...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.

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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!

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.