Presentations that Work

My book “Presentations that Work” is now available in paper form. You can purchase it here for $12.95 (free shipment). The electronic version in PDF is available for $7.95.

The paper version will soon be available in Amazon.com as well.

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Bad stage ettiquette

At the same conference that I was in, one of the keynote speakers was an executive from London. Someone must have told him it was good practice to speak amongst the audience (about 200 persons) by walking around. And it is a good practice. Much better than standing behind a lectern.

But his chap took it to the extreme. He was darting around the room like a headless chicken and getting right into the person space of the audience. He made the audience very uncomfortable by getting very close to some people’s faces.

And then he made the fatal mistake. He went over his allotted one-hour time slot by 20 minutes. That is a CARDINAL sin for speakers. A good speaker always shows discipline and RESPECTS the audience and the speakers following him by staying on time.

If I were the MC, I would have turned off his mike and ushered him out of the room. Perhaps the reason he was darting around the room so much was that he was trying to avoid the trap door on the floor that would drop him.

A very poor speaker. Very few people remembered his mumblings. But they all remembered his poor performance. Another case of you can’t fix stupid.

A really bad slide

I was at a conference yesterday and a speaker presented this slide and he immediately said:”I know you can’t read this….”.

So why would anyone in this right mind show the audience a slide that he KNOW to be unreadable? The funny part was that half of the audience was straining to read the tiny little numbers on the slides and paid absolutely no attention to the speaker.