I am a pragmatic being. At my core, I understand the values of efficiency and expedience. I embrace the art of compromise and understand that life often gets in the way of ideals and theories. Reality is often harsh and not adjusting to it often harsher.
Yet there is one principle relevant to the presentation community on which I do not yield. One ideal to which I hold stubbornly. At this windmill, I gladly tilt: it is the notion that a presentation content creator can create one set of slides that will function ably for the projected content and for the printed material.
This is an impossible notion. Everything else in life might be possible if you work hard, but not this one thing. In my 15+ years as a presentation consultant, I have not once seen it done successfully.
Not once!
When you set forth to create content for a presentation, you work with two forces that are fundamentally at odds with one another. You want to create projected content that is compelling and you want to provide information that is complete and useful. The pragmatic being in you usually prevails, and in the interest of time, you look for a happy medium.
Unfortunately, that twain shall not meet. Nary.
As discomfiting as it may be for content creators, a properly-prepared set of visuals for a presentation will fail as leave-behind collateral. Your slides are supposed to be incomplete; they are supposed to be no more than the tease for the words that you will speak. If they say too much, they inhibit your ability to tell the story.
Guy Kawasaki’s latest effort is a gold mine for those who want to stay on top of the presentation community. Alltop describes itself as having “all the top stories covered all the time,” and from its simple home page, you can click on one of dozens of general topics to see who is saying it.
Its newly-added Speaking category is a one-stop shop for our profession, with an exhaustive list of blogs from all of the prominent commentators. You can go directly to it at http://speaking.alltop.com/.
As the Web and the blogosphere becomes impossibly vast, I am grateful for sites like Alltop that can keep me dialed in without requiring the 24×7 vigilance for which life is way too short…
While I like a great many of the trends that I see in the presentation community, here is one that I loathe:
“Create a PowerPoint for your presentation.”
My disdain for this new expression exists on many levels, but I’ll cut right to the chase: In elevating the slide deck to such importance, it threatens to undermine and cheapen the experience of creating and delvering a presentation. It’s also unfair to the software, as if it is primarily, or worse, solely responsible for the success of a presentation.
I understand that PowerPoint’s saturation is about 99%; I practically owe my livelihood to that fact. Nonetheless, I cringe when I hear it used as the ubiquitous noun for all things relating to a presentation. We don’t say “Create a Word with your thoughts,” “Put together an Excel with those figures,” or “Write me up an Outlook on that.” Why is PowerPoint different?
I fear that the answer is in the way people view the slide deck: Too many people see one’s slides as the presentation itself, as if the presenter is secondary. And this, of course, stems from the unfortunate reality that people rely too heavily on their slides when giving presentations. Too much text, too many complete sentences, too many audience members thinking “couldn’t you have just emailed this to me? Why did I have to be here?”
Where do we stem this tide? We start by remembering that you are the presentation; your slides are not. They must be subordinate to your ability to connect with your audience in meaningful ways and on levels other than the purely intellectual. Audience members are moved to action because they feel it in their gut; that rarely happens because you created a “good PowerPoint.” It happens because you conceived a good message, prepared content to support that message, and yes, prepared compelling visuals and key points to complement that message.
“Creating a PowerPoint” does not bring rise to any of those critical activities. It cheapens the entire process. Creating a slide deck to help with your message is fine; asking it to BE the message is not!
As part of her narrative on being the more electable candidate, the campaign for Senator Hillary Clinton distributed a PowerPoint slide deck to Democratic members of the House of Representatives, to be viewed, she hoped, by many uncommitted superdelegates.
I wish she had hired me as her presentations coach — at a minimum, I would have pushed for an entirely different approach, and if I’m being completely honest, I would have advised against sending out the slide deck at all.
As you can see from the PDF version of the deck, the slides contain consistent branding via a header but otherwise lack any sort of cohesion at all and are devoid of any effective design. Headlines all have underlines, bullets are misplaced and used inconsistently, photos are used gratuitously, and charts are overladen with information. Slides 6 - 8 contain charts that have obviously been pasted in as graphics: their top borders cut into the text. In the case of Slide 8, it is downright embarrassing.
We did not receive the actual slide deck, only low-res JPGs of the slides, so we cannot say for sure whether the Clinton team attempted to create builds to sequence some of the chunkier data, like the charts and graphs. If we give her content creators the benefit of the doubt and assume that they did create builds for the more dense slides, then they are guilty of creating no navigational assistance whatsoever for the viewers working through the slides.
The photos used are unimaginative and mostly shoved into corners of slides, with no thought whatsoever given to how they might be more evocative and more emotional. The irony here is that there are some truly excellent photos available at the Clinton website. In about one hour, I was able to produce an entire makeover of this slide deck, relying even on low-res screen grabs of website photos:
Above all, this should not have been sent as slideware; it should have been a PDF document. Without a live person advocating these positions, the bulleted content is insufficient for fleshing out the argument. Given Clinton’s position as underdog, these arguments are too nuanced to be made by static bullet slides, especially poorly-designed ones. This deliverable should have been a completely-formatted document, created in InDesign or Xpress, or at a minimum, Publisher, with evocative photos, fully-formulated paragraphs, and integrated data charts.
The data and the argument are potentially compelling, but I score this as a missed opportunity for the New York Senator…
Read our more extensive writeup on our makeover at our editorial archive.
The other day I was working with a client on a presentation that had to be less than 10 minutes, and he was frustrated with the challenge of creating slide content for a talk so brief.
I said one thing to him that became a bit of a sea change.
“Why don’t you forget entirely about slides with text on them?”
[silence]
“I’ll bet you could be just as persuasive with your words, and your slides could be even more impactful.”
It needs to be said that I caught my client at a weak moment in which he was unusually receptive to such an unconventional idea. Most execs would look at me as if I were from Mars were I to suggest slides with no text on them, but the rigors of a 10-minute presentation demanded unusual measures.
His talk went beautifully. Which raises the more vital question: Could you do it? Do you know your topic well enough? And are you sufficiently in touch with the images that you would want to evoke with your audience?
If so, the search capabilities at all of the stock photo sites can help. In the case of the presentation shown here, I used the general search word “economics” to find the right imagery. I had to wade through lots of photos of currency, as well as some clichés of scales and gold bars. But it was worth the dip into the photo pool, as I uncovered photos that nicely complemented the messages of the talk.
One PowerPoint trick to note when you intend to create text-less slides: Instead of having to switch to the Blank layout for every slide, edit your slide master so that the title and the bullet placeholders are both off the slide. Just move them out of there! Now you need only issue the New Slide command to get a blank slide.
What do you do when you have one of the pickiest eaters in the world living under your roof, and you are about to enter into a religious observance that prohibits the consumption of two of the only three food items she’ll eat, pizza and pasta?
The Passover ritual is proof positive that wonders shall never cease. As we seek to identify with our ancestors who fled from Egypt many thousands of years ago, we rid our home of all food with yeast. After all, if the ancient Hebrews could eat cakes of unleavened bread for the months and years that they fled through the desert, certaily we could do it for eight days.
But how will Jamie eat matzah, the second coming of tasteless cardboard? And will she go anywhere near a hard-boiled egg dipped in salt water? Horseradish, literally cut from the root? And gefilte fish?? The Red Sea should sooner part than we should watch our 12-year-old resort to such torture.
But wonders never cease. “Hey Dad, can we buy some matzah early?”
“What, you want to get it over with? It doesn’t work that way!”
“No, I like it.”
“________”
“Dad?”
“________”
“Are you okay, Dad?”
She likes matzah. She who eats around anything red or green in her salad, she who would declare anything she doesn’t recognize to be inedible, she who would be fine with macaroni morning, noon, and night, she for whom we must buy pulp-free orange juice…she likes matzah?
It’s a miracle! Wait…that’s the wrong holiday. It is some sort of incredible affirmation of the mysterious power of faith-based rituals.
As for the gefilte fish…well, let’s not press our luck.
When you write a book with a title such as mine, you would be drawn to an article entitled: “Why Your Website *Sucks*”.
This incisive and well-written article could just as easily have been written for the presentation community, as its principal message resonates with most of us:
It’s not about you. It has to be about them.
Anyone struggling with message, or struggling with someone who is struggling with message, will enjoy this fine article from Chris Hadad.
There will be times in the life of any content creator when the desired image doesn’t exist and needs to be created. Those are the times when it’s good to know about objects—photographic images that consist only of a central foreground object, removed entirely from its background.
Our quest is to create an image of a healthy woman working out. As robust as the photos.com library is, we were not able to find the perfect image. But we did find the perfect woman.
She is an object; she has no background. And once we imported her into our image-editing program of choice, with one click of the automatic selection tool, we had her being sent out as a PNG file, the format that supports transparent objects like this one. Then we searched through traditional photographs for a dance studio or a clean, well-lighted gym, and found a great one. And by marrying the two photos, we ended up with this:
We had succeeded…and we had failed. The woman came in transparently atop the studio, all right, but she appears to be floating, as if she doesn’t really belong.
One of the finest live presentations I have ever witnessed featured a man and a microphone. It was in 1989, the debut event of the CorelWORLD User Conference, the precursor to the PowerPoint Live User Conference. John Meyer, the president of Ventura Software, was the keynote speaker. He did not speak from a script, yet it was obvious that he knew what he wanted to say. He began at a podium, but frequently moved to the edge of the stage where nothing separated him from his audience. He was always looking into someone’s eyes, and regularly journeyed from one side of the room to another.
He spoke of the company’s beginnings, but resisted all temptations to proper the dreadful “corporate background” speech. He shared with us through anecdotes how customers had influenced the product, but did not give in to the air-puffed “we are responsive to your needs” cliches. And he shared with us his goals for the software, but never once used words like “proactive,” “vision,” “innovative,” or any other buzzword that sounds good but means nothing at all.
The crowd of 300 was utterly riveted. They watched his every move, and hung on his every word. All the focus was on John, as the lights were up and there were no multimedia distractions behind him.
One year later, Xerox had taken over the software. Instead of entrepreneur John Meyer giving the opening keynote address, it was corporate journeyman-turned-president Larry Gerhardt. He began with a corporate backgrounder, offered his own resume, talked about how Xerox would be responsive to our needs, and spoke of being proactive and innovative. For the attendees at this conference, this wasn’t a speech; it was a punishment.
It was bad enough that this address was everything that conference goers didn’t care about, and delivered with the energy and charisma of a potato. What made it worse were the slides—those dreadful slides. Instead of working the room, Gerhardt was working the projector, fiddling with transparencies and trying not to put his face in the light.
This leads to a question that has been nagging me for the last two years: Where have all the good presenters gone? Because I refuse to believe that there aren’t any left, there must be something else going on, and I’ll tell you what it is:
Presentation software
The tyranny of presentation software is what it does to skilled speakers. It takes good speakers, able to carry an audience with their voice and their language, and it dummies them down.
I wrote these words in October 1998. It is both entertaining and troubling to see how far and how little we have progressed in the span of a decade. You can read the entire article at
For the past six weeks, I have been a complete political junkie. Since I started following politics at the not-so-ripe age of nine — when Humphrey and Nixon went down to the wire on election night in 1968 — never have I been more engaged in an election process than this one involving the two Democratic contenders. My family makes fun of me, my TiVo is littered with partial CNN and MSNBC shows, and anything with the word DEBATE in its description gets recorded automatically.
Like many, I find myself fascinated by Senator Barack Obama. My colleague Garr Reynolds has written a great post about Obama’s inspirational quotient; I am equally engaged by the tactics that he used during the last two debates, in which Senator Hillary Clinton sought to make up ground in a race whose control has eluded her.
Her task has been well-defined: create separation and distance between Obama and herself, and in that space, make the case for why her position is superior. But she couldn’t. On each occasion in which Clinton attempted to create separation, Obama rebuffed it. How did he do this?
By agreeing with her.
In both Texas and Ohio, Obama chose not to take issue with Clinton and went out of his way to find the areas in which they share common ground. Clinton tried to create space between them; Obama sought to close that space. Here is one of many examples — in this case, Obama received one of the easiest opportunities to attack an opponent, with a question about why Senator Clinton is not worthy of the Presidency.
And yet he resisted. Not only did he resist, but he used it as an opportunity to close the gap, not widen it. In fact, with his agreeable tone and complementary remarks, he all but forced Clinton to return the tone. Watch her nod and smile while he speaks — she has no choice but to be agreeable back, lest she portray herself as mean and vindictive.
At this stage in the campaign, having won the last 11 consecutive primaries or caucuses, Obama knows that people prefer his style and his personal manner. The only area in which Clinton can make inroads is on substance and Obama is making it practically impossible. I counted eight times in Ohio where Obama said “We agree on the issue of _____,” and twice pointed out that there is “very little difference between us on this issue.”
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You might not find yourself in an election any time soon, but you can use a similar strategy when met with opposition during a public presentation. The next time you field a question that carries dissent, do more than just pay lip service. Consider these possible responses:
“I understand your concern, but when you look at all of the factors involved…”
“I understand your concern. Nobody wants to be placed in that situation, but when you look at…”
“I understand your concern. I share your concern. In fact, I lived with your concern for 72 hours when we debated this question, because we knew that it would have repurcussions. and the fact that we weighted all of the factors thoroughly and feel comfortable with our decision does not absolve us from the responsibility of addressing your concern.”
The first one is lip service; it is barely more than an “um” before moving into the main point of the response, the rebuttal. The second one is better, but not good enough. With the third one, the main point of the response IS the concern, not the rebuttal. If you can bridge this kind of gap with a disagreement, you will rarely have credibility questions with partisan issues.
Back to politics. If Obama continues on to the Democratic nomination and faces Senator John McCain in the general election, I will find it fascinating to see when he chooses this same strategy of conciliation and when he chooses to go on the attack. Should he be “swift-boated” by partisan groups, it will be nothing short of an artform if he can blend his smooth oratory with sharp defense. I can’t wait…!
