I thought of words like “commandment,” “mandate” and “stricture” – but I ...
guidelines, but there are too many variables out there for all ten to work all the
time.
10 Simple rules to...
AVOID BAD POWERPOINT KARMA
& Have a Leadership Conversation
MAKE A POWERFUL POINT In order to Make a POWERFUL Point, we have to understand what works. We need to practice some of the art and science of using PowerPoint to persuade. I’ve broken this down into “Ten Simple Rules to Avoid Bad PowerPoint Karma and Have a Leadership Conversation.” I can tell you it took me a long time to settle on that phrase. I got a lot of pushback from colleagues and friends. The words “rules” “karma” and “leadership conversation” were all troublesome. Even the term “PowerPoint” was up for debate. Rules work. I thought of words like “commandment,” “mandate” and “stricture” – but I “ruled” them all out. Too strong. Too dictatorial. You can’t follow these Ten Simple Rules mindlessly. Sure they’re good guidelines, but there are too many variables out there for all ten to work all the time. I don’t want you to become the victim of unintended consequence. Likewise, “guide,” “tip” and “hint” didn’t make the cut. Much too soft. These rules are here because they work. Use them to help you. Think about how they apply to the context you’re in. By all means ignore them if you want to – but have a good reason in mind for doing so. Karma was difficult. I really do believe people inherit their PowerPoint Karma. We get out of presenting what we put into it – and for a lot of people, that isn’t much. We all participate in a community of boring PowerPoint, setting a standard of tedious slides full of bullets and the odd piece of clip-art. We perpetuate it by reusing old slides, borrowing from other bad presentations and being lazy about finding interesting visuals. The leadership conversation is the reason that you are up there presenting. You have a precious opportunity to persuade and make a positive impact on your audience. It is a leadership moment; one that should not be squandered.
Rule #1
KNOW WHAT YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE. There are probably a million variations across multiple cultures to say, “if you don’t know where you are going, it’s difficult to get there.” It’s one of those truisms that is absolutely – how do you say – true. Planning to achieve a particular outcome equally applies to your presentation. Opening up PowerPoint and typing up an outline is not the way to get started. It’s a path for dumping words on a slide and producing boring bullets. First, figure out what you want to achieve and then use that as both a guide and a filter. Get any old scrap of paper. A napkin will do. Draw a line down the middle, making two columns. On the left, write the title, “Outcomes I Want”. On the right, put the title, “What Does The AUDIENCE Need?” Underline the I and the Audience.
Think hard. Prioritize ruthlessly. Think some more. You’ve just been promoted. You’re having your first operations review. Your boss and the CEO of your company will both be there. What do you really want? If you’re honest, you probably want to avoid saying something that will end your career. But that probably doesn’t belong at the top. You might want to show up well. Have your boss feel she made the right choice in promoting you. Let everyone in the room know where you plan to go with your piece of the business. Whatever it is, be honest with yourself. Prioritize. Rank things in their order of importance to you. Now move to the right hand column. Put down what your audience needs. The best way to get that information is to ask the audience directly, in advance.
If it’s your first operations review, ask your boss what she wants: “What do you want to come out of this knowing?” “Are there any particular aspects you want me to cover in depth?” You will usually get a candid answer. After all, your boss has a vested interest in seeing you succeed. You can also ask a peer or a colleague. Find a good stand-in – someone you trust and respect. If all else fails, GUESS. Think about being in the audience. It will do you some good. In an operations review, for example, your audience will want to know that you have a solid handle on the business. They’ll want to understand how you are doing against the plan. Are there any shortfalls? How you will make up any gaps?
There is one more decision to make. Are you there to persuade or inform? A fair answer would be both. But the most effective presentation will skew towards one or the other. Persuasion connotes emotion, passion and entertainment. It’s usually more pitch and less technical. Informing is about content, organization and detail. It’s usually more technical, without glitter. A presentation without a point-of-view is dull and lifeless. A talk that is all flash and passion usually leaves you feeling like you’ve been sold a bill of goods. Know what you want to achieve. Don’t sit on the fence. An operations review requires more than persuasion. Sure it requires focus on detail and content. But that doesn’t mean a stream of data
Get a plan approved
with no point-of-view. You have to be able to add clarity and interest, detail and context. Likewise a pitch that is heavy with hot air and light on content won’t work. Pick a side and stay on it. OK, you’re done with step one, but don’t toss the napkin away just yet. You know what you want to achieve. This is your north star. As you dive into the work of pulling your presentation together, refer back to your notes. They will help as you create and refine your work.
w hat they want. Ask your audience . Or ask someone else Or guess! n, ask them anyway But w hen you begi
Report status
10 Simple Rules
Sell an idea
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Rule #2
TELL A STORY.
10 Simple Rules
Rule #2 falls into the category of easy to say, hard to do. Unless we work in a particularly creative business, storytelling doesn’t seem like honest businessrelated work. It seems like something we should be doing at home with our kids. And we are so used to PowerPoint, we’ve forgotten what a story is and how to tell it.
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Dictionary.com tells me that a “story” is “a narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader; a tale.” This is dead on. Don’t worry how factually accurate the story is. The point is to interest, amuse and instruct. (I am not suggesting that you lie, but don’t give a deposition, either. They’re usually not good stories.)
E.M. Forster talks about the difference between lifeless facts and a story in Aspects of the Novel. Look at this bald statement: The King and the Queen died. Now, listen to this tiny-story: The King died and then the Queen died of a broken heart. Which is more interesting? More emotional? Which will you remember? Persuade with stories. Stories have power – the power to engage, the power to educate, the power to move. The right stories give people the power to believe and the power to act. It’s been that way since Stone Age people huddled around campfires and invented language. It’s how we humans relate to each other.
(Thankfully, this picture isn’t the bathroom in the store – note that I’m not worried about the actual fact, but I did get your attention.) Josh’s first thought: “My customers will see this.” So he rolled up his sleeves and cleaned the bathroom. In fact, Josh spent so long in there cleaning; the store manager was worried about him and went to check to see if he was OK. It wouldn’t have been good for his career to have Josh have a medical episode in his store bathroom. He actually found something worse. The store manager and the COO then finished cleaning the bathroom together.
Why does Josh tell that story? 1. It humanizes him. It says that even though he has a big important title, he rolls up his sleeves and does what it takes to get the job done. 2. It’s an object lesson in focusing on the details. If you get the little things right, the big things follow. 3. It’s not about what your job is. It is about what you’re responsible for. This story has transcended into myth in Josh’s company. And now spotless bathrooms are everywhere!
Yet somehow, PowerPoint gives us permission to stop being people. Human interest gets replaced by bullets, spread sheets and clip art. Stories – and energy, engagement and stimulation – magically vanish. And we wonder why we get bored. Whatever you are going to say, use a story to say it. It can be a personal story that establishes your credibility. Or someone else’s story that highlights a particular opportunity or problem. Stories work. Use them.
10 Simple Rules
We work with the Chief Operating Officer of a multi-billion dollar business. Let’s call him Josh. Whenever Josh is in front of a group of his people, he tells a story about visiting one of his retail stores. When he walked into the store’s bathroom, he found it was filthy.
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Rule #3
IT’S ABOUT THEM.
10 Simple Rules
Remember this rule or you might as well be speaking to an empty room. There are two sides to every conversation. It’s your job to make sure that whoever you’re talking to is willing and able to hear what you have to say. Just because you have 30 minutes on an agenda to ramble on about your favorite subject doesn’t mean anyone has to listen. Assuming they are polite, all they have to do is sit there and pretend to listen.That’s why in Rule #1 you made your guide and dedicated 50% of the available space to what other people wanted to hear. Refer back to this. Give the audience what they want.
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They (those people staring at you with perky expressions) have to be the protagonist at the center of your story. If they aren’t the hero or heroine, or can’t identify with what you are speaking about, you’re wasting your time. You may feel you have an attentive audience. But you actually have people who have mastered the art of looking engaged while channel-surfing in their heads. If you are out there selling what your company can do for someone else, stop and think: Are they really interested in your company’s credentials? Or is what they really want the solution to their business problem. Can you help with
that? Do you understand what they are going through? The challenges they face? Can you make their job easier? Can you make them the hero that saves the day? If the answer to these questions is “yes,” I guarantee you will have authentic, rapt attention. You have to make it all about them. I can prove this scientifically. If you plot how Interested a member of the audience is, against how much your presentation is about them, using the formula where Interest = all (me)2 + I, you see a curve where interest exponentially increases the more it is about them. So clearly, any time the curve is in the not about me region, your audi-
ence is glancing at their Blackberries. When the curve is all the way over to the about me area, the audience has forgotten about Blackberries or what’s for lunch and is seriously interested. After all, who doesn’t like to hear about themselves? I call this phenomenon the slope of increasing relevance. Keep it in mind every time you start a new slide. You might want to sketch it on the back of the napkin with Rule #1 on it. OK, I’ll concede the math is dodgy here. But I do know if I start telling you something that is about you, or directly affects you, your ears will perk up. It’s
human nature. You will be less interested in hearing about someone else. Think about how to make the audience the central character in the story. Go back to that scrap of paper where you wrote what the audience wanted. If one of their objectives was to know how you will achieve plan in the fourth quarter, tell them. And don’t leave out the part they play in getting there. Remember, it’s all about them. Keeping your audience engaged is more important than making the content relevant and interesting. In this sense, “presentation” is a bad word. It implies a monologue. This won’t work. It can’t be a one way street.
Anyone who has carried a bag of samples around and made customer sales visits will tell you that monologues don’t make money. Dialogues do. If you show up in a customer’s doorway and you’re the one doing all the talking, you’ve probably talked yourself out of the sale. Same with your presentation. Find ways to get your audience engaged. Ask real questions. Pay attention to their needs. Don’t just rely on slides. Go to a flipchart, play a film clip, bring another voice into the room. Change the pace.
Given: 2 INTEREST = all (ME) + I Not about me NOT Interested
Not
About me VERY Interested
About Me 10 Simple Rules
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Rule #4
SET YOUR HOOK.
10 Simple Rules
All great stories have a great beginning. “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” “Call me Ishmael.” You probably won’t get to the level of Charles Dickens or Herman Melville, but you can take a page from their books. Set your hook at the very outset. You want to do two things with this: first; draw your audience in, and second, set the stage.
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One of the best examples comes from the movies. I was 11 years old when Star Wars came out. I can still remember the excitement as I read about a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Then the opening notes of the soundtrack blasted through the theatre. I was hooked. It drew me in and set the stage with the opening crawl:
“It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil GALACTIC EMPIRE. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet. Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy...” Thirty years have gone by. But that crawl, the music, and the imagery of a massive spacecraft being pursued by an even bigger one in the opening effects – this as a hook is still as powerful as the day it first played.
George Lucas drew me into the world of Star Wars and set the stage for a saga that millions of people around the world continue to see. You may not be George Lucas and you probably won’t get to the standard of Star Wars, but you can work really hard on getting the Hook. You only have one chance to make a first impression. If there is only one part of your presentation you practice, it has to be this one. A smooth and engaging start will immediately relax you, allowing you to have a more effective presentation. And it will get your audience up and running with you. It’s not easy to break through and get people really engaged. But it’s much harder to bring them in if you have a bumpy start...
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2. se
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(crawl) 10 Simple Rules
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Rule #5
USE A PROXY.
10 Simple Rules
In most cases, you suffer from “the curse of knowledge.” You know more about the topic than the average member of your audience. You are probably quite passionate about it too. There are two traps you can fall into here. One is trying to impart all that wisdom in one go, confusing your audience or boring them. The second trap is to lose them. You assume that they are as familiar with the topic as you. Your pace is too quick and your aim too high. A simple way around this is to use metaphor as a proxy. Introduce something you and the audience both know about. Use it to bring them up the learning curve without overwhelming them. Think of a simple, engaging proxy that explains and entertains.
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My partner Rose and I worked with an Area marketing group in a large, national technology company. This group had a simple mission: grow their data revenue from last to first place against the other geographies in the company. A planning session was held prior to the big presentation. We listened to seven very competent presentations that day. We heard about the state of the market, an analysis of where the competition was, what marketing programs would be put in place, what products were rolling out, etc. A lot of metaphors were used to help people understand. Bees and honey. Jigsaw puzzle pieces. The military. We saw timelines, roadmaps and lots of bullets.
What stood out in that crowd of information was a single phrase; “We need to move the needle.” It was said early on and echoed throughout the day. It was never written down. There was no visual. But this metaphor tied everything together. “If we could just move the needle when it came to data . . .” This became the rallying cry for the presentation and the yardstick by which progress was measured. That area went from dead last by almost every measure, to second in the space of three quarters, on the back of that one metaphor.
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Rule #6
DON’T MIX METAPHORS.
10 Simple Rules
OK, by now you’ve figured out what you want to achieve, set a powerful hook, come up with a story that draws in the audience, and developed a proxy that will allow people to easily latch on to your main point. Be careful now – you don’t want to go to extremes and create an awful stew of mixed metaphors.
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Phrases like, “One dark day in the middle of the night” and “You can’t make a leopard change his stripes” (when used deliberately) can be a useful emphasis. But Caveat Emptor – when you trowel on metaphor after metaphor, building a cacophonous tower of Babel, with every brick in the skyscraper composed of overused cliché after overused cliché you run the risk of being the moron in your verbal cloud of oxymorons.
You’d never speak or write like that, but for some obscure reason, it just seems like the thing to do when we put together a deck. Let’s look at this real example, shamelessly filched from a colleague’s laptop. Names have been changed to protect the guilty. I’ll switch on the cynical inner voice that everyone has, as I react to the visual assault.
OK, I get to hear about what we are going to do. Great.
This guy’s been playing with Excel. Look at that. 3D. Does green mean good and red mean bad? Or is green decision influence and current print provider?
Wow, more Excel charts. This guy can really crunch numbers.
Hmm, OK; an organization chart. Where am I? What are those colors? Yellow means decision influence. Green also means decision influence... That’s helpful.
Great, pie charts! I love pie charts. Just like high school. I wonder what the difference between unserved and ineligible is? Does red mean color and grey mean black and white?
Back to the chart wizard in Excel. I get it now. This is in black and white, so black and white charts mean black and white printing... Clever.
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Rule #7
10 Simple Rules
STAND OUT.
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OK – if you’ve figured this out by now, a big part of creating a great presentation is to know how to put the right em•pha•sis on the right syl•la•ble. First you prioritized what you wanted to achieve. Second you honed your story to a central point. Now you are going to set this up, break it down, and use visuals to support what you are saying. Time to use slides. A good rule of thumb is to have one central point on each slide you create. You just saw what happens when you try to cram too much in. “Wait a minute!” I hear you say. “That’s not so easy! I could end up showing hundreds of slides with one or two words on each.” Yes you could. You could also take a page from people in news, magazine publishing and web design. Essentially, their job
is to figure out how to take enormous amounts of information and organize it in a way that you can read and understand. It’s all about hierarchy. Figure out what the main points are and what supports them. Then decide how you want to structure your slides. If you go back to our beginnings as hunter-gatherers, early man had to survive in a wild environment. And we are specifically adapted to process visual cues very rapidly to avoid threats. We are still here because we’re good at picking things out. I’ve shown this slide to thousands of people. A field of (to most people) incomprehensible Latin, with three phrases hidden in plain sight. We see movement. Color stands out, and eventually irregularity. That’s our visual pecking order, and it works
for any age group in any culture. It’s how we used to avoid getting eaten by saber-toothed tigers. It’s how (for the most part) we are able to drive and follow road signs without collisions today. The eye is naturally drawn to movement first, then to differences in color and shading, and finally to irregularity or inconsistency in silhouette. These principles in reverse, work in camouflage. You can make them work for you. First, figure out the FEW things you want to say. Figure out the pecking order, and then make sure that your slides echo this order of importance as you create a visual hierarchy that matches the importance of what you are trying to say. Of course, certain people tend to fall in love and stay in an endless honey-
moon with the bells and whistles of PowerPoint. Discreet displays of affection are OK, but you can carry it too far. We’re equally as uncomfortable with the overuse of every color, motion and wild font, as we are by a couple playing tonsil-hockey on the train.
This is from a presentation about the changing marketing landscape circa 2004. It discusses four forces shaping the marketplace. A build took you through the high points of each.
Rule #7A: Know where you want the eye to go. The corollary of Rule #7 is rule #7A – know where you want the eye to go. You’ve thought about what you want on a slide. You know what the main point is. But there’s still a lot of information to convey. That’s fine – use motion, color and shape to build your hierarchy. This is a bad example. I didn’t create that slide and, without someone leading me through it, I have no idea what the main point is. Is it strategic relevance? The golden thread? The overall process? It just isn’t clear to me. On the other hand, you can still put an awful lot of information on one slide.
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Rule #8
AVOID THE DATA DUMP. “Laptop on a slide” says it all. It’s symptomatic of presenters who are worried about their wares, so to avoid being caught out with nothing, they have everything. Finance people are masters of this. They have slides composed of excel spreadsheets It’s great that you want to provide your audience with a lot of detail. I am just not convinced you really need to cut and paste from Excel into Powerpoint.
10 Simple Rules
The first slide is a typical Data Dump. A big table full of numbers. We have to take for granted that the numbers are right. We can’t read them in the room. Even if you print them out, they don’t tell any story. They don’t have a real point. They don’t inform. They don’t
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really provide cover either. If I am the senior executive in the review, just itching to talk about why unit sales of my favorite line extension in the south area aren’t meeting my expectations, and you haven’t happened to speak about it yet, this will be the “gotcha” moment. Despite what you want to say with this slide - maybe there is a great story about how the retail channel has performed (despite the fact unit sales in a certain line extension aren’t there) – you can bet we will be on my talk track, not yours. This type of slide just invites two reactions - inquisition or narcolepsy. Neither is good for you. Don’t use slides like this.
It’s far more powerful to use a single number. See the “after” version of a Data Dump slide. The main point was, “we can make $428 million in five years, if we go after this market.” And that is all it says. It’s a powerful, compelling number. It’s designed to get people to sit up and take notice.
Before
After
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Rule #9
DON’T TALK IN BULLETS. Everyone who talks about PowerPoint talks about bullets. Here is my little rule of thumb. They are your last option. If you can avoid them, do. Ironically, people tend to use bullets to protect themselves. They’re worried about being able to say everything they need. They think, “Hey, if I have a lot of information to share, bullets will keep me on track.” For the presenter, they work like a poor man’s teleprompter. Literally, a verbatim talk track to read.
10 Simple Rules
Let’s be clear. A teleprompter is designed to allow a speaker to appear conversational and at ease. Reading bullets from a slide does the opposite. It makes it look like you can’t remember what you wanted to say.
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Here is a typical example of a “before” slide, laden with bullets. Its part of a presentation about improving the customer experience for a business by changing product packaging. The presenter was trying to invoke a picture of a world where that customer experience had changed.
IMAGINE •Submit your rebates online •Participate in an online learning experience •Give our devices and services easy to read and easy to follow directions •Become environmentally friendly or “go green” •Improve our self-service for customers
Here is the “after” version. Very simply done, all in PowerPoint, with builds for each sub-point.
I’ve bulleted out the reasons people use bullets right here.
• It is nerve racking up here. A lot of
people are staring at me. I can’t afford a teleprompter, so these bullets are the next best thing.
Online Rebates
IMAGINE Online Learning
IMAGINE Simple Directions
IMAGINE
• Not only am I very smart, I have a lot to say. Just sit there and listen while I read it to you.
• I need to look smart. But I have
difficulty remembering big words. So I will prepare in advance with statements like “Dematerialization breaks down into all sectors except power. See detailed assumptions in Appendix 3”.
• What if I forget something? I can’t afford a teleprompter.
EcoFriendly
IMAGINE Total Self Service
IMAGINE
• They told me to! • Don’t worry, I’m a professional. It
won’t take long. I can speak faster than you can read.
Bullets also play into our need to look smart. In the calm of preparation, with access to company reports, Wikipedia and the resources of the Internet, I can come up with useful data, big words and interesting analogies that I don’t hold in my head. So I’ll just write those down on a slide, and show you that I am smart and prepared. Unfortunately, bullets come with a downside. Once we have gone through all that preparation, we feel a deep need to share every bullet and read them out loud. Never forget; the audience can read as well as you can, and they can do it faster than you can talk. By the time you’re on your last bullet, they’re looking at their Blackberries. There is no denying that bullets play a role. They anchor the audience to what you are saying. They provide context for the audience. They serve as a reminder for you. So how do you inherit the upside without the downside?
10 Simple Rules
Our three friends are here: Fear (I don’t want to stand out from the pack), Time, (I just don’t have enough), and Blindness (I’ve never seen it done any other way). There are some other very specific reasons why people love bullets. They fall into two categories: People’s need to feel safe (a reaction to fear), and their need to feel superior. Bullets
are like Linus’ blanket in the Peanuts comic strip. They offer a false reassurance that our mouths won’t suddenly go dry. We won’t break out into a nervous sweat. We won’t draw a complete blank. So we use them in place of memory. We write, nearly word for word, what we would like to say.
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Rule #10
NO GRATUITOUS PIXELS. This is the corollary of Rule #9: Don’t Talk in Bullets. You don’t want to overuse words on a slide – and you don’t want to overdo the pictures, either.
10 Simple Rules
You’ve gone through a lot of trouble to figure out what you want to achieve, the tone you’d like to set, and you’ve made a great start by setting your hook and drawing the audience in. The last thing you want is for them to tune out. It’s great that you are telling a story, you have a simple powerful theme, and you aren’t overdoing the bullets. Remember that you are constantly fighting the instincts of the human brain. Don’t allow your audience to let their minds wander.
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Thanks to the advent of the Internet, the rise of all sorts of new media and
the proliferation of tiny, powerful devices to connect it all for us, our lives have sped up and our attention span is shorter. Ten years ago, it would have been easier to stay focused for 30 minutes. Today, not so much. We are stimulated by such a broad variety of compelling inputs that we go channel surfing in our heads. I have been in presentations where one piece of clipart stimulated a mental journey from the company and our business strategy to shadows, clip-art and Microsoft, to jelly beans, to a sweet shop I frequented in my childhood, and a ranking of the world’s best confectionary. How do you overcome this surfing? Do you screen your audience to make sure no one has an over-active imagination and a capacity to tune out and daydream? This is tough, since it would
eliminate a good proportion of the human race, and consequently your audience. Start by being very prudent about the use of clip art. Great design is as much about what you leave out as what you put in. I know that you can use the clip-art button. You’ve probably figured out how to do some nifty animations. You may personally like word-art, 3D effects and drop shadows. But before you go there, think about the message you are trying to convey. Does the image support the point I am trying to make? Am I enhancing or amplifying it? Remember how color and clip art helped mix metaphors in the slides I showed you for Rule #6? Aesthetics and visuals play an important role in both engaging people and aiding recall. But you have to know what you’re doing.
Do the minimum to say the
10 Simple Rules
maximum. 20
Where do I go from here? All of these rules are designed to help you prioritize and focus your message. The whole point is to be able to get a memorable message across, and do it succinctly. The golden rule – do the minimum to say the maximum. When you cloud the message, confuse the logic of your points, or over-decorate your slides, you are finished. This is the first in a series of several pieces of forward thinking on Making a Powerful Point which we will publish. This first one dips a figurative toe in the water. We are going in at the shallow end, and starting with PowerPoint. But making a Powerful Point is broader than that. It’s about message discipline – how to communicate your strategy to the front line so they can execute on it. It’s about the leadership conversations you have, and the shadow you cast as a leader. And it’s about how you can communicate to your customers and clients in a powerful and emotional way, so they can understand the value you can provide to them and move them to action. I’ve grappled with my ability (and disability) to communicate professionally for about 20 years. At first I thought PowerPoint was a silver bullet. Then I began to learn. My journey began in university, thinking, “No, please don’t make me stand up and speak.” Then I graduated to “I can do this if I have to.” I didn’t do it very well, and went back to graduate school – partly to find out more. In the past several years, I’ve been able to do this for a living. Over that time, I’ve found that ideas and lessons on how to communicate to broad audiences come from everywhere and anywhere. Building up to researching and writing a Powerful Point, we have become parttime students a in mishmash of fields. Everything from stand-up comedy, news programming, visual design, architecture, comparative literature, information architecture, object oriented programming, requirements engineering, cinema and television, psychology. Typography. Politics. Rhetoric. Advertising. Journalism. We’ve also learned from our clients experiences. People ask us to help them make a powerful point. We pull their slides apart. Get in touch with what they need to say. Understand what their audience wants. And we put something better back together. The good news is that this first piece touches on pretty much everything you need to bear in mind as you make a Powerful Point. The bad news is that we are only dipping our toe in the water. There are questions left unanswered and detailed explanations required. How do I create compelling messages? How do I tell impactful stories? How can I build message discipline throughout my organization? How can I make sense of and use complex data? How does my audience hear me? What triggers their memory and retention? How do I design visually appealing slides? What is a good design and assembly process? How do I prepare to speak? What do I look like while I present? 10 Simple Rules
All of these questions are noteworthy in themselves. Each new title in the series will address one of these in depth. They can be read separately for the specific knowledge they contain. But if you want to come back to the whole, take another look at this piece of forward thinking. It is the glue the others will all connect with.
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10 Simple Rules
Design Lead: Ben Bassak Content Lead: Gavin McMahon
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10 SIMPLE RULES © 2012 fassforward Consulting Group
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fassforward is a boutique consulting firm that helps big companies do big things because of an uncanny ability to translate their vision into practical game-changing reality. We are a transformation company. We have deep expertise in systemic change, advising and developing leaders, and translating confusing messages, data, and information into a simple clear picture people can see themselves in. Powerful Point is a system that helps you get promoted, win more business, and create a following through better presentation. Deep down every professional knows they’re auditioning for that next job every day. Every sales person needs a winning pitch. Every leader has to inspire and energize their people. How do you get better? By doing the right things; having conversations that frame and shape how people view the world and conversations that move people to action. If you know your presenter type, who your audience is, what they want to hear/see, the means of presenting, and how to build the best deck to support you, you be able to communicate in the most powerful and direct way. To learn more about how Make a Powerful Point, call Jess at .914.738.7200. If you have a critical pitch or presentation coming up, we can help.
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