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.
Finance students can gain competitive advantage with superior finance presentation PowerPoint
Whether the presentation class is in Philadelphia . . . or Mumbai . . . or Cali . . . or Chennai . . . or Singapore . . . I hear the same universal and eerie refrain from finance students everywhere with regard to their finance presentation PowerPoint—
“Finance is different.”
“We don’t do all of that soft-skill kumbaya presentations stuff.”
“For us, the numbers tell the story.”
Worshiping at the Altar of Numbers
Numbers seem to enchant business-people in deep and mysterious ways.
It’s almost as if numerical constructs are somehow less malleable than the English language, less subject to manipulation.
In a chaotic world, a spreadsheet exudes familiarity, a firm valuation offers comfort, an income statement serves as anchor.
For some, numbers convey a certitude and precision unavailable to mere rhetoric.
This illusion of certitude and precision exerts influence on finance folks to believe that, well . . . that the laws of human nature that stymie the rest of us do not apply to them in the coldness and hardness of objective numerical analysis.
Finance presentations are somehow harder.
They appear more firmly rooted in . . . well, rooted in the very stuff of business.
Finance Presentation PowerPoint . . . Beware!
But this is an illusion.
Among other problems, the numbers on a spreadsheet are nothing more than proxies for the conditions that gave rise to them in the first place.
Yet folks create and sustain the myth that “The numbers tell the story.”
But the numbers tell no story.
They are mute.
They offer the illusion of precision. They offer fool’s gold to those who worship at the numbers altar.
The result is 2D presenting, full of voodoo and bereft of nuance and subtle analysis.
Where business presentations are concerned, finance folks are not different, special, unique or otherwise gifted with special powers or incantations denied the mere mortals who toil in marketing or human resources.
Delivering rilliant finance presentation PowerPoint isn’t difficult . . . neither is is easy
We’re all subject to the same demands placed upon us by the presentations beast, demands that nettle us equally and indiscriminately during the business presentation process.
As with most things, there is bad news and good news in this slice of life provided here.
Finance Presentation Hell
The bad news is that modern finance presentations are a vast wasteland of unreadable spreadsheets and monotonous, toneless recitations of finance esoterica.
It seems that there must be a requirement for this in finance.
In fact, many finance presentations crumble into little more than meeting “discussions” about a printed analysis distributed beforehand. They’re picked apart by Gotcha! jackals with nothing on their minds except proving themselves worthier than those who might be unlucky enough to be the presenter du jour.
Finance presentation PowerPoint shows seem to offer nothing save the opportunity for public posturing and one-upmanship.
A presenter or group of presenters stands and shifts uncomfortably while everyone else sits and interrupts with strings of gotcha questions, usually couched to demonstrate the mastery of the questioner rather than to elicit worthy information.
Several presentation cliches guarantee this sorry state of affairs a long life. But there’s hope.
Upcoming posts offer solutions to this common presentation conundrum.
Don’t enter the World’s Worst PowerPoint Slide Contest
If you think your business presentation slides are bad (they probably are), latch on to the good news that worse slides are out there . . . in fact, this post features the Worst PowerPoint Slide in the World.
But first, your personal slide curse.
Your personal revelation of your own bad PowerPoint slides starts innocently enough . . .
You click the remote and a new slide appears. You cast a wistful look back at the screen.
You pause.
Perhaps you squint as you struggle to understand what’s on the screen. It’s almost unreadable.
Your mind reels at the thought that well, maybe . . . this slide actually is awful and should never have been included.
Take heart!
As bad as your slides are, they likely are not as bad as what lurks in corporate America or in the U.S. government.
New York Times Features the World’s Worst PowerPoint Slide
Your slides likely will never reach the bottom of the pit, the awful standard set by our friends in the U.S. government, who crafted and actually presented a monstrosity of such egregious proportions that the New York Times featured it on its front page in 2010 for no other reason than that it was an awful PowerPoint slide.
When the NYT considers your slide front page news, that is a bad slide.
The slide was actually used in a briefing to the commanding general of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal. It purported to explain U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, all on one slide.
That slide appears at the end of this post.
If you dare, scroll down to this heinous freak of design concocted in a government laboratory and completely undeserving to be shown in public . . . except on the front page of the New York Times as the exemplar of how depraved PowerPoint evil can be.
Our Bad Slides Usually Involve Numbers
We show numbers, lots of them. And at times we are tempted to believe that the “numbers speak for themselves.”
And so we whip out the tired, useless phrase “As you can see.”
The phrase “As you can see” is so pervasive, so endemic to the modern business presentation that it requires iron will to prevent ourselves from uttering this reflexive phrase-hiccup.
The Worst PowerPoint Makes Us Squint
The bain of “As you can see” is that it is usually accompanied by a vague gesture at a screen upon which is displayed some of the most unreadable nonsense constructed for a slide – usually a financial spreadsheet of tiny, baffling numbers.
Probably cut-and-pasted from a written report and not adjusted at all for visual presentation.
The audience most assuredly cannot see.
In fact, there might be a law of inverse proportion that governs this syndrome – the less the audience can actually “see,” the more often the audience is told that it can see.
And that’s why we reach for the phrase.
Because we can’t “see,” either.
We look back helplessly at our own abstruse PowerPoint slide and realize that it 1) makes no sense, 2) never will make any sense, 3) is so complicated that we should have used four slides to make the point or should have deleted it, and 4) has no chance of contributing at all to our show.
Satanic Spreadsheets
You, the presenter, stare back at the screen, at the phalanx of numbers displayed on your unreadable spreadsheet.
Perhaps you grip the podium with one hand and you airily wave your other hand at the screen with the words . . .
“As you can see—”
And then you call out what seem to be random numbers. Random? Yes, to your audience, the numbers seem random because you have not oriented the audience to your material.
You have not provided the context needed for understanding. No one knows what you’re talking about.
Your classmates watch with glazed eyes. Perhaps one or two people nod.
Your professor sits sphinx-like.
And no one has a clue. You get through it, finally, and you’re relieved. And you hope that you were vague enough that no one can even think about asking a question.
“As you can see” Syndrome is the tacit agreement between audience and presenter that neither of us really knows or cares what’s on the slide. And we promise each other that there won’t be any further investigation into whatever this abominable slide holds.
It gives rise to the worst PowerPoint slides imaginable, because the incentive to excellence is removed.
This can’t be good. Not for the audience, not for anyone.
All of this sounds heinous, I know. And probably too familiar for comfort.
If the best thing you can say about your slides is that they’re not the worst PowerPoint in the world, then maybe it’s time to upgrade your expectations.
You can beat “As you can see” Syndrome with a few simple techniques that we be discuss in days to come.
Develop PowerPoint Slide Skills for Especially Powerful Impact and Personal Competitive Advantage
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 slide skills.
And yet, PowerPoint is a brilliant tool.
Yes, brilliant.
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 Slide Skills 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.
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.
If you correct even a few of the most egregious errors, you can lift your presentation to a much more professional level.
One key to improving is recognizing that you might be part of the problem. And that like most any musical instrument, you can tune yourself up to play more beautiful melodies.
One strategic way of doing this is to begin broadening your professional perspective.
Your Learning Curve for Better Powerpoint
It’s the process of enriching your personal context so that you become aware of new and varied sources of information, ideas, concepts, theories. You become learned in new and wondrous ways.
Think of it as enlarging your world.
You increase your reservoir of usable material. And your business presentation can connect more readily with varied audiences.
You do this in a pleasant and ongoing process – by keeping your mind open to possibilities outside your functional area. By taking your education far beyond undergraduate or graduate school. And that process increases your personal competitive advantage steadily.
By doing something daily, however brief, that stretches your mind. Or allows you to make a connection that otherwise might have escaped you.
Expand Your World for Better PowerPoint?
By reading broadly in areas outside your specialty, you sharpen your acumen in your specialty. You understand its place, its context.
Read a book outside your specialty. Have lunch with a colleague from a different discipline. Dabble a bit in architecture, engineering, art, poetry, history, science.
It also means sampling some of the best offerings in the blogosphere on business presentations.
Bad PowerPoint is a Debilitating Presentation Pathology
It starts innocently enough . . .
You click the remote and a new slide appears. You cast a wistful look back at the screen.
You pause.
And then you reach for the easy phrase.
That’s when AYCS Syndrome strikes even the best of us, cutting us down in our presentation prime.
AYCS Syndrome + Bad PowerPoint
“As you can see.”
The phrase “As you can see” is so pervasive, so endemic to the modern business presentation that there must be a school somewhere that trains people to utter this reflexive phrase-hiccup.
Is there an AYCSS Academy? It would seem so.
The bain of AYCSS is that it is usually accompanied by a vague gesture at a screen upon which is displayed some of the most unreadable nonsense constructed for a slide – usually a financial spreadsheet or array of baffling numbers. Probably cut-and-pasted from a written report and not adjusted at all for visual presentation.
And the audience most assuredly cannot see. In fact, there might be a law of inverse proportion that governs this syndrome – the less the audience can actually “see,” the more often the audience is told that it can see.
And that’s why we reach for the phrase.
Because we can’t “see,” either.
We look back at an abstruse PowerPoint slide and realize that it 1) makes no sense, 2) never will make any sense, 3) is so complicated that we should have used four slides to make the point or should have deleted it, and 4) has no chance of contributing at all to our show. At that point, AYCS Syndrome attacks.
Numb and Dumb Your Audience with AYCSS
Finance students seem particularly enamored of AYCSS.
In fact, some rogue finance professors doubtless inculcate this in students.
Financial analysis of the firm is essential, of course. There are only few occasions when financial data do not make their way into a presentation. Financial data are where you discover the firm’s profitability, stability, health, and potential.
Bad Powerpoint Can Sabotage Your Presentation
But the results of your financial analysis invariably constitute the ugliest section of a presentation.Something about a spreadsheet mesmerizes students and faculty alike. A spreadsheet splayed across the screen gives the impression of heft and gravitas. It seems important, substantial.
Everyone nods.
Too often, you display an Excel spreadsheet on the screen that is unedited from your written report. You cut-and-paste it into your presentation. You splash the spreadsheet onto the screen, then talk from that spreadsheet without orienting your audience to the slide.
This is the incredibly awful technique displayed by finance students, in particular, that is accompanied by the dreaded words: “As you can see.”
Satanic Spreadsheets
You, the presenter, stare back at the screen, at the phalanx of numbers.
Perhaps you grip the podium with one hand and you airily wave your other hand at the screen with the words . . . “As you can see—”
And then you call out what seem to be random numbers. Random? Yes, to your audience, the numbers seem random because you have not oriented the audience to your material.
You have not provided the context needed for understanding. No one knows what you’re talking about. Your classmates watch with glazed eyes. Perhaps one or two people nod.
Your professor sits sphinx-like.
And no one has a clue. You get through it, finally, and you’re relieved. And you hope that you were vague enough that no one can even think about asking a question.
AYCS Syndrome is the tacit agreement between audience and presenter that neither of us really knows or cares what’s on the slide. And we promise each other that there won’t be any further investigation into whatever this abominable slide holds.
It can’t be good. Not for the audience, not for anyone.
All of this sounds heinous, I know. And probably too familiar for comfort. But you can beat AYCCS with a few simple techniques that we’ll be discussing in days to come.
Especially Powerful PowerPoint can boost your presentations . . . but you still must adopt good habits
One of the country’s finest presentation coaches, Carmine Gallo, offers this interesting contribution to what we know about effective presentations . . . let’s call it PowerPoint Superiority.
The upshot of his Forbes column is that “PowerPoint superiority” by way of pictures is a “new” style of presenting.
I’m delighted that Carmine urges the corporate community away from the heinous habit of cluttered and wordy PowerPoint slide presentations. But he misses the mark on why this is an effective mode of presenting . . . and why it needs considerably more effort than merely posting happy snaps on the screen as a backdrop.
Here’s why . . .
PowerPoint Transformation . . .
Carmine makes an important observation, but he leaves out the utterly crucial point that it is the presenter who must change for the slide change technique to work at all, much less result in an especially powerful business presentation.
Without a significant shift in mindset and activity of the presenter, just altering what’s on the slides is nothing more than cosmetic.
You must dedicate yourself to change and the generation of positive energy. Not submit to the easy lure of “making great slides,” which won’t help you at all if you continue to engage in bad habits.
How a speaker sounds, moves, gestures, stands, and expresses herself or himself is absolutely the most important congeries of techniques that makes or breaks a presentation.
When a presenter moves from cluttered bullet-point slides to high-impact visuals, the technique of the presenter must change as well.
Many posts on this blog address the aspects of voice, expression, gesture, appearance, stance, passion, and movement. I address all of these and much more in my new book The Complete Guide to Business School Presentingavailable from Anthem Press, Amazon.com, and bookstores everywhere.
Take to heart Carmine’s advice, but also pledge to transform yourself accordingly so that his advice on PowerPoint Superiority makes sense.
In what has to be the biggest surprise for me on this blog in the year-and-a-half I’ve been writing it is that the most popular post I’ve ever done, by far, is this one.
Nope, you can’t have my slides attracted an incredible amount of views and sustained discussion on LinkedIn.
For some reason, slide posts get people worked up.
People apparently have strong opinions on the PowerPoint slides they prepare for their presentations and, then, what they choose to do with them. Hand them out in hard-copy . . . or not. Hand them out before a presentation . . . or not. These choices elicit strong feelings.
My own position is the clear and simple point that I don’t give away my slides.
Period.
Other Viewpoints?
Many folks have offered opinions counter to that . . . for what I consider spurious reasons, or reasons that may have merit on the periphery, but which interfere with the centrally important function of the presentation.
To recap . . . My slides are not meant to be “reviewed” or read at leisure after a presentation. I usually prepare a short compendium of main points of my talk and pass that out . . . after the presentation.
The notion that paper copies of an upcoming presentation should be passed out in advance is absurd. Yes, absurd.
It destroys both power and purpose of the presentation . . . if your presentation is worthy of the name.
Unless the presentation is to an audience whose second language is English, there is no reasonable reason to erode your presentation’s message and power by distributing a distraction. There is enough competition for audience attention without adding to it.
If people want to take notes, they can use a notebook.
If people want to split their attention and “follow along” on some printout, rustling and shuffling papers throughout your talk, they are destined to be disappointed . . . and may actually enjoy the pleasure of not constantly shifting back and forth from handouts to unreadable screen while listening to someone read slides verbatim.
“Following along” is not part of a good presentation. If you do your job right, and you have prepared proper visual aids, the audience won’t need a cheat sheet to interpret what you’re saying and doing.
Would you hand out the script of a hit movie beforehand, so folks can “follow along,” or would you rely upon the strength of your visuals, the power of your delivery, and the concision of your script to convey your meaning in a memorable way?
More Generally . . .
While we’re on the issue of slides more generally (and there is much that could be said), there’s this:
If you’re addicted to delivering presentations with quickly produced “bullet point” slides, then you are mired in a highly ineffective – even failed – presentation model. A look at a couple of superb sources is in order.
Beyond Bullet Points, by Cliff Atkinson and Slide:ology, by Nancy Duarte are fabulous resources to transform the most mundane presentations into memorable moments for any audience (at least from the perspective of your visual aids, if properly utilized).
Granted, most of us believe that vast swaths of the presentation activity are open to opinion on this or that technique. My position on the matter is that far less is open to disagreement than we like to pretend. I watch and evaluate a minimum of 75 group business presentations and 300 individual presentations each year.
If the point is to communicate in an especially powerful manner the major points of a business presentation, there is a right way to do most of what many still believe is open to debate.
If the object of a presentation is to mimic the boss, to show one’s mastery of arcana, to anesthetize the audience, to conduct a group slide reading . . . then sure, let a thousand “techniques” blossom, and Good Luck and Godspeed!
But if the point is to focus laser-like on a major topic or broad theme and the desire is to communicate this in the most powerful and persuasive manner available, then ironclad principles – call them immutable laws – are available to guide us.
And the First Law is “Nope, you can’t have my slides.”
Presentation PowerPoint slides are meant for viewing, not distribution.
My PowerPoint slides are proprietary.
I spend lots of time on them. They have a latticework of subtle animations and overtones that bulk out the size of the file, and I practice with them a great deal to make their presence an organic part of what the audience experiences.
It takes a long time to make slides unobtrusive, you know that, right?
You should.
All of which is why my own presentations may seem to carry a bit more heft than the norm. And so should yours.
PowerPoint slides constitute my intellectual property. Not the specific information contained on them, although some of the unorthodox ways I present it could be considered original.
No PowerPoint Slides for You!
The slides themselves are my IP, and often I must refuse well-meaning requests for a “copy of your slide deck” as if it is just something I hand out to passersby, a sort of shareware.
In fact, some folks actually expect to get a copy of my presentation’s slides, which indicates to me how far down that sorry road we have come . . . the presentation is just a formality, really just a formal group slide reading.
Why pay attention if you’ll get a copy anyway?
Uh . . . no.
I believe that this strange tradition of passing out copies of presentation slides just prior to a talk was launched because most presentations feature slides that are virtually unreadable on the screen. They feature dense blocks of text that assault audience sensibilities. Hence, the tail began wagging the dog, as unreadable slides required that hand-outs be supplied so that something could be intelligible.
This, of course, has led to mind-numbing presentations, where folks in the audience shuffle and rattle paper constantly as they “follow along.”
If your audience cannot “follow along” with your presentation, the solution is not slide hand-outs. You have a big problem presenting, and the solution is presentation training.
Stop the Paper-Shuffle!
The slide presentation, ideally, should not be a review source for an audience. Another document should be prepared for audience review and for take-home, touching on the major points of the presentation and prepared in suitable format.
So when I receive requests for my slides from my shows on presentations, I point people in this direction.
This source has everything I talk about in my seminars . . . and more. Much more.
More detail, more gravitas, more examples.
And it’s designed to be read at home to help you develop an especially powerful presentation.
No, you can’t have my PowerPoint slides . . . but you can have this.
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 don’t know how to work with PowerPoint.
And yet, PowerPoint is a brilliant tool.
Yes, brilliant.
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.
Good Work with PowerPoint 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 other 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.
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 on-camera, do have a look at my own short video on how to work with PowerPoint. It is enough to get you started and, I hope, whet your appetite for more instruction.
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.
Choose the Blue Pill for an especially powerful discovery process that can result in superior personal competitive advantage and outstanding business presentations
The business presentation is an entirely different form of communication than a written document, and thats why you need a reliable PowerPoint Guide to get you through the rough waters of slide preparation.
For your presentation, do you ever throw together a half-dozen makeshift slides cut-and-pasted from a written report, with dozens of bullet points peppered throughout?
Guilty as charged? Most of us are at one point or another. The results can be heinous.
A PowerPoint Guide for You
The results are slides that confuse the audience rather than reinforce your major points delivered in awful, mind-numbing presentations. You bear a cost for serving up what designer Nancy Duarte calls “bad slides.” Nancy says in her book Slideology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations:
“Making bad slides is easy, and it will negatively impact your career. Invest in your slides, but invest in your own visual skills as well. The alternative is to inadvertently commit career suicide.”
Absent specific instruction, you might believe that it’s acceptable to simply cut and paste graphics from a written report directly onto a slide.
Why not?
Who says this is a bad idea? After all, the professor wants to see certain material on the screen, doesn’t he? Well, I’m giving it to him. ’nuff said.
This is awful for the reason that the slide presentation sometimes doubles for a written document, and this is an incredibly stupid mistake.
One . . . or the Other
Your PowerPoint can serve admirably one or the other purpose . . . but not both.
Move from 2D business presenting to 3D presenting by incorporating the secrets of this PowerPoint Guide
The presentation – or show – is dramatically different than the written document that is meant to be reviewed later. Never let one serve in place of the other.
Prepare two separate documents if necessary, one to serve as your detailed written document, the other to serve as the basis for your show.
When you commit the error of letting a written document serve as your public presentation, here’s what usually happens: You project a parade of abominably cluttered slides onto the screen while you talk about them. Usually prefacing what you say with the words “As you can see . . . .” [this is called As You Can See Syndrome, or AYCSS]
The results are often poor, if not downright ugly and embarassing. It is a roadmap to disaster.
But the insidious part is that no one tells you the results are disastrous. They don’t tell you what makes your creation an abomination. So let’s discuss the types of issues you face in assembling your show.
No Magic Pills
Start by recognizing that no slide show can substitute for a lack of ideas, a lack of preparation, and lack of a story to tell. PowerPoint cannot rescue you with its colors, sound, and animation.
This is akin to Hollywood filmmakers who spend millions of dollars on dazzling special effects and neglect the story. They bomb miserably.
On the other hand, you can craft a winning film with a superb story and drama, but with minimal special effects: See the classic Henry Fonda film 12 Angry Men. You cannot craft a winning film with no story or a bad story populated with people you don’t care about.
Forget the notion that slides are somehow the backbone of your show. They have no special properties.
Slides can enhance your show . . . and they can most assuredly help destroy it. Presenting coach Aileen Pincus makes this point in her 2008 book Presenting:
“Slides are not a magic pill; they won’t organize a disorganized presentation; they won’t give a point to a presentation that doesn’t really have one; and they never make a convincing presentation on their own.”
So is there a reasonably easy way to get around this busy-slide pathology?
Of course, and this leads us to one solution to the problem of overburdened slides. Remember three words when you prepare your slides, and you can eliminate 90 percent of your PowerPoint pathologies.
Orient . . . Eliminate . . . Emphasize
First, orient your audience to the overall financial context. If you take information from a balance sheet or want to display company profit growth for a period of years, then display the sheet in its entirety to orient the audience. Tell the audience they view a balance sheet. Walk to the screen and point to the information categories. Say “Here we have this number” . . . “Here we have this category.”
Second, eliminate everything on the screen that you do not talk about. If you do not refer to it, it should not appear on your slide. Strip the visual down to the basic numbers and categories you use to make your point.
Third, emphasize the important points by increasing the size, coloring them, or bolding the numbers. You can illustrate the meaning of the numbers by utilizing a chart or graph.
When you orient, eliminate, and emphasize, you polish your meaning to a high sheen. You dump distractors that leech the strength and power from your presentation.
Consequently, by substraction you infuse your presentation with the zest that make it especially powerful.
Finance Presenting offers special challenges, but it’s also a chance to increase professional presence
Whether the presentations class is in Philadelphia . . . or Mumbai . . . or Cali . . . or Chennai . . . I hear the same universal and eerie refrain from finance students.
“Finance is different.”
“We don’t do all of that soft-skill presentations stuff.”
“For us, the numbers tell the story.”
Numbers seem to enchant business-people in deep and mysterious ways, as if numerical constructs are somehow less malleable than the English language, less subject to manipulation.
In a chaotic world, a spreadsheet exudes familiarity, a firm valuation offers comfort, an income statement serves as anchor.
False Certitude, Faux Anchor
For some, numbers convey a certitude and precision unavailable to mere rhetoric. And this illusion of certitude and precision exerts influence on finance folks to believe that, well . . . that the laws of human nature that stymie the rest of us do not apply to them in the coldness and hardness of objective numerical analysis.
But this is an illusion. And the result is 2D presenting, full of voodoo and bereft of nuance and subtle analysis.
Where business presentations are concerned, finance folks are not different, special, unique or otherwise gifted with special powers or incantations denied the mere mortals who toil in marketing or human resources.
We are all subject to the same demands placed upon us by the presentations beast, demands that nettle us equally and indiscriminately during the business presentation process.
As with most things, there is bad news and good news in this slice of life provided here.
The Bad News
The bad news is that modern finance presentations are a vast wasteland of unreadable spreadsheets and monotonous, toneless recitations of finance esoterica. It seems that there must be a requirement for this in finance.
In fact, many finance presentations devolve into basic meeting discussions about a printed analysis distributed beforehand, with the group of presenters merely standing while everyone else sits and interrupts with strings of questions. Several presentation cliches guarantee this sorry state of affairs a long life . . .
“Just the facts”
Exhortations of “Just the facts” serve as little more than a license to be unoriginal, uninteresting, and unfocused.
“Just the facts”
Folks believe that this phrase gives the impression that they are no-nonsense and hard-core. But there is probably no more parsimoniously pompous and simultaneously meaningless phrase yet to be devised. It achieves incredible bombast in just three syllables.
What does it mean, “Just the facts?” Which facts? Why these facts and not those facts?
Events are three-dimensional and filled with people; they require explanation and analysis. Mere “facts” are flat, two-dimensional, unemotional, and unsatisfactory proxies for what happens in the real world. “Just the facts” masks much more than it reveals.
“The numbers tell the story.”
This is a favorite of folks who seem to believe that the ironclad rules of presentations do not apply to them. “We don’t deal with all of that soft storytelling,” finance majors often tell me. “We deal in hard numbers.”
There’s so much wrong with this that it’s difficult to locate a reasonable starting-point. Not only do numbers, by themselves, tell no story at all . . . if numbers were conceivably capable of telling a story, it would be a considerably incomplete story, giving a distorted picture of reality.
The end result of these presentation shenanigans is an overall level of mediocrity and outright bad presentations. If firms want nothing more than a group discussion about a handout, with the only thing distinguishing the “presenters” from the audience is that they are standing, then so be it. It may be useful. It may be boring. It may be morale-building. It may be team-destroying. It may be time-wasting. But whatever else it is, it is not a presentation.
“Cut ’n’ Paste”
This is the heinous data dump that all of us inevitably see. PowerPoint slides crammed with data in tiny, unreadable font. The display of these heinous slides is accompanied by a sweep of the arm and the awful phrase: “As you can see . . . ” The cause of this pathology is the rote transfer of your written report to a PowerPoint display, with no modification to suit the completely different medium. The result?
Slides from Hell.
The Good News
In every obstacle exists an opportunity. Because the bar for finance presenting is so low, if you invest your presentations with the powerful principles that apply to all business presentations, your own shows will outstrip the competition by an order of magnitude. This, of course, implies that your content is rock-solid. It should be. Your ratio analysis, your projected earnings, your sophisticated modeling should all reflect the superb finance education you have received.
Build Credibility With a Powerful Presentation
But how you present that content is the key to presentation victory.
All of the presentation principles that we discuss here apply to finance presentations, particularly the parsimonious display of numbers and the necessity for their visual clarity. If anything, finance presentations must be more attentive to how masses of data are distilled and displayed.
A situation statement must be given.
A story still must be told.
Your analysis presented.
Conclusions must be drawn.
Recommendations must be made.
And external factors must be melded with the numbers so that the numbers assume clarity and meaning in an especially powerful 3D presentation.
If you do the above, and nothing more, then your finance presentations will outshine the hoi polloi with ease.
But if you delve even more deeply into the masterful techniques and principles available to you, learning to use your tools skillfully, you can rise to the zenith of the finance presentation world precisely because you are part of the tiny minority who seizes the opportunity to deliver an especially powerful presentation.
Beware the Zombies of bad business presentation advice
Over the years, I’ve learned that the zombies of bad 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.
Bad Advice
The process of becoming a great presenter is not so much prompting students to do something the right way. It’s getting you – yes, you – to stop doing things the wrong way.
Accordingly, I instruct students to stop what they’re doing now as a result of bad habits and bad advice. 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 downright decent. But 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.
Let’s Have a Look
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. 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 handwringing. It leaves your right hand free to gesture, and those gestures themselves appear more decisive.
ZOMBIE #2 “Make eye contact.”
This old chestnut is insidious in that it actually carries a large kernel of truth. On the surface, it sounds reasonable, but is such a cliche that we don’t really think about the words themselves. People don’t really talk this way. Instead, you “look someone in the eyes.” You don’t “make eye contact.” That make no sense. This gem of a cliche doesn’t tell you how to “make eye contact.” 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. Look individual audience members in the eyes long enough to ascertain eye color, then move on. This connects in a way that is comfortable for all concerned.
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. 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, providing a distorted picture 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 host 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 from folks who believe that the length of a presentation dictates the number of slides you use. 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 and snap crisply, and they carry your audience along for an exciting and joyous 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 advice. What’s the use? Just ignore it and replace it in you own work with sound power presenting principles. 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.
Don’t numb your audience with bad PowerPoint during your business presentation
Why is so much Bad PowerPoint out there in the corporate world?
I suspect that the reason for this is mimicry and corporate incest.
In the absence of good habits within an organization, bad habits perpetuate themselves, especially if senior leadership is the culprit. If the model within a firm is average or below-par, then this becomes the norm.
We unfortunately do not license users for competence or require that candidates complete a PowerPoint safety course to ensure that they commit minimal damage. As a result, bad PowerPoint technique thrives.
Mimicry Breeds Mediocrity
The natural tendency of people is to mimic the boss. They accept his style as proper. While this may serve you well as a corporate survival tool, it stunts your personal growth. Like any principle, it can be followed mindlessly, or it can serve you well if you are judicious.
Such is the case with PowerPoint. People see “professionals” use this tool in gross fashion, and they copy the bad technique.
They think it’s “the way to do it.”
I’m certain that this is how students develop such bad habits.
Some corporate vice president or successful entrepreneur shows up at your school unprepared to deliver a talk, believing that his professional achievements are enough to impress you. He or she believes that preparation is unnecessary, that faux spontaneity can carry the day.
They feel no drive to deliver a satisfying talk.
This worthy believes that anything he says will be treated as business gospel. Who can blame you for copying him and his bad habits?
But bad habits they are, and they span the disciplines. They run rampant the length of the corporate ladder. I separate these bad habits and actions into two broad categories – 1) the PowerPoint material itself, and 2) your interaction with that material during your presentation.
Let’s look at that first point.
Especially Bad PowerPoint
Oftentimes, students throw together a half-dozen makeshift slides. They cut-and-paste them from a written report with dozens of bullet points peppered throughout.
You’ve probably done this yourself. The results are slides that confuse the audience rather than reinforce your major points and which are delivered in awful, mind-numbing presentations.
There is a cost for serving up what designer Nancy Duarte calls bad slides . . .
“Making bad slides is easy, and it will negatively impact your career. Invest in your slides, but invest in your own visual skills as well. The alternative is to inadvertently commit career suicide.”
Absent specific instruction, you might believe that it’s acceptable to cut and paste graphics from a written report onto a slide. You then project that slide onto the screen while you talk about it. Usually prefacing what you say with the words “As you can see . . . .”
The results are usually poor, if not downright heinous. This is what I call the “As you can see” syndrome: AYCSS. It’s a roadmap to disaster.
But the insidious part is that no one tells you the results are disastrous. And they do not tell you what makes your creation an abomination.
So let’s discuss the types of issues you face in assembling your show.
What Makes Bad PowerPoint?
Agile interaction with your visuals is essential for an especially powerful business presentation
Start by recognizing that no slide show can substitute for a lack of ideas, a lack of preparation, and lack of a story to tell. PowerPoint cannot rescue you with its colors, sound, and animation.
This view is akin to Hollywood filmmakers who spend millions of dollars on dazzling computer generated special effects and neglect the story. The films flop, one after the other. Yet Hollywood does not get the message.
You can craft a winning film with a superb story and drama, but with minimal special effects: See 12 Angry Men. You cannot craft a winning film with no story or a bad story populated with people you don’t care about and who are buffeted by dangers and threats contrived by Industrial Light and Magic.
And it’s the same with your presentation.
Likewise, Aileen Pincus, a superb presentation coach, tells us that “Slides are not a magic pill; they won’t organize a disorganized presentation; they won’t give a point to a presentation that doesn’t really have one; and they never make a convincing presentation on their own.”
Start improving your slides and your use of them today. Implement the following three-step remedy.
Orient . . . Eliminate . . . Emphasize
First, orient your audience to the overall financial context.
If you take information from a balance sheet or want to display company profit growth for a period of years, then briefly display the balance sheet in its entirety to orient the audience. Tell the audience they view a balance sheet.
Walk to the screen and point to the information categories. Say “Here we have this number” . . . “Here we have this category.”
Second, eliminate everything on the screen that you do not talk about. If you do not refer to it, it should not appear on your slide. Strip the visual down to the basic numbers and categories you use to make your point.
Sure, put the entire balance sheet or spreadsheet on your first slide, tell your audience what it is to provide context, and then click to the next slide, which should contain only the figures you refer to.
Third, emphasize the important points by increasing their size, coloring them, or bolding the numbers. You can illustrate the meaning of the numbers by utilizing a chart or graph.
It is incredibly easy to do the above, if you know to do it. Most folks do not. But now you do.
Try these three simple steps, and I guarantee that your presentation improves dramatically.
The Complete Guide to Business School Presentinghas much more on how to interact in an especially powerful manner with your slides and avoid bad PowerPoint along the way to achieving personal competitive advantage.
Banish Bad Presentation Techniques Once and For All
A debilitating pathology of bad presentation technique afflicts many presenters.
It starts innocently enough . . .
You click the remote and a new slide appears.
You cast a wistful look back at the screen. You pause.
And then you reach for the easy phrase.
That’s when AYCS Syndrome can strike even the best of us, cutting us down in our presentation prime.
“As you can see.”
AYCS Syndrome
The phrase “As you can see” is so pervasive, so endemic to the modern business presentation that there must be a school somewhere that trains people to utter this reflexive phrase-hiccup.
Is there an AYCSS Academy? Probably!
The bain of AYCSS is that it is usually accompanied by a vague gesture at a screen upon which is displayed some of the most unreadable nonsense constructed for a slide – usually a financial spreadsheet or array of baffling numbers. Probably cut-and-pasted from a written report and not adjusted at all for visual presentation.
And the audience most assuredly cannot see. In fact, there might be a law of inverse proportion that governs this syndrome – the less the audience can actually “see,” the more often the audience is told that it can see.
And that’s why we reach for the phrase.
Because we can’t “see,” either.
We look back at an abstruse slide and realize that it 1) makes no sense, 2) never will make any sense, 3) is so complicated that we should have used four slides to make the point or should have deleted it, and 4) has no chance of contributing at all to our show. At that point, AYCS Syndrome attacks.
Numb and Dumb Your Audience with AYCSS
Finance students seem particularly enamored of AYCSS.
In fact, some rogue finance professors doubtless inculcate this in students.
Financial analysis of the firm is essential, of course. There are only few occasions when financial data do not make their way into a presentation.
Financial data are where you discover the firm’s profitability, stability, health, and potential.
But the results of your financial analysis invariably constitute the ugliest section of a presentation.
Something about a spreadsheet mesmerizes students and faculty alike. A spreadsheet splayed across the screen gives the impression of heft and gravitas. It seems important, substantial.
Everyone nods.
Too often, you display an Excel spreadsheet on the screen that is unedited from your written report. You cut-and-paste it into your presentation. You splash the spreadsheet onto the screen, then talk from that spreadsheet without orienting your audience to the slide.
This is the incredibly bad presentation technique displayed by finance students, in particular, that is accompanied by the dreaded words: “As you can see.”
Satanic Spreadsheets
You, the presenter, stare back at the screen, at the phalanx of numbers.
Perhaps you grip the podium with one hand and you airily wave your other hand at the screen with the words . . . “As you can see—”
And then you call out what seem to be random numbers. Random? Yes, to your audience, the numbers seem random because you have not oriented the audience to your material.
You have not provided the context needed for understanding. No one knows what you’re talking about. Your classmates watch with glazed eyes. Perhaps one or two people nod.
Your professor sits sphinx-like.
And no one has a clue. You get through it, finally, and you’re relieved. And you hope that you were vague enough that no one can even think about asking a question.
AYCS Syndrome is the tacit agreement between audience and presenter that neither of us really knows or cares what’s on the slide. And we promise each other that there won’t be any further investigation into whatever this abominable slide holds.
It can’t be good. Not for the audience, not for presenter.
All of this sounds heinous, I know. And probably too familiar for comfort. But you can beat bad presentation techniques with a few simple changes that we’ll discuss in days to come.
