The best presenters don't structure their presentations by thinking, What's the next point I should make? Instead, they decide, What's the next question I want them to wrestle with?
That concludes our reduced-anxiety presentation. Now we just need a closing graphic. Which do you like better, the giant Xanax pill or the shot of James Carville in the lotus position?
Read more Made to Stick columns
For more advice on creating sticky presentations, see www.madetostick.com/bookresources
Dan Heath and Chip Heath are the best-selling authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.
Email
Digg
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Buzz Up!
LinkedIn
Recent Comments | 16 Total
October 30, 2008 at 10:23am by John Agno
Good leaders don't waste their time in "dressing dead people."
"Jacked Up: The inside story of how Jack Welch talked GE into becoming the world's greatest company" by Bill Lane (McGraw Hill) is a book about what the author and Welch did to make communications better at General Electric (GE).
What Lane did, and still does, is observe. He can see what works and doesn't work, and spots the elements that make a presentation a triumphant success, and those that spell disaster or even career death. Take his advice and you will never make a bad presentation for the rest of your career; and if you are already near or at the top, you'll never tolerate another bad presentation made to you.
This book is about vanity. It is a shot at clarifying the character and personality of perhaps the most significant business leader in history. But, much more important and focused than that, the book is a 20-year foray into how Welch's "vanity" drove him to change the way the world's greatest company spoke to the world, and how you can better communicate with and present yourself to your world.
The vanity of communications is about never ever allowing anything but your best face, and that of your organization, to ever, ever, appear in front of your constituencies or your employees or your mates.
November 5, 2008 at 2:12pm by Carlos Hernandez
My observations are that PowerPoint centered presentations are a masquerade for weak public speakers.
Toastmasters seems to be a better solution.
September 14, 2009 at 10:23am by Jessica Pyne
Some very good points. It is very important to include only information that is interesting and relevant to the audience in a sales presentation or corporate presentation, and an audience will simply read the bullet points if they are projected, completely ignoring the presenter.
Yet you've missed an important point: not all PowerPoint slides are bad. If PowerPoint is used to create visual aids that work with the presenter, the effect can in fact be much more engaging and memorable.
Perhaps not a case of 'show, don't tell' but rather: 'show, and tell'?