Presentation Secrets

Do What You Never Thought Possible with Your Presentations

Alexei Kapterev

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118170472
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Réunions et présentations

Plan, create, and deliver amazing presentations!

Alexei Kapterev's online presentation on presentations has seen more than one million views, all with no advertising or promotion. Building on this hit, he now brings us Presentation Secrets outlining his successful tactics for planning, producing, and presenting memorable and unique presentations. The author shares his insight, wisdom, and advice with impressive clarity and detail, covering the three main components required to a presentation: storyline design, slide design, and delivery. Presentation Secrets lets you get to work immediately, fully prepared, armed with confidence, and ready to inspire.

• Teaches everything that goes into a successful and memorable presentation
• Helps create a storyline, from planning the beginning, middle, and end, to establishing key points, to making a presentation scalable
• Discusses how to design a slide template that meets your goals, ensure consistency, and find focal points
• Dissects the delivery of a presentation, including how to create "a character", integrate mistakes, listening to yourself, talking to the audience, and avoiding monotony
• Includes non-presentation metaphor to drive home your understanding of storytelling, improvisation, and delivery

Also featuring real-world examples of presentations from the worlds of business, science, and politics, such as Steve Jobs, Hans Rosling, and Al Gore, this unique book delivers tried and tested secrets and inside tips for making a sensational presentation!

Chapter 1

What Is Presentation?

In This Chapter

• Communicating with presentations
• How this book is organized
• Storytelling, slides, and delivery
• The three principles

In late 2003, I was working for a consulting company as an analyst. The firm specialized in policy advising. Our clients were Russian ministries, senators, regulators, and formerly state-run, now privatized, companies. My job was to write reports to support decision-making processes. I had almost no contact with the clients, and frankly, I didn’t suffer much because of that. I was quite happy just writing. But then came “the day.” One of the firm’s partners (to whom I am now very grateful) decided that it was time for me to see the big world. I had to present one of my recent reports before the firm’s client.

NOTE I tried to transform my report into a presentation in a PowerPoint deck. It was a bullet-point, teleprompter-style nightmare, which is becoming rare nowadays. I remember my boss telling me to use more pictures. In 2004, “pictures” came mostly from a clip-art gallery, which came by default with Microsoft Office. Also, I had zero design skills and my taste wasn’t exactly ideal. So, yes, there were a few pictures, but frankly, it would have been much better without them.

I spoke for about 30 minutes and it all went very well, or at least I thought so. Unfortunately, it turned out that the client didn’t quite share my view. He didn’t understand why the report was prepared, what the findings were, and why we wasted so much time and money. My bosses had to improvise another presentation on the spot, one which, happily, did the job. The client calmed down but asked that they never delegate any presentations to me again. I was so frustrated that I promised myself to master the skill in the next few months.

This is how it all started. Two years later, the client (albeit a different one) asked for me to present whenever possible. Four years later, I’d read Jim Collins’s book Good to Great and decided to do for a living what I found I could do best—give presentations. Next year, I published a presentation called “Death by PowerPoint,” which to my utter surprise went viral, having been viewed by more that one million people as of now. It was the greatest reassurance that the path that I’ve chosen is the right one. I’m currently teaching presentations at one of Russia’s best business schools, doing corporate workshops, practicing as a consultant, and occasionally working with Mercator, Russia’s leading producer of corporate films, business presentations, and infographics.

What Are Presentations?

We live in a world in which nobody knows how to do anything. What I mean is that capitalism is based on the idea of division of labor and the labor is divided as never before. With division of labor as great as ever, we have to connect via words, symbols, and electronic code. We have to connect via phone conversations, written reports, e-mails and instant messaging, blogs, micro-blogs, and via just plain water cooler conversations—and presentations, yes, via presentations. We have to speak publicly more now than ever.

Presentations are an extremely complex and expensive form of human communication. The interaction is relatively short but the combined time of all the people involved costs a lot. The only explanation as to why people continue to give presentations despite their complexity and cost is that they are also sometimes tremendously impactful. Also, sometimes, there’s a lot at stake. People give presentations before commencing expensive projects and after finishing them. It makes sense to conduct extensive preparations in these cases, and there’s almost no limit on how deep and wide you can go. You can rehearse, you can rearrange your slides, and you can research for new arguments in support of your point. So, whenever I am asked to “help with a presentation,” my first question is inevitably, “What is the presentation in this case?” Answers differ vastly.

Moreover, with more presentations being e-mailed rather than presented, this part is quickly becoming less important.

People frequently think that presentations are about delivery, about acting skills, and about how you say what you have to say. In the end, these aspects are what we see and hear, but are only the tip of the iceberg. People also think that presentations are mostly about slides. This is what I am asked to do a lot: make slides. The word “slides” has become synonymous with the word “presentations” in some organizations. People spend lots of time designing the right slides, making them so they can work with or without the actual presenter.

Apart from slides, there’s another part that has to do with structure and argumentation, which is whole different domain. It has to do with what you say rather than how you say it. This part requires storytelling, script- and speechwriting skills, and a deep knowledge of the content. Can any single person possibly become an expert in all these fields? Can you become a present-day Renaissance person: a scriptwriter, a graphics designer, and a master of verbal and nonverbal delivery?

The short answer is “yes,” but let me make a confession first. My education is in finance. As you are probably aware, finance is one of the most tedious professions on Earth. It’s really not far from accounting. I spent three years working as a financial controller for Citibank. At some point, I even considered a career in one of the “Big Four” auditing firms. Before my involvement with presentations, I never seriously thought of myself as a “creative type.” I was never good at oral communications; my only serious strength was writing. I wasn’t even a good storyteller, as my reports didn’t require any storytelling skills (or so I thought at the time). As I mentioned, I never studied graphics design in any systematic manner. I wasn’t a good actor. So, yes, it is possible to become good at something as complex as presentations. It is possible even without any existing skills and without dedicating your whole life to it. After all, I didn’t quit my job to learn how to give presentations. The first thing you need is motivation. I studied because of my initial failure; you might study because of your initial success. The second thing you need is a plan. The purpose of this book is to give you the plan.

Three more points about this book:

1. Figure 1-1 is a slide from my presentations training workshop. It’s what I show people when I want to explain what presentations are. Coincidently, this is also how this book is organized. It is split into three major parts. Part I is about story structure, Part II is about slides, and Part III is about delivery. Also, I have three broad principles that I use in my work. In each part there are three chapters and each chapter will follow one broad topic, thus producing a nice three-by-three matrix. In this chapter, I give you a brief introduction to the three parts and three principles.

Figure 1-1: How this book is organized.

2. This book comes with illustrations, and I designed almost all of them by myself with no external help. I briefly considered hiring a professional graphics designer but realized that it would not be fair. If I say that everybody can learn to design slides by applying some principles and practicing, I should at least be able to do it myself. So I did. I am not a professional designer but at least they are authentic (which I believe is exceptionally important).

3. This book mostly relies on my five years of deliberate practice in the art of presentations. This is not a scientific book. I love science, and I care a great deal about empirical evidence. Unfortunately, however, some of the topics I discuss here are grossly under-researched. Sometimes, I have no other choice but to jump to conclusions, which just seem logical to me and are based on nothing but experience.

So, that’s it for the introduction. Shall we get started?

Story

Everyone who studies public speaking sooner or later gets to Aristotle’s Rhetoric. It is hardly a joyful read, so I’ll just give you one concept from it. Aristotle says that there are three modes of persuasion: logos, pathos, and ethos. Logos is an appeal to the rational, pathos is an appeal to the emotional, and ethos is an appeal to the personality, which are the qualities of the speaker. That was in the 4th century B.C. Unfortunately, in the centuries that followed, scholars of rhetoric perfected logos and ethos and rejected pathos. You can see their attempts to appeal to pathos in the New Oxford American Dictionary, which gives the second definition for the word “rhetoric” as “language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience, but often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content.” Well, pathetic.

I think I know precisely what led to this. It seems that scholars of rhetoric deal with pathos because they think they have to, not because they truly want to. Public speakers always put themselves in opposition to poets. In their eyes they were decision makers and the seekers of truth, while poets were lowly entertainers. But canons of public speaking always included entertainment. Hence, the classical Roman docere, movere, delectare (educate, motivate, entertain), but only because the public demanded entertainment. Speakers would love to just inform and motivate, but, unfortunately, this isn’t an option. So, they struggle with it, poor chaps. Even today I meet speakers (mostly scientists) who believe that an appeal to reason is inherently ethical and persuasive, whereas an appeal to emotions is deceptive and unworthy of a real educator. They are doing it only because they can’t avoid it.

By contrast, poets—and I use this word in its broad Greek sense meaning also artists, dramatists, and writers—always loved entertaining. This was their job. Aristotle himself admits, “It was naturally the poets who first set the movement going.” It seems that in the past couple of centuries, our civilization has made truly dramatic progress in storytelling. We started to tell more and better stories. Better yet, we learned how stories should be constructed.

I won’t be covering logos much in this book. This isn’t because I hate logos (I love it); it’s because this field is pretty much covered already. For those of you interested in pure logos, I recommend an excellent book called The Minto Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing, Thinking, & Problem Solving by Barbara Minto. Problems with logos are well known. Such presentations look very reasonable and even persuasive but aren’t very motivating. People nod their heads and then mind their own business. Nelson Mandela said, “Don’t address their brains. Address their hearts.” However beautiful this phrase is, I don’t fully agree with it. I don’t think we should avoid addressing the brains. As scientists, businesspeople, and activists, we have to deal with facts and logic. Storytellers love to contrast stories with statistics by saying that stories are a much more persuasive and effective means of communication, but really, there’s no clear evidence for that. They are more entertaining—that’s obvious—but that does not necessarily make them more effective from a practical standpoint. But secondly and most importantly, there isn’t much difference between storytelling and fact telling anyway. Storytelling is and always was the essence of business presentations. Storytelling is nothing but putting facts in a sequence and making connections.

Funny as it may sound, storytelling should not be confused with telling stories. Telling an anecdote is just an attempt to illustrate your concept, to provide an example or counterexample, to make your audience more engaged. This might be a useful tool but that’s not what Part I of this book is about. I don’t just suggest you use stories within your presentation, I suggest you adopt the story structure for the whole presentation.

NOTE There’s an ongoing dispute about the relative persuasiveness of stories versus causal evidence and statistics, with no clear winner. Some empirical studies have concluded that stories indeed elicit significantly fewer objections than sta...