I’ve been working with a set of really skilled and experienced presenters for the past few months. The executives had a set of massively important strategy presentations to give to their Global CEO and his executive team. Their Company realises that even the most experienced and skilful sometimes need a little support in really challenging…
We all have good and bad days as presenters. I think that complacency is a performer’s most dangerous (legal) habit. In pondering the kinds of thinking and approaches that hurt even highly skilled speakers I came up with this. The 5 most irritating things that good presenters do, but great presenters don’t are: 1. Think that…
Fit Your presentation should be built with the needs of your audience at the front of your mind and in all of your preparations you should look to answer the following questions: What do they want/need to know? What don’t they want/need to know? How can you find out before you start to prepare? Focus…
You know who he is. He’s the zeitgeist shaping writer of such popular classics as ‘Outliers’, ‘The Tipping Point’ and ‘Blink’. He’s popularised performance psychology and brought millions of readers to consider some fundamental human questions like – Q.What’s the difference between Bill Gates and me? A. Not much. Q. Is success all about hard…
In our previous post I owned up to making a short cut in my preparation and had a technical malfunction in a high-profile pitch at a world-class business school. I did rescue the situation and all ended a) well and b) getting paid, but I got lazy, took a risk and it nearly caught me…
I work with some great speakers in my day to day existence. People who lead businesses and do great things, and the last thing they need from me is coaching on the ‘how’ to deliver a relevant, focused message. They know how. They tend to use me as a source of stories, anecdotes, facts and…
how Google, Amazon, Twitter, BBC, Facebook, Tumblr and a few others looked when they started out. Web originals. What struck me is how good the original ideas were and how little they’ve changed since. The exception being Twitter’s hideous logo compared to its marvellous visual presence now.
A great post from Stefan Lindegaard, on his excellent blog 15inno, from Denmark. It’s Steve Jobs again. Stefan shows a great clip of ‘God’ speaking at the 1984 unveiling of that TV advert and suggests that- The story-telling, the buildup of an us-versus-them feeling and the general control of the audience by Jobs – without using slides…
If you want a great example of how to create interesting and relevant ‘keynotes’ from the unlikely combination of sources as varied as sport, psychology, pharmacology, dog training, infomercials, gynaecology and business- among many others, look no further than here- Malcolm Gladwell’s blog. gladwell dot com – malcolm gladwell, blink, tipping point and new yorker…