In response to an email from LK to my recent post on “Innovation and Creativity” in a conventional way, I write in the following post to further elaborate my point.
As a seasoned “professional salesman” in a broad sense, my fundamental belief is that “the meaning of communication is the response you get”.I adpoted this belief from one of the NLP presupposition. (Click this link for further expanantion)
Recently, I watched the movie, Benjamin button, which was a close to 3 hours movie. I thought it was great movie and I enjoyed it so much that my perception of the 3 hours was too short and I wanted more. However, a dull 20 minute presentation can be perceived as 3 hours long or even more. If we feel that we get nothing out of a 20 minutes presentation, we want our time back. If there are 300 peoples attending a presentation of 20 minutes long and they get nothing out of it, we are wasting a total of 100 hours of productivity.
Actually, 20 minutes is long enough to pass one important message. If anyone does not believe that, go to TED.com and watch for yourself some of the world great minds, like Bill Gates, Al Glore, Bill Clinton, Sir Ken Robinson and Jill Taylor, who are all given less than 20 minutes to deliver their talks and to pass their messages.
The following is a superb presentation by Sir Ken Robinson on “creativity” without using PowerPoint
The following is a recent talk by Bill Gates in TED conference.
I think the following talk by Dr. Jill Taylor is the best.
The duty of the presenter
As a presenter, we all want to inspire the audience by getting our message across, which resulting in the audiences taking appropriate actions. However, it is not an easy job. We have to arouse the initial interest of the audience so as to engage the audience in our presentation. When the audiences are engaged in our presentation, a connection with the audience is thus created. Without such connection, there is no flow of information from the presenter to the audience. Only there is a smooth flow of information, will there be a chance that our audiences get inspired by my message. A dull presentation cannot arouse initial interest. A dull presentation will tune out audience in the first few minutes. A dull presentation will encourage the audiences to play with their mobiles phones or blackberries. The audiences will want their time back after they found out they learn nothing out of a dull presentation. There is no way we can inspire the audiences by delivering a dull presentation.
If the movie, Benjamin Button is dull one, I probably will leave the theater one hour later and I want my money back. If an ad in the TV is a dull one, we will use our remote controller to vote against the ad by switching to another channel. If a presentation is a dull one, we will tune out or just leave the venue few minutes after the presenter commenced the presentation.
However, for most dull presentations, the common culprit is the misuse of Microsoft built-in bullet-point template. So long as we forgo the use of this template and start learning a better way of preparing our next PowerPoint presentation, we can start afresh by turning our dull presentation into relatively more interesting and engaging presentation. To become a superb presenter overnight is not easy, there are million things we have to learn and practice. However, by just changing the way to prepare a PowerPoint presentation, we will have an instant significant improvement in turning an absolute dull and boring presentation into a relatively interesting and engaging presentation for the same speaker presenting the same material. This obeys the slight edge principle, changing little to achieve a lot. The following two slideshare presentation will help illustrate my point.
To become a better presenter
My belief is that we all can become better presenter. I reckon that there are people who are more gifted than average people as a presenter. However, as far as I know, even world-class presenter like Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, who appear so natural and so powerful as a presenter need a lot of rehearsals before appearing on stage. He also participates proactively in preparing the keynote presentation. As a result, his presentation is so perfectly synchronilised for the speech he delivered and the visuals and images he used in the keynote.
I always visualize myself to be a top-notch presenter and yet the cold reality is that my presentation skill is still really sucked right now. However, based on my belief that the skill is learnable, I have committed myself to learn the skill by doing the following on a regular basis:
1) Join my Toastmaster Club meeting every Monday and grasp every opportunity to speaking on prepared and impromptu speeches and evaluating others’ speeches.
2) Read blogs on speaking from the www.alltop.com and spend time on watching great speeches in websites like www.ted.com;
3) Read as many books as possible directly or indirectly related to public speaking, presentation and personal development;
4) Write posts in this blog about public speaking, presentation, personal development training.
5) Keep on speaking in Hong Kong Institutes of Surveyors and Rotary Clubs.
