[Music] hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to the inside strategic coach podcast with Dan Sullivan Dan one of the things that has always been true of strategic coach materials is our graphics and how clearly the concepts and ideas are explained in print form and particularly in the graphic form and it's something we don't really talk about but it's been true since day one certainly when I first met you in 1991 it's true now and especially in the form of the books and all the fabulous cartoons that HH does and I thought it'd be really interesting to talk about what is the value of having conversations and ideas put not only into words but also into graphic format that's something you've been really clear and consistent on since day one well I think the big thing is that first of all we live in a graphic age so if I think about when I was you know just a child there were a lot of words and there were a lot of sounds but there weren't a lot of graphics and what I mean by that right now you've got the internet which is filled up with graphics and you know any kind of graphic you have YouTube you have diagrams by the millions and you know TV basically kicked in when I was about 8 years old and all of a sudden you had enormous number of graphic images and now it's overwhelming if you choose to make it overwhelming and I would say that the mobile devices I would say that they is much greater use of Graphics today and it's done two things one is that the quality of these Graphics the craftsmanship and not only that the technology which is used to actually put ideas into graphic form are at a very very high level today and the use of digital technology to make things vividly colorful and make things move in very imaginative ways is at a very high level compared to what it was when I was a child but at the same point because there so many of them the overwhelming amount of Graphics has actually made things more confusing it hasn't made things clearer and that there are certain graphic images which still stand out I mean there's some very famous products where the moment you see the logo it immediately conjures up enormous amount of meaning one of them is Coca-Cola the logo of Coca-Cola and then a lot of Disney related activity Mickey Mouse is the highest paid Entertainer in the history of the world and they don't even use Mickey Mouse and any of their videos but when kids go to Disney World any of the Disney Worlds or Disneyland they definitely want to see Mickey and you know these are kids who are six years old now and they've never seen a Mickey Mouse cartoon but they know about Mickey and Disney really protects these I mean you can't fool around with any of their characters you know there's Nursery schools that have put Disney characters on the walls of a nursery school and within a week a lawyer from Disney is visiting them and saying you take those off the walls that's the Disney's property well I actually saw down to that point a set of Disney sheets with the images and the big TM big register trademark actually was on the sheets oh yeah on each of the images and I was like wow they are protecting their property which is really interesting yeah and I I would say probably one of the most famous it's a sculpture but it's actually the image which is globally powerful is the Statue of Liberty there's all these pictures of the first thing people seen when they immigrated from anywhere else in the world that they came to New York Harbor and they were all a Gaga to see the Statue of Liberty so the big thing about it is that graphics on the one hand are always more effective than words and you can show a diagram and people immediately get something where if you used a thousand words it would be more probably more confusing and I have a an experience two experiences that when Babs and I formed the company which is now the Strategic coach program company it was 1988 and the very first person who went on our payroll was an artist and he was 16 years old and he stayed with us until he was probably 20 years anyway he stayed with us and to me having an artist who could actually do diagrams and you have to understand the technology in the 80s was nothing compared to what we have now as a matter of fact we made great advant ances in terms of our computer technology simply because of the growth of skill of this one artist who started with us Sean Tamlin when he was 16 years old and it also took us into the Apple World rather than the windows world right off the bat because apple right from the beginning went after the artistic world even today you wouldn't even think about Windows using a Windows computer if you had the choice of Apple's graphics programs I'm an artist and so I am very interesting I'm a talker but I didn't actually talk as a child I'm told I don't have vivid memories here but until I was two and a half I didn't really talk but I drew pictures at like I was starting to draw pictures at like one years old and you know I started drawing right off the bat and I think the reason is that I see everything graphically so when I see thoughts and I see the concepts of the program I'm seeing them in terms of Geographic forms in my mind right now as we're doing this podcast I'm seeing the relationships between things in my mind and I'm seeing them in terms of arrows Stars circles all the geometric forms boxes and a lot of people don't know this because they've come into the program with other coaches but every single Concept in the program when you get a work sheet I'm the first one to ever lay out the diagram for that workshe every single strategy Circle impact filter free days Focus days buffer days everything in strategic coach starts with a rough and the drawings are getting rougher and rougher as the artists that we have are getting better and better probably the greatest example is the quarterly books where I work with an artist and he's 1200 miles away from me and we have the zoom technology where he can take the actual life layout of two pages and we have the text already we have the outline of what the text is going to be and heish McDonald who lives in charlot town Prince Edward Island for those of you who are not Canadians it's way way way to the East and we'll just talk through what's going to be on two pages and he has the ability in very rough form to actually create on the pages the thoughts that I'm having in my mind about this and I'll say no a little bit to the right there now and then we have shorthand things like okay so this is going to be wallpaper and wallpaper is where you have a common design in the background and I'll say it'll be this type of wallpaper and then I know when I come back the second time he will have done the fill in and all I have to tell him something what the wallpaper is going to be there's a very famous artist called Briel from the medieval 1500s he has these amazing In Crowd scenes and Riot scenes and I said okay this is kind of a bral on the way to Hell situation so he knows it's going to be fiery furnace and it's going to be lots of bad things going on and fights going on and I'll come back the next day and he's got the brolene already filled in but we're told you know by the readers that having the cartoons in our books has lowered the consumption age from adult down to 6 old 7 years old 8 years old a lot of our clients says now that when they come back from their strategic coach workshop and they have a new quarterly book they said oh I want to see it I want to see the cartoons and then the child will go through the cartoons can you explain this one to me can you explain this one to me so it just shows you that the earlier you want to communicate to people use Graphics don't use words and everything like that and there's something about words you either nail it or you don't nail it oo good point you know in other words with words you can kind of convey the meaning but with a graphic you either totally get the idea or you don't get the idea you know it's either totally understandable in an instant or it's not terribly you know understanding it's kind of vague and there's nothing worse than a vague graphic yeah or a meaningless one I guess is what that would make it really that's fascinating so you hired sea first before you h IR D anyone else so talk a little B and then we hired a salesperson next also good yeah who hired me but also you were you weren't advertising before I was I worked for actually a big you know worldwide agency called bbdo which I don't know what that actually means today but I was at the Canadian you know Toronto office and this is a worldwide in those days may still be one of the five biggest ad agencies in the world and they have you know they're in many countries and this was the Toronto and I was a writer I'm a good writer and I'm a good artist I wouldn't say I'm a great writer and I'm not a great great artist but if you're not depending on either of those to make your living they're wonderful skills to have if you're doing something else and the books I don't write either you know a lot of people say how do you find time to write the book every quarter and I said well the way you find time to write a book every quarter is don't be the writer so I'm good at outlining books and then you interview me and a lot of people don't know this and then there our editor Carrie Morrison has brother Adam and Adam is the writer and he gets the transcripts from the recordings and he listens to them and then he writes the copy and then once we have the copy then heish and I sit down and we take the copy apart and we make make the visuals not a complete reproduction of what the written word is but to kind of convey a bigger or a deeper meaning of what this is all about so I see a lot of entrepreneurs who try to operate in the print world only and they are enormously disadvantaged because they don't have an artist and they don't have to become artists you can hire artists I have to tell you there are more really good artists starving to death on this planet than you can imagine you know the skill is there the capability is there you just have to commit to saying hey come in for two hours a week and I'm just going to talk about my latest ideas and out of that I want you to create three really great diagrams of what I'm talking about then you take the diagrams and you try it out on someone and say this is basically what I'm talking it's a lot easier to get a big check out of a diagram than a big check out of 10 page proposal now that's interesting Dan why is that do you think well they either get it or they don't get it and if the first one doesn't get it you know how to modify the diagram to make it clear they said well I'm not seeing this and I'm not seeing that and actually most people if you show them a diagram they'll pick up a pencil and I said I'm not understanding what this means and they actually do an improvement for you but they'll never take your pages of copy and try to improve your copy right but the other thing is to do with the legal industry and what I'm finding is that if you are regulated in terms of your Communications for example the entire Financial Services industry is regulated in terms of what you can put into print and lawyers I mean lawyers are designed to prevent your print from actually going out into the marketplace you know the purpose of lawyers is to prevent marketing and uh except for really good lawyers who are good at diagrams so I said well along with your print you know you're sending in your print of your marketing whatever your sales is just send in a diagram and hands on that the lawyer will just sign off on the diagram and send it back to you because lawyers don't get paid for looking at pictures lawyers get paid for reading words and lawyers don't see diagrams and first of all you can't really make a promise with a diagram okay you can't actually all you can do is show relationships you know you can show thought processes you can show action processes you can show first we do this stage one stage two stage three stage four well guess what that's how many stages there are but you're not making a promise you're just simply saying what working with us is going to entail us we do this first we do that first and you can add some words to the diagram but it's very interesting the Pentagon in Washington which probably puts out bigger contracts for new things than any other organization on the planet if you can't present your new idea whether it's a system or it's a technique or it's a weapon or anything else if you can't present it in a one-page diagram you can't go into the room and present I love that you have to get your thinking so clear that you can show the beginning the middle and the end value of what you're system is and I think that that is tremendously probably they just uh that if it's more than onepage diagram it's too complicated and just so that everyone's aware if you haven't yet done this in your Workshop is our whole premise around packaging your unique process you know one of the things that you did early on Dan is you had eight interlinking arrows and it went in a clockwise Direction started kind of mid page upper right went down to the the bottom and up to the right and it was all these arrows and people would write their their stages in for what they did because there is a step-by-step way in which people create value and instead of a 10 20 30 page Tome about what it is outlaying the steps and the process and the stages gives people enormous confidence and when people are packaging or naming it I'm was like well so they don't know exactly what you do but it conveys to them that you know exactly what you're doing and there's massive value in that that I think is just underappreciated for me it's the one page as someone who likes the bottom line when I see an overview of the process it gives me complete confidence that you know what you're doing yeah and the thing is you can get right into the experience of what's being communicated rather than being hunt up by well I don't know exactly what this word me I find people argue over words a thousand times more than they argue over diagrams you know the diagram either gets it or it doesn't get it you know and they're more lasting too really good diagram will last for decades or centuries that there's a famous it's related to President Reagan in the United States there was an economist called Arthur laugher and he created a curve and he showed the relationship between Taxation and the actual tax revenues and he showed a curve that went up in a upward Direction and it reached a point and then it started going backwards and he said at this point if you have tax rates up until this point you will get maximum Revenue but push the tax Point One Step Beyond this and the revenues start disappearing it was called the laugher curve and it totally changed the US economy the economic Concepts in the United States and was it's called The laugher Curve and people say well laugher curve it's not exactly true but the fact is that there is a point point where if your tax rates get certain High all of a sudden the government revenues will disappear because people will find a way not to get taxed and I'll give you an example the us about a year after Trump came in in 2016 they took corporate taxes from 34% to 21% well it's 133% and then they said now all you corporations that are parking your money overseas if you bring the back right now we'll tax you at 21% but if you go beyond this deadline not only are we going to tax it at 34% we're going to add a penalty to it and3 trillion immediately came back into the country and it was basically you could take LA's curve and show you what's going to happen to your money if you don't comply you get a one-year amnesty and then after that we're going to really so for a corporation said you know they're dropping the amount of money we have to spend like 13% on every dollar they're dropping it down so is it worth go going through all the you know the bother with offshore legal firms and accounting firms and trying to find a place to hide it or why don't we just pay our taxes and get it back into the country but if you go back to the laugher curve that's just an updated version of the logic of a diagram that was done in 1970s early 1980 so there are some diagrams that really boom you know you just get the point now if you put that in a th Pages nobody get it but since it's one page and it's just a few lines it's actually much more effective so what I try to do is have a rule that I don't introduce any concept into strategic coach if I can't diagram at first so there's no use me going for the words if the picture doesn't do it mhm so I'll keep working and working and working to get the picture right and then once I got the picture then I'll find the words because the words are simply supporting the picture I love that I mean you see graphically so for someone who does not see graphically Dan I'm not sure everyone sees in words either for that matter but I remember actually sitting at one of our cocktail parties it was just a start of a 10 times workshop and I pulled out the napkins on the bar at the restaurant we were in and I started diagramming some of I mean literally this was a pen on a napkin it was not fancy and I was diagramming stuff and you know I can do a good imitation of circle aial star after this many years and I was just kind of Illustrated in concept and people afterward like um can I take that and I was like seriously and they're like yeah yeah no this is really helpful I'm like okay sure I mean you'll fortunately get a better version soon but it's fasing like you don't have to be good at it I have no artistic ability I can do Circle Arrow star but stick figures or the extent of my artistic capability doesn't matter when you can convey those relationships I think actually that's another thing about Graphics you get relationships between things which you cannot do through you get context it's actually it's actually context I was thinking about it that actually my artistic skills have gotten a lot worse in the time that I've been at coach I can't do any of the drawings today if you ask me a drawing that I did 30 years ago couldn't do it I just don't because I haven't really practiced but what you used to spend like days on them yeah but what's increased enorm is the artistic talent that I have around me and since I don't consider artwork A Unique ability I consider it a supporting communication ability that I can actually just sketch things out very very roughly and they'll come back in perfect form and so and it's very very interesting because my writing skills aren't what they were 30 years either but my talking skills are Way Way Beyond what they were so I don't get paid for artwork I don't get paid for writing I get paid for talking and then my talking is especially better when I'm in a conversational I'm not good just talking by myself I'm really good I'm really good when I'm got an interactive creative relationship going conversation yeah but the whole point is I tell people you know look you can call the local art school you got art schools there are artists listed but you just go on Google and say freelance artists in my area freance yeah and hire them for two hours and have them just listen to a conversation where where you're having with someone else and maybe you have a whiteboard there and you're kind doing the Whiteboard and say you know capture everything that I've said here and bring it back in a two or three diagram and they'll come back I mean they'll probably do it right on the spot because that's how good they are then take the best of them and say I'm just going to test this out on some customers and um have them be in one of the meetings with the customer and the customer say well I don't quite get this I get this and everything like that and immediately the artist being an artist will immediately see a better version of their artwork within a couple of weeks you'd have a first class diagram and uh I tell you the amount of money that you have to pay that artist no matter how much it is is a lot cheaper than having your words being misunderstood so true so true you've always also talked about you know put it on to one page 8 and 1 half by 11 and laminate laminate laminate people never throw away something that's laminated at the end of the world there's only two things that exist cockroaches and laminations you know like that nobody but nobody ever throws away anything that's laminated you know they'll throw out all their love letters they'll throw out legal documents they'll throw out their college diplomas they'll never throw out something that's laminated and real shiny laminations get thrown out less than others you know yeah I love it so Dan you've given some really great practical advice too so hire someone Local Schools Elance some of the other great amazing crowdsourcing capabilities that are now available to us laminated is awesome 8 and 1 half by 11 and describe what's true describe the process that you're going to take someone through and that's a really powerful way to communicate yeah and the one mistake I find is that people will get a beautifully Perfect Design that's really kind of minimalist you know it just shows relationships and then they want to add a whole bunch of copy they say well I just want to make sure that they I said no no no that's for talking have them look at the diagram and then you talk them through don't add the words cuz nothing ruins a diagram like adding a lot of words it's true titles are fine yeah it's amazing how much you I did a diagram showing the westward push of the United States from 1620 to 2020 basically you know I mean it's basically next year the first you know Colony or settlement or Community which survived a full year was Jamestown Virginia in 1620 and then in 270 years the frontier in the United States moved from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and I just showed this movement and that there were two I think there might have been 200 people who made it through the first winter and by 1890 and that's when the frer was declared closed in the United States there were 63 million and I just showed this diagram and I showed what had happened over that period of time and everybody said that's amazing that's amazing and it's just a sheet of paper with a map of the outline of the United States the 48 states and then I took it across and it's just little arrows just a series of arrows you know and I said you know you have your own views on whether that was a good thing or a bad thing but I I want to tell you that's an enormous amount of geographic progress and demographic PR progress in a very short period of time and it just showed the whole thing now that could be a 600 page book which described this and it wouldn't communicate the amazing speed with which this phenomenal country actually developed in a short period of time and it was just a diagram I love it yes well and I think your point about context is really key so make sure you can put it into a diagram it does provide the context which is really what people are hungry for and what people buy don't overcrowd it with words words have the most essential ones but that's it and use it as a talking platform with all the great talent that's out there that's and the other thing is that you'll never get turned down by a lawyer for a diagram because lawyers don't see Graphics they see words they get paid for the words they don't get paid for the graphics fantastic Dan thank you because I think this is a really great coaching point that a lot of people as they want to communicate their message in all of the different mediums that you talked about at the beginning knowing how to do that or have access to how to make that happen is a huge Advantage so thank you thank you