Don’t Let PowerPoint® Ruin Your Presentation

Our good friend and WSN partner Rick Altman has authored a Working Smarter eCourse for us entitled “Don’t Let PowerPoint® Ruin Your Presentation,” which you can sign up for by clicking here. This is the first lesson of his eCourse, entitled “Too Much Too Easy.”

First are the dues to pay. As a good friend and messaging guru Jim Endicott like to remind us, good storytelling is often about first identifying the pain. And as tennis great

Martina Navratilova once said to me personally, “No pain...no gain.”

She was talking about physical fitness, not creating slides, but I couldn’t pass up a chance to name drop...

The 30-Minute Syndrome

If only I could earn the proverbial nickel for every time I have heard the following:

“PowerPoint is easy. I learned it in less than half an hour.”

Let’s start by acknowledging that the statement is generally true: PowerPoint® is not difficult to pick up and begin using. Both of my daughters created slides for school projects before the age of 10, and indeed, a reasonably astute grownup can begin making slides within 30 minutes.

Microsoft® might have you believe that this is a virtue of the software. In fact, it is bad. It is very, very bad.

Creating a presentation can be an extraordinarily creative experience, but it rarely starts out that way. And that is because PowerPoint’s default settings are not very creative and because most PowerPoint users do not come to the software from a creative field. They start out elsewhere in the Office® suite. They are Excel® crunchers, Outlook® gurus, Access® junkies. When they encounter PowerPoint and discover that they can begin using the program with effect in less than an hour, they are like kids with new toys.

But again, this is not a good thing; it’s a bad thing. These people declare themselves proficient after their requisite 30 minutes. These same people who get really good at their 30-minute skill set call themselves advanced. And those who get really fast at these same skills call themselves gurus. Those who teach it to others are gods.

But they don’t get beyond those first 30 minutes of skills. And then they go forth and commit high crimes against innocent business­people everywhere. Yup...Death by PowerPoint.

With PowerPoint, you practice your craft in public, and this craft is forever linked with death and taxes as the three things humans fear most. This is much more than the converted Excel user bargained for. It’s possible, make that likely, that she had no experience at all speaking before a group; she simply taught herself how to make bullet slides.

And herein lies the biggest disconnect of all. The company that this innocent Excel-***-PowerPoint user works for might spend millions of dollars on its brand. Expensive design firms to create glossy brochures...P.R. firms with lots of names on their door, hired to spin messages...high-powered marketing firms to ensure maximum exposure.

And this same company then sends someone out with 30 minutes of proficiency to make what will likely be a company’s first impression: the presentation in a boardroom.

Companies have simply not made enough of an effort to identify, define, and cultivate the role of the presentation professional. Therefore, it usually is assigned in haphazard fashion to anyone willing to step up to the plate, including the person who is simply good with Microsoft Office.

The Cram-Everything-In Obsession

I recently watched an episode of The Apprentice, where a handsome, well-dressed twenty-something man pleaded his case to Donald Trump by reciting every business slogan he could possibly think of, as fast as he possibly could, interspersed with the robotic “I’ll be great for your organization, Mr. Trump” at every breath. And it worked: Trump fired the other guy.

This is a very real phenomenon in today’s culture—the sense that it’s better to say everything than risk forgetting to say the one thing that you really need to say. And nowhere is this more evident than in the typical slides that project onto the whiteboards and white screens of America today.

This plays out in a fairly predictable way by those who prepare their own slides for a presentation:

• They sit down at their desk.
• They open PowerPoint.
• They start thinking of every point that they need to make.
• Soon they start thinking of how they are going to make each point.

End result: they have written a speech.

This is not such a bad proposition for the uninitiated public speaker; as we all know, it’s a horrible proposition for her audience. The woman from Scottsdale Arizona probably thought she was on the right track when she perpetrated the slide below:

It said everything she wanted to say.

No question about it: one of today’s most acute pain points is when speakers use their slides as notes. In many cases, it is because they have no idea that the Notes view exists.

This leads to Universal Axioms No.1:

• If a slide contains complete sentences, it is practically impossible for even the most accomplished presenters to avoid reading the entire slide word for word.

Watch for it the next time you attend a presentation: the more verbiage a slide contains, the more likely is the speaker to read all of it. Talk about your double-whammy, because Universal Axiom No. 1 leads directly into Universal Axiom No. 2:

• When you read your slides word for word, you sound like an idiot.

The slide shown above is the result of a five-minute makeover. We did nothing more than parse out the main ideas and add a rule. If you take 10 seconds, you’ll get the gist of what this presentation is about, but you probably would not have invested even one second trying to sift through the original slide. More important, we might stand a chance of hearing the real person come out if she speaks to this slide, as opposed to the drone who would have read the first slide. Gone is the compulsion to recite the slide verbatim; now she’ll have to actually collect her thoughts and deliver them. Scary? Perhaps at first. But the five-minute slide makeover will also make her over into a better presenter.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First, more pain in lesson 2...

If you liked what you’ve read thus far, then click here sign up for Rick Altman’s eCourse “Don’t Let PowerPoint® Ruin Your Presentation.”

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