Now That We Have Your Complete Attention ...

Peter Shea, a plant controller for Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), knew it was time to shine. He'd been summoned to Wilmington, Delaware to the boardroom of ICI Americas to make a five-minute presentation on his value to the company. Shea wanted to capture the imagination of the 18 senior executives in the room so he devised an intriguing metaphor. His factory was like a race car, he suggested, and his job was to keep it running fast. Bad idea. The executives cut him off after four sentences and asked him to leave (the room, not the company). "I lost it," he cringes. "I wilted and died."

Dave Jensen of Search Masters International is an executive recruiter who focuses on the biotechnology industry. He was giving a presentation in San Diego, to the Society for Industrial Microbiology, and he wanted to charge up the crowd. So he opened with a joke from a book of speaking tips. Bad idea. "It just died," he laments. "It wasn't very funny. And industrial microbiologists aren't a funny group to begin with. When you lose something in the first two minutes of a talk, you just can't get it back."

Darryl Gordon, a multimedia guru with Kenneth C. Smith Advertising of La Jolla, California, was invited to demonstrate the power of digital technology to 60 ad agency presidents. So he decided to give his presentation off a computer -- complete with colorful slides, bright graphics, and lots of sound. Bad idea. He flipped on the "power" button and nothing happened. It took 15 minutes to load the presentation onto a spare machine. "Every second of that 15 minutes felt like a lifetime," he recalls. "I'll never forget it."

Presentations have become a ubiquitous ritual of corporate life -- and for good reason. As more work becomes teamwork, what you know is less important than how well you communicate it. "We have really bright people who think up incredible things," says Michael Fors, a corporate training manager at Intel who teaches the company's popular course on presentations, "but if they can't make their ideas understandable for other people, what good are they? It takes real presentation skills to translate this technology."

The absence of those skills, Fors might have added, can have serious career repercussions. More than ever, young people are making high-stakes presentations to the most senior executives in their companies. One of the quickest ways to freeze your progress up the ladder is to foul up a big presentation. "People five or six levels down in the organization present to the CEO today," says Rae Gorin Cook, who teaches presentation skills to executives at companies such as Hewlett-Packard, SmithKline Beecham, and Mobil. "Most of them are terrified. The typical scenario is an up-and-comer, someone in their 20s or 30s, who gets in front of top management and gets beaten up. Be prepared."

What follows, then, is Fast Company's eight-point program, based on insights from the best experts around, to help you prepare for your next presentation. Don't expect a list of "can't miss" openers or lame tips about visualizing people in their underwear. The best presentations seem effortless, but they're the results of well-designed technique and lots of practice. Now that we have your complete attention ?

1. Incite, don't inform.

Effective presentations don't end with nodding heads and polite applause. They end with action. The most important question to ask before any presentation is, "What do I want my audience to do and how do I convince them to do it?"

David Gunby, a leadership trainer at EDS, has taught a course on presentations to more than 1,200 of his colleagues over the last few years. "Even 'informational' presentations are more powerful if there's a persuasive end in mind," Gunby says. "It might just be, 'How do I persuade people to use the information I'm giving them?'"

Of course, aiming to persuade is different from actually persuading. At the level of strategy, Intel's Fors says the best presentations answer basic questions that few presenters ever bother asking: What's my core message? How does that message benefit my audience? What barriers are there to people accepting the message? What common ground (values, experience, goals) do I share with the audience? When I finish, what do I want the audience to do? "Presentations are about objectives, benefits, and actions," Fors says. "It's really that simple."

At the level of tactics, presentation-consultant Rae Gorin Cook urges people to design slides as tools for persuasion rather than sources of information. Her basic advice: think like a journalist. "Don't 'title' your slides," she argues, "write 'headlines.' If you're giving a talk on quality, don't label a slide 'Frequency of Parts Replacement.' Use a headline, 'Parts Replacement Decreases with Value Engineering.' It clarifies your argument and keeps people focused on the message."