Excellent blog post on presentation from Jake McKee

Jake McKee is the Principal at Ant's Eye View, a Dallas-based customer collaborations strategy practice.

Clearly, this post on his blog belies the comment, “I’m just a n00b at all of this public speaking stuff.” He offers up some sophisticated tips which are very useful to the average business presenter.

His brainstorming and content creation process is quite ingenious:

Typically my presentations, whether client research findings or conference keynote, start on the white board. I start free forming a running list of ideas, thoughts, points, and issues that may be relevant. This includes everything from major points to minor factoids.

Once I come across a point that I see as “significant”, I write it down on an index card and lay it on the floor. (I may also thumb through an old stack of cards from an previous session) Pretty soon there’s a bunch of cards laid out on the floor. I take a first pass at culling them down a bit, putting them in some sort of order, and identifying anything that might be missing. I’m a very visual person, so seeing this all laid out in front of me really helps.

This idea of whiteboarding, then culling the broader points to index cards is outstanding. Too often, speakers think of their presentation as text and words. This method is a more visual, right-brained, big picture method that is likely to lead to a better organized and well-thought-out structure. It's a very effective and creative way to get started.

Jake goes on to add a great suggestion about time:

No audience likes watching the presenter hurry through the last 15 slides in 2 minutes because they ran out of time. I tend to plan content for no more than 75% of the time allotted, although typically I plan for more like 50% of the time allotted.

Throughout the planning process, I’ll develop for that 50% target (i.e. 30 minutes of content for a 1 hour time slot). This helps me to ensure that I’m focusing on the truly important issues, but it also makes it easy to deal with the “oh yeah!” content that pops in during the rest of the development.

He is SO right about ideas coming up later in the process and adding that extra 25%.

I concur completely with Jake's point about clothing: “one step above the audience.” I want to be the best-dressed person in the room but only by a little bit.

He says:

I always try to ensure I’m presenting wearing my wildly comfortable Nike AirMax 360 sneakers.

If you can get away with sneakers, more power to you. I wear either Ecco, Rockport, Cole Haan Air Nike brand dress shoes because they are as comfortable as running shoes but very stylish and acceptable in ANY environment, right up to the boardroom.

He also has some great tips on visual media - images, PowerPoint / Keynote, etc.

Terrific post, Jake!

How NOT To Use Powerpoint

I just came across this very funny video on YouTube:
"How NOT To Use Powerpoint By Comedian Don McMillan"
Good advice for anyone who uses PowerPoint.

Urban Word of the Day: nano nap

This made me laugh.

Are people taking "nano naps" during your meetings or presentations?

Urban Word of the Day
www.urbandictionary.com

August 14, 2007: nano nap

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nano+nap&defid=2345578

An unintentional, seconds-long nap that you take most often in class or a really boring meeting. So short that usually nobody but you notices.

I caught myself taking a nano nap on that conference call

Images and PowerPoint update

bigstockphoto.com

Check it out.

They license stock photos for $1 - 2 per image. The quality of images seems high and the selection appears to be good.

I'd like to hear about your experience using them.

Images and PowerPoint

Finding images for PowerPoint slide shows is a time consuming process.

That said, it can be time well spent ... if you are using PowerPoint correctly, making images and graphics the focus rather than text.

PowerPoint is misused by the VAST majority of corporate users. Edward Tufte (described by The New York Times as "the Leonardo da Vinci of Data") believes that PowerPoint is responsible for degrading the effectiveness of corporate presentations. In his words:
"Rigid slide-by-slide heirarchies, indifferent to context, slice and dice the evidence into arbitrary compartments; producing and anti-narrative with choppy continuity."

In a sense, we are using a linear, hierarchical, left-brained format to communicate a layered right-brained narrative.

It's clear to me now that learning to utilize the right-brained big picture tools of story and metaphor is a requisite to excellent communication.

Finding the right image to capture a visual metaphor or to tell a story can be a tricky business. That's why I was very interested in an article in the April issue of Business 2.0, titled, "You Ought To Be In Pictures." The article focuses on the business of licensing images and lists several image sources.

There are "The Goliaths":

• Corbis
• Getty

And "The Davids":

• Fotolia
• Dreamstime
• Shutterstock

I would add to that list:

• Concept Images
  

Of course, Google's image search is a great resource for images but one has to be careful about violating copyright laws, especially for corporate presentations. Also, Google can be far more time consuming as the images are usually not labeled or tagged with the searcher in mind.

In other words, if you are looking for the image of a female archer, you are likely to use "female archer" or "woman archer" as your search string. However, Jill, an avid archer might post dozens of high-quality images of herself practicing archery on her personal web site and never use those words to label her photo files.

The sites that license the use of their images are incented to tag them so that they can be found easily. Hence, searches using the paid sites can often be less time-consuming.

When I work with intact teams, I coach clients to create a pool of images that each team-member can draw from. This can help to cut down the amount of time spent on searching for images. In addition, it encourages conversations about how various images, stories and metaphors are being employed. "Good artists copy. Great artists steal." said Pablo Picasso. You SHOULD be stealing ideas from colleagues, if you want to truly master the art of communication.

I've made much personal effort to make sure I had access to all the images that we at The Henderson Group have compiled over the years. Having a good recall of these images has often saved me from time-consuming image searches.

This is an important personal practice that can benefit your team-members as well. Some final tips:

1. Thinks in terms of story and metaphor
2. Use images to tell your story or illustrate your metaphor
3. Use image resources and services to help you find the right image
4. Make the image the focus on the slide, taking up more real estate
5. Minimize the use of language
6. Keep bullets to a minimum
7. Think of your bullets as very succinct "hooks" (more on this is a future post)
   

Low tech presentation

On Saturday, April 28 our local paper, The Press Democrat (A NY Times paper), published a front-page article titled, "Pen and paper trump tech: In a world of impersonal gadgets, techies are turning to tactile pleasures" by Meg McConahey.

For example:
"Moleskine notebooks, classic bound journals into which Matisse poured his sketches and Hemingway his prose, have become almost "a fetish" among techies, said Rich Gibson, Internet mapper and database programmer from Sebastopol."

This parallels the experience that I often have when a participant in a presentation skills workshop or coaching session turns to the flip chart or white board.

The use of the hand-written media often draws more attention than PowerPoint. In addition, the human touch of a crudely drawn figure or flow chart has more charm than a carefully crafted, slick presentation slide.

The additional advantage is that such a graphic can be quickly drawn on the fly with minimal preparation whereas an intricate flow model can take hours to construct in PPT.

This reminds me of Polish director Jerzy Grotowski's arguments for a low-tech theater in "Towards a Poor Theater." Grotowski argued that theater should be stripped down to it's essence: "a theatre in which the fundamental concern was the work of the actor with the audience, not the sets, costumes, lighting or special effects ... 'Poor' meant the stripping away of all that was unnecessary" according to the WikiPedia entry on Grotowski.

Often, presenters become so enamored by (or addicted to) their technology that they lose the human connection with their audience.

As my mentor David Henderson used to say, "They won't form a relationship with your slides."

Guy Kawasaki, Visionary!

Back in January, I was leading a workshop at TIBCO with their marketing team. Stefan Farestam sent me some links to sites that he likes.

I spent about an hour surfing around Guy Kawasaki's blog, How to Change the World.

As his site states, "Guy Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine."

He offers very interesting perspectives on work, business, start-ups. I loved his ideas about presentation and the use of PowerPoint. I particularly liked his "The Art of the Start Video."

I am not worthy ...

Slide remotes

Often in my presentation skills workshops the subject of PowerPoint presentation remotes will come up.

A couple weeks ago at TIBCO, a client showed me his very cool Logitech slide remote with a built in timer. It can be set to vibrate at 2 & 5-minute intervals. That's a nice feature for verbose windbags, like me.

I've been a fan of Logitech mouses (mice?) for years. This unit requires no software - it is plug and play and has extra features like "launch slideshow", "black screen", and volume control, plus an integrated laser pointer (which I personally think should be banned). The cordless mini-receiver stores inside the device.

I'm jealous.

That said, I still love my MobileEdge remote which was a gift from a client, Doug Dooley at Juniper Networks.

It has similar features - forward, back, black screen, white screen, (Yes, it also had the cheesy laser pointer).

It doesn't have the timer but it is parked inside my laptops PCMCIA slot when not in use, so I never have to find my remote. AND it slips into my trouser pocket without breaking the line of my slacks. Always a plus for the fashion conscious. Way cool!