Small Business Samaritans Featured Friday

2023 will be a year of accomplishment. Our theme this year is: ‘Why Walk Alone When you can walk with a Friend’.

Phillip Saxton – ‘SBS TED Talks – Preparation – 3rd Pearl’

The successful entrepreneur role is to recite from memory, on great occasions, the oral chronicles of their business including products & services. They are expected not merely to share their business narrative, but to endow their SBS TED Talk with the power of language and performance producing a following and increased consciousness.

You begin with an attraction to gain undivided attention and develop your talk with the every increasing addition of pearls on a string which results in a beautiful piece that is memorable.

Your talk exists as a fusion of three distinct layers: The narrative framework or overarching “master text”: This framework is composed of structured episodes, and it is the narrator’s immediate task to recall these in appropriate sequence. He/she is at liberty to expand on them in whatever way best suits the context of performance and the character of the audience, employing in the process a number of formulaic devices not only as props to memory but as building blocks in the recreation of the epic. How you arrange these pearls and the sequence of them depends on your audience.

The other two generic layers derive from the condition of oral performance mentioned above: the digressive recitation  of “stories” composed independent of the “master text” that can be inserted where needed or where traditionally they need to appear. These can be selected based upon sharing experiences that address or meet a know business need.

The third layer of recitations are performed as autonomous pieces. Performance of the epic is highly rhythmic, with breath stops, often accentuated by tonal patterns. To these affects must be added movement and gesture, with which the narrator dramatizes action or provides a visual delineation of character—extraliterary aspects of epic performance that evoke the direct relationship of the griot to his audience.

You end with a great climax that leave your audience with the desire to hear it again.

 “Think memorable thoughts. In a primarily oral culture, to solve effectively the problem of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence. Your thought must come into being in heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or antitheses, in alliterations and assonances, in epithetic and other formulary expressions, in standard thematic settings…, in proverbs which are constantly heard by everyone so that they come to mind readily and which themselves are patterned for retention and ready recall, or in other mnemonic forms. Serious thought is intertwined with memory systems.” – Characteristics of Orality From Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong

TED is a nonpartisan nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks. TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 110 languages. Meanwhile, independently run TEDx events help share ideas in communities around the world.