Several things came together to trigger this post on the topic of presentations. I was talking about it with two colleagues today. One of them is heading for a presentation course to improve his technique tomorrow, and the other was berating the use of PowerPoints. The course in question is the kind of thing where they video you so you can get to see just how many mistakes you make. I am a great advocate of this sort of thing. I used to work for a company called Interactive (now swallowed up by Epicor) where they instituted a policy so that any new hire at whatever level would have to go on our standard 1 day course if they had any contact whatsoever with customers. It didn’t matter if they were to be a director or senior manager, or had been on dozen presentation courses before. This was a both a great leveller and team building technique, helped give us a consistent, good quality presentation approach, and the course material was fun too. There is nothing better than watching yourself on TV to cure some of those bad habits you’ve probably picked up.
You may know that I’m not a fan of PowerPoints, although like many I fall in to the trap of using them regularly. If you do, use the Kawasaki 10/20/30 rule - I hate slides with too much and too small text. Yesterday Guy pointed me to a great example on Presentation Zen of the non-PPT approach, from Steve Jobs. Presenting to his town council in Cupertino, they had cleared the agenda and probably expected him to come with multi-media and a group of henchmen. Instead it’s just him in a black tee shirt with his casual but charismatic style, getting across his message in a subtly understated manner. He was initiating the process of approvals and planning consent for a 40 acre site he had acquired (in 9 land deals) for a new Apple Campus, meaning he can stay in the city and remain their biggest tax payer. It’s a great example, and by the way you will be viewing it on YouTube. This is a phenomenon that I just keep hearing about over the last few weeks. It’s obviously in regular use by youth culture in the USA to share all manner and quality of videos, but seems to have become a major digital video repository. Update: Philip, who write the “real” SME Blog, was the colleague heading for the course. He’s been doing his homework because he pointed me to these two items on presentation bad habits and body language.
Technorati Tags : presentations, Steve+Jobs, Apple, Cupertino, PowerPoint, Guy+Kawasaki, Presentation+Zen
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