Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a great fan of PPT. I find it intrusive, and most PPT presentations are too complex, use too many screens, and fill the screens with too many words or visuals. Too often, the audience focuses on the screen instead of on the presenter – and there is also a temptation for the presenter to address the screen instead of addressing the audience. So it was refreshing to discover that a major learning conference, Learning 2009 (being held in Florida in November 2009) is promoting itself by trumpeting: Reduced PowerPoint: Engage, Discuss & Explore. Precisely!

YF: In The Element, you say that we are responsible for the lives that we create, and that by discovering more about ourselves, we can channel our passion into creating more fulfilling lives. Is it really as simple as that?
KR: I never thought of channelling our passions more creatively as simple, but I do think it’s true. We humans are born with the gift of imagination and creativity. The quality of our lives depends hugely not only on what happens to us, but on what we make happen. The human mind is essentially creative, and the power of our imagination is paramount. We humans are inveterate storytellers. We compose our own narratives. We determine our own sense of optimism and pessimism. This, surely, is what defines culture. Culture is the sum of the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. Ireland is a prime example of a culture where narrative is a very strong theme.

Walk into any bookstore, and you’ll find plenty of business books with titles like The Truth Shall Make You Rich: The New Road Map to Radical Prosperity by Farrah Gray. You could be forgiven for thinking: Oh no, not another get rich quick book. Except that this book was written by someone who did become rich – very rich. And he did it quickly – ridiculously quickly. We’re talking becoming a millionaire at age 14.

Jim Collins. Tom Peters. Stephen Covey. Peter Drucker. Michael Porter. What do they have in common? They are all management gurus, many of them bred out of the great US business schools such as Harvard, Stanford and the Sloan school of management at MIT. In 2002, the Institute for Strategic Change at Accenture conducted a survey to determine the top 50 management gurus. The top nine were business professors and management consultants. The sole journalist came in at #10 - Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence.

Fast forward to 2009, when The Wall Street Journal published its ranking of top management gurus based on Google hits, newspaper mentions and academic citations. No fewer than two of the top four positions are journalists – New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat) at #2 and New Yorker journalist Malcolm Gladwell (Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers) at #4.