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.

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.

I have sat through so many company introductions and been bored almost to death by one hour presentations telling me about stuff I, and the the other audience members are really not interested in. As mentioned in my previous post on company introductions – a company introduction should only last around ten to fifteen minutes. Anything longer means you are putting in far too much information.

Below is a list of things to include and a list of things to take out immediately if they are in your company introduction.

1. Information about how your company was founded and by who
2. Any interesting stories about your founder (if you don’t know any – ask and find them!)
3. what were the first products or services your company sold
4. How your company got to where it is today
5. What you are doing today, how big you are (not factory size or the square meterage of your company’s offices – but how many employees you have and how many units you sell etc)
6. What are your company’s future plans.

That’s it. You do not need anything else.

What you should not put into your introduction:

1. Your company’s management structure – it means nothing to us!
2. All the different departments your company has – we do not care!
3. All the different products or services your company produces and sells – it’s too much information.
4. Line upon line of text – it really is very boring and you will read it making it even more boring!
5. Copied and pasted pictures of your Chairman opening a new factory. Seriously, it looks awful!

Well, I may have told all those of you who read this blog regularly that you should always back up your presentations – just in case things go wrong, I discovered something else you should also do. Check your back up copy!

Yesterday, I was doing a class. I had prepared my presentation file the night before. I saved it and went to bed. I did not check that the file had saved correctly, because I had never had a problem with a backup file.

When I tried to open the file I got an error message “The file you are trying to open is not in a recognised format”

No matter what I did I could not open the file. I had to do the class without my presentation file. Not a complete disaster, but certainly an inconvenience.

Remember!!!! Always check that your back up file works. Do not make my mistake.

Yesterday, I did a presentation training course with a large company here in Korea. After dinner, I did an exercise inspired by Garr Reynolds’ Google presentation where he asks the audience to talk about the best and worst presentations they had attended.

The Results:

The most striking think about the results was that both the good things and the bad things about the presentations my students had attended in the past, were pretty much the same as any western audience would say.

The interesting thing here is that many people think that there is a difference between western and eastern audiences and what they want. Clearly, from this rather unscientific experiment, that thinking is not true. Audiences around the world appear to want the same thing. I found particularly interesting the fact that my students want humour, simple and short presentations with a presenter who is confident and not afraid of eye contact. My students do not want a presenter who is always looking at a script with too much content in their slides and using too much jargon.

Pretty much want any western audience would say.

Next time you are presenting to an international audience, keep in mind that had I done this experiment with almost any audience in almost any country, I would most likely to have got the same result.