Meeting Communication

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!

I’m heading off to Atlanta for a three day PowerPoint conference. It is billed as “the finest event in the world for the presentation professional, the PowerPoint user, and those who brand company messages”. I’m looking forward to spending three days learning more about PowerPoint and meeting other people that like or love PowerPoint. I’m especially interested in hearing about PowerPoint 2010. Maybe my next post will be from Atlanta and for three days the center of PowerPoint excitement.

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.

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.

I recently attended the annual conference of the NY chapter of the Meeting Professionals International. It was an excellent meeting to say the least, as it should be a premier event since it is produced by some of the best meeting planners in the industry.

The first sign that this was a good event is that every meeting at the conference seemed to have full attendance. In this economically challenged world this alone is a big achievement. Of course every meeting evolved to a discussion about the economy even if it was not supposed to be the primary focus of the meeting – although in many cases the economy was the target topic.

The meeting industry is under siege since the day of the now famous AIG Meeting fiasco. Obama has taken a leading role in making comments about companies accepting tax payer TARP money and not using it for “FUN” business trips . . .  “You can’t take a trip to Las Vegas or down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers’ dime”.

Many companies have since canceled many meaningful, important meetings, even if they have not accepted TARP money – to be sure they do not appear to be wasting money on meetings. And some companies have just used it as an excuse to cut meeting and event budgets.

The President’s, along with some high profile senator’s comments have wrongly given the public perception via the negative media mania of the day,  that ALL business meetings are fun and games and a big waste of money. Yes, there are some business meetings that are strictly fun and games, they are called Incentive Meetings. These trips are usually for top company revenue producers, or employees that met big goals or achieved great things for the company. But this is small percentage of meetings and events.

And then there is often a “fun” activity at many meetings and events to give incentives to employees to attend the meeting, because often meetings are NOT fun, but hard, challenging, stressful work! Meetings are big business, because so much BUSINESS gets done at meetings.

I love technology, but nothing can replace the power of a face to face meeting or a good handshake!

A thought that occured to me at the end of this conference having spent a day listening to and meeting with some of the best professional meeting planners, organizers and meeting facilitors in the business, maybe the world . . . Obama should hire an army of Meeting Professionals and put them to work at bringing the Government’s meetings into the 21st century. . . . and maybe then we’d end this financial crisis and move the country forward on other important issues at the pace of today’s digital world.

It’s great to see Obama have the first Presidential Webinar with the public participating in a live in-person audience and via the web. Let’s see him encourage MORE effective MEETINGS that produce results. Maybe he should start at home with the improvement of Senate and Congressional meetings. I know a few good professional meetings planners that he can hire that can turn those ineffective, time wasting, tax dollar supported meetings into efficiently run, effective meetings that will actually produce some results!

For a PowerPoint guy, this has to be the coolest gadget of the year, a projector that fits in my pocket. It’s a little bigger than my Treo cell phone. I had read about its anticipated arrival months ago and as soon as they were shipping I ordered one to test. (I bought the 3M MPro110 from the 3M store for $349.) No more lugging around our “portable projector” which is about the size of a small lunch box.

When the package arrived, I dropped everything to play with this new toy. I hooked it up to my micro video camera, turned the lights off and played movies on the ceiling of my office. AMAZING! What fun. I could not wait until I was next in a client’s office to pull out this tiny projector from my pocket and show their PPT slides on their wall (or ceiling) instead of my laptop screen.

But, cool as it is, practical it is not. After further testing, it was fairly easy to connect it to my Thinkpad Laptop. The image is fairly clear, but 7 lumens is not very bright. It may be OK for watching a fun movie with your kids on the ceiling or an excellent way to show some family photos directly from your digital camera, but not for a business presentation. Even the cheapest portable projectors these days have at least 1000 Lumens. It has been years since the last time I’ve been to a presentation where they had to turn the lights off. With 7 lumens, you have to turn the lights off and shut the blinds.

I still think it is one of the coolest presentation gadgets to arrive in the past few years, but I’d wait until version two or three and a micro projector with more lumens before carrying one around in my already full pockets.

You can check out a more extensive review of micro projectors by my favorite gadget reviewer, the New York Times David Pogue’s mini projector blog post and review at: “The New World of Pocket Projectors”

I had the honor and pleasure to be a speaker at the Small Biz Summit 2008. It was a great opportunity to be on the other end of the slides. It’s been awhile since I was a speaker and not the speaker support person or on the speaker support team. I was speaking on a panel on how to transform your business. The panel presented 40 tips in 40 minutes. I had 10 minutes for my 10 tips.

I had ten plus weeks to prepare. I started thinking about it maybe ten weeks ago, but didn’t dive into it seriously until maybe 10 days ago. We were supposed to have the slides finalized and to the event producer 14 days ago. I’m so used to most of eSlide’s clients giving us slides for their presentation the day before they present, I thought 14 days in advance was silly. But it wasn’t.

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How many meetings have you had where you spent so much time preparing for the meeting, you left little time to sleep the night before a meeting? What is better, more meeting preparation, or more sleep?

I have a monthly meeting that I’m responsible for planning and facilitating. Since I’ve been in the meeting business for the past 25 years, it should be a breeze. But since we are in the business of designing and producing presentations, we are driven by client presentation deadlines. We often miss our own deadlines in order to meet our client deadlines. Although I am the least directly involved in the production of client presentations, I seem to have my own full plate of administrative deadlines.

I always start out with the plan to start preparing for the meeting the week before, but other priorities get in the way and it always seems a good portion of the preparation is the night before (just like our clients). Considering I leave for the office at 5:30am, if I stay up late to prepare the meeting detailed agenda and notes, I usually start the meeting sleep deprived. I definitely notice the difference in the success of the meeting when I get a good night’s sleep vs just a few hours or when my partners are severely sleep deprived, because of crazy client deadlines.

I wonder how many meetings are being run by sleep deprived facilitators or presenters? Bad meetings are often blamed on bad slides, but it could just be too many people stay up late producing (bad) slides and then don’t have the needed energy to present the information effectively. Their sleepy presentation produces a bored, sleepy audience and a big waste of time for all.

Just like it is illeagle to drive in NJ if you are sleep deprived (no sleep for 24hrs), maybe there should be a law against running a meeting with less than 6 hours of sleep?

I participated in a one hour Tele-Class today. It was disapointing for a number of reasons. I suspect there were 25-50 participants and 2 speakers. It started off with some technical difficulties. One of the speakers had the wrong number and was not in the call at first. Then when the call was switched to record it knocked everyone off out of the call. I and others had to dial-in 3 or 4 times to get back into the call. I missed the first half of the first presenter.

I felt like it was a step back in time, like listening to an old AM radio show. There were some noise in the background including a few people who obviously did not know how to mute thier phones. I found myself watching some email coming in, then answering a few emails, and the phone call became the background.

The big problem . . . NO VISUALS. Not even some bad PPT visuals. I have to admit that I’m biased a bit (or a lot) on the value of visuals, but this is the age of YouTube and VISUALs. Show me a talking head, show me a bad PPT, but show me something.