How to Give a Great Presentation

Want to make HR dazzle? Great presenters are not born — they are prepared. Here are some tips on how to give a great presentation from the masters.

A Few More Presentation How-To’s. Kathy Sierra from Passionate talks about what could “turn a ‘regular’ person into an excellent presenter.”

How to Get a Standing Ovation. Guy Kawasaki gives 11 points on how to give great speeches. Number 1: Have something interesting to say.

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. Another Guy Kawasaki classic. He says, “It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.”

PowerPoint is Evil. Edward Tufte says, “PowerPoint Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely” in this Wired article. Read what the author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information has to say about PPT.

The Best Presentation. Seth Godin says the best presentation may just be no presentation at all. He says, “So, here’s what I’d like you to consider: Skip straight to the part that people seem to like the best, and that you’re the best at: the Q&A.”

My Best Presentation Tricks. Chris Brogan talks about how you need to bring out “your inner David Lee Roth” and be both a storyteller and entertainer in this Lifehack.org article.

Now That We Have Your Complete Attention. This article is subtitled “Here’s Fast Company’s eight-point program for presentations guaranteed to keep your listeners on the edge of their seats.” Perform, don’t present is one of my favorites.

How To Give Great Oscar Speeches. Ah, such agony, sitting there waiting for the great Academy Award speech, only to hear an actor prattle on about his agent. Ugh. Great advice: Be honest, be authentic, and be concise.

If You Don’t Fall Over, Then You Weren’t Going Hard Enough. Here’s a one minute interview of management uber-guru Tom Peters. Pump up the noise, and give it your all.

Unbelievably Bad Presentations

We had a lot of fun with KnowHR’s Top 10 Best Presentations Ever and Top 10 Best Presentations – The Reader’s Choice. But even more fun is watching the equivalent of someone falling down on the ice. How else can you explain that 14 times as many people watch America’s Funniest Home Videos than watch The News Hour? With that in mind, and tongue firmly planted in cheek, here’s our list of Unbelievably Bad Presentations (and some advice on how to make your presentation even worse):

C’mon, anyone?. Starts with three letters, ends in d-o-o?

Ben Stein shows what a bad – c’mon, anyone? – presentation is about.

Where It All Went Wrong

Top 10 Presentation Disasters. Microsoft makes a list of how things can go wrong so quickly. An example: ‘I once attended a customer presentation with 200 people in audience where the presenter forgot to switch off their wireless connection and Instant Messaging (IM). Half way through the presentation, the IM notification window popped up%u2026 “Wet Patch has just signed in.”‘

Steve Ballmer Does the Monkeyboy Dance. You know, there’s energy, and then there’s a moment that you wish you’d forget. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer probably wouldn’t put this one in his “finest moments” scrapbook.

Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers. Um, you know it’s gone wrong when your presentation has more mods than the original had viewers. This one from MacComedy is the funniest of the Steve Ballmer clips all rolled into one comical ball.

Even Steve Jobs Isn’t Infallible. Here’s a compendium of bloopers from Apple Keynote presentations. The cool part is that even when it’s bad, it’s good with Steve.

The Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint. Four score and seven ways to make a great speech into a disaster.

You Scream, I Scream, Howard Dean Screams

Here’s the scream that ended a presidential bid.

Don’t Try This at Home

They’re trained professionals.

The Ten Worst Presentation Habits. From Business Week comes this set of bad habits. Don’t try these at home, kids.

How to Give a Bad Presentation. The 10 Commandments for making a bad presentation. Examples: Thou shalt not be neat; Thou shalt not covet brevity;l and Thou shalt not make eye contact.

10 Ways to Give a Bad Presentation. “Just wing it” is a beauty piece of advice. Coupled with “finish weak” and you have the formula for a guaranteed bad presentation.

Stop This Presentation Before It Kills Again.. Kathy says that sometimes the best presentation is no presentation at all.