A Happy New 2010 to All My Readers!

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.

Norman

PowerPoint’s 25th birthday

This is a slide presentation from Rowan Manahan. Very funny and insightful. I love the quote from Churchhill: “Up with which I will not put!”

PowerPoint @ 25

View more presentations from Rowan Manahan.

You are all in Sales! Period.

I just love Tom Peters. He is the best speaker (sorry – I meant to say salesman) I know. Bar none. Listen to what he has to say about sales:

When you make a presentation, you are selling something to someone. You are selling an idea to your colleagues. You are selling your business proposal to potential clients. If you are a teacher, you are not really teaching – you are really selling your knowledge to your students. If your presentation sucks, your students turns you off and nothing is taught.

The term “salesman” or “sales” has gotten a bad rap. It is not cool to be called a salesman. We sometimes associate sales to used car salesman. And that’s not fair to sales. We refer to used car salesman as those people who are too slick and too unethical in their dealings with customers. It is the same in the presentation world. If a presentation is too slick or comes off too smoothly, we become suspicious of the speaker. We think he is not one of us – and rightly so too.

So that’s another reason why you should never over-rehearse your presentation to the point where people think you are too slick. It needs spontaneity. And from it comes sincerity and credibility. Without credibility, no one will buy from you.

The art of listening in a presentation

When you make a presentation, you are communicating with your audience. I have said many times that you are in effect having a conversation with the folks in front of you. Having a conversation involves LISTENING. Listen to what management guru Tom Peters has to say about listening. Wow!

How do you listen while making a presentation? You pay attention to the audience. You listen through your eyes in addition to your ears. If members of your audience are dozing off, your eyes are “telling” you that you are boring and you are using too many bullet points.

Use wheelbarrow words in your presentations

When making a presentation, try to use as many wheelbarrow words as possible. What are wheelbarrow words? These are words that you can put inside a wheelbarrow. Here is an example:

Instead of saying that your construction firm is the “largest” in the neighborhood, you tell the audience you have 5 bulldozers and 3 cranes. People have different perception of what the word “largest” means based on their own experience. But everyone can visualize the bulldozers and construction cranes. They can all fit in a wheelbarrow – albeit a pretty big one. when they can “see” your words, they understand you.

Wheelbarrow words help minimize misunderstanding.

Here is an inspiring video with no bullet points!

I came across this video some time ago. It is inspiring and very well made. A great presentation without a single bullet point! Enjoy.

What to say when you don’t have the answer to a question?

It happens to all of us at one time or another. Someone in the audience ask us a question about our presentation and we do not have the answer to it. What should we do?

The answer is clear: Just say “I don’t know.”

This is a much better strategy than to ham and haw and try to evade the question and give a non-responsive answer. All that bobbing and weaving is not going to do you one bit of good because the audience is doing to see right through you. So it is much better for you to just confess your ignorance AND ask if anyone in the audience has the answer.

In his seminal book “Moving Mountains”, Henry Boettinger says “quibbling and evasion produce disgust. If you don’t know the answer, say so directly.”

What not to do in a presentation

This is a very funny video on common mistakes made by geeks when making presentations. Although it was staged, all those mistakes actually happen in real life. Enjoy! 

Here is another video that is very funny and instructive

Never tell your audience you are nervous!

Never apologize to an audience before you speak. Never say things like: “I am nervous about public speaking” or “I am new at this topic. So please bear with me.”  

Let’s face it: If you are truly nervous, the audience will soon find out. So telling them beforehand is nto going to help you.

 

The irony is that very often we feel a lot more nervous inside than it is shown outside. Even the best speakers feel a bit nervous before speaking but they don;t show it. Likewise, your audience may not even know that you are nervous. So why confess? Remember: We are often the harshest judge of our own performance.  

When you apologize at the outset by saying that you are new at the topic, you are telling your audience to expect a bad presentation. You are telling your audience not to listen to you. In fact, you are destroying your own credibility before you have a chance to demonstrate you have it. This is like going to battle and telling your enemy that you are weak and asking him to slaughter you. Does not make any sense at all.

 

There are more practical tips in my book.

Why you should avoid bullet points

The beauty of not using bullet points is that it forces the presenter to “have a conversation” with the audience rather than a recitation or worse yet a reading of bullet points! The primary reason people use a bunch of bullet points on a single slide is that the bullet points act as reminders or crutches. They are security blankets. Without the bullet points, you have to know the topic and speak to it naturally. I always ask people this: “When was the last time you spoke to your friends in a social setting and both of you were reading off a deck of index cards?”

Long time ago I was at a seminar where this moron (presenter) actually got on the podium and read his bullet points from notes to the audience for one hour without ever looking up once. Actually it was worse than that. He started the presentation by syaing that he didn’t really know aything about the topic! The presentation was so bad that it was almost funny. If there had been a trap door underneath him, the lever would have been pulled 5 minutes into his recitation. Finally one fellow from the audience stood up and asked why he had to pay $1000 to listen to someone read his notes.

The moral of this story: If you do not know your topic well enough to speak from your heart, don’t speak. No need to tell your audience you don’t know anything about your topic. They will know soon enough!