When Slides Just Aren’t Right…
This from Ed Harycki, CEO of Swift Financial:
We give lots of presentations for small groups (a few of us and a few of them). Our primary audiences are financial institutions where our product would be a good fit for their customers base, and we are trying to convince them to partner with us to offer our products.
In these meetings, we might be able to offer handouts, but not likely to be able to access a screen to have a “live” show. Sometimes, it is challenging to even crack open the deck as the audience members just don’t want it. Do we try to force it or just go with the flow?
_______________
Never, ever force a slide deck upon someone. The members of your audience are reluctant enough to sit through them on their own volition. The implicit formality of projected material makes it less than ideal for small meetings which tend to be more like conversations. While it is possible to create a scenario in which it is comfortable to show slides in that environment, it would require a willing partner. If the partner is not willing, it is never going to feel right.
Presenters in small gatherings should ALWAYS be prepared, ready, and able to speak off the cuff, off script, and without aids. From there, they could introduce them gradually, starting with one or two printed sheets, working up to a handout or leave behind. And maybe, in the course of conversation about a deep topic, you could flip open your notebook to show a visual that would help illuminate the topic.
But trying to get to the slide deck misses the real objective. In small meetings, eye contact is the promised land. You don’t want anything to take away from that while you are trying to engage and connect.
___________________________
Follow up from Ed:
In a small group, if you feel you need to hand something out to get the conversation going, would you hand out a two- or three-page summary for conversation, and then leave a more detailed presentation behind?
_______________
I would not hand anything out to “get the conversation going” — I would try to make that happen myself. Remember, you are the presentation. And in small groups, your eyes are everything.
Once going, then yes, I would be ready with a short summary, preferably by directing them to the summary section of the handout. I am unconvinced as to the wisdom of having two separate leave behinds, given the likelihood that one of them would be misplaced. My instincts would be toward a single handout with an executive summary in place.
Top Ten Reasons to Attend the Presentation Summit
With apologies to David Letterman, here is the Top Ten List of reasons to attend the 2010 Presentation Summit, the preeminent conference for presentation professionals, to be held Oct 17-20 in beautiful and sunny San Diego.
1. INCREDIBLE LEARNAGE: You can’t possibly imagine how much you’ll learn at this conference, with dedicated tracks of seminars for PowerPoint technique, presentation design and delivery, and our Special Delivery track, focusing on all forms of presentation delivery. Check out the schedule of seminars.
2. UNPARALLELED EXPERTISE: It’s one thing to know PowerPoint; lots of people know that. It’s another thing to know about creating a compelling presentation; far fewer people know that. And it’s yet an altogether different thing to be able to teach these concepts; only a select few know how to do that. How few? Let’s see…Nancy Duarte, Garr Reynolds, Rick Altman, Julie Terberg, Carmen Taran…what a coincidence, they’re all on the conference team…
3. AWESOME HELP: The conference’s Help Center is quite simply the finest opportunity for support with presentation software and technology anywhere on the planet. It’s free, it’s drop-in, it’s all hands-on, and it’s open from morning ‘til night. Some come to the conference just for the Help Center.
4. BECOME PART OF A COMMUNITY: At the Presentation Summit, you do more than learn; you develop contacts within the presentation community that you’ll keep for the rest of your career. When you put 200 passionate people together under one roof, the bonds created go way beyond that of a webinar, a discussion forum, or a faceless trade show. People who have met at our conferences have gone into business together, hired one another, visited each other during trips, and have even married.
5. MEET THE DEVELOPERS: Microsoft’s PowerPoint development team never misses this event. They take copious notes, they schedule late-night schmooze sessions, and they attend all of the seminars. They know the value of having so many earnest users of their product together at once and they place extraordinary value on your input.
6. THE EXPO: You’ll be the kid in the candy store when you visit the Summit Expo on Tuesday of conference week. Over a dozen vendors, all of them offering goods and services dedicated to the presentation marketplace. Lots of show specials, lots of giveaways, lots of opportunity to meet the people who make the products that make your life easier as a presentation professional.
7. SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL: This is not a huge, faceless trade show — nobody enjoys attending those. The Summit limits enrollment to 225 so everyone is assured of receiving personal attention. Conference organizers are experts at hosting events of this size — they know exactly the type of programming and scheduling that fits.
8. YOU RUN THE PLACE: You pick and choose which seminars to attend; you do not have to commit to any one track ahead of time and you can cross tracks at will. Furthermore, several of the sessions could feature you! Submit work that you are particularly proud of or believe needs work and you could find yourself being showcased or made over. Sign up for the Trivia Contest and you could be part of a team participating in a unique blend of Jeopardy and Family Feud. Sign up early and you could venture out for an exclusive digital photography field trip to a San Diego landmark.
9. YOU WILL BE WELL FED: You’ll get robust continental breakfasts each morning and a fully-catered sit-down lunch on Monday and Tuesday.
10. YOU’LL HAVE AN AMAZING TIME: The Presentation Summit is like summer camp for adults; you would not have thought it possible to have such a good time at an event where you also learn so much. With relaxing meals where you don’t have to scurry out to the restaurant, evening socials, and a fabulous resort hotel perfectly situated on San Diego’s Mission Bay, you will remember the four days that you spend with your colleagues probably for the rest of your life.
_________________________
Why the Summit is Different (video)
How to convince the boss to let you attend
What Has Happened to Spontaneity?
I had mixed emotions while watching Tiger Woods’ mea culpa moment two weeks ago. Same with the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. And a recent presentation that a client gave. All of these events shared a common thread.
Several dozen politicians could have learned from Tiger on how to issue a public apology, and the Canada’s Olympic Committee crafted a breathtaking show. So did my client.
This is unfair to the Olympics, it’s only sin being the timing of all of this. The carefully-crafted performance came around the same time as so many others that I either watched or was in the room for. It got me thinking…
Does everything have to be staged these days?
What would happen if public figures went without a script?
The Woods spectacle was so tightly controlled, the Golf Writers Association of America chose to boycott the event. If they couldn’t ask questions, they argued, it was not a true news event and not worthy of their participation.
And then there’s my client. So focused was he on the performance aspect of his presentation, he had it timed to the second, and one of his slides had 13 builds on it. The slide was scheduled to be displayed for roughly 20 seconds. And it was just a quarterly update to a management team!
I don’t get it. Have we forgotten how to engage an audience without a stage director? Have we lost sight of why people attend a presentation? Do we think that audience members walk into a room just dying to see our slides?
Perhaps Carmen Taran said it best at last year’s PowerPoint Live (now the Presentation Summit), when she spoke of the importance of, to use her words, “presenting naked.” This speaks to the value of being genuine and having no barriers between presenter and audience. While I acknowledge the value of theater (and again, the Olympic festivities were phenomenal), I wouldn’t want to see the message lost in the medium, and all too often, my clients are ready to do just that.
We need less staging and more speaking. Less theater, more engagement.
What we can learn from Michael Jackson
The passing of legend Michael Jackson has been felt in every part of society's fabric, so it should come as no surprise that the community of presentation professionals can reflect on his life and take something from his experiences.
As I separate the bizarre from the pathetic, I try to disregard the surgeries, skin-bleaching, bed-sharing, and bone-scavenging. Instead, I focus on the loneliness and extreme isolation which led to his confusing two important emotions — a confusion that could befall anyone who performs in public.
Michael Jackson confused attention with adoration and adoration with love. He wanted people to love him and thought that he could get there through his fame. That became a dreadful, perhaps fatal, cycle. As Jackson said to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the unofficial rabbi to the stars in Los Angeles, "I want people to love me…because I never really felt loved. Maybe if I sharpen my craft, people will love me more."
This is an all-too-easy trap for anyone in the public eye, including presenters who might place inordinate value in earning applause from an audience. If that is the closest personal connection they feel to other people, they are bound to become lonely.
I have experienced a related dynamic myself. In the course of four compressed days at PowerPoint Live, we develop tight bonds with people whom we have just met and it is easy to regard these types of friendships as more than they are. Not to suggest for even a moment that there is anything artificial in the affinity that we all feel for one another, because the congeniality and the vibe that we create at the conference is one of its most important qualities. Come Thursday morning, however, the day after the conference closes, we all realize that our newfound BFFs cannot replace the closeness of life-long relationships that have been forged over decades.
Many of the veteran alumni who see each other year upon year have created lasting relationships, and that is the point — they take time and earnest effort.
If we presenters are not careful, we could find ourselves seeking the quick fix that Jackson did — adoration instead of love. When you have just nailed a presentation and 200 people are all standing and applauding, it's tempting to want to have the Sally Field moment. We can bring meaning to Michael Jackson's passing if we remember the importance of cultivating genuine and healthy relationships, instead of fooling ourselves into believing that a grateful audience can magically turn into a room full of best friends.
A Blast from the Past…and the Tyranny of PowerPoint
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
What do you think — have we learned anything? Are we better off today? Or just more endowed with technology and toys…?
Hillary Clinton Commits Death by PowerPoint
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:
http://www.betterppt.com/blog/hillary/before_and_after.ppt
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…
Why websites suck? Same reason as with presentations
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.
