How many times have you wished you were dead while watching a PowerPoint presentation? Every time?
I’ve been on the giving and receiving end of presentations more than anyone should – most of it was very painful. My rough gesstimate is that I’ve seen just shy of 2,500 (yes, twenty five hundred) presentations delivered live over the last decade. I’ve also delivered somewhere in the vecinity of 500 presentations big and small (still get a bit nervous in direct proportion to the stakes at hand), and created only about 80-90 brand-new presentations.
Recently Lee Ackerman suggested the book Presentation Zen from Garr Reynolds. Its an excellent book you can’t miss if you got this far into this blog post. It should be required reading for everyone in business. It should be part of English 101. Business runs 90% on PowerPoint, 9% on Excel and 1% on the platforms it really should.
This is a must-read for folks involved in presentation creation. If you’re only involved in the receiving end, then skip this book or you’ll walk out of your next meeting really frustrated.
To Illustrate how critical the material in this book is I put together a single chart – lets see if the relevance of creating and delivering good presentations comes across clearly, plainly and viscerally on the following single slide
You definitely get your point across with this slide, Andres, but…. YUCK!
Unforgettable… In every way… :)