Meeting Communication

For a many reasons, there is always plenty of buzz lately about having meetings without PowerPoint. I say one of the biggest reasons is because there is so much BAD PowerPoint being used there is a backlash against this powerful communication tool. I hope with the coming of the new version PowerPoint 2010 it may bring back some of the excitement, ease of use and fun that drove PowerPoint to become a corporate standard in meeting rooms around the world.

One point that is often overlooked in the debate of a meeting with or without PowerPoint is that if used correctly PowerPoint is not just a very powerful visual tool, but a message, content development too.

PowerPoint started out as a simple slide/overhead creation tool for turning an outline into a slide or overhead. A great tool for developing and organizing content, complex information. I would guess most people rarely use this component of the application but jump right into creating slides. Another very helpful too is the slide sorter – another excellent tool for organizing and developing a good story, an effective communication.

I use both these tools for developing content for my own presentations – although I have to admit I often use PowerPoint’s close cousin MS Word outlining function to start.

I recently watched a keynote presentation by a well known, social media rising star. I love reading his blog, and following him in Twitter. His new book is on my next to read list. He spoke for 20 minutes, he had a Twitter flow on the screen behind him instead of the traditional slides. He is big on breaking the old rules, doing things differently.

Because he is brilliant, one of the leading experts in this fast moving new social media driven world, he spoke very conversational, and seemed to keep the audience engaged with some good stories and expert tips. But I thought his overall talk (not a speech), was
interesting, but was rambling and seemed to me like he might have spent not more than 5 minutes planning what he was going to say. It was like a Twitter talk – just short blurbs of sometimes interesting info, but lots of chatter of useless, unconnected flow of 140 character text reading torture.

This speaker pulled off what I would rate maybe a B- keynote- with a lot of extra credit for his star, almost celebraty status – that the average presenter can not count on. If he took the time to enhance his keynote with some powerful PowerPoint visuals, he could have scored an A++ and sped up his star status to rock star and more important delivered to the audience more impactful and memorable information.

Even if he wante to go with the very trendy screenful of Twitter chatter, I believe he would have benefitted greatly by using the PowerPoint outline tool for planning the flow of his presentation – but it takes time and most people like to skip or limit to a minimum
this very important step for any presentation – my favorite four letter word PLAN.

There has been a good deal of publicity buzz about a new book called The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience by Carmine Gallo. I have only read a few excerpts and hope to read it some day as I am a big fan of Steve Jobs and the Mac. I don’t have to read the book to know Steve has a big advantage over most presenters. He has a great company creating exciting, game changing products like the Mac, iPod, itunes, and iPhone. It does help to have a great, exciting product to present like steve jobs. Everyday corp presentations usually don’t have this advantage to have such a great product to announce or  such an exciting story to tell – but I’m sure the book is full of good tips – most important is Steve Jobs REHEARSES and Practices HARD.

It is probably the most overlooked element of a good presentation. PLAN and practice.  In today’s time challenged world leaving enough time to practice your presentation is difficult to plan on. The best professional presenters I know practice so much, you’d never guess they rehearse at all because they seem so natural and conversational.

A video of the Carmine Gallo giving a few good tips from his new book can be  found at Forbes.com

First, I think Prezi is a great presentation tool from what I have seen of it and played around with so far. I have to admit up front that I am  PowerPoint biased, having used PowerPoint for 25+ years, and only used Prezi for maybe 25+ minutes, maybe a couple of hours total. It is fun to use, and the more I use it the more potential I see, but old habits are not easy to break.

I have heard plenty of people raving about it in some of the presentation groups/forums I belong to. Personally, I have yet to find an appropriate presentation/meeting to actually use it in. And that is my main point. It may be a good option for presenters, but as for being a replacement for PowerPoint, my experience to date with it leads me to believe that it could replace certain uses of PowerPoint, like when a whiteboard presentation would suit the content or meeting objectives better than PowerPoint slides.

I view Apple Keynote, SlideRocket, Google Presentation doc, Adobe Presenter, etc. as possible replacements for PowerPoint. All of these presentation tools follow the traditional outline, linear slide presentation path. Prezi makes a new, flexible path, a more free flow, creative style, non-linear path to developing and communicating your ideas. This can be a big advantage in meetings where the presenter wants to share information in a more interactive way and change course or paths pending on the audience feedback and input.

It may be a great tool for planning and developing a presentation that then might be presented from Prezi, but in my view of most of the  presentation content I see, a linear PowerPoint slide show would often be the better final presentation tool. People need the structure offered in an “outline” based presentation tool like PowerPoint.

There is so much free flowing, overflowing, information out in the world, the process of developing a linear story is often important in the final communication of the message.

I see Prezi as another visual presentation tool that I might suggest such as a video or flash animation rather than a PowerPoint slide show for certain types of information sharing of content or type of meeting event.

I don’t see it as a full replacement for PPT yet,  but a totally new visual presentation tool that will work for meetings and information sharing that PPT should probably not be a consideration in the first place. In the millions of presentations given every day, there is a place for Prezi, but I’m not sure how big a place yet. I see it replacing traditional white board presentations, poster board, and easel/marker information sharing. Or it may even create a new model of meeting information sharing.

It will add a great deal to meetings that can benefit from the free flowing, non-linear information sharing that Prezi excels in.  It really depends on the objectives of the meeting communication. Some meetings may benefit from a free flow, non-linear path, but often in today’s business environment with shorter meeting times, and even shorter times to prepare for the meetings . . . a well planned and practiced linear slide show to support a presenter’s communication will often achieve the best results.

We work on 100’s of presentations in a month and I see few that Prezi could replace. There might be parts of a presentation or meeting that would benefit from the use of Prezi, but for the most part we can achieve similar zoom-in and non-linear flow with PPT too. Most people do not even know the easy trick of entering a slide number and a return key click will take you to that slide number in slide show mode. Most users don’t even touch the surface of the power of PowerPoint. And in the same way, maybe I am not giving Prezi a fair shake yet, as I have only limited experience and knowledge of Prezi.

PowerPoint is so often used incorrectly, and there is soooo much bad PowerPoint out there, it is an easy target for “replace PowerPoint with . . .  a video, an animation, a Prezi, a sliderocket, a white board . . .”  instead of focusing on the advantages of the alternative for the particular type of meeting, information sharing or meeting communication that a new tool like Prezi will assit in. In some ways it’s not about just using a new tool (Prezi), it may be about a new way of presenting and sharing information.

I believe the original PowerPoint application came from the idea of turning an outline into slides. This linear “outline” is still the foundation of most slide shows and meeting communications these days. In today’s information saturated world, a tool like Prezi and it’s non-linear format, Prezi may be the future, but I do not believe it is going to replace PowerPoint in most cases any time soon.

A switch to Prezi, may be similar of the “trend” to produce presentations without bullet points. I love producing presentations without bullet points. They are often more fun, more visual than heavy verbal/text slides, they are more engaging, but also take more time to create. For 95% of the presentation I see pass across my screen it would be nearly impossible to loose the bullets – but it is possible to turn a sentence or paragraph bullet into a short, powerful bullet phrase (and maybe add a visual to support it).

My PowerPoint mantra:  “it’s not death by PPT, but death by BAD PowerPoint!”  You can kill an idea or meeting just as easily with a bad Prezi. You can also bring to life to an idea or make a meeting exciting and memorable with the support of some excellent visuals – in PPT or Prezi.  The visual tool you use depends on the audience, the  information to be communicated, the presenters skills, and speaking talents – where Lily Latridis from Boomerang.com expertise is very important.

PowerPoint totally replaced 35mm slides and acetate overheads in about a decade. Maybe Prezi will totally replace whiteboards as we know them today. Or maybe replace both whiteboards and the idea of presenting with linear electronic slides.

What I need to do next is to try Prezi to create a presentation on using the right presentation tools to achieve the optimal meeting communications. Watch for an update to this post with a link to my Prezi in the near future.

Ric Bretschneider, Sr Program Manager of the Microsoft PowerPoint Team gives a preview of the future of PowerPoint 2010

Just got back from “The Future of PowerPoint” and the next version of PowerPoint looks amazing! I have been trying to get to the PowerPoint Live conference for years and finally made it this year. I will not miss another. The event was everything a good event should be: educational, inspiring, fun and memorable.

The highlight for me was getting to see the new features of PowerPoint 2010 being demonstrated and explained by Ric and Sandy from the Microsoft PowerPoint team. It was great to spend three days with 100’s of other people passionate about PowerPoint and the power of the program when used correctly. There were plenty of examples of really good PowerPoint shows from some of the best in the industry. The only talk of “Death by PowerPoint” was how ridiculous a statement it is especially when you consider all the powerful communication going on when PowerPoint is used effectively.

Cliff Atkinson talked about how PowerPoint producers should avoid being seen as a commodity and focus on “value pricing”. He spoke about his assistance in producing visuals for a court trial that resulted in a $253 million dollar verdict for the client. Cliff also noted how often people in the room produced presentations that were part of successful communications which resulted in millions, if not billions of dollars for the companies they did the presentation design and productions for.

Rick Altman, the organizer of the event uses a tag line that says “making the world a better place, one presentation at a time”.  Although the media loves to pickup the negative stories of PowerPoint overload, and “Death by PPT” stories, it is clear from this event that PowerPoint is alive and well, and will be driving successful meeting communications around the world for a long time. The amazing new features introduced in PPT 2010 will make the program an even more powerful tool for creating visuals that support successful meeting communications.

I will write about some of my favorite features of PowerPoint 2010 in future posts, but if you want information now, a great place for information on PowerPoint 2010 is the Microsoft Team Blog. Maybe my next post will be one where I beg and plead with someone on the Microsoft PowerPoint Team to send me a beta copy of PPT 2010. I can’t wait to use it!

In my quest for trying to understand why so many people hate PowerPoint (and even I sometimes hate it), I have come to the conclusion that a key reason is that when working with PowerPoint most people are racing against the clock. It sometimes seems that when working with PowerPoint, the clock just starts racing ahead to that presentation deadline.

They don’t really hate PowerPoint, but the deadline and what they have to do to get to the deadline. Then, to top it off they have get up in front of a group and present their story or critical information, a task often feared as much as going to the dentist for a root canal surgery.

A presentation deadline is like no other. It is often a one shot deal. One shot to make and win your point. It is often a deadline that you can not delay or change. Getting a group of people together, often a group of important people or large group of people to meet these days is a challenge in itself. Wasting your own time is one thing, wasting other people’s time is magnified tenfold by the potential loss or gain of the meeting outcome.

A good presentation often takes a great deal of time to develop and design. It is my experience that most people don’t PLAN enough time for a good PowerPoint presentation. The best presenters plan more than enough time and are so well rehearsed,  that when they finally present they look so good, as if they never have to rehearse.

Before PowerPoint (Keynote, and other electronic slide applications) presentations used to take a lot longer to develop and a minimum of 24 hours to get the “slides”, the 35 mm slides or color overheads (acetates) processed. You could not make last minute edits the way you can now. With the power of PowerPoint, you can make changes to your presentation slides right up to the second before you are about to present. This is great to be able to update last minute data, fix a typo, or add a last minute important thought, but it also adds to the stress of time. The production is not done until you present it.

I’d write more, but I have to go plan my next presentation.

Guy Kawasaki is a great speaker that often speaks to entrepreneur groups about how to present their ideas to venture capital groups. His 10-20-30 rule has been getting a lot of tweet time today. It’s a good rule for presenting to Venture Capitalist, but it should not be taken as a universal rule for presenting. He says for this VC target audience “you should not have more than 10 slides, speak longer than 20 minutes and do not use text smaller then 30 points”. He says “if you can’t fit the 30 point text on the slide then it is too much text”.

My rule would be more like 20-10-18. I’d aim for more slides with less on each slide, but about one slide per 30 seconds to keep the presentation visually interesting and moving along.  I would try not to use any type smaller than 18 point and always keep slides as simple and clean looking as possible. Yes, larger text is always helpful, especially if you are presenting to a large audience or with anyone that distance viewing may be a limited.

The more important rule is make sure your slides are readable from a distance and your important point stands out. It is ridiculous to limit the number of slides. All to often we see slide limits as the cause for content chaos – where a presenter attempts to cram 40 slides worth of content into his 15 slide limit. Good meeting facilitators should not give speakers slide number limits but time limits. It is the responsibility of the presenter to practice and trim their content to fit the time allotted as a speaker. If you have limited time to speak,  well designed PowerPoint slides can often assist in communicating the information faster and make it more memorable. A good agenda with good slides can also keep the speaker and audience stay on track for keeping the meeting to the allotted time.

The most important rule is don’t follow all the rules. Do what it takes to be innovative, creative and interesting. Break the rules if you feel it will result in more interesting visuals and a more engaged audience. Remember your objective is to communicate important information in the allotted time, not get through 10 slides as fast as you can.

There are not many people that would admit or say that they love PowerPoint. I do.  I have been in the business of creating electronic slides (often referred to today as making “PowerPoints”) since 1991. It seems everyone loves to hate PowerPoint.  But everyone continues to use it. And too many people abuse it and don’t use it correctly. If PowerPoint is used correctly it can be a great communication tool for getting your important points across to your audience quickly and effectively. You have a better chance of having people remember what you present if you present it with good visual support -  with good PowerPoints.  I have seen PowerPoint decks that have launched new products, new businesses, new careers, ideas, strategies, and raise millions of dollars for charities, promote environmental causes, explain complicated medical procedures, assisted in winning  million dollar sales deals and be a critical communication component  in closing a billion dollar merger. Has PowerPoint helped you achieve your meeting objectives?

As Swine Flu hysteria makes a come back this fall, will the new attire at your next business meeting be business casual with a business blue face mask?  My daughter is home from school today for the second day. She has a simple cold or what appears to be a simple cold, but anyone sneezing or coughing at school gets sent home.  Will this new wave of Swine Flu give companies another reason (besides budget cuts) to cancel meetings and events?  What is going to happen to all the medical meetings planned that will contribute to avoiding Swine Flu outbreaks in the future? Will they be canceled? Time to call the stock broker and invest more money in Webex and the other online meeting companies.

If you work with PowerPoint, you’ve heard the term “Death by PowerPoint”. Some days it seems PowerPoint has killed more people than the Iraq war. PowerPoint has never killed or hurt anyone. It is only a communication tool that can be a great tool when used properly or a very bad tool when used poorly. Unfortunately, it is so easy to use and used so often (estimated to be 30 million users daily), it is often abused and too often used to torture audiences rather than engage and excite them.

It is not “Death by PowerPoint” but “Death by BAD PowerPoint”. PowerPoint as a communication tool has the capacity to support a meeting communication, but can also kill an idea or meeting if used incorrectly.

PowerPoint can be an amazing tool when used correctly.  It can help engage your audience, enhance your presentation, help close a deal, explain a complicated process, keep an audience focused on the important points, share information faster and more effectively than a speaker without PowerPoint slides. It can bring life to your ideas and to your important communications!

Eight years ago, I was headed into New York City for a client meeting.

I was traveling into the city on NJ Transit, just outside the Newark Train station where on a normal day, if you have a window seat you get a great view of the amazing New York City skyline from across the river. But the amazing view turned into the most horrific view of seeing the North Tower smoking like it was a long monster cigarette.

When I reached the station, it was still unclear if it was an accident or attack, but I got off the train, called my client, canceled the meeting and caught one of the last trains out of NYC that day to watch the rest of the horror on TV. Today, I will stop what ever I am doing at 8:46am and watch the anniversary memorial ceremonies and will say a prayer for those who died, the survivors, their families and friends, and most of all for peace in the world.

Maybe their would be more peace in the world if political leaders knew how to facilitate and participate in more effective meetings?