Blogs

Never Say "Never"

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 15:46:00 GMT

By Jerry Weissman

Sir Winston Churchill, the great British Prime Minister, prolific author, and distinguished orator who addressed some of the most august assemblies in the world, once delivered a speech to the boys at Harrow School in Britain:

Never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy

Sir Winston spoke those words in 1941and they have reverberated down through the decades as a model of an inspirational speech. But the Prime Minister was using negativity to inspire; he was telling his audience what not to do.

Negativity is difficult form of communication. It has become the campaign method of choice in politics. While it often proves effective—as we saw in Mitt Romney’s victorious primary campaign to become the 2012 Republican candidate for president—it leaves a hostile residue and a divided electorate.

In business, negativity fails to provide information. How often have you heard this statement in a presentation?

What we’re not is…

Huh? Well then, what are you? Tell your audiences what you are, not what you are not. Moreover, negative statements sound defensive.

One of history’s most famous negative statements was President Richard Nixon’s infamous defense of himself in the Watergate scandal, “I am not a crook.”

Had he framed his statement positively as “I am an honest man,” history might have remembered him more forgivingly.

Does this mean that you should never say “never” unless, like Sir Winston, you are exhorting your audience? Mardy Grothe, the author of Neverisms, a collection of quotations that begin with the ultimatum “Never,” defines Sir Winston’s technique as “dehortations,” or statements intended to advise against a particular action.

By all means, when you want to inspire, dehort to your heart’s content; you will be in good company. In an article about Mr. Grothe’s book, Erin McKean, the founder of the online dictionary Wordnik.com, extracted some famous dehortations:

“Never send a boy to do a man’s job.”

“Never speak ill of the dead.”

“Never judge a book by its cover.”

“Never count your chickens before they’re hatched.”

“Never make the same mistake twice.”

My personal favorite dehortation was coined by Leroy "Satchel" Paige who, after a lengthy career in the Negro Leagues, became the oldest rookie—at 42— in Major League Baseball after Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier. When asked about how he was able to stay youthful and competitive, Mr. Paige said,

Don’t look back, something may be gaining on you.

However, in business, negativity for negativity’s sake brings problems to the forefront and can lead a presentation into a black hole—the “Houston, we’ve got a problem!” problem.

Instead, focus on the upbeat, the potential, the road ahead, the actions you are taking, the vision that propels you.

This is not to say that you should sweep problems under the rug or ignore the elephant in the room; you must always be accountable and tell your full story. Just be sure that, if you bring up the negative, you balance it with the positive.

As the old World War II song advised, “Accentuate the positive.”

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This chapter is from my new book, just published by Pearson, "Winning Strategies for Power Presentations"; it is one of 75 lessons from the world's best presenters, and available now from Amazon.

http://www.powerltd.com/winning_strategies.htm

Is This Really How You Really Talk?

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:16:00 GMT

Sue Shellenbarger, the creator and writer of the Wall Street Journal's "Work & Family" column, wrote a comprehensive article here on how the quality of a person's voice can impact his or her career. Our solution is a skill called "Resonance," which helps anyone improve the quality of their voice by simply widening their throat, mouth, and nasal sinuses when speaking. You can find a full discussion about resonance along with a set of simple exercises in a chapter called, "How to Develop a Rich, Resonant Voice," in my new book Winning Strategies for Power Presentations.

“There isn’t an executive, salesman, banker, politician, or religious leader on the planet who can’t improve their presentation skills. Jerry Weissman is the guru to whom they turn to learn to deliver their message better.”

–ADAM LASHINSKY, Sr. Editor at Large, Fortune Magazine; author, Inside Apple

Two Presentation Lessons from Leah Garchik

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

by Jerry Weissman

Leah Garchik, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, writes mostly about social events, but this week’s column provided two important lessons for presenters. See if you can find them in the text of her column below; and while we’re posing questions, see if you can identify the three authors Ms. Garchik references:

“She could do with a little less training,” said an observer who attended a book lecture last week by a modern feminist member of high-tech royalty. The author, whose homage and how-to about having it all is being snapped up by women everywhere, and is atop the best-seller list, seemed to be so media-coached that instinctive charisma had been replaced by repetitions of the phrase ‘in my book.’ In consultant's terms, this is called “staying on point.” In real life, this is called “tedious.” “I think she wants to run for office,” said the spy.

And then there's the savvy entertainment mogul whose onstage chronological account of his career was peppered with "in Chapter 2," then "in Chapter 3," and so on. We were there to pretend we were chatting with him one-on-one, as if he were sitting across the kitchen table; no one was going to look up citations. Sharing celebrity foibles is interesting, but signing a contract does not an anecdote make.

Finally, my neighbor at a fundraising luncheon a few months ago said she'd heard the main speaker a few days before, at another luncheon for another cause. This was a much-admired national hero whose name has become a household word. At first shy and somewhat stumbling in the media glare, over the past few years, as he's been on the TV and luncheon circuit, his sentences have become more grammatical, his points more polished. In fact, they are so shiny nowadays that his remarks sound as though they were learned in Motivational Speaking 101.

Bravo to all three for the feat of sharing their stories. But too much storytelling practice doesn't always make perfect.

The first presentation lesson resides in Ms. Garchik’s sentence, “We were there to pretend we were chatting with him one-on-one, as if he were sitting across the kitchen table.” One-on-one is the approach every presenter should use in every presentation. As a coach, one of my consistent challenges is to get presenters to be conversational rather than attempt to be performers. Business people are not auditioned for their jobs; they are chosen on the basis of the impression they make during their intake interviews—and those interviews are conversations and not presentations. A simple solution is to make every presentation a series of person-to-person conversations. The second lesson comes from Ms. Garchik’s observation about the excessive repetitions of the phrase “in my book,” which makes the exchange “all about me”—and not about the listener. Substitute “audience” for “listener” and you can see the problem: a one-way street. Just as salespersons who sell features rather than benefits fail to make the sale, presenters who disregard their audiences fail to make the connection. Or as the line from the classic Paul Newman film, Cool Hand Luke, has it, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” Make it all about them.

Winning Strategies for Power Presentations: Conversation with Jerry Weissman

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 18:15:00 GMT

Jerry Weissman's new book featured on Indezine:

http://blog.indezine.com/2013/04/winning-strategies-for-power.html

Jerry Weissman is among the world's foremost corporate presentations coaches. His private client list reads like a who's who of the world's best companies, including the top brass at Yahoo!, Intel, Intuit, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Netflix and many others.

Jerry founded Power Presentations, Ltd. in 1988. One of his earliest efforts was the Cisco Systems IPO road show. Following its successful launch, Don Valentine, of Sequoia Capital, and then chairman of Cisco's Board of Directors, attributed "at least two to three dollars" of the offering price to Jerry's coaching. That endorsement led to more than 500 other IPO road show presentations that have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in the stock market.

In this conversation, Jerry discusses his new book, Winning Strategies for Power Presentations.

Geetesh: Your new book, Winning Strategies for Power Presentations explores presenter personalities -- and their strategies to be convincing and persuasive – tell us more about your book!

Jerry: When My new book is essentially a playbook of case studies based on the fundamental principles in my three original books: Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, The Power Presenter: Technique, Style, and Strategy, and In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions. Taken together, the three offer a proven methodology to develop all the essential elements in any presentation: how to develop a crisp, clear and compelling narrative supported by simple PowerPoint slides; how to deliver that presentation with poise, assurance, and confidence; and how to control Q&A sessions. The case studies in my new book are from fields of communication beyond presentations such as books, films, politics, advertising, music, and sports The common elements in these fields, demonstrate the universal aspects of presentations.

Geetesh: The presenters profiled in this book including people alive and also others whom we only know through their books or recordings -- how did you choose the 75 personalities for this book -- what sets them apart?

Jerry: I chose a variety of communicators and writers who have eloquently expressed basic concepts that illustrate the fundamental principles of my presentation methodology. Their breadth: from diverse fields and from ancient times to the present, demonstrate their universality.

From The New York Times

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:12:00 GMT

One on One: Jerry Weissman, Silicon Valley’s Storyteller

By QUENTIN HARDY

Jerry Weissman may produce more revenue than almost any director in history. His big successes haven’t been plays or movies, though. For more than two decades, Mr. Weissman, a former television and stage director, has coached the executives of technology companies on the theater of the initial public offering.

Mr. Weissman’s company, Power Presentations, works with chief executives on the “roadshow,” a major step toward a stock offering. The presentations consist of speeches, slide shows and question-and-answer sessions with prospective investors. Getting that story right builds enthusiasm for a company’s shares, sending initial stock prices higher.

His clients have included Intuit, eBay, Cisco, Dolby, Netflix and most recently Trulia, the real estate Web site. His clients also include executives at established companies like Microsoft, where he helps with other kinds of presentations, like conference speeches and product marketing.

Mr. Weissman, who is based in Burlingame, Calif., has written several books on his craft, the most recent of which is “Winning Strategies for Power Presentations.” I caught up with him recently, in between client meetings. READ MORE...

Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Masters of the Game

by Jerry Weissman

The 40^th and 44^th Presidents of the United States, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, were two men whose politics are poles apart, but who share one common touch point that serves as a lesson for any presenter.

Although their speaking styles also differ—Mr. Reagan, the genial former actor from the Midwest, who overwhelmed audiences with his underplaying, and Mr. Obama, the cool former Ivy League attorney, who rouses audiences with his dynamic voice and elegant bearing—both men use their individual styles in the service of their outstanding ability to tell human interest stories.

Mr. Reagan almost singlehandedly invented the anecdotal game. The Great Communicator rarely missed an opportunity to tell a tale about a brave soldier or a dedicated student. Readers of Presentations in Action will recall the story of how, in 1983, Mr. Reagan honored the courageous act of a federal employee named Lenny Skutnik by recounting the details of the act during the State of the Union Address—while Mr. Skutnik sat next to Nancy Reagan-establishing a precedent that every president since has followed.

Mr. Obama appreciates Mr. Reagan’s talents. In his autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, Mr. Obama frequently referenced his predecessor. “I understand his appeal,” Mr. Obama wrote, referring to Mr. Reagan’s ability to spark Americans to “rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility, optimism and faith. That Reagan’s message found such a receptive audience spoke … to his skills a communicator.”

Mr. Obama took his appreciation of Mr. Reagan along with him during his 2010 holiday vacation in Hawaii in the form of a book. At the slow news periods like holidays, media interest sometimes turns to what the president is reading. That year it was a biography called President Reagan, by Lou Cannon. In it, Mr. Obama read a statement Mr. Reagan made just after he left office:

Some of my critics over the years have said that I became president because I was an actor who knew how to give a good speech. I suppose that’s not too far wrong. Because an actor knows two important things—to be honest in what he’s doing and to be in touch with the audience. That’s not bad advice for a politician either. My actor’s instincts simply told to speak the truth as I saw it and felt it.

Little did Barack Obama know how meaningful that statement would be. Shortly after his return from that vacation, on January 8, 2011, a deranged Jared Lee Loughner shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen other people during a public citizens’ meeting held in a supermarket parking lot in Tucson, Arizona. Four days after that tragic event, Mr. Obama flew to Tucson to address a stunned nation and the families and friends of the victims at a memorial service at the University of Arizona.

After a brief formal opening of condolences including a passage from Scripture, Mr. Obama began to talk about each of the victims. In simple, but eloquent words, he painted a warm human picture of each person’s life—especially that of nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green whose story he extended as a role model for the nation:

Imagine -- imagine for a moment, here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that some day she, too, might play a part in shaping her nation’s future. She had been elected to her student council. She saw public service as something exciting and hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.

I want to live up to her expectations.

The passage could have been taken right out of the Ronald Reagan style manual.

Validation came from the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, a former speech writer for Mr. Reagan and a frequent critic of Mr. Obama. In her postmortem of the Tucson event, she wrote, “About a third of the way through, the speech took on real meaning and momentum, and by the end it was very good, maybe great.” She attributed the pivot to “when Mr. Obama started to make things concrete … specific facts about real human beings.” (F29.5)

“Specific facts about real human beings,” is sound advice for any speaker.

Seth MacFarlane Bombs at the Oscars

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 03:54:00 GMT

by Jerry Weissman

There’s an old Show Business story about an aging vaudeville comic who is about to meet his Maker. His friends and family come to his deathbed to say their goodbyes. One of his former partners, dismayed at seeing his friend’s frail state, leans in to whisper, “Dying is hard.”

The vaudevillian looks up and says, “Not as hard as comedy.”

Seth MacFarlane tried to be funny as the host of the 2013 Oscar telecast and proceeded to lay more eggs than a chicken farm in rural New Jersey. He bombed because he broke the three cardinal rules of comedy:

He announced that he was about to tell a joke
He snickered or laughed after he told the joke
He mis-timed his delivery by pausing too long before his punch lines

His content was another matter. Content is all a matter of taste, and many critics found Mr. MacFarlane’s mockery of women, Jews, blacks, gays, alcoholics, children, and even the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, thoroughly tasteless.

Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, summed it up perfectly: “It wasn’t funny,” Mr. Foxman said. “It was ugly.”

Mr. MacFarlane, in a sense, agreed. When asked whether he would repeat his performance for the next Oscar broadcast, he said, “No way.”

Public Speaking Advice from a Comic Novelist

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 19:08:00 GMT

Teddy Wayne, a novelist whose latest, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review on Sunday, also appeared in the newspaper on Monday with an article giving advice about public speaking. Mr. Wayne earned this prime coverage because of his reputation for comic writing. The review called his new book “more than a scabrous sendup of American celebrity culture; it’s also a poignant portrait of one young artist’s coming of age.”

But comedy might not be the best vehicle for advice on public speaking. I commented on his article:

You're a very funny writer, Mr. Wayne, and you've done some clever riffs on the apocryphal misconceptions about public speaking advice, but this is a dead serious matter. Businesses and careers can rise or fall on how a person communicates.

Another clever writer named Mark Twain once said that there are two kinds of public speakers: those who get nervous and those who are liars.

They may not see the humor in your article.

Obama's 4th State of the Union

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 18:07:00 GMT

(commentary from last week's State of the Union, February 12, 2013)

by Jerry Weissman, author of Winning Strategies…

By their nature, State of the Union Addresses take the shapeless form of a laundry list. As President Obama noted in the opening sentence of this year’s—his 4^th—edition of the annual event, it is his task “to report the State of the Union.” To make that report complete and accurate, the president and his speech writers send parts of the speech in advance to the various departments of the federal government for their input and confirmation. That process falls into the category of “creation by committee,” and its companion phrase, “a camel is a horse created by a committee.” That’s why most such addresses come across as a patchwork quilt—except for this year’s edition.

After a few opening sentences, President Obama stated his main theme: “It is our generation’s task, then, to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth.” He then proceeded to stay on that single subject for what amounted to 65% of the nearly 6500 word speech. In that stretch, he spoke about diverse subjects, most of them directly related to the economy such as reducing the deficit, tax and entitlement reform, creating jobs, and investing in infrastructure. He also spoke of subjects tangential to the economy but he carefully wove them back into the economy. Note how he ties each subject to his main theme (italics mine):

Climate change: “We can make meaningful progress on this issue while driving strong economic growth. I urge this Congress to pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change.”

High-quality education: “Every dollar we invest in high-quality early education can save more than seven dollars later on.”

Immigration: “Our economy is stronger when we harness the talents and ingenuity of striving, hopeful immigrants.”

Violence Against Women: “We know our economy is stronger when our wives, mothers, and daughters can live their lives free from discrimination in the workplace, and free from the fear of domestic violence.”

This consistent back reference gave the address continuity that is rare in State of the Union Addresses

Mr. Obama also used another powerful device rhetorical device in his speech, one favored by orators since the dawn of civilization. The Greeks called it “anaphora,” or a figure speech repeated over a series of successive phrases or clauses. The most famous is Reverend Martin Luther King’s use of the phrase “I have a dream” 16 times successively in his historic civil rights speech.

At the end of his State of the Union, the president moved from the economy to gun violence and told the story of a victim named Hadiya Pendleton who was shot and killed in a Chicago. Mr. Obama repeated the same phrase five times:

Hadiya’s parents, Nate and Cleo, are in this chamber tonight, along with more than two dozen Americans whose lives have been torn apart by gun violence. They deserve a vote.

Gabby Giffords deserves a vote.

The families of Newtown deserve a vote.

The families of Aurora deserve a vote.

The families of Oak Creek, and Tucson, and Blacksburg, and the countless other communities ripped open by gun violence – they deserve a simple vote.

It served as an emotional climax to a well-constructed speech.

Aristotle, The First Salesman

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 08:00:00 GMT

by Jerry Weissman

Mortimer Adler, the noted 20^th Century professor, philosopher, and chairman of the Board of Editors at Encyclopedia Britannica, was also a scholar of the classics. In his 1983 book, How to Speak How to Listen, Mr. Adler described an invitation he received to speak at the Advertising Clubs of California:

They asked me in advance for a title. I suggested that it be “Aristotle on Salesmanship,” a title I thought would be sufficiently shocking for them. It was. No one had ever before connected the name of Aristotle with salesmanship—or with advertising, which is the adjunct of selling.

Sadly, no one connects presentations with selling either. Why else do audiences so often mutter to themselves, “What’s the point of all this?” or “…and your point is?” Such questions are prompted by a pointless story, but more often, by a lack of a call to action.

The answer to those questions may be that, because salesmanship is held is such low esteem in our culture, asking for the order is considered pushy. In a book called The Art of the Sale, author Philip Delves Broughton points to two Pulitzer prize-winning plays, Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" in 1949 and David Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross" in 1984, as having marked salesmen as archetypically unsavory characters. Mr. Delves Broughton goes on to describe current salesmen as people who are “goaded to perform and reined in when they sell too hard. They are patronized as 'feet on the street' by those who prefer to imagine that business can be conducted by consultants with dueling PowerPoint presentations.”

The solution is to go beyond PowerPoint and make your point crystal clear, make an unmistakable call to action. That is the mark of effective salespersons, effective presenters, and, effective people in all walks of life. As L. Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, wrote in his review of Mr. Delves Broughton’s book:

We all engage in sales of one sort or another. Parents sell the idea of eating vegetables to their children; reporters sell their latest story idea to editors; university presidents sell their institution's neediness to potential donors.

But asking for the order is only part of the solution to effective salesmanship; the other is to provide benefits to customers in sales, and benefits to audiences in presentations. Failure to give benefits in each arena is anathema.

Which brings us right back to Aristotle. 2300 years ago, the great philosopher proposed that, to be persuasive, a speaker must provide the holy trinity of Ethos, or credibility, Logos, or evidence, and Pathos, or benefits. In the 21^st Century, the first two are givens. Given the curiosity and speed of our media, no speaker or business person can get away with unethical behavior or shoddy evidence—for very long. Consider the current parade of exposed politicians and executives whose misdeeds make the sleazy salesmen in “Glengarry Glen Ross" look like kindergarten pranksters.

But pathos is still sadly missing. So if you take away only one lesson it is this: load every presentation you ever give with benefits for every audience. And do it with this simple rule of thumb: pause every couple of minutes in the forward progress of your story, and start this sentence, “The reason this is important to you is…” and then finish it with a benefit to that specific audience. Or pose this rhetorical question, “What’s in it for you?” and answer it with a benefit.

Only then can you make your call to action; only then can you make the sale.

You can read more about Barack Obama's rhetorical techniques in "The Power Presenter".

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You can also read more from my new book, just published by Pearson, "Winning Strategies for Power Presentations"; it is one of 75 lessons from the world's best presenters, and available now from Amazon.

http://www.powerltd.com/winning_strategies.htm

"But I'm not an artist"

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Rx: Infographics

by Jerry Weissman

In my constant effort as a coach to persuade business people to remember that a picture is worth a thousand words and to avoid the dreaded "Presentation-as-Document Syndrome," presenters often protest, "But I’m not an artist!"

Cast adrift from their familiar text slides, presenters are reluctant to try alternatives. However, you don't have to go out and buy a painter's smock and beret to break the mold of an endless parade of boring bullet slides.

Begin with overarching concept that the primary—and sole—purpose of your PowerPoint is to illustrate your narrative. Remember my often-repeated (because it still hasn't taken hold) recommendation that your business slideshow should follow the example of television news broadcasts: the anchorperson tells the story and the graphics serve as a headline that captures the essence of the story.

Then design your presentation headlines as "infographics" or "data visualizations." Visual.ly, the world’s largest community for sharing infographics, defines these terms as follows:

…Infographics are images created to explain a particular idea or dataset. They often contain beautiful graphics to increase their appeal and help catch your attention. Many of them use data visualization.

Data visualizations represent numerical data in a visual format. They can be anything from a simple bar chart to a complex three dimensional CAT Scan representation.

But go beyond the usual charts and venture into more vivid images to communicate and illustrate your story. You have at your disposal a number of resources to convert text into images, and to inspire your thinking visually:

Google and Bing: Each of these powerful search engines has an "Images" feature. Just go to the search bar on either site, type in a keyword, and you'll see a broad array of photos, clip art, and line drawings. You can also search for synonyms of a key word. For instance, "jail," "prison," and "penitentiary" will bring up multiple variations of incarceration images. Moreover, as soon as you type in a key word, each site offers a pull down menu with other variations. "Jail" brings up "jail bars," "jail cell," and "jail house," and each of them brings up even more images—all in the interest of getting your creative juices flowing to think outside the plain vanilla text box.

Be aware, however, that many of the images on these sites may require payment for high resolution copies and/or royalties. Below is a list of ten websites where you can find free or low cost images.

Royalty-free / Public Domain Image Websites:

Freepik
Google Images
U.S. House of Representatives
Open Clip Art Library (OCAL)
Picdrome
Public Domain Photos
United States Senate
Totally Free Images
U.S. Government Photos and Images
U.S. History Images

Visual.ly: Visit the excellent graphic community site and see what they call their "data visualization enthusiasts" have created. Browse the site and sample the many impressive infographics their members have posted. They will inspire you to think visually. The site also provides a tool to step you through the creation of your own infographic.

Microsoft PowerPoint: The industry standard presentation software itself offers multiple ways to turn plain vanilla words into interesting graphics. Just click the "Insert" tab on the top Ribbon and another tab opens with the following graphical choices: Table, Pictures, Clip Art, Photos, Shapes, Charts, and SmartArt. The latter provides an almost infinite array of shapes, colors, and textures to enhance the look and feel of your text. Look at the difference that embedding text in simple shapes and shading can make with the identical text in the figure below.

Now, with your palette of four different options—Google/Bing, Free Images, Visual.ly, and Microsoft PowerPoint—are you ready for your artist’s smock and beret?

Q&A with Jim Harbaugh

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 02:09:00 GMT

In a prior blog, you read the infamous advice about handling tough questions offered by Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during the controversial Vietnam War:

Never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you. And quite frankly, I follow that rule. It's a very good rule.

But it’s only a good rule for government officials and politicians. While the public has come to tolerate non-answers from such individuals, most other people, in most other walks of life—particularly business men and women—can never get away with ducking questions.

Except for sports figures. Most press conferences in the sports arena are never more than an exchange of innocuous answers to innocuous questions for one very simple reason: all that matters in sports is what happens on the playing field. Talking about a game in advance or after the fact devolves into either meaningless conjecture or equally meaningless rehash.

Jim Harbaugh, the coach of the Super Bowl-bound San Francisco Forty-niners, understands the rules of the press conference game, but he makes his non-answers a form of art. In anticipation of this Sunday’s big game, Mr. Harbaugh’s artful style was captured by Kevin Clark, a sportswriter for the Wall Street Journal, in this clever article.

Enjoy.

Breaking Into Jail

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 20:05:00 GMT

Breaking into Jail

The Elephant IS in the Room

Jail break films have long been a staple offering of Hollywood but, in a real life reversal of form, the Los Angeles Times reported that a former prisoner of the California State Prison in Sacramento, one Marvin Ussery, attempted to break into the jail. Although Mr. Ussery claimed that he was only “reminiscing,” prison authorities suspected that he was trying to smuggle in drugs, tobacco, or mobile phones to sell to the inmates. However, a search didn’t find any contraband on him, so his motive remains a mystery.

In business, “breaking into jail” has a different connotation: offering negative information voluntarily. Revealing a liability raises doubts in the audience’s minds about a company’s viability. However, there is a very good reason for such revelations: accountability. In presentations, unlike awkward social situations: the elephant in the room cannot and must not be ignored.

In some cases, accountability is mandatory. The Securities and Exchange Commission requires that a company selling stock to the public for the first time must include a “Risk Factors” section in the Prospectus for their Initial Public Offering. But the road show presentation of the offering isn’t required to use the Draconian language of the prospectus. Nor is there such a requirement for countless other routine types of business presentations. Yet all presentations must be forthcoming about bad news, or the presenter will be perceived of as having something to hide.

The challenge is when and how to handle the revelation. The “when” has two options:

Be preemptive: Include the negative information in the body of your presentation
Be reactive: Wait until a question comes from the audience and have a prepared response ready.

Each option has a risk. Offering negative information is “breaking into jail,” or admitting guilt, and raises an issue that the audience may not have considered. Waiting until a question is asked can appear evasive or concealing.

Regardless of which option you choose—the choice is a judgment call dependent on the situation, the audience, and/or the presenter—you must then make full disclosure by acknowledging the negative. But, as soon as you do, follow up immediately with the actions that you and your company are taking to rectify the problem or to prevent its recurrence.

If your bad news is about:

a down quarter, describe your extra efforts to stimulate new sales
the loss of a key customer, explain your efforts to win a new customer
the resignation of a key executive, talk about your search outreach
a delayed product release, lay out your accelerated production schedule
a failed product trial, list the corrections you are making
a critical comment by an important thought leader, find a more positive opinion and quote that person.

This strategy is a variation of the correct method for handling the ritual “What keeps you up at night?” question. Be candid about what keeps you up at night, but immediately follow up with what you are doing about it. Be candid about your company’s bad news, but immediately follow up with what you are doing about it.

Acknowledge that the elephant is in the room, and then lead it out.

You can also read more from my new book, just published by Pearson, "Winning Strategies for Power Presentations"; it is one of 75 lessons from the world's best presenters, and available now from Amazon.

http://www.powerltd.com/winning_strategies.htm

Obama’s 2nd Inaugural Address: Echoes of History

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 21:10:00 GMT

Obama’s 2^nd Inaugural Address: Echoes of History

Yesterday, in his second inaugural address, President Obama eloquently expressed his future vision of America: “…it will be up to those who stand here in four years, and forty years, and four hundred years hence…” but he did so by looking back in historical context: “… to advance the timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia hall.”

In the second paragraph of the speech, the president quoted the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

He then proceeded to echo his idol, Abraham Lincoln, by embedding the famous words of the Gettysburg Address in this sentence: “The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a Republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.”

And then, as a unifying theme, Mr. Obama used the immortal first three words of the Constitution, “We, the people…” as a recurring phrase at the beginnings of four consecutive paragraphs:

We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity.

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity.

We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still

By using repetition, the president was echoing Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday was celebrated concurrent with Inauguration Day. Dr. King used the phrase “I have a dream” 16 times in his 1963 speech. In fact, Mr. Obama was reaching even further back in history to the Greek orators who termed the use of a repetitious phrase in successive sentences, Anaphora.

If you look back at the fourth instance of “We, the people…” you’ll see that Mr. Obama employed another rhetorical device: By restating the words of the Declaration of Independence, “the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal,” he created a bookend, an echo of his beginning.

Bookends, anaphora, and familiar quotations, are techniques any presenter can employ in any presentation.

You can read more about Barack Obama's rhetorical techniques in "The Power Presenter".

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You can also read more from my new book, just published by Pearson, "Winning Strategies for Power Presentations"; it is one of 75 lessons from the world's best presenters, and available now from Amazon.

http://www.powerltd.com/winning_strategies.htm

Lance Armstrong Does the Right Thing

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 16:04:00 GMT

By Jerry Weissman

After more than a decade of denials, Lance Armstrong finally admitted in yesterday’s televised interview with Oprah Winfrey that that he used performance enhancing drugs. His denials had been so vehement, Gail Collins, the Times satirical columnist, said that they “made ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ sound like a confession.”

One Wall Street Journal story speculated that Mr. Armstrong’s motive was to “figure out a way to compete again;” another quoted “ESPN writer Don Van Natta Jr. [who] posted on Twitter, ‘You don't go on Oprah to confess. You go on Oprah to be forgiven.’”

Motives aside, Mr. Armstrong’s admission provides a larger communication lesson; it is what every human being must do in every exchange: take responsibility and be transparent.

In a prior blog, you read how Rupert Murdoch, when confronted with charges that his newspapers had engaged in phone hacking, ducked his responsibility by issuing an apology in the passive voice: “We are sorry for the serious wrongdoing that occurred.” But the passive voice is the opposite of transparency.

As Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, “at the length truth will out.” Evidence mounted in the phone hacking scandal, and a year later, the United Kingdom Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee issued a report that called Mr. Murdoch irresponsible. In response, he apologized and he did so in the active voice, “We certainly should have acted more quickly and aggressively to uncover wrongdoing. We deeply regret what took place and have taken our share of responsibility for not rectifying the situation.” (You can read the full account in my latest book, Winning Strategies for Power Presentations.)

The truth came out for Lance Armstrong. Last year, the United States Anti-Doping Agency barred him for life from Olympic sports and stripped him of his seven Tour de France medals. His major sponsors such as Nike, Oakley, and Discovery Channel dropped their endorsements. And so Mr. Armstrong finally took responsibility when he told Ms. Winfrey, “I viewed this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times.”

Transparency counts. Its vital importance was best expressed by Meg Whitman, the CEO of HP. In a video interview on the Journal’s CIO Network earlier this week, she spoke about her company, but her words have universal applicability: “One of the things that I think is so important, I will tell you in some ways I learned this in the governor’s campaign, which is transparency of communication. Say what you mean, mean what you say and deliver along the lines that you say you will deliver.”

What readers are saying about "Winning Strategies for Power Presentations"

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 07:36:00 GMT

5.0 out of 5 stars 75 great lessons in effective presentation from a master

January 3, 2013

By Jeff (Northern California)

Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program

Full Disclosure: I've been through the author's 3 day introductory course and am a huge fan of his insight and lessons.

Winning Strategies for Power Presentations tackles a problem endemic to our current times: short attention spans. In fact, Chapter 54 is about the difficulty of presenting to a crowd lost in their Crackberries. Ironically, it's the only topic where Jerry admits trying a lot of techniques and not finding one he likes.

Well, never mind, because the other 74 chapters offer sound advice for many challenges in communicating effectively in presentations. Each one takes a problem and in anywhere from 2-5 pages gives practical advice distilled from several of his other books. As usual, he's informative, entertaining, and quite insightful.

If you're new to Power Presentations, this is a great book to start with. However, if you're really serious, you will want to move on to his other works where the chapters are longer and the advice is more detailed. Think of this book as the appetizer. When you're done, you've got several great full courses in front of you.

If you've read any of his books before or taken one of his courses, this book is a great reminder of his advice. I caught myself reverting to 2-3 old habits recently and this booked snapped me right out of that.

Finally, Jerry has a keen eye for really good and really bad examples of public speaking. Although he refers quite often to politicians both in this book and in his courses, he also pulls material from many other fields of endeavor. He's not afraid to show examples of people who contradict his advice and can get away with it (e.g., Ronald Reagan not moving his hands when he speaks.) This book is a thought provoking, quick read, that should make you want to read everything else he has written. There is no one else like Jerry Weissman.

For additional information and ordering: http://www.powerltd.com/winning_strategies.htm

David Letterman's Top Ten

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 18:52:00 GMT

Pick a Number

by Jerry Weissman

On Sunday, President Obama awarded David Letterman, along with several other artists, among them Dustin Hoffman, the Kennedy Center Honors for influencing American culture through the arts.

In his nearly two decades as the host of the CBS “Late Night” show, Mr. Letterman has made his nightly reading of his “Top Ten” list a social ritual of American culture. While he uses his list for comic effect, you can use the same approach to create a structure for your presentations.

Authors Stephen R. Covey and Deepak Chopra used the numbering technique for the structure of their respective bestsellers, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success. The popular Politico website regularly calls out the Top Five takeaways from the political events that they cover; how-to newspaper and magazine articles add sidebar boxes that summarize their main tips with a total number; and the help desk web page of product and service companies summarize their customer FAQs with a total number.

In the fast and furious business world where presentations are often hastily cobbled together with a disparate collection of begged, borrowed, or stolen slides and delivered by a presenter who is the only one in the room who can understand what on Earth one slide has to do with another, the numbering technique can be emergency CPR. Simply organizing the different elements into a clear order makes it easy for both the presenter and the audience to follow.

Eric Benhamou, the former Chairman of 3Com Corporation (acquired by HP in 2010), did so under rather trying circumstances.

Mr. Benhamou was invited to deliver a keynote speech at a dinner given by the California-Israel Chamber of Commerce, an organization as diverse as the more than 7000 miles that separate those two centers of business. The event, which was held on a mid-week night at Silicon Valley’s large San Jose Fairmount Hotel, began with a cocktail hour that ran for far more than an hour. When the ballroom doors finally opened, the several hundred guests rushed in to find seats at tables they had to share with strangers. After the usual rubber chicken meal, the Masters of Ceremonies presented awards to individuals who were familiar only to Californians, and some who were familiar only to Israelis. Each of the recipients then proceeded to give an acceptance speech that made Academy Award acceptance speeches seem abrupt by comparison. When Mr. Benhamou’s turn came, it was nearly nine o’clock.

How would you like to have to deliver a speech in those circumstances?

This blog post is an excerpt from my new book, just published by Pearson, Winning Strategies for Power Presentations; it is one of 75 lessons from the world's best presenters, and available now from Amazon.

Ready, Fire, Aim!

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Old Habits Die Hard

by Jerry Weissman

The quality that earned you your present job--as well as all of your previous jobs--is the same quality that impedes your ability to answer questions effectively: you are a results-driven person.

To determine how good and--just as important--how fast you are at producing results, your employer undoubtedly assessed your resume, your references, and your character during your intake interview. Having demonstrated your proficiency means that you spend most of your time on your job (and most likely, the rest of your waking hours) ready to pounce on problems and find solutions. As a result, whenever you get a question, you are primed to provide an answer instantly.

Unfortunately, if you are too quick with your response, your answer might be wrong--because you did not understand the question. You will have fallen into the "Ready, Fire, Aim!" trap.

Being a good listener, as you learned from Johnny Carson in a prior blog, is important, but that is only the first step; it is just as important to take a beat before pulling the answer trigger; to put the aiming in its rightful place--before the firing. Pause before you answer a question.

But pausing is difficult during a mission-critical presentation because you are acting under the influence of a double speed whammy: the adrenal overdrive of being on the spot, and the DNA of a trigger-happy problem-solver.

Apple Computer understands trigger-happiness. The company, which is well-known for carefully guarding its product development, makes a practice of keeping all but a few select senior executives from answering questions from the press. In Inside Apple, a book describing what the subtitle calls its "secretive" practices, author and Fortune Magazine Senior Editor Adam Lashinsky quotes an Apple product marketing executive: "The challenge with those guys is that they are super smart and they know a lot of details, but...they haven't learned how to gracefully avoid answering."

Apple's competitor, Google, also understands trigger-happiness. Their Gmail has a feature called "Undo Send." Once you hit "Send," Gmail will hold your email for five seconds, during which time you can stop the email from going out.

The most sensitive trigger-happy arena of all is television and radio. Broadcasters employ a seven-second delay in live programs to monitor and edit undesirable material. Think of the wardrobe-malfunction at the Super Bowl or an excited blurt of profanity during a live Academy Awards acceptance speech. The most common example of the seven-second delay is the frequent sound of beeps during broadcasts of Jon Stewart's bawdy "The Daily Show."

Author Frank Partnoy extols the benefits of delay in his book, Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, with examples of a baseball batter waiting for the perfect pitch to hit, a comic waiting a beat before delivering a punch line, and a matchmaker counseling a blind date to suppress snap judgments.

Because presenters do not have the facility of an "Undo Send" button or a seven-second video delay, they must create their own beat in real time--with a verbal pause. That is not a contradiction in terms; a verbal pause is none other than the old reliable paraphrase. Readers of In the Line of Fire will recall that the paraphrase--a reconfiguration of a question--serves as a buffer. For our purposes, let's consider the paraphrase as the presentation equivalent of the seven-second video delay.

For instance, suppose an irate customer was to ask, "Where do you get off charging so much for your product?" The hair trigger answerer might say, "It's not that expensive when you think of all the features you get..." or "You have to consider the long-term cost of ownership." Each of those rapid responses accuses the questioner of being wrong. If instead you paraphrase by saying, "Why have we chosen this price point?" you remain neutral--and you take that vital verbal beat.

Having bought the time, you can then go on to describe the features and/or the long-term cost of ownership, but you will do so without--to extend the metaphor--the crossfire.

Hair trigger answers are old habits, as unproductive a habit as procrastination. Old habits die hard, but die they must because each of them--one more extension of the metaphor--backfires. Replace them as you would any bad habit, with positive action: listening and paraphrasing--and get positive results.

This blog post is an excerpt from my new book, just published by Pearson, Winning Strategies for Power Presentations; it is one of 75 lessons from the world's best presenters, and available now from Amazon.

Obama and Romney without Words

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 18:55:00 GMT

by Jerry Weissman

In the aftermath of the election, political pundits have inundated the media and the web with postmortem analyses of the results, most of them attributing Barack Obama’s victory to his get-out-the-vote “ground game,” others to the president’s advertising campaign, some to Mitt Romney’s “47%” video, some to the Latino, Asian, and African-American, and women’s voting blocs, some to campaign finances, and some even to Hurricane Sandy.

Allow me to chime in with what is my admittedly parochial point of view by giving due credit to the candidates’ presentation styles. When citizens vote for the leader of their country, they are choosing an authority figure, and they want that person to appear authoritative. Single issues such as the economy, jobs, climate control, immigration, family values, foreign policy, and women’s rights notwithstanding, voters are seeking a father (and someday, maybe, a mother) figure, which, by any measure, is a gut decision. They are impelled more by their hearts than their minds. “Who’s your Daddy?”

Andrew Kohut agrees. He is the president of the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan “fact tank” that did extensive public opinion polling during the election. In an article for the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Kohut wrote, “Postelection talk of ‘lessons learned’ is often exaggerated and misleading.” He then went on to add:

In particular, they are paying too little attention to how weak a candidate Mitt Romney was… Just 47% of exit-poll respondents viewed him favorably, compared with 53% for Mr. Obama. Throughout the campaign, Mr. Romney's favorable ratings were among the lowest recorded for a presidential candidate in the modern era. A persistent problem was doubt about his empathy with the average voter. By 53% to 43%, exit-poll respondents said that Mr. Obama was more in touch than Mr. Romney with people like themselves.

James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, goes even further than Mr. Kohut. A veteran political watcher who has covered many elections since his days as Jimmy Carter’s speechwriter, Mr. Fallows wrote an article for the September issue of the magazine in anticipation of the 2012 presidential debates in which he referenced a political meme:

…the easiest way to judge “victory” in many debates is to watch with the sound turned off, so you can assess the candidates’ ease, tenseness, humor, and other traits signaled by their body language.

Mr. Fallows’ words echo a noted study (noted in the presentation trade) conducted by Professor Albert Mehrabian of the Department of Psychology at UCLA. The study ranked the relative impact of the three key dynamics of interpersonal communication:

Verbal: Content

Vocal: Voice

Visual: Body language

The results: the body language had the greatest impact, the voice next, while the story had the least impact—substantiation of the “sound turned off” premise.

You can see further substantiation in two events on the culminating night of the 2012 election: Mr. Obama’s victory speech and Mr. Romney’s concession speech. Granted that one man was feeling lift of exhilaration and the other the pain of defeat, but by viewing each speech (via the YouTube links)—with the sound turned off—you’ll readily see why Mr. Obama had a ten point advantage in the Pew Research exit polls.

Watch for three visual factors:

Eyes: Both men read their speeches from teleprompters, but as Mr. Romney shifted from between the teleprompter panels, his eyes darted an instant before his head turned, making him appear furtive. Mr. Obama turned his eyes and head at the same time, making him appear to be connecting directly with his audience.

Gestures: Mr. Romney made minimal use of his hands and arms, appearing constrained, while Mr. Obama used his hands and arms expressively, appearing animated and enthusiastic.

Stance: Mr. Romney stood either ramrod straight or leaning back, while Mr. Obama repeatedly leaned forward to his audience. As Mr. Kohut said, “exit-poll respondents said that Mr. Obama was more in touch than Mr. Romney.”

"Who's your Daddy?"

Obama Gets Back His Mojo

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 08:00:00 GMT

by Jerry Weissman

On the Sunday before Election Day, the New York Times (which had enthusiastically endorsed President Obama the previous Sunday) published a negative article in its Magazine section titled, “Still Waiting for the Narrator in Chief.” In the article, Matt Bai, the newspaper's chief political correspondent, pondered how Mr. Obama had “squandered his narrative mojo.”

Mr. Bai was echoing an opinion voiced by many others throughout the election campaign; particularly by his Times colleague, Maureen Dowd, who, in one of her many critiques of the president, took a shot at him by referencing a new book, A Nation of Wusses, in which “Democrat Ed Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania, wonders how ‘the best communicator in campaign history’ lost his touch.”

Even the president himself agreed. In an interview with Charlie Rose, he said,

The mistake of my first term – couple of years – was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that’s important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times. It’s funny when I ran everybody said, “well he can give a good speech, but can he actually manage the job?” And in my first two years, I think the notion was, “well, he’s been juggling and managing a lot of stuff, but where’s the story that tells us where he’s going?” And I think that was a legitimate criticism.

That self-evaluation became a self-fulfilling prophecy in his first debate with Mitt Romney. Mr. Obama’s lackluster performance drew a torrent of criticism—including here—and a dip in the opinion polls. But the criticism also served as a wakeup call. He became a man possessed for the rest of the campaign. Reaching back to his breakthrough keynote at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he pulled out all the rhetorical stops from that speech and deployed them throughout the rest of his 2012 campaign: in the second and third debates, in his many stump speeches, and then again in his rousing victory speech.

Readers of The Power Presenter will recall that I analyzed the rhetorical techniques in the 2004 speech. Below you’ll find a reprise of three of the techniques and their equivalents in the 2012 victory speech:

Antithesis: two contrasting ideas juxtaposed in adjacent phrases.

2004:

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there’s the United States of America.

2012:

it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you're willing to try.

Anaphora: a phrase repeated in several successive sentences, clauses, or phrases

2004:

America! Tonight, if you feel the same energy that I do, if you feel the same urgency that I do, if you feel the same passion that I do, if you feel the same hopefulness that I do -- if we do what we must do, then I have no doubt that all across the country, from Florida to Oregon, from Washington to Maine, the people will rise up in November.

2012:

This country has more wealth than any nation, but that's not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military in history, but that's not what makes us strong. Our university, our culture are all the envy of the world, but that's not what keeps the world coming to our shores.

Anecdote is a brief human interest story (and not a joke.)

2004:

I met a young man named Shamus in a V.F.W. Hall in East Moline, Illinois…

2012:

And I saw just the other day, in Mentor, Ohio, where a father told the story of his 8-year-old daughter…

As Mr. Obama starts his second term facing many daunting domestic and international challenges, he will have to keep that narrative mojo going at full strength. As Matt Bai put it in the conclusion of his article, “Once you’re in office, the story you tell about and to the country …is, to a large extent, the presidency itself.”

Debate III: Agreement

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 17:24:00 GMT

by Jerry Weissman

Yesterday’s post, in anticipation of the third and final presidential debate of 2012, described how Al Gore agreed with his opponent, George W. Bush, seven times during one of their 2000 debates. In last night’s debate between President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney, Mr. Romney outdid Mr. Gore nearly twofold:

1. …we’re going to have to recognize that we have to do as the president has done. I congratulate him on — on taking out Osama bin Laden and going after the leadership in al-Qaida.

2. There was an effort on the part of the president to have a status of forces agreement. And I concurred in that and said we should have some number of troops that stayed on. That was something I concurred with…That was your posture. That was my posture as well.

3. After Mr. Obama, speaking of his handling of Syria, said, “What we’ve done is organize the international community, saying Assad has to go,” Mr. Romney said:

Recognize I believe that Assad must go.

4. After Mr. Obama, speaking of his handling of Libya, said, “We did so in a careful, thoughtful way, making certain that we knew who we were dealing with, that those forces of moderation on the ground were ones that we could work with. And we have to take the same kind of steady, thoughtful leadership when it comes to Syria. That’s exactly what we’re doing,” Mr. Romney said:

I don’t want to have our military involved in — in Syria. I don’t think there’s a necessity to put our military in Syria at — at this stage. I don’t anticipate that in the future.

5. After moderator Bob Schieffer of asked Mr. Obama, “During the Egyptian turmoil, there came a point when you said it was time for President Mubarak to go,” and Mr. Obama said, “Right,” Mr. Schieffer turned to Mr. Romney for his position, and he said:

I believe, as the president indicated and said at the time, that I supported his — his action there….once it exploded, I felt the same as the president did

6. After Mr. Obama said of Mr. Romney, “He’s praised George Bush as good economic steward and Dick Cheney as somebody who shows great wisdom and judgment,” Mr. Romney said:

My plan to get the industry on its feet when it was in real trouble was not to start writing checks. It was President Bush that wrote the first checks. I disagree with that.

7. After Mr. Obama said, “What I now want to do is to hire more teachers, especially in math and science, because we know that we’ve fallen behind when it comes to math and science,” Mr. Romney said:

Look, I — I love to — I love teachers, and I’m happy to have states and communities that want to hire teachers, do that.

8. I want to underscore the — the same point the president made, which is that if I’m president of the United States, when I’m president of the United States, we will stand with Israel.

9. After Mr. Obama said, “As long as I’m president of the United States, Iran will not get a nuclear weapon. I’ve made that clear when I came into office. We then organized the strongest coalition and the strongest sanctions against Iran in history, and it is crippling their economy,” Mr. Romney said:

And crippling sanctions are something I’d called for five years ago when I was in Israel speaking at the Herzliya Conference. I laid out seven steps. Crippling sanctions were number one. And they do work. You’re seeing it right now in the economy. It’s absolutely the right thing to do to have crippling sanctions.

10. When Mr. Schieffer asked Mr. Romney about the president’s plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan in 2014, he replied:

Well, we’re going to be finished by 2014. And when I’m president, we’ll make sure we bring our troops out by the end of 2014.

11. We look at what’s happening in Pakistan and recognize that what’s happening in Pakistan is going to have a major impact on the success in Afghanistan. And — and I say that because I know a lot of people just feel like we should just brush our hands and walk away. And I don’t mean you, Mr. President, but some people in the — in our nation feel that Pakistan (doesn’t ?) — being nice to us and that we should just walk away from them.

This is — this is an important part of the world for us. Pakistan is — is technically an ally, and they’re not acting very much like an ally right now, but we have some work to do. And I — I don’t blame the administration for the fact that the relationship with Pakistan is strained. We had to go into Pakistan; we had to go in there to get Osama bin Laden. That was the right thing to do.

12. When Mr. Schieffer asked, “Let me ask you, Governor, because we know President Obama’s position on this, what is — what is your position on the use of drones? Mr. Romney replied:

Well, I believe that we should use any and all means necessary to take out people who pose a threat to us and our friends around the world. And it’s widely reported that drones are being used in drone strikes, and I support that entirely and feel the president was right to up the usage of that technology and believe that we should continue to use it to continue to go after the people who represent a threat to this nation and to our friends.

To repeat the George Santayana quote I cited after Mr. Obama’s flat presentation in the first debate, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Debate III: Overcompensation?

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 16:11:00 GMT

by Jerry Weissman

Twelve years ago, during the presidential election that pitted Vice President Al Gore against then Texas Governor George W. Bush, the candidates met in three debates, just as President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney are doing this year. One dynamic from the 2000 campaign could carry forward to this year: dramatic reversals in presentation style. Just as Mr. Obama made a significant shift from his listless demeanor in the first debate to what Maureen Dowd called an “alpha tone” in his second, Al Gore made significant shifts in his style between his debates.

In the first contest, Mr. Gore, who was expected to dominate the notoriously language-challenged Mr. Bush, came out roaring like a lion. His statements and rebuttals were filled with aggressive and divisive words like “wrong,” “not,” “differences,” “mistake,” and “opposite.” His manner was also combative, continually punctuated by condescending sighs, derisive head-shaking, scornful frowns, and disdainful eye-rolling.

The arrogant behavior immediately boomeranged. Television broadcasters had a camera isolated on Mr. Gore for reaction shots. Their news directors took the output of this camera and edited his expressions into a rapid-cut sequence that they ran in their local and national broadcasts repeatedly. Public and media criticism rained down on the vice president.

In response, Mr. Gore made a sharp about face in the second debate and came out like a lamb. During the 90- minute event, he expressed agreement with his opponent seven times—earning him further public criticism. So Mr. Gore reversed field again and swung back to his aggressive ways in the third debate.

At one point, moderator, Jim Lehrer of the PBS News Hour, who also moderated the first Obama-Romney debate, asked Mr. Bush the same question he would later ask Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney:

I’d like to know how you see the differences between the two of you

Mr. Bush rose from his seat and began to address his answer to the town-hall audience

Well, the difference is that I can get it done. That I can get something positive done on behalf of the people. That’s what the question in this campaign is about...

As he continued his answer, Al Gore stood up, and started to walk across the stage, directly toward his opponent, almost menacingly. Unaware of Mr. Gore’s move, Mr. Bush continued:

…It’s not only what’s your philosophy and what’s your position on issues, but can you get things done?

In the middle of his statement, Mr. Bush turned to see Mr. Gore approaching, paused for a beat, then nodded at Mr. Gore and smiled, evoking titters from the audience.

Then, Mr. Bush turned back to the audience and said:

And I believe I can.

The audience titters gave way to laughter. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll about the effects of the debate on public opinion gave George W. Bush a seven point advantage over Al Gore. Mr. Gore compensated for his initial aggressive behavior by being passive, and then he overcompensated for being passive by being even more aggressive. Mr. Obama compensated for his initial passive behavior by being aggressive.

What will we he do tonight?

Being Presidential

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 19:24:00 GMT

In yesterday’s post about the second presidential debate between President Obama and Governor Romney, you read a quote about the importance of preparation from the great Roman orator, Marcus Tullius Cicero, written in 55 BC.

The words are from Cicero’s essay, “On the Character of Orator,” in which he goes beyond preparation into all the essential skills required to be an effective presenter. As you read the passage below, please think about how it all applies to being presidential.

Eloquence, in fact, requires many things: a wide knowledge of very many subjects (verbal fluency without this being worthless and even ridiculous), a style, too, carefully formed not merely by selection, but by arrangement of words, and a thorough familiarity with all the feelings which nature has given to man, because the whole force and art of the orator must be put forth in allaying or exciting the emotions of his audience.

Further than this it requires a certain play of humour and wit, a liberal culture, a readiness and brevity in reply and attack, combined with a nice delicacy and refinement of manner. It requires also an acquaintance withal history, and a store of instances, nor can it dispense with a knowledge of the statute-books and all civil law.

I need hardly add, I presume, any remarks on mere delivery. This must be combined with appropriate movement of the body, gestures, looks, and modulation and variety of tone. How important this is in itself may be seen from the insignificant art of the actor and the procedure of the stage; for though all actors pay great attention to the due management of their features, voice, and gestures, it is a matter of common notoriety how few there are, or have been, whom we can watch without discomfort.

One word I must add on memory, the treasure-house of all knowledge. Unless the orator calls in the aid of memory to retain the matter and the words with which thought and study have furnished him, all his other merits, however brilliant, we know will lose their effect.

We may therefore well cease to wonder why it is that real orators are so few, seeing that eloquence depends on a combination of accomplishments, in each one of which it is no slight matter to achieve success.

Cicero’s advice is just one of 75 lessons from many masters of communication—among them Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill, and John F. Kennedy—contained in my new book, Winning Strategies for Power Presentations, due out in December from Pearson; but available for pre-order from Amazon now.

Debate II: Preparation Counts

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:42:00 GMT

President Obama’s fiery performance in the second presidential debate on Tuesday left media pundits perplexed by the 180 degree turnabout from his flat demeanor in the first debate: “Perhaps it was mere fatigue that night in Denver. Or overconfidence. Or lack of preparation. Or the altitude,” mused Politico’s Roger Simon, or as the president himself said, “I was too polite.”

It was preparation, no question. We have no way of knowing just how much time and effort each candidate devoted to preparation, but we do know that on the day before that first debate, Mr. Obama made a campaign stop at Hoover Dam and, according to the Wall Street Journal:

… complained Monday during a phone call with a campaign volunteer that his aides are "keeping me indoors all the time…making me do my homework." However, a brown tarp blocking the view of the resort's basketball court suggests Mr. Obama has been shooting some baskets between sessions.

In sharp contrast, in the run up to the second debate, the Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Obama spent

… three days of prep sessions that began Saturday at a five-star resort in Williamsburg….Outside the sessions, Mr. Obama has spent time walking the grounds of the resort, which is set along the James River, and working out at the gym

The difference was dramatic and, because the media is abuzz with commentary about body language, eye contact, succinctness, and assertiveness, I will confine my comments to only one aspect of preparation: facts.

By far, the most dramatic moment in Tuesday's debate came when Governor Romney challenged Mr. Obama on his handling of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya:

ROMNEY: There were many days that passed before we knew whether this was a spontaneous demonstration, or actually whether it was a terrorist attack. And there was no demonstration involved. It was a terrorist attack and it took a long time for that to be told to the American people.

The president replied:

OBAMA: The day after the attack, governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people in the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened. That this was an act of terror and I also said that we're going to hunt down those who committed this crime.

And then a few days later, I was there greeting the caskets coming into Andrews Air Force Base and grieving with the families.

And the suggestion that anybody in my team, whether the Secretary of State, our U.N. Ambassador, anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we've lost four of our own, governor, is offensive. That's not what we do. That's not what I do as president, that's not what I do as Commander in Chief.

CNN’s Candy Crowley, the moderator of the debate, turned to Mr. Romney and said:

CROWLEY: Governor, if you want to...

ROMNEY: Yes, I -- I...

CROWLEY: ... quickly to this please.

ROMNEY: I -- I think interesting the president just said something which -- which is that on the day after the attack he went into the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror.

OBAMA: That's what I said.

ROMNEY: You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, it was an act of terror.

It was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you're saying?

The governor glowered at the president. Mr. Obama stared back.

OBAMA: Please proceed governor.

ROMNEY: I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.

OBAMA: Get the transcript.

CROWLEY: It -- it -- it -- he did in fact, sir. So let me -- let me call it an act of terror...

OBAMA: Can you say that a little louder, Candy?

CROWLEY: He -- he did call it an act of terror.

Just as the CEO of a public company whose revenues have not met expectations must prepare for a quarterly earnings call with investors, or the CSO of a pharmaceutical company whose drug has failed clinical trials must prepare for a Board of Directors meeting, or a product manager whose product missed a shipping date must prepare for a meeting with a customer, political candidates must prepare for the worst case scenario against their opponents and have a strong response at the ready.

Ever since the attack a month earlier, the Benghazi issue was roiling in the media, and was sure to come up in the debate. Each candidate's party was hurling charges and counter charges at the other in public, so each candidate had to have a carefully delineated response and a well-supported argument and to be fully prepared to deliver it under the pressure of a live television debate.

Mr. Romney, in his drive to prove that the president was "misleading," missed an important fact: Mr. Obama in his drive to prepare for the issue, knew the fact cold.

The importance of thorough preparation was put forth in 55 BC by the great Roman orator, Cicero:

Unless the orator calls in the aid of memory to retain the matter and the words with which thought and study have furnished him, all his other merits, however brilliant, we know will lose their effect.

Obama's Seven Tactical Mistakes

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 16:21:00 GMT

Debate Post-mortem

Last month, in anticipation of last night’s first presidential debate between President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney, veteran journalist James Fallows did a lengthy piece in the Atlantic in which he wrote, “the easiest way to judge ‘victory’ in many debates is to watch with the sound turned off, so you can assess the candidates’ ease, tenseness, humor, and other traits signaled by their body language.”

With or without the sound, any viewer could see stark differences between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney. During most of the ninety-minute debate, the image on the CNN broadcast was a split screen of the two candidates in close-up; so viewers could see both of them simultaneously. During most of Mr. Romney’s speaking turns, Mr. Obama was nodding in seeming agreement. The image was a déjà vu of the first presidential debate in 1960, when Richard Nixon, unaware of the camera, nodded while John F. Kennedy was speaking. As philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

The nodding was only the first of six other tactical mistakes the president made:

He scowled while listening, looking angry and petulant

His kept his eyes cast down rather than looking at his opponent

His answers were filled with diverse statistics and subjects, rarely ending with a clear point

He often failed to counter Mr. Romney’s charges while Mr. Romney repeatedly countered his

He didn’t attack Mr. Romney’s previously-revealed vulnerable positions

He appeared ill-prepared and halting as evidenced by his repeated iterations of “um.”

Following the debate, I surfed the cable channels for post mortems and found a consensus—even from those inclined to favor Mr. Obama: the Huffington Post’s lead headline: “Romney wins the night,” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews wrote, "Where was Obama tonight?" and this morning's New York Times lead story: “Romney Wins Debate Praise as Obama Is Faulted as Flat.”

There are still two more debates to come. Will Mr. Obama take Mr.Santayana’s advice or will he allow Mr. Romney to overtake him?

The Making of the President 2012

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Gut Feeling

by Jerry Weissman

As 50 million viewers prepare to watch the first of this year’s presidential debates tonight, the media is abuzz with discussions and opinions about the major issues: jobs, taxes, healthcare, Libya, Iran, Israel, abortion, immigration, and same sex marriage. For many voters, this is a single-issue election that drives them to favor one candidate or another, but all voters are driven by one factor more powerful than all the others: their gut feelings.

The feelings actually emanate high above the gut, from a group of brain cells called “mirror neurons.” As their name implies, these cells mirror feelings between people, creating an instinctive emotional bond between them. First discovered two decades ago in experiments with lab monkeys, the mirroring phenomenon became known as “monkey see, monkey do.” In humans, what people see, they feel; if we see another person wince in pain, we cringe, if we see another person giggle uncontrollably, we smile, if we see an anxious person, we feel ill at ease, if we see a confident person, we feel elated. These feelings are also called “empathy.”

Political pollsters call them “likeability,” a more sedate term than "gut" and less touchy-feely than "empathy", yet all of the terms describe the primal emotions that candidates generate in the electorate. After all, the president of a nation, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, is very much like the chief of a tribe or the patriarch (and perhaps someday, the matriarch) of a clan. Followers of any leader want to feel—deep inside—that they are in good, strong hands. “Who’s your Daddy?”

Theodore H. White, the great political historian who chronicled the presidential elections of 1960, 1964, 1968, and 1972, saw these primal forces at work in the seminal 1960 debate that pitted the patrician John F. Kennedy against the rumpled Richard M. Nixon. In his classic, The Making of the President 1960, Mr. White wrote that debates “give the voters of a great democracy a living portrait of two men under stress and let the voters decide, by instinct and emotion, which style and pattern of behavior under stress they preferred in their leader…[they] generalize this tribal sense of participation, this emotional judgment of the leader, from the few to the multitude.”

Half a century later, Mr. White’s words were echoed by Dante Chinni in a Wall Street Journal article anticipating tonight’s debate between President Obama and Governor Romney:

Of all the measures of a presidential candidate, the most useful may be the most basic: whether voters have “positive” feelings toward him. In every recent presidential race, the candidate with the higher positive numbers has won the White House.

Mr. Chinni’s article went on to list the likability figures for the month preceding the three most recent presidential elections and that of the most recent month this year:

Will the patrician Mr. Romney break the likability string or will the cool Mr. Obama keep it alive?

Trulia Jumps 40% and the IPO Window is Open Again

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 16:59:00 GMT

Best Practices from a Double IPO CFO

As the stock market surges to new highs not seen since before the fall of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns—Standard Poor's 500-stock index is up 25 percent over the past 12 months—the window for IPOs is beginning to open again. Yesterday, Trulia, a real estate information site, closed up 40 percent on its first day of trading, as the New York Times story described it, “defying the recent lackluster performance of newly public stocks.”

The surge was the subject of a panel discussion at last week’s high profile KPCB CEO Summit in Pebble Beach, California. One of the panelists was Ken Goldman, a respected Silicon Valley CFO, who has served in that role for Cypress Semiconductor, Sybase, Excite@Home, Siebel Systems/Oracle Corporation, and Fortinet. Having led the IPOs for two of those companies, Mr. Goldman offered the 200+ CEOs at the conference 17 brief pieces of advice, five of which related to presentations. (He had a sixth, which was to utilize presentation coaching, but in the interest of selfless-interest, let’s stay with five).

While very few people get the opportunity to make a presentation that seeks to raise tens of millions of dollars as most IPO road shows do, in each of Mr. Goldman’s recommendations below, you’ll see aspects that resonate with all presentations, along with basic best practices that you can employ for your presentations.

1) Don’t be bashful - In 1-on-1 meetings, ask your potential investors for their thoughts on the company and if they have any issues or concerns that should be addressed

Mr. Goldman is recommending that CEOs “Ask for the order,” or as sales people put, it “Go for the close.” Faint heart never won fair lady. Does this mean that a presenter should thrust a contract at the audience and ask them to sign on the dotted line? Of course not, but there is a wide gulf between hard sell and no sell.

A sales person can ask a customer for the order by saying, “We hope that you’ll see how well our product meets your requirements.” An IPO CEO can ask an investor for the order by saying, “We hope that you’ll join us in this attractive opportunity.” Mr. Goldman’s usual call to action for investors is simply, “So what do you think?”

Define your call to action.

2) NetRoadshow has changed the game – Meetings are primarily Q&A, not a regurgitation of the road show presentation

In 2005, following the stock market excesses that led to bursting of the Internet bubble, the Securities and Exchange Commission mandated, in the interest of full disclosure, that companies offering stock for the first time must make their road show presentation available to the public online. Since then, every company makes a video recording of the management team delivering the pitch and posts it on the NetRoadshow site and its public companion, retailroadshow.com, along with the slideshow that accompanies the narrative.

Despite this wide access, the company’s senior management team goes on the road for about two weeks, during which they visit potential investors in about dozen cities across the country, for about 30 or 40 meetings a week for a total of 80 or more iterations—just as they did before NetRoadshow.

The reason for this grueling tour is that no investor will make a decision to buy up to a 10% tranche of an offering based on a canned presentation alone. Investors want to meet the executives in person, press the flesh, look them in the eye, and interact with them directly. As a result, many of the meetings are not presentations, but intense Q&A sessions.

Prepare for the most challenging questions to your presentation.

3) You control the road show logistics – Despite the hectic schedule, there is enough time to conduct business, hold conference calls, workout and unwind.

Mr. Goldman is referring here to the tried and true concept of time—and personal—management. All too often, when business people have a major project (and there is no project more major than an IPO road show) they allow daily business tasks and physical exercise slip by the wayside. Not a good idea for business and not a good idea for your body.

Make the time. Take care of business. Exercise regularly.

4) Road show start critically important; Europe or otherwise.

Here Mr. Goldman is advocating a strong launch. Success in the first iterations can generate word-of-mouth within the investment community that creates momentum for the offering. Companies that develop road shows for product launches need the same impetus.

Run through your presentation multiple times in advance; to your team or to “friends of the court” to refine your pitch. Launch only when ready. Make the first iteration as polished as the last.

5) Six timing decision points: a) Soft start; b) Formal Bakeoff; 3) Organization meeting; 4) File S-1; 5) Start road show and 6) Price

While Mr. Goldman’s steps are IPO-specific, they represent a high level strategic roadmap with key milestones. Every presentation requires a strategic roadmap laid out in advance so that when D-Day arrives, you are ready for action.

Mr. Goldman knows whereof he speaks: Fortinet, his current company, has seen its stock price climb more than 50% in the past year alone. If adjusted for a 2:1 stock split last year, the adjusted price is $54, more than 4 X IPO price of $12.50

Heed his advice.

(Note: Parts of this blog will be contained in my next book, Winning Strategies for Power Presentations, due out in December from Pearson.)

Jerry Comments on iPhone 5 Release in New York Magazine

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 17:24:00 GMT

New York Magazine

Can Tim Cook Pass the Steve Jobs Test?

By Kevin Roose

Obama and Pronouns

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 15:33:00 GMT

It's All About "You"

by Jerry Weissman

Barack Obama has endured expected criticism from Republican, Tea Party, and Libertarian naysayers who disagree with his politics; but he has also taken heat from his own supporters who have accused him of being distant and aloof. On the eve of his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Maureen Dowd took him to task in herNew York Times column:

Obama doesn’t like to share the stage with other politicians or even campaign for House Democrats. He thinks of himself as a singular force, a unique brand, and his narrative has always begun and ended with him. He thinks he did build it himself. But now — because of his own naïveté, insularity and arrogance — he needs Clinton

As if to drive the point home, just as Mr. Obama was about to deliver his speech yesterday, the Times published a lengthy article that analyzed transcripts of his campaign speeches and found that he used the words “I want…” 174 times in 41 speeches. But in his actual speech last night, Mr. Obama turned the tables and the pronouns:

So you see, the election four years ago wasn’t about me. It was about you. My fellow citizens — you were the change.

You’re the reason there’s a little girl with a heart disorder in Phoenix who’ll get the surgery she needs because an insurance company can’t limit her coverage. You did that.

You’re the reason a young man in Colorado who never thought he’d be able to afford his dream of earning a medical degree is about to get that chance. You made that possible.

You’re the reason a young immigrant who grew up here and went to school here and pledged allegiance to our flag will no longer be deported from the only country she’s ever called home; why selfless soldiers won’t be kicked out of the military because of who they are or who they love, why thousands of families have finally been able to say to the loved ones who served us so bravely, welcome home. Welcome home. You did that. You did that. You did that.

If you turn away now — if you turn away now, if you buy into the cynicism that the change we fought for isn’t possible, well, change will not happen. If you give up on the idea that your voice can make a difference, then other voices will fill the void, the lobbyists and special interests, the people with the $10 million checks who are trying to buy this election and those who are trying to make it harder for you to vote, Washington politicians who want to decide who you can marry or control health care choices that women should be making for themselves.

Only you can make sure that doesn’t happen. Only you have the power to move us forward.

The shift impressed the Times’ David Brooks, who wrote:

I liked the emphasis he put not on himself but on the word “you” — the idea that change comes organically from the bottom up.

Bill’s Barn Burner

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 20:36:00 GMT

By Jerry Weissman

Last night, former President Bill Clinton returned to the scene of his original crime, the Democratic National Convention, exonerated and honored. Twenty-four years earlier, he gave a speech in the same venue—in nomination of Michael Dukakis—that ran so far over his allotted time, the audience cheered derisively when he said, “In closing…”

There was no derision last night as the seasoned warrior pulled out all the stops in a barn burner of a keynote, trashing the Republicans and making a powerful case for Barack Obama’s re-election. Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor of the New York Times, wrote an excellent analysis of the speech here.

Paul Ryan: Criticize and Propose

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 07:00:00 GMT

by Jerry Weissman

In 2007, Ryan Lizza, the Washington correspondent for New Yorker magazine, wrote a comprehensive profile of Barack Obama when he was an up and coming Illinois state legislator, called “Can Barack Obama Catch Hillary Clinton?”

In 2008, Barack Obama caught Hillary Clinton and kept running—all the way to the Oval Office.

In the August 6, 2012 issue of The New Yorker, Mr. Lizza wrote a comprehensive profile of up and coming Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan.

Five days later, on August 11, 2012, Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate for president, announced that Mr. Ryan was his choice for his vice-presidential candidate.

Has Mr. Lizza picked another winner? Only the Election Day will tell, but both of Mr. Lizza’s choices for in-depth profiling have parallel communication qualities:

Speechmaking: In 2004, Mr. Obama wrote and delivered a Cinderella speech that took him from obscurity to rock stardom. In 1993, Mr. Ryan did his political internship as a speechwriter for former football hero Jack Kemp who, three years later, went on to become Bob Dole’s vice-presidential candidate.

Positive messaging: In 2008, Mr. Obama’s famous campaign slogan was “Yes we can!” In 2012, Mr. Ryan told Mr. Lizza:

If you’re going to criticize, then you should propose…People like me who are reform-minded ignore the people who say, “Just criticize and don’t do anything and let’s win by default.” That’s ridiculous…They don’t want to produce alternatives? That’s not going to stop me from producing an alternative.²

“Criticize and propose” represents an unusual positive strategy in a campaign that, until now, has been as negative as it gets; characterized by the New York Times as “sliding back down the banister.” Mr. Obama’s “Yes we can” has vanished—replaced with a welter of critical ads and speeches. Mr. Romney, who battled his way to the Republican candidacy by attacking and counterattacking his opponents in the primaries, has continued in the same antagonistic mode against his Democratic opponent.

Mr. Ryan’s positive strategy, if he can stay with it, in the face what looks like an unrelievedly contentious campaign, provides a lesson for any communicator.

Business people cannot make their own case at the expense of the competition because it not only casts a negative pall on the whole market; it also boomerangs back onto the naysayer. Bashing sounds defensive. The lady doth protest too much, methinks. It is far better to look at all the players in the competitive landscape and position them within that larger context.

One way to do that is with the classic comparison matrix, originated by the Boston Consulting Group, of four quadrants, charting values along the x- and y-axes. Here’s how the BCG website describes it: “This framework categorizes products within a company's portfolio as stars, cash cows, dogs, or question marks according to growth rate, market share, and positive or negative cash flow.”

Another comparison table shows all the players on one axis and how they compare in several key features along the other axis, and grades them with checks and crosses, or plusses and minuses, or what is known as Harvey Balls, in which filled circles represent full value, empty circles, no value, and partially-filled circles represent partial value:

Just imagine if, in the upcoming October debates that will pit Mr. Ryan against Mr. Biden, and Mr. Romney against Mr. Obama, the candidates were to compare and contrast each other along the lines of one of these charts. We might just have a campaign that focuses on issues rather than charges; alternatives rather than criticism.

The Rules of Writing Skewered

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 16:25:00 GMT

In the Sunday New York Times Book Review section, novelist Colson Whitehead took the opportunity to poke fun at some tried and true rules of the writers’ craft, some of which I have recommended myself. Among them are:

Show and tell
Write what you know
Less is More, aka “Kill Your Darlings”
What isn’t said is as important as what is said
Revise, revise, revise

See what fun Mr. Colson has with these “Best Practices,” and you will too.

Pandolist: CEO Coaches

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 07:00:00 GMT

See Jerry’s interview on Pando Daily’s Pandolist: CEO Coaches. Pando Daily, founded by Sarah Lacy in 2012, is a news site that covers the technology startup ecosystem. Its single goal is to be the site-of-record for that startup root-system and everything that springs up from it, cycle-after-cycle.

1) What is your biggest fear?

The polarization in the United States now.

2) What's one thing you believe in that nearly everyone disagrees with you on?

My approach to presentations, people want me to give them short tips, they don’t want to take the time to learn. If I become a critic, nobody learns.

3) What's the one event in your life, be it personal or professional, that brought

you here today?

When my friend grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and said start this business and do it now.

4) What is one piece of advice you're glad you didn't take?

I should just maintain this as a one man operation and close the door when I'm finished.

5) If you could have any mediocre super power, what would it be?

Reading peoples’ minds for 5 minutes at a time.

The Art of Telling Your Story

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Arianna Huffington, the president and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of thirteen books wrote about the value of good story telling in her blog today.

Is Storytelling the Secret Weapon of the 2012 Race?

The Eyes Have It

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Relax!

by Jerry Weissman

“I like that person; he/she looks you straight in the eye!”
“I don’t like that person; he/she is shifty-eyed!”

These two familiar exclamations define the opposite poles of eye contact, the most essential element in interpersonal communication. But effective eye contact has another little-known but important benefit: Calming the user.

Whenever you—or any presenter—stand up in front of any audience, the stress of the moment triggers an adrenaline rush that sets your whole body into the accelerated motion of Fight or Flight; particularly your eyes which sweep the room in search of escape routes.

The rapid eye movement makes you appear furtive to your audience, which makes feel them uneasy; when you sense their uneasiness, you become more stressed which heightens your adrenaline rush which makes your eyes move faster and…a vicious cycle.

It gets worse.

During the sweep, your eyes take in a great deal of sensory data. All of that data is processed by your brain which increases your stress which heightens your adrenaline rush which makes your eyes sweep faster; the faster your eyes move, the more data you take in… the vicious cycle compounds.

Instead, look at each individual in your audience long enough to see that person look back at you. This simple step will suddenly diminish your rapid eye movement. Readers of The Power Presenter will recognize this technique as “Eye Connect,” a more pronounced form of eye contact in which you engage with each member of your audience in full. Contrast this approach with the scanning that most presenters do in their attempt to make eye contact. Connect with every person you see by waiting until you see each person look back at you, until you make the connection.

While Eye Connect decreases the frequency of your eye movement, it also decreases the amount of sensory data your brain has to process, which reduces your stress, lowers your adrenaline rush and makes you calmer.

The calming effect created by diminished eye movement has an analogy in scuba diving. Karyn Scott, the Director of Enterprise Segment Marketing at Cisco, is a certified scuba diver. She explains that when she sees a novice diver panic under water, she swims to that person and gives hand signals— pointing two fingers rapidly back and forth between their eyes and hers—directing the person to look her in the eye. As soon as their eyes stop darting, their panic subsides, and the air bubbles coming from their regulator quickly slow down. Connecting eye to eye with another human is so powerful there’s almost no need for words.

Bruce Iliff, an Australian scuba Divemaster, has a variation of Ms. Scott’s method: he recommends that when divers start to panic, they should “look at the surface. At 20 metres the surface looks so close you could reach out and touch it, a comforting thought!”

In essence, both Mr. Iliff and Ms. Scott are advocating the same method you can use when you present: look at each person in your audience until you see that person look back. That simple but powerful step will decrease the frequency of your eye movement, increase the duration of your engagement—and you will become calmer.

That’s Eye Connect.

Grammar Gaffes

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

by Jerry Weissman

Sue Shellenbarger, the creator of the "Work & Family" column for the Wall Street Journal, did a piece last week on the importance of good grammar in the workplace. The column quickly became the most popular on the newspaper’s website. Ms. Shellenbarger identified the challenge at the beginning of her column: “looseness with language can create bad impressions with clients, ruin marketing materials and cause communications errors.”

The rest of her column is just as good, so I’ll step out of the way and let you read it yourself.

P.S. Be sure to try your hand at the 22 test questions by clicking on the "interactive graphics" tab directly under the title.

Yawning Audiences

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

By Richard Hall, Guest Blogger

No presenter in his or her right mind would want to see an audience yawning, right?

Of course not, but there is an aspect of yawning that is desirable: Empathy, the involuntary sharing of feelings between human beings. We are all familiar with the phenomenon of one person’s yawn producing a contagious chain of yawning in other people in the room. But I’m not talking about putting your audience to sleep; I’m talking about provoking a positive empathy as contagious as yawning.

Empathy occurs in specialized brain cells called mirror neurons. Studies have shown that mirror neurons cause us to mimic the physical behaviors and emotional states that we observe in others. What we see, we feel.

ABC Science of Australia reported on a study on empathy made by Atsushi Senji at the University of London’s Birbeck College. In the study, two groups of children, one with and one without autism—a developmental condition that severely affects social interaction—watched video clips of other people yawning. The researchers found that the children with autism yawned less than the other children, leading the researchers to conclude, "It supports the claim that contagious yawning is based on the capacity for empathy."

In other words, empathy is intrinsic. Your audience perceives and responds to your emotions on a very fundamental level. If you appear poised and confident, they will feel your confidence and you will win them over.

But how can you be poised and confident when you get up on stage, the bright lights hit you, and your adrenaline starts flowing? The only method I’ve found successful is to do the groundwork first.

As a producer of corporate meetings and events, I’ve seen the full spectrum of efforts when it comes to presenters. Some prefer to be spontaneous and just “wing it.” Others inherit a slide deck from their boss or a colleague and try to shoe-horn it into the context of their presentation or speech.

Effective presenters first get their story straight by brainstorming, determine the key elements, the benefits for the audience, establish a logical order for their story, and then develop slides that support their message. But most importantly, they are the ones I see showing up for rehearsals!

No one can completely eliminate the adrenaline rush that occurs when you are on stage. But if you’re well-rehearsed, you own your own story, and tell it in a logical order, the adrenaline rush will be greatly reduced. You will feel more poised and confident, and your audience will feel it too.

And I guarantee they won’t be yawning!

Thanks to Chad Hall of Ioxus and Eli [Oleg] Pozniansky of CSR Technology (formerly Zoran) for their contributions to this post.

"It's all about you!

Wed, 23 May 2012 15:27:00 GMT

...but they're just not that into you."

by Jerry Weissman

In a previous post, you read about how self-centeredness is an obstacle to all communication, extending all the way from social conversations to our focus, presentations. To remove that barrier, to put the “co-” in “communication,” the effective communicator adds interaction to interpersonal exchanges, but more important, adds benefits for the listener—whether that listener is the other person in a conversation or the audience for a presentation.

But that leaves open the question of why any person in his or her right mind would allow a failure to communicate to occur in the first place. There are two answers: one scientific and the other a pervasive misconception that has taken on the status of a legacy in the world of presentations.

Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir and her Harvard colleague Jason Mitchell conducted a series of experiments to explore why people like to talk about themselves. The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said:

Here, we test recent theories that individuals place high subjective value on opportunities to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others and that doing so engages neural and cognitive mechanisms associated with reward. Five studies provided support for this hypothesis. Self-disclosure was strongly associated with increased activation in brain regions that form the mesolimbic dopamine system, including the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area.

The mesolimbic dopamine system just happens to be the same part of the brain in which pleasurable sensations occur. Meaning that, as the Wall Street Journal story about the study summarized it, “Talking about ourselves—whether in a personal conversation or through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter—triggers the same sensation of pleasure in the brain as food or money.”

This places a very high barrier to being able to interrupt the party bores who monopolize conversations; and the only solution I can offer is to repeat what I wrote in the previous blog: excuse yourself and head for the bar to refresh your drink.

Presentations are another matter. As a coach, I have spent the greater part of my career urging presenters to include benefits in their pitches. But the need to remind them still persists. Presenters continue to sell features and/or blow their own horn. The reason they do—and this is only conjecture—goes all the way back to the dawn of the presentation universe when some sage decided that presentations should begin with a “snapshot” that introduces the presenter’s company. This usually results in an initial slide that, depending on who creates it, is a hodgepodge of disparate facts that include (but is not limited to):

year of founding
number of employees
value proposition
financial results
markets served
key customers
office location
square footage

This step gets the presentation off on the wrong foot for a number of reasons: the slide attempts to tell the whole story, the story is not apparent at a glance, the focus shifts attention away from the presenter, the presenter is forced to read the slide…the list goes on. But worst of all, it’s all about you and not about the audience and, to paraphrase the title of the 2004 bestselling book, they’re just not that into you.

Make the front end of your presentation about your audience. Focus on their issues and concerns and tell them what your company can do for them. Pivot from your point of view to theirs. This pivot is best illustrated by the story of Theodore Leavitt, a professor at Harvard Business School who told his students not to try to sell customers a quarter-inch drill, but a way to make a quarter-inch hole. Tie what you do to your audience’s needs.

Consider the snapshot as boilerplate that is best left to the handout materials. If you still feel the need to include information about your company within the presentation, shift it to later in the deck, after you have shown them how well you understand them.

It’s all about them.

SPECIAL PROMOTION: On May 24, BN.com will offer my book, Presentations in Action, as an e-book for just 1.99.

The Sound of Ka-Ching!

Wed, 16 May 2012 15:12:00 GMT

Scale the "You"

by Jerry Weissman

If you’ve ever tried to have an important conversation on your mobile telephone from a busy airport terminal, a crowded restaurant, or a noisy street, you’ll appreciate the solution developed by Audience, Inc., a Silicon Valley company. Using sophisticated software algorithms and integrated circuits that mimic the dynamics of the human ear, Audience’s technology separates the background noise from the human voice and transmits conversations with crystal clarity. Investors appreciated Audience’s technology—and the 316% Compound Annual Growth Rate of their revenues—when they went public last week. The stock was priced above the anticipated range, and then rose 12% higher on the first day of trading.

Investors related to Audience as end users of mobile devices, but they also related in their primary roles as investors because Peter Santos, the company’s CEO, made the connection for them in his IPO road show. After describing Audience’s revolutionary solution—with a simple but dramatic demonstration of Audience’s technology enhancing a mobile conversation on a noisy street—Mr. Santos punctuated his presentation by scaling the “you.”

If you or billions of other mobile phone users want to have not just narrowband calls but wideband calls, to be able to have video in addition to voice calls, want to be able to enter addresses or search strings using your voice instead of typing it on a keypad, and if you want to do all these things in a noisy mobile environment, you have a much higher bar in terms of acoustic signal processing….Audience has solved those problems.

Because Mr. Santos scaled from the single “you” of a mobile phone user to the implied multiples of “you” represented by the “billions of other mobile phone users,” he demonstrated the large market potential for Audience’s technology. But he didn’t stop there, he went on to widen the opportunity for that same technology to address several other applications and several other markets; all of which is music—as clear as an enhanced mobile phone call—to investors’ ears, music accompanied by the sound of a ringing cash register: Ka-Ching!

Scaling the “you” was a lot easier for Mr. Santos than it was for the CEO of a medical device company whose product treats diabetes victims. In her IPO road show, the CEO could not address the investor audience as individuals for two reasons: less than 10% of the population has diabetes and, far more important, she might have made her audience feel uncomfortable by associating them with a debilitating disease. In her road show she went right to the big market by describing the 25.8 million children and adults in just the United States who could be helped by her company’s product. Ka-Ching!

The CEO of another medical device company whose product is a minimally-invasive surgical tool, had it a bit easier. I coached his IPO road show and role-played a potential investor in our sessions. During the final rehearsal of his presentation, he held up his minimally-invasive surgical device, looked at me and said “With this device, you can make a better incision.” I shook my head and said, “I don’t make incisions.” He thought for a second, held up the device again and said, “So you can see, if tens of thousands of surgeons want to make better incisions, they’re going to have to buy this device from us.” Ka-Ching!

Do the calculations for your audiences and add value.

Scale the “you,” and listen for the happy sound of Ka-Ching!

The Outline Trap

Wed, 09 May 2012 15:55:00 GMT

Britannica and Brainstorming

by Jerry Weissman

One of the early lessons we all learn in school is how to make an outline; how to create that waterfall of Roman numerals, capital letters, Arabic numerals, and lower case letters that cascade down to the bottom of the page, if not dozens of pages of interminable term papers. Thus we are forever programmed to arrange our ideas in a hierarchical order—in sharp contrast to what our brains do naturally: generate ideas in random order.

To demonstrate: as I sit writing this blog, I glance at a ball point pen on my desk. The logo on the pen reminds me that I got it at as souvenir at a business conference. I remember that I met a man at the conference who told me about a book on presidential politics. This reminds me that I had been planning another blog on the same subject, and so I open a file with the notes on that subject and…. you see where this is going. I’m sure that if you were to track your own thought patterns, you would discover the same winding, random path. That’s the way every human mind works: unstructured.

And yet, when business people sit down to develop a presentation, they immediately start to apply structure, in either a hierarchical outline form or by organizing a set of existing PowerPoint slides to create a new “deck”—each approach forces structure onto unstructured ideas.

In a prior post about how Woody Allen creates, you read that he and other artists let their random ideas flow unimpeded, note them as they occur, and then lay out the notes in a panoramic view. Mr. Allen tosses scraps of paper onto his bed, other film directors use storyboards, architects make papier-maché models, military officers use wall size maps, and businesses encourage employees to doodle their creative ideas on whiteboards during product development or strategy sessions. The Wall Street Journal reported that sales of IdeaPaint, a paint product that turns a wall surface into a whiteboard, have doubled since 2008. For your presentation development, you can do your brainstorming on a whiteboard, a computer screen or Post-it Notes as you generate your ideas, but what is as important as the free flow is that you see the ideas you generate in a panoramic or landscape view.

The simple reason for this part of the creative process is that our eyes are set side-by-side in our heads, making the landscape view more pleasing and open than the portrait view. If you start with an outline, the constricted view imposes a ranking sequence too early in the process. A panoramic view allows you to see the conceptual relationships among your ideas.

Even the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica has come to understand the importance of visual thematic relationships. The publisher of alphabetized—sequential rather than conceptual— reference works for almost 244 years, discontinued its print version in March and went digital. As part of the transition, they included a link map feature, shown above, that looks like a brainstorming session you might do on a whiteboard.

Walter S. Mossberg, the author of the Wall Street Journal’s “Personal Technology” column, reviewed the new feature and wrote that the publisher, which “has always been expensive, and a bit stodgy...[in] order to make itself more relevant in a Wikipedia world…has produced a slick app…Perhaps the coolest feature is the link map, triggered from an icon at the top of each article page. This generates a spider web of icons representing other articles related to the one you were reading.”

The 35,000 foot view shows patterns that lead to clear stories; an outline traps ideas.

Take the high road.

When NOT to Tell 'em

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

"Get on with it!"

by Jerry Weissman

Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate for president in 1964 infamously said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” This misguided view of political policy became a major factor in Mr. Goldwater’s landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson, but it also serves as a warning lesson for presenters. Extremism in any pursuit can overshoot the mark and result in the opposite intent of the pursuit.

One of the most frequently repeated pieces of advice for presenters is to “Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, and then tell ’em what you’ve told ’em.” In fact, I offer the same advice in my own coaching practice and writing. The intent is to impose and maintain a clear narrative flow in presentations and speeches; and the reason it is repeated so often is that most presenters and speakers, who regularly crank out long, rambling, pointless patchwork pitches, desperately need reminding. The Triple “Tell ’em” is one solution. However, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing; a sword can cut two ways.

Bruce Eric Kaplan, a cartoonist who appears regularly in the New Yorker magazine as BEK, skewered the excessive Triple “Tell ’em” earlier this month with a panel that showed a presenter in front of an audience, saying, “First, I want to give you an overview of what I will tell you over and over again during the entire presentation.”

We’re also painfully familiar with presenters who impose a narrative laundry list on their bullets by saying “First, I’d like to talk about…” then move on to the second bullet saying, “Next, I’d like to talk about…” and then proceed through every bullet the same way until the end, when they say—wait for it— “Last but not least…”

Some presenters push their extreme handholding even further, by utilizing their slides to do the tracking. As in the figure above, they insert copies of an agenda slide between the sections of their presentation, progressively shifting the highlighted bullet to “Tell ’em what they’re gonna tell ’em” in the upcoming section. This technique can be useful in long tutorial presentations, but if there are only one or two slides between the variations of the agenda in short presentations—and short presentations are obligatory in this 140-character day and age—the audience, feeling patronized, will react with a big Duh!

Presenters are not the only perpetrators of such deliberate continuity devices. Geoff Dyer, who writes the “Reading Life” column the New York Times Book Review section, considers excessive tracking a “basically plodding method.” In one of his columns, he criticized art historian Michael Fried, whose book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, takes “the style of perpetual announcement of what is about to happen to extremes.” Mr. Dyer said it is “like watching a rolling news program: Coming up on CNN . . . A look ahead to what’s coming up on CNN.” Concluding his critique, Mr. Dyer wrote, “I kept wondering why an editor had not scribbled ‘get on with it!’ in huge red letters on every page of the manuscript.”

To keep your audience from thinking “Get on with it!” apply the Less is More rule, not just in your slide design but in your content. As you read in the prior posts, “Kill Your Darlings,” and “How Long Should a Presentation Last?”:

Edit the amount of material you present
Be brief AND concise

Then, with a shorter and more succinct story, look at your presentation from a 35,000 foot view—as a storyboard—in the Microsoft PowerPoint Slide Sorter view, or with the Power Presentations Storyboard form in the accompanying figure. It’s downloadable from our website: www.powerltd.com by clicking at the bottom of the home page.

Just as television and film directors use storyboarding to see the full scope of their stories, look at your slide show in this panoramic view to see your flow. Then rehearse your presentation aloud, moving from frame to frame. Do this several times. Along the way, you’ll find that you might want to add, delete, or shuffle slides. As you proceed with your iterations, you will develop verbal connective links for your narrative.

Ultimately, you will have a presentation in which The Triple “Tell ’em” is transparently implied. You will have a story that will be easy for you to deliver and, more important, easy for your audience to follow—without a laundry list, without CNN-style teasers, and best of all, without those patronizing agenda slides.

Get on with it!

This post appeared on hbr.org

Robert McNamara Was Wrong

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 21:49:00 GMT

You MUST Respond to All Questions

by Jerry Weissman

Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, who was the driving force behind the controversial Vietnam War, went on to a more successful stint as head of the World Bank. He lived until the ripe old age of 93, but according to his New York Times obituary, “spent the rest of his life wrestling with the war’s moral consequences.”

As part of his struggle, he agreed to be the subject of a 2003 documentary in which he expressed regrets but ultimately defended his actions. The film is called The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons of Robert S. McNamara. Lesson Ten is about communication, and it contains sound advice for presenters about what not to do. Said Mr. McNamara:

One of the lessons I learned early on: never say never. Never, never, never. Never say never. And secondly, never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you. And quite frankly, I follow that rule. It's a very good rule.

Unfortunately, that rule has taken on a life of its own in the modern business world. Many consultants urge presenters to stay on message. And yes, it’s good to do that--within bounds. But think about it: How can it be a “very good rule” not to be responsive to other people? In interpersonal relationships, not answering a question can lead to an argument; in business, not answering a question can lead to the failure of a deal. Only in politics, where the public has become inured to the practice of ducking and spinning does the public tolerate unanswered questions. But even there, the McNamara rule can backfire.

In the contest for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, Texas Governor Rick Perry threw his hat into the ring late in the game, but his track record of three consecutive victories in Texas elections and strong conservative support vaulted him to the top of the public opinion polls very quickly. However, after hapless performances in live televised debates, Mr. Perry’s poll numbers sank as fast as they had risen. The polls were confirmed in his dismal showings in the first three primaries, and he withdrew from the race five months after he entered.

Mr. Perry’s two most notorious performance stumbles were his brain lock in one debate and a bungled statement in another, each of which went viral on the Web and in the media. But what was largely overlooked in all that attention was a Robert McNamara moment in the October 18, 2011 debate on CNN, when moderator Anderson Cooper asked this question:

COOPER: Governor Perry, the 14th Amendment allows anybody. A child of illegal immigrants who is born here is automatically an American citizen. Should that change?

PERRY: Well, let me address Herman's issue that he just talked about.

COOPER: Actually, I'd rather you answer that question.

PERRY: I understand that. You get to ask the questions, I get to answer like I want to.

“I get to answer like I want to.” Imagine a salesperson saying that to a customer, a mid-level manger to a senior executive, an executive to a board member, or a CEO to an investor. Meeting over. No deal.

Imagine saying that to your significant other. No comment.

Anderson Cooper called Mr. Perry on it, “That's actually a response, that's not an answer.”

Four months later, in another debate among Republican candidates, a déjà vu Robert McNamara moment occurred in this exchange between Mitt Romney and CNN moderator John King:

KING: What is the biggest misconception about you in the public debate right now?

ROMNEY: We've got to restore America's promise in this country where people know that with hard work and education, that they're going to be secure and prosperous and that their kids will have a brighter future than they've had. For that to happen, we're going to have to have dramatic fundamental change in Washington, D.C., we're going to have to create more jobs, have less debt, and shrink the size of the government. I'm the only person in this race --

KING: Is there a misconception about you? The question is a misconception.

ROMNEY: You know, you get to ask the questions want, I get to give the answers I want.

You must respond to all questions. This is not to say that you should give away state secrets; you have every right to decline to answer on the basis of confidentiality, competitive data, or company or legal policy, but you must provide a rational reason — and “I get to answer like I want to” is irrational.

This blog originally posted on hbr.org

Book Review: What the Plus! by Guy Kawasaki

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 19:08:00 GMT

by Jerry Weissman

At first glance, the only Greek in Guy Kawasaki might be the most recent dinner he had at Evvia, the popular Palo Alto restaurant, but after reading his new book, What the Plus! Google+ for the Rest of Us, I’ve decided that he must be a distant relative of Aristotle. The classic Greek philosopher established the ground rules for rhetoric 2300 years ago, and Guy has brought them roaring into the 21^st Century at a gallop.

Aristotle proposed that, to be persuasive, a writer must provide the holy trinity of Ethos, or credibility, Pathos, or benefits, and Logos, or evidence.

Ethos. Guy, whose new book positions Google+ in the social media space, posts five to ten times a day himself, and so he knows whereof he writes. If that were not enough, he runs Alltop and HolyKaw, two popular social media sites. And of course, his legacy as the Chief Evangelist at Apple Computer gives him the ultimate in credibility; think of it as Cred+.

Pathos. The book is loaded with helpful advice for anyone who wants to be current and successful in today’s online—social and business—world.

Logos. The format is studded with illustrative screen shots, tables, and examples. As a crowning touch, Guy kick starts each chapter with a clever but pertinent epigram.

Taken together, What the Plus! provides a clear comparison with Facebook and Twitter, and forms the basis for a valuable manual in the art and science of social media.

Coincidentally, on the day I read Guy’s book, I also decided to sign up for an online music service. I tried one and found it so complex and daunting that I abandoned the effort after two frustrating hours—especially when I was unable to reach customer support. I tried another service, logged in instantly, and then had some questions. They responded to my email query in less than five minutes with full, clear, and authoritative answers.

The experience was a perfect metaphor for Guy’s new book: swift, helpful, and thorough or, as his undoubtedly long-lost ancestor Aristotle would say, Ethos, Pathos, and Logos.

Vinod Khosla's Cardinal Rule:

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:19:00 GMT

“Message sent is not the same as message received.”

“Telephone,” the traditional party or children’s game—in which a phrase or sentence is whispered from one person to another around a dinner table or room—provides a valuable lesson in the lost art of listening. Inevitably, at the end of the cycle, when the last person speaks the message aloud, the phrase has taken on a completely new meaning. The phenomenon has the positive effect of stimulating conversation and interaction in the game, but in other walks of life—particularly business—the outcome can be a failure to succeed, let alone communicate.

Influential venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, whose five-second rule of slide design you read about in an earlier post here and Forbes post, is a keen observer of all aspects of communication. Another of Mr. Khosla’s cardinal rules is “Message sent is not the same as message received,” an eloquent statement of the obligation of all presenters to assure that their target audience has received the intended message. Fulfilling that obligation requires a full court press that can be described, with all due respect to Stephen Covey, as “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Presenters”:

1. Analyze your audience in advance. Just as sales people qualify their customers, presenters must qualify their audiences. In your preparation, gather as much information as you can about who they are, what they know, and what they want to know; identify their concerns, fears, and hot buttons.

2. Develop focused content. Armed with your thorough analysis, create content that addresses your audience’s interests. An essential part of this process is to eliminate irrelevant information—easier said than done because most presenters operate under the assumption that, for their audience to understand anything, they must tell them everything. Wrong! Tell them only what they need to know.

3. Offer multiple benefits. Here, too, a basic sales practice provides a lesson. Most sales persons sell features rather than benefits—and so do most presenters. Infuse your pitch with benefits. Find multiple points in your presentation to insert a sentence that begins, “The reason this is important to you…” and then concludes with a benefit to your audience.

4. Customize, customize, customize. In today’s high pressure, high stakes business world, presenters—who have become road warriors—try to save time by making a one-size-fits-all presentation. Wrong again! Use the information you collected in your preparation and make frequent references to it throughout your presentation to keep it fresh and specific.

5. Track your progress as you present. The importance of eye contact in presentations is a given, but most presenters merely scan their audiences and see nothing. Read your audience’s reaction to your story. Look for their head nods.

6. Adjust your content. If instead of head nods, you get frowns or puzzled looks, pause in your narrative and add a brief explanation, or ask your audience if they have questions.

7. Respond to all questions in full. Whether you get questions during or after your presentation, you—unlike politicians—must respond. This is not to say that you must reveal strategic or confidential information, but that you should address the issue in every question and give a reason when you cannot. Respond you must. Never evade.

Although Mr. Khosla applies his cardinal rule to the presentations of his existing portfolio companies—and those who aspire to become one of his portfolio companies—he represents every member of every audience of every presentation you will ever give. If you aspire to succeed, make sure that every message you send is received—loud and clear— by every audience.

How Audiences See

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Follow the Action

By Jerry Weissman

oes this large, illuminated letter look familiar? It should. The style has been around ever since medieval times to mark the beginning of a new document. It has continued on into modern publishing where an enlarged first letter marks the beginning of chapters in books and the beginnings of articles in magazines and newspapers. Now it becomes a factor in how we view computer screens.

EyeTrackShop, an eponymous Swedish start-up company, does exactly what its name says: track eye movements to, as their slogan puts it, “identify where people look, for how long and in what order.” Using webcams to follow and record how viewers perceive images, the company’s technology helps advertisers create effective ads and web designers create effective web pages. By understanding the dynamics of how viewers perceive ads and web pages you can create effective graphics for your presentations.

One of EyeTrackShop’s projects studied how users viewed the homepages of Facebook and Google+. The results, shown in the “Fixation Order” charts below and reported in the Wall Street Journal, found that in both cases, “Users’ eyes head straight for the big status column in the middle of the screen, then over to the list of categories on the left side, then hop across to alerts on the right.”

Those movements are driven by forces more powerful than the images on the Google and Facebook sites, two forces that drive the eyes of every human being:

Nurture: In Western culture, because we have learned to read from left to right, our eyes always start reading at the upper left corner of documents

Nature: The optic reflexes in all human eyes impel them to take in new images, and so, having started at the upper left, readers’ eyes naturally—and involuntarily—move to the right.

As a result, human eyes do essentially what the eyes of the subjects in the EyeTrackShop study did: after centering on the full image, they move to the upper left to start reading, and then sweep across to the right to continue reading. Therefore, whenever you click to a new slide, your audience’s eyes start reading at the upper left of the screen and sweep across to the right.

If your slide is densely packed with images, numbers, and/or text, your audience’s eyes will not see the entire image on the first rightward move; they will have to come back to the left and go back to the right again. The denser the slide, the more times your audience’s eyes will have to traverse the screen, the more traverses they make, the less they will hear of what you are saying.

Do you see where this is going? Back to the familiar Less is More principle, and this new added corollary: Reduce the number of moves your audience’s eyes must make to understand your slide.

Apply this basic approach to the two most common slides in presentations today: text and bars.

Avoid wordwrap in text

Eliminate left axes in bar charts.

You saw these principles applied in a prior blog, but they’re worth another look:

Feel how your eyes naturally take in each slide: they start at the left and swing to the right.

Do the same for all your presentations. Design effective slides by reducing the number of eye moves your audiences must make.

Minimize the processing their eyes—and their brains—must do. Let them spend their energy and time focused on you.

This post also appears on Indezine.com

Mitt Romney Makes a Silk Purse out of a Sow's Ear

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:20:00 GMT

by Jerry Weissman

During his campaign to become the Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney has taken many lumps for being rich. His opponents and the media have exploited the contrast between his personal wealth and the economic struggles of much of the electorate. Mr. Romney hasn’t helped his cause by making several awkward statements about the subject. Yesterday, the day before today’s critical Michigan and Arizona primaries, the ABC News OTUS site ran a twelve-page post titled, “Is Mitt Romney out of touch?” which included the following assertions:

He likes firing people
He “isn’t concerned about the very poor”
The $370,000 he earned in speaking fees is “not very much”
He offered to bet Rick Perry ten thousand dollars during their debate

The latest gaffe came last Friday in a speech Mr. Romney gave in Detroit, during which he said, “I drive a Mustang and a Chevy pickup truck,’’ but then went on to say, “Ann drives, a couple of Cadillacs, actually.’’ The statement wound up on the first page of the ABC News post.

On Sunday, however, Mr. Romney reversed gears by turning the gaffe into an asset. During an interview on Fox News, Chris Wallace asked, “Governor, could you understand why some voters could be put off by those things?”

(video clip requires Microsoft Windows Media Player)

Mr. Romney replied:

I can't be perfect, I just am who I am and I can tell you this with regards to the cars that was talked about last September and people ask us what vehicles we own. We have a car in California; we have a car in Boston. And so that's the way it is. If people think that there is something wrong for being successful in America, they should vote for the other guy. I have been successful.

Mr. Romney didn’t equivocate or evade as so many politicians so often do. In the parlance of the middle America he is trying to win over, he “told it like it is;” in the parlance of effective communication, he was being open and direct. But being even more effective, he added one more sentence to his answer:

And I want to use that success to help the American people.

That single sentence represents both a benefit to the electorate and a declaration of his qualifications to provide that benefit. This is a technique called Topspin; taken from the tennis term for a power stroke, it adds power to answers. You can read more about Topspin in my book, In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions—and can get a FREE Kindle copy now on Amazon.

Santorum Echoes Kerry

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:19:00 GMT

History Repeats

by Jerry Weissman

Going into last night’s debate among the four candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination, Rick Santorum had the wind at his back. Having swept the contests in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado two weeks ago, he surged to the head of the polls for next week’s primary election in Michigan—the home state of Mitt Romney, the presumptive favorite—a potential bump in the latter’s road to the nomination. CNN moved Mr. Santorum to center stage for the debate, a promotion from his wing position in the previous 19 televised debates. However, being the front runner also means being in the cross-hairs of the other candidates and, as expected, Mr. Romney, Ron Paul, and John King, the CNN moderator, as any moderator would, went after Mr. Santorum.

In the run up to the debate, one of the major subjects drawing attention in the media was Mr. Santorum’s social conservatism, particularly his views on birth control. A viewer sent a question on the subject to CNN via the Internet, and Mr. King asked it of each candidate:

KING: We take a question now from cnnpolitics.com. You can see it up on the screen here: “Since birth control is the latest hot topic, which candidate believes in birth control and if not, why?”

Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich each gave his answer, and then came Mr. Santorum’s turn:

SANTORUM: As Congressman Paul knows, I opposed Title X funding. [Title X Family Planning program, was enacted in 1970 as part of the Public Health Service Act.] I've always opposed Title X funding, but it's included in a large appropriation bill that includes a whole host of other things, including the funding for the National Institutes of [entity display="Health" type="section" active="true" key="/health"]Health[/entity], the funding for [entity display="Health" type="section" active="false" key="/health"]Health[/entity] and Human Services and a whole bunch of other departments. It's a multi-billion-dollar bill… So while, yes, I -- I admit I voted for large appropriation bills and there were things in there I didn't like, things in there I did…

Now flash back to the 2004 presidential campaign and candidate John Kerry’s statement about his position on support for the Iraq War:

KERRY: I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.

Now flash forward to the current campaign and Mr. Santorum’s repeated accusations of Mr. Romney’s flip-flopping. As philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” After last night’s debate, NBC News/Marist released a new poll that showed Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum “locked in a statistical tie” in Michigan.

This post also appears on Forbes.com

Having a 'versation

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:22:00 GMT

“I” versus “You”

by Jerry Weissman

There’s an old joke about the opera diva who receives an adoring fan in her dressing room after a performance. The diva goes on and on about how magnificently she sang every one of her arias, about her dramatic acting, her expressive gestures, and her fabulous costumes. After about half an hour, the diva says to the fan, “But enough about me, what did you think of my performance?”

Joe Dator, a cartoonist for New Yorker magazine, did a variation on the diva joke. In his sketch, a man is speaking to a woman seated across a table. The caption reads, “Enough about me, but nothing about you just yet.”

This is no laughing matter in most other walks of life where self-centeredness is an obstacle to communication. In presentations, self-centeredness is manifested by a lack of relevance to the audience, and in sales by the lack of benefits for the customer. But to fully understand the negative impact of such one-way communications, let’s take a more universal view by focusing on self-centeredness in conversations, a social phenomenon otherwise known as “Having a ’versation.”

We’ve all been trapped by party bores who emulate the opera diva by delivering monologues all about themselves. One of the early indications that the one-way street is heading for a dead end is the ratio of declarative statements to questions. Bores speak with no question marks on their verbal keyboard.

Another indicator is the ratio of how frequently bores say “I” to how infrequently they say “you.” That simple metric serves as an early warning for you to excuse yourself to head for the bar and refresh your drink. But the role of pronouns in communication extends beyond chit chat into interpersonal relationships.James W. Pennebaker, a University of Texas at Austin psychologist, studies the connections between the frequency of words and feelings. In his book, The Secret Life of Pronouns, he writes:

Pronouns (such as I, you, we, and they)…broadcast the kind of people we are…By looking more carefully at the ways people convey their thoughts in language, we can begin to get a sense of their personalities, emotions, and connections with others.

Mr. Pennebaker conducted a variety of research projects ranging from Craigslist ads to Twitter messages to prove his point. One of the most revealing was a study on speed-dating which, according to a report in the New York Times, “found that couples who used similar levels of personal pronouns, prepositions and even articles were three times as likely to want to date each other compared with those whose language styles didn’t match.”

This post is not meant to help you improve your results at speed-dating, but to urge you to match closely with your listeners, to focus on the “co-” in communications, to have a conversation, not a ‘versation.

When you present, be mindful of your audience by offering them benefits; when you converse, be mindful of the other person by balancing your “I” to “you” ratio. When in doubt, err on the side of the latter.

Note: Mr. Pennebaker offers an opportunity to assess your compatibility with a friend by tracking your word usage in this online exercise: secretlifeofpronouns.com/exercise/synch.

Foreign Films

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

The Pause that Refreshes

by Jerry Weissman

After several high school and college courses, a few classes at Berlitz, and numerous trips to France and Italy, I have developed enough facility in their languages to get by in their restaurants, hotels, and shops, but not nearly enough to have full conversations. However, I have also developed a taste for French and Italian cinema, and so my Netflix queue is populated primarily by such films. Of course, when I watch them, I have to rely on the subtitles for translation and drop my eyes to the bottom of the screen every time they change. As I do, my ears pick out some of the spoken words but, because the actors are natives, they speak too quickly for me to follow them—except for the words at the ends of their sentences.

Therein lies a lesson for presenters.

Whenever actors, public speakers, clergy, or people in conversation, end a sentence or a phrase, they usually pause. The pause gives the listeners—the audience—time to absorb the words. But when a presenter stands up in front of an audience, the stress of the situation triggers an adrenaline rush which produces time warp that causes the presenter to speak faster and rush past the pauses.

Watch any Woody Allen film and you’ll see the effect of stress on speech tempo. Most of his characters—as reflections of his own public persona—are neurotic people who get into complicated situations. As soon as the plot thickens, the characters’ words accelerate like a Ferrari on the open road. This is amusing in a Woody Allen film, but it can damage a presentation because the rapid pace not only makes a presenter appear harried; it garbles the presenter’s words. The latter problem is heightened when—in our globalized world—presenters speak to audiences for whom English is a second language.

That is where we come full circle to the lesson from foreign films. Professional actors pay as much attention to the cadence of their speech as they do to the tone of their voices; and so, when actors end their sentences, they pause to punctuate the meaning of an idea. Presenters are not actors, but their ideas do fall into logical phrases. Presenters would do well to give their audiences—whether native English speakers or English-as-a-second-language speakers—a moment to absorb their information by pausing at the ends of their phrases. The best way to create a pause is to drop your voice at the ends of your phrases. Sadly, many presenters today do the opposite; they let their voices rise at the ends of their phrases, producing the dreaded “Valley Girl” effect (the subject of an earlier post.) If you concentrate on dropping your voice, you will not only sound more authoritative, you will add those valuable pauses.

I attended a presentation given by a Frenchman who started his pitch as fast as a racehorse bolting out of the gate. In the first moments, I heard him say “zee ontairpreez,” and didn’t understand. But later on in the presentation, when he settled down and began pausing (if nothing else than to breathe) he spoke the words again. Only then did I realize that he had said, “the enterprise.”

Learn a lesson from foreign films and from the classic Coca-Cola slogan, take “the pause that refreshes.”

This post appeared on hbr.org

How Woody Allen Creates

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

First Things First, Last Things Last

By Jerry Weissman

In a prior post on the art of developing your story, you read that Federico Fellini, the legendary Italian cinema director noted for his imaginative stories, approached the creative process with an open mind; considering any and all ideas fair game for his films. The equivalent of Mr. Fellini’s method in presentations is brainstorming, a step most presenters skip in their rush to prepare their next pitch. Instead, they begin by shuffling existing slides, and often at the last minute. They do this because, as results-driven people, they seek to impose structure at the outset. But every human mind, whether artistic or business, generates ideas randomly, and so an essential part of the creative process—and developing a presentation is a creative process—is to incorporate the randomness. Artists understand this fact of life and go with the free flow.

Woody Allen, a virtual one-man movie studio, having written more than 60 films during his long and illustrious career, is no exception. He revealed his creative process in a biographical documentary on the American Masters series PBS. In a scene shot in his apartment, Mr. Allen reached into a nightstand drawer, took out a large stack of cluttered papers and said, “This is my collection. This is how I start. It’s all kind of scraps and things that are written on hotel things. I’ll ponder these things.” Then, as he tossed the papers onto his bed, he added, “I’ll dump them here like this…I go through this all the time, every time I start a project. And I sit here like this… and I look at one… like that...and then …”

For your brainstorming, as your version of Mr. Allen’s hotel scraps, you can use 3-by-5 index cards, a whiteboard, Post-it Notes or one of the many software products on the market, among them Inspiration, MindManager and Microsoft’s Visio. Whichever vehicle you choose, consider any and all ideas—but be sure that you resist your results-driven instinct to impose structure during your free flow. If you impose structure too soon, you impose censorship, and could lose a fresh idea. Save the structuring for after the brainstorming is done.

Here, too, we find a lesson in the methodology of Woody Allen and Federico Fellini. Each of them is noted for his creativity in post-production, the period after the writing and the shooting, when the director assembles and structures the film. In fact, one of Mr. Fellini’s techniques was to cast actors who looked best for the filming and other actors whose voices sounded best for the sound track and overdubbed them in the post-production.

Let your mind do what it’s going to do during your brainstorming, and do your structuring afterwards. Use the right tool for the right job and in the right sequence.

Follow Woody Allen’s advice, “It’s not rocket science, this is not quantum physics. If you’re the writer of the story, you know what you want your audience to see because you’ve written it. It’s just storytelling and you tell it.”

Look Ma, No Hands!

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:29:00 GMT

"Doin' What Comes Natur'lly"

Jerry Weissman

The most frequently asked question of presentation coaches is “What do I do with my hands?” In a previous post, I cautioned against choreography; I’ve seen far too many presenters attempt to illustrate their narrative with specific gestures and wind up tying themselves into pretzel knots. Instead, use your hands and arms as you do naturally, to illustrate what you are saying. However, I do recommend one gesture: to extend your hand and arm periodically, bridging the gap between you and your audience (as AT&T says, “Reach Out”), while simultaneously replicating the universal handshake.

Ronald Reagan provides an alternative point of view. Throughout his career, The Great Communicator rarely used any gestures. A commercial DVD called Ronald Reagan: The Great Communicator contains clips from more than 100 public appearances during his eight years as president. In all the clips, he made an expansive gesture with his hands and arms only once.

Mr. Reagan actually began to use this style during his formative years as a presenter. Between the twilight of his days as an actor and the start of his political career as the Governor of California, he spent eight years as a spokesman for General Electric Corporation which gave him many opportunities to present in many venues. One of them was as the host of GE Theater, an anthology series of television dramas. In one 1954 episode, he delivered his introduction standing, framed by stage lights, in front a blank wall of a movie studio. Attired in a smartly-tailored tweed coat sprouting a natty pocket kerchief, he had his right arm propped on a stage light and his left hand in his trouser pocket. During the entire introduction, neither arm ever budged.

You might call this the “Look, Ma, no hands!” approach, taken from the common phrase that a child riding a bicycle might call out to its mother—and used in countless other variations. The style worked—wonders—for Mr. Reagan. Would it work for you? The answer, as always, is to do what comes naturally for you.

An unnatural approach is to treat gesturing as performing. One variation of performing is to divide the use of hands into two camps known as “Anchorperson or Weatherperson.” As we all know from television news programs, Anchorpersons sit stock still at a desk, rarely using their hands; while Weatherpersons wave their hands and arms about broadly to indicate weather patterns on a map. This division parallels the Ronald Reagan no-hands style vis-à-vis the gesture-to-illustrate style, but it does so as performance.

If you are reading this post, it is highly unlikely that you are a performer or that you were auditioned for your position or that you were hired because of your acting skills. You were hired on the basis of the personality you presented during your interview and vetting process; and that personality was your natural style.

Heed the advice of Irving Berlin’s song in the classic musical, Annie Get Your Gun, “Doin' What Comes Natur'lly.”

(Thanks to Jeff Paine for sharing the “Anchorperson or Weatherperson” concept.)

Photograph courtesy of Reagan Library

John Doerr's “Chalk” Talks

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

3 Best Practices from a Top Venture Capitalist

by Jerry Weissman

John Doerr, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), is in great demand as a speaker. His repute is attributed to his diverse and successful involvements in for-profit companies (Google, Groupon, Zynga, Amazon), not-for-profit organizations (NewSchools Venture Fund,), and public policy (The President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness). Mr. Doerr is often invited to share his experiences, insights, and best practices, and he does so in an unorthodox way: rather than stand and deliver from a canned deck of PowerPoint slides, he asks his audiences what they want to hear and then fulfills their requests. Whenever Mr. Doerr steps up to the front of a room, be it a conference center stage or a university auditorium, he polls his audience for the subjects they’d like him to address. He annotates what they say on a large whiteboard—his version of the classic academic “chalk” talk—then proceeds to discourse on each subject. The nature of the organization or event enables Mr. Doerr to anticipate the key themes he might be asked about. To support his discussion, he brings along a few PowerPoint slides to illustrate the themes, and he accesses the slides as he makes his way through his whiteboard list. In doing so, he provides a role model of three important presentation best practices:

1. Elevate the audience’s primacy. One of the most common faults that salespeople make is to sell features rather than benefits. This fault has its parallel in presenters who focus on their message without regard for the audience (witness the one-size-fits-all “Corporate Pitch”). The results, respectively, are the failure to close the sale or to achieve the goal of the presentation. Mr. Doerr’s approach rights the balance.

2. Relegate the slides to their proper secondary role. Undoubtedly, another common fault is to multi-task the role of slides; presenters use them not only as illustrative graphics, but also as speaker notes, send-aheads, and leave-behinds. As you read in a prior blog, this approach produces images of encyclopedic detail that serve none of the functions. Here, too, Mr. Doerr’s approach rights the balance.

Moreover, in accessing his slides randomly, he employs a useful, but little-known, [entity display="Microsoft" type="organization" subtype="company" active="true" key="microsoft" ticker="MSFT" exchange="NASDAQ"]Microsoft[/entity] PowerPoint technique:

3. The “Go To” Command. When PowerPoint is in Slide Show mode, Mr. Doerr—or you—can go directly to any slide in the deck by entering the slide number (prompted by a printed outline of all the slides) and pressing the “Enter” key. These simple strokes will jump the slide show directly to the desired slide.

This technique has three benefits:

The presenter appears in complete command and control, sending the subliminal message that the presenter is an effective manager. [entity display="Management" type="section" active="true" key="/management"]Management[/entity] is the primary investment factor.
Instant gratification for the audience; nice to have for any human being, vital for every audience.
The “cool” factor.

In his primary role as a venture capitalist, Mr. Doerr sees many presentations from many companies that pitch him to invest many millions of dollars. Surely, he measures what he sees and hears through the filter of his own best practices.

How would you measure up?

This post also appears on Forbes.com

Meaningful Words

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Words that Inspire Confidence

by Jerry Weissman

In response to a prior blog about meaningless words, commenter Brett wrote, “It would be interesting to see those words and phrases that do inspire confidence and trust. That would be a great follow up.” Here you go, Brett (and Aggressive Reader, who seconded Brett’s suggestion). This discussion of meaningful words is primarily about replacements for weak, meaningless ones, while the prior discussion was about the complete elimination of condescending, insulting or self-deprecating ones.

Attorneys have long cautioned officers and employees of corporations to avoid forward-looking statements. The financial scandals of the past decade have made those attorneys even more diligent about language. As a result, corporate presenters now fill their pitches with sentences formed in the conditional mood. Phrases containing “we believe,” “we think,” and “we feel” pervade presentation narratives to such a degree that they spill over into sentences where caution is unnecessary. More to the point, the spillage weakens what should otherwise be assertive language, as in the following sentence:

With this large opportunity and our superior technology, I think you’ll see that our company is well-positioned for growth.

The words “I think” introduce doubt, even if only subliminally, in the minds of your audience. As a presenter attempting to persuade an audience, your job is to provide them with as much certainty as you can. The way to get from doubt to certainty is to switch from the conditional to the declarative mood by eliminating the offending words:

With this large opportunity and our superior technology, you’ll see that our company is well-positioned for growth.

That simple nip and tuck strengthens the impact of the entire sentence.

This is not to say that, when the outcome is uncertain, you should make forward-looking statements or forecasts. That’s risky business. In such cases, you must use the conditional mood, but instead of the weak words “think,” “believe,” and “feel,” try these stronger options:

We’re confident . . .
We’re convinced . . .
We’re optimistic . . .
We expect . . .

With this large opportunity and our superior technology, you’ll see that our company is well-positioned for growth, and we’re confident that growth will translate into significant revenues.

From the sublime of persuasive words to the banal of airline travel, think of the announcement you typically hear on the public address system when your flight touches down at your destination:

I’d like to be the first to welcome you to San Francisco.

Sound familiar? It’s boilerplate; not just in airline travel, but also in political speeches, college lectures, church sermons, award ceremonies, acceptance speeches, wedding toasts—the list is endless. In business presentations the sentence sounds vague and indefinite. Besides, if you’d like to do it, why not just go ahead and do it?

Welcome to San Francisco

And then there is this often-used phrase:

What we’re not is…

Huh? Well then, what are you? Negative statements fail to provide information. Tell your audiences what you are, not what you are not. Moreover, negative statements sound defensive. Always make positive statements.

As you read in a prior blog, one of history’s most famous negative statements was President Richard Nixon’s infamous defense of himself in the Watergate scandal, “I am not a crook.” Had he framed his statement positively as “I am an honest man,” history might remember him more forgivingly.

Meaningful words stated in the declarative mood, assertively, and positively are more likely to beget meaningful actions.

(This post appeared on Harvard Business Review Blog)

The Patronizing Paraphrase

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Trying to Channel Bill Clinton

by Jerry Weissman

Scenario #1: Silicon Valley, an Executive Briefing Center at a major IT company. One of the company’s product managers finishes a presentation about a product upgrade to a group of existing customers and then opens the floor to questions.

The first question comes from the CIO of a large financial institution: “We’ve spent millions of dollars on the first version of your solution and it gave us nothing but problems—crashes, down time, glitches, and endless repairs—and now you want us to upgrade to a new version. We’re still having problems with the earlier version. What are you folks going to do about it?”

The product manager responds, “Quality is important to us…”

Scenario #2: New York City, a hotel meeting room during a financial conference. A CEO of a public company finishes the company’s management presentation to a group of investors and then opens the floor to questions.

The first question comes from an analyst at a leading mutual fund: “Your revenues are flat, your stock is down, and your outlook for the next quarter is guarded. When are you going to turn this sucker around?”

The CEO responds, “Performance is important to us…”

Scenario #3: Chicago, a conference room at the headquarters of a national retail chain. An account executive of a manufacturing company finishes a presentation about the status of a current product and then opens the floor to questions.

The first question comes from the vice president of sales: “Your last product was late and the one before that was late. Now you tell us that this one will be late. You know that our sales are seasonal and if we miss that narrow window we lose revenues and market share. When are you guys going to get your act together?”

The account executive responds, “Promptness is important to us…”

Sound familiar? No doubt you’ve probably heard the “_______ is important to us” phrase countless times. It has become boilerplate in the Q&A trade.

The problem with the phrase is that is the blinding flash of the obvious. Of course quality, performance, and promptness are important—each of the questioners just got finished saying that! Therefore, when a presenter states the obvious in a paraphrase, it sounds patronizing to the audience.

Why would any presenter do that to any audience? It is probably a misguided attempt to echo Bill Clinton’s famous words, “I feel your pain.” Mr. Clinton coined the phrase during his run for the presidency in 1992, in response to a question from an AIDS victim. The phrase was to become a campaign slogan that sent a broader message that Mr. Clinton hears and understands every voter.

As presenter, it is vitally important that you send the message that you hear and understand every questioner, but do so without saying that you feel your audience’s pain—especially when, by the challenging nature of the question, you or your company caused the pain in the first place. Instead, paraphrase the key issue neutrally, with no emotional value.

The correct paraphrase for each of the three tough questions above is:

“What we’re doing to assure quality is…”
“What we’re doing to improve performance is…”
“What we’re doing about on time delivery is…”

From this neutral start you can move forward into an efficient answer as to how you are going to address the questioner’s problem. And, regardless of the verbiage, you’d better have an answer, regardless of the paraphrase.

If you want to channel Bill Clinton’s undoubtedly effective presentation style, follow the advice of his campaign slogan, “Put People First.”

Rick Perry Overcompensates

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 14:39:00 GMT

Leave the Acting to Actors

by Jerry Weissman

Ever since Texas Governor Rick Perry entered the race to become the Republican presidential candidate in the 2012 election, he’s learned the importance of presentation skills—the hard way. Right after he announced his candidacy in mid-August, he soared to a double digit lead in the public opinion polls, ahead of all the previously-announced candidates. But as you read earlier, after a poor showing in a debate among all the candidates in September, and another poor showing in another debate in October, Mr. Perry’s ratings did a double digit drop to fall behind the front runners, Mitt Romney and Herman Cain.

The criticism of Mr. Perry’s debate appearances—even from other Republicans—was primarily about his halting delivery and lack of energy. NBC’s Saturday Night Live parodied his behavior in a skit in which actor Alex Baldwin did an impression of Mr. Perry bumbling and yawning.

In response, Mr. Perry shifted gears for the next debate and went after Mitt Romney, his chief opponent, with a vengeance, hurling charges at him with aggressive body language and voice. Mr. Romney responded with equal aggression that devolved into a virtual food fight.

Feeling his oats, Mr. Perry continued the animated delivery style in his media appearances and stump speeches. In one particular speech—to a group of conservative supporters in the key primary state of New Hampshire—he let out all the stops, mugging, giggling, winking, and gesturing broadly. An eight-minute video digest of his performance went viral on the Internet with over a million and a quarter views, followed by countless blogs, tweets, and another parody on Saturday Night Live that attributed his dramatic change to alcohol, drugs, or medications.

The video was perfect fodder for Jon Stewart’s satire. He commented, “Best case scenario, that dude's hammered. Worst case scenario, that is Perry sober and every time we've seen him previously, he's been hammered.” Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post was more balanced, questioning whether Mr. Perry’s speech was “Playful or plain odd.” In my opinion, it was the former. Mr. Perry was not under the influence, but was overcompensating in response to the earlier criticism.

His shift in delivery style was reminiscent of Al Gore’s reversals in his debates with George W. Bush during the 2000 election campaign. In the first of their encounters, Mr. Gore repeatedly expressed disdain for Mr. Bush with frowns, eye rolls, head shakes, and sighs, but this arrogant behavior immediately boomeranged. The television producers had a camera isolated on Mr. Gore for reaction shots, and their directors edited the videotape of his expressions into a rapid-cut sequence. When the news broadcasts ran the sequence, public and professional criticism rained down on the vice president. In response, Mr. Gore made a sharp about face and, in the second debate, came out like a lamb. During the 90 minutes, Mr. Gore expressed agreement with his opponent seven times on major issues. (You can see this “sigh” sequence in my DVD, In the Line of Fire.)

The lesson for Mr. Gore, Mr. Perry, and you is to be natural, be yourself. Don’t try to perform when you present. Instead, consider every presentation a series of person-to-person conversations.

As Mr. Perry said in response to all the ado about the video, “I've probably given 1,000 speeches. There are some that have been probably boring, some that have been animated, some that have been in between.”

Be in between. Be yourself. Leave the acting to actors.

This post also appears on Forbes.com.

Easier Said Than Done

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Writers Block II

by Jerry Weissman

In a prior post on writer’s block, you read about how to get past the proverbial blank page with a step-by-step process that is as applicable to presenters as it is to writers. But another method to break through the mental barricade is to just start talking.

Writers have long known that speaking aloud what they have written in silence helps them to shape their ideas. In a Wired Magazine article on voice recognition, Clive Thompson tells of 16th-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne and 19th century American writer Henry James, both of whom wrote by dictating their work to their secretaries. Moving to the present, Mr. Thompson cites the example of writer and critic Tim Carmody who “found himself staring at an empty page, not knowing where to begin. He had no problem talking to friends about his ideas, so Carmody booted up Dragon, (voice recognition software from Nuance) talked aloud for hours, and got past the block.”

Mr. Carmody was experiencing the front end of a spectrum of benefits that comes from combining the written words with the spoken. At the back end of the creative process—reviewing and polishing—speaking aloud provides perspective. Many professional writers read their work to themselves (rather than to their secretaries as Messrs. Montaigne and James did.)

Giving sound to what had been a silent process puts writers in the role of their readers. This extra step gives writers an objective view of their content. Bestselling author Nicholson Baker calls his version of the verbalizing process “speak-typing,” in which he dictates to himself and types as he speaks. In an interview with the New York Times about his new book, House of Holes, Mr. Baker explained that “the words come out differently. The sentences come out simpler, and there’s less of a temptation to go back and add more foliage. I’m trying for a simpler kind of storytelling.”

Presentations are all about speaking aloud, and preparing for them should involve talking too. As a coach, I recommend that presenters rehearse their presentations by displaying their PowerPoint slides in the Slide Sorter view (also known at Storyboard) and then running through their narrative aloud, assuming the role of their audience.

But giving voice to ideas also helps that challenging front end of the creative process. Just as Mr. Carmody did, you can jump start your own creative process by speaking your presentation aloud and recording it using Dragon software or the voice record function on your smart phone. Play back the recording afterwards to shape or reshape your ideas and words, but the key to breaking the logjam is to start talking. (If this technique sounds familiar, I referenced it in the prior post as a method to eliminate meaningless words. The same approach helps you develop meaningful words)

Writer’s block occurs because the prospect of starting from scratch is daunting. Even if a writer has a clear idea of a new story—or a presenter has a clear idea of a new presentation—the prospect of choosing which of all the available ideas to include or how much detail to provide, overloads the writer’s mind. However, writers and presenters alike, having lived with their subject matter, know it intimately and have no difficulty chatting about it. Extend that facility into having a conversation in private with your recorder. You’ll find the process liberating and productive.

Mr. Thompson’s article tells us how much Mr. Montaigne valued the process: “‘The things I say,’ Montaigne dictated, ‘are better than those I write.’”

This post also appears on hbr.org

Rx: CrackBerry Addiction

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 15:57:00 GMT

Control Yourself!

by Jerry Weissman

For the more than two decades I have been a presentation coach, the question most frequently-asked of me has been, “What do I do with my hands?” So frequent, I devoted a prior post to answering it. But that was then and this is now.

Of late, the most frequently-asked question is, “How do you deal with audiences who are fixated on their smart phones?” The question, asked by distraught presenters, refers to a chronic malady known as “CrackBerry Addiction.” Compounding the problem, those very same presenters, when they become audience members themselves, proceed to exhibit the same severe symptoms of the disease. The addiction is at epidemic proportions.

Quite frankly, I’m stumped for an answer. I’ve tried every technique I know—pregnant pauses, steely stares, provocative questions, innocent questions, polite requests, forceful demands, gentle nudges, outright pleas, periodic breaks, and even making a demonstrative point of shutting down my own smart phone—to no avail. The addiction persists.

Therefore, I’ll approach the problem from a different angle; instead of trying to help presenters, I’ll cast a wider net by recommending how anyone can escape the hypnotic allure of those glowing LCD screens. Admit it, you know that you are hooked, too. My hope is that if I can help move the needle only slightly, clearer minds might become more attentive audiences.

Professional writers, for whom concentration is critical, are often derailed by the double-edged sword of the Internet: they use it to find material, but they often go off on search sidetracks that interrupt their creative process. In an article for the New York Times Book Review, travel writer Tony Perrottet described one of his lengthy web detours, and added that he is not alone in literary circles, “everyone I know acknowledges the problem of digital distraction.” Mr. Perrottet then went on to note that some writers “have made gestures toward enforced self-denial,” and gave the example of author Jonathan Franzen who wrote his bestselling novel, The Corrections, “in a dark room wearing earplugs, earmuffs and a blindfold, and confessed to blocking his Ethernet port with Super Glue.”

Extremes measures, but not as extreme as those of Rolf Dobelli. Mr. Dobelli, the driving force behind the popular business book summary website getAbstract, is a writer in his own right. In an online essay titled, “Avoid News,” he recommends going cold turkey:

Make news as inaccessible as possible. Delete the news apps from your iPhone. Sell your TV. Cancel your newspaper subscriptions. Do not pick up newspapers and magazines that lie around in airports and train stations. Do not set your browser default to a news site. Pick a site that never changes. The more stale the better. Delete all news sites from your browser’s favorites list. Delete the news widgets from your desktop.

As admirable as Mr. Dobelli’s goal is, it is also unrealistic. Ever since Adam, humans succumb to temptation, and so are virtually incapable of going cold turkey. Why do you think there are so many diet books on the bestseller lists?

A more realistic approach to CrackBerry Addiction is to follow the model of other established substance abuse solutions: one step at a time. Mr. Perrottet tells of two authors, Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) and Nora Ephron (I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections), who use a computer program called Freedom that blocks Internet access for up to eight hours. Just as airlines require passengers to turn off their mobile devices for the duration of the flight, the withdrawal is confined to a limited period.

This is the first step toward self-control, and if self-control ever catches on, perhaps your next audience will take their eyes off their CrackBerries and focus on you.

Sure, and there is a Santa Claus.

Vinod Khosla's Five-Second Rule

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 19:57:00 GMT

A Sanity Check for Every Presentation

by Jerry Weissman

By any measure, Vinod Khosla is one of the most influential people in business today. In his long and distinguished career, Mr. Khosla has contributed to the growth of hundreds of companies, primarily in his role as a venture capitalist; first at the renowned KPCB, and then, since 2004, at his own firm, Khosla Ventures. Among his notable successes are Sun Microsystems, Nexgen/AMD, Excite, and Juniper.

On their way to maturity, each of the many companies Mr. Khosla touched came under the scrutiny of his expert eye, assessing their business plans, balance sheets, strategic relationships, marketing materials, and especially their presentations. During his 25 years in venture capital, Mr. Khosla has seen as many—if not more—presentations than a presentation coach. Most of them were on Mondays, the day Silicon Valley venture firms traditionally allocate to screening pitches from new companies. Then, once the companies make it into the portfolio, Mr. Khosla continues to monitor and critique the presentations they develop to pitch to their potential customers and partners.

For each of them, he applies his five-second rule: he puts a slide on a screen, removes it after five seconds, and then asks the viewer to describe the slide. A dense slide fails the test—and fails to provide the basic function of any visual: to aid the presentation.

By applying his simple rule, Mr. Khosla is addressing two of the most important elements in presentation graphics: Less is More, a plea all too often sounded by helpless audiences to hapless presenters; and more important, the human perception factor. Whenever an image appears on any screen, the eyes of every member of every audience reflexively move to the screen to process the new image. The denser the image, the more processing the audiences need. At that very moment, they stop listening to the presenter. Nevertheless, most presenters continue speaking, further compounding the processing task. As a result, the audience shuts down. Game over.

The simple solution to this pervasive problem is one that readers of my books will recognize: use television news programs as a role model. With vast high-tech graphics resources at their disposal, all the broadcasters show is a simple image composed of a picture and one or two words to serve as a headline for the story that the anchor person tells. In presentations, consider yourself as the anchor person, and design slides that pass Mr. Khosla’s five-second test to serve as the headline for your story.

Game on!

This post also appears on Forbes.com

More Meaningless Words

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:25:00 GMT

The Weeds of Vocabulary

By Jerry Weissman

The italicized “more” in the title of this post signifies a greater degree of meaninglessness in words rather than an increase in their occurrence. In an earlier blog, you read about several innocuous phrases that have crept into our daily language, each of which casts doubt on the competence of the presenter or the audience. Another group of phrases and words casts doubt about the content itself:

“Sort of”
“Pretty much”
“Kind of”
“Basically”
“Actually”
“Really”
“Anyway”

These phrases have taken on the frequency of fillers, empty words that surround and diminish meaningful words, just as weeds diminish the beauty of roses in a garden. Most speakers are unaware that they are using fillers, and most audiences don’t bother to think of their implications.

Sometimes, these words can have a purpose. In a New York Times article about author David Foster Wallace, writer Maud Newton noted that “Wallace’s nonfiction abounds with qualifiers like ‘sort of’ and ‘pretty much.’” But she also noted that his use of these meaningless words was intentional, a “subtle rhetorical strategy” to make a critical point and defuse it with irony. As a prime example, she cited the title of one of Mr. Wallace’s collected essays: “Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think.”

Presenters do not have the luxury of indulging in irony or—with all due respect—the literary talent, to engage in such artful wordplay. Qualifying words lessen the importance and the value of the nouns and verbs they accompany. Those nouns and verbs represent the products, services, and actions of the business—the franchise—that the presenter is pitching, and a presenter must not diminish their worth. Parents do not describe their children as “sort of cute.”

Instead, follow the advice of the Strunk and White classic, The Elements of Style: “Use definite, specific, concrete language.” To accomplish this you must diligently delete meaningless words and phrases from your speech, a task easier said than done because of their pervasiveness. One way to kick the habit is to capture the narrative of your next presentation with the voice record function on your smart phone, then play it back post mortem and listen to your own pattern. (You’re in for a surprise in more ways than one.) You will have to repeat this process several times before you start correcting yourself, but do it you must.

Ms. Newton put the challenge perfectly at the end of her article:

Qualifications are necessary sometimes…But the idea is to provoke and persuade, not to soothe. And the best way to make an argument is to make it, straightforwardly, honestly, passionately.

This post appeared on hbr.org

The Sandbox

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:09:00 GMT

How NOT to Look Presidential

Against the backdrop of the shifting sands of public opinion polls that show former Godfather Pizza CEO Herman Cain’s numbers surging and Texas Governor Rick Perry’s falling, the gloves came off in last night’s Republican Presidential debate in Las Vegas, broadcast live on CNN. Mr. Cain and Mitt Romney, the current front runner, were the primary targets in what degenerated into a grudge match.

The attacks came from all sides. At first, all the candidates went after Mr. Cain and his 9-9-9 tax plan. Then Rick Santorum, trailing the pack in last place, went after Mr. Romney and his health care plan. Soon after, Mr. Perry, who was trying to regain his momentum and to counter criticism of his weak debating style in previous debates, went after Mr. Romney on immigration policy and conservative position, and he did so with a vengeance. Mr. Romney gave back as good as he got, but their sharp exchanges—expressed with aggressive verbiage and gestures—were charged with animosity, personal attacks, and repeated interruptions. Moderator Anderson Cooper could barely control the cross talk, let alone the format.

Today’s Wall Street Journal review of The Rare Find, a new book about the search for skilled people, describes the importance of “serenity in the face of adversity.” That quality is also an aspect of “presidential,” but the adjective was not applicable to the candidates vying for that office last night. Even Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and perennial presidential candidate, who has been there, done that, said in his closing remarks that “maximizing bickering” was probably not the best way to get to the White House. John King, the CNN political analyst, took Mr. Gingrich’s observation one step further. In his post mortem commentary, Mr. King said that the clear winner of the debate was Barack Obama.

Governor Perry’s Bad Night II

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:33:00 GMT

Yesterday was not a good day for Governor Rick Perry in his quest to be the Republican candidate for president. He awakened to the news that he had dropped to third place in the NBC News/Marist public opinion poll for the Iowa Republican Presidential Caucus, 15 points behind front runner Mitt Romney; and even further to a distant fifth place in the same poll for the New Hampshire Republican Presidential Primary, a whopping 38 points behind Mr. Romney—and this only hours before he was to meet Mr. Romney and the other Republican candidates in that state’s debate.

Compounding Mr. Perry’s woes, later in the morning Mr. Romney received the endorsement of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, the man who, until his withdrawal from the race last week, was considered far and wide to be a serious candidate himself. And then evening fell, and so did Mr. Perry’s fortunes. The New York Times coverage of the debate reported that:

In the days leading up to the debate, Mr. Perry aggressively challenged Mr. Romney and accused him of waffling on conservative principles. But he brought almost none of the criticism to the debating stage and went for long stretches without being recognized by the debate moderators or trying to insert himself into the conversation.

When moderator Charlie Rose did recognize Mr. Perry with a question about his economic plan, he replied,

… it doesn't make any difference whether it's "Obamacare," whether it's Dodd-Frank, or whether it's the tax burden, a president, particularly with the plan that I'm going to be laying out over the next three days -- and I'm not going to lay it out all for you tonight. You know, Mitt's had six years to be working on a plan; I've been in this for about eight weeks.

A participant in a debate, particularly a candidate for the highest office in the land—but also anyone in business—cannot defer answers to the burning question of the moment; nor can that person claim insufficient time to prepare. Readiness to act and willingness to go the extra mile are essential elements of leadership. Governor Perry then punctuated his non-answer with this digression:

But clearly, we're going to be focused on initially the energy industry in this country and making America again independent and clearly the place where domestic energy needs to be produced from.

All of which prompted Alex Castellanos, the Republican analyst for CNN, to observe in his debate post-mortem commentary:

Obviously, his campaign decided that we’re going to simplify things for our candidate. We’re going to give him one idea: energy equals jobs, and we’re going to let him be quiet the rest of the time and get through the debate that way.

The last debate, the excuse was made, well, he was standing up all the debate long and he got tired. So this debate should’ve been his debate, he was sitting down. I think next time, he’s going to have to get a mattress…

Then Mr. Castellanos added,

…because there was no energy, no fire

Leadership also requires high energy and a fire in the belly. As you read earlier, Mr. Perry’s poor responses to questions in the previous debate cost him his lead in the public opinion polls. The reversal was a hollow echo of the Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960 and its reverberations in 2011that the Wall Street Journal described as “a Michele Bachmann bounce and a Tim Pawlenty plunge, a Herman Cain climb and a Rick Perry plummet.” Last night’s performance could cost Mr. Perry even more.

Christie's Challange

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:47:00 GMT

Politics Provides Presentation Lessons

by Jerry Weissman

The rollercoaster race for the Republican nominee for president in the 2012 election has produced dizzying rises and precipitous falls for Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry. Although struggling to right their listing campaigns, they are both still in play—along with Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, and last week’s candidate du jour, Herman Cain. With no clear leader, however, the GOP faithful and the media are looking for yet another fresh face. This week’s candidate du jour—after a rousing rally-the-party-and-bash-Obama speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California—is New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

Mr. Christie has yet to declare officially, but this has not stopped a deluge of opinions and advice from diverse factions within the party, from the other candidates, and from the media. These opinions range from serious considerations about Mr. Christie’s positions on major issues to silly prattle about his weight. Sitting in the middle of these two polar opposites is the more urgent compressed time factor. In the next two weeks, there will be two more nationally-televised debates among the declared candidates. In three months, with three major holidays intervening, the first primary elections will take place. Mr. Christie has yet to develop position papers, assemble a funding committee, or build a campaign organization. All these risk factors have prompted Mr. Christie’s supporters—among them Ari Fleischer, the former Bush White House press secretary—to urge him not to run. In a blog post on CNN, Mr. Fleischer identified several pitfalls—each of which has application to business and to presentations. Mr. Fleisher’s words about Mr. Christie are in italics, the lessons for you are in regular font:

Does he know the issues? Debate preparation is time-intensive -- and that means time he's not raising money, returning calls, or hitting the campaign trail.

Presentation preparation is time-intensive, too, yet presenters all too often relegate theirs to the eleventh hour, after their email, phone calls, and meetings.

One False Step: Everything he does will be magnified by the media, turning small stumbles into giant falls. Just as they're hyping his candidacy now, the press will overhype his (inevitable) mistakes the moment he declares.

In this day and age of Sarbanes-Oxley, the market and the media are unforgiving of corporate mistakes. One small misstep can tank a stock. On the other hand, slips in presentations are forgivable. It’s the human factor. When a presenter stumbles, the audience—who has been there, done that—can relate and be accepting.

He didn't return my call: In the aftermath of an announcement, he'll get flooded with calls from important people who want to talk to him and his not-yet-existent campaign staff…But when no one returns their calls, because there is no organization and no time, it won't take long for grumbling to begin.

Just as politicians must be responsive to their supporters and the media, so must presenters. But unlike politicians who are not always responsive to questions, every presenter must answer every question from every audience member.

He gave his word: Christie has already said he won't run. If he changes his mind now, what does it say about his willingness to change his mind on other issues, once his word is given?

Politicians—and lovers and shoppers—can get away with changing their minds, business people cannot. Consistency of message is critical.

Bachmann’s Media Pendulum

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 15:59:00 GMT

by Jerry Weissman

In a prior post about Representative Michelle Bachmann’s presentations, you read how she recovered from her stumble of speaking to the wrong camera during her televised response to President Obama’s State of the Union in January by imposing an iron fist in her management of media relations. But now, with her presidential aspirations being severely challenged by Texas Governor Rick Perry, Ms. Bachmann has stumbled again.

She just released a new campaign video with extremely low production values: standing in front of a cheesy plastic plant, she speaks directly into the camera but her voice sounds thin and distant by an evidently misplaced microphone. The New York Times report of the video called it “a metaphor for a presidential campaign increasingly perceived as struggling financially and organizationally.”

Her media troubles continued when Ed Rollins, the veteran political campaign guru who made his mark as the manager of President Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign, resigned as Ms. Bachmann’s manager for “health reasons,” but then proceeded to criticize her in the media. The Times story added:

On MSNBC, he [Mr. Rollins] called her vaccine-mental retardation comments a “mistake,” something Mrs. Bachmann has not conceded; and on another occasion he averred that she lacked “the ability or the resources” to continue her campaign beyond Iowa…

Referring to a news photograph of her during a visit to a meat-cutting business on Tuesday that some thought made her look unpresidential, he said, “I’m not calling up and saying, ‘You should not be in meat lockers.’ ”

Mr. Rollins’ split from Ms. Bachmann is an echo of his resignation as the campaign manager of Ross Perot’s bid for the presidency in 1992. According to the Times report then, “Mr. Rollins said the prime source of disagreement was over the nature and timing of an advertising campaign for Mr. Perot.”

Ms. Bachmann is diametrically opposed to the theories of Karl Marx, but the 19th century socialist once made an observation that is applicable here, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."

Governor Perry's Bad Night

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Slips in the Debate, Slides in the Polls

by Jerry Weissman

It’s one thing for Gail Collins, the Democratic-leaning New York Times columnist, to say of Texas Governor Rick Perry’s performance in the televised debate among Republican presidential candidates in Florida last Thursday, “it was impossible to watch that debate without realizing that Perry is not presidential timber, or even presidential polyurethane,” but it’s another for the Republican-leaning Wall Street Journal to quote Erick Erickson of RedState.com who “called Mr. Perry's performance ‘a train wreck,’ while Bill Kristol of the [neo-conservative] Weekly Standard wrote, ‘It was close to a disqualifying two hours for him.’” And still another thing for Republican-leaning Fox News, the co-sponsor of the debate with Google, to run a video clip headlined, “Perry Not Ready for Prime Time?” All this criticism was triggered by Mr. Perry’s defensiveness throughout the debate but also by two bad stumbles; the first when he went after Mitt Romney, his primary opponent, and said:

I think Americans just don’t know sometimes which Mitt Romney they’re dealing with. Is it the Mitt Romney that was on the side of — against the Second Amendment before he was for the Second Amendment? Was it — was before — he was before the social programs from the standpoint of — he was for standing up for Roe versus Wade before he was against first — Roe versus Wade? Him — he was for Race to the Top. He’s for Obamacare and now he’s against it. I mean, we’ll wait until tomorrow and — and — and see which Mitt Romney we’re really talking to tonight.

And the second, in his response to a question about what he would do if he learned that Pakistan had lost control of its nuclear weapons to the Taliban:

Well obviously, before you ever get to that point you have to build a relationship in that region. That's one of the things that this administration has not done. Yesterday, we found out through Admiral Mullen that Haqqani has been involved with -- and that's the terrorist group directly associated with the Pakistani country. So to have a relationship with India, to make sure that India knows that they are an ally of the United States.

For instance, when we had the opportunity to sell India the upgraded F-16s, we chose not to do that. We did the same with Taiwan. The point is, our allies need to understand clearly that we are their friends, we will be standing by there with them.

Today, we don't have those allies in that region that can assist us if that situation that you talked about were to become a reality.

Two days after the debate, Mr. Perry spoke at a breakfast meeting for hundreds of delegates at a convention sponsored by the Republican Party of Florida. Clearly aware of his stumbles, the candidate resorted to damage control:

What Americans are looking for isn’t the slickest candidate, they’re looking for an authentic, principled leader…You’ve seen what happens when our country chooses a leader who chooses words over deeds.

Later that same day, those same delegates cast their votes in a straw poll. Mr. Perry—the front runner in every poll since he announced his candidacy in August— finished a distant second to Herman Cain, the former chairman and CEO of Godfather Pizza. In 1960, Richard Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy after stumbling in a televised debate. As philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Netflix and Politics

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 15:20:00 GMT

Netflix, the high-flying Internet subscription service for movies and TV shows, whose stock reached an all-time high of $304 in July, ran into a cyclone that plunged the price to $130 this week, its 52-week low. The cause for the drop was a mass defection of a million subscribers who were incensed at the company’s $6 a month price increase for its DVD and streaming video service.

Although the response from Wall Street and Netflix’s customers was swift, the response from Reed Hastings, the company’s co-founder and CEO was just as swift. On Monday, two business days after the stock fell 19% in one session, Mr. Hastings wrote a blog on the company site and duplicated it in an email blast to subscribers that began, “I messed up.”

No evasion, no blame game, no shucking, no jiving.

But Mr. Hastings was not done. He continued:

It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology.

“Respect” and “humility” in the very next sentence and “apology” in the sentence after that! How often have you seen or heard any of those words at all, let alone right up front? And this is in business, not politics. Those words do not exist in the vocabulary of politicians and, given the ongoing contentious climate of our political system, it is doubtful they ever will.

The hope is that Mr. Hastings’ candor and transparency will set an example for communications in business—and in all human relations—that we must accept responsibility for our actions.

P.S. Mr. Hastings’ blog/blast went on to announce that the company would separate its DVD and streaming services. The announcement produced a further backlash from customers, but that is a strategic matter that will require other actions. Whatever those actions may be, they, too, will require candor.

Don't Raise the Bridge, Lower the Water

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Better Box Thinking

by Jerry Weissman

The aphorism, “Don’t raise the bridge, lower the water,” has applications from the soaring heights of architectural design to the quotidian task of presentation graphics; the common denominator in both being the importance of thinking outside the box.

In a paper (links to a PDF) called "Thinking More Effectively about Deliberate Innovation," Christopher M. Barlow, PhD, a member of The Co-Creativity Institute, said that the familiar phrase "forced me to a new perspective: creativity is not a change in the problem, it is a change in us, a change in our thinking that makes the already possible solutions obvious."

Mr. Barlow identified the problem in the aphorism as how to "get the boats past the bridge," and then went on to say, "If I ask you to design a lift bridge, and you begin describing the building of a dam and lock to lower the water level, I have to wonder about your sanity or intelligence…When some of the alternatives [are] made obvious by the new viewpoint are better than the best of the old ideas, we call it creativity." He summarized the creative process as "Not out of the box thinking, better box thinking!"

An example of better box thinking in the usually boxy world of architecture comes from the recently opened International Commerce Centre in Hong Kong, a 108-story, 1,588-foot building that is now the fourth-tallest tower in the world.

Because tall buildings tend to sway in the wind, architects—like Paul Katz of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates who designed the ICC—seek innovative ways to mitigate the risk.

According to the Wall Street Journal story about the tower:

Most skyscrapers utilize pendulums or dampers, designed to transfer the motion of the building to mitigation devices. These can be enormous. Taipei 101, the world's second-tallest building, sports a massive 660-ton steel ball, suspended from the 92nd floor that swings in full view of visitors...Mr. Katz designed the entire ICC to provide wind buffers. Instead of meeting in corners, the sides join in recessed notches. Its scaled surface—which gives the building a dragon appearance beloved by Chinese—also breaks up wind force. "It's like the opposite of an aircraft's wing," Mr. Katz explains. "It breaks up lift."

For presenters—who usually think within the strict confines of outbound corporate marketing boxes—better box thinking involves consideration of the audience. In most of today’s unilateral and overloaded business presentations, thinking about the audience all too often goes missing in action.

A client of mine, let’s call him Jason, who is a marketing manager for a Silicon Valley telecommunications company, was assigned to develop his company’s slide show for a new product launch. One of the slides Jason created was a network diagram in which all the labels were crammed into small boxes (pun may or may not be intended), each box containing two- and three-line captions. Readers of Presenting to Win will recall that wordwrap makes it harder for the audience to read than one-liners. When I suggested that Jason trim the labels to one-liners, he asked, "Should I make the text smaller or the boxes larger?"

I replied, "Don’t raise the bridge, lower the water!"

Jason smiled in recognition that it was more important to make the slide easy for the audience to read than for him to create.

That’s better box thinking.

This post also appears on Indezine.

Romney vs. Perry: Round Two

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 22:51:00 GMT

The Sound Bite of the Week

by Jerry Weissman

Politicians always strive for the big sound bite, the clever phrase that the media grabs and repeats ad infinitum, gathering momentum and mind share. This week’s winner was a moment during last night’s Tea Party debate among Republican presidential candidates on CNN. The debate brought front-runners Mitt Romney and Rick Perry face to face. CNN Moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Mr. Romney, “So does Governor Perry deserve any credit for all those jobs that were created in Texas?”

Mr. Romney replied, “I think Governor Perry would agree with me that if you’re dealt four aces that doesn’t make you necessarily a great poker player.”

The card game analogy struck home on two counts: First was the echo of Texas Hold’em poker, an extension of the Romney campaign’s view of the Texas governor as a “barbarian,” and second, the loud and clear implication that Mr. Perry did not deserve any credit.

Mr. Romney then parlayed (play on words intended) the poker analogy, by promoting himself:

The four aces that are terrific aces are the ones the nation should learn from, the ones I described, zero income tax, low regulation, right to work state, oil in the ground and a Republican legislature.

And then, taking one more shot at Mr. Perry:

And by the way, there has been great growth in Texas. Under Ann Richards, job growth was under 2.5 percent a year, under George Bush was 3 percent a year, under Rick Perry it’s been 1 percent a year.

Not to be outdone, when Mr. Perry’s turn came, he said, “Well, I was going to say Mitt you were doing pretty good until you got to talking poker.”

As the old saying goes, “Sometimes you bite the bear, sometimes the bear (sound) bites back.”

Obama's Speech on Jobs

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

by Jerry Weissman

In a prior blog about President Obama’s State of the Union, I referenced Marcus Porcius Cato (234 BC - 149 BC), a senator in the glory days of the Roman Empire, who urged his fellow senators to attack rival Carthage (Tunisia today) by concluding every speech with the phrase, “Ceterum censeo, Carthaginem esse delendam,” meaning, “Furthermore, I think Carthage must be destroyed.” Today, the shortened form of the sentence, “Ceterum censeo” has become a catch phrase to indicate a repeated slogan.

Mr. Obama repeated the slogan “Change We Can Believe In” to great effect in his 2008 election campaign, but of late has been accused by his supporters as well as his detractors of going soft in his messaging. Not so in his speech on jobs last night. In urging Congress to approve The American Jobs Act, his bill to provide more jobs, the president used the active verb “pass” 21 times. The Huffington Post highlights video underscores the repetitiousness in fast cuts. Moreover, Mr. Obama hammered home his message with such passion that Howard Gleckman, in his post on Forbes, wrote, “As political theater, the speech was terrific.”

Cato’s sloganeering ultimately paid off: Rome attacked Carthage and destroyed it. Will Congress pass The American Jobs Act?

Governor Perry Comes out Shooting…and Draws a Blank

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:33:00 GMT

By Jerry Weissman

2300 years ago, Aristotle prescribed the three requirements of persuasion:

Ethos, or the reputation of the speaker

Pathos, or the appeal to emotion of the audience

Logos, or the logic to support an argument

In his first debate against his opponents for the Republican presidential nomination last night, Texas Governor Rick Perry fell short of logos.

In anticipation of the debate, Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal, wrote, “[I]f ever two candidates saw each other as Exactly the Kind of Guy I Don't Like, it would be Messrs. Perry and Romney. Mr. Romney's people see Mr. Perry as a dopey Texas barbarian. Mr. Perry's people see Mr. Romney as Northeastern, elite, effete and opportunistic.”

As advertised, both candidates took off the gloves and went after each other. Governor Perry, true to form, came out shooting and gave as good as he got. Except when John Harris of Politico, one of the moderators, asked him: “Just recently in New Hampshire, you said that weekly and even daily scientists are coming forward to question the idea that human activity is behind climate change. Which scientists have you found most credible on this subject?”

Governor Perry replied:

Well, I do agree that there is -- the science is -- is not settled on this. The idea that we would put Americans' economy at -- at -- at jeopardy based on scientific theory that's not settled yet, to me, is just -- is nonsense. I mean, it -- I mean -- and I tell somebody, I said, just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said here is the fact, Galileo got outvoted for a spell.

But the fact is, to put America's economic future in jeopardy, asking us to cut back in areas that would have monstrous economic impact on this country is not good economics and I will suggest to you is not necessarily good science. Find out what the science truly is before you start putting the American economy in jeopardy.

Unsatisfied with Mr. Perry’s non-answer, Mr. Harris asked him again, “Just to follow up quickly. Tell us how you've done that. Are there specific -- specific scientists or specific theories that you've found especially compelling, as you...”

The governor replied:

Let me tell you what I find compelling, is what we've done in the state of Texas, using our ability to regulate our clean air. We cleaned up our air in the state of Texas, more than any other state in the nation during the decade. Nitrous oxide levels, down by 57 percent. Ozone levels down by 27 percent.

That's the way you need to do it, not by some scientist somewhere saying, "Here is what we think is happening out there." The fact of the matter is, the science is not settled on whether or not the climate change is being impacted by man to the point where we're going to put America's economics in jeopardy.

At that point, Brian Williams of NBC, the co-host of the debate, called time and moved the debate along to Michele Bachmann’s turn. But the fact remains that Governor Perry did not answer the question. Alexander Burns of Politico, the debate co-sponsor, took note of this in his report, “Asked to identify a climate scientist who backs his view that global warming is a hoax, Perry did not come up with a single name.” In other words, no logos.

Roger Simon, also of Politico, summed up Mr. Perry’s performance:

Many people watch debates for the same reason many people watch the Indy 500: to see who crashes and burns…Debates do not allow for thoughtful silence before answering a question. Nor do these potential presidents get to gather advisers around them before formulating a policy. They must speak instantly from the podium, hoping their answers convey strength, intelligence, warmth and electability. Especially electability.

You get only one chance to make a first impression. Perry made his Wednesday night.

The lesson: You must answer questions—especially about claims you have made—or you will risk crashing and burning.

Swimming Lessons and Presentations

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Deconstruct and Reconstruct

by Jerry Weissman

To teach swimming, coaches take novices through the component skills in progressive stages. The first lesson takes place out of the water, at the side of the pool, where the novice learns the arm stroke and the leg stroke separately. Then the novice gets into the shallow end of the pool and practices the arm strokes and leg strokes, still separately, but now with training equipment—flotation devices, kick boards and the rungs of a ladder—to develop the skills further.

As the training progresses, the novice puts aside the equipment and swims, first in the shallow end of the pool, then the deep end, and finally, in a lake or ocean. The fundamental aspect of this approach is to deconstruct the basics and then to reconstruct them progressively. It works in swimming—as it does in all sports—and it works in presentations.

In the Power Presentations program, we teach delivery skills in progressive stages, very much in the same manner that swimming coaches teach swimming; an approach that produces an unexpected benefit for presenters in the development of their stories.

In the delivery skills session of the program, we begin the deconstruction by excluding slides from the session. The initial impetus for this approach was two-fold:

to reduce the complexity of the exercises (like the swimming lesson on dry land)
to reinforce the primacy of the presenter over the slide show

Just as swimming lessons involve multiple repetitions, so too, do we ask our participants to repeat a short pitch several times. The unexpected benefit is that, as presenters develop their delivery skills, they also improve their narrative flow. The reason this occurs is also two-fold:

Verbalization, a practice technique you read about in prior blogs, most recently here, creates familiarity and therefore fluency with the content
When presenters are freed from having to relate to their slides, they can concentrate more on their stories

Slides, as they are conventionally designed today, hinder rather than help presenters. The all-too-common complexity of the slides forces presenters either to skim over them or, in the worst case, read them verbatim. This unholy alliance also fragments the narrative because each slide is discussed individually with no relationship to the next. When we exclude the slides in the practice, presenters focus on telling their story, connecting the dots and creating a clear progression.

This is not to recommend that you eliminate slides completely. Given the deep entrenchment of PowerPoint in business today, that would be foolhardy. Instead, use simply-designed slides that serve

only to support your narrative and reinforce the primacy of the presenter.

In our coaching sessions, we ultimately bring the slides back into our exercises, the equivalent of putting the novice swimmer into the water. Then, having developed each component of each skill separately, a presenter can integrate all of them into a Power Presentation.

Here’s how you can use the deconstruction/reconstruction process to develop your presentation:

First create a clear and logical narrative.
Then design slides to illustrate your narrative.
Combine your story and slides in a verbal run-through of your presentation, but do it seated in front of your computer screen so that you don’t have to think about your eye contact, gestures, posture, or voice.
Do another run-through standing up in a vacant conference room, presenting to the empty chairs as if they were filled with audience members. This time, focus on your eye contact, gestures, posture, and voice.
Do a dress rehearsal to colleagues or friends, integrating all the components.
Diveinto the water and swim like a fish.

Michele Bachmann & History Lessons

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Presentation Counts
by Jerry Weissmann

In her determined quest for the presidency, Michele Bachmann has made several statements about historical data that were later proven erroneous and corrected by the Pulitzer Prize-winning website PolitiFact.com. But after getting off on the wrong foot by speaking to the wrong camera during her televised response to President Obama’s State of the Union in January, Ms. Bachmann learned her history lesson about the importance of presentation in politics.

The lesson began with the 1960 presidential debate in which the patrician John F. Kennedy won over an uptight Richard Nixon. That iconic event raised the bar for all future political campaigns, and they progressed through history in a rock-and-scissors game:

The intense Richard Nixon won over a bland Hubert Humphrey and an equally-bland George McGovern
The homespun Jimmy Carter won over a bumbling Gerald Ford
The smooth Ronald Reagan won over a homespun Jimmy Carter and a bland Walter Mondale
The dynamic Bill Clinton won over an aloof George H. W. Bush and a dry-as-dust Bob Dole
The folksy George W. Bush won over a stiff Al Gore and an equally-stiff John Kerry
The oratorical Barack Obama won over a petulant John McCain

Accentuating the personal image factor in those races, a Wall Street Journal article by Peter Funt, noted that the winners had a better head of hair and/or hairline than their opponents. While Mr. Funt’s article focused on male candidates, the stakes are even higher for women. The unflattering shots of a tired Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 primary campaign stood in stark contrast to the youthful vigor of her opponent, Barack Obama.

Michele Bachmann is taking no such chances; she is conducting her campaign in maximum control mode. Trip Gabriel of the New York Times reported on the many measures Ms. Bachmann’s staff is taking to assure that she always appears as fresh as a daisy—including having had her duck offstage during the commercial breaks in her televised debate with male Republican candidates to touch up her makeup. Mr. Gabriel went on to note that she “is more controlling than most, carefully stage-managing her contacts with the news media and the public.”

In a related profile in the New Yorker, Ryan Lizza reported that Ms. Bachmann’s press secretary spoke to the media crew traveling with the Bachmann party and said, “I know everything is on the record these days…but please just don’t broadcast images of her in her casual clothes.” Of course that didn’t stop the critical article from accompanying the text with a caricature of Ms. Bachmann in cargo pants. The image was drawn by Barry Blitt, the same artist who did the controversial cover of the magazine showing Barack Obama dressed in a turban and Michelle Obama dressed as a terrorist, fist-bumping each other.

Be that as it may, Ms. Bachmann is wisely taking full cognizance —as every candidate must—of the fate that befell Richard Nixon in 1960: He refused professional makeup for his televised debate, and instead tried to mask his characteristically heavy beard with a slapdash coat of a caulk stick called “Lazy Shave;” but “Lazy Shave” was not porous and Mr. Nixon perspired under the hot studio lights, revealing his beard anyway, making him look more nervous and more intense than his cool, calm and poised opponent.

History lesson learned: Presentation counts.

“Does that make sense?”

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:28:00 GMT

...and do you really want to know?
by Jerry Weissman

Language is alive, a dynamically evolving and changing entity.

One of the newest expressions to gain momentum in American speech is, “Does that make sense?” The phrase is most often used by a speaker in the middle of a conversation—or a presenter in the middle of a presentation—to check whether or not the listener or audience member has understood or appreciated what the speaker has just said. Unfortunately, the expression has three negative implications:

Uncertainty on the part of the speaker about the accuracy or credibility of the content

Doubt about the ability of the audience to comprehend or appreciate the content.

The word, “sense,” which, by its interrogative formation, implies that the content in question is of dubious sense, or senseless, or completely nonsense.

“Does that make sense?” has become so pervasive it has taken its place among other filler words such as “I’m like…” and “I mean…” Most speakers are unaware that they are saying it, and most audiences don’t bother to think of its implications. The phrase has attained the frequency—and meaninglessness of:

“You know…” as if to be sure the listener is paying attention

“Like I said…” as if to say that the listener didn’t understand

“Again…” as if to say that the listener didn’t get it the first time

“To be honest…” as if to say the speaker was not truthful earlier

Every responsible speaker or presenter, in their well-intentioned effort to satisfy their audience, has every right to check whether their material is getting through and whether their audience is satisfied. But instead of casting negativity on the content or the audience, all a speaker has to say is:

“Do you have any questions?”

Obama’s Next Big Speech

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 22:25:00 GMT

By Jerry Weissman

Barack Obama has given several notable speeches in his career, starting with his sixteen and a half minute “Cinderella” speech at the Democratic National Convention in July, 2004 that launched him on the path to the presidency. Since that date, Mr. Obama has hit several high water marks for his oratory:

March 18, 2008
A More Perfect Union “The Race Speech”
Philadelphia, PA

August 28, 2008
“The American Promise” Acceptance Speech
Denver, CO

November 4, 2008
Election Night Victory Speech
Grant Park, IL

January 20, 2009 Inaugural Address
Washington, D.C.

June 4, 2009 “A New Beginning”
Cairo, Egypt

December 1, 2009 Speech on Afghanistan to 2010 Cadets,
West Point, NY

January 12, 2011 “Together We Thrive: Tucson and America”s
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

But the president has also hit several low water marks—the loss of his majority in the House of Representatives, resistance to his legislation, and the defection of many of his supporters—that his speeches were unable to affect. In that time, his public approval ratings dropped to a new low of 26%. The many Republican candidates who are vying for the candidacy to run against Mr. Obama next year are going after each other, but they all agree on one subject: attacking him.

The president began his counterattack with a three-day bus tour of the Midwest this week. Then as the tour wound down, White House press secretary, Jay Carney, told MSNBC that the president is planning to deliver a major speech on jobs and the economy after Labor Day. Given that those twin themes have been the primary point of assault, that speech could be more mission critical than any of the others. The New York Times’ Michael Shear is dubious. Yesterday, he asked, “Can Another Speech Really Help Obama?”

To meet the challenge, Mr. Obama will have to modulate the soaring rhetoric of his inaugural address—“In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come”—and come down to earth with specific plans to put the country back on track and Americans back to work.

His actions will have to speak louder than his words.

Christine O'Donnell Bolts CNN Interview

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 15:42:00 GMT

The Rules of the Game
By Jerry Weissman

Tea Party darling Christine O'Donnell, who tried and failed to win Joe Biden’s Delaware senate seat last year, did what all politicians eventually do, write a book. And, as all authors do, Ms. O’Donnell set about to promote Troublemaker, as the publication is aptly titled. One of her first stops was a one-on-one interview with the heir to Larry King’s CNN throne, Piers Morgan.

Mr. Morgan, who was groomed in the now-infamous British school of aggressive journalism, went right for the jugular, quizzing Ms. O’Donnell about her own infamous statements (made for posterity—and ready playback—on television) about witchcraft, abstinence, masturbation, and gay marriage. At first, she attempted to laugh off his questions by saying, “Let’s not go there,” but as Mr. Morgan persisted, she stiffened and defaulted to another line of defense, saying that her positions are covered in the book. Undeterred, Mr. Morgan pressed on: “You keep saying, ‘It’s in the book,’ I’m bemused at why you wouldn’t just say it in an interview if you say it in the book.” But she continued to duck his questions and, true to his bulldog form, he continued to ask them. Before long, Ms. O’Donnell accused her host of being rude and, not long after that, she stood up and walked off the set in the middle of the live broadcast.

The incident sent waves rippling through cyberspace and the media. Not unsurprisingly, it also vaulted Troublemaker to #2 in Amazon’s State and Local Government category—validating the classic media axiom, “The only bad publicity is no publicity.”

But the central publicity issue in the flap was Mr. Morgan’s having called Ms. O’Donnell on the gap between writing about her position and discussing it on air. By accepting an appearance to be interviewed, she is fair game has to be prepared for all manner of questions. Surely, her handlers had to have anticipated that any interviewer worth his salt—and Mr. Morgan is as salty as they get—would pursue the juiciest subjects. Apparently, her handlers did not and so, because Ms. O’Donnell couldn’t stand the heat, she had to get out of the kitchen.

Those are the rules of the game.

Kill Your Darlings

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 17:12:00 GMT

A Presentation Lesson from an Historian

by Jerry Weissman

Historian Amanda Foreman, the author of the bestselling Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, has written a new book, A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War. In an article for the Wall Street Journal’s “Word Craft” column, about her creative process, Ms. Foreman provided a valuable lesson for presenters:

The fruit of my 11 years of research meant that I had more than 400 characters scattered over four regions... This vast mass of material was so unwieldy that I could hardly work my way through the first day of the conflict, let alone all four years.

While few presenters spend 11 years developing their stories about their businesses, they, like Ms. Foreman, have a vast mass of unwieldy material that they have to communicate to various audiences. Unfortunately, most presenters then proceed to deliver that mass to their audiences as is, inflicting the dreaded effect known as MEGO or “My Eyes Glaze Over.”

Although Ms. Foreman is a respected scholar with a doctorate in history from Oxford University, she has storytelling in her DNA. He father was Carl Foreman, on Oscar-winning screenwriter who wrote the classic film The Bridge on the River Kwai. At the end of her research, Ms. Foreman realized that, even for a story as immense and complex as the Civil War, she had too much information for both reader and writer to process. Her solution:

I plotted the time lines of my 400 characters and identified and discarded people who, no matter how interesting their stories, had no connection to anyone else in the book. This winnowed my cast down to 197 characters, all bound to one another by acquaintance or one degree of separation.

Ms. Foreman was tapping into a practice—well-known among professional writers—called, “kill your darlings.” In fact, a community of writers in Atlanta has adopted that name for its website. The phrase is often attributed to Nobel Prize novelist William Faulkner, but it was actually coined by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, a British writer and critic who, in his 1916 publication, On the Art of Writing, said:

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

The sentiment was echoed by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the screenwriters of Captain America, the current Hollywood action film based on the 70 year-old comic strip character. In another Wall Street Journal “Word Craft” article, the team wrote:

Adapting an existing work for film is usually a process of reduction. Whether it's a novel or a short story, a true-crime tale or 70 years' worth of comic books, the first job is distillation. If this means losing someone's favorite character, so be it. The simple fact is that we can't put everything on the screen. Darlings must die

The phrase rings true because writers, who labor over their ideas and words like expectant mothers, invariably fall in love with their offspring and are reluctant to find fault, and even more reluctant to part with them. In the same manner, presenters who live, breathe, walk, and talk their businesses, want to share every last detail about them with their prospective audiences. But audiences do not share their interest, and so presenters, like writers, must kill their darlings.

In presentations, the process begins by assembling all your story elements. A chef prepares for a meal by gathering all the ingredients, seasonings, and utensils, but doesn’t use every last one of them. Once you have assembled all your presentation ingredients, assess every item for its relevance and importance to your audience—not to you. Your audience cannot possibly know your subject as well as you do, and so they do not need to know all that you do. Tell them the time, not how to build a clock. Delete, discard, omit, slice, dice, or whatever surgical method you chose to eliminate excess baggage. Be merciless. Retain only what your audience needs to know.

Once you have made that first cut, make another pass, and then another. Each time you do, you will see your draft with fresh eyes and find another candidate for your scalpel. Follow the advice of the classic Strunk and White’s The Elements o f Style: “It is always a good idea to reread your writing later and ruthlessly delete the excess.”

Bestselling horror novelist Stephen King—who knows a thing or two about ruthless killing—follows a similar practice. In his 2000 book On Writing, he shared a note his editor once sent to him:

You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%.

Deal with your vast mass of unwieldy material in your preparation, not in your presentation; behind the scenes, not in front of the room. A gentler way of saying “kill your darlings” is, “when in doubt, leave it out.”

Footnote: Amazon lists Ms. Foreman’s book at 1008 pages. Imagine how many more pages it would have run had she not killed those 203 characters.

The post also appears on Harvard Business Review online.

Pawlenty Drops Out

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 22:46:00 GMT

Spackle or Crackle
By Jerry Weissman

Thanks to Forbes’ own Quentin Hardy for his insightful comment on last Friday’s post about Tim Pawlenty’s negativity in a debate among Republican presidential candidates in Ames, Iowa. Not only did Mr. Hardy recommend what Mr. Pawlenty might have done differently—“The mistake he made, in my view, was not challenging her first in the specifics, then setting her aside to talk about his ‘real’ record,”— he also questioned the accuracy of Ms. Bachmann’s charges to which Mr. Pawlenty was reacting so negatively.

In support, Mr. Hardy pointed to Erza Klein’s article on the Washington Post blogsite:

Over and over again, Bachmann misstated basic facts. She said that Tim Pawlenty “implemented” cap-and-trade in Minnesota. He did no such thing. She said “we just heard from Standard Poor’s,” and “when they dropped our credit rating what they said was we don’t have an ability to repay our debt.” Simply not true.

S&P has never questioned our ability to repay our debt. That’s why we remain AA+. They have questioned whether political brinksmanship will stop us from paying our debt. The downgrade “was pretty much motivated by all of the debate about the raising of the debt ceiling,” said John Chambers, head of S&P’s sovereign ratings committee.

Two days after the debate, which was a prelude to Saturday’s Iowa Straw poll, Mr. Pawlenty placed a distant third in the voting behind frontrunner Ms. Bachmann and close second Ron Paul. The next morning, Mr. Pawlenty withdrew his candidacy. CNN reported that he told his staff, “We needed a boost from Ames that didn't happen."

What did happen in Ames was Mr. Pawlenty’s negative behavior in the debate, attacking Mitt Romney as well as Ms. Bachmann. What also happened in Ames was that Mr. Pawlenty tried to counter the recurring characterization that he lacks luster; a characterization implied by Maureen Dowd’s description of the Republican candidates in yesterday’s New York Times as “the sane ones are boring as spackle and the insane ones have crackle.” Mr. Pawlenty tried for crackle and end up with cranky. He tried to move beyond his natural style and overshot the mark.

All of which points to the vital importance in politics—and in all walks of life—of an assertive but positive style to express a clear and well-defined substance. Finding that balance is a challenge but, ever since the iconic 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate and escalating in importance ever since, presentation counts.

The road to November 6, 2012 will be paved with many lessons.

This post also appears on Forbes.com

Pawlenty versus Bachmann

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 15:45:00 GMT

The Gloves Come Off
By Jerry Weissman

In 1970, Vice President Spiro Agnew famously said, "In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.” Mr. Agnew was referring to the liberal media and their contentious relationship with the Nixon administration. Since then, driven by the broad reach of cable news channels and websites on both sides of the political fence, the contentiousness has escalated by an order of magnitude. With the presidential election 15 months away, we can only anticipate—and dread—how negative the campaign will be between Republicans and Democrats.

But the negativity has already begun within the Republican Party. Last night, in anticipation of Saturday’s straw poll in Iowa—and what will be the first direct indicator in the campaign—eight declared candidates met for a televised debate at Iowa State University. As expected, President Obama was the primary target of attack, but so were the Republicans at the other lecterns. In what the New York Times report characterized as “a burst of incivility,” the candidates went after each other. Most pointed was the one minute exchange between Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor and current Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann. Standing next to him, she cited three of his actions as governor that “sounds a lot more like Barack Obama.” Mr. Pawlenty’s counterattack included the following accusations:

“record of misstating”
“making false statements”
“The American people are going to expect more and demand more”
“She said she’s got a titanium spine; it’s not her spine we’re worried about, it’s her record of results.”
“If that’s your view of effective leadership with results, please stop, because you’re killing us.”

Negative statements have a way of taking on a life of their own. Spiro Agnew is long gone, but his words linger. So do the words of his running mate, Richard Nixon, and his infamous defense in the Watergate scandal, “I am not a crook.”

What if Mr. Nixon had said instead, “I am an honest man”?

This post also appears on Forbes.com

Obama and the S&P Downgrade

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:07:00 GMT

End Not with a Whimper but a Bang
by Jerry Weissman

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

The famous last line of Nobel-Prize winner T. S. Eliot’s 1925 poem, “The Hollow Men,” has become a modern catchphrase in both its original form above and its converse, “not with a whimper but a bang.” Mr. Eliot’s original intent was to express his view of the futility of life after World War I, but many other writers have since used the converse version in popular culture, in literature, music, art, and especially in politics to describe weak resolutions—as Dana Milbank did in his Washington Post line-by-line deconstruction of President Obama’s response to Standard and Poor’s downgrade of the U.S. credit rating:

“No matter what some agency may say, we’ve always been and always will be a AAA country,” Obama said, as if comforting a child who had been teased by the class bully.

[H]e revisited the same proposals he had previously offered to little effect: extending unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut, and spending more on infrastructure projects. This, he said, is “something we can do as soon as Congress gets back,” along with further deficit reduction. “I intend to present my own recommendations over the coming weeks,” he said. Over the coming weeks? As soon as Congress gets back?

“There will always be economic factors that we can’t control,” Obama said. Maybe. But it would be nice if the president gave it a try.

And as Maureen Dowd did in her New York Times column:

Obama’s response on Monday to Friday’s Standard & Poor’s downgrade and to the 22 Navy Seal commandos and 8 other soldiers killed by a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan was once more too little, too late. It was just like his belated, ineffectual response on the BP oil spill.

Seeking bangs not whimpers, Mr. Milbank and Ms. Dowd are echoing the critical sentiments of another former supporter of the president, Drew Westen, the subject of this previous post.

The quest for assertiveness as it pertains to writing was articulated by James J. Kilpatrick, a well-respected newspaper editor, columnist, author of several books, including The Writer’s Art. As reported by Ben Zimmer in his New York Times “On Language” column:

Kilpatrick’s appreciation of language was an aesthetic one. In his waning years, he gave Garner [Bryan Garner, the author of Garner’s Modern American Usage, and a stickler about language] this advice on ending a column: “End it on an accented syllable, preferably with a long vowel.” In other words, not with a whimper but a bang.

The aesthetic lesson for presenters is to end every phrase of your narrative by dropping your voice, the spoken equivalent of an accented syllable in writing. Dropping your voice in speech is the vocal equivalent of a period in writing. If you do not drop your voice, your forceful statements will sound like dubious questions—or like “Valley Girl Talk,” the subject of a prior blog. If instead, you drop your voice at the ends of your phrases, your statements will sound strong and assertive.

The rhetorical lesson for presenters is to punctuate your presentation with clear calls to action. Don’t assume that your audience will respond favorably to your pitch just because you give it. Be specific. To use the mantra of salespeople, “Ask for the order.”

The metaphorically-minded Mr. Eliot would be pleased to know that his famous phrase provides a double lesson for presenters.

This post also appears on Forbes.com.

Anti-PowerPoint Party

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 15:13:00 GMT

Another Precinct Heard From
by Jerry Weissman

Last month, a Swiss group calling themselves the Anti-PowerPoint Party launched their efforts—complete with a bright red octagonal STOP sign logo—and took their place in a long line of detractors that stretches back to 2003. The formal start of the criticism was the publication in Wired magazine of an article called “PowerPoint Is Evil: Power Corrupts, PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely” written by Edward R. Tufte, the noted graphics guru and professor emeritus of political science, computer science and statistics, and graphic design at Yale University.

Readers of this site will recall that I’ve often challenged Mr. Tufte’s opinions, most recently here, but the beating of PowerPoint goes on. My argument, simply and repeatedly stated, is to blame the penmanship, not the pen. A bad presentation is the fault of the user, not the tool.

To be flair, the Anti-PowerPoint Party does not fully advocate what its name implies. In fact, its goal, as stated on their home page is much more aligned with my argument:

We do not want to abolish PowerPoint*; we only want to abolish the PowerPoint*-CONSTRAINT.

We want that the number of boring PowerPoint* presentations on the planet to decrease and the average presentation to become more exciting and more interesting.

Nevertheless, the hue and cry of the Anti-PowerPoint Party was echoed by Lucy Kellaway, who writes the respected “Business Life” column for Financial Times. In her article on the launch, Ms. Kellaway advocated that “the APPP needs a terrorist faction, which would advocate cutting the wire in the middle of the table that connects the laptop to the projector…Better still would be to campaign for an outright ban.”

Even better still would be to campaign for a correction of user errors by banning the use of PowerPoint for anything but presentations (not send-aheads or leave-behinds) and to subordinate its use during presentations to support and illustration of the presenter’s narrative.

Joining this approach was a letter to the editors of Financial Times in response to Ms. Kellaway’s article. The letter was sent by Michael Baldwin, a presentation coach in New York who wrote:

In print cartoons, there is a dynamic relationship between the image and the caption that makes them—the good ones—both inseparable and unforgettable. With proper training, presenters can employ this same dynamic to produce memorable and convincing presentations.

Heed Mr. Baldwin’s metaphorical advice or your presentation will become a literal cartoon.

This post also appears on Indezine.

Obama and the Debt Crisis

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Actions Speak Louder than Words
by Jerry Weissman

As a presentations coach, I show archival videos as positive and negative role models to demonstrate what participants should and should not do when they present. Although most of my participants are business men and women, most of the videos are of political figures, such as The Kennedy-Nixon debate and public appearances by Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, both Presidents Bush, and Barack Obama.

This often prompts a question about how many politicians I have coached. My answer is, “Zero,” which often prompts a follow-up question, “Why not?” My answer to that question resonates with today’s headlines, and particularly with President Obama. “In order for any speech or presentation to succeed, it must have a single, well-defined, and clearly stated goal. My job as a coach is to help speakers and presenters define and express their goals; but it is difficult to do that with politicians because they are obliged to satisfy different constituencies and often end up compromising their messaging.”

Over the past weekend, two political commentators—one from the right and one from the left—took the president to task for that very shortcoming in the way he handled the debt crisis. Peggy Noonan made her critique in her weekly Wall Street Journal column:

The power of the president's oratory was always exaggerated. It is true that a good speech put him on the map in 2004 and made his rise possible…But speeches aren't magic. A speech is only as good as the ideas it advances. Reagan had good ideas. Obama does not. The debt-ceiling crisis revealed Mr. Obama's speeches as rhetorical kryptonite. It is the substance that repels the listener.

As a conservative columnist and a former speechwriter for President Reagan, Ms. Noonan’s position is understandable; but her opinion was echoed in the New York Times by Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University who identifies himself as, “a messaging consultant to nonprofit groups and Democratic leaders.” In his Op-Ed article, Professor Westen draws a distinction between the president’s acknowledged superior speaking style and the substance of his actions:

[H]e ran for president on two contradictory platforms: as a reformer who would clean up the system, and as a unity candidate who would transcend the lines of red and blue. He has pursued the one with which he is most comfortable given the constraints of his character, consistently choosing the message of bipartisanship over the message of confrontation.

Professor Westen went on to chastise President Obama because “history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise,” and urged him to take a strong, clear stand, just as President Franklin D. Roosevelt did in similar contentious economic circumstances:

Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right…In a 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden, he thundered, “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

As a presentations coach, I urge you to take a stand whenever you speak or present. In the sales arena, this is known as, “Ask for the order!”

Actions speak louder than words.

How to Survive an Attack

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

"That was certainly a downer!"
by Jerry Weissman

The annual shareholder meeting of Yahoo! Inc. in June was an "unlikely lovefest" — according to the report of the event in the New York Times — unlikely because the company's stagnant stock price and poor performance against its competitors would seem to have invited a more critical session. The lovefest carried through more than an hour of glowing outlook from the board and management as well as softball questions from the shareholders.

But then, a man called Steve Landry took the floor. Mr. Landry identified himself as a personal investor who also advised institutional investors holding more than a million shares of Yahoo! He then proceeded to attack the company in general and its Chief Executive Officer, Carol Bartz, in particular. Addressing her directly, he said, "It came out earlier this week in a blog that the board is secretly talking to other potential CEO candidates. I've heard similar details and believe that it's true." He then went on to say, "the last thing Yahoo needs is a lame duck CEO... The buyout talks of your contract need to start today and a search needs to be accelerated."

According to a transcript of the webcast, Ms. Bartz responded:

Thanks for your opinion, the bloggers and the rumors. What else? Wonderful — that was certainly a downer. So again, thank you for coming to Yahoo! We are working very, very hard in this company and managing our assets and we will see the benefit of that.

However, the reports of the exchange in the major financial press — the Times, Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and CNET — carried only the central phrase of Ms. Bartz' answer, "that was certainly a downer." This left readers with the impression that Mr. Landry's direct attack had damaged her.

While Ms. Bartz did the right thing in ending her answer on an upbeat note, but made two tactical errors at the front end of her response, both of which outweighed and therefore overshadowed her positive effort.

1. She failed to address the issue in the attack
2. She validated the negativity

Instead, Ms. Bartz should have said,

Yahoo!'s policy is not to comment on rumors and blogs. What I can tell you is that we are working very, very hard in this company and managing our assets and we will see the benefit of that.

These two issues provide larger lessons for how any presenter should handle tough questions.

1. Presenters have every right to take every opportunity to make positive statements about their companies, but they must first earn that right by addressing the central issue in the challenging question or statement. They may agree, disagree, admit, correct, or deny the issue, but presenters cannot leave it ignored. Yahoo!'s policy is not to comment on rumors and blogs.
2. Negative facts may be sad but true — Yahoo!'s stock price has been stagnant — and presenters can actually be forthright about it, but they cannot validate the negativity by letting it hang, twisting in space: that was certainly a downer.

Instead, presenters can admit to negative facts — so as to be transparent — but then, after a brief, very brief, admission, they must immediately follow it with an upbeat counterpunch. Yes, the stock price has been stagnant, but when you consider the outlook for the new products that you heard about today and the fact that we are working very, very hard in this company and managing our assets, I am confident that we will see the benefit of that.

Following the annual meeting, CNET reported that a Yahoo spokesperson emailed to say, "Rumors suggesting there is or has been any sort of search for a replacement to Carol are categorically untrue"

(This post first appeared on the Harvard Business Review blog site.)

How NOT to Manage a Crisis

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 16:18:00 GMT

First Impressions Last
By Jerry Weissman

In the past three months, Representatives David Wu (D-Oregon) and Anthony Weiner (D-New York) were forced to resign their congressional seats for inappropriate sexual behavior. Although each man had a different form of misconduct, each of them had two factors in common that provide a striking lesson in crisis management:

Both were caught by irrefutable incriminating evidence

Both made first responses to the charges that made matters worse

A local newspaper, the Oregonian, broke a story that Mr. Wu, who is 56, had an “unwanted sexual encounter” with an18-year old woman who left a distraught voice mail at his Portland office. Mr. Wu’s first response was a one-sentence statement: “This is very serious, and I have absolutely no desire to bring unwanted publicity, attention, or stress to a young woman and her family.” The entire statement was about what Mr. Wu would not do; a complete lack of action and culpability.

Andrew Breitbart, a conservative commentator and publisher, broke a story on his own website, Breitbart.com, that Mr. Weiner had sent lewd photos to women via his Twitter account. Mr. Weiner’s first response was that his account was hacked. The blame game.

Neither man learned the lesson of Watergate: never cover up. A cover up, when unraveled, only turns up more evidence because the press and the public dig deeper. The solution is the blinding flash of the obvious: take responsibility, admit guilt. Better sooner than later. Delay only results in more revelations that make the ultimate denouement even more devastating.

After three weeks of additional revelations and additional lewd photos, Mr. Weiner could no longer claim victimhood. He held a press conference to announce his resignation, “I am here today to again apologize for the personal mistakes I have made and the embarrassment I have caused.”

Four days after the Oregonian story, with Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and House minority leader, calling for an ethics investigation, Mr. Wu had no choice but to resign, “With great sadness, I therefore intend to resign effective upon the resolution of the debt ceiling crisis. This is the right decision for my family, the institution of the House, and my colleagues.”

Ironically, Mr. Wu had handled a very similar situation correctly seven years ago. In 2004, when he was running for re-election to a fourth term, the Oregonian learned that Mr. Wu had been charged with an unwanted sexual encounter when he was a student at Stanford University in 1976. At first, the report continued, “Wu refused interview requests related to the Stanford incident for months and hired an attorney who aggressively attacked the paper's reporting and sought to stop publication.” The stonewall defense. But when “the story ran three weeks before the 2004 election, Wu quickly apologized for his ‘inexcusable behavior’ and was re-elected.” The public approved his having taken responsibility.

As William Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, “truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long; a man's son may, but at the length truth will out.”

Go in the Right Direction

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:47:00 GMT

A Presentation Lesson from Akira Kurosawa
By Jerry Weissman

During his long and distinguished career, the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa pioneered many innovative cinematic techniques that are applicable to today’s presentation graphics. One is Mr. Kurosawa’s creative use of the Wipe, a filmic transition between scenes in which a new image slides across an existing image and replaces it—like a curtain being drawn across the screen.

In today’s fast-cut action films, the Wipe has fallen out of favor, but the effect is very useful in presentations where fast cuts can be jarring to an audience. More about speeds in a moment, but first let’s look at how Mr. Kurosawa used Wipes in his 1952 film, Ikiru.

Ikiru, which means “to live” in Japanese, is a story about a man dying of terminal cancer, and was inspired by The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a novel by Leo Tolstoy. Two current films, Biutiful and Beginners, deal with the same personal subject, but Mr. Kurosawa provided an extra dimension to his film by adding social commentary—and expressing his point of view with the Wipe effect.

The leading character in Ikiru is a career civil servant in post-World War II Japan where stultifying bureaucracy was weighing heavily on a Japanese society trying to recover and stabilize. To illustrate that situation, a group of mothers shows up at a government office to lodge a complaint about a sewage pond in their neighborhood, but the bureaucrats duck their responsibility by sending the mothers to another office, and then to another, and another, giving them the runaround.

Mr. Kurosawa depicts the runaround in a montage of 16 very short scenes, transitioning from one office to another with the Wipe effect. The first nine Wipes alternate left and right, but the last seven all move to the left. In an earlier post you read that, because audiences “read from left to right, you should design, animate, and display your presentation graphics so that—depending on the message you want to convey—your graphics follow or fight that predisposition. Movement to the right creates positive perceptions, movement to the left negative.”

In Ikiru, the crescendo of leftward moves builds to create a negative perception of the bureaucrats. Film historian Stephen Prince, who provided the commentary track on the Criterion Collection version of the film, called the montage “an assembly which is basically a Rogues’ Gallery of scoundrels.”

The lesson for presenters is, if you want to send a negative message, for instance, to discuss your competition, use the Wipe Left transition in PowerPoint. But if you want to create a positive perception of your own company, use the Wipe Right.

Now for a note about speed: In all the versions of PowerPoint prior to 2010, the Wipe Right transition was done with a hard edge and at a fast speed, creating that curtain-across-the-screen effect. In the 2010 version, the default for the Wipe Right transition is with a soft edge at a slower speed, creating the effect of a dissolve, and slowing down the transition. I am not recommending that you revert to the machine gun cutting that most of our movies use today; instead, use the Wipe Right as your preferred transition, but change the speed from the default of one second to a quarter of a second.

Give your audiences positive perceptions, not a Rogues’ Gallery of scoundrels.

Stage Fright

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

A Close Cousin of Writer’s Block

By Jerry Weissman

In the prior blog, you read about how the hero of the Hollywood film, Limitless, cures his writer’s block with a new drug that stimulates his creative capabilities. Concurrent with the film’s opening, a related article about creative paralysis appeared in the New Yorker magazine. Staff writer Dana Goodyear profiled Barry Michels, a real life therapist who treats blocked Hollywood screenwriters with his own unique methodology derived from the concepts of Jungian psychology.

Mr. Michels, whose starting rate is $365 an hour, also treats the stage fright that movie colony writers and other creative people face when they have to pitch their ideas—a subject near and dear to the solar plexus of every presenter. The presentation equivalent of stage fright is the pervasive fear of public speaking. Although Hollywood pitch meetings are anything but public; and Los Angeles is 3000 miles and a galaxy away from Wall Street, the angst is just as real and just as pervasive.

Mr. Michels, who works in tandem with his mentor, psychiatrist Phil Stutz, treat their clients with three techniques that they call:

Visualization
The Shadow
Dust

Ms. Goodyear described how Mr. Michels uses Visualization:

Patients are told to visualize things going horribly wrong, a strategy of “pre-disappointment”…[that] involves imagining yourself falling backward into the sun, saying “I am willing to lose everything” as you are consumed in a giant fireball, after which, transformed into a sunbeam, you profess, “I am infinite.”

Mr. Michels’ version of visualization is a 180° reverse of “guided imagery,” a technique used by mental health professionals to get their patients to think positive thoughts and direct their minds toward a relaxed or desired state.

Positive visualization is also used in sports where athletes envision successful outcomes: the racer crossing the finish line, the basketball going through the hoop, or the tennis ball landing in the perfect spot across the net. This technique took wing in the 40-year old bestseller, The Inner Game of Tennis, in which author W. Timothy Gallwey wrote, “Concentration is the act of focusing one’s attention. As the mind is allowed to focus on a single object, it stills.”

Mr. Michels considers the Shadow as:

…the occult aspect of the personality that Jung defined as “the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the contents of the personal unconscious.”

The Shadow is another negative point of view, as is Dust which:

…involves pretending that your audience is covered from head to toe in dust—“a nice, thick, two-inch coat of dust, like you’re going up into an attic and everything is covered, it’s been up there for eight months”

If Dust sounds familiar, it is. Mr. Michels and Mr. Stutz have coined a variation of a two-decade old presentation book called I Can See You Naked which recommended reducing the fear of public speaking by imagining the audience without clothes.

And if you’re beginning to see an unorthodox trend here, you’re not alone. In what has to be the understatement of the year, Ms. Goodyear observed, “Needless to say, neither therapist relates much to the wider analytic community, and both suspect that the techniques would be met with consternation.”

Nor do the techniques relate much to business community for one very simple reason: they ask their end users to apply imaginary solutions to real challenges. Business people require specificity: The “Show me” principle.

To overcome the fear of public speaking, presenters should focus on the tangible results of their efforts: how the audience is reacting to their presentation in real time. If presenters see nodding heads, they can continue; but if presenters see furrowed brows or perplexed looks, they must stop and adjust their content to clarify or explain what they have just said. This simple act will produce head nods, and this immediate visible change will diminishes the fear of failure that caused the stage fright in the first place.

In presentations, the endgame is a sea of nodding heads, not an image of the sun or a shadow or of a coat of dust. The only imaginary images are those of a bank of bright light bulbs going off over those bobbing heads, accompanied by a chorus of resounding “Ka-chings!”

See the cause and effect a change. “Show me the money!”

Rupert Murdoch’s 90% Apology

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 18:37:00 GMT

Who Did It?
by Jerry Weissman

In the wake of the phone hacking scandal that is rocking the foundation of his media empire, News Corp Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch issued an apology in a series of newspaper yellow; "advertisements on Saturday. The advertisements, headed “We are sorry,” went on to read:

We are sorry for the serious wrongdoing that occurred. We are deeply sorry for the hurt suffered by the individuals affected. We regret not acting faster to sort things out. I realise that simply apologising is not enough.

At first glance, the apology appears to take full responsibility—but not quite. Mr. Murdoch composed that first sentence, “We are sorry for the serious wrongdoing that occurred,” in the passive voice, a form of speech style common in reserved British culture (as common as the British spelling style of“realise” and “apologising”); but the form of speech is also used by public figures—particularly politicians—to duck responsibility, as you read in a prior post.

The passive voice omits the doer of the action. Mr. Murdoch’s sentence does not say who did the wrongdoing. If he had written instead, “We are sorry for the serious wrongdoing we committed,” he would have taken 100% responsibility.

Mr. Murdoch, who is Australian, is steeped in British culture. He is also a lifelong journalist who is fully-schooled in grammar. And he is a man faced with a very embarrassing public situation described by the New York Times headline of the story as: “Tentacles of Phone-Hacking Scandal Grow Tighter.”

Which raises two questions: which aspect of Mr. Murdoch’s character did his letter reflect, and what was his true intent?

Writer's Block

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

How to Break Through
by Jerry Weissman

Writer’s block is the proverbial stuff of legend and literature. The latest variation on the theme is Limitless, the Hollywood film starring Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro. In it, Mr. Cooper plays a down-and-out writer who beats his severe case of writer’s block with a new drug that not only jump starts his creative output, but gives him many other advanced mental capabilities. Of course, the story is fictional—A.O. Scott’s review of the film in the New York Times called it, “an energetic, enjoyably preposterous compound… a paranoid thriller blended with pseudo-neuro-science fiction and catalyzed by a jolting dose of satire”—but the situation is very real: writers do run dry.

Mr. Scott went on to list the many real attempts tortured writers have made to get past their paralysis: “Sharpen 10 pencils. Eat a sandwich. Pretend that the first chapter of your long-overdue opus is a casual letter to your grandmother. Weep quietly. Have another drink.”

However, creative block is not limited to aspiring and professional writers who are trying to craft their next article on deadline or write The Great American Novel. Presenters, too, are frequently faced with having to crank out their next great pitch. Their challenge is not as great as that of solitary writers staring at a blank computer screen, yellow legal pad, or sheet of paper. Presenters belong to a team—a business unit in a large company or a small start-up—and so they have access to their colleagues’ slide shows.

Therein lies the problem: Business people consider their presentations to exist primarily in PowerPoint. In fact, many companies amass an enormous, searchable database of slides for anyone in the organization to access. Enter “corporate strategy” and dozens of slides containing those words will download in an instant. The problems is then compounded when a presenter picks out what he or she thinks are the appropriate slides and then assembles them in an order that is meaningful to him or her—but only to him or her. The resultant aggregation is what is known as a “Frankendeck.”

It gets worse. Having to rely on a set of disparate slides created by others, the presenter reads the slides verbatim to the audience. The inevitable result is a train wreck.

The problem with this method of preparation is that it starts in middle of the creative process and then jumps to the end, skipping several important steps along the way.

A simple solution is to begin at the end instead.

“Whoa!” readers of this blog may be thinking. In an earlier post I referenced Pulitzer Prize writer John McPhee who, in a Wall Street Journal column titled, “Writing a Strong Lead Is Half the Battle,” recommended starting at the beginning. A contradiction?

No, by beginning with the objective of your presentation and not with the slides, the entire story has an overarching focus. Then, still working without slides, follow these next steps:

Analyze your audience and how they will react to your objective
Brainstorm ideas that support your objective and address your audience’s needs
Identify the key ideas and discard the irrelevant ones
Organize the key ideas into a logical flow

Only then are you ready to design slides that serve their sole purpose: to illustrate the key ideas.

This step-by-step process is a prescription not for a drug but a solution that will enable you to realize your own creative process—and create winning presentations.

In the next post, you’ll read about a close cousin of writer’s block: stage fright.

Retrospective

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

In observance of Independence holiday, we are taking a break and offering you a second look at prior post. We’ve chosen a classic: An analysis of President Obama’s historic Inaugural Address. Next week, you will read a fresh post titled “Writer’s Block.”

Obama, Aristotle, and Fred Astaire

An accomplished orator, and Barack Obama is a very accomplished orator, has at his disposal a repertory of classic rhetorical devices—dating back to Aristotle—to enhance the expression of ideas in a speech. Our new president’s eloquence was best described by the chief book critic of The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, “his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have … endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas…to persuade and uplift and inspire.”

In The Power Presenter, I described several tropes he has used throughout his ascent to the presidency. It should come as no surprise then that he turned to some of them again for his high profile Inaugural Address. Read more…

Misdirection

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Musicians and Graphics
by Jerry Weissman

Believe it or not, a new documentary called Make Believe, about a group of teenagers who compete in a championship competition for magicians in Las Vegas, offers a lesson in how to display presentation graphics. The film focuses in on one of the most fundamental techniques used in magic: misdirection, or getting the audience to look in one direction while the magician performs a trick in the other direction. Magicians create misdirection in a variety of ways, but they are all based on the reflexive action of the audience’s eyes—to look at new visual information involuntarily.

Presenters often inadvertently misuse this reflexive action of their audiences’ eyes because of one of the most commonly-held false beliefs about presentations: that if presenters turn to look at their slides, they will appear to be unsure of their own content. However, if a presenter does not turn to look at a new slide, but continues to look at the audience, the audience will become conflicted. Their optic reflexes will force them look at the new image involuntarily. At the same time, the audience will also feel compelled to return the presenter’s gaze. Driven by these two opposing impulses, the audience’s eyes will rapidly shuttle back and forth between the screen and the presenter in confusion.

The difference between the false belief and neurological fact can be described as business school or B-School thinking versus C-School, for cinema, thinking. B-School teaches students to demonstrate assuredness; C-School teaches students to be cognizant of human sensory perception. Cinematographers and film editors understand the powerful subconscious physiological and psychological forces that impact audiences. These professionals play to these dynamics; they shoot and edit sequences to create positive or negative feelings to depict action as needed. In presentations, you want to create only positive feelings in your audiences.

Therefore, as a presenter, the instant a new slide appears, you must turn to look at the screen. As a matter of fact, turn to look at the screen with every click of every slide. Every time you turn to the screen, your movement will lead your audience turn to look where you are looking. Both you and your audience will arrive at the identical point in your presentation, in synchronization.

In the Wall Street Journal review of Make Believe, film critic Joe Morgenstern wrote “In magic, as distinct from filmmaking, misdirection is a good thing.” To which I add, in presentations, misdirection is a bad thing. Always turn to look at your screen.

(This post first appeared on the Harvard Business Review blog site.)

From Bogart to Gingrich

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 07:18:00 GMT

Who Did It?
by Jerry Weissman

One of the best moments in the classic 1942 film, Casablanca, is a scene between Rick, the owner of a nightclub in Casablanca, played by Humphrey Bogart, and Captain Renault, the commander of the French forces in the city, played by Claude Raines. At the time of the film’s setting, during the early days of World War II, allegiances and political positions were, at best, guarded. Each of the characters in the film has a skeleton in the closet and each of them is reluctant to reveal any information—as this exchange between Rick and Captain Renault demonstrates:

Captain Renault: What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?
Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Captain Renault: The waters? What waters? We're in the desert.
Rick: I was misinformed.

The exchange also demonstrates the passive voice, the form of speech in which the doer of the action is not stated. Who misinformed Rick? And how could he possibly have come to the desert seeking waters? This verbal dodge serves Mr. Bogart’s character and any deep dark motives or secrets he wants to conceal, but it doesn’t serve presenters because this form of speech sounds evasive.

In certain spheres, the passive voice is actually the preferred form of expression:

Science. To avoid ego and maintain objectivity: “Further analysis showed…”
Social. To avoid direct conflict: “An offense was taken…”
Politics. To avoid responsibility: “Mistakes were made”

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan, who had avoided commenting on a sensitive political subject—the involvement of his administration in the Iran–Contra scandal—finally agreed to address the subject in a press conference. The headlines in the next day’s newspapers carried his key statement: “Mistakes were made.”

But the president didn’t say who made the mistakes.

Ten years later, President Bill Clinton, who had avoided commenting on a sensitive subject—the involvement of his administration in improper fundraising activities—finally agreed to address the subject in a press conference. The headlines in the next day’s newspapers carried his key statement: “Mistakes were made.”

But he didn’t say who made them.

Ten years later, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, in a press conference on a sensitive political subject: the dismissals of eight federal prosecutors, acknowledged that “mistakes were made.”

But he didn’t say who made them. History repeats itself.

This year, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, in anticipation of announcing his candidacy for the 2012 presidential campaign, sat down for an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network. In response to a question about his earlier extramarital affairs, Mr. Gingrich replied, “There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life (Italics mine) that were not appropriate.”

In his use of the passive voice, Mr. Gingrich shifted the responsibility for his inappropriate things—his extramarital affairs—away from himself and to his work.

The public has learned to endure such equivocations from politicians. Mr. Reagan, Mr. Clinton, Mr. Gonzales, Mr. Gingrich, and generations of politicians before and after them use the passive voice to protect their associates, their constituencies, and themselves. In business, where accountability is paramount, sentences formed in the passive voice are not acceptable; they remove the doer of the action, and with it, remove the presenter from any responsibility or culpability for the action, whether bad or good.

In a New York Times article about the passive voice in politics, William Schneider, a political guru, noted, “…that Washington had contributed a new tense to the language. ‘This usage,’ he said, ‘should be referred to as the past exonerative.’”

This is not meant to be a lesson in syntax, but a lesson in psychology. The difference between the passive voice and the active voice is subtle in grammar, but profound in impact in speech. Avoid the former; use the latter. Put the doer into your sentences.
Become a power presenter.

In the Moment

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

By Guest Blogger: Rob Wishnowsky

Bored, distracted and clearly wishing he was anywhere else but here, the checkout clerk gamely tried to pronounce my surname as he told me that my discount card had saved me $2.13. Then he wished my left shoulder a nice day as he swiveled to repeat the identical ritual with the next person in line.

He’d obviously been trained to use his customer’s last name, probably because some research had shown that using customers’ names increases repeat business. It would be fascinating to see research that measured repeat sales when checkout clerks truly connected with their customers.

Unfortunately, connection is hard enough to describe, let alone measure.

Connection is eye-meets-eye, and heart-meets-heart. It is looking into someone. And being in the moment with someone means engaging him or her, to the exclusion of all else. When you next present to an audience try connecting at this level: one mind at a time; one heart at a time. No extraneous thoughts. No regrets over what has been. No anticipation of what is to come. In that moment imagine there are no others in the room; just the two of you.

Of course you, and the person with whom you’re connecting, will want you to move on before the connection becomes awkward. So, end your connection at a logical point – at the end of a phrase, on your next click, or as you complete a thought. You’ll find that shorter connection is appropriate for those who are seated very close to you. Sometimes the connection is as brief as a few words. But as you deliver those few words, connect with that person as though he or she is the only soul on the planet.

Will this feel awkward for you as presenter? Yes! It’s not at all natural to be in solid eye contact with people almost all of the time. But from your audience’s point of view it will feel perfectly natural, since each person in your audience is getting only a period of eye contact with you before you pause and connect with someone else.

Once you’ve tried this a few times, advance to the next level. Care about the person you’re connecting with;warm to them as you connect. Care about them even if their eyes are glued to their Blackberry. Connection and caring melt that glue. Try it. You’ll be amazed.

She smiled and looked into me as I looked into her. Our hearts met for a moment. The rest of the world disappeared. Her lips formed my name. I’d saved only $1.15, but I knew that I’d be back…

Rob Wishnowsky is the founder of Cruxio, a company that helps executives get to the crux of their story.

Mark Twain's Fingernails

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 13:55:00 GMT

How to Remember What to Say
by Jerry Weissman

Moonwalking With Einstein, the current bestselling book by Joshua Foer, deals with a subject close to the pounding hearts and minds of every public speaker or presenter: how to remember what to say. Speakers and presenters rely on a number of devices—from low-end three-by-five index cards to expensive high-end teleprompters—to aid their memories, but Mr. Foer offers an even higher end and lower cost technique: visual imagery, or associating a diverse list of subjects with a series of related physical objects.

Mr. Foer’s take on mnemonics is only the latest variation of a method that goes all the way back to Cicero, the first century Roman philosopher, statesman, and orator. In Rome today, the tour guides at the ruins of the Roman Forum tell of how Cicero and his contemporaries spoke for hours on end without any notes. Paper—which would not be invented until two hundred years later in China—was not available to the Romans orators, and so they used the marble columns of the forum as memory triggers. Each column represented a single subject and its related ideas. As the orators delivered their speeches, they strode from column to column and subject to subject, using the visual prompts to remind them of a group of related ideas.

Over the years, this technique has morphed into the popular (over 70,000 entries on the Internet) “Roman Room” memory method, in which physical objects inside a room serve the same associative purpose as the open air columns of the ancient Roman Forum.

Mr. Foer’s book drew the interest of Maureen Dowd of the New York Times who delved into the subject and found two other writers and their memory aids:

Mark Twain, who “once wrote the first letter of topics that he wanted to cover in a lecture on his fingernails.”

England’s Ed Cooke, the author of Remember, Remember and a Roman Room devotee who recommends, “If you have a list to remember, you put the items in a path throughout a familiar place, like your childhood home.”

Mr. Cooke, who is also the co-founder of Memrise, a blog site about memory, even related the technique directly to presentations. In a 2008 article in London’s Guardian, he wrote:

Begin by reducing your talk to, let's say, 20 bullet-points…Write out your points in order. Now find an image that captures each point. To remember that the pound is losing ground on the dollar, you could imagine George Bush beating up Gordon Brown with a wad of dollar bills. If you wish to remember that 90% of women are at a disadvantage in the workplace, you might imagine a 90-year-old woman carrying a heavy weight. Then arrange your images on a route around a familiar space. So the Bush-Brown scenario could go in your bathroom sink, the granny could go in your shower, and the next 18 images could be arranged sequentially in a route around your home.

In my version of Mr. Cooke’s advice, I go back to Cicero and recommend that speakers and presenters cluster the diverse components of their pitches into a few conceptual Roman columns, or main themes, and then to represent those ideas in simple PowerPoint slides designed under the Less Is More principle. The memory prompt then comes from a specific image rather than from an imaginary physical layout.

CFOs, with their usual attention to detail and concern about forward-looking statements, often prepare their presentations as complete text on paper or on slides, and then they read or try to memorize the words. Those approaches force the CFO—and any presenter—to stay connected to the text and disconnected from the audience.

One CFO showed up for his coaching session at my company with his presentation written out in full sentences. I asked him to reduce each sentence to a four-word bullet and to speak from that. He did and it flowed. Then I asked him to reduce each four-word bullet to one word and to speak from that. He did and it flowed. Then I asked him to speak without any text. He did and it flowed. We then put the four-word bullets on the slides and he delivered his pitch directly to the audience and it flowed.

Of course, you can always skip the PowerPoint slides and, like Mark Twain, write the first letter of each of your subjects on your fingernails or, like Sarah Palin, write notes on your palm, or default to those old standby three-by-five index cards; but then, every time you glance down—like a detail-oriented CFO—you will not only disconnect from your audience, you will also appear to be unsure about what to say and diminish your credibility.

Better to go with Cicero’s columns and PowerPoint.

Valley Girl Talk

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Invisible Question Marks

One of the most familiar quotes from the Bible is, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

Unfortunately, legions of men—and women—have not followed the Biblical progression: they have become adults, but they still speak as children. They punctuate and malign their speech with repeated insertions of “like” and “you know?” But their most egregious and pervasive quirk is the sing-song pattern of their childhood. They speak their declarative sentences with rising inflection at the ends, forming questions rather than statements.

The effect is also known as “Valley Girl Talk.”

Taylor Mali, a spoken-word performer, voiceover artist, and poet captured this juvenile speech pattern in a clever poem called “Totally like whatever, you know?” The first stanza reads like this:

In case you hadn't noticed,
it has somehow become uncool
to sound like you know what you're talking about?
Or believe strongly in what you're saying?
Invisible question marks and parenthetical (you know?)'s
have been attaching themselves to the ends of our sentences?
Even when those sentences aren't, like, questions? You know?

Mr. Mali’s poem was turned into an equally clever video called “Typography” by Ronnie Bruce in which the visual artist accompanies Mr. Mali’s words with animated fonts. And Mr. Mali’s voice reciting the poem on the soundtrack gives perfect expression to the rising inflection he disdains by ending his sentences with what he calls “Invisible question marks.”

The remedy for Valley Girl Talk is to drop the voice at the end of sentences—in spoken language, at the ends of phrases—thus parsing the logic of the phrases. Dropping the voice to punctuate the phrases creates a crisp, clear, and adult cadence. Cadence in speech is like rhythm in music. Think of the main theme of Beethoven’s great Fifth Symphony and its famous pattern of three short notes followed by a long one:

Bam-Bam-Bam BAM.

From the sublime of Beethoven to the mundane, the universally familiar “Shave and a haircut … two bits.” The rhythmic snippet is often expressed without words, as a knock on a door composed of five short notes followed by two long ones:

Bam-Bam-Bam-Bam-bam, BAM, BAM.

Try rapping your knuckles on your desk with just the five short notes…

It sounds incomplete, doesn’t it? The final raps resolve the musical phrase, just as dropping the voice in speech resolves the spoken phrase.

Readers of The Power Presenter will recognize this skill as “Complete the Arc;” the arc is the logic of the phrase, and the completion is the falling inflection that adds the BAM, BAM to your words—and puts away childish things.

(Thanks to A. Gino Giglio for the link to Taylor Mali)

Jon Stewart’s Right

Fri, 27 May 2011 14:37:00 GMT

Positioned on Purpose?
By Jerry Weissman

We’re pleased to present blog five of five consecutive blogs about presentation design, and we are proud to announce that Indezine, a website dedicated to PowerPoint, is running this series concurrent with ours.

'No, not Jon Stewart’s right as in “correct;” and, given the liberal point of view of the host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, certainly not as in “right wing.” I’m referring to Jon Stewart’s right side where he shows the video clips of people and events he satirizes or mocks. Is this positioning arbitrary or intentional?

In previous blogs, you read that, because audiences in Western cultures read from left to right, you should design, animate, and display your presentation graphics so that—depending on the message you want to convey—your graphics follow or fight that predisposition. Movement to the right creates positive perceptions, movement to the left negative.

In Microsoft PowerPoint animation, the left and right movements occur in two general options: between slides (Slide Transition) and within a slide (Custom Animation). Although the direction of movement is the same in each option, each has a different nomenclature. Movement to the right in Slide Transition is called “Wipe Right;” movement to the right in Custom Animation is called “Wipe from Left.” Because your audiences’ eyes are accustomed to the left-to-right movement, make your default animation follow that same natural movement.

Movement to the left in Slide Transition is called “Wipe Left;” movement to the left in Custom Animation is called “Wipe from Right.” Use this counter-intuitive effect when you want to send a negative message such as the shortcomings of competing products, past problems your company has conquered, or market forces that pose major obstacles for your industry.

Moreover, whenever you present, be sure that the screen on which you display your slide show—whether a large projection screen or a small laptop—is located to your left as you face your audience. This positioning creates the familiar left-to- right movement for your audience. Every time you click to a new slide, their eyes will travel from you to your words and images in a smooth, fluid movement. If you present with the screen to your right, every new slide will cause your audience to make a resistant move to the left that would force them to read your words backwards.

Jon Stewart positions the images of the targets of his humor to his right, forcing his audiences to move to the left—with friction—to see the images. Friction in the movement produces a fractious perception.

Is this positioning arbitrary or intentional? Is Jon Stewart sending us a message?

To use the words of one of his favorite targets, “You betcha’!”

SPECIAL OFFER: Order Jerry Weissman's new book, Presentations in Action, between May 20 and June 10 to receive a free copy of the In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions DVD and 40% off another Weissman publication from FT Press.

PowerPoint and Movie Stunts

Fri, 27 May 2011 01:55:00 GMT

Use Graphics to Create Continuity
by Jerry Weissman

We’re pleased to present the fourth of five consecutive blogs about presentation design, and to announce that Indezine, a website dedicated to PowerPoint, is running this series concurrent with ours.

Cinema and presentation graphics, although miles apart in complexity, share many common aspects. One is movie stunts. Matt Zoller Seitz, a freelance film critic, wrote an article about movie stunts on Salon that provides a valuable lesson in presentation design. Mr. Seitz noted that the latest cinema technologies, while creating imaginative and exciting action, have lost the important element of continuity. He wrote that the modern movie “seeks to excite viewers by keeping them perpetually unsettled with computer-enhanced images, fast cutting and a camera that never stands still.” As a result, he claimed, the film denies “the viewer a fixed vantage point on what’s happening to the characters.”

In contrast, Mr. Seitz cited a 100-year old silent film of a man jumping out of a burning hot air balloon into the Hudson River. Although the film itself is lost, the key shot lives on in a Topps bubble gum card. The point of Mr. Seitz’s historic reference is that the image is “a sustained wide shot that showed the diver in relation to the balloon and the Hudson River,” thus providing context for the action and for the viewer. If that scene were shot today, he added, “We'd more likely see a flurry of shots, only one of which showed us the big picture.”

The operative words above are “in relation to.” In today’s films, computer animation and fast cutting move the story along so quickly, audiences overlook or are unaware of the lack of context. In today’s pitches, presenters hurriedly cobble together a set of their company’s existing slides, giving their presentations s a one-after-another sequencing, in which no slide has any relationship to the preceding or following slides—and therefore no continuity for the presenter or the audience. At first, an audience might try to figure out what one slide has to do with another but, after a very short while, they give up and turn their attention to their smart phones.

One solution is for the presenter to make verbal links between slides; another is to create continuity in the slide design using a technique called Anticipation Space. In the slide below, you see two boxes side-by-side, one filled and one empty—the empty box creates a sense of anticipation.

When the empty box is filled with a set of parallel items, it sends the message that your company’s solution fulfills every requirement.

Anticipation Space creates relationships, continuity, and much more: it makes your presentation easy for your audience to follow. So easy, they might even look up from their smart phones.

Tomorrow's post will be Jon Stewart’s Right: Positioned on Purpose?

SPECIAL OFFER: Order Jerry Weissman's new book, Presentations in Action, between May 20 and June 10 to receive a free copy of the In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions DVD and 40% off another Weissman publication from FT Press.

The Graphics Spectrum

Wed, 25 May 2011 14:11:00 GMT

Lives of Quiet Desperation
by Jerry Weissman

We’re pleased to present the third of five consecutive blogs about presentation design, and to announce that Indezine, a website dedicated to PowerPoint, is running this series concurrent with ours.

In 1845, the American author, philosopher, and naturalist Henry David Thoreau felt the need to get away from it all. He sequestered himself at an idyllic lake in the Berkshire Mountains for two years and wrote Walden; or Life in the Woods in which he famously observed, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Mr. Thoreau’s words are applicable to business people today who lead lives of not-so-quiet desperation every time they have to make a presentation. Of all the many reasons for their desperation—time pressure, workload, and the fear of failure—perhaps the most pressing is the self-imposed practice of using their PowerPoint slides as not only the presentation graphics, but also as speaker notes, send-aheads, and leave-behinds. This multitasking approach produces images of encyclopedic detail that serve none of the functions. This bane of presenters has become a boon for another constituency: professional designers and authors who offer solutions to help business people create simple, expressive, and purely illustrative graphical images. The best of the breed is Garr Reynold’s marvelous book, Presentation Zen, which offers readers design concepts based on the principles of Japanese minimalism.

These polar opposites of the graphics spectrum leave a large underserved area in the middle made up of presenters who want to break away from those encyclopedic slides but find Mr. Reynold’s Zen ideal is too far a reach for them. At one end of the spectrum, some presenters protest, “But I’m not a designer!” At the other end, others protest, “We don’t have the time to do that!”

For that large majority, here is a simple set of guidelines for the two most basic types of garden variety graphics used in presentations today: bullet slides and bar charts.

The guiding principles of this simple but effective bullet slide can be summarized in four bullets:

• Consider every line as a headline and not a sentence
• Avoid wordwrap by restricting every item to one line
• Start each line with the same grammatical part of speech: verbs, modifiers, etc.
• Distribute all the lines proportionally

The guiding principles of this simple but effective bar chart can be summarized in four bullets:

• Omit the y-axis and place the numbers directly on the bars
• Represent the legend in legible font size
• Use color-coded large labels
• Make it easy for your audience by minimizing their search

Or to paraphrase the last bullet in terms that Mr. Thoreau would appreciate, help your audience to lead lives free of desperation.

Tomorrow's post will be PowerPoint and Movie Stunts: Use Graphics to Create Continuity.

SPECIAL OFFER: Order Jerry Weissman's new book, Presentations in Action, between May 20 and June 10 to receive a free copy of the In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions DVD and 40% off another Weissman publication from FT Press.

Signage versus Documents

Tue, 24 May 2011 16:26:00 GMT

Drive Your PowerPoint Home
by Jerry Weissman

We’re pleased to present the second of five consecutive blogs about presentation design, and to announce that Indezine, a website dedicated to PowerPoint, is running this series concurrent with ours.

American Apparel, Staples, Knoll Furniture, and Lufthansa Airlines all share a common denominator with the New York subway system: each of these diverse organizations uses the same popular typeface in its signage: Helvetica. A book called Helvetica and the New York City Subway System describes why their decision makers chose the font style:

For years, the signs in the New York City subway system were a bewildering hodge-podge of lettering styles, sizes, shapes, materials, colors, and messages. The original mosaics (dating from as early as 1904), displaying a variety of serif and sans serif letters and decorative elements, were supplemented by signs in terracotta and cut stone... Efforts to untangle this visual mess began in the mid-1960s, when the city transit authority hired the design firm Unimark International to create a clear and consistent sign system. We can see the results today in the white-on-black signs throughout the subway system, displaying station names, directions, and instructions in crisp Helvetica.

Helvetica is best suited for signage because it is a sans serif font which, with its clean, straight strokes, commands attention. In fact, sans serif is used for two of the most universally familiar signs: EXIT and STOP.

Serif font, with little hooks at the ends of the lines, is better suited for text documents because the hooks help a reader’s eyes to distinguish individual letters.

This distinction was validated in a book called Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaenev, a neuroscientist at the Collège de France in Paris. In a review of the book for the Wall Street Journal, Jonah Lehrer, the author of the newspaper’s “Head Case” column, explained why raising the bar of difficulty in visual information improves retention.

Unusual sentences with complex clauses and odd punctuation tend to require more conscious effort, which leads to more activation in the dorsal pathway. All the extra cognitive work wakes us up; we read more slowly, but we notice more. Psychologists call this the "levels-of-processing" effect, since sentences that require extra levels of analysis are more likely to get remembered.

The point here for presenters is to draw an indelible boundary between documents that are meant to be read and graphics that are meant to illustrate. If you are creating a document, by all means use the “unusual sentences with complex clauses and odd punctuation” that Mr. Lehrer described. And use serif font.

But if you are creating presentation graphics, treat the text in your slides as signage or headlines. Look at any newspaper or magazine and you’ll see that headlines are composed mainly of key words such as nouns, verbs, and modifiers, with very few articles, conjunctions, and prepositions; the latter are only needed for complete sentences in reading text.

Unlike readers of text, your presentation audiences cannot process your ideas if you assault their eyes with dense information on your slides. And unlike readers, your presentation audiences must process not only what you are showing but simultaneously what you are saying. Their eyes, ears and, ultimately, their brains go into sensory overload. Instead, compose the text in your slides as headlines and do so in sans serif font—then provide the body text in your narrative.

You are the presentation; your slides are the signage.

Tomorrow's post will be The Graphics Spectrum: Lives of Quiet Desperation

SPECIAL OFFER: Order Jerry Weissman's new book, Presentations in Action, between May 20 and June 10 to receive a free copy of the In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions DVD and 40% off another Weissman publication from FT Press.

Why Use PowerPoint at All?

Mon, 23 May 2011 14:24:00 GMT

Retention is 67% Visual
by Jerry Weissman

We’re pleased to present the first of five consecutive blogs about presentation design, and to announce that Indezine, a website dedicated to PowerPoint, is running this series concurrent with ours.

Considering the universal condemnation by critics, audiences, and even by presenters themselves, why would anyone use PowerPoint? The software—and its usage—have developed a negative reputation, ranging from the common epithet, “Death by PowerPoint,” to the pointed opinions of Edward Tufte, the well-known graphics guru and author of The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint in which he contends that “PowerPoint routinely disrupts and trivializes content.”

After all, the most memorable speeches of history did not use PowerPoint.

• Cicero’s orations in the Roman Forum
• Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
• Winston Churchill’s World War II rally to arms
• Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights speech
• John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address
• Ronald Reagan’s “Tear down the Berlin Wall” speech
• Barack Obama’s Cinderella speech

So why, indeed, would anyone use PowerPoint? The simple answer lies in the aphorism, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Those familiar words are backed by a wide array of scientific evidence. One of the most thorough is an HP publication titled, “The Power of Visual Communication,”—which cites nine learned sources, among them Mr. Tufte—and concludes that:

Recent research supports the idea that visual communication can be more powerful than verbal communication, suggesting in many instances that people learn and retain information that is presented to them visually much better than that which is only provided verbally.

Even more to the (Power) point is the opinion of Stephen M. Kosslyn, the author of the popular book, Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations, based on his work at the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. As Dr. Kosslyn put it in one of his academic studies:

The timeworn claim that a picture is worth a thousand words is generally well-supported by empirical evidence, suggesting that diagrams and other information graphics can enhance human cognitive capacities in a wide range of contexts and applications.

The newest guru of visual expression is Hans Rosling, a Swedish medical doctor and statistician, whose revolutionary methodology electrified the high profile TED conference and made him an instant media and talk circuit rock star. Ten thousand words would not be adequate to describe his technique, so see for yourself in this YouTube video. A New York Times article about Dr. Rosling described the impact of his graphics:

The goal of information visualization is not simply to represent millions of bits of data as illustrations. It is to prompt visceral comprehension, moments of insight that make viewers want to learn more.

This is not to say that you should attempt to scale Dr. Rosling’s heights. In fact, he developed his own specialized Trendalyzer software (that you can download from his site for free), but to be inspired by his simple yet animated approach to depicting statistics. Be inspired even more by his “Five Hints for a Successful Bubble Presentation” that he offers with the download. Especially his second hint:

Explain what is shown on the vertical and horizontal axis by color and size of bubble before you start moving the bubble.

In that one sentence, even Dr. Rosling, his dynamic software notwithstanding, validates the primacy of the presenter over even his graphics.

Now you know not only why, but how to use PowerPoint.

Tomorrow's post will be Signage versus Documents: Drive Your PowerPoint Home

SPECIAL OFFER: Order Jerry Weissman's new book, Presentations in Action, between May 20 and June 10 to receive a free copy of the In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions DVD and 40% off another Weissman publication from FT Press.

Eight Presentations a Day

Wed, 18 May 2011 15:29:00 GMT

Cause and Effect
by Jerry Weissman

Every year, for the past 40 years, the American Electronics Association, under the auspices of TechAmerica, holds its Classic Financial Conference at which more than 1,800 technology companies and more than 6,000 investors come together in one venue. Presenting companies deliver 8 to 10 iterations of their corporate pitch in one day, giving existing investors multiple opportunities to get updates on their holdings and potential investors multiple opportunities to learn about new businesses.

One of the presenters at the most recent conference was Noland Granberry, the CFO of Silicon Image, Inc., a public company that is a leading provider of advanced, interoperable connectivity solutions for consumer electronics, mobile, and PC markets. Over the course of his eight presentations, Mr. Granberry experienced a progressive dynamic that provides a helpful lesson for any presenter.

As he delivered each iteration of his corporate pitch, Mr. Granberry felt his comfort zone increase, resulting in what he believed to be a smoother delivery; he also felt he portrayed his company more confidently and authoritatively. This progressive evolution also produced another benefit:

At the end of each presentation at the AEA conference, each presenter opens to the floor to questions. As a matter of course, most investors ask challenging questions—after all, they want to be sure that their investment is in good hands. Mr. Granberry got his share of challenging questions in his sessions, but he noticed that, as they day wore on, the questions became less challenging—in direct proportion to the improvement in his presentation delivery.

Think about that: Mr. Granberry delivered the identical content each of the eight times and nothing changed but his delivery. He had experienced—in real time—the power of Verbalization, a rehearsal method of speaking the presentation aloud multiple times.

Unfortunately, most presenters bypass any rehearsal at all. If they do rehearse, they either mumble, “Blah, blah, blah…” or they talk about their presentation, “On this slide, I’ll discuss…” Neither of these methods is Verbalization. Verbalization means delivering the presentation in rehearsal as if there were an actual audience in the room, “Good morning. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to…”

This powerful—and yet underutilized—practice technique clarifies the words and the flow of the content, giving presenters the assurance to present with conviction. If you prepare, practice, and deliver your presentation thoroughly, you can not only present your story more effectively, you can also diminish the challenges in your Q&A session.

You can control your own destiny.

Obama Gets Back on Message

Wed, 11 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

by Jerry Weissman

We are proud to announce that this blog post appears simultaneously in a new column on Forbes.

Marcus Porcius Cato (234 BC - 149 BC), a senator in the glory days of the Roman Empire, was of the firm belief that his country should attack rival Carthage (Tunisia today). So persistent was Cato, he concluded every speech in the senate—regardless of the subject—with the phrase, “Ceterum censeo, Carthaginem esse delendam,” meaning, “Furthermore, I think Carthage must be destroyed.” Cato’s perseverance paid off: Rome finally launched the Third Punic War and did indeed destroy Carthage. Message repetition is also one of the fundamental techniques of:

Advertising: Slogans
Education: Rote learning
Music and Theater: Rehearsals and dress rehearsals
Military: “Hut-two-three-four! Hut-two-three four!”
Training: Practice makes perfect

However, today’s politicians—for whom messaging is a matter of public life or death—find it difficult to stay on message for one very simple reason: their diverse constituencies have conflicting agendas. As a result, politicians characteristically try to be all things to all people and end up satisfying none.

Witness President Obama’s vacillating positions on the uprisings in Egypt and Libya. Pardon the play on words, but the shifting sands of both of those North African revolutions caused him to equivocate on his foreign policy. But the president finally got back on message with his domestic policy, and the timeline of how he did that provides a lesson for speakers and presenters.

In the 2008 presidential race, Mr. Obama hammered home his campaign slogan, “Change We Can Believe In,” so often and so effectively, it helped him win the election. No such slogan—or consistent message—appeared during his first two years in office. Then, in January, during his State of the Union Address, Mr. Obama introduced the phrase, “Winning the Future,” and he repeated “the future” a dozen times in the speech.

Michael Scherer, the White House correspondent for TIME magazine and the author of “Swampland” blog, took note of the new messaging in a post called “The New White House Messaging Strategy: Repetition and Precision.” In it, Mr. Scherer analyzed two speeches Mr. Obama made two years apart at the same location, Georgetown University. The first, in 2009 during the recession, was about his economic recovery policy; and the second, in March of this year, was about his energy policy. In the first, the president stood in front of a cluster of American flags, in the second he stood in front of a light blue background emblazoned with repeated images of the words, “Winning the Future.” Mr. Scherer explained:

This change is a direct result of a newly retrofitted White House communications operation, with David Plouffe, Obama's 2008 campaign manager, running the show. “A huge value has been placed on precision and repetition of language, in terms of we know what our message is, and we repeat it and repeat it,” one senior administration official tells me. “The whole new communications structure was designed to have greater discipline and stronger message consistency.”

Mr. Scherer went on to note that the president proceeded to repeat his “Winning the Future” message, “almost every day since this year's State of the Union address, no matter what else—Arab uprisings, Japanese earthquake, new foreign air invasions—has been going on.”

By the time Mr. Obama returned to Georgetown in mid-April to give a major speech on fiscal policy, he used the phrase “win the future” three times. Only when he delivered his annual comedy routine at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner and then his dramatic announcement of the killing of Osama bin Laden, did the president take his foot off the pedal.

But the day after the bin Laden statement, Mr. Obama stepped on the gas again. In a Rose Garden speech honoring the 2011 National and State Teachers of the Year, he referred to the importance of shaping the future three times. Ceterum censeo, define your own message and repeat it often.

SPECIAL OFFER: Order Jerry Weissman's new book, Presentations in Action, between May 20 and June 10 to receive a free copy of the In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions DVD and 40% off another Weissman publication from FT Press.

Tricky Questions

Wed, 04 May 2011 16:43:00 GMT

Be Transparent or Be Trapped
by Jerry Weissman

Adam Bryant interviews CEOs for his weekly “Corner Office” column in the New York Times. He distilled a group of the interviews into a book called The Corner Office, whose subtitle describes its intent: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed.

The key word is “lessons.” I follow Mr. Bryant’s excellent column every Sunday and often find valuable lessons for presenters. Two of those columns addressed the same subject: how to handle tricky questions: Mr. Bryant asked two chief executives—Kevin O’Connor of FindTheBest.com and Paul Maritz of VMware—about the tough questions they ask prospective employees. Both men referenced questions that, on the surface, appeared to be deceptively easy.

Mr. O’Connor said, “I try to give them a question that feels like a two-by-four between the eyes,” and he cited as an example, “How smart are you?”

At first, this question may sound more like a free pass than a two-by-four, but it can become a trap for the latter. “How smart are you?” is analogous to one of the most frequently-asked presentation questions, “What keeps you up at night?” If a presenter were to reply, “Nothing keeps me up. I sleep like a baby,” the presenter would appear to be unrealistic or evasive. Audiences want presenters to be honest and candid, but also to describe what they are doing about problems.

In that same way, if an interviewee were to reply to the “How smart are you?” question with, “I’m the best in the business!” that would make that person appear to be hyperbolic. When Mr. Bryant asked Mr. O’Connor what he would consider a good response to this question, Mr. O’Connor replied, “someone who’s really, really good at something, and knows it. But they also realize they have shortcomings in other areas.”

And when Mr. Bryant asked Mr. Maritz about his tough interview questions, he replied, “I’ll just pick anything that they’ve done in the past and I’ll say: ‘Thinking about it now, what would you have done differently? What did you learn from that?’”

Just like Mr. O’Connor, Mr. Maritz looks for realistic or direct answers. He said, “If they blame everything that happened during that period on somebody else, that tells you that the person is probably not thoughtful or self-aware. If they can talk in length about what was really going on, why they made the decisions they did and how they would perhaps make the decision differently now, that tells you that this person thinks deeply and is honest enough to really be objective, or as objective as they can be about themselves.”

The common denominator that both Mr. O’Connor and Mr. Maritz were seeking is forthright honesty, or transparency. Interviewees and presenters (as well as all human beings) must be straightforward about their limitations. Once they acknowledge that these exist, they are free to go on to state their own case. Not the other way around. Politicians, whose perpetual spinning we have come to tolerate, are perpetually stating their own cases and are rarely transparent—the political equivalent of “I’m the best in the business!” type hype.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t toot your own horn; by all means do so, but do it with honesty and transparency.


March 18, 2008	A More Perfect Union “The Race Speech” Philadelphia, PA
August 28, 2008	“The American Promise” Acceptance Speech Denver, CO
November 4, 2008	Election Night Victory Speech Grant Park, IL
January 20, 2009	Inaugural Address Washington, D.C.
June 4, 2009	“A New Beginning” Cairo, Egypt
December 1, 2009	Speech on Afghanistan to 2010 Cadets, West Point, NY
January 12, 2011	“Together We Thrive: Tucson and America”s University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ