Category Archives: Style

message, Personal Competitive Advantage, Slides, Style, Technique

Touch the Cave Wall . . .

Touch your own cave paintings in your especially powerful business presentation
Take ownership of your business presentation and embrace 10,000 B.C. technology

It’s 10,000 BC, and you’ve painted a detailed graphic on your cave wall for your upcoming business presentation.

It depicts your keen analysis of the recent successful hunt.

Now, you offer to show it to your group, perhaps young hunters seeking essential knowledge.

How would you deliver your hunting presentation?

Would you stand to one side and gesture vaguely at your cave wall graphics as you give your presentation on how to take down a mastodon?

Would you?

More likely, you’d take ownership.

And if you did, you’d take your first step to achieving personal competitive advantage.

Here’s how you’d do it . . .

Own the Cave Wall Presentation . . .

You’d step over to the wall and run your fingers over the colored lines.

You’d trace the outline of the images as you shared the story that the painting illustrates.  You’d use the graphic to bring your presentation to life.

Likewise, in your own business presentations today, when you interact with your PowerPoint slides, I suggest that you use 10,000 BC technology – you should  “touch the cave paintings” to meld with your presentation.

Especially Powerful Mastodon Business Presentation
Breathe life into your Business Presentation!

Take ownership of your business presentation, and touch the cave paintings you’ve created to flesh out and support your message.

Step to the screen when you’re ready to refer to a chart or a graph.

Orient us to what we’re about to see.

Explain the vertical and horizontal axes so that we can quickly grasp the data.

By stepping to the screen and gesturing, you enhance your participation in the presentation, becoming the animation for the slides under review.

And you preclude using one of the most heinous devices ever created that can destroy potentially outstanding business presentations.

The Laser Pointer.

Think of the Laser Pointer as a Presentation self-destruct button.

That’s right . . . self-destruct button.

Don’t Self-Destruct!

Even the best of us occasionally thumb that laser pointer self-destruct button that is built into most remote control clickers.

Personal Competitive Advantage
Lose the laser pointer, Skywalker

But you want to deliver a Laser Pointer Presentation, don’t you?

You’ve waited your entire life for the chance to legitimately use that laser pointer!

Haven’t you?

You’ve pictured yourself be-suited and commanding the room . . . standing back, perhaps with a jaunty posture, as you sweep the screen behind you with the little bobbing speck of red light.  The meekest among us is invested with bombast and hauteur by even the most inexpensive laser pointer.

Don’t do it.

Put down the light saber, Skywalker.

The laser pointer is 21st century overkill technology.  It distances you from your presentation message at the exact moment you should meld yourself with it.

How so?

If something is so crucially important on your slideshow – perhaps a graph or a series of numbers – that you must direct audience attention to it, then step into the presentation.  Gesture to the data with your hand.

Use 10,000 B.C. Technology

Merge yourself with the data.  Step into the presentation so that you, in essence, become the animation that highlights your points of emphasis.  Don’t divide audience attention between you, the data on the screen, and a nervously darting red speck.

Instead, concentrate your audience focus on your major points, touching the screen, guiding us to the facts and figures you want us to internalize.

It’s a cave painting, so run your hands over the cave wall.

Show us what you want us to see with your hand.

Now, I issue a caveat here.

If the screen behind you is so high that you cannot reach it, then you might be justified in using the pointer.

But probably not.

Instead, if you want to highlight or draw attention to your points of emphasis, then utilize the highlighting animation available on most multimedia platforms.

Nothing is more gratuitous in modern business presenting than the laser pointer.  And few things more irritating than the laser pointer presentation.

Rid yourself of this awful affectation today.  Pledge never to deliver another laser pointer presentation in your business life.

Instead, run your hands over the cave wall, touch the cave paintings to meld with your presentation and communicate with your visuals in especially powerful fashion to gain especially powerful personal competitive advantage.

For more on Business Presentations, consult my book The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting.

General, Style, Technique, Tips

Stay out of the Tall Grass

Especially Powerful personal competitive advantage
Cut through that Presentation Tall Grass!

All of us do it, some more than others – we insert empty, distracting phrases that take us into what I call the Presentation Tall Grass.

You know the feeling of walking through tall grass.  Tall grass, as in knee high.

It slows you down.

Think of wading quickly through knee-deep water . . .

Right, you don’t wade quickly through knee-deep water.

You push forward.

Sluggish.

Likewise, tall grass tugs at you, brushes your legs.

Holds you back.  And in this case, it holds your audience back too.

It’s so unnecessary, too, so let’s see what to avoid and why to avoid it.

Presentation Tall Grass Phrases

In the business presentation, we sometimes enter the tall grass needlessly.

We insert qualifying phrases that add no necessary substance but do distract the listener from our main points.

These phrases do not cripple your presentation.  But if you can eliminate them, you move out of the tall grass.

Your presentation becomes cleaner.

Crisper.

So what do these Tall Grass phrases look and sound like?

personal competitive advantageHere is one of the most common tall grass phrases.  And it seems innocent enough.

“Now, I want to talk a little bit about . . .”

Say what?

No, you aren’t here to “talk a little bit about” anything.  You’re here to deliver powerful, even stunning information in a tight, direct presentation that grips your listeners.

The affected breeziness of “talk a little bit about . . .” conveys a chattiness that is anathema to most business presentations.

In some public speaking venues this toss-off line might be acceptable, but I find it difficult to think of any presentation of my own where I would say something like this . . . except by mistake.

Because it’s a phrase that creeps into our show at times when we aren’t careful.  I know that if I use it once, it’s bound to show up again.

And again.

As an affected filler.  So I train myself to avoid it.

Perhaps you should, too.

References to Repetition – Ugh!

“As my colleague mentioned before . . .”

“As I said earlier. . .”

We tend to say this from an over-cultivated sense of honesty.  It springs to the lips, unbidden, when we poise to deliver a point . . . and then we suddenly remember that another presenter said something similar earlier.

We believe that someone in the audience is ready to pounce, to call us on our repetition if we don’t confess.

So we feel compelled to “fess-up” and give credit to our teammate.  We inject this wholly unnecessary comment:  “As my colleague mentioned before . . .”

Uh-oh.

Suddenly, the audience is jolted into thinking back, tugged back to several minutes earlier, trying to remember if someone actually said this thing earlier and wondering why you’re saying it again.  In other words, you have injected all sorts of unneeded distractions into audience minds.

Suddenly, you’re in the presentation tall grass, qualifying and interjecting, distracting.

It’s discordant.

Don’t be discordant.

Simply deliver your point.  Don’t refer back to a teammate or to yourself, for that matter.  Simply repeat the information.

Are these small points?  Sure they are.  They’re like individual brushstrokes.

And that’s how any master paints a masterpiece.  A single brushstroke at a time.

Deliver enough bad brushstrokes because you believe that each stroke by itself is inconsequential, and soon enough you’re giving just another routine, bad presentation.

You don’t want that.

So stay out of the presentation tall grass.

For more on the smart choices in your business presentations and how to achieve personal competitive advantage, consult The Complete Guide to Business School Presentations.