Stanley K. Ridgley, PhD is one of the country’s foremost experts on delivering Business School Presentations and is the author of the award-winning 2012 book, “The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting,” the authoritative guide to delivering powerful business presentations in the nation’s business schools. He is also the faculty instructor for the course “Strategic Thinking” in the DVD series TheGreatCourses.com.
Dr. Ridgley brings to bear the most powerful instructional techniques from one of America’s great business schools and combines them with the lessons of military leadership and high strategy learned on the front lines of the Cold War as a Military Intelligence Officer.
PowerPoint, done well, can be a Powerful Tool of Communication
Microsoft’s PowerPoint multimedia software has gotten a bum rap, and this unfair reputation springs from the thousands of ugly presentations given every day from folks who have not developed their PowerPoint skill.
It also stems from awful articles like this one, which appeared recently in something called Business Insider.
The article is so bad that I actually recommend that you read it to get the perspective of someone 1) who doesn’t know how to make a cogent argument, and 2) who obviously understands nothing about PowerPoint or how to use visual aids in delivering presentations.
His “argument” is akin to offering criticism of a bad high school football team as a reason to eliminate the NFL. Moreover, his lead sentence is a textbook exercise in the straw man argument . . . such argument as exists at all.
PowerPoint is a brilliant tool.
Yes, brilliant.
But not for those such as the hapless fellow writing in Business Insider.
But just as any tool – say, a hammer or saw – can contribute to the construction of a masterpiece . . . or a monstrosity, PowerPoint can contribute to the creation of an especially powerful presentation.
Or . . . it becomes the weapon of choice to inflict yet another heinous public-speaking crime on a numbed audience.
PowerPoint Skill a Necessity
PowerPoint isn’t the problem. Clueless presenters are the problem.
So just how do you use PowerPoint?
You can start by consulting any of several PowerPoint experts who earn their living sharpening their own skills and helping others to hone theirs.
Folks such as Nancy Duarte, who has elevated PowerPoint design to a fine art. You can subscribe to her newsletter here by scrolling to the page bottom and signing up. You can also enjoy her supremely interesting blog here. She’s done all the heavy lifting already – now you can take advantage of it to develop your PowerPoint slide skills.
Garr Reynolds is another giant of the PowerPoint kingdom, and his concepts approach high art without being too artsy.
Meanwhile, if you want immediate help to develop not only your PowerPoint slide skills, but also your technique of working with your presentation projection, do have a look at my own short video on how to work with PowerPoint.
It’s enough to get you started and, I hope, whet your appetite for more instruction in PowerPoint skill.
For once you create those marvelous slides inspired by Nancy and Garr . . . you then must use them properly in a ballet of visual performance art called a business presentation.
This short video reviews several of my own techniques that provide basic guidance on how to work with PowerPoint.
This is the presentation paradox for more people than you might imagine.
In fact, you may be one of them.
You dream of delivering a powerful business presentation. An interesting presentation. A presentation that sets everyone nodding.
A show that earns the accolades of the professor and your peers.
If you’re an executive delivering a report in the C-Suite, you note with satisfaction that no one surreptitiously checks email.
It’s a presentation that exhilarates you as a fist-pumping job well-done.
And yet . . .
Presentation Paradox Paralysis
And yet, you don’t want to be the center of attention.
You believe that you can get by with directing everyone’s attention to a screen behind you. To slides filled with gibberish in tiny font.
If the room is dark enough, people may not even see you, and you think this is fine.
You see the disconnect here.
Delivering an especially powerful business presentation means changing what you do now . . . changing your behavior to achieve what you envision yourself becoming.
To deliver an especially powerful business presentation means that you must become the center of attention. In fact, you become the message itself, a sincere proponent of a position that you convey to an audience in animated and convincing style.
Break out of the Presentation Paradox Prison
And yet this center-of-attention is the last thing that many business students want to be.
Many presenters would rather become part of the audience.
And some actually do.
They pivot to show the audience their backs. Then they edge backward toward the audience, almost becoming part of the assembled listeners.
They assume the role of Slide-Reader-in-Chief.
Everyone reads the slides together . . . if they’re legible at all to the audience. And this is an awful presentation, and you know it’s an awful presentation, and yet you do it anyway.
Why? Why not change that?
Let’s break out of the presentation paradox prison today and adopt techniques that can hone our skills to a scalpel-like edge. This won’t happen overnight, so let’s adopt one new thing each week and practice it to start building a personal competitive advantage.
You choose which technique out of many. My recommendation?
Develop your presentation skills to achieve a personal competitive advantage . . . and learn not to hate presentations
Here is the key to delivering especially powerful business presentations.
If you already feel reasonably confident, competent, and thoroughly satisfied with your presenting skills, then excellent!
I congratulate you and suggest that you pass Business School Presenting along to a buddy who might profit from it.
But if you are like most of the 1.3 million English-speaking business school population worldwide, you have muttered I hate presentations more than once.
And you probably have issues business presentations. Which is why you read this right now.
You don’t want to be just average. You don’t want to be merely good. You want to deliver especially powerful business presentations.
You’re ready. Energized. You’re in the right place — the center of the business presentation universe.
One in 255 Million?
According to NetCraft in its October 2014 Web Server Survey, the internet reached an estimated 1 billion websites worldwide.
Of that 1 billion, this is the only site devoted exclusively to business school presentations. I could be wrong about that, and I hope that I am.
Even if this is a lonely outpost today, we know that as quickly as the online community responds to the needs of its users, that could change tomorrow.
I trust you’ll let me know, so that I can link to these nooks and crannies of the web that may hold secrets that we all need. So go ahead. Check.
But right now, this instant, I do believe that this is it.
I believe, and you may agree, that business school students need credible, brief, and direct resources on presenting – solid information and best practices. Not vague generic “presentation principles” and not “communication theory.”
Certainly not a handful of “tips.”
In short, you want to know what works and why.
You want to know right from wrong, good from bad.
You want to know what is just opinion and what, if anything, is carved in stone.
You’ll find answers here to the most basic of questions.
How do I translate complicated material, such as a spreadsheet, to a PowerPoint slide so that it communicates instead of bores?
2,500 Years of Presenting
Business School Presenting answers every one of these questions and many more that you haven’t even thought of yet. You may not like the answers.
You may disagree with the answers.
Fair enough.
Let a thousand presentation flowers bloom across the land. Listen, consider, pick and choose your pleasure.
Or not.
But you should know that I offer here the distillation of 2,500 years of public speaking and presentation secrets, developed by masters of oratory and public speaking and refined in the forge of experience.
Folks who certainly did not hate presentations . . .
Especially Powerful Business Presentation
Cicero, Quintilian, Demosthenes, John Adams, Patrick Henry, Daniel Webster, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama — all find their places in the pantheon of the most powerful presenters of all time.
They all have drawn upon the eternal verities of presenting.
In turn, they have each contributed their own techniques to the body of wisdom. You find those verities here.
The confidence and surety of President Reagan
On the other side of things, I’d like to hear your own presentation stories from your campus that illustrate challenges particular to your school and academic concentration.
The various subdisciplines in business – finance, marketing, accounting, human resources, and such like – have their special needs, even as they are all tractable to the fundamental and advanced techniques of powerful presenting.
So think deep.
Consider the personal competitive advantage that can be yours when you develop world class business presentation skills and the ability to deliver the especially powerful business presentation.
Microsoft’s PowerPoint software has gotten a bum rap as insufficient for your presentation visuals.
This unfair reputation springs from the thousands of ugly presentations given every day from folks who don’t know how to use it.
And yet, PowerPoint is a brilliant tool.
But any tool – say, a hammer or saw – can contribute to the construction of a masterpiece . . . or of a monstrosity.
PowerPoint either contributes to the creation of an especially powerful presentation, or it becomes the weapon of choice to inflict yet another heinous public-speaking crime on a numbed audience.
Presentation Visuals to Rivet the Audience
PowerPoint isn’t the problem. Clueless presenters are the problem.
So just how do you use PowerPoint as the basis for your presentation visuals?
This short video reviews several of my own techniques that provide basic guidance on sound PowerPoint use. It’s just a few minutes, but what might you learn to turn your presentation frown upside down!
These Magic Words provide an especially powerful presentation conclusion
Let’s toss out a life preserver on how to conclude a presentation. Because everyone needs a life-preserver at some point in a speaking career.
I’ve tossed this rescue device out many times to students in trouble during a business presentation.
At times, even the finest presenters get themselves in trouble. Having this rescue device near to hand can salvage a speech that is careening off-course, that is flirting with disaster.
Your Life Preserver
Occasionally we must be reminded of this quite simple device that can serve us well near the end of our talk.
When your talk is winding down and you feel yourself suddenly spent . . .
When you begin to spiral out of control and cannot remember your train of thought . . .
When your pulse quickens and your mind goes blank . . .
Grasp for two words.
Your life-preserver.
“In conclusion . . .”
That’s it. Just two words.
A Pithy Presentation Conclusion
These two words have rescued thousands of presenters before you. They’ll rescue you as well.
These two words work a magic on your psyche that is almost inexplicable in terms that a logical, reasonable person would believe. Speak them, the path to the end of your talk becomes clear.
Speak them, and suddenly you know what to say and do.
Here is what you do. Confidently tack on another phrase . . .
“In conclusion, we can see that . . .”
“In conclusion, our recommendation makes sense for reasons just given . . .”
“In conclusion, this means that . . .”
See how it works?
You see how incredibly easy it is to get out of the sticky wicket of a talk spiraling down out of control? To craft a presentation conclusion with punch?
“In conclusion” leads you out of the wilderness. It puts you back onto your prepared path. It leads you to restate your thesis in concise manner and then . . .
. . . stop!
You’re done.
But you’re not done building your Personal Competitive Advantage by improving your business presentation skills. Consult The Complete Guide to Business School Presentingfor more on especially powerful techniques on the presentation conclusion.
Over the years, I’ve learned that the zombies of bad presentation advice never die.
We can’t eradicate bad presentation advice completely, because these zombies are impervious to every remedy known to 21st century civilization.
When Armageddon finally comes, cockroaches and bad advice zombies will be the only survivors.
But let’s give it a shot anyway.
Zombies of Bad Presentation Advice
The process of becoming a great presenter is not so much doing things the right way. It’s getting you – yes, you – to stop doing things the wrong way.
This is much tougher than you might expect.
This is because 1) people generally dislike the idea of change, and 2) many folks tend to think that the presentation is something that exists outside of themselves . . . in a PowerPoint software package, or in notecards, or in a book.
The notion that the presenter actually has to change is not welcome news.
Not at all.
Flee the Bad Presentation Advice Zombies
Accordingly, I instruct students to just stop what they do now as a result of bad habits and bad advice. Just stop.
That’s much more difficult than it sounds.
And we don’t engage in lengthy discussions of various opinions of what constitutes good presenting or how people want leeway granted for their own tics or habits. This is not a time for a “conversation on presenting.”
All it takes is one film session to disabuse people of the notion that a bad habit is somehow acceptable.
Once they stop engaging in bad habits and misconceptions about presenting, they become de facto reasonably competent presenters.
That’s right.
Just stop the bad habits, and what remains can be reasonably good.
But Bad Habits Die Hard
Bad habits can be perpetuated by exuberantly following bad advice. The problem is recognizing what constitutes bad advice.
This isn’t easy, because much bad advice paradoxically masquerades as good advice, and lots of these bad advice zombies stalk the land.
Here are some of the most common examples of awful, vague, or incomplete presentation advice you invariably hear during your business school career from the most well-meaning of folks.
ZOMBIE #1 “Don’t Put your hand in your pocket . . . it looks ‘unprofessional.’”
This is absurd and carries the stink of oral tradition about it.
From presidents to preachers, the hand in the pocket – if done properly – conveys assurance and confidence.
Powerful, Authoritative
For many speakers, it also removes one hand from the equation as an unnecessary distractor.
Put that left hand in the pocket and you keep it out of trouble.
No more strange finger-play.
No more tugging at your fingers.
No more twisting and hand-wringing. It leaves your right hand free to gesture, and those gestures themselves appear more decisive.
ZOMBIE #2 “Make eye contact.”
This advice is insidious in that it actually carries a large kernel of truth.
It sounds reasonable.
But it doesn’t tell you how to do it. And, yes, there is such a thing as bad eye contact.
Too long, and you come across as creepy. Too short, and you come across as untrustworthy.
Make eye contact with people in your audience long enough to ascertain eye color, then move on.
ZOMBIE #3 “Move around when you talk”
This gem was given to me by a student, passed on from one of his other professors.
This advice suggests that you wander aimlessly about the stage in hopes that it will improve your presentation in some unspecified way. Or it might mean to roll your shoulders as you step side-to-side.
It actually can mean most anything, and as such, it’s terrible advice.
In this case the bad advice is worse than no advice at all. See my previous posts on movement for ideas on how to incorporate movement into your talk . . . and how to incorporate pauses for effect.
ZOMBIE #4 “Just the facts.”
Really? Which facts are those?
What does it mean, “Just the facts?”
Folks believe that this phrase makes them appear no-nonsense and hard-core. But a more pompous and simultaneously meaningless phrase has yet to be devised.
Again, it means nothing and is arrogance masquerading as directness.
“Facts” must be selected in some way, and context must be provided to give them meaning. “Facts” must be analyzed to produce alternatives and to render a conclusion.
This is a euphemism for “I don’t like what you’re saying . . . tell me what I want to hear.”
ZOMBIE #5 “The numbers tell the story.”
This is a favorite of finance folks, who seem to believe that the ironclad rules of presentations do not apply to them.
“We’re special,” finance majors like to say. “We don’t deal with all of that soft storytelling; we deal in hard numbers.”
There is so much wrong with this, it is difficult to locate a reasonable starting-point.
Not only do numbers, alone, tell no story at all . . . if the numbers were conceivably capable of telling a story, it would be a woefully incomplete story, a distortion of reality.
Numbers provide just one piece of the analytical puzzle, important to be sure, but not sufficient by themselves.
Moreover, the business presenter who elects to serve the god of numbers sacrifices the power and persuasiveness that go with a host of other presenting techniques. Underlying this myth is the notion that you “can’t argue with numbers.”
You certainly can argue with numbers, and you can bring in a wealth of analysis that changes completely what those numbers actually mean.
ZOMBIE #6“You have too many slides.”
How do you know I have “too many” slides?
Say what? You counted them?
I assure you that you don’t know. You can conclude nothing about my presentation by looking only at the number of slides in it.
You will hear this chestnut from folks who believe that the length of a presentation dictates the number of slides you use.
You can defeat the bad presentation advice zombies by incorporating especially powerful presentation techniques into your show
Absurd on its face, people who use this believe that every slide will be shown a fixed amount of time.
They likely do some sort of calculation in their heads, dividing the time available by the number of slides to yield a number they believe indicates there are “too many” slides.
This is because they usually deal with folks unschooled in Business School Presentations methods.
If you follow the presentation principles laid down here in Business School Presentations, you will learn the glorious method of crafting frugal slides that pulse with power, surge with energy . . . slides that people remember, because they are smartly crafted. They snap and pop, and they carry your audience along for an exciting ride.
And no one can tell anything about this by the number of slides in your presentation.
Bad Advice Zombies – these are just some that will come after you.
It’s probably not a good idea to argue with folks who give this sort of presentation advice. What’s the use? Just ignore it and replace it in your own work with enduring and especially powerful presenting principles – especially powerful presentation advice.
You can’t eliminate the zombies, but you can outrun them and outfox them.
And continue your upward trajectory toward becoming a superior business presenter.
Hook your audience with an especially powerful grabber
Some experts estimate that you have an initial 15 seconds – maybe 20 – to hook your audience for your business presentation.
And with a kaleidoscope of modern-day distractions, you face an uphill battle.
In that short window of less than a minute, while they’re sizing you up, you must blast into their minds. You must get them über-focused on you and your message.
So how do you go about hooking and reeling in your audience in those first crucial seconds?
Think of your message or your story as your explosive device. To set it off properly, so it doesn’t fizzle, you need a detonator.
This is your “lead” or your “grabber.”
Your “hook.”
This is your detonator for blasting into the mind.
This is a provocative line that communicates to your listeners that they are about to hear something uncommon.
Something special.
With this provocative line, you create a desire in your audience to hear what comes next. The next sentence . . . and the next . . . until you are deep into your presentation and your audience is with you stride-for-stride.
“Thank you, thank you very much . . .”
But they must step off with you from the beginning.
You get them to step off with you by blasting into the mind. You don’t blast into the mind with a stock opening like this:
“Thank you very much, Bill, for that kind and generous introduction. Friends, guests, associates, colleagues, it’s a real pleasure to be hear tonight with so many folks committed to our cause, and I’d like to say a special hello to a group of people who came down from Peoria to visit with us here this evening, folks who are dedicated to making our world a better place, a more sustainable world that we bequeath to our children and our children’s children. And also a shout-out to the men and women in the trenches, without whose assistance . . .”
You won’t hook your audience with cliches and bad jokes
That sort of thing.
Ugh.
Folks in your audience are already checking their email. In fact, they’re no longer your audience.
And you’ve heard this kind of snoozer before, far too many times.
Why do people talk this way? Because it’s what they’ve heard most of their business lives.
You hear it, you consider it, you shrug, and you think that this must be the way it’s done.
You come to believe that dull, monotone, stock-phrased platitudes comprise the secret formula for giving a keynote address, an after-dinner speech, or a short presentation.
You come to believe that a listless audience is natural.
Not at all!
So How to Hook Your Audience?
The key is to do a bit of mind-blasting.
You must blast into their minds to crack that hard shell of inattention.
You must say something provocative, but relevant. You must grab your listeners and keep them. Hookthem. You must arrest their attention long enough to make it yours.
Something like this:
“The gravestone was right where the old cobbler said it would be . . . at the back of the overgrown vacant lot. And when I knelt down to brush away the moss and dirt, I could see my hand trembling. The letters were etched in granite and they became visible one by one. My breath caught when I read the inscription–”
Or this . . .
“There were six of them, my back was against the hard brick wall, and let me tell you . . . I learned a hard lesson–”
Or this . . .
“I was stupid, yes stupid. I was young and impetuous. And that’s the only excuse I have for what I did. I will be ashamed of it for the rest of my life–”
Or this . . .
“At the time, it seemed like a good idea . . . but then we heard the ominous sound of a grinding engine, the trash compactor starting up–”
Mind-Blast to Hook your Audience
Or this . . .
“She moved through the crowd like shimmering eel cuts the water . . . I thought that she must be a special woman. And then I knew she was when she peeled off her leather jacket . . . and, well–”
You get the idea.
Each of these mind-blasters rivets audience attention on you. Your listeners want to hear what comes next.
Of course, your mind-blaster must be relevant to your talk and the message you plan to convey. If you engage in theatrics for their own sake – just to hook your audience to no good end – you earn the enmity of your audience, which is far worse than inattention.
So craft an initial mind-blaster to lead your audience from sentence to sentence, eager to hear your next one. And you will have succeeded in hooking and holding your listeners in spite of themselves.
There is no such thing as an inherently uninteresting topic. Nor is there an inherently interesting topic.
Interest is something that you generate, combining your unique gifts and training to create something special that appeals to the audience. Whether your audience is the CEO, a potential client, the Rotary Club, or your fellow students.
That’s your job. In fact, that’s what you’ll be paid to do upon graduation.
Interesting Topic? That’s Your Job
Cases are not assigned to you in B-School to interest you. No one cares if they interest you.
That’s not the point.
Whether you find your topic personally interesting or not is irrelevant. It’s your duty to craft a talk that interests the audience, perhaps even captivates the audience.
We all would love to be spoon-fed “interesting topics,” wouldn’t we? But what’s an “interesting” business presentation topic?
I’ve found the following to be true:
The students who complain about never getting an interesting topic actually do get assigned those topics – topics that are rich with potential and ripe for exploitation. Some folks don’t recognize them as “interesting” because their store of information and context either is absent or is untapped.
So they invariably butcher a potentially interesting topic and miss every cue and opportunity to craft a great presentation.
It’s time to recognize that you simply want an interesting topic for yourself . . . not so you can do a bang-up job for the audience.
The Nail – A Powerful Presentation Topic
You make the business presentation topic about nails interesting . . . it’s your responsibility, in fact
The upshot is that if you don’t take presenting seriously, then you won’t do anything different for an “interesting” business presentation topic than you would for a “boring” topic.
The creative challenge is greater, in fact, for presenting on the topic of tenpenny nails than it is for, say, the Apple iPhone. The initial perception might be that the iPhone is more inherently “interesting.”
It’s hip. And familiar.
Students gravitate to the topic like bees to flowers.
But give me a student who gladly takes a business case that involves tenpenny nails and who weaves a compelling, imaginative, and professional presentation, and I’ll show you a future business star.
The best students recognize the drama and conflict and possibilities in every case. They craft an interesting presentation regardless of the topic.
How do you generate interest? How do you mine a case for what is dramatic, different, uplifting, unusual? Public speaking master James Winans provides several suggestions from almost 100 years ago:
[I]nterest is, generally speaking, strongest in old things in new settings, looked at from new angles, given new forms and developed with new facts and ideas, with new light on familiar characters, new explanations of familiar phenomena, or new applications of old truths.
It actually requires thought and a broadening of context.
It requires the extension of horizon, and the expansion of the personal frame of reference.
In short, the learning of new stuff, which is always more difficult than relying upon what we already know – the tried and the true and the comfortable.
The Beast: The Interesting Topic
And as an aside, what would you do with the topic of tenpenny nails if you were assigned the task of demonstrating to the general public, say, their value to the building industry?
Are these the three-inch nails that take their name from the original price-per-100? I always thought so.
But an alternative explanation says the name has nothing to do with price.
Instead, it has to do with . . . . Well, when you deliver a presentation on nails, you’ll find the answer. The name, by the way, dates from the 15th Century, the same century as the invention of the Gutenberg printing method.
The Presentation Opening sets the tone for your Business Presentation
Of course you know how to begin a business presentation with a powerful presentation opening.
The Presentation Opening is surely easy.
Right?
But do you really know how to launch a powerful presentation?
Consider for a moment . . .
Don’t Tiptoe
Do you begin confidently and strongly? Or do you tiptoe into your presentation opening, as do so many people in school and in the corporate world?
Do you sidle into it? Do you edge sideways into your show with lots of metaphorical throat-clearing.
Do you back into it?
Do you actually start strong with a story, but let the story spiral out of control until it overshadows your main points? Is your story even relevant?
Do your tone and body language and halting manner shout “apology” to the audience?
Do you shift and dance?
Are you like a turtle poking his head out of his shell, eyeing the audience, ready to dart back to safety if you catch even a single frown?
Do you crouch behind the podium like a soldier in his bunker?
Do you drone through the presentation, your voice monotone, your eyes glazed, fingers crossed, actually hoping that no one notices.
A Bad Presentation Opening
I viewed a practice presentation that purported to analyze a Walmart case. The lead presenter was Janie. She began speaking, and she related facts about the history of the company and its accomplishments over the past 40 years.
She spoke in monotone. She flashed a timeline on the screen. Little pictures and graphics highlighted her points.
I wondered what all of this might mean.
I waited for a linking thread.
Grab Your Audience with The Presentation Opening
I waited for her main point.
As the four-minute mark approached, my brow furrowed. The linking thread had not come.
The linking thread would never come . . . it dawned on me that she had no point. At the end of her segment, I asked a gentle question.
“Janie, what was that beginning all about? How did your segment relate to Wal-Mart’s strategic challenges in the case at hand?”
“Those were just random facts,” she said.
“Random facts?”
“Yes!” she said brightly.
And she was quite ingenuous about it.
She had recited a litany of “random facts,” and she thought that it was an acceptable way to begin a business case presentation. I do not say this to disparage her. Not at all. In fact, she later became one of my most coachable students, improving her presentation skills tremendously.
She has since progressed to graduate school. And now she delivers powerful presentation openings.
But what could convince a student that an hodge-podge of “random facts” is acceptable at the beginning of a presentation? Is it the notion that anything you say for a presentation opening is okay?
Let’s go over the beginning, shall we?
The Right Presentation Opening
Together, let’s craft a template beginning that you can always use, no matter what your show is about. When you become comfortable with it, you can then modify it to suit the occasion.
You begin with your presentation opening. Here, you present the Situation Statement.
The Situation Statement tells your audience what they will hear. It’s the reason you and your audience are there. What do you tell them?
The audience has gathered to hear about a problem and its proposed solution.
Or to hear of success and how it will continue. Or to hear of failure and how it will be overcome . . . or to hear of a proposed change in strategic direction.
Don’t assume that everyone knows why you are here. Don’t assume that they know the topic of your talk. Ensure that they know with a powerful Situation Statement.
A powerful situation statement centers the audience – Pow! It focuses everyone on the topic.
An Especially Powerful Situation Statement
Don’t meander into your show with chummy talk.
Don’t tip-toe into it. Don’t be vague. Don’t clutter your presentation opening with endless apologetics or thank yous.
What do I mean by this? Let’s say your topic is the ToughBolt Corporation’s new marketing campaign. Do not start this way:
“Good morning, how is everyone doing? Good. Good! It’s a pleasure to be here, and I’d like to thank our great board of directors for the opportunity. I’m Dana Smith and this is my team, Bill, Joe, Mary, and Sophia. Today, we’re planning on giving you a marketing presentation on ToughBolt Corporation’s situation. Again, thank you for your attention and time. We’re hoping that—”
No . . . no . . . and no.
Direct and to-the-point is best. Pow!
Try starting this way:
Especially Powerful hooks and grabbers for your presentation opening
“Today we present ToughBolt’s new marketing campaign — a campaign to regain the 6 percent market share lost in 2009 and increase our market share by another 10 percent. A campaign to lead us into the next four quarters to result in a much stronger and competitive market position 12 months from now.”
You see? This is not the best intro, but it’s solid. No “random facts.” No wasted words.
No metaphorical throat-clearing.
No backing into the presentation, and no tiptoeing. Just an especially powerful and direct statement of the reason you are there.
Put the Pow in Power!
Now, let’s add some Pow to it. A more colorful and arresting introductory Situation Statement might be:
“Even as we sit here today, changes in the business environment attack our firm’s competitive position three ways. How we respond to these challenges now will determine Toughbolt’s future for good or ill . . . for survival or collapse. Our recommended response? Aggressive growth.
“We now present the source of those challenges, how they threaten us, and what our marketing team will do about it to retain Toughbolt’s position in the industry and to continue robust growth in market share and profitability.”
Remember in any story, there must be change.
The very reason we give a case presentation is that something has changed in the company’s fortunes. We must explain this change. We must craft a response to this change. And we must front-load our intro to include our recommendation.
That is why you have assembled your team. To explain the threat or the opportunity. To provide your analysis. To provide your recommendations.
Remember, put Pow into your beginning. Leverage the opportunity when the audience is at its most alert and attentive.
Craft a Situation Statement that grabs them and doesn’t let go.
Let’s explode the presentation soft skills myth right now.
When higher education folks label something a “soft skill,” students automatically drop that “soft skill” to the bottom of the learning priority list.
It becomes something to “pick up along the way.” And if you don’t actually learn the “soft skill,” well . . . so what?
It is, after all, a “soft skill.”
This is hokum of the worst sort, but it’s the attitude of many young people, including my daughter, who ought to know better. One of those “soft skills” is the set of skills required to deliver an especially powerful business presentation.
Business Presentation Soft Skills Myth
One reason that you see so many bad business presentations is this pervasive presentation soft skills myth.
These skills are apparently so “soft” that one of my former colleagues believes he can inculcate adequate presentation skill in, as he says, “30 minutes.”
Such is the myth of the soft skill.
This suggests that skill at business presenting is somehow “softer” than, say, accounting. It therefore needs less attention or development.
It must be somehow “easier.” It must be simply a matter of opinion.
It’s probably something that can be “picked up along the way.”
Many people believe this. It can needlessly limit the early careers of young people, who form a wrong impression of the craft of speaking publicly.
Public Speaking – excellent public speaking – is tough.
To deliver a superb business presentation is one of the tougher tasks, because it often requires coordination with others in a kind of ballet.
The Reality of Business Presentation Skills
Powerful Business Presentation Soft Skills can confer personal competitive advantage
And it requires practice, just like any other discipline.
But invariably, the “soft skill” label moves it down the priority list of faculty and college administrators and, hence, of the students they serve.
I can quickly gauge the attention on business presenting skills at an institution by simply watching a cross-section of presentations.
To be generous, student business presentations are usually poor across a range of dimensions.
They come across most often as pedestrian. Many are quite bad.
The great embarrassment is that the majority of business students have untapped potential for becoming competent and especially powerful business presenters.
And yet they falter.
They never realize that potential, because they never progress out of the swamp of poor business presentation skills.
Some students pass through the business school funnel with only cursory attention to business presentation skills. Perhaps I’m too demanding, and the degree of attention I’d like to see just isn’t possible.
But . . .
But the craft of business presenting needs only the proper focus for it to transform young people into capable and competent presenters.
And some institutions get it right.
Grab those Presentation Soft Skills, so-called, and create a powerful personal brand!
I’m blessed to serve an institution that takes business presentation skills seriously.
My school’s winning results in case competitions demonstrates this commitment to preparing business students to excel in the most-demanded skill that corporate recruiters seek.
A coterie of professors, particularly in finance, recognizes the power bestowed by sharp business presentation skills.
And they emphasize these skills far beyond the norm in most schools.
Administrators, too, insist that students pass through rigorous workshops that inculcate in students the presenting skills to last a business lifetime.
Presentation Skills = Powerful Brand
The results can be phenomenal. Merely by exposure to the proper techniques, students gain tremendous personal career advantage.
By elevating business presentation skills to the same level of the sub-disciplines of, say, marketing, operations, or risk management, B-Schools can imbue their students and faculty with the appropriate reverence for the presentation enterprise.
One result of this is the molding of young executives who tower over their peers in terms of presenting skills.
This highly refined skill of delivering stunning business presentations becomes part of a powerful and distinctive personal brand.
A brand that cannot be copied easily and so becomes part of a personal competitive advantage that can last a lifetime.
There is much to be distilled from 2500 years of recorded presentation wisdom, and we can hardly consider this treasure house of knowledge presentation soft skills.
The wisdom and power are there, waiting to be tapped. It remains for us to seize it, explode the presentation soft skills myth, and make it our own for enhanced personal competitive advantage.
With regard to presentations and so-called “presentation tips,” I deal with two large groups of people.
For descriptive simplicity, let’s call these two groups “Natural Born” and “McTips!”
“Natural Born” and “McTips!” represent two extreme views of what it takes to become an especially powerful and superior business presenter.
Neither view is remotely accurate. And neither group is what might be called enlightened in these matters.
Members of both groups are frustrating and irritating in their own ways and completely self-serving.
Here is why . . .
Tale of Two Errors
We often look for folks to excuse us from what, deep down, we know we ought to do, or what we can do.
If we look hard enough, we find what we search for, and excuses are extremely easy to find. Let’s look at these two excuses that hold us back from fulfilling our potential as especially powerful presenters.
The first view would have us believe that great speakers are born with some arcane and unfathomable gift, combining talent and natural stage facility.
No, it’s not “natural born” talent
The first view would have us believe that Bill Clinton sprang from the womb declaiming that he feels our pain.
That Ronald Reagan was born orating on lower capital gains taxes.
That Oprah Winfrey began her talk show career in kindergarten.
If these great speakers were born with rarefied talent, then how might we become like them if we haven’t the genes for it?
Business Presentation Tips?
Doesn’t this sound foolish?
If the first view holds that great speakers are born with a gift, then quite logically this view leaves the rest of us to strive with middling presentation skills.
It’s an excuse for us not to persevere. Why bother to try?
Why not, instead, hire some of these natural born speaker types to do the heavy presentation lifting?
The rest of us can skate along and pretend that we’re not actually lazy . . . or frightened . . . or disinterested . . . or unambitious.
The second view is the opposite of the first.
This “McTips!” perspective would have us believe that delivering effective presentations is a snap.
The Second View . . . Presentation Tips!
So easy, in fact, that one of my colleagues assured me confidently and with not a little hubris that he could teach his undergraduates “everything they need to know about presenting in 30 minutes.”
He also assured me that “all that other stuff you talk about is B.S.”
Has the presentation landscape changed so much that what was once taught as a fine skill is now mass-produced in 30-minute quickie sessions of speaking “tips”?
I actually saw a headline on an article that offered 10 Tips to Become a Presentation God!
Have the demands of the presentation become so weak that great presenting can be served up in McDonald’s-style kid meals . . . “You want to super-size your speaking McTips?”
Hardly.
McTips – Presentation Fast Food
In the 1800s, public speaking was refined to an almost-art; “elocution” was the new science/art, and departments of elocution and public speaking flourished in universities throughout the land.
In Philadelphia, on Walnut Street in fact, the National School for Elocution and Oratory became a Mecca for would-be stars of the pulpit, the stage, the bar, and the political wars in the 1890s. It published books like this one.
On into the first decades of next century, public speech was regarded with respect and a high-skill to be mastered with much study and practice.
The fact is that despite however much we might wish otherwise, today’s PowerPoint high-tech software multi-media offerings cannot change the fundamental truth that it is still you who must deliver the presentation.
So no . . . you cannot learn “everything you need to know about presenting in 30 minutes.”
You cannot become an especially powerful presenter at the fast-food drive-in window, unless you want to ply presenting at the lowest common denominator. Unless you want to become one of the multitude of mundane slide-readers who populate every business and law firm from New York to Nashville, from Boston to Baton Rouge, from Savannah to San Diego.
Ask yourself . . . if learning to deliver top-notch presentations is so fabulously easy, then why are 9 out of 10 presentations such awful forgettable bore-fests? (and that’s a kind estimate).
The Third View – The Power Zone
There is a third group, and it is destined to remain small.
This group is privy to the truth, and once you learn the truth about presenting, you can never go back to viewing presentations the same way. Consider this pop culture analogy from the 1999 film The Matrix.
In The Matrix, humans live in a world that is not what it seems. In fact, everything they believe about the world is false. Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburn) promises to reveal the truth to Neo (Keanu Reeves) about his existence.
Morpheus offers Neo a Blue Pill and a Red Pill. The Blue Pill returns him to his old state of ignorance. The Red Pill reveals the secret, and once he learns it, Neo cannot return to his old life.
The process of presentation discovery is much like the red-pill/blue-pill choice that Morpheus offers to the young computer hacker Neo . . .
You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Likewise, you can stop reading this article this instant – the blue pill – and return to the righteous and relaxing world of “Natural Born” or “McTips!” Both viewpoints allow the average presenter to remain mired in mediocrity with an excuse that sounds plausible.
One perspective means you don’t try at all, while the other means you offer token effort as befits a low-level pedestrian task.
So, if you decide to take the Blue Pill, close this site and go your own way. Bon voyage! I wish you a hearty good-luck and Godspeed, and perhaps you will be happier for your choice.
But if you are one of the few who thinks for a moment . . . “Hmm. What if the Professor is right?”
Then . . . Take the Red Pill
Then you can read on to the next brief paragraph – the red pill – and be forever stripped of the excuse for mediocrity. For the truth is in the Power Zone, and once there, you will never be satisfied with your old presentation life again.
You cannot go back.
That’s the paradox, the Curse of Freedom. It is completely within your power to seize the fruits of great presenting. It’s your choice.
You can launch an auspicious presentation career right now, right this minute. Or you can dismiss this site as yet another fraudulent claim to revealing secrets to you . . . only to have it exposed as a method that requires you to actually do something.
Choose the Red Pill and Become an Especially Powerful Presenter
A method that transforms you.
Choose the Red Pill. Step boldly into the Power Zone.
The Power Zone is the province of the privileged few who understand the truth that anyone can become a great presenter, with the right kind of hard work and the willingness to become a great presenter.
To join this third group requires you to take on a new state of mind.
If you already carry this view, that’s superb. If you don’t . . . you can decide now to adopt it or forever be relegated to the other two groups – believing you’re not good enough, or believing you are good enough when you’re actually not.
Public presentations – great presentations – require study and practice and preparation and technique. Not “presentation tips.”
A deep philosophical, academic, and professional history undergirds public speaking. This history informs the very best presenters and their work. You dismiss it only to your great loss.
No, you need not become a scholar of public speaking.
In fact, few people have that deep an interest in the subject and even fewer can claim that kind of knowledge today.
But what you can and should do is this: Open your mind and heart to the possibilities of found treasure.
You actually can become a capable presenter. You can become a great presenter. When you enter the Power Zone, you are both cursed and blessed with knowledge. This knowledge represents two sides of the same coin.
You are cursed with the knowledge that the only limitation you have is you. You are blessed with the knowledge that you can become a good – even great – speaker.
An especially powerful presenter.
Now, you have no other real excuse. It’s totally up to you.
For the ultimate guide to developing your personal brand as an especially powerful business presenter, CLICK HERE.
Perhaps it’s human nature that leads us to search for single answers.
The search for the Global Solution has gone on as long as men have searched for the Philosopher’s Stone (and perhaps even longer, but not jotted down).
Likewise, this is the case for business presentations.
No Easy Way Out
We seek easy solutions, the quick fix, the “secret” to turn a drab, staid, listless presentation into one that brims with vigor, zest, and elan.
An especially powerful presentation.
Failing that, perhaps just something that can flog a bit of life into our tired efforts.
One evening, we may see a memorable, delightful, scintillating presentation. It’s a show that engages us, that sparkles with memorable visuals and that implants core ideas and powerful notions in our minds. A great presentation!
What made it a great presentation?
No Global Solution Exists to Create Presentation Gold
Many folks answer with one – maybe two reasons. This is akin to medieval alchemists searching for a method to transform lead into gold.
A shortcut to wealth.
And so we contrive abstractions and unsatisfactory responses:
The speaker was interesting.
The topic was relevant and au courant. Torn from today’s headlines!
It was the audience . . . he had a good audience!
But none of these easy answers yield something that we can actually use . . . something we can operationalize in our show.
This is because no easy answer exists.
No one reason. No single technique.
There is no business presentation alchemy. Except in the notion that we must get lots of things right.
The superb business presenter does 100 things right, while the bad business presenter does 100 things wrong.
What are the “100 Things?”
Is it exactly 100?
Of course not, no more than great writing consists in getting exactly 100 things right, instead of getting them wrong.
For any talk, it could be 90 things, or it could be 150 things. Or something else.
The “100 things” trope suffices to convey that great presentations are planned and orchestrated according to set principles that can be learned, and those principles consist in proven practices.
Lots of them.
Practices that replace unthinking habits.
100 Things to Transform your Presentation
Techniques of posture, voice, syntax, gestures, topic, presentation structure, your expression, confidence, your movement . . . all of these done well or done poorly combine to yield either an especially powerful presentation . . . or a dud.
Go to Scott’s Lessons, the book that inspired and taught Abraham Lincoln as he grew into one of America’s great orators, and you will find a wealth of powerful techniques to transform even the most mundane of speakers into a champion.
More than 100 things? Surely.
The important lesson is that great presenting is assembled from the verbal and non-verbal construction materials we select.
Lots of mistakes make for awful shows. Getting those 100 things right yield a show that’s spectacular for no single, discernible reason. It’s the power of synergy.
Take just one aspect of your show – the way you stand. Have you ever thought about it? Where you stand? How you stand?
If you’ve never given it thought, then you’re likely doing it wrong. To learn how to adopt the perfect (for you) stance, go here and the secret shall be revealed. And you’ll have learned a handful of the essential 100 things to launch you on your way to presentation power.
The next step, of course, is to actually do it. In your next presentation.
More of the 100 Things that constitute Business Presentation Alchemy here.
Give an interesting business presentation by broadening your context to generate a 3D effect of richer texture and deeper meaning
Our goal: give an interesting business presentation.
That seems easy enough, but too often we simply assume that this somehow “just happens.”
And I wager that not many folks spend lots of time on the task.
Let’s look at how you can enrich your presenting in unexpected ways so to give an interesting presentation regardless of your audience.
Let’s discuss how to deepen and broaden your perspective so that it encompasses that proverbial “big picture.”
Let’s start with how to become a 3-D presenter.
3D Presentations
Now, this means several things. It includes how you utilize the stage to your utmost advantage, of course, but a major component is the exercising of your mind.
It’s the process of enriching your personal context so that you become aware of new and varied sources of information, ideas, concepts, theories.
It’s a process of becoming learned in new and wondrous ways. Think of it as enlarging your world.
You increase your reservoir of usable material.
As a result, you can connect more readily with varied audiences.
You accomplish this in an ongoing process – by forever keeping your mind open to possibilities outside your functional area. By taking your education far beyond undergraduate or graduate school.
The Interesting Business Presentation
That process increases your personal competitive advantage steadily and incrementally.
By doing something daily, however brief. Something to stretch your mind to establish connections that otherwise might have escaped you.
By reading broadly in areas outside your specialty. 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.
How to give an interesting business presentation? Expand your Context.
We sometimes cloister ourselves in our discipline, our job, our tight little world, forgetting that other fields can offer especially powerful insights.
For me, it means sitting in on classes taught by my colleagues. It means reading outside my specialty area. It means exposure to doctrines I don’t rightly believe, but probably ought to understand.
How will this help in preparing my own classes? At this point, I can’t be certain. But I know it will. At some point.
Without fail.
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. They’ll be connected to the “real world” – textured, deep, and richer than they otherwise would have been.
It will do the same for yours. And it will likely aid in your development into an especially powerful presenter, imbued with professional presence.
For more on how to give interesting, and especially powerful, business presentations, click HERE.
Given the number of long, dull, pedantic, repetitious, boring, confusing – bad – presentations I see both inside and outside of the business school, I suspect there must be some common law tradition that speaks to the topic.
Bad Business Presentations are Everywhere
Bad business presentations can be a career-killer.
No one will tell you this, of course.
A conspiracy of silence surrounds bad business presentations and the people who give them. Yet Bad Business Presentations are given everywhere, sprouting like kudzu along a North Carolina highway . . .
. . . and because they are everywhere, we think that bad business presentations must be legitimate.
They must be the norm. They must be bad, because that’s just the way it is.
But this is heinous myth, and this myth perpetuates itself like some kind of awful oral tradition.
You see a bad business presentation that some people praise as good. It looks like this . . .
Some Vice President from a visiting company stands in front of you, hands gripping a lectern. He reads from slides with dozens of bullet points taken from a written paper and pasted onto PowerPoint slides.
He alternates looking at a prepared text in front of him and turning to look at a projection screen behind him. He rarely looks at you.
A Wasteland On the Screen
Unreadable spreadsheets appear on the screen. Legions of tiny numbers march in cadence.
The presenter reads slide-after-slide verbatim, his head turned away from you. You realize, finally, that he is reading the slides together with everyone in the audience.
It’s boring.
It’s unintelligible.
The Bad Business Presentation Wasteland
The slides are unreadable or irrelevant.
It’s a bad presentation, and you can’t remember a thing except the three texts you received during the presentation as you checked your iPhone between yawns.
You could legitimately ask yourself, “Is this all there is?”
If bad business presentations are the norm, you scratch your chin and perhaps you think “That’s not hard at all.” I can be as bad as the next person.
Cobble Together a Few Slides
Cobble something like that together, and you think you have a business presentation.
And why wouldn’t you think that?
It seems to have all the elements: A speaker-reader of slides (you), a PowerPoint display on the screen with writing on it, some numbers, and a five-minute time slot to fill with talk.
Stop giving bad business presentations!
But what you actually have is something awful.
You don’t know what you want to accomplish . . . or why.
You have no idea what you should say . . . or why.
And you don’t view yourself as benefiting from the process in any way. Instead, you see it as something painful.
Because it is painful.
It’s a bad business presentation that is painful and awful because of the way it’s been explained to you.
Because the explanations are incomplete. Because you never get the whole story. Teaching you how to deliver a cogent, competent, powerful business presentation is always someone else’s job.
This can be a problem because your career often hinges on how well you can present. And if you present badly, you needlessly handicap yourself.
I Feel Your Pain
Sure, there are “presentation”courses. But it seems that the good folks who actually provide you some sort of presenting instruction in school are often disconnected from your business courses.
They teach you “How to give a speech” or “How to introduce yourself.” But you don’t have the opportunity to engage in a complex group business presentation.
Oftentimes, these folks aren’t even in the business school. They can’t show you how to incorporate business content into your presentations – things like the SWOT, value chain analysis, financial analysis, PEST, Five Forces, and such like.
And on occasion, professors in your business courses demonstrate the same malaise that plagues business at-large.
For most of your professors, presenting is secondary. This makes sense, as each faculty has a specialty or functional discipline he or she is charged with teaching.
Business “presenting” is no one’s functional discipline. So it goes unaddressed, orphaned to expediency and neglect.
It’s the same in the corporate world. Your presenting woes are the same woes that scourge the American business landscape.
Boring, dull, numbing . . . all of this is equated wrongly with “serious.” Consequently, we get the bad business presentation as the standard.
The Malaise in Corporate America
I attended a business conference on the west coast not long ago. I had the misfortune to witness some of the worst speaking I have ever heard coupled with use of incredibly bad visuals PowerPoint visuals.
Monotone voices.
Busy slides with tiny letters.
Listeners shifting in their seats.
Motionless speakers planted behind a lectern.
Aimless and endless talking with seemingly no point.
Cramped and crowded slides.
No preparation and no practice attended these presentations.
Papers shuffling in the audience, because handouts were given prior to the talk.
This is more common than you might imagine.
Communications consultant Andy Goodman conducted major research on the issue in 2005, surveying more than 2,500 public interest professionals and asking them to evaluate their presentation viewing experiences.
The average grade public interest professionals gave to the presentations they attended was C-. The average grade given to the visuals that respondents observed in presentations they attended was also C-.
Survey respondents were asked to recall presentations they had seen over the last few months. They said they were more than likely to see a bad business presentation as to see an excellent one.
This is the current state of presentations in corporate America and in business schools. Is it uniformly bleak? No, of course not.
Glimmers of Hope . . . Gigantic Opportunity
Generalizations are just that – general in nature.
I have seen enough fine presentations to understand that, somewhere, superb instruction holds sway. Or, at the least, young people whose early development has trained them for the stage have found their way to the business platform.
Good for them.
But for the most part, it is as I have described here.
And this opens up magnificent opportunity for you.
Now that you understand the situation and why it exists, it’s time for you to join the ranks of superior presenters. Becoming a superior presenter means gaining incredible personal competitive advantage that is difficult to imitate.
By investing your presentations with passion, emotion, and enthusiasm, you deliver especially powerful shows with persuasive power. Presentations that are anything but dull. So . . .
It’s time for your debut.
Time to break the Law of Bad Business Presentations.
Most presentation practice is bad, but you avoid this in favor of our Third P: great presentation practice that yields a stellar performance.
Wait . . . what do you mean that some types of practice are “bad”?
How can you possibly say, Professor, that such a thing as “bad presentation practice exists?”
Aren’t you pleased that folks are at least . . . practicing?
In fact, bad practice is pernicious.
It’s insidious, and at times can be worse than no practice at all. It can create the illusion of improvement and yet be a prelude to disaster.
Check yourself out . . . then shun the Mirror
Practice is one of those words that we never bother to define, because each of us already “knows” what it means.
Certainly your professor thinks you know what it means, since he urges you to “practice” your presentation prior to its delivery.
But what does it mean to “practice?” Doesn’t everyone know how to practice?
How do you practice?
Have you ever truly thought about it? Have you ever thought about what, exactly, you are trying to accomplish with your practice? Do you make the mistake of that old cliché and “practice in the mirror?”
Don’t practice in the mirror. That’s dumb.
You won’t be looking at yourself as you give your talk, so don’t practice that way.
I say it again – that’s dumb.
The only reason to look in a mirror is to ensure that your gestures and expressions display exactly as you think they do when you employ them. Other than that, stay away from the mirror.
Practice – the right practice, good practice, proper rehearsal – is the key to so much of your presentation’s success. And your ultimate triumph.
The Russians have a saying much akin to one of ours. We say “practice makes perfect.” The Russians say “Povtoreniye mat’ ucheniya.”
It means “Repetition is the mother of learning.”
And it’s great advice.
Presentation Practice Leads to Victory
The armed forces are experts at practice. Short of actual war, this is all the military does – practice for its mission in the most realistic conditions that can be devised.
And in doing so, the military arms our warriors with the confidence and skill necessary to accomplish the actual missions assigned to it.
Strive for Perfect Presentation Practice
Likewise, we must practice in the most realistic conditions that we can devise for ourselves, and in doing so we reduce our apprehension and uncertainty.
We gain confidence.
The nerves that go with public speaking are like the nerves a soldier feels as he walks through a minefield – he fears a single misstep will trigger an explosion.
But once the minefield is traversed a single time, the path is clear. With a clear and predictable path, the fear evaporates.
The danger is avoided.
Confidence replaces fear.
Presentation Practice Eliminates Fear
Likewise, once you have practiced your talk, your fear dissipates. Once you have practiced it exactly like you will deliver it, straight to completion without pause, then you will have reduced the unknown to manageable proportions.
The gigantic phantasmagoria is shrunk.
Your way through the minefield is clear. And the fear evaporates.
Does this mean that you won’t have butterflies before a talk? Or that you won’t be nervous? Of course not. We all do.
Before every game, professional football players are keyed up, emotional, nervous. But once the game begins and they take the first “hit,” they ramp-up confidence.
Likewise, a bit of nervousness is good for you. It ensures your focus. But it’s good nervousness, borne of anticipation.
It is not the same as fear.
And so we see that the key to confidence is knowledge and preparation.
We lack confidence when we are unsure. With every practice, we gain confidence. And all the while we rehearse diligently, remember this dictum . . .
Sear This into Your Mind
Practice exactly the way you deliver your presentation.
I mean this literally.
Stage your practices, both individually and as a group, as close to the real thing as you can. Make it as realistic as you can. If you can, practice in the room where you will deliver your show.
You want as much pressure as possible.
One of the most prevalent and serious practice mistakes is to restart your presentation again and again when you make a mistake. Do not start over when you make a mistake . . .
When you stumble, practice recovering from your error.
This should be common sense. You must practice how you respond to making an error. How you will fight through and recover from an error. Then, if you stumble in your presentation, you will have the confidence and prior experience to weather the minor glitch because you will have faced it before.
Think of it this way. Does a football team practice one way all week, and then employ a completely different game-plan on game-day?
The right kind of presentation preparation lays the groundwork for spectacular performance.
Squeeze the most from your prep time, and try doing it this way . . .
Let’s say you are assigned the ToughBolt business case to analyze and to provide your recommendations in a business presentation.
Your first task is to prepare the business presentation . . . the right way.
After all, you’re performing before the directors of the Toughbolt Corporation . . . and you get one shot to get it right. Shouldn’t it be your best shot?
Presentation Preparation for your Best Shot
Your group has produced a written analysis. It’s finished.
What now?
How do you “prepare?”
“Prepare” has such a sterile sound. Almost vacuous.
And yet too many students stumble over this most mundane of activities. They rush.
They fumble. They grope blindly. Perhaps you grope blindly . . . and decide at the end to “wing it.”
But here is where you tuck away one of the most important gems of wisdom necessary to giving a first-rate show. Here you apply the sound method of correct Preparation – the second of the Three Ps.
Presentation Preparation invests you with confidence
Your task is clear. It’s time to present your conclusions to an audience in the most direct and cogent manner possible.
And in this task is embodied a verity for you to internalize.
Let me repeat that, because it is so misunderstood and ignored.
Your business presentation is a completely different product than your written report.
It’s a different mode of communication.
Do you wonder how this is possible, since you prepare the business presentation from a written report? How can the products differ significantly simply because one product is written and the other visual and vocal?
They are different in the same way that a film is a completely different product than a novel, even if the story is supposedly the same.
How Different?
It’s different in the way that a play read silently from the page differs from a play acted out on stage.
You operate in a different medium.
You have time constraints.
A group is receiving your message.
A group is delivering the message.
You have almost no opportunity for repeat.
You have multiple opportunities to miscommunicate.
In short, you are in a high-risk environment and you are vulnerable. You’re far more vulnerable than you might be in a written report, where the risk is controlled.
Look at the chart below.
These differences between the written report and the business presentation are, to many people, insignificant.
Many folks believe that there is no difference.
And this is why those same folks believe that delivering a presentation is “easy.” It consists of little more than cutting and pasting a written report’s points onto a half-dozen cramped slides, and then reading them in public.
As absurd as this might appear in print, it actually has currency. People believe this, because they’ve not been told otherwise.
Numbers Trump All?
Finance people are especially prone to this habit, believing that the “numbers tell the story.” As they prepare the business presentation, one thought trumps all . . .
The more numbers, the better.
The more obtuse the spreadsheet, the tinier the font, the more complex the chart, the more stuff packed on each slide . . . the better.
Such a vague, incomprehensible, numbers-heavy mess seems to be the currency of many business presentations.
It’s wrong, and it’s wholly unnecessary.
Part of your preparation is the crafting of clear, compelling, and on-point graphics that support your message . . . not obscure it. Rid your presentation of chart junk. Zero-in to achieve what I call über focus.
“How come I never get assigned an interesting topic?”
Perhaps you’ve said that? I’ve certainly heard it.
“How come I never get assigned an interesting topic?”
Presentation Preparation?
Now, whether any topic is inherently interesting is irrelevant to your task. It’s your duty to craft a talk that interests the audience.
Business cases are not assigned to you so that they will interest you.
Your tasks as a project manager or consultant don’t come to you on the basis of whether they interest you.
No one cares if they “interest” you.
That’s not the point.
We all would love to be spoon-fed “interesting” topics. But what’s an “interesting” topic?
I have found the following to be true:
The students who complain about never getting an interesting topic actually do get assigned inherently interesting topics. They don’t recognize them as interesting.
And they invariably butcher a potentially interesting topic as they prepare the business presentation.
And they miss every cue and opportunity to craft a great show.
Moreover, it is your job to presenting an especially powerful and scintillating presentation, regardless of the topic.
Face it. If you don’t take presenting seriously, then you won’t prepare any differently for an “interesting” topic than you would for a “boring” topic. You simply want an interesting topic for yourself . . . not so you can do a bang-up job for the audience or client.
Let’s shed that attitude.
Great presenters recognize the drama and conflict and possibilities in every case. They invariably craft an interesting presentation whether the topic concerns tenpenny nails or derivatives or soap.
Crank up Interest
How do you generate interest? Public speaking master James Winans provides several suggestions:
[I]nterest is, generally speaking, strongest in old things in new settings, looked at from new angles, given new forms and developed with new facts and ideas, with new light on familiar characters, new explanations of familiar phenomena, or new applications of old truths.
The typical start to a presentation project is . . .
. . . procrastination.
You put it off as a daunting task. Or you put it off because you believe you can “wing it.” Or you lament that you don’t have an “interesting topic.”
Let’s say that your task is to provide a SWOT within the body of a group presentation, and your time is 4-5 minutes. What is your actual task here as you prepare the business presentation?
Think about it.
How do you usually approach the task? How do you characterize it?
Here is my guess at how you approach it.
You define your task as:
“How can I fit X amount of information into this limited time?”
In your own mind, the objective is not to communicate clearly to your audience. Your only objective is to “fit it all in.” And if you “achieve” this dubious objective, then in your mind you will have succeeded.
Unfortunately, your professor might agree with you, since many b-school professors look only for “content.” They do not evaluate whether the content has been communicated clearly and effectively.
And this is what is missing – you don’t analyze how or why or in what way you can present the information in a public forum.
If a written paper has already been produced, this complicates your task.
You feel the irresistible allure of cut ’n’ paste.
The result is less than stellar, and you end up trying to shovel 10 pounds of sand into a five-pound pail. And this result is predictable.
Your slides are crammed with information.
You talk fast to force all the points in. You run over-time.
You fail.
You fail to deliver a star-spangled presentation for lack of proper preparation.
This Time, Procrustes has it Right
Take the Procrustean approach when you prepare the business presentation. This approach is named after Procrustes, a figure from Greek mythology. The Columbia Encyclopedia describes the myth this way:
He forced passersby to lie on a very long bed and then stretched them to fit it. If they were too tall to fit his bed, he sawed off their legs. Using Procrustes’ own villainous methods, Theseus killed him.
Surely Procrustes was a villain, what with sawing off people’s legs or stretching them to fit an arbitrary standard. In modern-day parlance, it has retained its negative connotation with the term “Procrustean solution.”
“Procrustean solution” is the undesirable practice of tailoring data to fit its container or some other preconceived stricture.
A common example from the business world is embodied in the notion that no résumé should exceed one page in length.
But in this case, let’s give Procrustes a break.
Your Procrustean Solution
Take a Procrustean approach and forge an especially powerful presentation. Consider this:
We have no choice in the length of our presentation. It’s four minutes. Or five minutes.
That’s our Procrustean Bed. So let’s manipulate the situation to our benefit and to the benefit of our audience in our presentation preparation.
We’re not stretching someone or something. And we’re not hacking off legs.
We are using our minds and judgment to select what should be in our show and what should not be in our show.
And if you find the decision of what to include too difficult, then let’s do even more Procrustean manipulation. Pick only three major points that you want to make.
Here is your task now:
Pick three points to deliver in 4-5 minutes. If you must deliver an entire SWOT, then select one strength, one weakness, one opportunity, and one threat.
Why do we do this? Here’s why:
If you try to crowbar an entire SWOT analysis into a four-minute presentation, with multiple points for each category, you overwhelm your audience.
They turn off and tune you out. You will lose them, and you will fail.
Presenting too many points is worse than delivering only one point.
Especially Powerful Paucity
If you present, say, a total of 5 strengths, 3 weaknesses, 4 opportunities, and 3 threats, no one remembers it. None of it. And you irritate your audience mercilessly.
Your presentation should present the results of analysis, not a laundry list of facts on which you base your analysis.
The SWOT is, in fact, almost raw data.
You want the audience to remember how you massage the data, analyze it, and arrange it. You want the audience to remember your conclusions.
You take information and transforming it into intelligence. You winnow out the chaff and leave only the wheat.
You reduce the static and white noise so that the communicative signal can be heard.
You are panning for gold, washing away the detritus to find the nuggets. When you buy gold, you don’t buy the waste product from which it was drawn, do you?
Do you buy a gold ring set in a box of sand?
Of course not, and neither should you offer up bucketfuls of presentation sand when you present your analytic gold to your client.
As you prepare the business presentation, you sift through mountains of information, synthesize it, compress it, make it intelligible, then present it in a way that is understandable and, if possible, entertaining.
Digest this Preparation guidance, try it out in your next presentation, and watch yourself produce and deliver the most powerful presentation of your young career.
If you have spent any time at all in this space, you already know about the “Seven Secrets of Power Presenting.”
Now, you might head-scratch and wonder how the “Seven Secrets” mesh with the “Three Ps of Business Presenting.”
A fair question.
For Especially Powerful Presentations
The “Principles” referred to are the Seven Secrets, the pillars of your transformation into an especially powerful presenter.
Learning and improving on the Seven dimensions of power presenting is essential to your presentation quest in a broadest sense.
You don’t improve on the seven dimensions of presenting overnight . . . it requires application and adoption of the proper habits of behavior.
This may appear intuitive, but too often I see students who appear to understand the seven secrets but do not apply them for a host of reasons. Perhaps good reasons, in their own minds.
You always have a choice. Choose to implement the Three Ps of Business Presenting, and you’ll find that your delivery improves immensely
And yet, the choice cripples them in their presentations.
When it comes to individual presentations, you must apply your principles. And this means preparation.
It means practice.
Don’t assume that you know what I mean by preparation and practice, because we likely have different conceptions of both, and I’m betting you’ll like the results you get from the approach presented here.
So, settle in . . . and for the next couple of days, we will explore the Three Ps of Business Presenting and how their assiduous application can transform you into the Especially Powerful Presenter that you always knew you could be.
Eliminate Stick Puppet Presenting and you’re on your way to achieving personal competitive advantage
If experience is any guide for us, we can say that approximately 90 percent of our business presentations are delivered in 2-D fashion . . . stick-puppet presenting.
No, I don’t mean this literally in the sense that people become stick figures.
Stripped of the qualities that make it interesting, stimulating, and persuasive.
The potential richness, energy, vigor, and power that is provided by purposive movement is absent.
Crude Stick-Puppet Presenting
We are left with cutout figures, like stick puppets. You’ve seen stick puppets. They’re crude, flat little figures pasted onto sticks and then used in a child’s display to convey a story.
Rudimentary as it gets, the puppets shake and move up and down as someone voices dialogue from somewhere offstage.
Today’s business presentations are sometimes no better than stick-puppet presenting.
Call this the 2-D presentation.
Stick-Puppet Presenting is characterized by a zombie-like figure crouched behind a lectern, gripping its sides.
Or a speaker who reads from a laptop computer and alternately looks at a projection screen behind him, citing it verbatim. If any movement occurs, it is unconscious swaying.
Or rocking, or nervous happy-feet dancing.
Eliminate Stick Puppet Presentations for personal competitive advantage
Perhaps there is a bit of pacing back-and-forth to fulfill some ancient advice mumbled to the speaker years earlier: “Move around when you talk!”
And so the stick-puppet presenter wanders about the stage.
This is worse than no movement at all. It adds one more irrelevant distractor to an already deteriorating situation.
But we want movement . . . the right kind of movement. We want to accelerate from 2-D to 3-D presenting. One powerful step in that direction is the addition of proper movement.
The addition of proper movement to your presentation can imbue it with energy, depth, richness, and enhanced meaning.
So in the next series of posts, we’ll analyze this component – “movement” on the stage in support of your presentation.
Do you invest your topic with energy and elan, regardless of whether it’s shampoo or sugar or ship-building?
What is it that fills you with the thrill of discovery, the adrenaline of newness?
What can compare with the natural high of applying yourself to a task that excites you?
What generates those endorphins? What brings a smile to your face involuntarily? What furrows your brow?
Is it “world hunger?” Or European soccer?
Is it social injustice? Is it political theory? Is it comic book collecting? Chess? Numismatics? Tennis? Travel to exotic locations? Helping others solve problems?
Writing essays? Fashion design? Financial manipulations? Reading and then reflecting on a good book?
What’s your passion? Do you even have one?
Is your Presentation Passion buried?
Likely as not, your passion has been buried under a ton of necessity, the debris we call the business of life.
f you find that your passion is buried, then this is the time to rescue it as one of the most potent factors in delivering your most powerful presentations.
Once you explore your own visceral feelings, your passion, it becomes that much easier to invoke presentation passion in your show.
To exhibit genuine enthusiasm for the subjects of your shows.
Can you generate presentation passion? Of course you can. Will it be “artificial” passion? Of course not. Passion is passion is passion.
Especially Powerful Presentations all exhibit Presentation Passion
Unless you have passion for a subject and demonstrate that passion, you will always be at a disadvantage with respect to those who do.
If you are in competition with several other teams pitching a product or service to a company for millions of dollars – and there is no noteworthy difference in the quality or price of the service – then how does the potential customer decide?
On passion.
If he sees a real passion for the work in one team, if he feels the energy of a team driven to success and truly excited about the offering, don’t you think he’ll be inclined to the team that stirs his emotions? The team that makes him see possibilities?
The team that helps him visualize a glorious future?
The team that shares his love and passion for his product or service and sees in you a shared passion for achieving something special in partnership?
Reread the previous paragraph, because it encapsulates so much of the presentation passion that is absent in presentations today, and so much of what is needed.
Centuries of Presentation Passion
Passion has served as a crucial element in verbal communication for centuries. Here are two of my favorite quotations on its power:
“True emotional freedom is the only door by which you may enter the hearts of your hearers.”
Brees and Kelley, 1931
“Earnestness is the secret of success in any department of life. It is only the earnest man who wins his cause.”
S.S. Curry, 1895
Recognize in yourself the capacity for passion. Recognize that you have the wherewithal to embrace even the most staid material, the “dullest” project.
Remember always that it is you who make it better. You who invest it with excitement.
You are the alchemist.
Many times you hear an “interesting” presentation about an “interesting” topic. It’s well-done, and it engaged you.
And you wonder why you never seem to get the “interesting” projects.
It’s your job to make it interesting
Have you ever admitted to yourself that you might be the missing ingredient? That perhaps it is your task to invest a project with interest and zest?
That what makes a project “interesting” is not the topic . . . but rather the interaction between material and presenter.
Ultimately, it is your task to transform a “case” or business situation into an interesting and cogent presentation. It’s your task to find the key elements of strategic significance and then to dramatize those elements in such a way that the audience is moved in powerful and significant ways.
And you don’t need an “interesting” case to do it.
You just need presentation passion. More on how to develop especially powerful presentation passion here.
Let’s move from the realm of what you do and say in front of your audience to the realm of how you actually appear to your audience – presentation appearance.
Likewise, let’s immediately dismiss the notion that “it doesn’t matter what I look like . . . it’s the message that counts.”
In a word . . . no.
This is so wrong-headed and juvenile that you can turn this to immediate advantage. Adopt the exact opposite perspective right now to achieve incredible presentation competitive advantage.
But I’d wager that most folks your age won’t, particularly those stuck in liberal arts, for better or worse.
Much more dramatic to strike a pose and deliver a mythic blow for “individuality” than to conform to society’s diktats, eh?
Well, let those folks strike their blows while you spiff yourself up for your presentations, both in public and in private job interviews, and gain a superior competitive advantage.
The Upshot – Presentation Appearance
Here is the bottom line. Your appearance matters a great deal, like it or not, and it is up to us to dress and groom appropriate to the occasion and appropriate to our personal brand and the message we want to send.
Presentation Appearance is about setting yourself apart . . . in a way that sells yourself and your ideas to others
“Slob cool” may fly in college – and I stress may – but it garners only contempt outside the friendly confines of the local student activities center and fraternity house.
Is that “fair?”
It certainly is fair.
You may not like it. It may clang upon your youthful sensibilities.
Tough.
You’re on display in front of a group of buyers. They want to know if your message is credible. Your appearance conveys important cues to your audience. It conveys one of two chief messages, with no room to maneuver between them.
First, your appearance telegraphs to your audience that you are: sharp, focused, detailed, careful, bold, competent, prudent, innovative, loyal, energetic . . .
or . . .
Your appearance telegraphs to your audience that you are: slow, sloppy, careless, inefficient, incompetent, weak, mercenary, stupid.
Presentation Appearance is Part of Your Brand
Moreover, you may never know when you are actually auditioning for your next job.
That presentation you decided to “wing” with half-baked preparation and delivered in a wrinkled suit might have held in the audience a human resource professional recommended to you by a friend.
But you blew the deal. Without even knowing it.
Think. How many powerful people mentally cross you off their list because of your haphazard, careless appearance?
How many opportunities pass you by?
How many great connections do you forfeit?
Your Choice . . . Choose Well
Granted, it’s up to your discretion to dress in the first wrinkled shirt you pull from the laundry basket, but recognize that you may be paying a price without even knowing it.
Your appearance on the stage contributes or detracts from your message. So, as a general rule, you should dress one half-step above the audience to convey a seriousness of purpose. For instance, if the audience is dressed in business casual (sports coat and tie), you dress in a suit. Simple.
Powerful Presentation Appearance conveys a Powerful Message
But beyond your presentation, you are always on-stage.
You are always auditioning.
And you are creating your personal brand one wrinkled shirt at a time, one exposed pair of boxers at a time.
Or . . . clean, professional, sober, serious, decisive, thoughtful, and bold.
Personal appearance overlaps into the area of personal branding, which is beyond the scope of this space, but two books I recommend to aid you in your quest for appearance enhancement are You, Inc. and The Brand Called You.
Both of these books are worth the price and filled with stellar advice to propel you into delivering Especially Powerful Presentations enhanced by a superb presentation appearance.
