Blog about presentations

Q: I have to present to the Board to gain approval for an increase in headcount or a significant increase in budget. How do I go about it?

A: There are so just many variables in that question! If you walked in my door as a client and asked me that, I would respond with a bunch of questions:

• Is the budgetary/headcount increase coming as a surprise for the Board or do they know that it’s going to be discussed?
• How does the increase fit into the org chart? What is happening in the sector, your organisation, and in other departments?
• Is a presentation the best way to table this idea? Would meetings and one-on-ones do the job better?
• What is your professional credibility within the organisation? What has been your track record in situations like this? How good a presenter are you? Are you the best person in the team to make the pitch?
• How personally committed to this are you? (Will you resign if you don’t get what you are looking for?)

Next steps:

• The disposition of the decision-makers right now. If you pitched this idea to them today, one at a time, and they HAD to make a decision, what would each of them say and why? If you can’t answer that question, you should not make the presentation. When you CAN answer it, then you can determine how to swing the vote in your favour between now and D-Day.
• Crunching the numbers – looking at the short medium and long term implications of making the change and of not making the change. You need to be comprehensive, fluent, credible and totally accurate with your figures.
• The macro picture – what is coming down the pike? Sectoral changes, possible M&A activity, new product/service launches by competitors, etc. You are the presenter, you have to know this stuff.
• The micro picture – what are the internal impacts going to be? Big things like will there be enough people in the accounts department to deal with the change? Little things like parking spaces, switchboard capacity and stationery costs …
• A world-class, Oscar-winning film director is nothing without the full team. Who is your director of photography for this presentation? Who is your continuity person? Who is your researcher or fact-checker? Don’t do this alone unless you have to. Draft people in.
• Start capturing ideas on paper. Most people jump into the slide software too quickly and it becomes a constraint on their thinking. If you stick with a few big words per page, you can spread the pages on a big table or all over the floor. Keep asking yourself, “So what?” as you do this. (The “So what” is, of course, asked from the perspective of your audience.)
• When you are committing your ideas to software, be mindful of death by bullet point and death by pie chart. Sometimes you need to pretend PowerPoint was never invented and simply tell a story … Technology is your servant, the second you feel like you are its slave, something has gone fundamentally wrong. What are you going to do if there is a power cut in the middle of your presentation and the Board members are all going to be unavailable for the next two months?
• Assuming that there is no power cut, make sure your visual aids are stupendous. Clear, stripped back; a mixture of words, images, sounds, silence and whatever else you need to use. No small fonts. No 200-word slides. No 50-word slides. No clipart. No blurry images enlarged from the web. Human beings are immensely visual animals, seduce your audience with your visuals.
• Distil, distil, distil. Poor presenters frequently present what a skilled presenter would regard as an early draft. Too wordy, too ragged, no flow, crappy images. Distil - hone it, tweak it, refine it.
• REHEARSE! I wish more people would admit how much work they put into a great presentation. Have a look at Lawrence Lessig’s talk on Open Source (http://lessig.org/freeculture/free.html). Do you think he made this up as he went along? A 30-minute presentation requires an average of 4,500 words. Shakespeare’s Romeo only speaks 5,031 words onstage. Would you get up in front of an audience to do, “Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say ‘good night’ till it be morrow” without the benefit of rehearsal? The top people I work with habitually spend 30 hours honing a one-hour delivery. For really crucial presentations, they will spend even longer.

Q: I’m not a graphic designer. How do I produce “stupendous” slides?

A: Open your eyes! Start paying attention to posters, TV ads, magazine layouts. If you see something that looks good in someone else’s presentations, lift it. Type “good presentation design” into Google and spend a few hours surfing and downloading from the resultant 45 million hits. Delete ALL the clipart and ALL the design templates that came with your computer.

Use a digital camera or your mobile phone to take large, clear images of interesting stuff on an ongoing basis and save them in a dedicated folder on your PC. Explore images.google.com when you need to represent something visually. Buy stock images for three bucks a pop online.

Backgrounds. I produced this background for a brightly-lit presentation environment in 2 minutes flat on PhotoShop. It’s a simple white-to-grey gradient, filtered so that when it’s projected large up on a screen, it has a nice brushed metal look to it. I learned how to do that in under 10 minutes from one of the designers in my studio:

This blue background was done in the studio in about 30 seconds. The key to both this and the one above is that they don’t use flat colour – the human eye doesn’t respond well to flat colour and you rarely see it occurring in nature:

Using quotations. Here is how PowerPoint produces a Title Slide straight from a template, which is how most presenters will reference a quotation:

Quotes are much more pleasing, and therefore effective, when they are reinforced visually. I found a high resolution image of Tom Peters on his website and it took me less than 3 minutes to isolate Tom’s head and stick him down on my background. A stronger font and a bit of balancing and we have a much more polished-looking slide:

Q: What about text? How do I handle that?

A: People can read faster than you can talk, so do not fill the screen with text. Here’s a lumpy bit of speech (99 words) from a presentation on the subject of change:

If there is something in your existence that needs to evolve, something that just isn’t quite right … The first step is the easy one - you have a small “AHA!” moment. Your intelligence tells you what the problem is, and with a modicum of thought, it will probably point you towards the solution too. The difficulty for most people arises when you try to effect the change necessary to remedy the thing that isn’t quite right. And that’s where the stumbling block manifests itself – there is quite a gulf between your intellectual intelligence and your emotional intelligence.

A typical wordy slide for this would look like this:

33 words onscreen to represent 99 words spoken by the presenter. Not too bad, particularly if the presenter uses the ‘Build’ function to have each bullet appear as he or she speaks. But I think it could be done a whole lot better with 7 words (building in time with the spoken words) on screen:

Or even better, do it visually and you can then use the little green IQ and the big red EQ as a visual ‘hook’ for the rest of the presentation:

Q: So good presentation is 95% perspiration, 5% inspiration?

A: I’m afraid so. A cobbled-together presentation speaks volumes about how seriously you are taking the subject and the audience, which is why I say throw away the clipart and the standard templates. Good presentation, great presentation, is about understanding your audience, respecting them and caring enough about the topic and about them to put in the work. Only then will your content be relevant and your delivery polished.

If you were looking for a loan, you wouldn’t show up to your bank stinking of BO, wearing a torn “All Bank Managers Are Bastards” T-shirt. Don’t expect any member of your audience, all of whom are busy people, to ‘loan’ you their attention, their interest, their buy-in, or their approval unless you are behaving appropriately.

Part of the reason people dread public speaking is because they know if it is going to be any good, it’s going to take a whole lot of work. We all remember the endless rehearsals for the school play or Feis, so in your heart of hearts, you know what needs to be done. Senior management can set aside time, set aside budgets, have PAs and staff members do the research, and pull in outside expertise for look-and-feel and rehearsals. If you are making an important internal presentation, you need to do the same at whatever level you can. If you don’t take the business of presenting seriously, you can’t expect to be taken seriously …

Rowan Manahan has been described as an Insultant. He is the MD of Fortify Services in Dublin and he spends a lot of his time bellowing, “That was crap, do it again!” at his clients. He blogs on this, and other subjects here.

Rowan has kindly prepared two of these backgrounds in hi resolution finish for your own use, in Blue and Grey

If you would like to receive these backgrounds email rebecca.clark@recruitireland.com and we will email them to you.

Source: www.recruitireland.com