SlideMagic Blog

When your boss is editing your slides, there is a risk that she will add the same key message on every slide. She has not fully immersed herself in your story. She does not see the full context of the presentation. Time is short, too short in fact to study the presentation in detail.

Better make sure that the point “our architecture is flexible” gets mentioned a few times in the deck. Extra bullet on page 3, a nice bubble on the side on slide 7, foot note on page 15, and bold the flexibility point on the last page.

Have the courage to stand up and stop her.

These are often the best meetings. The audience has prepared, read the material, and is ready for a discussion. What presentation slides can help you run a meeting that is mostly free discussion?

Bring your entire deck, but select from it those slides that create a mental framework around the things you want to discuss. Often, they are very simple slides, but relatively dense with content. Examples:

• A 2x2 matrix with all the competitors listed
• A matrix of market segments (growth, and size on the axes)
• A simple ranking of sales and profits by brand
• A product development timeline
• Two market share pies: last year and this year
• A software architecture diagram

All these can be projected onto a whiteboard (use a white slide brackground), on top of which participants in the meeting can scribble. After the meeting is over, snap a picture of the remaining group art.

Changes are that if you look at that picture 3 weeks later, you can pretty much replicate the entire discussion. Not because the scribbles are so clear, but because your mind has allocated a physical space on the white board to store the entire debate in your memory. Similar to stories, a physical location makes it much easier for people to remember things.

You are a junior executive preparing a presentation for a senior manager. The problem is that when the senior manager is not fully emerged in the latest content that you want to include, she is likely to edit down the new bits. She will not present what she is not aware off, and your presentation is likely to look pretty much the same as the one she used last year at the same conference. The solution: stop the presentation design process, and take her in a meeting through the raw content and new insights you have gained. Speak without slides. Now that you are both aligned, PowerPoint can be opened again.

The memo that the Yahoo! Board sent to all employees after the former CEO Carol Bartz was fired is a good example of Board Speak. Big sentences, grand words, but it is unclear whether a cynical audience believes them with their heart:

In addition, the ELC will support a comprehensive strategic review that the Board has initiated to position the Company for future growth.  We are confident that we have talented teams in place and see enormous opportunities on which Yahoo! can capitalize, and right now we are focused on leveraging the Company’s leadership and current business assets and platforms to execute against these.  We fully intend to return the Company to a path of robust growth and industry-leading innovation.  We are committed to exploring and evaluating possibilities and opportunities that will put Yahoo! on a trajectory for growth.

The likely scenario is that people skim over all the text that contains the usual buzzwords, and extracts from the memo the pieces of information that are relevant: the names of new executives and their roles. When designing corporate communication, put yourself in the shoes of the audience.

The full text of the leaked Yahoo! memo is here on Business Insider.

The second page of a business presentation is most likely the agenda page, and they all look the same: we will summarize what we are going to say, then we go through the story, and then we will summarize it again.

The rule “tell’ m what you’re gong to tell, tell ’m, and tell ’m what you just told them” is often quoted as a good structure for a presentation.

There is one place where repetition is used to force people to remember things: education. We pound, and pound, and pound, on the brains of children reluctant to absorb new facts until the brain “snaps” and finally gives up the resistance.

As a result, content is remembered, but not for long. The day after the test, it already starts to fade away. If we have to hammer in the messages into the minds of our audience, we have not got our story straight.

Stories are a much more powerful way to make people remember things. People love stories. Take for example this very short one:

“For sale, baby shoes, never worn.”

It is the shortest story that Ernest Hemingway has ever written (and he claims that it is his favorite). Upon reading this story, your mind lights up. It is curious what happened to the baby. It starts to fill in the missing blanks.

The brain needs a framework in wich to put a story. Stories are great frameworks, and so are physical locations. Our mind is spatial.

We have all been in brainstorm sessions where the white board looks like a complete mess after an hour of discussion. If you take a picture of it using your cell phone camera, and look back 3 weeks later, there is a good chance that you can almost remember the entire debate minute-by-minute. Not because the writing on the picture is so clear, but because your brain has allocated a location on the board to store all memories form a particular fragment of the discussion.

I presented at an investor relations conference the other day and a buy-side analyst made some comments about what it was in a presentation or document that gets him to read further: the first four bullets need to catch his attention.

So, does this mean that your first slide should have 4 powerful bullet points on it?

Not necessarily. What the analyst said was that he wanted to get excited about an investment opportunity in about 1 minute. Given that most corporate presentations are a collection of bullet points, he translated that 1 minute into a number of bullets. However, that same minute can also contain a highly visual slide sequence that does a much better job pitching your idea.

Image by kcdsTM.

Mission statements are supposed to be the ultimate piece of prose: in one sentence you have the entire essence of a company: what you stand for, what your values are, how you treat customers, everything. This is serious stuff. Making jokes about the mission statement is often considered committing sacrilege.

Mission statements often feature on page 2 of a corporate presentation, right after the title slide. Here you are: our company in one sentence.

It takes time to develop a good mission statement. Projects to craft one can take weeks. The entire organization needs to be involved. Words need to be adjusted. Values need to be discussed.

And that is exactly the problem for an external audience. They miss the context of the 3-week project. They miss the background of the debate. They have no idea about that offsite where you discussed your company’s values. For someone who reads the mission statement for the first time, it is well, just another sentence with familiar sounding words.

The ultimate example of the Curse of Knowledge.

When I pooh pooh mission statements in presentations I did not mean to make fun about the values of your company. I think mission statements are valuable. Slide 2 of your presentation is just not the right place for them.

Big market disruption, check. Experienced team, check. Company traction, check. Trimmed down the investor pitch deck to 10 minutes, check.

But you forgot one thing: the sales pitch. Yes, this is an investor presentation and not a sales presentation, but still, every pitch to an investor should include an example pitch to a potential customer. The investor needs to get a feel that a customer will actually buy your product. The sales story on the slides is important, but even more important than that: they way you present the slides as a salesman.

I recently made the switch back to literary fiction after it took me around 25 years to overcome the bad memories of high school teachers forcing me to read this genre against my will.

Reading these books showed me just how empty corporate language is. Over the years I have developed a pretty high speed-read rate. Non-fiction books, annual reports, PowerPoint bullets can all be digested in very limited time without missing a beat of the content.

So, when I tried to apply this to literary fiction I was forced to back up. Every sentence actually matters. The world would be a much better place if corporate language stuck to this principle.

In the middle of a design project, I decided to ask the client the fundamental question again: “So what is this about again?”. It was followed by a short silence in which I could imagine the eyes rolling at the other end of the phone line. The short and candid answer to the stupid question was actually very useful in the design process. It is OK to ask stupid questions. It is useful to have an outsider do it.