The Tyranny of
Presentation Software
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 annual Ventura Summit, the precursor to the CorelWORLD User Conference as we now call it. 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 (of course, the word “multimedia” hadn’t even been coined yet).
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 Ventura users didn’t care about, and delivered with the energy and charisma of a potato. What made it worse were the slides—those dreadful slides. There were yards and yards of bullets, all black text on a white background, which mirrored what Gerhardt said, often verbatim. And this was back in 1990, when the big breakthrough in slide shows was the laser printer and transparencies (before then, slide shows were created on 35mm slides, a carousel projector, and hundreds of dollars in slide output charges). Instead of working the room, Gerhardt was working the projector, fiddling with transparencies and trying not to put his face in the light.
I recall these two memories because I want to share with you what I consider to be the highlight and the nadir of speech-making. The quintessential speaker can hold a room with his or her voice and words, while the less experienced or less talented speakers tend to retreat to various visual aids to help them through a presentation. But 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
Today’s presentation programs have made it so easy to produce bullet charts and graphs, that virtually all corporate speakers have turned to them, whether or not they really need to. In too many cases, presentation software has detracted from speeches, not enhanced them.
(Incidentally, before I receive death threats from the speakers that I hire for CorelWORLD, I do not include them in this group. I hire specialists whose presentations involve actually working the software, not just standing up and speaking. I distinguish between product demos and training seminars—in which the audience is watching the software—and a speech or an address, in which the audience is watching the speaker.)
This is not like the problems that Internet publishing has created this year, or desktop publishing caused a decade ago. This is worse. Electronic publishing has invited amateurs to advertise their lack of skill in public, often with embarrassing results. But the tyranny of presentation software is in 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.
Now that I have your attention, I want to say what I like about presentation software, because there is an awful lot of good things to say about it. In fact, it is very rare that I give a talk or a presentation without turning to PowerPoint (and now that Corel has an entry worth discussing, maybe WordPerfect Presentations). An on-screen slide show is the perfect way to illustrate the framework for your ideas or to show visually a relationship that would be difficult to describe with just words. It is also helpful to share your hierarchy of ideas.
At Corel’s launch of WordPerfect in 1996, I saw Jeff Hunsaker, WordPerfect Director of Product Marketing make very good use of WordPerfect Presentations, with well-organized and animated bullet points and amusing graphics. Text bounced onto the screen and an airplane even flew by at one point, but he got away with it because the entire slide show only lasted about five minutes, instead of throughout his entire talk.
No doubt there are many ways that presentation software can complement a good talk, but the key word there is “complement,” not replace. I had lunch recently with a Silicon Valley-based executive and he was telling me how most of his colleagues are too busy to spend more than 15 minutes or so to turn their notes into a slide show.
“Is it so important that they do that?” I asked.
“Today,” he replied, “you can’t give a talk in this business without showing slides.”
“But if you just turn your notes into slides, your slides will be the same as what you say.”
“That’s right.”
“That’s sad.”
“That’s right.”
You can’t give a talk today without showing slides. Those are some of the most distressing words I have heard all year. This is yet another example of knee-jerk software practice: Use determined by availability, not need. Executives with good speaking skills don’t need slides as they talk, and if they do, their slides should elaborate on their ideas, not repeat them. And executives who lack speaking skills make the situation worse with bad slides that compel them to read their speech instead of delivering it.
You can’t give a talk today without showing slides. I didn’t want to believe it, but then I thought back to last year’s Ventura conference, where we invited John Meyer back to address the group again. His ideas and his delivery were as crisp as ever, but alas, this time around, he felt obliged to include slides of bullet points. He had fallen prey to the tyranny of presentation software. Presentation software discourages creativity. It takes a very practiced speaker who can show a graphic of words and do anything other than read those words.
On the continuum from excellent to awful, here is how I see the components of a presentation:
Best Presentation: Truly excellent speaker, great ideas, and slides that amplify on the points made, instead of repeating them.
Very Good: Truly excellent speaker, great ideas, and no slides.
Still Okay: Excellent speaker, redundant slides that don’t add anything.
Not so Good: Bad speaker, good slides
Pretty Bad: Bad speaker, no slides
The Worst: Bad speaker, redundant slides
All statistics indicate that increasing numbers of Office and PerfectOffice users are adopting the included presentation program to assist in speech-making. If you are in that group, you will be tempted to place this powerful software into action at your first opportunity. If you make presentations before a group, you will be tempted to write your notes inside the software and then display them during your talk.
Resist! Don’t fall prey to the tyranny. Don’t let the presentation software take over the presentation. If you’re an experienced speaker, make sure that the software doesn’t turn you into a robot. If you’re not experienced, don’t expect the software to save you. Just like CorelDRAW itself, presentation software is a tool, it is not the art itself. In the hands of an artist, the tool can do wonderful things. In the wrong hands, it can turn a good speaker into a bad one, and a bad one into a dreadful one.