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.
Think of this place as your Official College Guide to Business School Presentations.
Don’t hate presentations!
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.
- What is this beast – the business presentation?
- How do I stand? Where do I stand?
- What do I say? How do I say it?
- How do I reduce 20 pages of analysis into a four-minute spiel that makes sense and that “gets it all in?”
- How should we assemble a group presentation? How do we orchestrate it?
- Where do I begin, and how?
- How do I end my talk?
- What should I do with my hands?
- How do I conquer nervousness once and for all?
- How can I tell “what the professor wants?”
- 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.
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.
And learn not to hate presentations by consulting my book The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting.