10,000 Learners on Analytics-Driven Storytelling!

Hey, it's Mark Dinolo at Sales Globe. And today is free Ative Friday. And I want to let you know we now have 10,000 learners on our course with LinkedIn learning called analytics Driven Storytelling. And I want to share a segment with you on engaging your primal wiring with analytics storytelling. And you can check out the whole course. The link is right here. See you there. The year was 1985, and I was an art school student in Philadelphia, and I was looking for a job. So where do you go for a job? You go to New York? I took the local train up the New Jersey Transit. I couldn't afford Amtrak back then, so I got up there, and a few weeks earlier, the professors told us how to do resumes and cover letters. And they said, you pack it all up and you put in an envelope and you put this little sticky thing on, it's called a stamp, and you send it off and you'll get some interviews. So I got some interviews. But they also said, when you do this, you're going to have a lot of open spots because not everybody's going to give you an interview. So what happened is, when I got up there, I remember what they told me. They said, in between the interviews, make a few calls, see if you can fill those spots out. There was this one design firm that I was really interested in. Their names, Shimaev and Geismar. I mean, they were the firm of the day. In fact, they're still. Still the firm now. They designed corporate identity programs and logos for companies like Chase Manhattan and. And PBS and mobile. They were it. And there was this one partner. His name was Steph Geisbuller, and Steph was from Switzerland. He was the quintessential Swiss designer, and he totally looked the part. So I wrote a letter to Steph weeks earlier, and of course, he never answered it. I'm on Madison Square Park, 26th street, and right across the street from their office. And I get in the phone booth to make a call. A phone booth is a little building with glass walls on it, and it is a phone, and you put money into it. So I make this call and. And I called up the office and I said, hi, it's Mark Danolo. I'm doing some interviews today. And I had an open spot, and I wondered if Mr. Geisbuehler might be available for an interview. And there was a long pause, and I fully expected her to come back and say, well, Mr. Geisbuehler is in a client meeting today, or he's in Milan shopping for his wardrobe, or frankly, Mr. Nollo, he has no interest in talking to anyone like you. But then she comes back and she said, well, Mr. Geisbuller has a spot open at 3 o'. Clock. And it was 2:45, and I was across the street. And at 2:47, I was in the lobby. And they put me in a conference room in the lobby outside the office, just in case things didn't go so well. And I sat there and I waited. And he walked in and he looked the part, Swiss, had the accent, wearing black and intimidating. And I'm sitting there just coming out of art school, and. And I am just mortified. And so I just kept my composure and I started to show my work. And he's paging through my portfolio and he's going, hmm, well, tell me about this piece back here. And it's like, oh, he likes that one. So I paged back a couple of pages and we took a look at it. And he said, well, tell me about the concept. What, what. What's the concept behind this project? I said, well, it's a flight museum. And so what I was doing is I was designing ramps that were made out of Plexiglas. So when you're walking over the ramps, you feel like you're in flight. What is the problem you were trying to solve? And so I kind of sort of said the same thing again, I paraphrased it. And funny thing happened. I realized as I'm talking and I'm psycho babbling, that the thermostat, the room started to go up and it seemed like the walls were getting a little bit closer. And then before I knew it, everything went silent. And he closed the book. And he said, thank you for coming. And he said, please tell your professors. And he knew my professors well. He said, please tell them that while you guys do beautiful design and you do all the right things, my frustration is that I don't see the strong concept. I don't see that you're solving the problem. So I'm back down on the street and I'm trying to figure out what happened. And a few days later, I finally realized what he was talking about. He was saying, you were doing all the right things. You were doing all the design things, the analytics. But what you weren't doing is you weren't solving the problem. And 30 years later, this still affects me. It still drives everything that I do. So what's the big point? You can be doing the analytics. You can be doing all the things that seem to be right, but you're not solving the real problem. And that's what analytics driven storytelling is about, is solving the problem with your analytics and with your stories to get action.