Stuck between mediocrity and excellence

"We'll put it in the appendix." Those are the words that tell you that you have way too many slides.  Our feeling of wanting to keep everything inhibits us from telling the core of a story.  As soon as you realize that content needs to go to an Appendix, keep that content going into the trash can.  It will be accessible if someone really needs it.  Presentations are different from leave behinds which are different from supplementary reading material.  If you are writing a book, put in an Appendix.  If you are authoring a research paper, put in an Appendix. But if you are creating a presentation, distill the content to its core messages.  Nobody reads the appendix.   [ht] Fix Your Really Bad PowerPoint 

A long time ago in a former life, I was encouraged by one of my management consulting directors to do a presentation with a client at a big conference.  The topic was about the work that we did to spin off a separate entity in Europe and it would be good press for our Firm and our client.  With some great help and support, we worked the presentation and it was ready to go.  Big conference. Lots of interested practitioners in my professional field. Expenses paid to Denver. Go.  We showed up to the conference and our presentation was what I would call a mid-major one.  At this particular conference, there were a number of sessions that people could choose to go to. Ours didn't necessarily conflict with a big session so I was feeling pretty good.  We had one of the biggest rooms in the conference center.  You know how many people showed up?  I counted 10. And I think 5 of them actually worked at the conference center.  Either w...

Everyone has heard that the majority of our communication is nonverbal. Whether it's 60%, 70%, or 90% -- it really does not matter.  Just know that more of your communication is nonverbal than verbal- even if you are one of the most talkative people on the planet.  Unless you are very self-aware of how you are perceived in meetings or presentations, it's hard to recognize the type of vibe that you are communicating. And I would probably say that the majority of us are probably too self-involved to even recognize other people's nonverbal cues when we are in a business setting. After all, we are all worried about what other people think of us.  This means that we're focusing on direct eye contact,  our posture, our voice inflection, and whatever other presentation advice we've been given by outside help -- if we've been bold enough to get outside help. If you have not received outside help or are embarrassed to, yet you want to be an effective...

I'm going to date myself and say that I've been using PowerPoint since the early 90's.  Just like kids are transitioning from the PC to mobile devices with very little effort, I transitioned from transparencies to PowerPoint in much the same manner.  It actually became a core competency of mine which is good when you are a management consultant.  We are now at a time where information is more pictures than words-- so much so that cloud services are increasing space size and companies catering to the photography generation are going out of business.  The irony is that you have to simplify the information as much as possible to get your point across and make your story that much more compelling. With this shift comes a whole  set of tools that give you instant gratification and new ways to tell your story outside of the PowerPoint templates of old. I'd recommend getting familiar with, if not immersing yourself in these tools. Otherwise, you'll be the one...