Power Presentations

Beware Biden’s Bombast

Barack Obama's choice of Joseph Biden as his Vice-Presidential running mate has already run into criticism about conflicting messages. Many MSM writers and Web bloggers have commented on the subject, but Tom Bevan on realclearpolitics.com put it best: "Going with Biden highlights the horns of the dilemma for Senator Obama. He wanted someone who could reinforce his message of change, but he needed someone with experience...so he was forced into sacrificing one at the expense of the other."

There is also another potential conflict in the Biden choice: how the delivers the team's messages. Joe Biden has developed a reputation for making lengthy speeches. Comedian Andy Borowitz, who posts his satirical blasts here on Huffington, wrote "Minutes after he was chosen as Barack Obama's vice-presidential pick, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del) revealed that he has begun writing a 50,000-word acceptance speech ...The address, which Mr. Biden has been working on around the clock, is an abridged version of a 200,000-word acceptance speech that Mr. Biden wrote when he ran for President in 1988."

Joe Biden is well aware of his reputation. Last April, when he was still in the race for the Democratic nomination, he participated in a debate among 8 candidates in Orangeburg, South Carolina. The moderator, NBC's Brian Williams, turned to Biden and said, "An editorial in The Los Angles Times said, 'In addition to his uncontrolled verbosity, Biden is a gaffe machine.' Can you reassure voters in this country that you would have the discipline you would need on the world stage, Senator?"

Biden relished the moment, smiled and then said, "Yes."

It will take more than a smile and a one-word answer to deal with verbosity because it is in direct conflict with Obama's media-savvy, Web-focused campaign which demands terseness. To reach the enormous bloc of younger voters directly and quickly, Obama's organization has developed an intensive text-messaging push. As part of that push, they made a special offer to people who signed on to an email blast to receive an early announcement of Obama's vice-presidential choice via text-message. According to The Wall Street Journal, the tactic "represented an opportunity to significantly boost the campaign's database of cellphone numbers, especially among the young people Sen. Obama is trying to court. Almost two-thirds of people between the ages of 18 and 28 said they send or receive text messages monthly."

In today's The New York Times, David Carr concurs: "The children's crusade of early Obama supporters will soon occupy the sweet spot of electoral politics and bring a new set of expectations to being courted and served."

If Joe Biden wants to court them, he has to start thinking and speaking in sound bites of text-message length.

McCain Closes the Gap

This morning's Wall Street Journal three-column headline says it all: "McCain Closes Gap on Obama as Conventions Loom." The tightening race is vividly depicted on realclearpolitics.com with a sharp dip in Obama's blue line and a sharp rise in McCain's red line. The RCP aggregation of 8 different polls has the spread at 1.4 points in Obama's favor. On Saturday, it was more than 3 points.

And then Saddleback happened. Obama and McCain were asked identical questions separately by evangelical pastor Rick Warren in a virtual debate. Since then, the media, both main stream and blogosphere, have been filled with analyses of each candidate's performance. Most found Obama "nuanced" and McCain "decisive" in their answers. Most analyses focused on messaging. My Monday post on Huffington Post focused on delivery.

All these dynamics brought to mind the Kennedy/Nixon debate of 1960. That first-ever televised matchup became the seminal event that changed the face of political campaigns forever. Although Nixon had held a slight lead over Kennedy for most of that summer, the September debate vaulted Kennedy into the lead and ultimate victory.

Ask anyone today about what Kennedy or Nixon said and the odds are that they would be hard-pressed to tell you; ask anyone about how the candidates said what they said and you will get volumes about Nixon's darting eyes, his perspiring chin, his 5 o'clock shadow, and his halting delivery. The most telling indication of the impact of delivery is seen in the Gallup poll after that debate: the respondents who had listened to it on the radio, favored Nixon; those who had watched it on television, favored Kennedy.

Obama and McCain will have 3 more face-to-face debate encounters, as well as many other speaking opportunities from stump speeches to convention acceptances. How they deliver their messages will count as much, if not more, than what they say. Remember that it was Obama's delivery of his speech to nominate John Kerry four years ago that brought him out of obscurity to his position today.

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.