Here, I point out what makes a pleasant communicative voice and what makes for annoying, weak, distracting voices.
A voice that undermines your credibility.
CAVEAT: Bad Voices . . .
Here I offer two examples from reasonably well-known personages.
Examples of heinous voices that irritate and grind upon the senses. They offer textbook instruction on what not to do if you are presenting.
The first video features actress Demi Moore, who is afflicted with two glaring voice pathologies that result in an incredibly bad voice.
Her first issue is a verbal grind that sounds as if she needs to clear her throat of something thick and unpleasant.
Her voice gurgles and grinds along. It sounds grotesque because she does not push enough air across her vocal cords to hold a steady, let alone mellifluous, tone.
Demi also is plagued with the infuriating verbal uptick – sometimes called the moronic interrogative – in which every declarative sentence is formed as a question. She sounds as though she isn’t sure of anything she’s saying. She seems to seek validation from you for everything she says.
The grinding and upticking go on interminably . . . truly painful to hear. It begins at the 60-second mark . . .
This second example is a young lady by the name of Danica McKellar — an actress, author, and “mathematician.” She is certainly not a public speaker, given her cartoon voice and her own vocal fry pathology.
She sounds suspiciously like a Disney Channel-trained former kid actor, possessed as she is with the tell-tale end-of-sentence rasp and shrill cartoon words. Words sourced direct from a pea-sized voice-box. Result? Bad voice.
If you find yourself afflicted with these pathologies, you can correct bad voice with a few minor adjustments. Push air across your vocal cords, use your chest as a resonating chamber, and stop inflecting your voice up at the end of each sentence.
With just a few changes, you can dramatically improve your presenting voice.
Cicero was doubtless as good at business presentations as he was at arguing before the Roman Senate
Before computers.
Before television and radio.
Before the bullhorn and all of our multifarious artificial means of expanding the reach of our unaided voices, the public speaker stood tall and apart.
The public speaker. The Business Presenter.
The Business Presenter
From out of mists of time, of the earliest Greek history came the public speaker as especially powerful citizen of the state, a persuader, a doer, a person imbued with almost magical powers to sway the crowd . . .
From the time of Corax in the 5th century B.C., public speaking blossomed and developed into what was considered close to an art form.
Some did consider it art.
Public speaking – or the “presentation” – was the province of four groups of people: Preachers, Politicians, Lawyers, and Actors. The first to save your soul, the second to take your money, the third to save your life, the fourth to transport you to another time and place, if only for a short spell.
Other professions utilized the proven communication skills of presenting – carnival barker, vaudevillian, traveling snake oil salesmen.
These were not the earliest examples of America’s business presenters, but they surely were the last generation before modernity began to leech the vitality from public speaking.
Began to suck the life from “presenting.”
Skills of the Master Business Presenter
The skills necessary to these four professions were developed over centuries.
The ancient Greeks knew well the power of oratory and argument, the persuasive powers of words.
Socrates, one of the great orators of the 5th Century B.C. , was tried and sentenced to death for the power of his oratory, coupled with his unpopular ideas.
In our modern 21st century smugness, we likely think that long-dead practitioners of public speaking and of quaint “elocution” have nothing to teach us. We’ve adopted a wealth of technological firepower that purports to improve, embellish, amplify, exalt our presentation.
Yet the result has been something quite different.
Instead of sharpening our communication skills, multimedia packages have served to supplant them, providing barriers between speaker and audience. Each new advancement in technology creates another layer of insulation.
Seize every opportunity to deliver a powerful and persuasive business presentation, and you’ll find your personal competitive advantage increasing
Today’s presenters have grasped feverishly at the notion that PowerPointis the presentation. The idea is that PowerPoint has removed responsibility from you to be knowledgeable, interesting, concise, and clear.
The focus has shifted from the speaker to limp fireworks, and this has led to such a decline to the point where in extreme cases the attitude of the presenter is: “The presentation is up there on the slides . . . let’s all read them together.”
In many cases, this is exactly what happens.
The presenter pivots, shows us his back, and edges away from the stage to become a quasi-member of the audience.
PowerPoint and props are just tools. That’s all. You should be able to present without them.
When you can, finally, present without them, you can then use them to maximum advantage to amplify the superior communication skills you’ve developed.
In fact, many college students do present without PowerPoint every day outside of the university. Some of them give fabulous presentations.
Most give simply adequate presentations.
They deliver these presentations in the context of one of the most ubiquitous part-time jobs college students perform – waiter or waitress.
On the Job Business Presentation Training
For a waiter, every customer is an audience, every welcoming a show.
The smartest students recognize this as the opportunity to sharpen presentation skills useful in multiple venues, to differentiate and hone a personal persona, and to earn substantially more tips at the end of each presentation.
Many students in my classes do not recognize the fabulous opportunity they have as a waiter or waitress – they view it simply as a job, performed to a minimum standard.
Without even realizing it, they compete with a low-cost strategy rather than a differentiation strategy, and their tips show it.
The Waiter as Business Presenter
Instead of offering premium service and an experience that no other waiter or waitress offers, they give the standard functional service like everyone else.
As a waiter, ask yourself: “What special thing can I offer that my customers might be willing to pay more for?”
Your answer is obvious . . . you can offer a special and enjoyable experience for your customers.
In fact, you can make each visit to your restaurant memorable for your customers by delivering a show that sets you apart from others, that puts you in-demand.
I do not mean putting on a juggling act, or becoming a comedian, or intruding on your guests’ evening.
I do mean taking your job seriously, learning your temporary profession’s rules.
I mean crafting a presentation of your material that resonates with confidence, authenticity and sincerity, and then displaying enthusiasm for your material and an earnestness to communicate it in words and actions designed to make your audience feel comfortable and . . . heroic.
It means becoming an especially powerful business presenter.
The Hero in Your Audience
Yes, hero.
Every presentation – every story – has a hero and that hero is your audience. Evoke a sense of heroism in your customer, and you will win every time.
I’ve just described a quite specific workplace scenario where effective presenting can have an immediate reward. Every element necessary to successful presenting is present in a wait-staff restaurant situation.
The reverse is likewise true.
The Hero in Your Audience
The principles and techniques of delivering a powerful presentation in a restaurant and in a boardroom are not just similar – they are identical.
The venue is different, the audience is different, the relationships of those in the room might be different.
But the principles are the same.
So, back to the early practitioners of oratory and public speaking. Here is the paradox: a fabulous treasure can be had for anyone with the motivation to pluck these barely concealed gems from the ground, to sift the sediment of computerized gunk to find the gold . . . but few bend to pick them up.
Adopt the habits of the masters. Acquire the mannerisms and the power and versatility of the maestros who strode the stages, who argued in courtrooms, who declaimed in congress, and who bellowed from pulpits.
They and their secrets offer us the key to delivering especially powerful presentations.
When asked if the university stifles writers, Flannery O’Conner quipped that the university unfortunately doesn’t stifle enough of them.
Indeed.
My naturally autocratic tendencies, which have held me back in the literary world for years, compel me constantly to cast a pall on the enthusiasms of my young charges.
To stifle the urge to ponderous first-person narratives sourced from an uncomfortable chair at an outdoor bistro on the Champs-Élysées.
To replace such pedestrian visions from well-worn paths with clarity and precision and vision of things and places never once visited.
At this time of year, such endeavor might be considered . . . Scrooge-like.
But no. You won’t find Scrooge in the Business School. There is no such thing as a Business Scrooge.
Scrooge is commonplace, but not here.
It’s Time for Mind-Clearing
This is about shaking off the bad habits learned over in the liberal arts college . . . about clearing the mind . . . scattering gnat-like notions to the winds . . .
Accordingly, as a business school professor, I urge my students to dispense with their fanciful flights picked up in undisciplined liberal arts courses. To dispense with the bad and the ugly . . . and to embrace the good.
In class, my students look at me, expectantly. Yes, we’re here – in class – now:
“You remember those idyllic scenes conjured by your imagination, back when you were young and unjaded? High school seniors . . . or even freshmen here in university? When college had its sheen?”
I roam the floor, the space in front of the rows of desks with their internet connections.
“Remember those scenes of professors and students out on the lawn under a late summer sun, students sitting cross-legged, perhaps chewing on blades of grass? Your kindly bearded professor, a tam resting upon his head, gesturing grandly while reciting something beautiful?
“Perhaps a passage from Faulkner? Perhaps a trope from Camus. Or verse from an angry beat poet? The occasional angry finger-point at the business school with all its philistinism? The house of Business Scrooge?”
One student speaks up.
“I saw a group out there last spring! Why can’t we do that?”
“Because it’s winter now, of course. But wouldn’t that be nice,” I respond.
Nods around the room.
Broad smiles.
“No, it would not be nice,” I say. “That’s not genuine. It’s not authentic. Just actors performing for touring visitors and posing for publicity shots. College isn’t like that. There is no authentic college of your dreams waiting for you to discover. Remember the lesson of Oliver Wendell Douglas.”
“Who?”
“Oliver . . . Wendell . . . Douglas.”
I’m concerned at this lack of essential preparatory knowledge of the modern college student at a major university.
Search for the Authentic
“The star of Green Acres, the greatest television show of all time. Don’t you watch Nickelodeon or TV Land? See Youtube.”
Green Acres. I explain.
It was really an allegory, a metaphor for our time.
Mr. Douglas was forever in search of the authentic. He had an idyllic conception of the rural experience. He abandoned his big city lawyer’s life in a quest for authentic Americana.
Instead, Mr. Douglas found a bizarre world populated by characters that could have been confected by Stephen King.
Hank Kimball.
Mr. Haney.
Sam Drucker.
Eb.
Frank Ziffle.
Everyone was an actor in a surreal drama staged for the benefit of Mr. Douglas’s dreams of the authentic rural life.
The unifying theme of the show was Sam Drucker’s general store, where many of the crucial insights were revealed. Rural folk did not use oil lamps, “’cause we all got ’lectricity.” The barrel in Sam Drucker’s general store was filled with plastic pickles.
The store was a magical place for Mr. Douglas, a crossroads for many of the strange characters who nettled him so naughtily. For the most part, they gave Mr. Douglas exactly what he wanted to see, because in the immortal words of Sam Drucker: “City folks seem to expect it.”
The idyllic outdoor-on-the-grass-communing-with-nature-scene.
Students seem to expect it.
High Expectations
Expectations that inevitably collapse under the weight of real challenges, real work . . . and in the process of genuine labor, a true generosity of spirit takes root.
“I suppose that no one in this classroom has seen Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan? And if you have, I’m betting you completely missed the theme of Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy of Utilitarianism expressed by Spock throughout the film. Never mind the obvious references to Melville’s Moby Dick?”
“Is this class Global Strategic Management, Professor?”
Again, those naturally autocratic tendencies assert themselves.
“This class is what it is,” not unmindful of the evasiveness. “And it is not about outdoor-on-the-grass-communing-with-nature instruction. It’s about . . authentic.”
I snap my fingers.
“How many people here believe in this . . . this muse?”
Silence. No movement.
“You know. This writing trope. This muse.
Anyone ever heard of this muse? Don’t hide from me. I know you were exposed to this . . . this muse over in that heinous liberal arts college.”
Hands begin to go up. Cautious hands. More hands than I expect. More hands than are comfortable.
Time to disabuse them, time to explode their fantasies.
“There is no muse.”
A simple declarative sentence, but with the unsentimental power and imperious grandeur of a Thomas Carlyle proclamation.
Puzzled looks. A few of them distraught. Then, anger.
“But there is. There’s a muse . . . there is!”
“Humbug! There is no muse! Get that Birkenstock notion out of your callow head.”
“But my English prof said—”
“Your English prof is teaching because no one publishes her bad novels and because she cannot earn a living foisting this muse-myth on folks who live and breathe and work and play in the real world. People who build bridges, harvest corn, make tires, feed hormones to beef, fly you home over holiday break, and who serve you every day at the 7-ll. People who pay taxes and die.”
Gasp.
“You must know only one thing.”
My voice drops low, just above a whisper, and I lean forward.
Pause.
“You must know only onething.”
The students sense something profound coming. They won’t be disappointed.
“Yes, there is a muse . . . I am your muse.”
I smile. A benevolent smile. I see several people actually taking notes, writing this down.
The Muse Whispers “There is No Business Scrooge”
“I am on your shoulder whispering to you in those moments when you lack inspiration. I am your solution to the blank computer screen.”
My voice rises, I lean back and spread my hands wide, just as I have seen evangelicals do when working a crowd.
“I am the muse, the answer to your writer’s block and the source of your inspiration.”
Titters of laughter ripple through the room, and I scowl.
“You think I’m joking . . . that this is a joke?”
I pace like a panther, my hands clasped behind my back. I stalk the room, the entire space in front of the classroom and right in front of the giant PowerPoint projection screen.
I stop and face them, squaring my shoulders and flexing my jaw.
“I want you to remember that one thing when you’re up at night and time is trickling by, and you have an assignment but no ideas and no hope . . . .”
They are silent, and they watch me.
The Incantation . . .
“I will perch on your shoulder, and I will whisper to you just four words. I want you to remember those four words. Just four little words – just five little syllables.
They are magic words!
An incantation!
A mantra to warm you on those cold nights bereft of imagination, as you trek that barren wasteland of words without order, without discipline, without a point.”
I have their attention now. They are rapt.
Will I win them over this time? Can I break through? Can I help them make the leap from soaring idealism to mundane responsibility?
“Remember these words: Love … the … Value … Chain!”
Groans.
They’ve heard this before. They sound disappointed. Cheated.
So many fail to see the beauty of disaggregating the firm into its functional components. The analytic precision it provides, the world of discovery that it opens up! So many stop short of making that final connection . . . except this time . . .
“I love the value chain, Professor!”
“Really?”
I’m skeptical, jaded. I search for signs of duplicity. But detect only enthusiasm.
“Which part of the value chain do you feel most strongly about?”
“Since I’m chronologically oriented, Professor, I’m partial to Inbound Logistics!”
There is a general murmuring and uneasiness in the class. Inbound logistics?
I nod sagely. “That’s fine, Ms. Zapata. It’s okay to privilege one segment of the value chain over another, if it gives you the key to identifying competitive advantage!”
A hand shoots up and a voice cries out before I can acknowledge it.
“Operations! That’s the ticket for me.”
And yet another!
“After sale Service!” a voice in the back calls out. “Professor, Customer Relationship Management has a symmetry and logic about it that outstrips anything we touched on in my basic philosophy courses!”
The dam had finally burst, and the classroom buzzed with talk of core competencies, competitive analysis, environmental scans, core products, strategy formulation processes, Five Forces analysis, and competitive advantage!
They are convinced – finally – that strategy and value chain analysis can be an art.
I even say positive things about accounting and accountants, observing that there is a bit of art and flair and imagination necessary to produce a product desired by the employer . . . or patron. Think of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel for his patron.
The Value Chain! Inbound logistics, Operations, Outbound logistics, Sales and Marketing, and Service.
If ever there were a time for sentimentality and outright weeping, this was it! For this is the key to wealth creation and the bettering of people’s lives in a thousand different ways.
It’s our cornucopia, the secret that has propelled civilization from the Renaissance to the Age of Google.
But then . . .
But then, one of the most staid literary conventions of all time reared its ugly head. Yes, one of the worst literary devices known to fictioneers.
I woke up.
I awoke from a dream.
A Sweet, Impossible Dream
It was nothing but a sweet dream. Students excited at the prospect of writing a paper on value chain analysis . . . on identifying a company’s core competency and developing a strategic plan to gain sustained competitive advantage based on that competency . . . students who loved the value chain . . . who could see the art and creativity demanded of the accountant and financial manager.
Who could see the beauty in efficient operations management.
Who would strive for efficiency because it was the right thing to do!
It was all a sweet dream.
A cruel dream.
I awoke to a cold, winter world where idealistic students still sleepwalk and irresponsible students still party and wiseacre students still wisecrack with a tiresome world-weariness and faux freshness. Who write with an undisciplined lackadaisical casualness that drives me to distraction.
It is the little things that do this.
I close my eyes and maybe . . . perhaps I can recapture a bit of the magic. Recapture the dream.
I look up, startled to find a group of students gathered round my desk after I have dismissed class. They are heading home in the cold for their winter break.
“What’s this?”
“A gift, Professor.”
“Thank you.”
“Won’t you open it now?”
I peel the wrap away in a crinkle of coated Christmas paper. It’s a book. A copy of Peter Drucker’s Management.
It’s a first edition, and I feel my eyes tearing up.
“We know how much you like Green Acres. And Drucker’s general store.”
Smiles abound. I cock an eyebrow, as I am wont to do.
“You do know that it wasn’t Peter Drucker’s store? It was Sam Drucker’s store.”
“Does it really matter, Professor?”
“In the grand scheme of things, I suppose that it does not. Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas!”
Why do I offer a hearty Merry Christmas instead of something ecumenically blasé?
Well, because I can. Because I’m authentic. Because I have authoritarian tendencies.
Is there some law, somewhere, that dictates that business presentationsmust constitute a painful business ritual?
Boring.
Barren.
Bereft of Excellence.
Given the number of long, dull, pedantic, repetitious, confusing – bad – presentations I see both inside and outside of the business school, I suspect there must be.
This dullness seeps into the consciousness. It numbs us, and begins to legitimize itself. It’s like a business ritual . . . a ritual of pain.
Corporate America seems addicted to this ritual.
And yet a conspiracy of silence surrounds bad business presentations and those who give them.
The Ritual of Pain is Ubiquitous
Bad Business Presentations are everywhere . . . and because they are everywhere, we think that bad business presentations must be legitimate.
They must be the norm. They must be bad, because that’s just the way it is.
And this bad presentation business ritual perpetuates itself, like some kind of awful oral tradition . . . like a ritual.
You see a bad business presentation that some people praise as good. It looks like this . . .
Some Vice President from a visiting company stands in front of you hiding behind a lectern. He reads from slides with dozens of bullet points taken from a written paper and pasted onto PowerPoint slides. He alternates looking at a computer screen and turning to look at a projection screen behind him. He rarely looks at you.
A Wasteland On the Screen
Unreadable spreadsheets appear.
Legions of tiny numbers march in cadence on the screen.
The presenter reads slide-after-slide verbatim, his head turned away from you.
The slides themselves are unintelligible.
It’s a bad presentation, and you can’t remember a damn thing except the three texts you received during the presentation as you checked your iPhone between yawns.
Given this familiar exercise in bad presenting, you could legitimately ask yourself, “Is this all there is?”
If bad business presentations are the norm – if this is the business ritual – you scratch your chin and perhaps you think “That’s not hard at all.”
I can be as bad as the next person.
Just Cobble Together a Bad Business Presentation
Cobble something like that together, and you think you have a business presentation. And why wouldn’t you think that?
It seems to have all the elements: A speaker-reader of slides (you), a PowerPoint display on the screen with writing on it, some numbers, and a 10-minute time slot to fill with talk.
Stop giving bad business presentations!
But what you actually have is something awful – just awful.
You don’t know what you want to accomplish . . . or why.
You have no idea what you should say . . . or why.
And you don’t view yourself as benefitting from the process in any way. Instead, you see it as something painful. Because it is painful.
The Business Ritual of Pain.
Let’s repeat, so there’s no misunderstanding . . . just awful.
This business ritual is painful and awful because of the way it’s been explained to you.
Because the explanations are incomplete. Because you never get the whole story.
Teaching you how to deliver a cogent, competent, powerful business presentation is always someone else’s job.
This can be a problem.
A problem because your career often hinges on how well you can present. And if you present badly, you needlessly handicap yourself.
I Feel Your Pain
Sure, there are “presentation”courses. But it seems that the good folks who actually provide you some sort of presenting instruction in school are often disconnected from your business courses.
They teach you “How to give a speech” or “How to introduce yourself.” But you don’t have the opportunity to engage in a complex group business presentation.
Oftentimes, these folks aren’t even in the business school. They can’t show you how to incorporate business content into your presentations – tools like the SWOT, value chain analysis, financial analysis, PEST, Competitive Intelligence, and such like.
And on occasion, professors in your business can seem indifferent to this business ritual.
For most of your professors, presenting is secondary. This makes sense, as each faculty has a specialty or functional discipline he or she is charged with teaching. Business “Presenting” is no one’s functional discipline, and so it goes un-addressed, orphaned to expediency and neglect.
It is the same in the corporate world. Your presenting woes are the same woes that scourge the American business landscape.
Boring, dull, numbing . . . all of this is equated wrongly with “serious.” We get the bad business presentation as the standard.
The Business Ritual in Corporate America
I attended a business conference on the west coast not long ago to watch the Business Ritual in all its ignominy.
Monotone voices.
Busy slides with tiny letters.
Listeners shifting in their seats.
Motionless speakers planted behind a lectern.
Aimless and endless talking with seemingly no point.
It seemed that no preparation and no practice had preceded these presentations.
Papers shuffling in the audience, because handouts were given prior to the talk.
This is more common than you might imagine. Communications consultant Andy Goodman conducted major research on the issue in 2005, surveying more than 2,500 public interest professionals and asking them to evaluate their presentation viewing experiences.
He then codified responses to this business ritual.
The average grade public interest professionals gave to the presentations they attended was C-. The average grade given to the visuals that respondents observed in presentations they attended was also C-.
When asked to recall presentations they had seen over the last few months, survey respondents said they were more than likely to see a bad business presentation as to see an excellent one.
This is the current state of presentations in corporate America and in business schools. Is it uniformly bleak? No, of course not.
Glimmers of Hope . . . Gigantic Opportunity
Generalizations are just that – general in nature. I have seen a sufficient number of fine presentations to understand that, somewhere, superb instruction holds sway.
Or, at the very least, young people whose early development has trained them for the stage have found their way to the business platform. Good for them. But for the most part, it is as I have described here.
And this presents a magnificent opportunity.
Now that you understand the situation and why it exists, it’s time for you to join the ranks of especially powerful presenters. Becoming a superior presenter means gaining incredible personal competitive advantage that is difficult to imitate.
By investing your presentations with passion, emotion, and enthusiasm, you deliver especially powerful shows with persuasive power. Presentations that are anything but dull. So . . .
Malcolm X was a powerful presenter, a passionate man of strong belief and charismatic bearing, and this Malcolm X presentation technique is a textbook on how to sway an audience
Like snapping a towel to skin, you want to sting your audience in a good way, and no better way to do it than with a Malcolm X presentation technique.
Make it sit up straight, snap their heads in your direction.
You can do this several ways, and it’s up to you what you choose, but it should fit your audience and the topic of your presentation.
One effective method is the use of a “grabber” line, which was a Malcolm X presentation technique.
This is a surprising and unconventional sentence or an unusual fact that immediately alerts the audience that its about to hear something special.
Not Another Canned Talk
One of the greatest public speakers of modern times was the late Malcolm X.
While his oeuvre rarely touched on aspects of business that we deal with in our presentation enterprise, his speeches serve as powerful examples of how to grab an audience and mesmerize it.
His techniques are so powerful that he deserves a category all his own, and you can captivate an audience with Malcolm X presentation techniques.
Whether you agree or disagree with him is irrelevant to the point that he was a powerful communicator who drew from a deep well of powerful presentation techniques. His charisma was unquestioned and it grew organically from the wellspring of passion that he invested in his cause and in every speech.
Malcolm X Presentation Technique was a powerful tool for persuasiveness.
Malcolm’s speeches are just that – speeches – and they are written for the ear and not the eye.
They are best read aloud so as to absorb the measured beats, to feel the repetition of key phrases, and to learn the effects of certain rhetorical flourishes.
When you read sentence after sentence, you sense the power and the deep moral outrage coming through, sometimes explicit but most often through a steady recapitulation of ideas using different phrases, but key words.
You gain a sense of the gathering storm, almost hear rolling thunder in the distance.
Today, I mine his speeches for their cadences, their imagery, their use of allegory, anaphora, and turns of phrase. With respect to grabbing an audience’s attention, too many presentations and speeches today begin with routine thank-yous and ingratiation of the audience.
They sputter with routine phrases, a gripping of the podium and a squinting at notes or giving jerky backward glances at an unreadable projection screen.
Use Malcolm X Presentation Technique
Remember that a speech is tremendously different from a written document. Pauses and repetition, tone and inflection are essential with the spoken word. Let’s look at the beginning of a typical Malcolm X speech and see how he grabs his audience. Read it with his spoken delivery in mind.
This speech – Message to the Grass Roots – was delivered in Detroit on November 10, 1963. Irrespective of the time and place and circumstance, which of course will leaven our approach, note that Malcolm begins his talk by immediately establishing intimacy with the audience.
We want to have just an off-the-cuff chat between you and me . . . us. We want to talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand.
We all agree tonight, all of the speakers have agreed, that America has a very serious problem. Not only does America have a very serious problem, but our people have a very serious problem.
In the space of four sentences, Malcolm has drawn in his listeners and layed out a situation statement that, at that moment, captivated his audience.
He establishes a mood of confidentiality and rapport. He then states boldly – “America has a very serious problem . . . We have a very serious problem.”
Who wouldn’t want to hear what comes next?
No Chit-Chat in a Malcolm X Presentation
Notice that he did not engage in throat-clearing and chit-chat. No “Thank you Mr. Chairman” . . . no “So good to see so many committed activists tonight and familiar faces in the crowd.” Notice also the use of repetition of key phrases: “Very serious problem.”
Straight to the point, and a bold point it is. See what comes next . . .
America’s problem is us. We’re her problem. The only reason she has a problem is she doesn’t want us here.
And every time you look at yourself, be you black, brown, red or yellow, a so-called Negro, you represent a person who poses such a serious problem for America because you’re not wanted. Once you fact this as a fact, then you can start plotting a course that will make you appear intelligent, instead of unintelligent.
Has Malcolm studied his audience? Is he reaching out with a message that is directly relevant to his listeners?
Has he grabbed your attention?
He surely has. With a Malcolm X presentation technique that grips the audience and never lets it go.
Malcolm was expert at executing Presentation Snap, grabbing his listeners in a way that zeroed in on them.
He focused on their needs, concerns, desires, hopes.
He framed the issue in colorful language, and created listener expectations that he would offer bold and radical solutions to real problems.
For now, focus on the grabber to seize the attention of your audience. Mull this excellent example from the Malcolm X presentation and ask yourself how he contrived it . . . and how it works.
In subsequent posts, we’ll look at more examples from Malcolm X as he moves through delivery of his presentation, building to his call for action at the end.
If you want to learn how to energize a presentation with Malcolm X presentation techniques, as well as the secrets that other powerful speakers use in their presentations, consult The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting.
Your presentation appearance transmits a message throughout your show
Oftentimes, we don’t consider that our presentation appearance transmits messages to those around us.
Most certainly, the appearance of a speaker before an audience conveys non-verbal signals. This happens whether you are conscious of it or not.
Your presentation appearance sends a message to your audience, and you cannot decide not to send a message with your appearance.
You cannot tell an audience to disregard the message your appearance transmits.
And you can’t dictate to an audience the message it receives.
Your Presentation Appearance . . .
What message does your presentation appearance transmit to people?
That you don’t care?
That you’re confident?
That you’re attentive to detail?
That you care about your dignity, your physique?
Is your appearance one big flip-off to the world because you fancy yourself an ageless rebel, shaking your fist at the “man” and refusing to “conform” to the “rules?”
If so, then you pay a dear price for so meager a prize.
That price comes in the form of ceding competitive advantage to your peers, who may want to spend their personal capital for more luxurious rewards.
Are you the “ageless rebel” battling the “Man”?
Many young speakers seem unaware of the messages that their appearance conveys. Or worse, they attempt to rationalize the message, arguing instead what they believe that the audience “ought” to pay attention to and what it “ought” to ignore.
You simply cannot dress for lazy comfort and nonchalance and expect to send a message that conveys seriousness, competence, and confidence. This is the lesson that so many fail to grasp, even on into the middle management years.
“I’m a rebel and exude confidence and independence!” you think, as you suit up in the current campus fashion fad. The message received is likely much different: “You’re a slob with no sense of proportion or clue how to dress, and I’ll never hire you.”
The best public speakers understand the power of presentation appearance and mesh their dress with their message. Take President Barack Obama, for example. He is a superb dresser, as are all presidents.
On occasion, you will see the President speaking in open collared shirt, his sleeves rolled up in “let’s get the job done” fashion.
And that’s usually the message he’s trying to convey in such dress: “Let’s get the job done . . . Let’s work together.”
Politics, Schmolitics . . . He’s a Sharp Dresser
You will never see President Obama address the nation from the Oval Office on a matter of gravity with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled-up. The messages must mesh.
The lesson here is that your dress ought to reinforce your message, not offer conflicting signals.
Here are some basic suggestions for ensuring a minimum pleasing appearance . . .
I deal with two large groups of people – let’s call these two groups “Natural Born” and “McTips!” – who seem unaware of the open secret to presentation power.
“Natural Born” and “McTips!” represent two extreme views of what it takes to become an especially powerful and superior business presenter.
Neither is remotely accurate.
Blind to the Open Secret to Presentation Power
And neither group is what might be called enlightened in these matters. Members of both groups are frustrating and irritating in their own ways and completely self-serving.
Here’s why . . .
We often look for folks to excuse us from what, deep down, we know we ought to do, or what we can do. If we look hard enough, we find what we search for, and excuses are extremely easy to find.
This is true of business presentations as well, where the easy out is always available. Delivering a powerful presentation is within our reach, but . . .
Let’s look at these two excuses that hold us back from fulfilling our potential as especially powerful presenters.
The First View
The first view would have us believe that great speakers are born with some arcane and unfathomable gift, combining talent and natural stage facility.
That Bill Clinton sprang from the womb declaiming that he feels our pain.
That Ronald Reagan was born orating on lower capital gains taxes.
That Oprah Winfrey began her talk show career in kindergarten.
If the first view holds that great speakers are born with a gift, then quite logically this view leaves the rest of us to strive with middling presentation skills.
It’s an excuse for us not to persevere. Why bother to try? Why not, instead, hire some of these natural born speaker types with all that presentation power to do the heavy presentation lifting?
The rest of us can skate along and pretend that we’re not actually lazy . . . or frightened . . . or disinterested . . . or unambitious.
The Second View
The second view is the opposite of the first.
This “McTips!” perspective would have us believe that delivering effective presentations is a snap. So easy, in fact, that one of my colleagues assured me confidently and with not a little hubris that he could teach his undergraduates “everything they need to know about presenting in 30 minutes.”
He also assured me that “all that other stuff you talk about is B.S.”
Has the presentation landscape changed so much that what was once taught as a fine skill is now mass-produced in 30-minute quickie sessions of speaking “tips”? I actually saw a headline on an article that offered 12 Tips to Become a Presentation God!
Have the demands of the presentation become so uninspired and limp that great presenting can be served up in McDonald’s-style kid meals . . . “You want to super-size your speaking McTips?”
Hardly.
In the 1800s, public speaking was refined to an almost-art; “elocution” was the new science/art, and departments of elocution and public speaking flourished in universities throughout the land.
In Philadelphia, on Walnut Street in fact, the National School for Elocution and Oratory became a Mecca for would-be stars of the pulpit, the stage, the bar, and the political wars in the 1890s.
On into the first decades of next century, public speech was regarded with respect and a high-skill to be mastered with much study and practice.
You Must Deliver the Presentation Power
The fact is that despite however much we might wish otherwise, today’s PowerPoint high-tech software multi-media offerings cannot change the fundamental truth that it is still you who must deliver the presentation.
So no . . . you cannot learn “everything you need to know about presenting in 30 minutes.”
You cannot become an especially powerful presenter at the fastfood drive-in window, unless you want to ply presenting at the lowest common denominator of mundane slide-readers that populate every business and law firm from New York to Nashville, from Boston to Baton Rouge, from Savannah to San Diego.
Ask yourself . . . if learning to deliver top-notch presentations is so doggoned easy, then why are 9 out of 10 presentations such awful forgettable bore-fests?
The Third View – The Presentation Power Zone
There is a third group, and it is destined to remain small.
This group is privy to the truth, and once you learn the truth about presenting, you can never go back to viewing presentations the same way. Consider this pop culture analogy from the 1999 film The Matrix.
In The Matrix, humans live in a world that is not what it seems. In fact, everything they believe about the world is false. Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburn) offers to reveal the truth to Neo (Keanu Reeves) about his existence.
Morpheus offers Neo a Blue Pill and a Red Pill. The Blue Pill returns him to his old state of ignorance. The Red Pill reveals the secret, and once he learns it, Neo cannot return to his old life.
The process of presentation discovery is much like the red-pill/blue-pill choice that Morpheus offers to the young computer hacker Neo . . .
You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Blue Pill . . . Forget Presentation Power
Likewise, you can stop reading this article this instant – the blue pill – and return to the righteous and relaxing world of “Natural Born” or “McTips!” Both viewpoints allow the average presenter to remain mired in mediocrity with an excuse that sounds plausible.
One perspective means you don’t try at all, other means you offer token effort as befits a low-level pedestrian task.
So, if you decide to take the Blue Pill, close this site and go your own way. Bon voyage! I wish you a hearty good-luck and Godspeed, and perhaps you will be happier for your choice.
And you abdicate the opportunity for presentation power that is within your grasp . . .
But if you are one of the few who thinks for a moment . . . “Hmm. What if the Professor is right?”
Then . . . Take the Red Pill
Then you can read on to the next brief paragraph – the red pill – and be forever stripped of the excuse for mediocrity.
For the truth is in the Presentation Power Zone, and once there, you will never be satisfied with your old presentation life again.
You cannot go back.
That’s the paradox, the Curse of Freedom. It’s completely within your power to seize the fruits of great presenting.
It’s your choice.
You can launch an auspicious presentation career right now, right this minute. Or you can dismiss this site as yet another fraudulent claim to revealing secrets to you . . . only to have it exposed as a method that requires you to actually do something.
A method that transforms you.
Step boldly into the Presentation Power Zone
The Presentation Power Zone is the province of the privileged few who understand the truth that anyone can become a great presenter, with the right kind of hard work and the willingness to become a great presenter.
To join this third group requires you to take on a new state of mind. If you already carry this view, that’s superb. If you don’t . . . you can decide now to adopt it or forever be relegated to the other two groups – believing you’re not good enough, or believing you are good enough when you’re actually not.
Public presentations – great presentations – require study and practice and preparation and technique. A deep philosophical, academic, and professional history undergirds public speaking. This history informs the very best presenters and their work. You dismiss it only to your great loss.
No, you need not become a scholar of public speaking. In fact, few people have that deep an interest in the subject and even fewer can claim that kind of knowledge today.
But what you can and should do is this: Open your mind and heart to the possibilities of found treasure.
You actually can become a capable presenter. You can become a great presenter. When you enter the Presentation Power Zone, you are both cursed and blessed with knowledge. This knowledge represents two sides of the same coin.
You are cursed with the knowledge that the only limitation you have is you. You are blessed with the knowledge that you can become a good – even great – speaker.
An especially powerful presenter.
Now, you have no other real excuse. It’s totally up to you.
For the ultimate guide to developing your personal brand as an especially powerful business presenter, CLICK HERE.
You have arrived at the most important website on the internet . . .
. . . on delivering the great business presentation in business school.
In fact, it’s the only site in the world in English devoted exclusively to business school presenting . . . and that’s out of almost 1 billion sites.
One billion?
Great Business Presentation Websites
The internet should reach the 1 billion website milestone by the end of 2014. And while no other site focuses on the challenges of business school presenting, plenty of other sites offer superb advice on this or that aspect of delivering a great business presentation.
I’ve compiled a great many of the best presentation sites, and links to them appear on the right of this site’s home page.
So go up-top to the menu, click “home,” and then look for great links to great sites . . . on the right, in its own column.
Is there some law, somewhere, that dictates that the bad business presentation must reign in corporate America?
. . . or in the business school classroom?
Is there a Law of Bad?
Given the number of long, dull, pedantic, repetitious, boring, confusing – bad – presentations I see both inside and outside of the business school, I suspect that there must be.
This dullness seeps into the consciousness. It numbs us, and begins to legitimize itself. Bad business presentations can be a career-killer.
But of course, no one tells you this.
A conspiracy of silence surrounds bad business presentations and the people who give them.
And yet, these monstrosities sprout everywhere.
Ubiquitous Bad Business Presentations
Bad Business Presentations are everywhere . . . and because they’re everywhere, we think that bad business presentations must be legitimate.
They must be the norm. They must be bad, because that’s just the way it is. But this is myth.
And this myth perpetuates itself, like some kind of awful oral tradition.
You see a bad business presentation that some people praise as good. It looks like this . . .
Some Vice President from a visiting company stands in front of you hiding behind a lectern. He reads from slides with dozens of bullet points taken from a written paper and pasted onto PowerPoint slides.
Bad Business Presentations offer the Kiss of Sleep
The VP alternates looking at a computer screen and turning to look at a projection screen behind him.
He rarely looks at you.
Unreadable spreadsheets appear on the screen. Legions of tiny numbers march in cadence. The presenter reads slide-after-slide verbatim, his head turned away from you.
You realize, finally, that he is reading the slides together with everyone in the audience.
It’s boring.
It’s unintelligible.
The slides are unreadable or irrelevant.
It’s a bad presentation, and you can’t remember a damn thing except the three texts you received during the presentation as you checked your iPhone between yawns. You could legitimately ask yourself, “Is this all there is?”
If bad business presentations are the norm, you scratch your chin and perhaps you think “That’s not hard at all.” I can be as bad as the next person.
Just Cobble Together a Bad Business Presentation
Cobble something like that together, and you think you have a business presentation. And why wouldn’t you think that?
It seems to have all the elements: A speaker-reader of slides (you), a PowerPoint display on the screen with writing on it, some numbers, and a five-minute time slot to fill with talk.
Don’t bore your audience with bad business presentations
But what you actually have is something awful – just awful.
You don’t know what you want to accomplish . . . or why.
You have no idea what you should say . . . or why.
And you don’t view yourself as benefitting from the process in any way. Instead, you see it as something painful. Because it is painful. It’s painful and awful.
Let’s repeat, so there’s no misunderstanding . . . just awful.
It’s a bad business presentation that is painful and awful because of the way it’s been explained to you.
Because the explanations are incomplete. Because you never get the whole story.
Teaching you how to deliver a cogent, competent, powerful business presentation is always someone else’s job.
This can be a problem. A problem because your career often hinges on how well you can present. And if you present badly, you needlessly handicap yourself.
I Feel Your Pain
Sure, there are “presentation courses.” But it seems that the good folks who actually provide you some sort of presenting instruction in school are often disconnected from your business courses.
They teach you “How to give a speech” or “How to introduce yourself.” But you don’t have the opportunity to engage in a complex group business presentation.
Oftentimes, these folks aren’t even in the business school. They can’t show you how to incorporate business content into your presentations – things like the SWOT, value chain analysis, financial analysis, PEST, Five Forces, and such like.
And on occasion, professors in your business courses demonstrate the same malaise that plagues business at-large.
For most of your professors, presenting is secondary. This makes sense, as each faculty has a specialty or functional discipline he or she is charged with teaching. Business “Presenting” is no one’s functional discipline, and so it goes unaddressed, orphaned to expediency and neglect.
It is the same in the corporate world. Your presenting woes are the same woes that scourge the American business landscape.
Boring, dull, numbing . . . all of this is equated wrongly with “serious.” What what we get is the bad business presentation as the standard.
The Malaise in Corporate America
I attended a business conference on the west coast not long ago.
I had the occasion to dip my toes into some of the worst speaking I have ever heard coupled with use of incredibly bad visuals. Primarily PowerPoint visuals.
Monotone voices.
Busy slides with tiny letters.
Listeners shifting in their seats.
Motionless speakers planted behind a lectern.
Aimless and endless talking with seemingly no point.
No preparation and no practice attended these presentations.
Papers shuffling in the audience, because handouts were given prior to the talk.
This is more common than you might imagine. Communications consultant Andy Goodman conducted major research on the issue in 2005, surveying more than 2,500 public interest professionals and asking them to evaluate their presentation viewing experiences.
The average grade public interest professionals gave to the presentations they attended was C-. The average grade given to the visuals that respondents observed in presentations they attended was also C-. When asked to recall presentations they had seen over the last few months, survey respondents said they were more than likely to see a bad business presentation as to see an excellent one.
This is the current state of presentations in corporate America and in business schools. Is it uniformly bleak?
No, of course not.
Glimmers of Hope . . . Gigantic Opportunity
Generalizations are just that – general in nature.
I have seen a sufficient number of fine presentations to understand that, somewhere, superb instruction holds sway. Or, at the very least, young people whose early development has trained them for the stage have found their way to the business platform. Good for them. But for the most part, it is as I have described here.
And this presents you with magnificent opportunity.
Now that you understand the situation and why it exists, it’s time for you to join the ranks of superior presenters. Becoming a superior presenter means gaining incredible personal competitive advantage that is difficult to imitate.
By investing your presentations with passion, emotion, and enthusiasm, you deliver especially powerful shows with persuasive power.
Presentations that are anything but dull. So . . .
It’s time for your debut.
Time to break the Law of Bad Business Presentations.
But wasSteve Jobs really a great presenter? Did he really have secrets that you can use? And can you learn how to be “an insanely great” presenter from this book?
No . . . no . . . and . . .
Well . . . on that last point, you can learn to become a pretty good presenter from this book.
But not from Steve Jobs.
The Extraordinary Jobs
Steve was a visionary and an extraordinary entrepreneur many times over. He grew tremendously since the early days when he thought that his self-absorbed bombast gave him license to insult Microsoft and Bill Gates mercilessly.
He emerged as a celebrity CEO, a man who loved the limelight and whose strong and quirky personality guaranteed him a following among a certain segment of the American populace.
But presenting?
On an absolute scale, Steve was a slightly above-average presenter.
Remove Steve’s high-tech prop that the entire wonk-world was waiting to see, and remove the employee/early adopter audiences that cheered his every eye-twitch, and we are left with a shabbily dressed average sort of fellow given to aimless pacing and whose high-pitched voice grates a bit on the senses with its “ummms” and “ahhhhs.”
Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs? Just one . . .
You and I know that there is only one reason that Steve Jobs was on that stage and one reason that he has a book purporting to reveal the presentation secrets of Steve Jobs.
It’s not for his presenting skills.
While Jobs himself was not someone whose presenting skills deserve emulation, he is obviously the subject of the book because of his built-in audience, and so we must deal with that.
Dismiss it, in fact. But the book does have a gem.
The gem of the book is the author.
The author of the Jobs book is Carmine Gallo, who is an extremely polished and superb presenter and presentation coach, and he embeds solid presenting nuggets throughout the book. Carmine is, in fact, a much better presenter than Jobs was on his best day. Have a look . . .
But even Carmine is not perfect. He begins by gushing at Jobs’s stature as a presenter that is almost embarrassing in its lavish excess: “Steve Jobs is the most captivating communicator on the world stage . . . He is the world’s greatest corporate storyteller!”
Really? Really?
But . . . well, we’re selling books here, and hype is understandable. I’d probably gush, too, if given a similar opportunity, so let’s give Carmine a pass on this one.
But one great danger that I see from this type of gushing is that we can begin to think of the presenter as hero. And what better hero than the great Steve Jobs?
All of us would like to be the hero of our presentation, wouldn’t we? And we are sorely tempted to put the focus on our product and ourselves.
No. Don’t do it.
Your Audience is the Hero
There is room for only one hero in the presentation, and that hero is not you.
The hero is in the audience, and you are there to help your audience become heroic. As with all presentation instruction, you can ignore or accept what you choose, and this point is no different.
No Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs
You can try to be the hero. Or, you can focus on your audience and its needs and its desires.
And make your audience members heroes of a sort.
In sum, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs offers a reasonable exposition of presentation methods that can benefit us all, but recognize that these methods have nothing to do with Steve Jobs and they do not help us become “insanely great” presenters.
But there is good news for you on the presentation front. The best news in all of this is, in fact, great news.
With dedication, coachability, and the right method, virtually anyone – and I mean anyone – can become a better business presenter than Steve Jobs.
Business Presentation Appearance, a source of personal competitive advantage
Many folks don’t consider that our presentation appearance transmits messages to our audience and either enhances . . . or forfeits your personal competitive advantage.
You ve seen enough scruffy presenters to vouch for this yourself.
Most certainly, the appearance of a speaker before an audience conveys non-verbal signals.
This happens whether you are conscious of it or not.
Your presentation appearance sends a message to your audience, and you cannot decide not to send a message with your appearance. You cannot tell an audience to disregard the message your presentation appearance transmits.
And you can’t dictate to an audience the message it receives.
Nonverbal Messages from Your Appearance
What message does your presentation appearance transmit to people?
That you don’t care?
That you’re confident?
That you are attentive to detail?
That you care about your dignity, your physique?
Is your appearance one big flip-off to the world because you fancy yourself an ageless rebel, shaking your fist at the “man” and refusing to “conform” to the “rules?” If so, then you pay a dear price for so meager a prize.
That price comes in the form of ceding competitive advantage to your peers, who may want to spend their personal capital for more luxurious rewards.
Are you the “ageless rebel”?
Many young speakers seem unaware of the messages that presentation appearance conveys.
Or worse, they attempt to rationalize the message, arguing instead what they believe that the audience “ought” to pay attention to and what it “ought” to ignore.
You simply cannot dress for lazy comfort and nonchalance and expect to send a message that conveys seriousness, competence, and confidence.
This is the lesson that so many fail to grasp, even on into the middle management years.
Presentation Appearance can be a Deal-Breaker
“I’m a rebel and exude confidence and independence!” you think, as you suit up in the current campus fashion fad. The message received is likely much different: “You’re a slob with no sense of proportion or clue how to dress, and I’ll never hire you.”
The best public speakers understand the power of appearance and mesh their dress with their message.
Take President Barack Obama, for example. He is a superb dresser, as are all presidents.
On occasion, you will see the President speaking in open collared shirt, his sleeves rolled up in “let’s get the job done” fashion.
And that’s usually the message he’s trying to convey in such dress: “Let’s get the job done . . . Let’s work together.”
Politics, Schmolitics . . . He’s a Sharp Dresser
You will never see President Obama address the nation from the Oval Office on a matter of gravity with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled-up. The messages must mesh.
The lesson here is that your dress ought to reinforce your message, not offer conflicting signals.
Here are some basic suggestions for ensuring a minimum pleasing appearance . . .
To get to the point where we can improve the speaking voice, we first must accept that there’s nothing sacred, sacrosanct, or “natural” about your speaking voice.
Your voice is the product of many years of development from numerous influences. Many of these influences might well have been unconscious acquisitions. Perhaps adaptations of which you may be unaware.
Why not evaluate your voice today?
Film your presentation, then watch with critical eye and listen with critical ear. Listen with an ear to how to improve your presentation voice.
See if it gets the presentation job done for you. Does it?
Does your voice crack? Does it whine?
Do you perform a Kim Kardashian vocal fry at the end of every sentence? Does it tic up at the end of every sentence with a bad case of uptalk, turning your sentences all into questions?
Do you lard your conversation with nonsensical filler such as “whatever,” “umm,” “totally,” and “like” hundreds of times per day?
It’s time to recognize that your voice is not a sacred artifact, nor is it some precious extension of your very being. It’s an instrument with which you communicate.
You can sharpen your communication skills by improving your voice.
Simply thinking of your voice in this way will improve its quality. Working to improve it will improve its quality dramatically and build your voice into an especially powerful skill for personal competitive advantage.
Let’s consider here several things you can do to improve your voice.
Always speak to the people in your audience in ways that move them – respect your audience.
Speak to your listeners in their language and to their needs.
Always offer them your respect and your heart.
Does this seem obvious?
“Respect Your Audience” Seems Easy
That’s the paradox.
We often forget that our audience is the other player in our two-player cooperative game. We mistakenly contrive our message in our terms.
We say what we want to say and what we think our audience needs to hear. We speak in language that gives us comfort.
Then we blame the audience if they don’t “get it.”
Too many speakers across the spectrum of abilities never consider the needs of their audience or why folks have gathered to hear the message. Often, a business presenter may offer an off-the-shelf message that isn’t even remotely tailored to the needs of the folks gathered to hear it. She ignores the precept respect your audience.
The Curse of Hubris
Paradoxically, this occurs often when men and women of power and accomplishment address large groups of employees or conference attendees. Infused with the power and sometime hubris that comes with great success, they believe this success translates into powerful presenting.
But it doesn’t.
They don’t prepare. They offer standard tropes. They rattle off cliches. They pull out blandishments. And they receive ovations, because those assembled believe that, well, this fellow is successful, so he must know what he’s doing.
What he says and the way he says it, whatever it was, becomes gospel.
But the presentation emperor has no clothes. He does not follow the precept of respect your audience.
Contempt? Close to It
What we actually witness from presenters of this type is a form of contempt. Presenters from 16 to 60 offer this up too often. The lack of preparation by speakers disregards the audience. It shows contempt for the time of people gathered to listen.
For instance, last year a successful young entrepreneur spoke to our assembled students about his own accomplishments in crafting a business plan for his unique idea and then pitching that idea to venture capitalists. His idea was tremendously successful and, as I understood him, he sold it for millions.
Now, he stood in front of our students wearing a ragged outfit of jeans and flannel shirt and sipping coffee from a styrofoam cup. He was ill-prepared to speak and offered-up toss-off lines.
What was his sage advice to our budding entrepreneurs for their own presentations?
You Call That Good Advice?
“Make really good slides.”
That was it.
Just a few moments’ thought makes clear how pedestrian this is. What does it truly mean? You need a millionaire entrepreneur to tell you this?
“Really good slides” means nothing and promises even less. Did this fellow follow the respect your audience mantra? I think not.
I guarantee that this youngster did not appear in his own presentations wearing his “cool slob” outfit. Likely as not, he developed a great idea, defined it sharply, and practiced many times.
It was presented knowledgeably by well-dressed entrepreneurs, and this is what won the day. And this is the lesson that our young presenters should internalize, not toss-offs from a character just dropping by.
So many of the dull and emotionless automatons we listen to could be powerful communicators if they shed their hard defensive carapaces and accepted that there is much to be learned. Speak to your listeners as fellow hopeful human beings in their own language of desires, ambition, fears, and anticipation.
We gain by following the respect your audience mantra.
Conversely, we all can learn from the people we meet and the speakers we listen to, even the bad ones.
Cultivate a Powerful Image for Personal Competitive Advantage
Let’s move from the realm of what you do and say in front of your business presentation audience to how you appear to your audience . . . an important source of personal competitive advantage.
Your appearance can cultivate this advantage. So right now let’s dismiss the notion that “it doesn’t matter what I look like . . . it’s the message that counts.”
This is so wrong-headed and juvenile that you can turn this to immediate advantage. You can adopt the exact opposite perspective right now and steal a march on the competition. Most folks your age won’t go that route, particularly those stuck in liberal arts.
It’s much more dramatic to deliver a mythic blow for “individuality” than to conform to society’s diktats, eh?
Take the Smart Fork
Well, let those folks strike their blows while you spiff yourself up for your presentations. Present a superior appearance in both public and private job interviews to gain a personal competitive advantage.
Here is the upshot. Presentation appearance matters a great deal. It’s up to us to dress and groom appropriate to the occasion and appropriate to our personal brand and to the message we want to send.
“Slob cool” may fly in college – and I stress may. But it garners only contempt outside the friendly confines of the local student activities center and fraternity house.
Is that “fair?”
It’s fair for Personal Competitive Advantage
It certainly is fair! You may simply not like it. It may clang upon your youthful sensibilities.
But here’s the deal . . . You’re on display in front of a group of buyers. They want to know if your message is credible. Your appearance conveys cues to your audience. It can convey one of two chief messages, with little wiggle room between them.
First, your appearance telegraphs to your audience that you are: Sharp, focused, detailed, careful, bold, competent, prudent, innovative, loyal, energetic . . .
Or . . .
Your appearance telegraphs to your audience that you are: Slow, sloppy, careless, inefficient, incompetent, weak, mercenary, stupid.
Moreover, you may never know when you are actually auditioning for your next job. So it pays to burnish your personal brand all the time to achieve the much-coveted personal competitive advantage.
That presentation you decided to “wing” with half-baked preparation and delivered in a wrinkled suit was awful. It might have held in the audience a human resource professional recommended to you by a friend. But you blew the deal. Without even knowing it.
Think.
Don’t Eliminate Yourself from Contention
How many powerful people mentally cross you off their list because of your haphazard appearance? How many opportunities pass you by? How many great connections do you forfeit?
Granted, it’s up to your discretion to dress in the first wrinkled shirt you pull from the laundry basket. But recognize that you may be paying a price without even knowing it.
Your appearance on the stage contributes or detracts from your message. So, as a general rule, you should dress one half-step above the audience to convey a seriousness of purpose.
For instance, if the audience is dressed in business casual (sports coat and tie), you dress in a suit. Simple.
Personal appearance overlaps into the area of personal branding, which is beyond the scope of this space, but two books I recommend to aid you in your quest for appearance enhancement are You, Inc. and The Brand Called You.
Both of these books are worth the price. They contain the right kind of advice to propel you into delivering Powerful Presentations enhanced by a superb professional appearance.
Our profession contrives business jargon and then clutches it to its breast.
It’s useful.
Especially as shorthand for keen concepts well-understood.
But the more Machiavellian among us sometimes enshrine it as a code for entry into a priesthood of the knowledgeable.
And so we have the conundrum – one man’s obfuscation is another man’s sharply drawn argument, both using “jargon.”
Who with compassion would strip a man of his outlet for facile expression, the utility of shorthand “jargon,” simply because there exist unscrupulous cads who abuse the privilege of a profession’s lexicon?
Business Jargon Struggles for Hearts and Minds?
The struggle is for clear and original expression against the encroachment of weasel-words. The struggle is for meaningful distinctions between useful locutions and the vulgarity of “jargon.”
So it’s a struggle, yes, but it’s also an internal struggle.
I’m torn, because it is my bane to be charged with teaching the lexicon, the “jargon” to vulnerable young minds. Minds to which business jargon sounds fresh and innovative, when it’s actually already stale and reified.
It’s an axiom that once something makes it into a textbook, it likely is already outdated.
But business jargon does perform valuable service. If used judiciously and properly and with clear intent to the purpose for which it was created.
If it’s wielded not to obfuscate.
If it’s wielded not to mind-taser the listener into a kind of numb dumbness.
For those of us in the profession that is home to our jargon, it serves as shorthand for many thoughts already thought, not simply a comfortable refuge. Shorthand for many debates already concluded. Many theories already expressed. Many systems already in place.
In fact, a deep vein of rich discussion lurks beneath the glib façade of most of our jargon.
And thus business jargon presents us with a dilemma – if it were not useful, it would not exist. And anything that is useful can be misused.
It should come with a warning label.
A Business Jargon Warning Label?
I provide such a warning label. But only half-heartedly.
Half-heartedly, because it is my first obligation to ensure that my charges remember the “jargon” that I serve up to them. They must imbibe deeply and, at some point during a seemingly interminable semester, they must regurgitate the jargon.
They must drink deeply from the cup of “competitive advantage.”
They must feast heartily at the table of “core competency” and ladle large portions of “market failure” and “pioneering costs” along with a light sprinkling of what some might consider the oxymoronic garnish of “business ethics.”
More insidious than the standard business jargon is the phalanx of “new” program buzzwords that march our way in endless columns, recycling ideas of old . . . and then recycling them yet again.
For those of us who bathe regularly in the sea of “competitive advantage” and “market saturation” and “pioneering costs” and “core competencies,” we cannot exercise the luxury of contempt.
Instead, we must labor as any wordsmith must labor. We must not ban the hammer because some use it to bash their thumb instead of the nail.
Just as any writer seeks and secures precision in language, the business writer must labor likewise. Constant vigilance is our only guarantor against the debasing of the language.
This is true in business and in academia as it is true in the high-minded world of the literati.
High-minded? It might be also useful to exercise constant vigilance that high-mindedness does not become high-handedness.
Humility and the hunger for clarity.
Uncommon qualities in the business and academic worlds? Perhaps, but surely they should be considered corollary to the jargon that seems pervasive and inescapable and that nettles us so naughtily.
But enough! Cast all of this aside and consult The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting for a jargon-free entre into the high priesthood of the finest business presenters in the corporate world!
It occurred to me to compile a list of the best presentation books to recommend to readers of this blog.
It’s really an obvious exercise, isn’t it?
“Best of” lists are always popular.
To recommend books chock full of presentation wisdom to hone our skill set. Great advice to lift our presentation to what we all sometimes refer to as “the next level.”
And then the equally obvious thought occurred to me – that list already exists.
The List of Best Presentation Books
In fact, I’m certain that several lists are already out there making the rounds.
And so I do the next best thing in this space . . .
I offer you a list of the 35 best presentation books compiled and judged by giants in the field . . . (and I offer my own view of what I consider to be the top three on the list). Yes, you can learn something about business presenting from a book. Quite a bit, actually.
These three books, for me, capture the spirit, the art, and the craft of especially powerful business presenting.
They advocate change. You must change the way your deliver your presentations in ways that, at first, may discomfort you. But they are changes that you must accept to become an especially powerful business presenter.
Best Presentations Books . . . this one on PowerPoint Slides
The Story Factor, in particular, is strong in transforming your presentations into sturdy narratives that capture an audience and propel your listeners to action. Consult Annette Simmons for deep learning about the power of storytelling.
A fourth book does not appear on the list. Actually, it does, but only in a modified form. This is Dale Carnegie’s The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking. This is an “updated” version of his classic from mid-way the last century Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business. In my view, the update strips much useful material from the book, and so I prefer the original.
You can find dozens of copies of the original classic for sale on ebay. This, in my opinion, is the most useful public speaking book ever penned.
Best Presentation Book on Storytelling
If I were forced to choose one . . . this would be it. And My Book?
My own just-published book, The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting, does not appear on this superb list of 35 books. And so here I offer the most generous and self-aggrandizing interpretation possible . . . it just hasn’t circulated among the cognoscenti nearly enough to have created a buzz-worthy impact.
I know that you, as do I, eagerly await its appearance on next year’s “Best of” list.
Until then, enjoy the creme-de-la-creme of the best presentation books as exemplified on the 2012 list!
One of the most important business presenting occasions you face in your career is the job interview.
In the interview, you present for your most important client – you.
And the question I’m asked most frequently with respect to how you present your accomplishments is this:
“How do I talk about myself and my qualifications in a way that is honest and forthright and yet does not sound like braggadocio?”
This is a reasonable concern, and if you can find a way to do so, then you will have acquired an especially powerful personal competitive advantage.
No Need to Boast . . .
Few people like to boast, instead going to the opposite extreme of false humility. Neither boasting nor meekness is the answer.
Instead, try this . . .
Understand that you are not in the interview to talk about your resume. Your resume got you through the door and into the interview.
Now, the recruiter is searching for something more. And that “something” is often indefinable.
The recruiter is evaluating you for other things, such as corporate fit, personality, working intelligence, verbal acuity.
Many times, the recruiter doesn’t know what he or she is actually looking for.
But the recruiter does know what is unacceptable and is thus conscious of disqualifiers.
For the young or mid-level candidate, the atmosphere can feel akin to a minefield. Some candidates feel that if they go tightlipped, they cannot make a mistake, and so they weigh each word carefully, triangulating what they believe the recruiter wants to hear.
But it is not enough to simply survive without making a slip . . . or a “mistake.”
This approach comes off as stiff, artificial, weird.
Instead, go into your interview to make the presentation of your life about you, not what you think the recruiter is looking for.
When it comes time to talk about yourself – here is exactly how to do it.
Talk about what you learned or what you discovered about yourself.
That’s it.
Digest that for a moment.
Yes, it really is that simple. But it’s not easy, especially if you aren’t accustomed to talking about yourself this way. It takes practice.
Talk about a difficult group project or a difficult task that required you to adapt and use your unique skill set. In, say, a group work setting, tell of your learning about the importance of time management, of punctuality. Translation:
I have a great work ethic and I’m punctual.
Tell how you learned to deal with people from different cultures and backgrounds and to value difference. Translation:
I get along with a wide range of people.
Tell how you discovered that you gain a sense of satisfaction from helping others do their best, drawing out their best qualities and backstopping them where they are weak. Translation:
I’m a team-player who subordinates my ego to get the job done for the company, recognizing that others may need help on occasion, help that I freely give.
Tell how you learned about different work styles and of the different ways of tackling problems. Translation:
I’m flexible and adaptable to a variety of work environments and people.
For an Especially Powerful Interview
See how it works?
You don’t talk about your strengths . . . you talk of what you learned about yourself during the course of a project or task. So think of a major project you’ve tackled in the past and build your story around that.
For example, you could say something like this:
“I worked on a major three-month project in my International Business Capstone involving a multicultural team, and in the project, I learned a great deal about myself as well as others. I believe that I grew not only as a professional, but as a human being. This gave me a great deal of satisfaction, especially as I saw others developing their skills as well.”
Or, if you are a young professional, you could say:
“We received a last-minute project and it was dumped on us without warning, which made us work through the weekend. That was pivotal. It was then that I learned that this is the nature of business – chaotic, demanding, unforgiving, unpredictable – and how I respond to the challenge makes the difference between a win and a loss. That experience forged me, and I’ll always be grateful for it.”
With that statement, you have conveyed a wealth of positive information to the recruiter.
Of course, it all must be true, so you must adapt your story particulars to your own work life. And all of us have these moments and experiences, so mine your recent past for them. Your resume itself has at least a dozen stories, and it’s up to you to find them. When you do find them, craft them, practice them, and use them . . . you will have achieved an important personal competitive advantage.
So always remember these key words . . .
Let me share with you what I learned about myself.
Be earnest . . . for a Powerful Business Presentation
“Earnestness” is a word that we neither hear much nor use much these days.
That’s a shame.
Because the word captures much of what makes for an especially powerful business presentation.
Edwin Dubois Shurter was a presenting master in the early 20th Century, and he said way back in 1903 that:
“Earnestness is the soul of oratory. It manifests itself in speech by animation, wide-awakeness, strength, force, power, as opposed to listlessness, timidity, half-heartedness, uncertainty, feebleness.”
What was true then is surely true today.
And yet, “earnestness” is frowned upon. Perhaps some think it somehow “uncool.”
Showing Too Much Interest?
It is uncool to show interest, because . . . If you appear too interested in something, and then you somehow are perceived as having failed, then your business presentation “defeat” is doubly ignominious.
Better to pretend you don’t care.
So the default student attitude is to affect an air of cool nonchalance. So that no defeat is too damaging. And you can save your cool. You save your best – your earnestness – for something else.
For your friends, for your sports contests, for your facebook status updates. For your pizza discussions, for your intramural softball team . . .
But this also means that all of your presentation victories, should ever you score one or two, are small victories. Meager effort yields acceptable results in areas where only meager effort is required.
Especially Powerful Business Presenting
Mediocrity is the province of the lazy and nonchalant. The sin of the insouciant.
Shurter was a keen observer of presentations and he recognized the key role played by earnestness in a successful presentation: “When communicated to the audience, earnestness is, after all is said and done, the touchstone of success in public speaking, as it is in other things in life.”
Earnestness means wrapping your material in you.
Embracing your topic.
This means giving a powerful business presentation that no one else can give, one that no one else can copy. Because it arises from your essence, your core. It’s the source of your personal competitive advantage.
It means demonstrating genuine enthusiasm for your subject. It means recognizing that the subject of your presentation could be the love of someone else’s life, whether it be their business or their product or their service – you should make it yours when you present.
Now, this means several things, including how you utilize the stage to your utmost advantage. But a major component is the exercising of your mind.
And I talk about that here.
Your Learning Curve
It’s the process of enriching your personal context so that you become aware of new and varied sources of information, ideas, concepts, theories. You become learned in new and wondrous ways.
Think of it as enlarging your world.
You increase your reservoir of usable material. And your business presentation can connect more readily with varied audiences.
You do this in a pleasant and ongoing process – by keeping your mind open to possibilities outside your functional area. By taking your education far beyond undergraduate or graduate school. And that process increases your personal competitive advantage steadily.
By doing something daily, however brief, that stretches your mind. Or allows you to make a connection that otherwise might have escaped you.
Expand Your World to Expand Your Business Presentations
By reading broadly in areas outside your specialty, and by rekindling those interests that excited and animated you early in life.
Read a book outside your specialty. Have lunch with a colleague from a different discipline. Dabble a bit in architecture, engineering, art, poetry, history, science.
It also means sampling some of the best offerings in the blogosphere on business presentations.
Their works are invaluable tools of my trade. If you become a serious business presenter, they’ll become your friends, too.
No Cloistering!
We sometimes cloister ourselves in our discipline, our job, our tight little world, forgetting that other fields can offer insights. For myself, while teaching in the LeBow College of Business at Drexel University, I am also sitting in on a course sponsored by another university’s History Department’s Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy – “Grand Strategy.”
What a leavening experience this promises to be: Thucydides, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Lincoln, and many others . . .
Does this help in preparing my own classes? At this point, I can’t be certain.
And that’s the beauty and potential of it.
I do know that it will enrich my store of knowledge so that my own presentations continue in 3-dimensional fashion, connected to the “real world.” They are textured, deep, and richer than they otherwise would have been.
It will do the same for your business presentations. And it will likely aid in your developing into an especially powerful presenter, imbued with professional presence and increased personal competitive advantage.
I don’t mean to be a pain to my long-suffering business students, but one power posing exercise that elicits more scorn than it deserves is called “Especially Powerful.”
It consists of everyone standing up and then striking a confident stance. Feet are shoulder-width apart and arms outstretched to either side, palms turned upward.
Picture it.
This is a critical and powerful pose.
Power Posing Personified
Then visualize a slight tilt of the head up and, in unison and in the best tradition of the deep-voiced Darth Vader, everyone repeats after me . . . “I feel especially powerful today!”
Several times.
“I feel especially powerful today!”
I’m not satisfied until the room reverberates with the appropriate tone and volume, which indicate a robust embrace of the exercise and what we’re trying to accomplish.
Which is . . . what?
Why do I engage in what might appear gimmicky or cute?
First, I don’t do cute. Second, the exercise achieves superb physiological goals that improve many characteristics associated with business presenting.
In short, much of what we call body language. Power Posing.
Body Language
Power Posing Carries Gravitas
We hear in some circles that nonverbal communication – your body language – comprises more than 50 percent of your message. Some studies contend that it comprises more than 70 percent.
For no other reason than this, we should be concerned with the messages we transmit with our posture, our expressions, our gestures. Yes, body language is critical to conveying your message, and power posing is some of the most effective body language you can use.
But it is essential for another equally important reason.
It’s a reason not generally well-known or understood. It’s a secret that I’ve use with my presentation students for years to invest them with confidence and new-found presentation power. Its core idea stretches back well more than a century, to one of the world’s first theories of emotion: James-Lange Theory.
William James and the Danish physiologist Carl G. Lange developed the theory independently of each other in the 1880s.
Here’s a taste of the real thing from Mr. James himself:
“My theory … is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion. Common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect … and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble …
Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike, but we should not actually feel afraid or angry.”
And if you aren’t satisfied with the narrative of a 19th Century social scientist you never heard of, then take the theory of Charles Darwin, who in 1872 was one of the first to speculate that your body posture can have an effect of generating emotions rather than simply reflecting them.
The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it. On the other hand, the repression, as far as this is possible, of all outward signs softens our emotions . . . . Even the simulation of an emotion tends to arouse it in our minds.
So how does this relate to powerful business presenting?
Every way you can think of.
We generally believe that our emotions affect our body language. We ourselves have experienced the effects of stage fright. Emotions influence the way you stand, the way you appear to your audience. They influence what you say and how you say it.
So if we feel stage fright and lack of confidence, our body language telegraphs that. Moreover, once we become conscious of the effects of our fears, they worsen, and we get caught in a downward spiral of cause-and-effect.
But what if we could reverse that cause-and-effect? What if we could, say, strike a confident pose and suddenly find ourselves infused with confidence?
Impossible, eh?
But James-Lange Theory suggests that very thing, that you can reverse the process.
Turn Negative Energy into Positive with Power Posing
You can use your gestures, movement, posture, and expression to influence your emotions. You can affect body language associated with the emotion you want to experience – namely, confidence – and so gain confidence.
Power Posing is a critical component of Confidence and Charisma
This means that we should lay the groundwork for our emotions to reflect our body language and our posture. Consciously strike a pose that reflects the confident and powerful speaker you want to be. This is power posing.
This may sound too easy and leave you asking “what’s the catch?”
No, there’s no catch. And now that recent research has scientifically confirmed the dynamic I just described, the secret is out.
Several theories later and after many attempts to debunk James-Lange Theory, the most recent research at Harvard University and the Kellogg School of Management would seem to give Mr. James and Mr. Lange the proverbial last laugh.
A 2010 Harvard study substantiated James-Lange Theory and found that power posing substantially increases confidence in people who assume them while interacting with others. The Kellogg study early this year yielded the same findings.
In short, the way you stand or sit either increases or decreases your confidence. The study’s conclusion is unambiguous that power posing can actually imbue us with power.
Our results show that posing in high-power displays (as opposed to low-power displays) causes physiological, psychological, and behavioral changes consistent with the literature on the effects of power on power holders — elevation of the dominance hormone testosterone, reduction of the stress hormone cortisol, and increases in behaviorally demonstrated risk tolerance and feelings of power.
This finding holds tremendous significance for you if you want to imbue your presentations with power and yourself with professional presence. In our 21st Century vernacular, power posing means you should stand the way you want to feel.
Power posing – “I feel especially powerful today!” – improves your entire presentation delivery in ways you’ve likely not imagined.
Power Posing can flood your system with testosterone and can suppress stress-related cortisol, so you actually do invest yourself with confidence and relieve the acute anxiety that presentations sometimes generate.
The lesson here is to affect the posture of confidence. Square your shoulders. Fix a determined look on your face.
Speak loudly and distinctly.
Extend your arms to either side and take up lots of space.
Seize the emotional energy flow and make it work for you.
You have arrived at the most important website on the internet . . .
