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.

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.

"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.)

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.”

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.

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!”

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?

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.

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…

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.)