Hi,

Welcome to our monthly newsletter. We aim to pass on some of our experiences to you. Please take it for what it is. Do not bet your house on these articles or take them for gospel. The ideas and experiences we talk about have sometimes made us laugh, or made us cry, or have caused us to shout out obscenities and may even have got us into trouble. So now that the disclaimers are out of the way let us get down to the nitty gritty.

Our target for this month is the humble business presentation.

I have traveled globally and have visited many countries. What is odd is that there is a common misconception that I have found in every country that I have been to. Let me explain. How many times have you been given the slides of death? You go along to a presentation, you sit down amongst a cohort of interested parties and you are spoon fed a cocktail of Microsoft power point presentations and the accompanying drone from a rambling speaker.

Don’t do it. Stop right there. The next time you prepare for a presentation don’t rely on 30 to 40 slides. If you do then you are likely to go through them in a very mechanical manner. You will bore the audience and you will have them praying for you to have a sudden exit. I honestly can’t remember how many presentations that I have sat in and have come out not remembering the fundamentals of what had just been shown to me.

Now there is one presentation that I will remember for a long time and that was given by the CEO of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNeally. He had a slightly different beef. He sees Microsoft as the enemy and hinted to the idea that all the Microsoft productivity tools are really unproductive to business. He suggested that you should dump these tools and make better use of the time you waste on them. You should animate your talks without any slides. Now the thing is he actually practices what he preaches. I was totally in awe of his ability to captivate the audience. I am not saying that we are all this powerful. However we do have it in our control not to bore our audiences to sleep.

Take a leaf out of my book. It works for me. Get rid of those slides. Keep a few that illustrate the statistics with those rather nice looking pie charts and engage your audience. You will enjoy the experience. Now to reinforce my argument lets look at how Billy Connolly performs. He has no script. Just before he goes on stage he has absolutely no idea of what he is going to say. Sometimes he actually ends up in a state of panic. However, once he goes on stage and makes contact with the audience something magical happens. He takes his listeners on a journey that they will not forget. Infact many end up in tears after laughing so hard.

In my view Billy and Scott have found something special. They are in full expression of themselves and are truly passionate in their delivery to the point of moving their respective audiences. We can all learn from them.

Here is a perfect example of how to get a simple message accross. CAMPARI by Mike Locke.

The Editor.
editor@bucks4biz.co.uk