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.
Top 10 Best Presentations - The Reader’s Choice
Our Top 10 Best Presentations Ever stirred a lot of interest and we were lucky enough to get tens of thousands of visitors thanks to Scott triggering a blogswarm. As you can imagine, we got lots of feedback, and readers offered addtional nominees for the Best Presentations. We looked at every one of them, and here are the the Top 10 Best Presentations - The Reader’s Choice (once again in no particular order…in fact, it’s how they came in):
Hans Roling talks about the “devolving world” at the 2006 TED Conference. This presentation was suggested by Blackfriars, who says, “I’d add Hans Rosling…who explains 50 years of trends in world health and development in 18 minutes of animations.” Roling is professor of international health at Sweden’s world-renowned Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder. What a powerfully enthusiastic presentation he makes. He loves this stuff. And makes us love it too.
Sir Ken Robinson advocates for educational creativity at the 2006 TED Conference. Another presentation suggested by Blackfriars. The conference bio for this video says, “Sir Ken Robinson is author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, and a leading expert on innovation and human resources. In this talk, he makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it.” Robinson argues that “creativity is as essential as literacy in education and we need to nurture that.” A captivating storyteller. And funny. Hey, where are his slides? Oh. He doesn’t need slides.
Al Gore talks to MoveOn about global warming in 2006. Suggested by Albert at Philly, who says, “How can you leave Al off the list?” Yes, it’s an inconvenient truth that I didn’t put Mr. Gore on my first list. But he’s on this list. Mr. Gore makes a powerful argument for taking action against global warming, and uses persuasive science combined with passion to make his points. Science and emotion together. What an idea.
Majora Carter talks about sustainable development and environmental justice at TED 2006. Okay, I have to go to TED 2007, because this sounds like the place to see all the presentation superstars in one place. Suggested by Guy Kawasaki, he says that Majora is “every bit as good as Steve Jobs” and offers 15 reasons why. Amazing talk in story style by the founder of Sustainable South Bronx. She got a sustained Standing O. And brought me to tears.
John F. Kennedy at the Berlin Wall in 1963. This speech, Kennedy’s Ich bin ein Berliner appeal to the free people around thw world, was suggested by by the German Anders|denken blog. This speech set the stage for people around the world to focus on being citizens of the world and fighting oppression.
My Name is Joe shouts I Am Canadian on a 2006 Molson ad. In the style of Dick Hardt’s Identity 2.0 presentation, this suggestion by Anders|denken blog is stirring in its own right. And dang funny. Who ever thought of using shadow puppets in their presentation? (I actually do know someone who did, so this is a second reference.) Humor is often sadly missing from presentations. Do humor if you can. And, go big or go home.
Ze Frank talks about what makes a website popular at TED 2004. Ian at Flashpoint said that he agreed generally with our first list of the Top 10, but said we missed Ze Frank’s talk. The world’s top vlogger shows how he got that title. He uses humor and creativity to make points about the intersection of technology and communication. Never underestimate the fact that people, first and foremost, want to be entertained. And that they don’t care about slide 18. Side note: Lots of people weighed in on this one (here’s one in German). It’s dang funny, I have to say that.
Douglas Englebart demos the first computer mouse and lots of other computer fucntionality…in 1968! “I’m suspicious of any best presentations list that doesn’t include at least a nod to Douglas Englebart’s Mother of All Demos” is what Christopher St. John commented on Guy Kawasaki’s post. Well, here’s the presentation in all it’s B/W glory. Vive la computer revolution! And it’s old school, baby.
Steve Jobs goes all Mighty Mouse at MacWorld 1997. What’s better than having people go nuts when the introductory speaker says, “This man needs no introduction”? Crazy. In 1997, Steve came back to save the day. Now Mighty Mouse is on its way. (This one was suggested by so many people that I’m thinking we might need a new category called “Top 10 Best Presentations by Steve Jobs.”)
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young sing “Ohio”. Ed Darell from Millard Filmore’s Bathtub offered up four suggestions, all of them historical. We’re going to do another list with the historical speeches, but CSNY’s Ohio is a powerful “speech” in its own right and, despite your politics, it undeniably changed behavior. Ed writes: “They intended it as a protest to the shootings of students by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio, in 1970. It played everywhere in that summer. By the fall, all protesters, claiming outwardly to be committed to protest, instead absorbed the hidden text message: ‘Four dead in Ohio.’ Students stopped protesting and instead got degrees and moved into government. Protest was deadly, was the message. By 1975, when the South Vietnamese government teetered on the brink, even U.S. Congressmen got the message, and the war ended when the U.S. refused to support a corrupt government. It happened again in the Philippines years later.”
Tom Peters: If You Don’t Fall Over, Then You Weren’t Going Hard Enough
Here’s a 60-second interview of Tom Peters where he talks about leaving it all on the stage: “If you don’t fall over, then you weren’t going hard enough.”
(via The Tom Peters Weblog)
Beautiful Evidence: Presentation Design Matters
Edward Tufte, the graphic presentation guru, who was called “The Leonardo DaVinci of Data” by the New York Times, has recently published Beautiful Evidence. He describes the book about presenting information by saying, “Beautiful Evidence is about how seeing turns into showing, how empirical observations turn into explanations and evidence presentations.” If you don’t own Tufte’s other three books, you can buy the entire bundle for $150 (saving yourself $35 and learning a heckuva lot about presenting information in the process).
The author was interviewed on NPR about the book in a piece titled Edward Tufte, Offering Beautiful Evidence. The five-minute interview is well worth listening to, especially when he talks about “spark lines,” which are data-rich presentations that give a much more complete way to present information.
In HR, presenting data is often a key part of the job. HR professionals present data to senior management about turnover, pay, performance ratings, and many other aspects of the work experience. It’s wise to consider Tufte’s work in that context. As we all know, when it comes to people, nothing happens in a vacuum.
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