A presentation is your opportunity to make a great first impression. It’s a bit like a first date — only the stakes are financial rather than romantic.
However, too many business leaders fail to consider the cost of delivering a bad presentation.
Many companies fall into the trap of making an invisible first impression. When presenting an idea for the first time — be it a product, a service or a project — the impression they make is invisible. It’s not that they make a bad first impression — though sometimes that happens too — but it’s not a good first impression either. It’s invisible.
It’s easier than you think to improve your confidence when presenting or public speaking. The more prepared and structured your approach, the more confident you will be.
Most business leaders don’t follow any sort of organised process when preparing a presentation. Keen to get started, they launch into things and hope for the best. We’ve all seen the person who decides to wing it or who turns up with chaotic notes.
The most successful messages are the simplest. The best writing gets to the point. The greatest speeches are concise and direct.
However, too many business leaders fall into the trap of giving presentations which are overly complex and technical. They navigate their audience down side roads and off on tangents. Their visuals mirror this and are often confusing and convoluted.
Why does this happen? It is all done for the right reasons. We are talking about high achievers who have set up their own businesses and who are leaders in their field.
Think about how technology has evolved over the last 20 years or so. Think about the tools we can use today to communicate our ideas to the world. Now, compare that with the tools we had a few years ago. Today in most industries we have more competition—not only from a business perspective but also from a communication perspective.
The tools we have today are designed to empower people—lots of people—to share their message with the world.
The 2022 French presidential election debate serves up a new dish, more palatable than the one served in 2017.
On Wednesday night, 20th of April 2022, two presidential candidates battled in Paris for the next five years in a crucial election here in France. For Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen this was their second debate, the last being back in 2017. But last night’s debate was very different.
Now, from a policy point of view, many views were exchanged on the environment, security, the economy and the current international context amongst many others. While we could debate the details and validity of the points made here, I will leave that to the journalists.
Misinformation is the scourge of our time. It confuses and divides us and can do irreparable harm. What can we do to fight it?
For the majority of us today working in business, life is good. In the last 15 years or so, I have observed huge improvements in the way large companies and corporations respond and communicate with their customers and peers on issues that matter: climate change, DE&I and Digital transformation being the most important. Our leaders now actually tell stories that inspire us and share their vulnerabilities. We have seen workspaces improve both in comfort, facilities and aesthetic. Our working weeks have become more flexible than ever, on average spending 2 days of our working week at home. Our children see us more and many of us no longer have to wait for retirement to do the things we really want to do. All of this, whether you are grateful for it or not, is in direct response to the commoditization of our individual power; from the small devices in our pockets accessing the information that we need to the social media accounts that we use and give us a voice that our peers listen to. We have come far and quickly. But the 21st century, for all its advances, is bringing us new problems, by actors who wish to reverse this empowerment. One of the weapons in their armory is misinformation, a kind of noxious drip-feed of poison, which is causing us irreparable harm.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has reached the parts that other leaders haven’t reached in a long time.
After weeks of an army build-up on the borders of Ukraine from the Russian state, and on the eve of a massive Russian invasion, the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskiy, hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned, made a video statement to his people from the centre of Kyiv which inspired not only Ukrainians, but also the rest of the world to the core:
Michael Rickwood from Ideas on Stage on how he got to meet the man who started it all for the presentation world.
Once in a while we set ourselves some great tasks. Interviewing my presentation hero was a particularly appealing one. Over the years I have read many great books on business communication and have taken inspiration from authors from all facets of our industry: Nancy Duarte, Garr Reynolds, Patsy Rodenburg, Dan and Chip Heath, Guy Kawasaki, Simon Sinek, Dan Pink, Dr. John Medina, Roger Mavity to name but a few. But there is one author whose books I come back to consistently, who, in my opinion, is the founding father of what we are all doing today in the presentations consulting industry. That author is Jerry Weissman.
