Extreme Meetings®
Brian Walter, Ken Boynton and Team
Extreme Meetings is a team of communication consultants and corporate humorists who write, produce and perform fully customized corporate infotainment and strategic meeting communications for organizations worldwide
Brian Walter and Ken Boynton of Extreme Meetings, based in Seattle, produce EXTREMELY customized infotainment programs based on your key meeting messages. Their engaging, theme-driven humor and parody music are so uniquely crafted that attendees actually remember the messages you most need them to recall and (gasp) even apply them! The result is a BIG MEMORY from your meeting or conference that packs an EXTREMELY substantial and lasting impact.
Engage Your Employees with Infotainment
When you review past meetings and conferences and think, "We really need to do something different this year"...this is your answer.
Extreme Meetings ® completely engage your employees. They hook their emotions by tapping into the power of stand-up comedy, on-stage skits, parody music, game shows and audience interaction. The targeted humor reinforces your most important content. Employees are laughing so hard they don't realize how much they're learning!
You Also Get Communications Consulting
Extreme Communication Consulting is a customized, strategic and scalable process that ensures your audience takes away the key messages they need to be successful. Working in conjunction with your meeting message managers and executives, The Team aligns communication across various elements of your agenda to substantially amplify meeting effectiveness.
They help you determine what actually needs to be communicated. They help you rewrite. They help you visually enhance your messages. They illuminate and bring forward what the audience needs to make a quantum leap of belief or behavioral change.
By focusing on the meeting messaging from the audience's point of view, Extreme Meetings builds participant understanding--intellectually and emotionally--on key take-aways and business strategy. Employees learn more in a shorter time and come away from the conference with a much clearer call to action.
Click on the communication consulting link at the top of this page for more information.
Extreme Meetings® Players
Your company's Extreme Meeting® is a true on-stage performance. The Team supplements their talents by pulling from a cast of specialists: Extreme Meeting® Players include actors, celebrity impersonators, singers, musicians, puppeteers, and two Emmy award-winning writers and lyricists.
When was the last time that Bruce Springstein, Elvis, Kelly Clarkson, Ozzy Osbourne, Paul McCartney, Sonny & Cher, or Neil Diamond & Barbara Streisand performed at YOUR meeting?
Extreme Meeting Clients
Every size company and audience (from 7 to 7,000) can benefit when its employees are powerfully engaged during meetings. No topic or industry is too challenging. Extreme Meetings® clients include Starbucks, Costco, Washington Mutual, Microsoft, the Social Security Administration, T-Mobile, Wells Fargo, Genentech, the IRS, Sodexho, Macy*s, and Verizon Wireless.
A sampling of customized program options:
- Song parodies, with every word customized about your audience and organization
- Fully customized "Poem Choreography" with your execs performing key lines
- "Your People Rock"--For incentive, recognition, or just acknowledgement of your teams...Your People Rock features Rock/Pop/Country song snippets, played LIVE by two singers, as pictures of your people synch to the lyrics. And your people DO MORE than just contribute to the lyrics. They ARE the lyrics...their names are sung in the exact same melodies and phrasings (and even vocal impersonations of the artists, including Phil Collins, Green Day, Led Zeppelin, Avril Lavigne...and many more) of the original songs. PLUS...It's a non-alphabetical reveal of the names. Everyone in the audience is following along attentively to see who's next, and what song they'll be featured in. It's a big, audience pleasing tour-de-force! Request a DEMO
- "Dr. Phil" on stage, interviewing your people to air out actual work issues, providing team relationship counseling, and helping everyone in the audience experience a breakthrough on a vital challenge.
- Video "shorts" and movie parodies featuring your organization's leaders (ALWAYS with their approval)
- Unique audience-participation games
- Game-show spoofs
- Fully customized and results-driven "Elevator Speech" program, ideal for sales audiences and anyone who talks to others about what they do for a living
- Shakespearean mini-plays about your products
- Humorous commentary on your services, products, competition or industry
- Comedic interviews with puppets, senior management or even senior-management puppets
- Live skits with theater actors on your company's product or service (showing a very right...or very wrong...application!)
- Tailor-made trivia contests
- And - as they say - much, much more.
Factoids about Brian Walter & Ken Boynton, Extreme Meetings founders
Brian Walter has been a professional speaker, creative services advertising director, radio and TV commercial producer, adjunct college professor, management trainer, communications manager, retail salesperson, and for three painful days before he quit...a telephone survey operator. Believe it or not, he's a Guinness Book of World Records holder for producing the world's shortest TV commercial.
Brian is a member of MPI, the National Speakers Association, and most importantly...the Bald Headed Men of America. Ken is a member of AFTRA, SAG and is a candidate for future membership in the Bald Headed Men of America.
Ken Boynton has worked on film and TV as an actor and voice talent. He is an Emmy award-winning songwriter and musician. Ken has also written and directed two award-winning short films, one of which was featured at Sundance. His writing and voice has been featured in thousands of radio commercials and corporate scripts. His presentation coaching system, Finding Yourself On StageTM, [described at the right] has become a highly successful "contrarian" process to the traditional ways of helping corporate executives connect with their audiences while onstage during meetings and conferences.
Together, Brian and Ken have presented to audiences ranging from 13 to 13,000. Their clients include national brand names from the Fortune 500 we all recognize...as well as some obscure ones like a Finnish papermaking company and a small dairy farm that specializes in chocolate milk.
Extreme Meetings: relevant, engaging results-driven, hilarious, memorable.
Travel From: Seattle, WA
Extreme Communication Consulting with Brian Walter and Ken Boynton
What in the world is communication consulting for corporate meetings?
You're an expert at what you do. Brian and Ken are experts at making your meeting message resonate with your audience.
You're investing a great deal in resources and time to bring your people together. After the last program finishes, the final evaluation is completed, and attendees head back to their jobs....what if nothing really impacted them? And no beliefs are changed, new insights realized, or new behaviors adopted? What is the true cost of your people being out of sync with your key initiatives and their role in achieving it?
Communication Consulting and infotainment with the Extreme Meetings [see box at the left] helps your message resonate emotionally, so you can achieve the changes in your audience that you need for a substantial return on your meeting investment.
Communication Consulting is a customized, strategic and scalable process that ensures your audience takes away the key messages they need to be successful. Working in conjunction with your meeting message managers and executives, The Team aligns communication across various elements of your agenda to substantially amplify meeting effectiveness.
They help you determine what actually needs to be communicated. They help you rewrite. They help you visually enhance your messages. They illuminate and bring forward what the audience needs to make a quantum leap of belief or behavioral change.
By focusing on the meeting messaging from the audience's point of view, the Team builds participant understanding-intellectually and emotionally-on key take-aways and business strategy. Employees learn more in a shorter time and come away from the conference with a much clearer call to action.
The process elicits the behaviors, beliefs and emotional shifts required in your work force, tapping into the power of the collective experience of a corporate meeting.
Their approach help you boil down your key take-aways into programming messages, eliminate "data dumping," bust myths, and increase audience buy-in and motivation.
THE PROCESS:
The most successful are built around a central story. Executive presentations must communicate the essential messages (realities, efforts, and beliefs) you want all attendees to internalize and act on. It's not about firing off a series of facts. It IS about sharing a compelling overall story. That story will become the theme...the organizing principle of the conference.
Working one-on-one or in small teams, Brian Walter and Ken Boynton coach speaker(s) through a step-by-step "Manage-Your-Message" system for developing conference keynotes, general sessions and/or breakouts. They provide original ideas and solutions for enhancing your content, as well as "punching" (i.e. re-writing) key portions of the speeches.
THEME-DRIVEN EXAMPLE:
For example, the story might be about how your company is "rising to the challenge." The presentations would then focus on the challenges in key areas and the dynamic actions being taking (some successful and some not).
They would help you celebrate the victories of challenges met, the passion of our struggles, and the lessons learned of our failures. In all cases, we would be communicating about rising...our performance in relation to the challenges.
Brian and Ken will help craft the conference story, and create a template of communication tactics and approaches for the message imperatives in that story. They can also advise on the sequence of the meeting components.
Ultimately the result is a detailed context for all presenters. They will know which part of the story their presentation is responsible for telling, and how their presentation relates to all the others.
RESULTS:
Bottom line: you'll all be revealing "chapters" of one unified, compelling story, and attendees will leave with a higher level of engagement, knowledge transfer, and enjoyment than when they arrived.
Successful conferences are those that go well beyond just clicking through PowerPoint decks. Extreme Meeting attendees are infused with relevance and performance bite.
Your meeting is no longer a meeting, it's a fast-paced, EXTREMELY relevant, results-driven SHOW.
When the Extreme Communication Consulting process is tied to Extremely customized infotainment routines [e.g. parody rock songs, game shows, stand-up style sketches and audience interaction exercises-see box at left], all elements align together to reinforce each aspect of your story and your takeaways...and raise the bar immeasurably on the quality and impact of your meetings.
Finding Yourself On StageTM
A Coaching Program for Executives
Finding Yourself On StageTM coaching system brings a theatrical perspective to presentation coaching. It's all about revealing the inherent strength and presence of your personality to your audience. Very few executives receive this kind of coaching, but from the looks on the faces of thousands of audience members he's seen, coach Ken Boynton knows employees wish more executives did.
Are you about to Find Yourself On StageTM?
A presentation can be a nerve-wracking pressure cooker. Why not be successful and memorable, while remaining confident and at ease throughout the process?
Now you can with Finding Yourself On StageTM, a 10-step system for creating and delivering memorable presentations.
Ken Boynton, who's provided speech coaching to the C-Suite at some of the world's largest corporations, has developed a system for improving presentation skills that he calls Finding Yourself On StageTM.
Here's what he says:
We all grew up with the same speech classes, the same strange instructions (tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em, tell ‘em, and then tell ‘em you told ‘em), and the same boring teachers. We model what we know. So, most of us try to be someone else on stage when we speak before large groups.
“Process-oriented” speech techniques (‘gesture like this,’ ‘walk like that,’ ‘don’t say “uh,”’ etc.) are taught all over the world, often netting their instructors thousands of dollars a day. I don’t think they work very well. Why? Look at almost every meeting you’ve ever attended. Almost without exception, speakers are BORING. In fact, the bar is so low that if someone is mildly interesting in the speaking arena, he or she is seen as brilliant.
And by "boring" we mean...
Boring (n). Something that is unchanging, predictable, all-the-same, goes on and on without end...
Even the definition is boring!
So, what's the simplest way to avoid boredom?
To be unpredictable, to be surprising...to be unique. Unique is easy. You already are. And knowing what makes you unique gives you quick insight into how to be pleasantly unpredictable, surprising and interesting.
The novelty and power of a compelling LIVE experience in a large business meeting is what generates inspiration, buy-in, acceptance of change, and shifts in belief or commitment in employees or stakeholders. It's a projection of leadership when your words and passion inspire and move people to action.
As we progress through the 10-step FYOS System, you'll learn:
1. Who you are, what makes you unique, and how to project that uniqueness.
2. How to forget what you thought you knew about presenting and stop listening to others' feedback (you're too serious, not serious enough, speak slower, speak faster, etc.).
3. How to craft your story, and skip using emphatitudes (emphatic platitudes).
4. How to deal with "nerves."
5. How to prepare your script.
6. How to use PowerPoint correctly.
7. How to use sound design to deepen your impact.
8. How to develop a "bag of tricks" that will become your stylistic "trademark."
9. How rehearsal can turn your presentation into conversation.
10. How to make Q&A interesting and dynamic.
Partnering with Brian Walter and "Extreme Meetings," Ken has brought life, drama and humor to presentations throughout North America for Pitney Bowes, Washington Mutual, Best Western International, Catholic Health Initiatives, AAA, Amazon.com, Verizon Wireless, Starbucks, Microsoft, Sodexho, KPMG, TMobile, COSTCO, Eddie Bauer and Wells Fargo, just to name a smattering.
His Finding Yourself On StageTM coaching system brings a theatrical perspective to presentation coaching. It's all about revealing the inherent strength and presence of your personality to your audience. Very few executives receive this kind of coaching, but from the looks on the faces of thousands of audience members he's seen, Ken knows employees wish more executives did.
Finding Yourself On StageTM clients include executives from:
- Best Western International
- Intermec
- Pitney Bowes
- Samsung Electronics
- Franciscan Health System
- AAA
- Russell Investment Group
- Microsoft
