Power Presentations

World's Best Presentation Contest Winners Announced

Slideshare.net announced the winners of the World's Best Presentation Contest:

Winners (chose by judges)

1. ShiftHappens by Jbrenman
2. Meet Henry by Chereemoore
3. Sustainable Food Lab by Chrislandry

People’s Choice Winners

1. PaniPuri--An Introduction by Thakkar
2. ShiftHappens by Jbrenman
3. Meet Henry by Chereeemoore

As you can see, the judges were in general agreement with each other, as well as with the voters. The criteria I used were: continuity, progression, and ample room for the presenter to add value. The top 3 winners and, I’m happy to say, many of the finalists just below the top three, all exhibited these qualities. Let’s hope that they can influence other presenters and elevate the level of presentations globally.

Blaming the Pen Again

The web is abuzz about yet another media academic who blames Microsoft PowerPoint for poor presentations. Garr Reynolds and Bert Decker, my fellow judges in the “World’s Best Presentation Contest” on Slideshare, along with many other bloggers and journalists, have commented about John Sweller, a researcher from the University of New South Wales, who, in an interview in an Australian newspaper complained that, “The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster…It should be ditched.”

Professor Sweller seconds his academic colleague, Edward Tufte, Professor Emeritus of Yale University, who contended “that PowerPoint routinely disrupts and trivializes content.” Both of these gentlemen blame the pen rather than the penmanship. Faulting the tool rather than the user is a misguided view I discussed in an earlier blog called, “PowerPoint Peeves.”

However, Professor Sweller did go on to make a valid observation about the presentation rather than the design aspects of PowerPoint. In 2003, he published an academic study which, as academic studies are wont to do, had a cumbersome title: “Cognitive Load Theory and Instructional Design: Recent Developments.” In his 2007 newspaper interview the professor explained his Cognitive Load Theory more simply, “It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.”

This observation touches on one of the most persistent anathemas in the presentation trade, the presenter who reads the words on the screen verbatim. In the nearly two decades I have been a coach, I have asked each and every participant how they react when they see other presenters read their slides verbatim. Invariably, the reply is a sarcastic, “I can read it myself!” Which raises the question, “If everyone dislikes the practice, who does it?” (That's a subject for another time.)

The reason behind such displeasure is that the human brain cannot process vocal and visual information simultaneously. Reading a slide verbatim is like crossing the audio and video cables in a projector, producing static.

The solution is not to blame or even to ditch PowerPoint, but to observe the Less is More principal of design.  Then, when presenting the slides, pause to allow the audience to absorb the image before preceding with the narrative. The pause is the keystone to a series of several other techniques (another subject for another time) that synchronize the presenter’s graphics and narrative, giving the audience’s brains time to process vocal and visual stimuli separately and effectively.

Professor Sweller might even reconsider his view.

Your Chops

Singers, notably Frank Sinatra, refer to their performance voices as “chops.” Presenters, while not exactly performers, have chops, too. But presenters, not having had the kind of training professional singers get, frequently strain their voices, particularly when they speak for long periods of time.

A Wall Street Journal article by Paola Singer offered a number of useful recommendations to preserve your voice ranging from the use of sports drinks, humidifiers, warm salt water gargles, and herbal teas with honey, to the avoidance of caffeine, alcohol, orange juice, and menthol lozenges.

The list of avoidances should also be extended to include carbonated drinks and milk products; the former for obvious reasons and the latter because they produce a coat of mucous on your vocal cords that forces you to strain harder to speak.

The list of aids should also be extended to a wonderful product called Throat Coat® Herbal Tea that soothes your throat with a combination of natural licorice root, organic wild cherry bark, cinnamon bark, and organic sweet orange peel.

Don’t forget plain old water either. But be sure to use a sports-top plastic bottle rather than the traditional glass of water. If your hand shakes when you present, as all flesh is heir to in front of an audience, the water in a glass will slosh over the edge visibly.

The ultimate in voice preservation is the now-ubiquitous wireless microphone which allows presenters to speak in a conversational tone. A simple rule of thumb is that average voices need amplification with audience north of 50; soft voices need it with audiences of 30 or more. Stentorian voices can be microphone-free with audiences up to 75.

If you speak for long periods of time and you do it often, you would do well to learn and practice voice production techniques that any professional voice coach can provide.

Obama Channels Reagan II

George Will, the veteran conservative commentator, wrote a column in which he noted how Barack Obama, who rocketed to fame on the strength of one rousing speech, also exhibited a gentler side, akin to Ronald Reagan’s vaunted congeniality. Mr. Will’s analysis was the subject of my previous blog, “Barack Obama Channels Ronald Reagan.”

Now, Mr. Will’s opinion has been seconded in a New York Times article called, “ 2 Years After Big Speech, a Lower Key for Obama,” in which political writer Adam Nagourney notes how Obama has become even more Reaganesque. “He is not presenting himself, stylistically at least, the way he did two years ago when he gripped Democrats at the Fleet Center in Boston.” Instead, Mr. Nagourney notes that the aspiring Democratic presidential candidate has shifted to “a political style that contrasts with the more charged presences of John Edwards… and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.” Senator Obama explains his shift, “I use a different style if I’m speaking to a big crowd; I can gin up folks pretty well,” he said. “But when I’m in these town hall settings, my job is not to throw them a lot of red meat.”

In fact, the Illinois Senator adjusts his style for almost any crowd. If you had seen the broadcast of a speech he delivered last March in black church in Selma, Alabama on the anniversary of the historic civil rights march, you would have heard him say, “Folks are complainin’ about the quality of our government, I understand there's somethin’ to be complainin’ about. I'm in Washington. I see what's goin’ on.” But in the transcript of the speech on his web site, the final “Gs” in his gerunds magically reappeared. “Folks are complaining about the quality of our government, I understand there's something to be complaining about. I'm in Washington. I see what's going on.” And those final “Gs” have remained resoundingly in place in his subsequent speeches since Selma.

Clearly, Senator Obama subscribes to the “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” philosophy.

World's Best Presentation Contest

Slideshare, a site that offers a place to upload, view, and search for PowerPoint presentations, has cordially invited me, along with other presentation professionals, Garr Reynolds, Guy Kawasaki, and Bert Decker to serve as judges to find the world’s best presentation.  Please visit the contest site, and stay tuned for all the action.

Babel: The Film vs. Babel: The Presentation

David Denby, the New Yorker film critic, in an extended analysis of Babel the Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett hit movie, focuses on the film’s style of jumping “backward and forward in a scrambling of time frames” that he calls “The New Disorder.” His analysis notes that Babel’s juxtaposition of time, place, and events is only the latest in a long line of films that use the same style including Syriana, The Good Shepherd, Miami Vice , 21 Grams, Memento, Traffic, and Pulp Fiction.

Mr. Denby’s 4,237 thoughtful, authoritative and articulate words trace the historical evolution of the style back to the inspiration to Jean-Luc Godard, the 1960s avant garde French film director, who once said that he wanted to make films with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order. Mr. Denby also goes on to attribute the current popularity of the style to everything from the technology of medium itself to the constant desire of artists to seek new forms. Perhaps he should go back a bit further to 1817 and also acknowledge Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the British poet and critic who introduced the concept of the willing suspension of disbelief.

Today’s cinema audiences are ready, willing, and able, and even eager to be entertained by accepting the superhuman powers of the characters and the phantasmagorical situations in the convoluted plots of current films.

But presentation audiences are different. They are impelled by the very concept that Mr. Godard seeks to preempt; a concept that goes back 2300 years to Aristotle who urged orators to observe the unities of time and place. Today’s orators are presenters whose audiences do not have the time or the patience to figure out someone else’s logic. If audiences are forced to try to follow disorganized content, they stop listening and the presentation fails. It is the duty of the presenters, who serve a similar function to that of film directors, to provide their audiences with a story that has the logic of a Swiss clock and not the chaos of a Tower of Babel.

Charisma, Charisma

Two recent concurrent events mark two different definitions of “charisma.” One is the formal announcement of a run for the presidency by Barack Obama, whose rapid ascent from obscurity is widely attributed to his charismatic public persona. The other is the release of a new book by Philip Rieff, a respected sociologist and the former husband of author Susan Sontag. Professor Rieff’s book, entitled Charisma, traces the root of the word to its religious origins.

Indeed, the first definition of charisma in the Random House Dictionary is theological, “a divinely conferred gift or power.” Relegated to second place is the more current “personal quality that gives an individual influence or authority over large numbers of people.”

Nevertheless, in this media-intensive age, it is the latter definition about magnetic public appeal that has the most currency and, in turn, the most impact on our lives. Our elected national leaders determine the course of world events; and charisma is a major determining factor in our national elections.

Look at how often persona, rather than issues, has influenced the outcomes of presidential elections since the dawn of the modern media age:

1960: A poised, patrician John F. Kennedy reigned over a tense, furtive Richard Nixon in a seminal television debate and then went on to win the election.

1964: Public sentiment over Kennedy’s assassination gave Lyndon Johnson a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater.

1968: A controversial war gave Richard Nixon a victory over Hubert Humphrey.

1972: The same controversial war gave Richard Nixon a victory over George McGovern.

1976: Personality returned as a major factor as a folksy Jimmy Carter defeated a prosaic Gerald Ford.

1980: Ronald Reagan’s radiant warmth and grace trumped Jimmy Carter’s Southern folksiness.

1984: Ronald Reagan, brandishing the mantle of The Great Communicator, outshone even the polished Walter Mondale; especially after skewering him with the memorable, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

1988: In a contest of the bland leading the bland, George H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis.

1992: A glib Bill Clinton easily outtalked both a Dana Carvey-caricatured George H. W. Bush and a contentious Ross Perot.

1996: Bill Clinton, doling out charisma by the carload, defeated dry-as-dust Bob Dole.

2000: The Supreme Court and Ralph Nader gave George W. Bush the election, but the late night television comedians contributed their part with mockery of Al Gore’s wooden persona.

2004: A controversial war gave George W. Bush a victory over John Kerry.

2008: Charisma, charisma, who’s got the charisma?