Rebel. Be Remarkable. All with GOOD PowerPoint..
"Life conspires to beat the rebel out of you," says Alex Bogusky of the Crispin-Porter Bogusky ad agency in this month's Fast Company.
But it's in the little rebellions where each of us has the opportunity to "be remarkable."
The battle against mediocrity is fought on many fronts. PowerPoint is one where I choose to engage (other posts here).
Just finished Garr Reynolds' phenomenal book, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices That Matter)
Reading it won't make you a great presenter, but if you don't follow his lead, it's going to be difficult to become one.
If you read the book and you still think that the best way to convey information (in a presentation you deliver) is through bullet points and "eye chart" graphs, you should probably just stop reading this blog. (I'm mostly serious about that.)
Garr makes a number of solid points about why those presentations are ineffective (if you want to relay vast quantities of written info, use a word processor). He also lives in Japan, where I lived for 2 years, and relates a lot of his theories to Japanese ideas, which sits well with me.
After all, "Death by PowerPoint" as a phrase didn't come about because most people are great presenters, after all.
With each presentation, you have a chance to tell a great story.
- What is your point?
- How do they all fit together?
Want to back it up w/reams of data? Great, hand it out. And for God's sake, please don't read us the slides!
Seth Godin posted the other day on the changing nature of work and the fact that, odds are, you'll need to do even more presentations. Many of those will be where you don't have the in-person audience. Gaining attenion is even more challenging in this environment.
If Seth's right (and he usually is), and you want to be successful, you're going to need to figure out a way to get your points across in a memorable, engaging, and stimulating manner.
Standard templates, slides that don't require you (i.e.: if I can figure out the total story of the presentation just by reading the slides, what value do you add?)...these are things of the past.
I know it's far easier to just "take the template and fill out the slides."
As a checkbox exercise, you'll be done. It is probably more efficient than spending A LOT of time upfront preparing a compelling and exciting presentation.
No question.
But, it won't be more effective
Which would you rather be?
.
Comments
Venkat said on 5.25.2008 at 9:30 AM
Surprised you didn't mention Lessig (of the Lessig method fame). That old curmudgeon of 'Visual Thinking' fame, Edward Tufte, also makes some still-relevant points, even though he seems against PPT. I work pretty hard on my PPTs when it matters (though I admit I sometimes throw crap together), but I am not a minimalist/Zen guy. There are times when busy slides, even insanely busy ones, can be effectively woven into a pitch, so long as the voice track is equally carefully designed. Sometimes even unreadable 12 point font -- where the intent is not to read out, or have the audience read, but achieve a different effect -- has a use. When I used to do USAF funded research, they'd periodically ask for status reviews in the form of a couple of extraordinarily dense 'dashboard' slides. One with a dense 4-quadrant overview of stuff going on, and the second one with a cherry-picked "highlight." These were actually effective for the purposes they were meant to serve.
Long story short, it is a mistake to be religious (whether your prophet is Godin, Lessig or anyone else) when it comes to the possibilities of a medium... they make some good points, but I wouldn't navigate ONLY by their advice.
Benjamin E. said on 5.25.2008 at 9:16 PM
I just finished a bioengineering lab class in which we did a lot of scientific communication and presentation work, and I found that it can be important for us to throw what we're saying up on the slides or else people can't keep details straight and they just zone out when they get too lost.
I think the key if you're in a situation in which you have to do that is to make sure you say it *first* and *then* make it appear on the slide, point by point - that way they need to listen to you, but they can still refer to the board to keep things straight.
Of course, audience matters - fellow researchers are different from people deciding whether to give you money - and the sorts of things you talk about definitely apply well to the second case. And even in the first case, it's true...capturing the attention even of fellow scientists is not something to be taken lightly.
jeremy said on 5.25.2008 at 11:14 PM
Garr's point is that there is a big difference between presentations and documents. If you want people to "be on the same page" as it relates to facts, no problem. Put it in a document and offer it up as a handout. But, combining the slides with a document as a "slideument" doesn't help your cause.
People have gotten lazy and combined slides w/docs, instead of looking at each as a different element of the communication/persuasion contest.
He doesn't say that there's no room for data/large quantity of info, he just says that you are fooling yourself if you think it is really helping your cause by putting it up on a slide.
Adam Schorr said on 5.27.2008 at 12:27 AM
Alex Bogusky is supposed to be a hotshot advertising creative. Yet he palms off lines like ""Life conspires to beat the rebel out of you" as if that's some piece of insight or wisdom that he has created. This is like some cheesy high school kid trying to score by quoting "How do I love thee, let me count the ways" to an unsuspecting sophomore.
Be interesting Alex! "Your" line is nothing more than ersatz Emerson who wrote "For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure." Emerson wrote this about 150 years ago. And I'll bet if we look not too hard, we'll find that Aristotle said something similar.
We don't have to create everything from scratch every day. It's OK to use other people's brilliance. Heck, it's stupid not to. But this felt too much like a cheap rebel without a rebellion kind of thing for me.