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I love this presentation. Chip Kidd is a different kind of presenter. Not boring, not pretending to be someone who he is not and most of all understanding that the most important people in the room are the audience.
Sit back, enjoy and see a master doing his work.
Over the last few months I have been training groups of employees at a large Korean company. All the students are non-native English speakers, and all the employees have differing levels of English.
In each 4 week course ( we do four hours per week) the students do two presentations. One at the beginning and one at the end.
These students are continuing their everyday work, and have to prepare their presentations in their own time, and, if they can find the time, during their working hours.
A number of interesting observations have come up that I would like to share with you.
1. at the beginning of the course, almost all students believe they cannot present in English. By the end of the course all students have the realisation that actually they can present in English. This has nothing to do with the course, or my teaching method – sadly. This has everything to do with confidence. At the beginning of the course, most of the students simply have no confidence in their English ability. Once they have completed two, short presentations in font of their peers they begin the believe in themselves.
This problem in endemic in Korea. Most business people are tested on their English ability before entering a company, then they spend the next ten or twenty years only speaking in Korean, with the occasional English greeting and a “thank you”. If you do not use English regularly, then you are not going to be confident using English in your professional life.
If you want to feel better at using English, then find every opportunity you can to use English.
2. Many students over prepare their short presentation and end up either memorising their words, or reading a script. These students are always the worst presenters. They lose their place during their presentation, they hardly ever look at their audience and they spend too long looking down at their notes / script that the words they are speaking sound muffled and unclear.
Doing a short presentation in class is not the same as doing a keynote presentation in front of a hundred English speaking journalists at the launch of a new product, but all the same, if the presentation is important, the way you communicate with your audience is vital. Reading a script will prevent you from connecting with your audience in a personal way and you will fail. Not only will you fail, but your whole presentation will fail.
You need to know what you are talking about. If you do not know your subject well enough, then you should not be presenting. Reading a script is unforgivable, and simply tells your audience that they are not important enough for you to prepare properly.
Preparing for a presentation is about knowing your topic, knowing your stories and knowing what it is you want to tell your audience. It is not difficult. Any presenter, who is presenting in a foreign language should have the necessary language skills already. If they don’t, they should not be presenting.
3. It is hard to let go of practices learnt in the past. Yet, letting go of 1990s style presentations is something we must all do if we are going to be great communicators in the twenty-first century.
Maintaining a love affair with complex charts, text and bullet points is damaging your ability to communicate effectively. A twenty-first century presentation is about presenting your ideas in a clear and concise way. It is not about presenting slide after slide of technical data. That simply does not work today. If your grandmother would not understand your presentation, then it is not simple and concise enough.
If your presentation is all about technical data, then consider preparing a handout with the details. Then in your presentation itself focus on the key points that you have pulled out from the data. Explain to your audience that the detailed data is contained in a handout.
On a side note here – I am shocked and amazed when students turn round and tell me that preparing a handout means more work! Unbelievable! If your presentation is important enough for you to be presenting it to an audience, then a handout should never be considered “more work”. It should be considered an essential part of your presentation for your audience’s complete understanding.
These are just three things I have picked up over the last few months. There are more and I will write about these over the coming weeks.
Apologising For “Poor English”
Many of my Korean students feel the need to apologise for their “poor English” at the beginning of their presentation. This is not a good idea. When you apologise for “poor English” at the beginning of your presentation, your audience immediately become nagative towards your presentation and expect a long, boring presentation.
Instead, if you feel the need to apologise for your “poor English”, say it at the end of the presentation. This way instead of getting a negative response, you will get yourself a positive response.
End your presentation with:
Thank you very much and I am very sorry for my poor English.
There are No Magic Phrases In Presenting
Recently, a company I have been working with, asked me for a list of words and phrases for doing a presentation. This shocked me. It made me realise that so many people simply do not get it. People still think that to do a presentation you need some unique forms of language.
This is not true.
A presentation has no set formula or groups of words, sentences or expressions. A presentation is simply a conversation with a group of people. If you start creating set phrases, words or sentences for a presentation, you are going to create a presentation that either nobody understands or make it so boring your audience is going to be asleep before you get to the five minute mark.
A presentation is a conversation with your audience. The only English you need for an English presentation is the English you use for every day conversations.
So, if you want to improve your English presentation ability, improve your English conversation ability. Stop complicating a form of communication that should be wonderfully simple.
Seth Godin writes about why reading your speech or presentation does not work. According to Seth, it is extremely difficult to read a speech and sound like you mean what you are saying.
“It’s extremely difficult to read a speech and sound as if you mean it.
For most of us, when reading, posture changes, the throat tightens and people can tell. Reading is different from speaking, and a different sort of attention is paid.”
When I am doing my presentation seminar, attendees have to do two presentations. The first is a brief self-introduction and the second is a final presentation on anything they like. What I find is that students, when given no time to write out a speech, actually sound a hundred times better, than students who are given time to write out a speech. They sound genuine, they sound like they really believe in what they are saying and above all they sound convincing.
I know, for most people presenting in a foreign language, having a pre-written speech is like a comfort blanket. But it really does not help you to deliver you message in the most convincing way.
Having a few “errm”s and “arrh”s in your speech is fine. It shows that you are genuine and it shows that what you are saying comes from the heart and not the head.
So next time you are preparing a presentation, do not write out a script. Make few notes by all means, but keep it natural aand allow the natural flow of your conversation to take over. If you cannot do that, then accept Seth Godin’s advice:
“… don’t bother giving a speech. Just send everyone a memo and save time and stress for all concerned.”
Decker Communications have released their 2011 top ten best / worst communicators list, and I could not agree more with their list.
However, there was one omission that I would include in the list and that would be the Pyeongchang Olympic bid team who presented in Durban, South Africa last July.
These guys were outstanding and their communication was brilliant. It would be great to see more Korean people effectively communicating globally in 2012, and I hope that I will be able to help this wonderful country (South Korea) to be a nation of global communicators.
Here’s a little presentation I did recently for CBC News here in Korea about my cultural journey – coming from the United Kingdom to Korea, and some of the things I have noticed that are different.
It is a light hearted look, but I hope it can show you how to keep a presentation natural, and how to use good quality slides to help your audience to fully understand what you are saying.
With the passing of Steve Jobs, there has been a lot of comment about his life and his presentation philosophy.
In the recent biography by Walter Isaacson, there are numerous references to Steve Jobs’s thinking on presenting and one in particular stood out for me. The quotation:
“I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,” Jobs later recalled. “People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”
This has always been a bug bear to me too. I simply cannot understand why anyone would want to use PowerPoint in a meeting. PowerPoint kills conversation, it puts slides at the centre of attention and it creates an atmosphere of staleness and boredom. The very things that prevent any kind of solution or idea being found.
The best meetings I have attended were where there was a proposal, typed on paper and given to all meeting participants before the meeting, and then everyone had an open and frank discussion about the subject. Often, new ideas were found or new angles were discovered about the original proposal, but one thing that happened was that people actually talked and discussed the idea.
The opposite meetings were where the organiser spent the first ten minutes trying to get his or her computer working, then completely dominated the meeting with slide after slide of boring text and poor quality clip art and pictures. There was no discussion and quite often a lot of confusion. The meeting ended and nobody knew what they were supposed to do.
PowerPoint and Keynote have their place, a product launch to a few hundred journalist, a training seminar where the slides are used to inform and teach. But a meeting to discuss a proposal or to come up with a solution to a problem is not the place.
Take a look at the video below. Here you see Steve Jobs talking to employees from Apple about the problems Apple was facing in 1997, and the solution. Note there are no slides, just Steve up front and centre talking to his staff, and then a video at the end. Had he used PowerPoint,it would have killed the effectiveness of what he had to say.
This year I have done our presentation seminar with a large number of people from many different companies. Some were large international companies, others were smaller domestic companies. On each occasion the students attending were a mixture of people from various departments ranging from the sales department to the human resources department.
However, one thing that has surprised me is that none of the students attending were senior managers. Almost all of them were junior members of their departments who, when questioned, did little or no presenting in their companies.
I find myself having to ask the question: why?
Why is it that the very people who have to do important presentations in English are the very people who do not attend presentation training seminars, courses or workshops? Do they think they are too good to attend? or is it that they feel they are too busy?
In my mind this is a crazy situation. Everyone knows that that the state of presentations today is terrible. In some places it is getting better and in some cases there is an understanding that presentation communication needs to improve, but the perception of the humble presentation is still that they are largely boring, useless and pointless.
My guess, and this is only a guess, is that these managers are too proud to admit they need further training. And it is here where the problem arises.
Most presentations I see done by university students are fantastic. The design, the message and the stories are there. It most cases the final presentation is a little rough around the edges, but on the whole their presentations are good, creative and have a clear, simple message. On the other hand most presentations I see done by senior executives have difficult to read slides, are full of boring text and are a complete mess when it comes to a message. The end product looks like something created in the 1990s., with no clear point and at the end a very confused audience.
Business communication did not stop evolving in the 1990s. The evolution of Business communication exploded in the 2000s. Audiences now demand simple, clear messages that are delivered in twenty minutes and the details are handed to them in a clear, convenient handout. Audiences no longer have time to sit in a meeting room listening to an old style executive spew word and boring word in a dull, unimaginative way for hours upon end. Audiences want to the point messages with great illustrations and simple easily digested facts and figures.
Until these senior executives get it and begin to understand that it is they that need to be taught how to present in the twenty-first century, presentations are going to continue with the same boring image. All I ask is that if you are a senior executive, please lose the pride and get some help. It will not only help you develop, but it will help restore the image of the presentation into something it should be. A great way to communicate a message.
Steve Jobs was a real inspiration to me and to many millions of others. Not only did he change the computer industry, he also changed the music and mobile phone industries. For one man to do all that, that is incredible.
But to me, Steve Jobs also changed the world of presenting. His style of presenting has inspired many millions of presenters around the world, the focus on simplicity, aesthetics and the message made people realize that a presentation is about the audience and about the message.
It was Steve Jobs and Apple’s products that gave me the tools to write Presentation Story, it was Steve Jobs and Apple that made it a real pleasure to write and create our presentation course and it was Steve Jobs and Apple that make it fun to create Keynote presentations for my regular Saturday morning business class.
Thank you Steve for everything you have given to the world. You will never be forgotten and you will always be an inspiration to me.