Presentation Matters

 I have spent many hours (years?) of my life listening to presentations made using a Powerpoint set. But that's not what I mean by presentation. I am broadly talking about communication. For instance, it could be just a way of telling a story. My grandfather told us one very effectively, and I still remember it vividly-about a rabbit scaring away a lion by pretending to be a bigger animal!

It could be the intonation, or images used-orally or on a screen, or board, or gestures, while communicating. In food shows, it's the plating that makes the food looks cool, because you can't taste it as a viewer, so you only have an image to help you imagine.

Packaging is a form of presentation. How you package a product can make a difference between someone buying it or not! Which is why smart marketers play around with packaging so much! How you display products in a retail store can also achieve similar results- good or bad.

In short, think about presentation. Whether it's yourself at an interview, or a on a date, or a presentation you make to a boss or a client!

Best Presentations

What were your best presentations, according to you?

I can remember two or three from my student days-

1. During my MBA days, we made a presentation for Prof. SK Roy's OB course. It was the review of a book called The Tyranny of Testing-a book about why IQ type multiple Choice Tests may not be the best way to test many good things. We worked hard (it was a group presentation), and I remember we did get a lot of applause.

2. The second was a solo by me, for another course, Effective Communication during MBA at IIM Bangalore. I chose Romantic Poets as my theme, and with the aid of Keats, Shelley, Byron and so forth, made a very interesting presentation, I was told by some of the audience.

3. A third that I remember was during a Project Management assignment in a Ph.D. course at Clemson. We decided to present CPM and PERT through a project that James Bond had-On Her Majesty's Secret Service. We watched the film's video and made a PERT chart out of it.

Presentations can be an interesting learning tool, that you may remember long after the lectures have been forgotten.

Presentation Skills

These are the most important set of skills a person may possess or acquire in life, in my humble view (just avoiding IMHO, the cliche). Why? It can change you from a hero to a zero, or vice-versa, in a jiffy. I have come to this wonderful conclusion about the human condition (might get nominated for a Nobel sometime), after sitting through a bunch of presentations at a conference where educated people, some faculty and some students, presented their research papers.

I have no quarrel with content that was presented, but I do have one with the way it was presented. Most speakers did not seem to have a clue as to how long they were taking. This was compounded by a laissez- faire chairperson, who allowed them to drift aimlessly from slide to slide (oh, what a slide it was, too).

Anyway, there were horrendous (egregious? maybe I still remember how to spell this, after all) errors of spelling, pronunciation, grammar, editing and the like on many of the slides and articulation of those. The central idea of the 10-15 minute presentation was not clear to the audience even at the end.

Is it so difficult to present a few ideas or thoughts or report on what you tried to do and achieved? I think not, but it needs you to think from the other's-the audience's-point of view. We are so full of ourselves that we as speakers neglect the audience. We have no idea of their needs, and make it so one-sided that it puts people off. Structuring a thought or two into a slide so that the audience gets a gist, should be the objective. Stringing the slides together for coherence should be the second objective. Editing it after it is done should be a matter of course.

Asking questions is another art that I will pontificate on some other time. The manner of doing it is just too rude in many conferences.