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Some article titles are click bait, others seem genuinely interesting and I am curious to find out the answer to the question posed. The disappointment is big when the journalist embarks on a very long story where characters are introduced and developed, background stories presented until the punch line comes somewhere halfway the 10 minute article.
A good product or company pitch does not have to be long.
Music streaming services such as Spotify change the way musicians make music. With an unlimited amount of songs to listen to, users can now skip through tracks quickly. The result: musicians put the ‘hook’ or chorus of the song really early in the track to convince new listeners to stick around just a few seconds longer. During a live performance of the same song, the build up could be different.
The same applies to your slide decks that you send for someone to read without you being there to explain. The investor or customer is ‘streaming your slides’. Think about how to put that ‘hook’ in your story to keep the viewer interested.
Hooks don’t have to be blunt. A massive drum solo as your song opening might get people to hit the skip button. “We will have $3bn sales in 18 months” sounds impressive but might not be credible. An unusual chord change, or a counterintuitive perspective on the market could do the trick.
Following my post from last week about pi, here is a link to a page full of beautiful visualisations of mathematical concepts. Often, a written formula is not the right way to explain math and proportions….
This blog post by Fred Wilson resonated with me.
Surrounding yourself with smart people is not enough to make (investment) decisions. Now that I am knee deep into coding applications myself, I finally start to understand technologies that I have been pitching in dozens of slide decks over the past decades.
I think it goes a bit further than Fred’s blog post. Really smart people (not saying I am) with MBAs (I have one), that work at prestigious companies such as McKinsey (I worked there) are extremely good at telling you why something will not work, and 99% of the time their arguments make perfect sense. It is very hard for these people though to commit to believing in something that will work. Advisors are not entrepreneurs.
“Winging” a presentation, making it up on the spot, is extremely hard, and I would say, impossible. All people that seem to get up on stage and deliver a perfect pitch without any effort have in fact been rehearsing this over and over and over. (The previous instances where they pulled off the same trick). You need to practice really hard to be spontaneous.
When you look at a piece of paper with the scribbles of your thoughts, it seems like you have it all in your head. Everything is there. But standing in front of an audience is different. Your eyes are moving quickly across the piece of paper, going back and forth if relationships are not clear. With speaking, there is no rewind option. You need to build that “visual” in people’s minds step by step.
Many things can go wrong here:
Don’t wing your pitch.
Certain layouts and compositions look right, others seem wrong. We can see it, but we can’t point our finger to exactly why.
This formula for the constant pi got my attention:
It is the so called Wallis product, a beautifully simple representation of a number that seems very random, the first 50 digits of pi are 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510……
Pi governs the shapes of rounded shapes, , waves and much more. The elegance of a circle is simple. But it is governed by a complex set of harmonics and ratios that all relate to each other. Beautiful designs have them, beautiful music has them. In most cases, we only appreciate the end result without grasping the underlying logic.
Garr Reynolds was the first presentation blogger in the world back in the mid 2000s. His book “Presentation Zen” is still the standard introduction into the world of presentation design. His blog has gone quiet over the past years, but recently Garr has been active on YouTube covering among other things how to improve your Zoom presentations. Garr might no longer be in your RSS reader, but it is worth adding him to your YouTube subscriptions.
In SlideMagic, you do not have to worry about picking the right scale for your data chart. The entire chart adjusts itself to the numbers you type in. See the example below:
To make sure that a consistent scale is used for your entire chart, you need to place all your data points in one shape, instead of using multiple shapes for example for each month.
P.S. I have added this monthly sales comparison chart to the SlideMagic slide library so you can easily use it in your own presentations as well. Search in the app for ‘sales’ and it will pop up.
Dr Clare Lynch is “chief business writing expert” at Doris and Bertie Ltd and a University of Cambridge writing instructor, she has an excellent YouTube channel that deserves more viewers.
In a recent video, she explains the official rules for punctuating bullet points, full stops or not, capitals, etc.
She gives 3 options and a warning:
Colon: no capitals, no full stops
The long hand version with capitals, and full stops
For writing: semi colons
Don’t mix sentence styles
Back at McKinsey in the 1990s, we were taught to write paragraphs in bullet point form but starting with what we called a “clunk”, with a heavy paragraph sign as the bullet point anchor (a pilcrow), and leave the full stop out after the last sentence (but use them for other sentences in the bullet point paragraph).
In presentations? First rule avoid bullet points if you can. If you to include some sort of list to make your point on a slide:
A clickbait link popped up on my phone with songs that were written in less than 20 minutes (I am linking to another post with the same subject).
Yes, these songs might have been written in 20 minutes, but I am sure that those 20 minutes are the result of years of practice, trying, and noodling by these musicians. All that effort that was built over a long time just fell in the right place.
I think this is true for every creative process, including presentation design and storytelling. In Hemmingway style: ‘gradually, then suddenly”, Seth Godin talks about it in “The Dip”, a tank filling up drop by drop until it finally bursts with great force.