The goal of a presentation to a meeting, a group, executives, board, etc. is to communication key information in order to move the activities to the next steps.
But too often, presentation are prepared differently. It’s as if the goal was to create a Keynote (Microsoft PowerPoint or other tools) presentation. The software will be opened, and starting from blank, a previous document, or a template, the team that presents would prepare the presentation. Cover page, table of contents, and then contents, lots of contents, and more contents, and if you can reduce font size to include more text in a page, then let’s do it.
At the meeting, the presentation is read more like a robot, then everybody in the room is bored, and nobody knows what is the real purpose of the presentation, or even the meeting. This all seems as if governance processes are a major overhead cost for the organization. It doesn’t help anybody.
In the end, so many presentations out there have been designed with the wrong objective in mind. The only goal should be to support effectively and strategically the communication. It should support the analysis by providing a storyline of the key elements, but not by replacing the person doing the presentation or flooding the audience with excessive content.
Steve Jobs was pretty good at that.
This article from Forbes also present a new a refreshing way of doing presentation.
Jeff Bezos And The End of PowerPoint As We Know It
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos addresses a press conference to introduce new Amazon and Kindle products in New York, September 28, 2011.(Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)
The next time you deliver a PowerPoint presentation that matters—a product launch, investor pitch, new client meeting— take a cue from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and ditch the bullet points. When Bezos unveiled the all-new new Kindle Fire HD this week, his presentation slides were light on text and heavy on images. This style of delivering presentations is fresh, engaging, and ultimately far more effective than slide after slide of wordy bullet points.
Since I wrote The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, I’ve noticed that many business leaders around the world are adopting the image-rich style including very famous CEO’s such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and even Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. The style works for any leader, in any industry. Ford CEO Alan Mulally even called me personally to thank me for revealing the techniques. Note—Steve Jobs used Apple Keynote software for his presentations, as do current Apple executives. However, since most people use PowerPoint, I use “PowerPoint” as a synonym for presentations. While there are differences between Keynote and PowerPoint, effective storytelling techniques apply equally to both. And no, Steve Jobs did not invent the style. He just happened to use it very effectively.
