The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

Insanely Great: Today the book from Carmine Gallo about one of the greatest speakers arrived in my mailbox. A quick glance revealed that I will have  good reading-evenings ahead of me. Stay tuned for a review as soon as I finished the book!

Tie or T-Shirt?

There are basically two schools when it comes to “dress code”:

A) The “better overdress”

B) The Comfortable and dont care

one. And it shows almost immediately when I attend a presentation to which school the presenter is bowing towards. Not always to his or her advantage. Especially when it comes to attire, conflicts arise. Why? Most of the time, presenters think that they have to wear something “appropriate” and mount suit and tie. In contrast to the everyday T-Shirt and Jeans. With the great effect that the whole audience will immediately notice the discomfort the presenter has. Or the case where a Suit’n'Tie  want’s to be overly cool and goes to stage in 15 year old T-Shirt.

Just wear the everyday cloths for a presentation would be overly simplistic. It IS important what you wear! But one has to find a balance between attire and comfort. as mentioned, going 180° to the other direction is sensed immediately and ruins a lot for you and the audience. So, what to wear?

Take your everyday attire as a baseline. Give your Closet a good look-over. Define what you will go in maximum either direction (business <-> casual <-> offduty). Then really think about your audience. Imagine  what would give you the most confidence in front of them. By this I mean for example that you will not feel great in T-Shirt in front of a group of exec’s whos ties might cost more than your whole fabrics.

Most importantly, do not fall into the “I want to make a statement” trap. It is hardly a good idea to start a presentation with offending the audience, and this will happen subconscious if you disrespect the audience by choice of clothes. So, adjust your selection to your audience, but to your own personal boundaries. Make a conscious decision about this.

A last note: Work on all your presentation skills and techniques. If you reach a point, where your audience will talk about your speech for hours but is unable to remember if you had a pink uniform or  blue overall, you made it!I

The language barrier…

Just a small issue, valid if your audience is mixed language. Of course, talking slowly and clearly is a must. But in case there might be persons that would require a different language, this must be checked out first. Especially in europe,  it could happen that the presenter has to be able to switch from his native language to english. The main trap that most fall into is that they ask “does everybody understand xyz, or shall I switch to english?” in their native language!. Of course, the attendees not from there will not understand the question and therefore will not have a chance to get the message of the whole presentation. This has to be considered especially in multinational companies, and is often overlooked…So if you are able and willing to present in a more commonly understand language, pose the question in that one, being it english, german, french, mandarin, whatever…

Keep your hands in the air…

I’ve recently attended a congress where a lot of breakout sessions where held. As the venue was not well equipped with rooms, a lot of these sessions happened in areas well visible for other attendees. So I was able to have short views into many presentations and saw many speakers do their thing. One particular detail got my attention. Hands! The majority of speakers had one or even both hands in their trouser pockets! Thinking about, I might do this as well, unintentionally…But it is actually not very good. It does neither look good, nor does it any good for the whole posture. Also, putting the hands into pockets prevents them from supporting your story.

Quick path to planning a presentation

Unfortunately, there is hardly ever enough time for doing anything important right. Hardly do we have enough time allowed for normal work nowadays, but it gets worse with things that are not on our primary job description. For most of us I assume that this is the case, and I also consider this one of the top reasons that contrary to the increase of presentations, their quality is, mildly stated, questionable…
So, I herewith give you a very short path to develop a great presentation in the shortest amount of time. Target are these typical corporate presentations where you are given a stack of data and about 20 minutes to present these in front of groups from 3 to 20 peers/managers.

MacJournal

So, how to update a Blog in the most elegant way? And even without any internet access when writing? I tried some of the available Blog editors and found MacJournal of Mariner Software most appropriate. This is in fact the first Blog entry into this very Blog and I made it with my brandnew registered copy of MacJournal.

It might seem a bit overkill to buy a separate editor for Blog entries. This might be true, especially in light of the very good editing capabilities of wordpress.com as an example. A good offline editor offers the advantage of being able to handle more than one Blog, so I have now the oversight of my Blogs and do not have to login to all Blogs to compare entries, or see if I already have some content I could use elsewhere…

Again, MacJournal is a great help for me. GIve it a try…