tellingpeople

Time for some company news.

As of later this week – August 1st – Curved Vision will be working every more closely with Aware Plus Ltd. Aware are a training company with a broad communications remit. Most of Aware’s work tends to be with local authority staff and Elected Members but they cover a different (but overlapping) range of topics to us.

If you’re interested in anything from stress training to deligation, motivation or crisis management, take a look and give them a call.

….well not as a search engine of course, but in terms of Google Docs. I’ve written about it briefly before but a friend of my has just pointed me at zoho.com. So far I’ve barely had chance to play with it but it’s looking useful.

Particularly interesting is the ability in import PPT slidesets and OpenOffice slidesets. We use both here (as well as Keynote slides) so it’s a useful way of us sharing slides for commenting on each other’s work. One word of caution that comes to light straight away though…. the importing/conversion process can’t cope with anything even remotely complicated!

I’ll keep you posted once I know more.

following on from my brief article about ducks and golden ducks in presentations, there’s more common-sense help from Seth Godin in his (just about as brief!) article on the three laws of great graphs.

I hope to heaven it’s a case of “great minds think alike” there, ‘cos otherwise it’s “fools seldom differ”

One of the big things my teachers were always going on about at school, when the exams came around was this – when it comes to getting decent marks make sure, make very, very sure that you read the question carefully. If you don’t read it, you might not answer it.

Unless you’re particularly lucky and the question just says “Write down everything you know about the topic” the chances are you’ll actually be best served by thinking about what the examiner/marker wants to know and – assuming you want to pass well – tell them what they want to know, in a sensible structure.

Think of presentations the same way. Your audience is your examiner and the title/subject of your presentation is the exam question. You’d not want to fail your exam, so why do so many want to fail their presentations by not reading the question and “just writing down anything they know” ……

As pretty much any writing will tell you, the hardest part of writing is being faced with the proverbial blank sheet of paper. The potential for creating something is tremendous – and so is the sense of responsibility and pressure to create. So, too, do presenters sometimes feel the pressure to ‘just start talking’ when they’re ready to deliver – or ‘just start writing’ when they’re preparing the presentation.

And just like writers who have various techniques to help them get started, so too do presenters – the most commonly used one, of course, being PowerPoint. It’s so simple to use you can just sit down and start creating.

Don’t do it.

On our public presentation skills training days we show people how using PowerPoint should be the last thing you do, basically because once you’ve started to “think as PowerPoint thinks” you’ll almost certainly only ever “think as PowerPoint thinks”. Sometimes you’ll be lucky and that will be the best way to do your presentation – but often it won’t. The result will be like trying to play a game of football with a rugby ball… everything will be out of shape, feel wrong and not work.

The tip? Decide – before you start filling the blank page – what the style and structure of the presentation would best be like. It takes some considerable self-discipline, I know, but you’ll feel better for it. And so will your presentations.

Well it’s hardly come as a surprise to hear that several papers (both sides of the Atlantic) are reporting that, as part of the American fight for the White House, Sen. John McCain is working with a presentations coach to try and sort things out. (See The Telegraph for an example story.)

Given how good Obama is, McCain is obviously in trouble when it comes to the bigger, set-piece presentations and – although it doesn’t automatically mean he wouldn’t be as good a President – it does mean it’s less likely he’ll get the chance.

It’s something I blogged about before but it’s nice to know that McCain has finally caught up with what’s been obvious to the rest of us for a very long time. Perhaps not making speaches as well as his opponent doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be a good President, but there’s a bit of me that thinks “if he’s taken this long to spot the obvious, perhaps that means he wouldn’t be a good President…..”

There’s an interesting blog post here that looks at how speakers need (or should) have vision above and beyond themselves and what they want to say.
http://businesspresentations.blogspot.com/2008/01/speak-to-lead.html

My take on it is pretty similar, though with, obviously, a British take.

My position is this…. not having a point bigger than the your presentation is a form of arrogance. …and believe it or not, that’s supposed to make you less nervous when you make your presentation.

How? Well it goes like this. Suppose you’re doing some public speaking about something very important to you, something you passionately believe in. Maybe it’s your charity work; maybe it’s your newly founded business. Maybe it’s something the work of Amnesty International or Oxfam.
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/

What’s more important? You? Or Amnesty, or Oxfam. You’re the means, not the end. The end is what your audience learns about Amnesty or Oxfam (for example). More importantly, it’s about what they decide to do with what you tell them. It’s not about you – don’t flatter yourself.

You’re not that important. Get over it.