How can you enrich your business presentation in unexpected and wonderful ways?
To deepen and broaden your perspective so that in encompasses that proverbial “big picture” we forever hear about?
Become a 3-D presenter.
Now, this means several things, including how you utilize the stage to your utmost advantage. But a major component is the exercising of your mind.
And I talk about that here.
Your Learning Curve
It’s the process of enriching your personal context so that you become aware of new and varied sources of information, ideas, concepts, theories. You become learned in new and wondrous ways.
Think of it as enlarging your world.
You increase your reservoir of usable material. And your business presentation can connect more readily with varied audiences.
You do this in a pleasant and ongoing process – by keeping your mind open to possibilities outside your functional area. By taking your education far beyond undergraduate or graduate school. And that process increases your personal competitive advantage steadily.
By doing something daily, however brief, that stretches your mind. Or allows you to make a connection that otherwise might have escaped you.
Expand Your World to Expand Your Business Presentations
By reading broadly in areas outside your specialty, and by rekindling those interests that excited and animated you early in life.
Read a book outside your specialty. Have lunch with a colleague from a different discipline. Dabble a bit in architecture, engineering, art, poetry, history, science.
It also means sampling some of the best offerings in the blogosphere on business presentations.
For instance, my three favorite PowerPoint gurus are Nancy Duarte, Garr Reynolds, and Gene Zelazny. Sample their online work . . . purchase their books, as I have.
Their works are invaluable tools of my trade. If you become a serious business presenter, they’ll become your friends, too.
No Cloistering!
We sometimes cloister ourselves in our discipline, our job, our tight little world, forgetting that other fields can offer insights. For myself, while teaching in the LeBow College of Business at Drexel University, I am also sitting in on a course sponsored by another university’s History Department’s Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy – “Grand Strategy.”
What a leavening experience this promises to be: Thucydides, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Lincoln, and many others . . .
Does this help in preparing my own classes? At this point, I can’t be certain.
And that’s the beauty and potential of it.
I do know that it will enrich my store of knowledge so that my own presentations continue in 3-dimensional fashion, connected to the “real world.” They are textured, deep, and richer than they otherwise would have been.
It will do the same for your business presentations. And it will likely aid in your developing into an especially powerful presenter, imbued with professional presence and increased personal competitive advantage.
For more on how to develop and deliver especially powerful business presentations, consult The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting.