Greetings from the beautiful Oregon Coast. Here's what I know about the Amazon orders. The PZ books left the publisher's warehouse about five days ago. Until all the Amazon warehouses have the book in their computers, etc, customers may get notices that the book is coming next month or later. But it is likely that that will change and that shipping will be much sooner than later; it's all in Amazon's hands now. You can also get books directly from the publisher here. (Photo: I dropped by Guy Kawasaki's house on my way to SFO to give him a copy of the book. He was very pleased and all smiles as usual. This is a pic I took of him in the kitchen of his house holding a copy of the book...then I dashed off to the airport).

As I said before, Nancy Duarte put together a wonderful little party with a lot of Duarte staff as well some invited guests that I was so excited to meet. Slideshare's execs were there (Rashmi, and Jonathan) as were the Decker team, and some cool executive communication coaches I knew from HP, etc. Ric Bretschneider, Lead Program Manager PowerPoint at Microsoft and Howard Cooperstein, a Microsoft manager who used to be Lead Program Manager for OfficeArt were also there. Ric and Howard are wicked smart and absolutely hilarious. I had a great time joking around with them and Nancy for hours. Meeting Bert Decker was a real thrill as he is the grand master of presentations coaching in Silicon Valley. Fantastic person. Below are a few pics of the evening. See many more on my Flickr page.


I presented for about 20 minutes in the Duarte Design theatre. Frankly, I was half asleep due to jet lag/sleep deprivation so I kept it light, short, and visual. Great audience!

Play
All creatives know the importance of play. So I was not surprised to see Duarte Design well equipped with plenty of space and "toys" for the adults to play with it. Duarte does serious and important work. A culture that embraces hard work, creativity, and play like Duarte does is just the kind of firm I love. Maybe I am nuts, but work and play are not opposites, they are not mutually exclusive. If we are lucky, we work for the kind of organization that gets the "play" aptitude that Dan Pink talked about in A Whole New Mind (see older post about this).


Microsoft's Ric Bretschneider assembled a podcast (available in January) with Nancy, Microsoft's Howard Cooperstein, and myself. It was a blast and it may actually be of interest to you. I'll let you know when the podcast is available.


Although I had not slept in something like 39 hours, I could not resist playing basketball with Ric and Howard in the offices of Duarte Design. We were awful, as is captured perfectly in these photos up on Flickr. We did this for about an hour while we talked about presentations and PowerPoint, the future, etc.


With Nancy (CEO of Duarte), Ric and Howard (Microsoft fat cats). Ric said his sweater was one of the older PowerPoint backgrounds.Yum.


Presentation Zen under the tree...