Jim Harvey's Presentation Blog

I've moved to www.jim-harvey.com

2011-08-07T13:22:00.001+01:00

Dear all,

I've moved my blog to www.jim-harvey.com hope you like the new look. Thanks for your loyalty here.

Jim

It’s all about you-

2009-12-06T19:07:00.002Z

There’s a word for it. It’s called ‘a tell’. It’s when a speaker ‘tells’ the audience about something without saying anything. There are congruent tells, where the subtle message reinforces the real one, like smiling sincerely and saying 'I'm really happy to be here'; and such congruence makes for a powerful message. Then there’s the incongruent tell which (you won’t be surprised to hear) does the opposite and makes for some exquisitely awful moments.

I think that they’re funny actually because, like that old saying that no matter how hard you try to convince someone of something, the harder you try, the more they think the opposite (eeeeek).

For me there’s a number of phrases that are more often than not, a sign of an incongruent ‘tell’. Here they are-

1. This is all about you.... Often as the speaker points to himself like Simon Cowell, meaning it's always' all about me...

2. I have your best interests at heart... Accompanied by a psychotic smile and glacial eye contact- start looking for the door. Ruuuun!

3. Trust me... - Obvious question- Why would anyone ask that of anyone else?

4. Maybe I’m a terrible person but... Translation- Obviously they are, just agree and walk away.

5. My primary concern is about making this right for you... Request- Well stop stabbing me in the back then

6. Our most important asset is our people... Translation- And we're selling as many of them as we can because we can't melt them down for candles.

Why would a speaker say any of these things unless he was nervous about displaying the truth? Watch out for these phrases and see if you think the person really means what they’re saying or is simply saying something that she thinks we want to hear. Tells are always telling.

George Orwell - suitable subject for a tattoo?

2009-10-29T17:50:00.004Z

I know that Orwell only wrote 4 decent books (The Road to Wigan Pier, Down and Out in Paris & London, 1984 and Animal Farm- in my opinion). As a novelist, I feel he was better at the ideas than their expression, but the was a truly great journalist. You'll all probably know his rules for writers-

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive when you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.

Well I don't understand why they're not tattooed onto the forehead of every single one of us who would seek to tell others how to talk. Yes, you'd change the first point to 'hearing in conversation' but that'd be it. It's great advice for us all and I'm going to commit to enforcing these rules whenever I hear professionals abusing them.

Oh, and as for point 6, I didn't really understand it until the evening I told a rather rude story about a celebrity at an after dinner speech I was making, and got roars of wicked laughter from every table except one.

I later found out from one of the party that the 'victim's' mother (and the story was true), had paid for the 12 people to be there and was sat stony-faced among them. Who would have thought it was possible? So I understand the point and still feel like a barbarian for having embarrassed a lovely lady, even though her son is a brute.

Orwellian word crimes- Modern heroes # 1

2009-10-29T08:54:00.002Z

Who could have said this without irony? They'd have to be in Management Consulting or HR wouldn't they?

Having finished my deck of (presumably PowerPoint) slides I shall now ping you over to Paul who will, no doubt be granular in providing you with the long-tail solutions in implementing the TOM by the TIMs through the twilight zone and beyond..

Answer he's the Head of HR, sorry, Human Resources, for Somerset County Council, a local government in the UK. Speaking at a conference in Summer 2009.

The confidence myth- why confident presenters often miss the point

2009-10-28T08:29:00.003Z

I've got a friend called Quentin. He's an actor and a good one too with a long track record of theatre, stage & screen roles behind him. Actors can sometimes be a bit full of themselves but not Quenty, he's a no-nonsense kind of bloke and when he says something to me with that special look on his face (like a bald bulldog chewing a wasp), I tend to listen.

We were working together with a group of high-end consultants preparing to pitch for a massive governement outsourcing contract in Europe. The pitch was strong, straight to the point and short. The team was skilful and experienced and very good, with one crucial exception. Let's call him Bob.

Bob was a technically competent presenter, with great experience in his field, but he was 'performing' the role of 'opener' and 'closer' of the pitch and he was borderline bloody awful. He was a classic example of the confident (but not really) presenter yhou see in corporate life. Here's what we could see with Bob-

He was smiling like the joker from Batman
He was talking too loudly for the room they were (and would be in)
There was an edge of 'I'm not frightened of you' in his delivery
He was trying too hard to be 'good'
He was presenting like he was watching himself on video and enjoying the experience

Bob was a really nice man off stage, but as soon as he got up in front of an audience he became unbearable to watch, and he didn't know it. As it always is, it became a matter of how do you broach the issue in a way that will allow him to learn, move on and do better for himself. Quent gave me 'the look' and I let him go.

Quent just asked him to stop 'performing', or 'pretending' to be something that he was not. He wasn't fearless, he was trying not to show his fear. He wasn't charismatic, he was trying to be charismatic. He wasn't compelling he was working at being compelling and all of that effort to be something else, took away from his technical skill as a presenter and his honesty as a real human being.

Bob came back to the room a totally different figure. Thoughtful, slightly shy and awkward, reflective and decibels quieter and he gave the introduction again and his team were spellbound and applauded at the end. Bob said to them, 'What's that for?' and one of them said 'for sounding like you really believed in what we are going to do.' Bob smiled and looked at Quentin and said it's his fault, he reminded me of the dictionary definition of confidence.'
'What's that?' said his colleaguue. 'Con fides, in good faith.' said Bob and Q said

'The problem for experienced and skilled presenters is that they often become 'performers' and switch off the thing that made them good in the first place, their warmth and honesty as a person. Then they become like hammy actors...' Everyone laughed and went on with the reheaesal.

Who should we look up to?

2009-10-21T18:33:00.004+01:00

When you're pretty good at something it can be easy to get into a comfortable spot and stay there. It happens to me about once a week, when I'm sitting there thinking, 'That went rather well. God I'm good...' and for those 15 seconds of warmth and complacency all is rather nice with the world.

I've painted myself as a bit of a lazy fool here, but to be fair, I don't tend to stay smug for very long. I'm rational enough to know that the world is full of talented people and that my loyal clients are only loyal to me as long as I continue to do well for them. Today though, I'm inspired and Stephanine Flanders (pictured) is the reason.

She's the BBC's (British Broadcasting Corporation) Economics Editor. I'm 45, male, reasonably well educated and literate, but that's what she did to me. She made me look at myself, and she made me feel that I could do better. I suggest that you watch her, wherever you're from, and notice these things about her, or other things if she strikes you differently-

She's not trying to be anything she just is- authoritative, concise and confident.
There's a truthfulness in her tone and delivery that is about her as a human being.
She is a model to watch while talking with projected visuals.

Hear her speak
See her present a piece to camera

I think she's the best the BBC has. I'd be interested to see whether you agree.

The 5 most irritating things that good presenters do but great presenter's don't

2009-10-20T17:19:00.002+01:00

I'm not trying to be smug, that comes with out effort, but it's a question I asked myself today. And here are my answers- based on exhaustive research (none) behind the ranking- The 5 most irritating things that good presenters do, but great presenters don't are-

Think that they can get away with 'winging it'.
Ignore the people in the seats until the presentation starts.
Assume that the audience knows and/or cares who they are.
Ask people to save their questions until the end.
Ask questions of the audience that they know the answers to already.

NB- the question came to me when I started thinking, honestly, about my own performance highs and lows- Physician heal thyself! What have I missed?

6 pieces of tomfoolery that some public speaking coaches tell you- and why they're wrong

2009-10-17T13:51:00.014+01:00

Philip Larkin, late, lonely, lovely English poet, wrote a short and bitter little thing that leads us into why so much rubbish is spouted to us by people who really should know better. 'This be the Verse'...

They F*** you up your Mum and Dad'
They do not mean to but they do,
They fill you up with all their troubles,
Then throw a few in extra just for you.

But they were f***ed up in their turn,
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern,
And half at one another's throats,

Man hands on misery to man,
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as quickly as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Hmmm. Larkin didn't have any kids and he died friendless and alone, so let's not use him as too much of a role model. But it makes me think that we've all been taught things by people who, were doing what they thought was best for us, with the tools at their disposal, at the time. Hindsight is the human being's greatest gift, isn't it?

Obviously a lot of what we've been told is valid but some, we come to realise, is just plain useless. I look round the great presentation skills blogs by my colleagues across the world (I'll tell you who they are as we go on) and all of us seem to have a collected a few of the presenting 'myths' to dispel, so here are 6 things that I was taught on my journey; by trainers who meant well; but that I've found to be fool's gold as I've grown.

Don't speak too quickly- What a lot of tosh. Some people speak more quickly than others, and they should because it reflects them, their culture and their personality. It's never how quickly you speak that affects whether you're understood. It's how well. Ever seen the 'Quick Shakespeare Company' who can do 'Hamlet' in 4 minutes? They speak at a rate of hundreds of words a minute and are easily understood. Why? Because their articulation is perfect and they honour the punctuation in the piece.
Don't say 'Umm' or 'Errrr'- Why not and who cares? If it's a natural, human sound you make occasionally when you're thinking, then I think people don't notice. But if it's the sound you make at the end of every sentence while you think of what to say next, it probably means you're not prepared and you should be whipped for it.
Don't use notes-Why not? What they often mean is 'pretend you don't need notes' and you end up using your slides, or a surreptitously hidden piece of paper, that looks poor and makes you nervous. Notes, cue cards, scripts are all fine and rather like wigs (toupees, hairpieces, whatever they're called where you live), they should be used unapologetically and well.
Don't get nervous?- Why not? Surely it's nervous excitement that delivers real performance. You should get nervous, throw-up if it helps, but learn to use the adrenaline and manage the effects so that you're really 'switched on' when you perform. Most audiences like to see a little sign of nervous energy at the start. It tends to mean that the speaker is taking us, and her subject seriously.
Don't wave your hands about- Again, what are the other options? Handcuffs? Pockets? Behind your back? No. Use your hands, gleefully, joyfully (and all those other words from 'The Logical Song' by Supertramp) naturally. It's what human beings do when they talk, and it helps you to express, emote and, errr, think.
Don't get in the way of the projecter- OK so why not? Surely you have to if you want to engage with your visuals, and direct your audience's attention to where it's best for them. What's the alternative? Stand next to it, stiff as a board, looking like a lemon? Just do it deliberately and love it.

Where do most of these myths come from? American political pollsters who look at politicians and how they 'work' on TV. Their results, over time are then passed on to political advisers, who work with their politicians on very specific issues to do with the way they come over on camera. And guess what? All of the things I've listed above do look terrible on TV because there's that really powerful, small frame, close-up, magnifying effect that TV has.

From Nixon vs Kennedy in the 60's (we're back to old style hats and coats) to McCain v Obama right now, the US election is a battle that's won on the news networks, so it's really important that candidates know the rules.

That's where all this stuff comes from. It's all valid for TV and totally, completely, ludicrously irrelevant for us in the real world of work.

Have you heard? PowerPoint is dead- Prezi is here

2009-10-16T19:22:00.010+01:00

What is Prezi?

In a nutshell, Prezi is a Flash-based presentation system that allows users to create incredibly dynamic presentations. Presentations where you can zoom in and out across a large area (no slides), create motion paths, embed images and video and do things that previously needed a pretty competent Flash developer and a whole chunk of time. It kicks traditional slide ware way into touch. And it is very, very easy to learn and use.

Is it better than PowerPoint?

No of course it’s not. I don’t even see it as a competitor. If Microsoft’s tool is the motor car, Prezi is the hand-built kit car for weekend use only. It looks lovely, it fills your heart with joy, it performs wonderfully well on those high mountain roads in summer, when love is in the air and you’re 25... But it's fragile, windy and noisy and you wouldn’t take the kids away in it, for a week skiing in December. Not yet anyway.

Obviously, Prezi is not as broad, flexible, integrated or widely used as Bill's much derided package, so it’s nowhere near PowerPoint as the default option for corporates, but as an expert user of PowerPoint, I could do some things much more easily and powerfully with this little gem, and there are times that I’d choose to use it, without question, simply because Prezi’s starting position is so different.

Crap presenters will still present badly with Prezi, maybe even worse because there’s less structure to follow than in a PPT template. But designers, poets, CEO’s who want to woo investors, show-offs, me, and people with a little bit of hunger for the new and dangerous will just want to have a go.

Should we learn how to use it?

Of course you should.

Why ?

It differentiates you from 99.99% of the others in your field. Put it more directly. I had a pitch last week for a big chunk of credit-crunch busting work over 2 years. I created a great story, charmed the client, created the visuals and chose to use this (with a PPT backup if all went wrong). It just wowed them. It made us look and feel different to the other people who'd walked into that room before us. Yes, we did a good job too- 95% our work, 5% these slavic nutcases at Prezi. But it helped .

You've got to try it out if you call yourself a presenter. Haven't you?

Lesson 6- Use everything in the verbal bag of tricks- but sparingly

2009-10-16T14:58:00.002+01:00

Use Alliteration:

Alliteration is the deliberate arrangement of words with the same letters and sounds at their start for explosive effect. Alliteration is a trick of the spoken word. A technique that is very popular with tabloid newspaper editors, TV presenters and poets… Examples

Magazine articles: “Science has Spoiled my Supper", “Too Much Talent in Tennessee", and "Kurdish Control of Kirkuk Creates a Powder Keg in Iraq"
Comic/cartoon characters: Beetle Bailey, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Phineas and Ferb, and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.
Children's Books: Animalia by Graeme Base is a famous example of alliteration within a storybook.
Shops: "Coffee Corner", "Sushi Station", "Best Buy".
Expressions: "busy as a bee", "dead as a doornail", "good as gold", "right as rain", etc..

Try Onomatopoeia:

The formation of names or words from sounds that resemble those associated with the action or thing to be named, or that seem to suggest its qualities; babble, cuckoo, croak, ping-pong, quack, sizzle and snore are all probable examples.

It can also mean the use of words whose sound adds meaning to the meaning of those words. “Whoosh” is a word that actually sounds like the sound that you are using it to describe.

Slimy, slithering, slippery and squelchy are words used to describe how something feels. The words themselves have a similar feeling. Slithering sounds wet and greasy and disgusting so hopefully the impact of the sentence and the overall meaning is enhanced.

Use the Rhythm of the words:

“Rhythmic speech or writing is like waves of the sea, moving onward with alternating rise and fall, connected yet separate, like but different, suggesting of some law, too complex for analysis or statement, controlling the relations between wave and wave, waves and sea, phrase and phrase, phrases and speech. In other words live speech, said or written, is rhythmic, and rhythmless speech is at best dead.” (Fowler’s Modern English Usage)

Some people use meter, the counting of beats and pauses and syllables and lines as the measure of rhythm. Don’t bother. Just get into the habit of saying what you write or intend to say out loud. If it sounds good then it’s probably rhythmical. If it sounds stilted, confused, over-complex then it probably isn’t.

Lesson 5- Use the simple metaphor to help- Learn Jeremy Clarkson's only trick

2009-10-16T14:51:00.001+01:00

Metaphor is a fundamental tool of the English language. Without it, meaning would suffer because we would be left with flat description not vivid pictures in words. A metaphor makes a link between previously unlinked things. This linking can add meaning, and depth to our understanding of the world.

When Mrs Thatcher, the UK's formidable first lady Prime Minister, was first called the "Iron Lady" many people laughed because the word "iron" is used metaphorically. To some iron represents fearlessness, to others heartlessness, for some it represented her principles and for others her lack of them. This metaphor stuck because it allowed people to say so much about their subject in a simple phrase. Well-worn examples of metaphor:

A trail of broken dreams
Someone or something falling at the first hurdle
Shareholders crying foul
Lloyds TSB gobbling up Royal Bank of Scotland
Heavy-handed asset strippers

Use simile too, she's metaphor's more direct sister and we know and love her as a natural part of our language, for simile is another version of metaphor. The difference though is that in a simile the comparison between two things is direct, and is often signified by the use of phrases like “like a” and “as if…” Common examples of similes include…

To follow like a lamb to the slaughter
To laugh like a drain
To look like grim death
To swear like a trooper

With a bit of thought you can invent your own for great and memorable phrases, remember Jeremy Clarkson has built his career out of this single skill. http://www.jeremyclarkson.co.uk/jc-top-gear-quotes/

Lesson 4 - Use visual imagery

2009-10-16T14:02:00.005+01:00

Hypnotists and comedians know that people hypnotise and amuse themselves. A hypnotist's job is to get the subject to use her own imagination to 'see' that other possibilities exist. To see her walking into a room with confidence, getting the job, making the presentation.

A comedian's job is to get us to see the joke just before he deliver's the punchline. Billy Connolly telling us that he told his ageing father that you could get prescription windscreens made for short-sighted drivers, and his father, having believed him, pestering him for weeks for the phone number of the garage who could fit him one. Billy then turns to us and says 'can you imagine driving in front of a car with a prescription windscreen? You'd look in your rear-view mirror and see a head (signalling with his hands) THIS BIG'.

When you give a presentation, try to create strong mental pictures for your audience. We are open to language that gets us to use our mind's eye to imagine whatever it is being described to us. Poets do it too.

“He was a proper poet he was,
He had a way with words,
Images flocked around him like birds,
Words, he could almost make them talk…”
Roger McGough

It's not just hypnotists, poets and comedians who can use it though, Gerry Spence, a very successful trial lawyer puts it as follows…

“I visualise my arguments, I don’t intellectualise them. I don’t choose the intellectual words like, ‘My client suffered grave emotional distress as a result of the serious fraud perpetrated against him by the defendant bank.’ Instead in my mind’s eye I see him coming home at night and I tell the story:

‘I see Joe Smith trudging home at night to face a heap of unpaid bills sitting on the kitchen table. Nothing but cold bills to greet him in that cold empty place. No heat, no light, no water, all cut off by the utility companies. I see my client, a tired man, a man worn down by the weight of his troubles, a man without a penny to him. The bank had it all…’

Lesson 3- Avoid cliché like the plague:

2009-10-16T13:42:00.001+01:00

In the " Dictionary of Plain English", the editor A.G. Fowler says…

"Hackneyed phrases become hackneyed because they are useful in the first instance; but they derive a new efficiency from the very fact that they are hackneyed."

I think he means that clichés can be useful if you use the right ones. Use the familiar phrase if it expresses your meaning clearly, but not simply because it is familiar. Then it becomes lazy.

"Dog-tired" is ok, "sick as a parrot" is not.

"Original thinking" is OK, "Blue sky thinking" is vomit worthy

"From start to finish" is OK, "chapter and verse" is hopeless

"Starting tomorrow" is OK, "Going forward" is horrible

Lesson 2- Remove business jargon: Blah, blah, blah

2009-10-16T13:33:00.008+01:00

Abstractions distance the audience from you as a speaker, they make it harder for you to connect your ideas with their lives. On bad days they make you sound like a charicature of corporate foolishness. The most commonly used abstractions in presentations are jargon. If you want to leave a warm & human impression behind, and sound sincere, then delete stuff like this from your phrasebook. No-one will notice if you do't use such tired old guff, key people will notice if you do and they won't be thinking 'What joy that he's talking like a buffoon...'

To help you understand how audiences think ( Based on expensve and rigorous reserach by the British Psychological Society) , I've added the internal commentary that you'd get from the audience as you said each of these words or phrases-

Empowerment- bullshit
Synergy- Utter bullshit he means job cuts
Commitment- don't talk to me about commitment
Bespoke- pompous oaf
Blue sky thinking- fool
Synergistic- I think he's going to sack me, kill me and sell my kids for medical research
Value-added- you're about as relevant as Cliff Richard (Outside the UK, look him up)
Leading-edge- When did we get in a time machine and go back to the 1980's?
Post-modern- Guardian (UK based liberal arts newspaper for students and hippies) reading poseur

Every company and industry also has its jargon. Just notice what yours is and remove it from your lexicon.. Try testing your next big speech on your friends, family and pets. If they think it sounds like bullshit. Guess what?

I Love Prezi and here's why you should love it too

2009-10-16T12:30:00.002+01:00

I know it's not the thing, but the way you use the thing that's really the most important thing (With me so far?) But sometimeas a thing comes along that makes you want to dance and sing with joy. Prezi is that thing. What is it?

It's just a presentation software package

It's very good value
It's a gorgeous organic thingy that allows you to move away from the linear cruelty of PowerPoint and all the other slide based tools.
It should become the default tool of the trainer, salesperson, teacher, lecturer and creative for explaining complex ideas in a flexible way for the audience.

If you wanna know more, go here http://www.prezi.com/ and if you want me to help you learn how to use it- email me at - jim@allcow.com for Prezi training and design in UK & Europe.

I'd love to help you love this thing too.

93% of the message is complete twaddle- The truth is much better

2009-10-16T12:19:00.001+01:00

We've all heard the numbers- 7% of your meaning is contained in the words you say; 35% in the vocal delivery and the rest (I can't be bothered to do the sums), is body language... Well folks it seems like even the guy who did the study thinks it's not true. Dr Albert Meherabian did the work back in the 60's, with a very specififc focus- Read here if you're interested http://www.speakingaboutpresenting.com/presentation-myths/stickiest-idea-presenting-wrong/

So if these numbers are so limited as a piece of research, why do we trainers use them so much? Is it to give us credibility? To add proof to the value of what we do? Who knows, but the thing to remember for presenters is that your power as a speaker is a fragile combination of -

You and how enthusiastic, confident, open and credible you are
The quality of your story and the logic in the path you take through your topic
The audience you're facing and how you deal with what they bring into the room

The great thing about brilliance is that it's derived differently for each one of us, and we can all be brilliant (or rubbish) in different ways, for different reasons, on different days.

The most moving speech I've ever heard was given by a very nervous 19 year old girl, with terrible diction, in halting prose with no visual aids, in a terrible room, at a wedding. It was the bride's daughter saying how much she appreciated what she'd done for her since she, her sister and her mum had been abandoned by her father 20 years before. It's the only time I've ever cried at a wedding.

Why was it so powerful? Because she was telling the heartfelt truth.

Adding flair to your presentation Lesson 1- Remove abstract language:

2009-10-15T22:42:00.003+01:00

A noun, as you know, is a word that describes a thing. An object, a town, a cat, a condition. An abstract noun is a word that describes a thing that has no physical reality. Abstract nouns can describe feelings, qualities, ideas and thoughts. Abstract nouns can describe feelings such as helplessness and sorrow; qualities like quality, courage and reliability, ideas such as equality and freedom, and thoughts such as concepts and creativity. When the abstract is overdone it can cause problems for readers and listeners.

“Pseud’s Corner” in the UK satirical magazine “Private Eye”, is filled with examples of speech and prose where people seem to be constructing whole articles out of abstract nouns.

“In this feminist exploration of the erotics of the marketplace, Hegel’s notion of property and Lacan’s idea of the phallus serve parallel functions in the creation of the sense of subjectivity necessary for self-actualisation.”

If you combine loads of abstract nouns with the passive voice and add a few technical terms you can create written works so dense that they are impenetrable.

So if you mean a telephone say "telephone" not 'novel communication facility’. You may know what you mean, make sure that the audience does. "Woolly" speech is usually full of abstractions and is often a sign of unclear thinking on the part of the speaker. At worst it can come across as ambiguous, pompous often misleading and just helps to distance the audience from you and the stuff you're trying to put over.

Be funny the easy way

2009-10-15T19:49:00.002+01:00

It's risky trying to be clever or funny so why not cut down the chances of something falling flat by using someone else's wit. Oscar Wilde made a witty remark in front of a well-known satirist and the satirist said, "Oh Oscar, how I wish I'd said that." Oscar replied, "You will, Henry, You will."

10 great lines that I've used a lot and just a little bit of the shine rubs off on you-

Use quotations to make really strong points gently

2009-10-15T19:46:00.000+01:00

If you have something controversial to say it is often a good idea to put the words in someone else's mouth. If you want to say that Audi make dull but reliable cars, quote Jeremy Clarkson. You can always follow up your insult with "I don't happen to agree…" but your point has already been made. Three of my favourite quotes from the large teenager-

“This is a Renault Espace, probably the best of the people carriers. Not that that’s much to shout about. That’s like saying ‘Oh good, I’ve got syphilis, the best of the sexually transmitted diseases!’”

“Koenigsegg are saying that the CCX is more comfortable. More comfortable than what... being stabbed?”

“I’m sorry, but having an Aston Martin DB9 on the drive and not driving it is a bit like having Keira Knightley in your bed and sleeping on the couch. If you’ve got even half a scrotum it’s not going to happen.”

I don't agree with any of these sentiments and find the disease references quite disturbing, but....

3 acts worked for Shakespeare maybe they'll work for you- Story structure

2009-10-14T22:21:00.009+01:00

Everbody knows that stories have structure. They start with 'Once upon a time....' and end with 'happily ever after.' And in between the beginning and the end, comes the middle. In Western culture, most novels, plays and films tend to follow a simple 3 act structure, with each act playing a particular role in driving the story to its end. Broadly speaking-

Act 1- Sets the scene and introduces the characters, the context and the challenge.
Act 2- Introduces the challenge in more detail and gives choices for the character to take
Act 3- Sees the pay-off where the character makes a decison, takes action and gets a result.

Each of the acts allows the audience to be taken on a journey that starts with- 'I Don't know anything about this character and don't really care what happens to the little bleeder...'; through 'I care now and don't want to see this lovely little thing fail'; to 'Oh my God, is he going to fall, die, leave, lose, love...?' To the bitter (or sweet) end of the story, where our emotions are released in joy or pain or hope..., and we can relax and go back to our lives with a lesson learned, or a message taken. But the story has to build step-by-step or it will fail.

Imagine the film 'Toy Story' going straight in at the scene where Buzz appears on the kid's bed. It would have no meaning, because we wouldn't understand so many things. Why his arrival changed things, why the toys were talking, who the skinny guy in the cowboy outfit was. We wouldn't know and we wouldn't care and we wouldn't watch for long. Imagine 'Titanic' starting at the point where they're all in the water; or 'High Noon beginning with the gunfight. 'Saving Private Ryan' opening with the tedious walk through the hinterland of Omaha Beach, looking for a kid called Ryan.

Stories whether drama and fictional or commercial and factual work better if the thousand year old structure of a story is used.

P.S. I know that there are more than 3 acts in Shakespeare, and there's alot of controversy about story structures, Freytag's 5 act structure and Quentin Tarantino's method, but sometimes you've just got to choose. I did. For more information- try this-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screenwriting or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure

Sometimes the only thing you can do is laugh- Corpsing for professionals

2009-10-14T15:40:00.002+01:00

Sometimes, often when you least want it to happen, usually at the most serious moment, something happens. A phrase comes out wrong and is somehow horribly right; someone exposes their stupidity to the light, your colleague drops you in it or life's essential futility slaps you in the face- What can you do?

Have a look at what the 'experts' do- courtesy of the Daily Telegraph in the UK.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6325358/Infectious-laughter-20-best-corpsing-videos.html

When Tony Blair blew it with the Women's Institute

2009-10-12T18:35:00.004+01:00

Tony Blair, then the UK Prime Minister, went to speak to the formidable ladies of the Women's Institute (WI) in June 2000. The WI is a conservative body of middle class women who know what they like and is not the most natural audience for a socialist (ish) Prime Minister. He made the mistake (and Tony often did) of using the occasion only as an opportunity to tell the world how well the Labour Party were doing in their first term of government. He missed a clear chance to build his popularity in middle-England, to say nice things about the WI and all that they had done over the years. He could simply have spoken a few words about their proud history, the great things they do for charity and how great their recipe for plum jam is. But didn't bother. The Reverend Blair just launched into a scripted set of platitudes, promises and abstract nouns and by 5 minutes into the speech he'd lost the old dears in the red plastic seats.

What happened next? It was breathtakingly thrilling and embarrassing. The ladies of the WI got restless, then they got angry. They started slow hand clapping the PM. Yes. they turned into a set of twin-set. blue-rinsed students. They were wolf whistling, jeering, singing clapping and generally doing everything they could to get the loser in the red tie off the platform. Tony was hopeless. He'd massively misjudged the audience and they let him have it, big-style.

It was unmissable television for each of the 50 occasions the broadcasters repeated it over the next few days. I enjoyed it too and I'm a fan of Blair the man. if not Blair the proselytising platform speaker. On that occasion, Tony talked down, at, over and through his audience. On that day he paid the price that those of us who've done the same thing probably never have to pay because our typical audience is much more passive than the WI. It doesn't change the fact that lots of us treat our audiences as clueless observers and rarely consider their experience, intelligence and needs in preparing what we want to say.

If you want to avoid Tony's mistake, present ideas and arguments in such a way that the style content and methods that you use are shaped for each unique audience you meet. You need to ask the audience to describe to you exactly what they what need to know before you start to prepare. You also need to consider what (If anything) ou have to tell them and consider how you can resolve the inevitable tensions between what they want and what you need to tell them. If you can't ask, then do the next best thing and use your imagination.

Put yourself in their shoes and ask waht you'd like to hear if you were them. I guess it's called empathy, and all the great speakers have it in spades. Whoever is out there in the audience. WI or not.

10 steps to creating a really strong story

2009-10-08T17:11:00.007+01:00

It sounds like a presentation trainer's cliche, but it's not. In business presentations, the story is the thing. There's a skill and a structure to creating interesting and compelling narratives. A craft started in the verbal tradition by prehistoric man, developed by the ancient Greeks, sharpened by the French, the Italians, Spanish and British over centuries, is now made into a global, multi billion dollar industry by the Americans. Telling stories with a message is what people have always sought to do. And those who are good at it have real value in the places they live and work.

Children are brought up on stories with a beginning, middle and end. Adults expect a point, a message, interesting characters, love, laughter, joy, tears and pity, and are disappointed if they don't get them. Then we go to school, university, college and work and all of the joy seems to disappear. And we get talked at. Why? Because people don't apply the simplest of the story-telling crafts to the most important parts of their life. Story structure? Ignore it at your peril or understand that when you've got a strong story, everything else will follow. How do we do it then? Here's a few thoughts:

1. Put yourself in your audience's shoes and ask 'if I were them what would be interesting, useful and relevant to know and understand about this subject?'

2. Brainstorm everything you could say on the subject onto a single piece of paper.

3. Consult with key members of the audience about what it is they want to know, don't want to know. Then decide what you absolutely have to tell them.

4. Go back to your brainstorm and highlight those things that now will feature in your presentation and write your presentation objectives- In this presentation I will show X, Y and Z, and explain how we came to this decision. Then I will tell them exactly what I think they need to do and by when, to make the most of their investment.

5. Build the storyboard- Act by act (See a classic 3-act structure) and keep on grinding until there's a real rational, logical path through the presentation.

6. Create a storyboard that tells the story with key scenes & content from each part.

7. Create the visuals to support the storyboard.

8. Add a high impact prologue (introduction) and epilogue (conclusion).

9. Build your 'script' through rehearsal and repetition out loud rather than writing it out.

10. Write your script to the level you require (bullet points are best but in some very important or sensitive presentations you have to be scripted word for word).

10 things you can do to build your own skills

2009-10-08T17:09:00.008+01:00

Role models, free lessons, blogs and other ways of keeping you sharp

1. Watch the way that TV news (anything but CNN where there’s just too much going on) tells a story with graphics, text and voice.

2. Look at the structure of a story in a newspaper, notice the headline, the grabber first paragraph in bold, the detailed in 3 acts, the summary at the end. It’s a habit that journalists have drilled into them as professionals from the start of their careers. We can learn from them in all of our presentations.

3. Read ‘How to Argue and win Every Time’ by Gerry Spence. Fabulous anecdotes and some great tips about pitching to hostile audiences in a courtroom.

4. Experiment with new things in your presentations from time to time- Tell a story, do a no text presentation where you only use images to convey your message, inject a little humour with a cartoon or quotation, use a flip-chart to make a point, anything that means you’re developing your flexibility as a presenter.

5. Search on the web and for great presenters giving great speeches and notice what they do to engage and inspire their audience- try with Steve Jobs’ Stanford University Commencement speech at www.presentationhelper.co.uk/ - Great stories with a real point.

6. Go to conferences and watch the speakers there and learn from the good, the bad and the ugly. See what works and what doesn’t and copy them yourself in your own work.

7. Volunteer to make a conference speech or an after dinner speech that puts you out of your comfort zone, maybe even on a subject that you don’t know much about but will have to research.

8. Read some poetry and see what real craftspeople do with words to make maximum impact in the shortest possible time.

9. Build up a bank of images, words, quotes and stories that you can use in your own speeches.

10. Have a look at some of the other great blogs on presentation skills and subscribe to them for free updates.

Using your voice

2009-10-08T17:09:00.007+01:00

It’s your instrument and most people don’t really know how to play it.

1. Rehearse in the place where you'll make your speech if you can, it makes a full dress rehearsal and readies you for the real thing. If you can't use the venue, use somewhere like it.

2. Project to people at the back of the room by imagining the breath that you'll need to make your voice get there and doing it.

3. Learn to breathe from your diaphragm for deep, slow, powerful breaths that give you all the oomph you need to project.

4. Practice hitting the end consonants of the words ('She sells seashells on the sea shore' is unintelligible to an audience unless you do).

5. Use the punctuation (verbal or actual) to pause for breath which helps your delivery and allows the audience to catch up with what you're saying. Practice a comma for a short pause (say 'one thousand' inside your head)and breath, full stop twice that, paragraph three times 'one thousand' again.

6. Rehearse the pauses too because confident use of them will help you to deliver your key points, with real impact.

7. Emphasise the 2 or 3 key words in a sentence to deliver the real meaning in what you say.

8. Rehearse practising changes of pace, emphasis, tone and drama until it feels right for you. That's what rehearsal is for, not simply so you remember what to say, but how you say it too.

9. If there are words, phrases, or parts of the speech you just can't say in rehearsal, cut them out or change them because you won't be able to say them in the real thing.

10. Speak with your real voice, not your 'phone voice or your actor's voice, your own voice with its accent, inflection, pitch and tone will deliver the most credible message to your audience.

Starting well

2009-10-08T17:08:00.004+01:00

Remember that the first 2 minutes are the point at which you have the audience's full attention, use it to full effect.

1. Contact as many people as you can before the date and ask them what they want to get out of the session, what they'd like to know and what they don't want. Even if they don't respond, they'll remember you asked them and it will warm you to them.

2. Get a list of names before the event and memorize as much of the list as you can, then fit faces to names as they walk in to the room.

3. Meet people (even if you know them) as they come into the room, shake hands, have a brief chat with them to help show your confidence and 'break the ice'.

4. Tell them who you are and why you're there (I'm the person who knows this system as well as anybody in the world and I'd like to help you learn how to make the most of this excellent piece of software...').

5. Tell them what they're going to get out of being here (You'll get an interesting, useful and memorable set of hints and tips that will help you to make the most of the investment you're making....).

6. Tell them how long you'll be and that if they 'do with patient ears attend...' they'll get lots out of the session. (I'll talk for 20 minutes, and you'll see how useful this product will be for you...).

7. Tell them what you want them to do. (Please feel free to ask questions as we go through and help me to give you what you need, though if I'm going to cover the point later I may ask you to be a little patient with me...').

8. Match your energy to the energy in the room (just above the energy level of a quiet room and just below that of a noisy room).

9. Take them through the 'story structure' for the presentation so they see your logic at the start.

10. Do your introduction to a blank screen at the start so they focus on you and use the story structure slide for the 'bridge' to act 1. Then you're in control and ready to go.

Creating great visual aids

2009-10-08T17:07:00.001+01:00

Remember that great visuals support the spoken words and are there to help the audience understand not as a prompt for the speaker.

1. Do the slides only after you've completed your presentation plan and storyboard or you'll have an overlong, text driven, linear presentation that will lead to dull, text driven slides.

2. If you're working from an existing PowerPoint presentation, use that as your storyboard and add story structure, edit ruthlessly and remove visual, verbal and text clutter.

3. Use pictures and diagrams before words, and use words as little as possible. Use a short word instead of a long word wherever you can. Use only nouns, verbs and key phrases on your slides.

4. Do your best to stick to 3 words per bullet and 3 bullet-points per slide.

5. Explain jargon TLA's (Three Letter Acronyms) and technical terms as you use them.

6. Use muted colours with no unnecessarily complex graphics or animations that can be seen in any light conditions.

7. Follow a strict slide format: every page is laid out exactly the same, making the whole presentation look very consistent.

8. Make sure that each slide has a single message, which is written out in the chart title and clearly supported by the words in the chart body.

9. Use occasional theoretical models & frameworks to structure information: time lines, force field analysis, evaluation of pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses .

10. Follow the example set by newspapers, TV and radio news bulletins.

10 things to help you set up well

2009-10-08T17:04:00.005+01:00

1. Call the venue to specify how you'd like the room set up well before the event, confirm in writing after the discussion and expect that it won't be done when you get there.

2. Arrange to show up early on the day to check out the room set-up and that all of the equipment works.

3. Be cautious in your presentation preparation and avoid complex video clips, animation, sound effects and web links, that might not work so well on the day with strange projectors, sound systems and weak web connections.

4. Remember the adage 'if it can go wrong, it will go wrong...' and make plans to deal with it.

5. Remove clutter & stuff from the room, like tables & chairs that won’t be used, that get between you and the audience.

6. Bring a pointer (laser or a stick) and a remote control mouse so that you can move away from the computer during your presentation.

7. Whatever computer you use, use a power cord and turn off power management, screensaver, e-mail and other pop-up applications that might interrupt your talk.

8. Use a template that works whatever the lighting conditions in the room or on the day. White text on a black background will never fail... Though it might not be your organization's 'official' template.

9. When you're set up, sit in key audience member’s seats to check you can see the visuals and read the text on the slides.

10. Keep some room lights on. The audience usually wants to see the speaker and it's great for the speaker to be able to see all of the audience too.

He might be a bully but he still has a point

2009-10-08T16:25:00.004+01:00

Paul had just finished his presentation and the room was dead. His boss, a notorious bully, said, when asked, if he had any questions,

"Yes, I've got a question for you. What was the last half hour about?"

Paul said "Er, what do you mean? I've just told you haven't I?"

Boss said, "No, you haven't?"

Paul said, "Yes I have, it's about saving £5 million quid."

Boss said "Where was that?, I didn't hear it?"

Paul said look slide 44..."

If Paul had got to the point at, or preferably before, before slide 1, he'd have had his boss's attention. Then the rest of the time could be spent showing how it was to be done, and how much support he'd need from his boss to get there. Then all concerned would have had a much more pleasant time.

His boss may be a bully sometimes but he's no fool.

Think 5% for real focus or you'll be wasting your time

2009-10-08T16:05:00.003+01:00

In retention and memory studies conducted by professional psychologists, (too dulll and detailed to be listed here) in esteemed places of learning they've learned a few really interesting things about the pointlessness of presenting too much information. Here are a few highlights-

If you spoon-feed facts and figures to an audience for 20 minutes non-stop, and test them 24hours later to see how much they've remembered, in the best cases less than 5% of everything you told them will be remembered.

That memory will dwindle down to almost zero over the next 72 hours.
So if I talk to you on Monday at 9am, you'll have forgotten 99% of what I said by friday morning even if I'm a brilliant and entertaining speaker. If I'm Bob from IT you'll recall much less than that.

So why bother with so many presentations? Well humans are great at remembering broad messages that are relevant to them. If the speaker manages to tell us something that's relevant to us, in a way that makes it easy for us to remember, and doesn't swamp us with detail- guess what? We'll never forget.

What kind of speaker are you?

2009-10-08T15:33:00.005+01:00

It will help you to get the most out of this blog, if you have a clear picture in your mind of the kind of presenter you are now vs the FFF model I've introduced. In this next short piece I'd like to give you time to identify your current strengths and weaknesses in relation to the model and see the advantages of being able to develop a more flexible approach.

All of us, as experienced presenters, will tend to have our own preferences about how we prepare and give presentations. That's fine as long as we realise that our current strengths will take us only so far.

Making your presentations relevant to the people in the room

2009-10-08T15:22:00.004+01:00

Yes you'll most often be presenting to a group of people, but remember that that group is composed of individuals with their own particular needs, wants and preferences. Making something relevant to one person is no more complex than for businesses or departments in an organisation. It just takes a bit of care.

Individuals want to achieve great success and avoid danger, just like businesses. Understanding that for the key people in the room will make it easier for you to put a compelling message to them . Success for an individual is about-

targets
recognition
reward
reputation gain
security
happiness
the avoidance of harm

Always remember that people are driven to avoid pain and achieve success. Releveance comes when the speaker understands this intuitively and applies it consciously to her speech, whatever the subject. There's really no good excuse for a generic presentation, only presenters that don't try to make it relevant to the people in the room.

Phil talks a lot of sense when sober

2009-10-07T16:33:00.004+01:00

I was talking with a friend last night and he's a no-nonsense sort of man, the Chief Operating Officer of a global consultancy. He's had to learn the skills of business development and selling on top of his 'day job' and he's done a pretty good job of it too. Here's what Phil said-

"For consultants selling, sometimes abstract products and services, undertsanding the value of what you do is the the first step, communicationg that value clearly is the second step, and delivering the value, time and again is the third step to world-class selling in our field."

Value = relevance from the client's point of view. If he's hanging from the edge of a cliff throw him a rope, if he's looking to have a bonfire party pass him some sausages and a box of matches.

Telling tales- particularly about yourself

2009-10-03T14:45:00.006+01:00

Steve was a guy I worked with many years ago and he was a great role-model as a presenter. He showed me that it's OK to look to amuse your audience as long as there's a serious point lurking in the background and he taught me the value of a story to make a powerful point in a subtle way. He also showed me how not to tell the personal anecdote. He told loads of them and they were interesting and funny and always had a point. The problem was that he was always the hero.

How Steve stood up to bullies at school, how Steve was the the most honest and decent man in the world, how Steve was unfailingly attractive to women, how Steve was faithful, successful, open, honest and modest. It would have been OK, if there had been even the smallest similarity between the Steve in the story to the selfish little sod speaking, but there wasn't, and for me that made Steve less than convincing over the long-term.

Then there was Harvey P. Harvey is exactly the oppsite kind of story teller. He tells great anecdotes with deep meaning and, yes, sometimes they're about himself. But when they are, he's more often than not the patsy. Harvey gets ahead of himself, Harvey thinks he knows what will work in his wife's country, Harvey starts to believe in his own publicity. We still laugh and learn from the tale but guess who we're really moved by? My mate Harvey, that's who.

Masterchef as presentation skills training

2009-10-01T19:23:00.008+01:00

I love 'Masterchef', a televised cooking competition in the UK, where would be Michelin starred chefs are brought in, placed under lights and lightly grilled until they explode. It's great telly and I've learned a whole new language too.

I thought reductionism was what Marxists did in argument. But no, in cooking, as I'm sure you already know, reduction is the process of thickening or intensifying the flavour of a liquid mixture such as a soup, sauce, wine, or jus by evaporation.

I've also learned that in the highest-end restaurants it's the sauce that makes the meal. It's not simply a matter of boiling merrily away though, as the cook's dictionary tells us-

"...reduction does concentrate the flavors left in the pan, but extended cooking can drive away delicate flavour compounds, leaving behind less interesting tastes." So be warned, and here's the point at last...

In public speaking, reduction is a skill that wil help even the most experienced presenter. It's the skill of being able to boil down a speech to it's simplest, shortest essence where none of the 'delicate flavours' are lost.

It's the 5-minute summary of the 30 minute speech, or the 60 second shortening of the quarter hour pitch. Can you do that when someone says 'just give me the 5-minute version...' If you can then you're as rare as a Michelin star in Birmingham (UK and Alabama, US of A). If you can't then it's a good habit to get into before you start to prepare.

Beyond PowerPoint by Cliff Atkinson (More BMW than Ferrari)

2009-10-01T16:34:00.004+01:00

I started flicking through the book and read a few parts of it and I was overtaken by an awful sense of dread. A light went out forever for me, and it’s all Cliff’s fault. Beyond Bullet Points (BBP) is a REALLY GOOD BOOK.

In my mind, it was me who was going to write the most practical and readable book ever written on presentation skills, and here it was, already done by some gorgeous geek from the USA. I bought the bloody thing as an eternal reminder of my preference for putting off actually writing anything of my own until tomorrow, and took it home and read it some more.

That’s when I started to feel better. It’s still a great book but it’s a detailed, precise, structured testament to sameness. It’s a bible for the OCD generation. It’s brilliant but about as comfortable as a masochist's corset.

The book covers everything you’d want or expect in such a thing. Memory & retention principles, story structure, storyboarding, slide design, rehearsal & delivery techniques and much more is rounded up in interesting detail. But Cliff is just so strict. I can see his house now, all straight lines and sharp edges. His desk will be an IKEA vision of order. His jim jams will be folded and ironed neatly with knife sharp creases all colour coded for the seasons of the year and the days of the week. His book is the same. There’s no room to move and not one thing out of place in his straight-line mind, and it leaves me to wonder whether anyone who used the principles of the book, to the letter, could really be a great presenter in the real world.

Surely the great speakers of modern times, (Bill Clinton, Winston Churchill, Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King Jr. Anyone?) had much more than just technical skill, they had a sense of love and empathy and respect for the people they spoke to and for. They had an ability to work at an emotional level too and it was empathy and emotional acuity that added power, weight and impact to their words.

So buy the book to improve your technical understanding of how to... and watch some of the people on TEDS.com to see what happens when joy and pain is added to great technique. That’s the new book I’m never going to write.

Developing your ability to communicate charisma

2009-09-25T13:29:00.002+01:00

If you buy into the fact that charisma is a skill that can be learned just as simply as walking, juggling and whistling, then how do we get good at actually doing it- Try
1- Connecting with your own emotional state- ie recognising how you feel about you, your subject and the place you're in right now. Then
2- Saying it like that- ie finding a way of communicating those emotions through words, voice and body-language to your audience.

It's really simple to do if you have one other thing- The courage of your convictions. Charisma is easy to do. Children, footballers and Country and Western singers do it all the time. But doing it requires that you have belief, faith and confidence that you and your feelings have relevance to the others in the room. If you think that you and your beliefs don't matter then you simply can't be charismatic.

The reason then that there are so few really charismatic speakers in business today is nothing to do with genetics or skill, it can simply be put down to the fact that modern corporate man and woman finds it easier to hide their joy, frustration, love, passion and pain; than share it.

Charisma. Is it born in you or can you develop it as you go?

2009-09-25T13:15:00.001+01:00

I once saw charisma defined as- "the ability to transfer an emotion that the speaker has to his/her audience." I thought it was a pretty good definition because it offers the chance that maybe, just maybe charisma is a skill that can be learned and used as a conscious strategy for all people seeking to influence, persuade, motivate and entertain.

It also hints that we are all charismatic, every single one of us, from the sulky teenager to the grumpy CEO. The teenager ruining a family dinner with his pout, floppy hair and monosyllabic responses to Grandma's questions about school. The CEO deflating the joy at the annual 'Town Hall Meeting' when he snaps at a provocative question from one of the cynics at the sharp-end of the business who isn't buying his suggestion that 'everything's rosy going forward' and there'll be 'jam for everyone tomorrow'.

The schoolboy, the cynic and the CEO have all succeeded in changing the mood in the room by transferring their emotions (hormone fuelled loathing, battle-scarred dubiousness and tired-out intolerance) brilliantly to other people. Surely that is charisma? And if they can do it unconsciously, why can't we do it too but consciously and carefully?

What happens when you fall off the stage?

2009-09-24T17:05:00.004+01:00

I’m often asked how someone as clumsy as me can be a professional speaker, and it’s a good question that I think I can answer with a bit of help from Geoffrey.
Geoff was a client of mine a few years ago. He was a gentle ,kind, thoughtful man with no visible ego, and he’d been asked to make a speech to some of his professional peers, representing his FTSE 100 employer at a first rank University in the UK. It was a big speech, and Geoff prepared well. I helped him a little bit, and agreed to go along with him for the big event as a bit of moral support. We arrived at the glided hall and hundreds of his peers were already there, Geoff was first on stage and he was nervous.
His time came and the Dean of the Business School introduced him and after respectful applause and slightly underplayed opening to his address he made a fantastic speech. As the crowd sat to applaud him and the Dean rose to thank him, Geoff went over to his seat at the back of the stage and sat down. In sitting, he shuffled his chair into the backdrop curtain, with a modest smile a wave of the hand to thank the audience for its kindness, and in a warm glow, disappeared from sight with a resounding thud bringing the red velour curtains down on top of him.
There was an instantaneous and as one gasp of horror from the audience, as we tried to work out what had happened. Where had Geoff gone... There was then an endless 2 seconds of horrified silence before our friend appeared like a jumping jack from the chasm behind the dais. He struggled to free himself from the heavy curtains and like a drowning man coming up for air, he appeared. His eyes were glassy and wide, his glasses askew, his immaculate hair all messed up and I had an aching, agonising wish that he would pass out and save himself from the horror of that moment... but just sympathy was about to overflow into embarrassment for him and mortification for the rest of us, Geoff did a simple and amazing thing. He smiled.
'Thank God' we all thought, 'he’s smiling and we have no need to be hurt or embarrassed for him. Oh raise our hearts to heaven and love the world for ever...' We breathed once more and began to smile along with him. Then Geoff grinned and we did too. Geoff Chuckled, laughed and shook his head at the madness of it all, and we did too. The standing ovation lasted for all of 60 seconds with cheers, whistles, slaps on the back, and thunderous 'hurrahs'. Geoff had fallen off the bloody stage and we loved him even more.
How can that be? Because we thought he die of shame and he didn’t.
Lesson- 99.9% of the audience want you to do really well and will forgive you pretty much anything unless you embarrass them. So when you make a mistake, don’t apologise, carry on and smile at your humanity and allow the audience to smile too.
That's how I can get through the occasional trip, or stumble. That I'll probably never have to deal with what happened to Geoff.

5 business phrases that make you sound like a corporate fool

2009-08-25T13:46:00.006+01:00

Maybe I'm in a bad mood today, but there's a bit of a rant. I got the idea the first five minutes of a speech by a management consultant in 2008 so don’t think I’ve made it up. It was a quite brilliant mix of cliché, banality and diffidence that delivered a well deserved 30 minutes sleep to the audience that had paid $800 to be there.

The point is that some phrases that are cliches are useful. Some are not. These phrases are not useful because they just take time, oxygen and patience away from the room you're in and the people you're with, and make you look like something you're, most probably, not.

It doesn't mean you can't ever use the phrases again but be warned that they have moved beyond their 'use by date' and are beginning to smell rather badly.

•Value-added- In my grumpy head, means you’ve swallowed a text book, got an MBA or wish you had an MBA -try saying 'worth doing'instead.
•Going forward- means absolutely nothing- try saying nothing else and moving on to the next point or be mischievous, and say 'moving backwards' instead and at least challenge us to ask what you could possibly mean.
•Bottom line- means you learned business from 1970’s films about advertising and think that's the height of hard-edged commercialism- try saying 'profit' instead and you'll get to the end quicker too.
•Synergistically - means you’re American and are deliberately trying to say things in as complex way as you can to impress us before you send us an outrageous invoice for your services. Why not - try saying 'by working together'
•Any metaphor that includes flag-poles or saucers of milk- Because such a metaphor was used, as far back as 1956, to show how advertising executives can be mindless spouters of meaningless hogwash, in the great, Oscar winning film '12 Angry Men' with Henry Fonda. If it was used like that then, what do you think it says of the user now?

Speaking in English (not your first language) to an English speaking audience

2009-07-25T11:45:00.006+01:00

You’re an experienced presenter in your own language, you have a working vocabulary of over 20,000 words, you can improvise, answer questions, use metaphor, jokes and the vernacular, what do you do when you’re faced with an audience of native English speakers?

That little voice in your head can start you thinking all of those negative things that will undermine you if you let them. Let's look at three of them for a start-

Thought 1-

“They’ll think I’m stupid with my foreign accent and limited vocabulary…”

It’s most likely that they won’t think you’re stupid because the likelihood is that as native English speakers they won’t speak a foreign language at all. They’ll think you’re rather clever, actually.

Thought 2-

“I’ll sound stupid with my greatly reduced vocabulary.”

You definitely won’t sound stupid using simple words and language. It’s one of the keys to powerful speech. As George Orwell said of great writing- “Never use a long word where a short word will do.” If you lack technical or business vocaublary in English, then that’s easy to work on with a newspaper and a dictionary, but no one will notice if you say “Yes” in answer to a question instead of “in all probability, that will be what we will do going forward”.

Thought 3-

“My accent will stop them from understanding what I’m saying”.

This might be true but is easily put right. Speaking to be understood is a complex mix of language, vocabulary, grammar, accent, diction and articulation, sometimes made more difficult by the subject about which you’re talking. Some people with a strong ‘foreign’ accent are difficult to understand, but only because they tend to talk to quickly.

Why do they talk too quickly? Because they don’t pronounce the consonants at the end of their words and they don’t follow the ‘punctuation’ of the phrases, sentences, and paragraphs of their speech. So, if you want to be understood by the 34 different nationalities in the room say,

”To be, (comma/pause) or not to be? (comma/pause), That is the question. (full stop/pause).

Not “tobeornotobethaisvequesyun”.

It’s just the same for English native speakers trying to be understood in Argentina or Zambia, miss the end consonants and the punctuation and you’ll be hard to understand by people not used to hearing English spoken ‘live’.

Speaking to International audiences

2009-07-24T16:59:00.003+01:00

I've spent 15 years or so travelling the world and talking to thousands of people in the course of my work and I've learned some interesting and painful lessons about English as the lingua franca of international business. It's also a real niche area of work for me now as there are hundreds of companies all over Europe expanding into new territories where English speaking is the norm, and they have little experience of it as pitchers, writers and presenters. In a global market, with an international audience, there are 3 distinct scenarios to be thought about, and they are-

Using English when it's not your first language to present to a business audience of English speakers
Speaking in English to an audience for whom English is not the first language
Using English when it's not your first language and it's not the audience's first language either

Each of the three scenarios have their different challenges for the person at the front of the room and over the next few days we'll look for lesons to learn for each of them. For each we'll look at what you need to do to be understood, and that will include advice on presentation structure, visual aids, articulation and language.

Go on then tell us what you do...

2009-06-30T19:02:00.008+01:00

We've talked for a few times about elevator pitches, and as so often happens, we like the idea of having an interesting, short, enticing pitch for all seasons but we don't ever get round to creating one. So give it 10 minutes and lets's see what we can come up with. Take a pen and piece of paper and jot down some thoughts about-

What your business does at the broadest level.
A short example of a real life case study and the benefits that has had for the client concerned.
A simple, truthful thing that makes you different to the competition.
Here are my notes for me-
We offer training and coaching in presentation skills to senior executives, we write speeches, we help design product launches, conferences and training workshops.
We helped Mitsubishi Motors launch its last 13 cars to its pan-European dealer network, giving them coherent messages to share with their salespeople, high quality reference materials and consistent brand messaging, also saving them 100,000's of Euros in duplication of time and effort
We would rather not do the work than work for organisations that don't care.

Next, look at what you've written and edit it for repetition, pretension and bullshit. Then simplify the language, to a sentence or two that a real person would say to his or her friends, and see how you're doing. My effort now looks like this-

We offer training and coaching in presentation skills to senior executives, we write speeches, we help design product launches, conferences and training workshops. We help our clients sell their products and services more effectively...

We helped Mitsubishi Motors launch its last 13 cars to its pan-European dealer network, giving them coherent messages to share with their salespeople, high quality reference materials and consistent brand messaging, also saving them 100,000's of Euros in duplication of time and effort- We've helped Mitsubishi launch their cars in Europe with a consistency and quality that has helped them achieve their commercial objectives over the last 8 years.

We would rather not do the work than work for organisations that don't care.- We really care about our clients and tend to build long-term partnerships with them.

Now look at the whole thing again and edit for all of those things again, and say it out loud to yourself. If you gag, rewrite it; if you vomit, start again- until you can say those words with real sincerity. That's your pitch for all seasons. Mine?

"We help our clients sell more and better stuff whatever they do. We've worked with motor manufacturers, architects, drug companies and many others we simply help them to tell the world what they do with precision, passion and pride. "

What makes something relevant to business audience then?

2009-06-19T12:10:00.004+01:00

What makes something relevant to someone? People, generally, are most interested in things that help them and their business become more successful. Success for businesses is made up of specific combinations of -

profit,
market share,
share price,
turnover,
customer satisfaction,
regulatory compliance

... Success for business departments, obviously, depends on their function in the business, but for a quick reference how about-

Sales Departments - Success for sales professionals (after driving a great car, wearing lovely clothes and talking, endlessly about themselves) will be about the volume of sales achieved versus their targets, the ratio of wins vs. opportunities, the price achieved for those sales and the cost of those sales to the business.
Marketing Departments- Success for marketers (as well as being able to look great, wear lovely clothes and talk a good game about how sales is really all about marketing), success for marketers is all about the brand and their support of sales through targeted and effective marketing and advertising campaigns. The brand effectiveness can be measured in terms of identity, awareness in their target groups and the demonstrable value of the brand in tangible terms; and campaign effectiveness can be measured through many complex and abstract means.
Production Departments- Measure their success (after how much blood they've shed for this company and how hard their working life is compared to all of the 'tossers' in .... add name of any/every other department in the business here) in terms of total
production achieved, the quality of that production vs. targets and the costs of that production vs their targets.
HR Departments- Tend to be measured in their ability to deliver the right people with the right knowledge, skills, attitudes and habits at the right costs for the business to do what it must.
Finance Departments- Are measured by the effectiveness of their
financial controls on the business and the quality of advice they give to the Board.

Making things relevant

2009-06-05T14:36:00.002+01:00

When you're presenting a subject to an audience, you're looking for 'relevance', to make the thing you're talking about fit a need that they have. Of course you are or what's the point in speaking?

So you could say that the real skill of a presenter, whatever the subject, is the ability to make it fit with the audience whoever they are. But as you know, there are many occasions that we are called upon to speak, when we don't know the audience at all well. It may be an introductory meeting, or a response to a request for information where we know one or two people in a crowd but not the rest. It's a real dilemma, but one that can be overcome with a little bit of thought.

I had a client a few years ago, who was a director of purchasing for a global motor manufacturer. He asked me to sit with him through a day of presentations from potential suppliers and give him my views on the quality of presentations that came before us. I had high hopes for the sessions as these were golden opportunities for the companies to make their pitches to someone who could place an order for tens of millions of pounds of products on the spot.

You'd think that they'd be as good as you'd find in the professional world of sales, wouldn't you? I thought so and I was wrong. It was an excruciating, though memorable experience. Most of the presentations were embarrassingly poor for similar reasons. Let's take one example-

But they weren't good

Meaning what you say when cynicism is cool

2009-05-26T18:19:00.004+01:00

Great public speakers are really good at sounding like they mean what they say. They practise it, they check for it and they rehearse it because it's so important. That doesn't make them liars, unless they're pretending, it makes them professionals.

How many speakers have you seen who seem like they don't really believe what they're saying? Or more commonly, seem like they neither believe or disbelieve? And is that ever appropriate in a professional environment?

Committing to your message is a really big barrier for some of the most honest and sincere people in business, because believing in what you say, and sounding like you do, are hard things to do. Why? because being really committed to something opens you up to hurt and ridicule, and is not very fashionable in the 2000's.

Diffidence is de riguer, cynicism is cool but it doesn't make you powerful or influential.

What is presentation ‘clutter’?

2009-05-20T11:21:00.001+01:00

PowerPoint slides, jokes, data,

Waffle, jargon, handouts (paper),

Anecdotes with no punchline,

Or point to help you underline,

Music, graphics, sound effects

That do not support the text,

Images that make no sense

Or patronise the audience

Graphs and charts of pie or venn

The thoughts of Chairman Mao or Zen

Buddhists when your thoughts would do

And clear conclusions reasoned to.

So in short a simple story

Beginning, middle, end no more,

With key factors pointed out

With evidence that leaves no doubt

You've thought things through from every side

So all we do is just decide

A yes / no / maybe decision

Not we don't understand- Derision

Removing ‘clutter’ from your presentations

2009-05-20T11:10:00.003+01:00

You're going to look around a new house on a Saturday morning. You're making a commitment already. You've given up 2 hours of your valuable time, and you've left the kids with Grandma. The details of the property looked good enough, the price seems right, and the sun is shining as you pull up outside your possible future home.
First impressions are good. The road is lovely, wide and tree-lined. There's a pretty cafe with tables outside and people drinking tea, there's the village green with ducks, and a pub, and a cricket ground where kids are playing happily on bikes and each other. You walk up the gravelled path and notice the roses around the door, just in bloom, no traffic mars the sound of songbirds and the whispering of a spring breeze in the trees all around you tell you that all is well with the world. You rap the brass knocker, gently, so as not to disturb anything or anybody and the door opens to a smiling face of a kindly soul who lives there now... 'Oh my expletive deleted God!'
You walk into the hallway and your eyes are assailed by a million impressions at once. The carpet of crazy kaleidoscope colours, the 146 pictures on the walls, the rugs, and hangings, the dresser, armoire and long-case clock, the horse-brasses, the cats, the smell of something burning in the kitchen, the radio, the chandeliers, antimacassars, shoes, umbrella stand, coat hooks, coats, wellington boots, so much stuff. So much stuff, in fact, that you can barely see the walls, the floor or the shape of the room. Every room is a rococo nightmare of mix and match madness.
After 5 minutes you've got a headache, after 10 it's a migraine and in 15 minutes flat, you're back in the car, speechless with disappointment. The 'clutter' got in the way. The house was lost behind it. All curves and personality, interest and promise erased by 'interference'.
In the world of selling houses, how often do we hear the professionals telling us to remove the rubbish before a viewing. Some of us even listen to them. Many of us though think 'people will be able to see through a bit of mess, and make up their own minds...' Won't they?'
And the answer is... Maybe. My research tells me that 20% can and do, but the rest just can't. And honestly; why should they? We're selling and they are looking to buy. How and why is it not our responsibility to do everything that we can to help the other party see the real value in the thing they're looking at? So if you're wondering what you should do? Tidy up...Now.
I know you can already see the link to presentations, so I'll just finish with a list of things that I've seen clutter up the average corporate presentation and if you'd like to go tidy up afterwards it will help you make your point much more powerfully.

First learn how to fall

2009-05-08T16:34:00.001+01:00

I was cycling through the quiet morning streets of Barcelona's old town yesterday, on a bicycle that's part of the successful public transport system of this funky, sexy, dirty, hot slice of Spain. Rickety, well-used and nothing like my own at home, the bicycle made me feel distinctly unsteady. I felt like a novice and started wondering what would happen if I crashed. Then the thought came to me, that I might fall, and if I did I'd be OK because I've learned how to fall throughout my life. Flat on my face, head over heels, hopelessly, helplessly, heavily, I know how to fall.

I've fallen hundreds of times from bikes, from skis, trees, horses and a donkey, I've fallen for girls, promises, charm and gold. I know how to fall so I'll be OK, and I was and I didn't. Funny that....

Developing Flair is about effort not talent- ask Tiger Woods

2009-04-15T09:42:00.003+01:00

Flair is, to many people, an indefinite thing. Some people have it and some people don’t. It’s often counted as innate, something that one person is born with and others are not. I don’t see it that way. If we consider what flair is, it could be defined as “having the ability to do a thing that many people find difficult in a way that seems natural." Tiger Woods- In golf, is the best player on the planet today, and some would say, ever. Let’s hear what Tiger has to say-

“It ticks me off that people talk about me as if I had been given a God-given talent. I’m sure that I do have something that I don’t own, but it also ignores the fact that I have worked harder than most of my peers for the past 20 years.”

How does the audience know how the genius got his or her talent. Often they assume that it's innate, when much more often that not, it's not. The combination of aptitude, learned skill and motivation to improve is a powerful sum. Remove anything and potential is limited but remove motivation and the whole future is lost.

So if we really want to get good at our public speaking, there's a lot we can learn from the best golfer in world.

Why 'Pearl Harbour' is the the worst fim ever made- or It's not only presenters that put too much in

2009-04-15T09:38:00.001+01:00

Focus is important throughout our lives. It’s important in conversation, in writing, in story-telling and the visual arts. The ability to make your point and move on is incredibly rare and undervalued.

Movie makers in Hollywood have the largest budgets and greatest amount of talent in the film-world to choose from, and even they get it horribly wrong sometimes. James Cameron's multi Oscar winning film, "Titanic", is a great picture in many people's eyes, but for me and most of the rest of the world, it’s too long by about 1hour. It could have made its point much more quickly, but it didn’t. On the subject of James Cameron, it's worth remembering too that "Pearl Harbour" is so appalling in every aspect that I think it’s actually 2 films stuck together and put out as one by mistake.

Clear objectives (Specific points you’d like your audience understand, remember, be able to tell other people about) for your speech are your “final destination” so it’s a great idea to get into the habit of knowing exactly where you're going before you start. It’s only fair to your audience that you tell them where you’re going before they get on the bus, so they can choose whether to join you, or not.

It’s all about focus:

Focus in a speech or a presentation leads to short, specific speeches constructed around a central idea and some key points to be remembered by the audience. If a focused speech were a piece of meat, it would be lean steak. If a film it would be that one with Humphrey Bogart and the Swedish woman, Ingrid Bergman.

2 steps to really focused presentations

2009-04-15T09:02:00.001+01:00

The first step towards real focus in your presentations is being ruthless at the construction stage of every speech. –

Simply, put less in and deliver just the essence of your thoughts in verbal form so that your absolutely key messages stand out.
The second step is to make more of your key points, the “If your life depended on it” (IYLDOI) bits.

If your life did depend on your audience remembering, when tested, your key points, you’d probably make sure that you'd taken stuff out so that those bits were obvious, and do a few simple things to make sure that it was those bits that they did remember when everything else had been forgotten.

We can't remember the detail dummy- Retention & memory issues for presenters:

2009-04-15T08:56:00.001+01:00

Retention:
In a vast scientific study into memory and retention in education, (Gillian Cohen, Martin Conway and Nicola Stanhop, March 1992) showed that after a lecture or presentation:

Rapid forgetting occurs in the first two years after learning.
Thereafter memory stabilized and remained at above chance levels for the remainder of the period.
Knowledge, still retained after approximately two years, appears to remain intact indefinitely.

There were two exceptions to this pattern of forgetting.
Memory for details and highly specific facts declined rapidly. In as little as 48 hours as much as 95% of the detail of any presentation is lost.
Memory for general principles was extremely stable and showed no forgetting over the 12-year period of the study.

So let’s just confirm some of that in plain English.

Highly specific, detailed information will be 95% gone from us 2 days after the talking stops.
We’ll remember the general principles of a presentation very well if they are clearly made.

So for those of us keen on detail for detail’s sake, there are a couple of really important things to remember. For the rest of us it probably means we should do
Less on the detail because it’s going to be forgotten anyway, and
More to ensure that the general principles of what we are saying are clear, interesting, relevant and repeated enough times to make sure that that’s what the audience remembers when everything else is lost. Interesting Eh?

(Don't) Stuff the audience like a goose

2009-04-15T08:54:00.001+01:00

Do you know how pate de foie gras is made? Here's a short outline that gives us all we need to know.

“Foie gras is made from the enlarged livers of male ducks and geese. Birds have up to 2 pounds of food per day pumped into their stomachs through long metal pipes that are shoved down their throats. The cruel ordeal often causes severe injuries that make it painful or even impossible for birds to drink. Those who survive the feedings suffer from a painful illness that causes their livers to swell to eight to 10 times their normal size. Many birds become too sick to walk and are reduced to pushing themselves across their cages with their wings. When the birds are slaughtered, their livers are sold for foie gras. “
People Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) Website

Most presenters treat their audiences as if they were those poor little geese. They stuff their captive public full of facts and figures and details that often have only a passing relevance to the point of the presentation. Achieving clear and real focus is probably the most difficult part of preparing a presentation.

So what’s wrong with detail?
There’s nothing wrong with detail. Detail is often the difference between really understanding a subject and having only a flimsy veneer of comprehension. What’s important is who is the detail for.

If you give a detailed answer to questions that come directly from your audience, then that’s fine. That’s exactly what you should be doing. But if the detail is in there because you’re making assumptions about the audiences wants & needs, then you’re adding unnecessarily to the length and complexity of the talk, and probably undermining the clarity of the whole message.

There is much data and research from psychologists that might help show you a little more reason why detail doesn’t work.

What if you don't have the time to consult the audience?

2009-04-15T08:50:00.000+01:00

On the occasions that you really don't have time to prepare properly, you might like to start by asking the people in the room some questions about what your they'd like to hear from you and a maybe even give them a "menu" of options with timings for them to choose from.

What if the audience consists of 30 people all with different needs?

a. You can help yourself to avoid difficult events like this, when you're almost guaranteed to fail to satisfy everyone, by giving separate presentations with slightly different focus for each of the interest groups present. Or if that’s unrealistic…

b. Go with what the most senior/influential people in the room want to hear because there's a reality that demands you satisfy key people and then most of the rest of the room will follow their lead.

What if you've got a really bad news presentation, how do you make that fit?

Give it to people straight, don't euphemise- a lost job is only "an opportunity to refocus your life" to an HR manager who's going to stay in his. Answer all of their crucial questions in your presentations (When do I leave? How much do I get? What help is available to me to get another job? What about my pension?)

What if they want a flip-chart presentation and I only do PowerPoint or vice versa?

Get practising with the marker pens or make sure that you explain why you'd choose to use a medium that very rarely adds anything to the quality of the message you convey.

Practical things to help you to make your presentation fit:

2009-04-15T08:42:00.001+01:00

Before the Presentation: Talk to the opinion formers

Before you start to prepare anyhting, do a bit of research among your audience. Ask a few of the more inluential people for the 3 most important things they'd like to get out of the presentation you're going to give them. How? Go and see them, ring them, e-mail them, talk to their PA's, but make the effort. Even if they can't really tell you what they want, they'll probably be able to give you a whole list of things that they don't want, and that gives you a real advantage when you get in fron to of them. What it if they don't respond at all? They'll know you tried and appreciate you for that.

If you really can't get to see the audience: Use your imagination

Ask yourself or a close colleague to think of the most difficult or embarrassing question that anyone of the likely audience could ask you, and prepare an outline of the presentation from that stand-point until you feel you have covered every possibility.

Draw up a list or a mind-map of all the things that you could include in your presentation and send it to your key audience members for them to highlight the key things they'd like you to concentrate on in your presentation.

Put yourself in the minds of the audience and ask yourself" If I was the Managing Director of this business, sitting in the audience, looking at me make this presentation. What are the key things I’d like to hear?" and prepare to answer those questions.

Why presentations don’t fit

2009-04-04T14:46:00.002+01:00

There are many reasons why we give presentations and speeches that just don’t “fit”. All of the reasons though are about the same thing, our message doesn't fit because we that we don't have a clear understanding of our audience’s needs and wants from the speech. Finding out, before we start to prepare, is a practised art of the brilliant presenter.

Let's pretend that you're a bus driver, called Norman. Norman is a confident driver and his confidence is one of his greatest assets. He fills his bus with passengers and they admire his coach, they like the music and the scenery they see through the windows and for the first 10 minutes all goes well. One person suddenly notices that they've been down the same road twice and says "Norman, where are we going?" Norman swallows hard and replies, "I don't really know!"

If you begin your journey without a destination in mind your passengers may enjoy the ride but eventually they'll get upset. They each have their own destinations in mind, they’re busy people, they’ve got a million things they could be doing now, and if you can't help them get to where they want to go, they'll give up and go home. Even if they stick with you to the end of the line, they’ll remember that you got lost, and choose another driver next time. People are always looking for a bus, or speech, to take them somewhere that’s useful to them, even if it’s not pleasant when they get there.

In the the real world of work. I agree, you don’t always get to choose your destination. Sometimes your boss says,

“Look just put together a few slides on the business for a guy we’ve got coming over to head office, about 30 minutes worth…” and that’s it.

Sometimes too, we turn up ready to go, to find a disaster in the offing. If you turn up on the day ready to go, you’ve got no real choices when you find out that 80% of your audience have buckets and spades for the beach, and your sat nav is programmed for Birmingham. (Which for those who don't know Birmingham in the UK, is a bit of a disaster).

It’s too late to do much else; unless you’re a brilliant improviser (and not many of us are) you have to dance with the guy you came with. And on you go with the devastating opening line:
“Well ladies and gentlemen I’ve some disappointing news…” Great start.

But let's be really clear here. When this happens we have helped to cause the problem. It's us who gets hurt by looking foolish so it's your responsibility to know your audience before you start any prep.

So What’s is Fit, Focus & Flair?

2009-03-28T09:56:00.001Z

Fit:
Your presentation should be built with the needs of your audience at the front of your mind and in all of your preparations you should look to answer the following questions:

Focus:

What is the very least that you can say on the subject in the simplest way and the shortest possible time? If as the research suggests, 8 hours after you have stopped talking, your audience will have forgotten 95% of what you said. The questions for you at the Focus stage are:

Flair:
You have a duty to inform and entertain the audience so flair will make the difference between “professional” and “exceptional”. Flair asks the presenter the following questions:

What can you do to make the presentation as clear, logical and simple as possible, because simple, logical and clear is the first step to brilliance in a speaker…
How can you make this clear, simple, logical presentation as memorable as you can? Because that’s the point of making your speech, to make an impression, to leave a lasting imprint, to help people to remember what you’ve said.

The model is a simple as the three stages we’ve described here. It is also far more complex and we’ll go onto explain it in more detail and give you real examples of how you can achieve more fit, focus and flair in your presentations over the next posts.

Introducing the blog and how it can help you become a better presenter

2009-03-28T09:53:00.003Z

Whatever level of presenter you are now, the ideas and suggestions in this blog can help you to make a impact the next time you get up to speak. However skilled you are at creating and giving speeches, you only need to know that you can get better if you want to. The most relevant questions at this stage are:

1. Do you want to get better?

2. Is getting better at it worth the effort you’ll put in?

If the answer to either of these questions is no then you don’t need this blog. If the answer to both of these questions is “yes” then let’s get started.

My model, “Fit, Focus & Flair” forms the foundation for this book. It is a simple idea to help you look at what you can do, if you want to prepare and give business presentations that do you great credit. Fit, Focus & flair is not presented here as “the truth” but as something that you might find useful. The model is something that I developed to help me do my work with clients, and I found it so useful that we passed it on to our clients and they, in their hundreds, have found it useful too.

I'll explain the model first and show you very clearly what you can do to make sure that all of your presentations are as fit, focused and full of flair as they can be. Then we will go on and show you how you can transform every presentation that you do from this moment on.

Please feel free to comment & leave feedback on anything that's here because Fit, Focus & Flair is a work in progress, and your experiences and thoughts will really help.

How to stand out from the crowd

2009-03-28T09:52:00.000Z

Now, the best part is that, even if you’re just a little bit better than the average presenter, you’ll stand out. If you can set out a topic that’s relevant to the people there; if you can take an audience through a step-by-step explanation; make a recommendation based on fact, experience or principle and then answer people’s questions, you’ll be remembered for a very long time.

Then, if you’re much better than average, and can do all of the things mentioned above, and be funny, interesting, challenging, memorable and, more than anything else, be brief, you’ll be given endless opportunities to do much more than you could ever have dreamed of.

Why you should be better than the average at presenting

2009-03-28T09:51:00.002Z

Whenever you get up to speak you will make an impression on every member of your audience, you can’t not make an impression, even though you may not mean to. You’ll always leave some trace or memory of you with them, because while you think your presentation is about the content, the audience thinks that it’s all about you. Over time, the impressions you make when you speak to your bosses, peers and subordinates, will become your reputation.

People infer all kinds of things about you, just from the way you make a presentation. They’ll decide whether you’re good at your job, whether you’re funny, attractive, intelligent and promotable, all from just watching you speak. The truth might emerge after they find out more about you; and often first impressions are wrong, but why not take every opportunity to make great impressions at every opportunity you have.

Think about the last time you saw a really bad presentation. Did it leave a positive impression of the speaker? Of course it didn’t. If you think of every occasion that you’ll make a presentation as an opportunity to impress, you’ll begin to build the kind of reputation that you want, rather than the kind of reputation you get saddled with when you don’t take those occasions seriously.

Presentations in corporate life tend to be set-pieces that get attention. They are the formal occasions at which things tend to get reviewed, decided and done. They tend also to have the right people there. They are great opportunities to build your reputation and a real chance to show the influential and important people in your organisation that you can be trusted to take on more responsibility than you already have.

The standard of presentation in corporate life is generally so low that even if you'r a bit better than the norm you'll stand out like a beacon in the glooom, and there's a lot of gloom around. If you can say something relevant, in a short amount of time, and have people remember the point the day afterwards then you're destined for greatness. That's why you should bother.

So what can you do about it-? If your presentations are rubbish?

2009-03-28T09:05:00.002Z

1. Get people to take themselves and their presentations more seriously
· Get people to do fewer but better presentations
· Get people to prepare as if their reputations depended on it

2. Show how you can gain a real competitive edge in business by simply being a bit better than the kind of presenter I’ve spent the last 19 years trying to avoid.
· Commit to the audience, the subject and the occasion
. Make shorter presentations
· Make them more relevant, interesting and memorable for the audience

If you want to find out how. Read on.

So why is it so? Why are so many corporate presentations rubbish?

2009-03-27T21:42:00.002Z

I have come to the conclusion that it’s so because, 1- Most of us set pretty low levels of performance for ourselves along the lines of- “Another presentation, let’s just get it over with”, and, 2- Those of us that have more experience don’t really care about most presentations that we are involved in. We’ll prepare for the really big ones, but do virtually nothing for the run of the mill talk. We tend to think, “I’m too busy to prepare properly, I can wing it.” And, 33- For the extra cynical among us “I’ll be able to wing it and it’s all bullshit anyway, so why bother doing anything else?”

Even when we’ve got a really important presentation to do; a sales pitch for an important contract, a product launch or a senior management briefing, we’re unsure as to what to do to make it brilliant so we accept “safe”. Have I missed anything? Is there any other reason why we collude in wasting our, and everybody’s time in taking part in such pointless rituals as:

“The project review meeting”- a whole day of scared people, presenting data they don’t believe in, to people they don’t trust, in order that the “people they don’t trust” can rip into them for missing one tiny piece of data that the senior management thought was really important, and sending them home depressed and really looking forward to the next one.

“The Employee Briefing Session”- A thirty minute break from the production line so that a young man that they don’t know, in a new suit, doesn’t introduce himself, and talks to them like children, uses a laptop and projector to show his script to the disinterested crowd, shovels platitudes of the “We’ve had great year but the Far East situation, as you can see, has greatly affected our ability to compete, blah, blah, blah…”

“The Market Update”- A cryptic title for a bad-news presentation to all employees, “just to fill you in on the opportunities and threats we face in the next financial year”.
I’m not saying that these meetings aren’t important. They are incredibly important. It’s just that our lack of professionalism in preparing for them, and our lack of skill in doing them undermines their effectiveness, however worthy the intention.

Let’s Be Honest: Most presentations we see in our working lives are rubbish.

2009-03-27T21:35:00.002Z

You’ve probably sat through hundreds of them in your time. Hours of PowerPoint type talking, gigabytes of bullet-pointed slides and a few charts that carefully combine the unintelligible and incoherent. If you’ve worked in corporate life over the past few years, you’ll have seen it all. Dull content gingered up by the occasional use of, apparently, witty, clichéd clipart to lighten the mood, and on a few tragic occasions, sound effects (Bullets, skids, bells and the like) that only the presenter and the bloke from IT, who doesn’t spend enough time with humans, find amusing.

It’s a miracle of once in a blue moon proportions if you happen to enjoy a presentation that you’re invited to. Name the last time you did. The last time that the presenter was friendly, open, interesting, and amusing; and the stuff she was talking about was relevant to you, clearly explained and put across in a shorter time than your natural attention span. When was the last time you were informed and entertained at a presentation?

It does happen, though, I grant you. I can think of 3 examples from my 19-year career…
That’s all. Three people in all that time. 3 out of about 950 presentations. 4 out of 1900 hours, a 0.21% success rate, a probability of 475-1 against that the next presentation I go to will be worse than finding yourself at the end of a very long queue for the loo at Islamabad Airport.

Even if you went to a presentation once every 2 days, and I know some of you do more than that, it means that it could be 4 years until you next attend one that helps you do anything other than catch a few minutes sleep. Bloody hell. Why is it so? And it’s not just me, I’ve checked with hundreds of friends and clients at many European and US companies, it’s the same there too.

Bullshit Bingo

2009-03-26T13:26:00.001Z

Have you come across it? It’s the fastest growing participation sport in corporate life. It just needs a place in which to do it, an audience, as many players as you can muster, a few minutes’ preparation and a victim. The game is a product of boredom, cynicism and powerlessness and comprises a strange mix of childish prank and indirect aggression.

Do you have the first idea of what I’m talking about? No? Well the chances are that if you have never played it you’ve been it’s innocent prey. I first came across it at the end of year lunch for the firm of consultants I’d just joined. I’d been asked to make a speech to my new colleagues, and had prepared a short, address to the whole staff before a boozy meal and taxi back to hearth and family for the Christmas holiday. As I approached the stage, I noticed a small fuss from the five, forty-something teenagers on the back row. They were sniggering to themselves and passing a piece of paper to one another, and I was genuinely interested to find out what was going on.
I asked them what they were doing and there was much shuffling, whispering and passing of papers back to the ring leader, who said, rather defensively, “Nothing!”. I persisted, sensing some kind of set-up.

“Please gents, what’s going on?” I asked again, the rest of the audience now fascinated, silent in anticipation…The ring-leader, Roger, Handed me a piece of paper rather sheepishly, and whispered, “Bullshit Bingo”. There was an awkward muttering and a few titters from the crowd and a confused nothing from me. I could smell trouble but I didn’t know what this “Bingo” thing was, so I asked Roger to explain. Pale, and in very public agony, he told me about this game that he’d spent time preparing, for him and his highly paid mates to play at my expense. And for your information “Bullshit”- or “buzz-word bingo”, for the easily shocked- is played as follows…

Any number of players pays a stake to enter the game. Each entrant is given a “bingo card” with a blank,16 square grid on it. In each of the squares the player writes a piece of jargon, a cliché or other trendy but meaningless phrase, that they think is likely to appear in the presentation they are to attend. Then the players simply sit and listen to the talk and wait for their predictions to appear.
When one of their chosen words or phrases is spoken, the player crosses it off their card, just like bingo. When they’ve crossed off all of their words, they’ve won. Then they must shout “Bingo”, loud enough for all of their fellow players to hear. The victor collects the winnings, usually, to be spent on champagne in the bar at lunch.

Stakes vary from industry to industry, though the highest pot-scoop I heard about was £5,500, (110 players at £5 per head) at an analysts briefing run by a Japanese investment bank in London in 2004. I was astounded and appalled. I’d never heard of “BB” before and the more I found out, the more incredulous I became. My impending speech was forgotten for a moment and Roger, thinking I was angry (I wasn’t) said, “It’s nothing personal Jim. We do it to everybody. Kevin, (the MD), got ‘bingoed’ in his first 3 minutes last year.”

Much laughter erupted around the room, but Kevin, who obviously didn’t know a thing about it either, just sat there red-faced and furious. Mind you, he is a truly terrible presenter, and we all know the truth hurts.

Now here’s the thing. I fancy myself as a good speaker and had been brought into the business to help the firm get better at just this kind of thing, so I had an idea. “What’s in the pot then?” I asked.
“Er, 320 quid” said Stuart, “16 (of the 30) people in the room at 20 pounds a pop.” Rogers’ sidekick in the game and a main-board colleague of mine. “OK, so if I agree to double the winnings if I lose, can I play against you?” I continued,

“If I make my speech as planned, and I say even one of those words on your sheets, I’ll double the pot. But if I go through the whole thing and no-one wins, I’ll take the money.” After a little bit of debate behind hands, the players agreed to the challenge, and off I went.

Even as I spoke, I was struck by the thought that this is in fact an awful and excellent pastime in equal measure. Pastime being the precise word, because it does, really help to have something interesting to think about when some M&S clad corporate clone is droning on about “visions and values, synergy and strategy” to the background of the dullest set of slides seen on stage.

The real issue here, is not the fact that some bored blokes, too scared to stand up for themselves, have invented such a game, but that they’ve done it because they’re sick of the same old “bullshit” they hear in corporate life. Can you really say that a part of you doesn’t agree with their sentiment? Have you never sat there during a slide show and secretly wished that the presenter would explode, or wet himself or do something to relieve the tedium? Why has Bullshit Bingo sprung up now?

Maybe it’s because as business becomes more global, we tend to find larger companies dominating, and some kind of international language of business takes over. The kind of language that sees nations, borders, traditions and culture as irrelevant to their operation and the people stuck in these “territories” as irrelevant too.

Maybe that’s it. The speeches mean nothing because we, the audience, are not seen as people with sense, feelings, education, families and other things to do, but as Human Resources. Things like every other business resource, to be bought, consumed and discarded. You don’t waste time and effort briefing your office building on a takeover, so why bother briefing the office staff?
But all of these companies have Human Resource Departments who have been trained to pretend that people need a little more maintenance than a building, who persuade their bosses that it might be a good idea to keep the Human Resource informed, so they set up “Employee Briefing” sessions.

In a recent survey, senior managers in over 50 of the UK’s top 250 businesses were asked to rate the value and effectiveness of the presentations they attend. Of the 2000 people that replied, over 80% of them felt that the presentations they attended were of “little to no value” to them in their working lives, and that 95% of them felt that the they could have learned more from a single page of A4 text on the same subject. What a disaster. .

So what should we Infer from the outbreak of Bullshit Bingo? In corporate terms, a speaker that uses concrete language might make the following point in the following way.

“We have made a £4 million loss this year. That is a very bad result and one that cannot be repeated next year or we will go bust.” A skilled bullshitter may say the same thing as follows.

“We have made negative £4 million profit this last reporting period. It’s a result that leaves us with a real challenge going forward.”

Abstract nouns include: Quality, Integrity, Trust, Faith, DNA (metaphorically), Hope, value-added and reliable. You get the picture, abstract nouns are the DNA of a bullshitter’s speech. The binding thread that holds an idea captive until it dies of boredom and the audience follows soon after. If you want to know how to stop BB in your Company, you can do one of 2 things- Ring me, or give the biggest bullshitter in your business this article…

Oh, and by the way, I lost! One rogue “vision” and £640 was gone from me forever.

Cheers

* What’s an abstract noun? Any word that describes a thing (noun) that needs further explanation before it makes any real sense. “Cat” is a noun, a concrete noun, that needs no further explaining before the audience can conjure up the image in their heads. Each of us may be thinking of a different type of cat, but that’s OK, we’re together in that we’re all thinking of CAT= Mammal/4 legs/Furry/Miaow etc.

Now an abstract noun is a little different. Abstract nouns describe things that exist only in the imagination, so you can’t touch, taste, smell, hear or see them. They need further explanation if they are to make any sense to us at all. Trust is an abstract noun, so is quality, honesty, integrity and synergy.