This article appears as an appendix in The Storyteller’s Spellbook available on Amazon (link at the end of the article). Updated and amplified because current pandemic work conditions require it. Presentation skills are my thing. I study them. I practice them. I teach them to others. The most challenging place…

Former Microsoft engineer James Whittaker talks about how CEO Satya Nadella can fix the deeply flawed company — The only easy answer to the question “what was it like working at Microsoft?” is “Which one?” My on-again, off-again Microsoft career spanned three different versions of the company, each deeply inspirational and tragically flawed in its own unique way. …

The world is full of frauds. From conspiracy theories to alternative facts, it is important to teach young people how to detect bullshit. Enter Santa Claus: the first fraud any child is likely to fall for and thus the logical place for bullshit detection education to commence. When my children…

How do you capture a life’s essence in a few short minutes? How do you eulogize a man you loved and admired in front of his family and friends? Through tears, that’s how. RIP: James Whittaker 1930–2017. The hardest part of writing this eulogy was the memories. Memories, you see…

How to confront performance anxiety and gain control over your stage fright. The stage is a monster. The lights are bright. The eyes are many. The fear is palpable. Escape? Possible. But only through abject humiliation. And being onstage is only the culmination of your anxiety. For days, it builds…

You should have woken to the nation’s first female president. You should have woken to hope, for your gender and for your generation. Instead, you woke up in a world where hate and racism have re-emerged and gained traction in every branch of our elected government. But I need you…

Google is worse than I thought four years ago. And its sickness may well be fatal. I left Google. I then exercised my freedom of speech and blogged about it. The post went viral. Now 4 years later it still resurfaces as a topic of conversation. …

Wanted: A generation of technologically gifted, open-minded idealists willing to step up and change a world that is in desperate need of changing. That’s right, Millennials, I am talking to you. Your forebears were only smart enough to fuck up this world. You must be smart enough to un-fuck it. …

Our schools aren’t merely broken. They’re doomed. The educational system that has been re-gifted from generation to generation since frontier days is finally at its end of life. After surviving political mismanagement and chronic under-funding for decades, it is technology that will deal the death blow. The same technology industry…