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According to Simon, Lectern Rock is a part theatre, part rock concert, part business insight briefing that was born out of what he saw to be a very boring, vanilla world of presentations in business.

“After attending a concert with my daughter, I realised artists were completely transforming the way they presented into a combination of theatre, music, their own oration,” Simon explains.

Simon felt that even the best business presenters weren’t bridging the gap between their business concepts and what people engaged with through popular culture.

“I was going to a lot of business presentations that were ‘death by PowerPoint’, so seeing a style of performance that was at the complete opposite end of the scale gave me an idea. I felt strongly that the business world deserved more, so I started to put together a group of musicians for a business-meets-theatre show.”

The result is a show that shares interesting, powerful and sometimes emotive stories about brands that connect with humanity, interspersed with live music that links these themes and encourages the audience to think about popular cultures’ role in business.

Bringing a theatrical style into the classroom

After several years of presenting Lectern Rock around the world, Simon is now teaching the key concepts of his show in the Master of Marketing.

Swinburne’s Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship (AGSE) has partnered with Hammond Thinking, a branding collective founded by Simon, to co-design and co-deliver the Branding and Creative Innovation unit.

“The way I present in the classroom is similar to my style in Lectern Rock. There are a lot of popular culture references and visual cues,” he says.

“In this unit, we look at the history of mankind and realise that behaviour has always come from a sense of where you fit in and where you belong. We apply that to the business world and show students that the important thing for marketing and branding is to create a sense of belonging, both in your own organisation as well as for your customers.”

Simon believes that it’s this kind of dynamic delivery that will help students to engage in their learning, getting them excited about the world of business and their future careers.

“There is change needed in the way we all teach in an age where people’s attention spans are challenged,” he says.  

“The world is vivid and three dimensional and I think you have to bring that into the classroom. You have to keep students engaged instead of just feeding them information and that’s what we’re doing in this course.”