Tor Hansson

Tor Hansson is a writer and communications professional from Sausalito, California.

With a BA in Mass Communications and an MBA from the University of San Francisco, Tor began his career in the burgeoning technology industry in Northern California, before he was headhunted back to his native Norway to work in advertising with McCann-Erickson, where he founded and managed Universal Media/Norway.

While at McCann he delivered one of the much-dreaded Coke Media Audits, an event where Coca-Cola execs descend from the Ivory Tower in Atlanta, and sit through a two-day presentation about anything and everything that has anything at all to do with Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola sales in that particular country. (Yes, drinking yoghurt is considered, and so is herbal tea, and plain tap water). The presentation took three 100-hour weeks of preparation, and was delivered in the absence of the Norwegian Coca-Cola managing director, who forgot that he had ordered it.

Back in the U.S. Tor worked in the corporate communications industry in the Bay Area, first with The Kenwood Group, then with Delphi Productions (now Group Delphi), working with a blue-chip group of technology and medical device companies. At Delphi he was the creative director on the design and development of the Space Odyssey Project, the space science wing of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

The night before participating in the winning presentation to the museum he discovered that the soles of his shoes were coming loose at the tips, so he superglued them, and put them under the legs of his hotel room desk for extra pressure. That lead to him giving the presentation to the museum with sky blue rug remnants sprouting from his shoes, and the opening story of that incident softened up the audience considerably.

Tor is now a freelance writer and creative director. He wrote The 1-2-3 System out of rank frustration with the presentation practices he saw more or less everywhere. The thought that people plain forgot how to communicate with their peers once they got hold of a computer and a copy of Microsoft PowerPoint was simply astonishing, especially in the face of both anecdotal evidence as well as scientific research that shows that the approach is quite deadly to a productive exchange of ideas. Tor thought that a short book to outline a common sense approach would be a good thing, and albeit slow, the book is winning converts, one presenter at a time. He is using the 1-2-3 system in all his own presentations, and

Tor is an avid fly fisher, and spends a fair amount of time along the banks of the trout streams of Northern California.