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.

The twenty-first century has seen many developments in the world of business. We now have cloud computing, making creating and sharing files between colleagues and partners easier. We also have the spectacular growth of wireless internet and smartphones, making communication between us and the office instantaneous, and we have had the development of video and images grow to a point where we can view videos of our family thousands of miles away live through the internet.

Sadly, despite all this technological development, many business presentations delivered today are stuck in the 1990s. There are few or no images to help make a point easier to understand, and the use of video in presentations is woefully poor. Either the videos used have no relevant point to the presentation, or there simply are no videos at all.

Many people blame PowerPoint, but that is not true at all. PowerPoint has developed throughout the first ten years of the new century making the use of images and video much easier.

What seems to have happened is that while technology has moved forward, business managers, who trained in the 1990s have not.

I have heard all sorts of excuses for the typical, boring, text dominated presentations. The best one so far is:

“Our customers don’t like modern presentations”

What complete rubbish! Your customers time and time again, when asked, say they hate boring old presentations. So why are you still delivering ‘boring old presentations’?

Part of the problem, I think, is that managers trained in the 1990s have not kept up with modern business thinking. What I mean by that is that managers still believe that facts, figures and details are what sell products.

Yet, in a world of instant messaging, cable and satellite TV, teleconferencing and smartphones your customers’ attention span has dropped dramatically. While in the past it was thought that an average person could focus on one thing for about fifteen minutes, today that figure has dropped to less than five.

What your customers what to know now is “how will your product or service benefit me?” And you have about ten minutes maximum to get that message across to them. If it takes you longer than that, I am sorry, but you will have lost your customer.

What your customer wants in the twenty-first century is a presentation that is informative and gives me the answer to the question “how will it benefit me?”

The details should be supplied to your customer on a fact-sheet. This will contain all the data, and boring technical details for your customer to go through at a later time if that is what they want to do.

So please, wake up and join us in the twenty-first century. Stop creating presentations that are boring and full of text, facts and figures and use a little imagination. Have your design team create your slides and tell them that you want to have a presentation that is visually appealing and containing as few words as possible.

People often ask me “how can I present like Steve Jobs?” the answer to that is simple:

First create visually, but relevant slides with little or no text

Second, rehearse, rehearse and rehearse.

It really is as simple as that.

최근 참석했던 세미나에서 도통 요점을 알 수 없는 프레젠테이션들이 몇몇 있었습니다. 발표자가 말하고자 하는 의도를 모르겠고, 무엇 하나 배울 점도 없어 제 소중한 시간을 빼앗긴것 같은 기분이 들었습니다.

문제의 원인은 발표자가 너무 많은 정보들을 프레젠테이션에 담아내려다 보니 생긴것이었습니다. 이로 인해 청중들은 혼란스러워 지게 되고, 전체 프레젠테이션은 길고 지루하게 느껴져 요점을 잃어버리게 되었던 것입니다.

많은 세부설명이 필요한 프레젠테이션은 실제로 극히 드뭅니다. 예를 들어, 여러분의 잠재 고객에게 자신의 회사를 소개해야 할 때에는, 회사에서 판매하고 있는 상품 하나하나가 어떻게 만들어지고 통계수치는 어떠한지 등을 자세하게 설명할 필요가 없습니다. 이런 세부사항들은 나중에 고객과의 개별적 미팅시 다루어져야 하는 내용입니다. 여러분이 잠재고객에게 드려야 할 정보는 간단한 회사 연혁 ( 언제 회사가 설립되고, 몇명의 직원들로 구성이 되어 있는지, 회사의 위치 등등)과, 또 고객에게 도움이 될 상품과 서비스는 무엇이 있는지, 향후 어느 분야에 주력할 기획인지 등만으로도 충분합니다. 회사를 소개하는 자리라면, 이 모든것들을 10분에서 20분 소요의 프레젠테이션으로 마치는 것이 이상적입니다.

하지만 애석하게도, 많은 회사들이 아직도 회사소개 프레젠테이션에만 1시간 이상을 진행합니다. 부디 제 말을 믿어주시기 바랍니다. 만약 여러분이 1시간씩 회사 소개를 하신다면, 여러분의 잠재 고객은 정말 지루해 미치게 될 것입니다. 프레젠테이션을 이렇게 길게 할 필요가 전혀 없습니다. 행여 이런 분들이 계시면 도시락 싸들고 말리고 싶은게 저의 심정입니다, 제발 부탁드리오니, 이렇게 진행하지 마시기 바랍니다.

프레젠테이션을 기획하실 때에는, 반드시 핵심 요점을 찾으시기 바랍니다. 핵심 포인트를 정하셨다면, 그것을 위주로 프레젠테이션을 만드십시요. 청중이 여러분의 프레젠테이션으로부터 배웠으면 하는 부분이 무엇입니까?.  프레젠테이션에서 이 질문에 대해 간단하게, 그리고 너무 많은 기술적 설명이 필요하지 않게 답하시기 바랍니다.

상세한 기술적 부연 설명이나 자료들을 꼭 첨부하고자 하신다면, 프레젠테이션이 끝난 후 청중들에게 나누어 줄 수 있는 핸드카피를 고려해 보시기 바랍니다. (절대 프레젠테이션 시작 부분에 나누어 주지는 마시구요. ^^ 시작 부분에 나누어 주시면, 청중분들은 여러분의 프레젠테이션 내내 핸드카피만 뒤적거리실 겁니다). 이렇게 하시면 여러분의 섬세한 배려에 청중분들도 고마워하게 될 것입니다.

Recently I have seen a few presentations that do not appear to have a point. The purpose was missing and I felt that I had learned nothing new and that I had completely wasted my time.

The problem was caused by the presenter putting in far too much information, which caused the audience to become confused and the whole presentation feel long, boring and pointless.

Very few presentations require a lot of detail. For example, if you are introducing your company to a potential new client you do not need to go into fine detail about each individual product your sell, how they are made and what the statistics are. These details can be given when you sit down with the client to discuss the details later. All you need to do is to give a brief history (when the company was established, how many employees you have and where you have offices etc), what your product or service can do to help your potential customer and where you company plans to go in the future. All in all if you are just introducing your company, then a 10 to 20 minute presentation should be sufficient.

Sadly, a lot of of these company introduction presentations last for an hour! Trust me when I tell you this. If your company introduction presentation lasts for one hour, your potential customers are going to be bored rigid. There really is no need for it. So please, I beg you do not do it.

When you plan your presentation find the main point. What do you want your audience to learn? Once you have established that, build you presentation around that main point. Answer that question in your presentation – do it simply and without too much technical detail.

If you feel the need to include a lot of data and technical detail, consider using a handout sheet that you can give you audience at the end of your presentation. Never give a hand out at the beginning. Your audience will appreciate your kind consideration.