How to effectively present in English in the 21st Century

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.

Last week I had the pleasure of doing a presentation on “The Importance of English” at Korea University’s Business School in Seoul. There were three of us each doing a twenty minute segment and each part was related to why English is important in today’s business world.

When I do a presentation, I always think very carefully about the font I use. As I have mentioned here before, the font you use helps to create the right atmosphere for your presentation. I decided to use “Impact” as my main font for this presentation because it has a very strong sense and it creates an atmosphere of importance and urgency – just my humble opinion.

After collecting my colleagues presentations to put into one file, I went through the whole presentation and made sure that we were using a unified font and style. As usual I saved a copy of my presentation in PowerPoint on a small USB drive in case there were any technical problems.

When we arrived at the venue, the organiser informed me that their system did not work with Apple Computers – I therefore kindly asked her if I could try and make it work. She of course agreed. Fortunately for me, my computer did work and we were able to do our presentation as it was prepared.

However, after being told my computer would not work with their system all colour drained from my face and fear spread throughout my body. After spending many hours checking and rechecking my presentation, I knew that the university’s computer would not have the font I used. Had I used my backup PowerPoint file on the university’s computer my whole presentation would just look wrong.

I realised that if you want to make sure that your presentation looks good, as you prepared it, then you need to insist that the venue where you do your presentation allows you to use your computer. There is nothing worse than using someone else’s computer and finding that they do not have the font you used or that they are using a different version of Powerpoint to you.

You spent a long time preparing your presentation, making it look right and making the animations work as you like them. It is your presentation. Do not allow all your hard work and effort fall down simply because you are asked to use someone else’s computer.

I frequently write on this blog about the need to bring our presentations into the twenty-first century. But what do I mean when I use the term “twenty-first century presentation”?

A twenty-first century presentation contains all the good elements from a 1990s style presentation, the need to inform, the need to educate and the need to get your audience to do something after the presentation (“call to action”), but it also needs to entertain.

This ‘new’ element of a presentation has come about because of our lifestyle change over the last ten years. Today, we can go to the internet and watch videos, look at high quality images and chat with out friends via video link.

As a consequence of all this wonderful technology our lives are full of entertainment and our attention needs have increased. Looking at line after line of text no longer interests us and we now become distracted by the technology on our mobile phones or iPads instead of focussing our attention on the presentation.

As a presenter you need to be aware of the attention needs of your audience. You need to be aware that a slide full of text is no longer going to raise your audience’s interest and they are not going to do anything if that is the sum total of you slide presentation.

What you need to do is to bring in images and video to demonstrate your points and to enhance your message. Not to make light entertainment, but to actually use relevant images and video that help to make your message ‘sticky’ (ie memorable) and you need to use stories to illustrate your points.

Standing behind lecterns or podiums, turning out the lights so your audience can see your slides better – but not you and reading your slides or written out speech are all elements of a 1990s style presentation that should stay in the 1990s.

Doing a twenty-first century presentation is not easy, and you need to think and be creative, but this is what our audiences are demanding today and if we do not start presenting in a modern, entertaining way our messages and calls to action are going to be ignored.

So please join me in the twenty-first century presentation revolution and help make the world that little bit better for audiences around the world.