Boston Book Tour Report: Days 1 & 2

5 lectures down, 3 more to go.

The week started with my featured talk at UI14, where I got to present from the new book about presenting and pitching (You can see some amazing sketch notes of my talk from Jason Robb). Presenting about presenting is almost as tricky as presenting about writing about presenting (or blogging about presenting about writing about blogging). After staying up much to late with other speakers, I taught a day session on Managing Innovation. The UIE folks know how to run a conference – always a pleasure to teach under their banner. Gave away a stack of books and the buzz and support was good.

Today was the campus tour – I hit MIT Sloan, Harvard Business School and U Mass. Three hour long lectures in less than a day. I feel fine – my feet and throat, not so much. The crazy thing about speaking at colleges is how the rooms are totally empty until about 5 minutes before start, and then, as if a bus just came by, a room sized wave of people suddenly arrive. I’ve forgotten the tyranny of class schedules. By my guesstimate I had 45, 80, and 75 people respectively.

Stupid things I did today: left power cord at Harvard, forgot to eat, confused harvard business school campus with Harvard’s main campus, forgot to eat again, fell asleep with most of my clothes on, fell asleep on the T, convinced myself I missed my stop, and then got off in a panic at the wrong one.

Bonus cool things that happened: @sheffi livetweeted my talk at Harvard, and started the trend of using #berkuntalk for my tour talks.

Tomorrow I head to Fidelity, and wrap things up in Boston at Refresh, which I hope will be a fun highlight of the trip. And then Friday I venture forth to Olin college, where the students are so smart, the go to school for free.

Thanks to everyone who came out to see me, wrote on their blog, or tweeted (thx @sheffi) about seeing me in action. The book is currently the #1 book on amazon.com on public speaking, and it’s still 6 days till we’re out past pre-order mode – Awesome! Thanks for the support.

If you’re in town come to Refresh Thurs. night - there’s still room for you.

Posted Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 9:06 pm

in On Tour, books | 3 Comments » |

Jason Robb - November 5, 2009 at 7:22 am

Dude, thank you for the mention. Really kind of you. And thanks for the great presentation, it’s really changed my viewpoint of what my job is. Kudos, and see you tomorrow!

Cheers,
Jason R.

vera anderson - November 5, 2009 at 1:45 pm

Scott,
I was wondering if you do any book tours in UK or fly across the pond for business. I bought your book Making Things Happen and have really been enjoying it.
You seem to have found that happy place in life by making some bold moves, what’s your secret (or should I say “solution”)?
Cheers,
Vera

Matt - November 5, 2009 at 2:02 pm

Hi Scott,

Caught your talk at Fidelity this morning – in a word: Fantastic! Great information, great advice, and immediately applicable. I coached a team of entry-level engineers prepping for a demo immediately after your talk and put your suggestions right to work. I reminded them that they’ll be the only ones that will know if anything goes wrong, and not to let it derail the demo. Of course, the demo was a huge hit!

Thanks again – and best of luck with the book tour!

Cheers,
-Matt