I came across this fantastic video by Tom Peters. The subtext of it is this: Perception is all there is. There is no reality. Think about that when you make your next presentation. Think about how your audience perceives you; think about this when you give a glib presentation — will your audience view it as being authentic? Will they accept your message without hesitation? Or will they think that you have just memorized your presentation and you are just reciting it back word for word?
I posted a blog two years ago (February 2008) on the topic of why you should vary your tone when you are making a presentation. Our local meteorologist Lauren Casey at WINK TV gives an excellent example of that. Notice how she varies her voice and facial expressions constantly and makes her weather forecast INTERESTING.
There is an OSHA online training course that exemplifies the worst kind of presentation. It shows a series of slides packed with words or bullet points and it has a computer generated voice READING every bloody word on the screen SLOWLY…AAAARH. That is enough to put anyone in a deep coma after a few slides.
It is beyond me why they do that “read along with Mitch” bit ala “sing along with Mitch”.
In Henry Boettinger’s wonderful book “Moving Mountains – the Art and Craft of Letting Others See Things Your Way”, he describes an incident where his colleagues made a presentation to an executive before the real thing – a big presentation to a group of senior executives. The preview was superb. Every detail and lesson were brought to bear. Timing was exquisite.
When the group finished the preview, the executive just sat silently shaking his head. He told the group: “It’s no good. Your presentation is simply too slick.” The executive went on to say: “Yes, everything is perfectly clear. Yes, there is convincing evidence on every point. Yes, the alternatives all look bad. No, nothing relevant has been overlooked. Yes, it is a first-class job. Yes, you have carried out your assignment in a thoroughly professional way.”
So what was the matter with the preview?
The executive went on to say: “My colleagues will find the razzle-dazzle offensive and will become unconfortable. They will feel that they have no place at all to apply their judgment. I ‘m afraid if you show them what I saw, they will modify your proposal, and I don’t want that to happen.”
The presenters asked the executive for advice on what they should do. Here is what the executive told them:
“Make the visuals look cheaper and less finished…Miss a few cues when one man turns the story over to another. Right now you come on like professional actors. But don’t change the story’s message.”
The moral of this story from Henry Boettinger is that if your presentation comes over as being too slick (often as a result of too much rehearsal), it loses its credibility. When the audience sees you as a smooth talker (aka snake oil salesman or used car salesman), they will start to question your motive and the message of your story will get lost in the glitter.
That – by the way – is another reason why you should always keep your slides SIMPLE. No big company logo on every slide. And no cheesy clip arts and special effects! You want to keep your glitter to a bare minimum.
Happy New Year to all my readers. May 2010 be a peaceful and happy year for you and may all your presentations in 2010 be wonderful and thought-provoking.
Here is an author who gave a talk on his book. The subject is kind of irrelevant. Let’s look at how he delivered his talk. It is obvious that he used speaking notes because we can see him refer to them frequently. But not so frequently that he was reading his notes to the audience – a cardinal sin and a big no-no in presentation. His delivery was not smooth. Nor was it slick. It was not over-rehearsed. He was having a conversation with the audience on a topic he knew very well. He was telling a story.
Just watch a few minutes of it and you will see what I mean.
I recently posted a question to the staff at Tom Peters’ website as to whether Tom rehearsed before his made his video. His staff checked with him and here is his answer:
“There’s less of an easy answer than you’d imagine. I do not rehearse in the formal sense. On the other hand, I come close to staying up all night before a speech going over my slides—over and over and over. Perhaps over 100 times???? Of course I formally modify the slides, to the point of de-emphasizing one word and emphasizing (italics) another. But as I go through the slides I am also sub-consciously, semi-consciously going through phrasing I might use. So in a way it’s damn near rehearsal, though you’re also right in that the main rehearsal is 3,000 or so speeches over about 31 years.”
As he said, he does not “rehearse in the formal sense”. What he does – in my opinion – is that he gets VERY familiar with what he plans to say to a particular audience the next day.
I have recently switched to a MacBook Pro from Windows. Just got tired of rebooting my Vista-based computer 3 or more times a day. So far the transition has been relatively painless. That is not to say there isn’t a bit of a learning curve.
All my presentations are now done with Keynote. That’s the same program that Steve Jobs used for his presentations. It is by far much better than PowerPoint.
As part of my transition, I purchased a copy of “iWork 09 – the Missing Manual” by Josh Clark. In this book, Josh includes many tips on how to make great presentations – like the ones Steve Jobs gives. Here are just a few samples from the book in quotes:
“Plan your talk from the get-go as a spoken presentation. Think about it as if you were having a conversation with just one member of your audience.” Why? The truth is that the words you use in conversations are very different from the words you use when you write an article or paper.
“Your slides should be as simple and uncluttered as possible. Think of slides as illustrations for your talk, images that complement your (spoken) words”. That’s what I have been preaching all along on this blog.
“It is fine to show nothing at all during portions of your presentation. Displaying a blank slide puts the focus back on you.” This is a very useful tip when you are talking about a fairly complicated topic. Never show a busy slide or diagram because it is a big distraction to your audience.
“Know your subject thoroughly, but don’t feel you have to say everything you know.” People have a tendency to cram everything they know in a single slide and in bullet points. In reality, they are using those bullet points as speaking notes or reminders to THEMSELVES. There is nothing wrong with having speaking notes. But You do NOT and should NEVER share your notes with the audience. Both PowerPoint and Keynote have the capability of showing two screens. One screen shows the speaker’s notes to the speaker only and one screen shows the presentation to the audience. It is called the Presenter’s View (PowerPoint) and Presenter Notes (Keynote).
I can’t take credit for this heading. It came from a very interesting post by Kathy Reiffenstein concerning her recent presentations in Nigeria and Kenya. She reported that bad PowerPoint is just as viral over in Africa as it is here. One of her fellow presenters gave her this quote: “PowerPoint is too many points without power.”
An observation Kathy made during her trip is that people over in Nigeria are very formal in their presentations. They always address one another as Mr. or Mrs. during their presentations. This of course reinforces the cardinal rule about when in Rome (Nigeria in this case) do what the Romans (Nigerians) do. Always follow local tradition and protocol. In many cultures, it is rude to address people you do not know well by their first name.
Another observation Kathy noted was that Nigerian moderators forcefully enforced the time limits for the speakers. I wish more moderators in the U.S. would do the same. Unplugging the speaker’s mike would be a good start. The use of a taser should not be ruled out entirely on those recalcitrant gas bags.
I wonder if Kathy picked up the $30 million promised her in those ubiquitous emails from Nigeria.
