powerbars, and water bottles that make our event day that much better. It’s like trick-or-treat but for adults.

But if you really want make your swag great, you need to make your gifts more meaningful.

The principle behind great swag

Swag is the chum we throw in the event waters in hopes of attracting people to our booths so we can advertise our products and services. However, if you are doing the same old generic swag that slaps your logo on a t-shirt or paper weight, you’re not going to bring in many new clients.

At heart, swag is a gift. And giving a gift invokes the strongest human persuasion principle possible: the principle of reciprocity. When someone gives you a gift, you feel obligated to that person. But how obligated you feel depends on how meaningful and appropriate that gift is for you.

According to social psychologist Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of the bestselling book Influence, you can be more effective with your gift giving if the gift is meaningful, unexpected, and customized.

For example: in one study when shoppers at a candy store received a free sample of chocolate upon entering the store, the shoppers were 42% more likely to purchase candy than those who did not receive a gift. A gift of chocolate in a candy store was a very meaningful gift. A key chain probably would not have gotten the same return.

Give meaningful and customizable swag

If you know your customer base well, you can easily customize your swag items. In the medical industry, pens used to be meaningful gift when physicians needed them for their work.

But how do you customize swag for hundreds of people? Short of having a 3D printing machine on site and making swag to order, you should think of destination or local swag.

Destination and local swag

Clients who are attending your event are often traveling from far distances. Many events are in different climates. So if your event is in Hawaii, you might give away free sunscreen or sandals. If you are in Seattle, you might think of giving away umbrellas.

In the same vein, you can localize your swag to the city. Give away local food or drinks. For example, if you’re in Portland you could offer Voodoo Doughnuts, or if you’re in Los Angeles you might offer Pink’s Hot Dogs.

Or you could offer a personalized map to show people in the conference the great places to visit and shop in the city.

Whatever you do, just remember to make it meaningful, and you will find you get a much better response rate.

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Kyle Crocco is an East Coast native and content creator for Big Speak. His career has taken him from authoring the Heroes, Inc. series, to living and teaching abroad in France and China, to completing his Ph.D. in Education at the University of California-Santa Barbara. He is also the lead singer for Duh Professors, a local Santa Barbara band.

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Risha Grant’s book That’s BS shows how to confront bias and be more inclusive.

Are you biased? Have you ever pre-judged someone you never met? If you felt uncomfortable with those questions, you’re not alone. We all have biases. Some are unconscious, some are validated, and all determine how we think and act towards certain groups.

However, if we never acknowledge these biases, we will never understand the power they have over our behavior or how they are affecting the diversity and inclusivity in our workplace.

Being more diverse and inclusive is important for success in business. Research has shown that companies that are more diverse have greater customer satisfaction and made 18 to 69% more in net income than companies that were less inclusive.

If you want help addressing your biases, diversity consultant Risha Grant has a book for you: That’s BS. Her book provides the reader with practical, no-nonsense advice about how to work on personal biases that doesn’t pull any punches.

Drawing on anecdotes from her life and from her years running the only award-winning, full-service diversity communications firm in Oklahoma, Grant explains the only way to increase diversity and inclusivity in our life is to give permission to ourselves to acknowledge and own our personal BS.

BS is short for “bias synapse.” Grant explains that synapses are the channels in our brain through which we act and think. In very real terms, we are our synapses. And some of these synapses function as bias synapses.

In the book, Grant shares a three-step process that grants the reader permission to acknowledge their biases and work on them as preparation for being more inclusive.

1. Identify your BS

The first step is to identify your personal BS. You can do this by asking three questions to assess, attribute, and identify the BS you have. Each question will take you deeper into the issue.

Assess: Who are the people who make me feel uncomfortable and why?

Attribute: Is the reason I am uncomfortable their fault, or is it my issue?

Identify: Are my feelings based on my personal experiences, societal norms, or a deeply rooted, long-held belief that was instilled in me as a child?

2. Own your BS

After you identify your personal BS, you need to own it. When confronted with our own personal BS, Grant says people can react in one of five ways: validation, passivity, shame, acceptance, and denial.

Validation is a bias that is based on our lived experiences. Say that you were cut off by a driver of a certain geographic location, such as a city driver. You might say that all “city drivers” are bad drivers. That bias is based on an actual experience. That does not mean you are excused from working on your bias; it just means you understand where it came from.

Passivity, shame, and denial are three ways people avoid working on biases. Shame makes you drag your feet about doing anything about a bias, passivity is your way of ignoring a bias, and denial is the way of pretending you don’t have a bias so you never confront it.

Acceptance is not a positive word in terms of bias. It means you accept that you are biased. For example: you might accept that you hate the New York Yankees or Dallas Cowboys and are fine with that and don’t want to change.

Whatever way we have handled bias in the past, once we own our BS in the present, we can work on it in the future.

3. Confront your BS

The last step is the hardest step. It is also the step we must continually work on during our life if we want to be inclusive. Grant says that the key to increasing inclusivity in our life is being intentional.

You must intentionally talk to people who are different than you to understand them. You must intentionally get out of your comfort zone to be comfortable with different groups.

Once you have confronted your BS, you can start taking the necessary steps in her book to make your life and workplace more inclusive.

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Kyle Crocco is an East Coast native and content creator for Big Speak. His career has taken him from authoring the Heroes, Inc. series, to living and teaching abroad in France and China, to completing his Ph.D. in Education at the University of California-Santa Barbara. He is also the lead singer for Duh Professors, a local Santa Barbara band.

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For attendees, a photo opportunity or a book signing with the speaker whose keynote just awed and inspired them can be a special way to end an event. Undoubtedly, these are nice ways to provide attendees with a special memento and a few minutes with the speaker.

For event coordinators, however, a photo lineup or book signing can be a logistical nightmare. Lines never seem to move or get any shorter and morph into clumps of people standing around aimlessly. Some people will take longer than their fair share of time with the speaker. Not everyone may get a copy of the speaker’s book or the opportunity to get it signed. Photos may turn out poorly due to lighting or a bad angle, and multiple re-takes will likely be requested. These are familiar scenarios for event planners.

To keep your post-event photo lineup or book signing functional, fun, and moving forward, follow these tips:

Photo line up

Hire a professional digital photographer

This will ensure that the photos come out right the first time. A professional photographer will set up the proper lighting, backdrop, and camera angle. With a professional photographer, there will be fewer (if any) photo retakes. The photos will be of better quality and the line will move more quickly. And attendees will appreciate the service and high-quality photos.

Bonus: Have a photo backdrop with event and sponsor logos printed on it. This will look more professional, and it’s a good way to promote the event.

Assign two people from your team to manage the line

Plan to have at least two ushers tasked only with the job of managing the line. One should manage attendees once they get to the front of the line and one should usher people away after they have taken the photo.

The first usher should instruct people of photo etiquette with the speaker and inform them where they can safely place their bags while taking the photo. After attendees have taken the photo, the second usher should hustle attendees along and inform them how and when they can access the photo. This second usher will also ensure that attendees don’t linger too long with the speaker after the photo has been taken and keep the line steadily moving.

Go one step further for VIP guests

For VIPs do a little something extra by sending them a framed copy of their photo in the mail. Consider engraving the frame with the event and speaker’s name, the date and the event location.

Where previously you could get 100 people through a photo lineup, with this system you’ll get 300 through in the same amount of time. Follow these tips and you’ll be well on your way to successfully managing the dreaded post-event photo lineup like a pro.

Book Signings

Coordinate all plans with the speaker’s team

Remember to maintain clear and open communication with the speaker’s team. Talk over plans to align your’s and the speaker’s expectations, needs, and preferences. It’s important to find out things like, how long the speaker is willing to stay after the event, and how many books are they willing to sign, before the day of the event.

Pro tip: a speakers bureau can help facilitate this discussion.

It’s also important to determine who is providing the books and how many are to be expected? Sometimes speakers will include an order of books in with their speaking fee, sometimes they will offer a discounted rate, and sometimes you will have to buy the books at retail cost on your own. Discuss and plan all of these details beforehand so there aren’t any surprises on event day.

Know how many books will be arriving and make sure they arrive on time

Many event coordinators have been disappointed by the number of books they received or didn’t receive on time. Check and double check that your books are arriving. Know exactly how many books are being delivered, and then manage expectations. If the event is relatively small, all attendees might get a book and the chance to have it signed. If the event is a large conference, it’s likely that not everyone will be able to receive a book.

Bring pens!

You’d be surprised how often this small but important detail is forgotten. Sharpies are the standard for many authors. Thick or thin—it’s their preference. But have plenty on hand.

Cut chit-chat to a minimum

Due to time constraints and preserving energy for the speaker, chit-chat during signing—other than an introduction and greeting—should be cut to a minimum. Follow photo lineup rule of assigning two ushers to manage the line. Determine beforehand if the schedule and the speaker will permit selfies during the book signing.

Set up the photo lineup or book signing location accordingly

Make sure the photo lineup or book signing is set up in a location that will not block people trying to exit the event and will allow ample space for attendees to form a line. This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many times this actually isn’t thought through before setting up.

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The content writers at BigSpeak Speakers Bureau are Experts on the Experts. They hold doctoral, masters, and bachelors’ degrees in business, writing, literature, and education. Their business thought pieces are published regularly in leading business publications. Working in close association with the top business, entrepreneur, and motivational speakers, BigSpeak content writers are at the forefront of industry trends and research.

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New to our roster of exclusive speakers is Chris Kelly, privacy and security expert, angel tech investor, and NBA team owner.

Chris Kelly has a long track record of representing and investing in innovative companies, and also in making the Internet a safer place.

Kelly was the 25th employee hired at Facebook and served as their first Chief Privacy Officer, General Counsel, and Head of Global Public Policy where he developed the site’s safety features and security policies.

In 2009, Kelly left Facebook to run as a candidate in the Democratic primary for California Attorney General, placing second in a crowded field despite having never been elected to office before.

Since then, Kelly has become a prominent investor in technology startups and independent films. Currently, Kelly is a chairman of the subscription-based movie theater service MoviePass, and serves as Chairman of Fandor, a San Francisco-based streaming media company focused on independent film and visual expression.

In 2013, he joined the executive board of a group of investors who purchased the Sacramento Kings NBA basketball team.

Before his time at Facebook, Kelly was a private practice attorney, where he represented Netscape in the Microsoft antitrust case and Diamond Multimedia in the suit over MP3 players that furthered personal use rights over digital content.

Why Chris?

Chris is versed in the legal ins and outs of privacy, cybersecurity, intellectual property, and the influence of technology on politics. His legal know-how coupled with his vast political experience allow Chris to bridge the worlds of technology and consumer rights in a simple and easy way that all audiences can understand.

Chris speaks on:

• The intersection of sports and technology, and the intersection of politics, campaigns, and technology.

• Privacy, security, and safety in a social media world.
• The Facebook story, and what it takes to make the leap from small startup to a giant corporation.
• How to succeed in Silicon Valley and how to find investors.
• The future of technology and the digital world based on his inside experience as an investor in Silicon Valley tech companies

Listen to Kelly talk about his time at Facebook, and the nature of startups

For more information on Chris Kelly or to book him for your next keynote, email us at Info@BigSpeak.com

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The content writers at BigSpeak Speakers Bureau are Experts on the Experts. They hold doctoral, masters, and bachelors’ degrees in business, writing, literature, and education. Their business thought pieces are published regularly in leading business publications. Working in close association with the top business, entrepreneur, and motivational speakers, BigSpeak content writers are at the forefront of industry trends and research.