Mommy, where do presentations come from?

Mommy, where do presentations come from?
Answer :

Mostly from people who haven’t put much effort in the preparation of the presentation

A wise man once said “I didn’t have much time to prepare this, so it’s going to be a long presentation.” A lot of presentations I’ve been thru are utterly boring! The speakers tend to put as much text as possible on the slides, and start to read these to you…

Death by Powerpoint
Check out the following presentation by Alexie Kapterev, and it will probably open up your eyes on a lot of things.

http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=death-by-powerpoint4344

| View | Upload your own

Freestyle?
Can you find yourself in the above slide set? Fear not, there are several styles you can use to improve your presentation skills.

• The Monta Method : refugee from a game show, but it pulls in the audience, gets them engaged
• The Godin Method : focuses on visuals that catalyze strong ideas; freely admits that presenting is selling
• The Kawasaki Method : ten slides, ten major ideas. A nice way to address the “eating an elephant” issue that many presentations struggle with – how to chunk up the information into bite-sized pieces
• The Takahashi Method : Apparently, also known as the Lessig Method; One word per slide, keep the pictures simple

Monta

The Monta method finds it’s origin in a Japanese game show where the host unveils the answers on his game board. You can think of it as the “fill in the blanks” type of questions in your high school years. More

Godin

Seth Godin is seen as a marketing guru, but he’s one of the first people to admit that presentations are all about selling things. Even if you do presentations within your own organisation, the aim will be to persuade your audience. Anyway, he has given serious thought to how to design appropriate messages and accompanying visuals. More

Kawasaki

One of the first marketing people for Apple in the old days. Yet he has a very powerful 10/20/30 rule. Only 10 slides, maximum 20 minutes & your smallest font may be not lower then 30. More

Takahashi

Text only! But not just any text — really big text. HUGE TEXT. Characters of impressive proportion which rarely number more than ten, usually fewer. The goal, he says, is to use short words rather than long, complicated words and phrases. More

So?
I hoped you enjoyed this post, and that it opened up new insights for you… Thru this contribution I hope to be helping the world to get rid of those horrible presentations. 😉

References
Presentation Zen
SlideShare
“Presentation skills: The 10/20/30 rule from Guy Kawasaki” by BennyK
“The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Powerpoint” by Jim MacLennan