Flashback Friday: The Best of Six Minutes

Six Minutes launched in 2007. We’ve published hundreds of articles from communication experts; tens of thousands of speakers around the world subscribe and follow via email, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. But, most of our precious readers — that’s you — haven’t been around since the beginning.

So, today, we’re launching a new feature on Six Minutes. On Fridays, we’ll dip into the article archive and emerge with one of the most memorable articles. We’ll dust it off, shine a light on it, and consider it from a new perspective.

How long will we go? 10 weeks or 100 weeks? That depends on feedback from you. Please let us know if you find this useful.

Today’s Flashback Article

For our first Flashback Friday article, we’re going all the way back to our very first article. Back in October 2007, we analyzed Dick Hardt’s famous Identity 2.0 presentation at the OSCON 2005 conference.

The distinctive style employed by Dick Hardt is known as the Lessig Presentation Method (named for Lawrence Lessig). Let’s be clear: this style is not for every speaker, nor is it appropriate for every audience. Many people love it, and many people hate it. How about you?

Either way, there is much we can learn from this presentation about a memorable speech opening and the use of humor, repetition, contrast, and analogies.

Read the article (and view the presentation):

• Critique: Lessig Method Presentation Style (Dick Hardt, Identity 2.0, OSCON 2005)