“Death by PowerPoint” is alive and healthy in corporate meetings around the world. The bad news is that we will have to sit through insufferably long and boring presentations for a long, long time. Here’s the good news. It gives you—the person who thinks creatively about engaging an audience—a fantastic career advantage.
I was recently invited to speak to a group of entrepreneurs going through an accelerator program for startups at Evernote, a popular cloud-based note taking and web clipping company based in Silicon Valley. At the end of my presentation, one young entrepreneur asked me a question that I had never heard. “Mr. Gallo, you've shown us great presentation examples from Steve Jobs, Apple, TED talks, the Twitter IPO roadshow, and others. What happens when everyone uses this method to deliver better PowerPoint presentations? It won’t be different anymore.”
“It will never happen,” I argued. “And that gives you a competitive advantage in your career.”
Why would I say such a thing? The question reminded me about a conversation I had with Dilbert creator Scott Adams. As we recorded this interview in his home office, I showed Adams a comic he had drawn in 2000. It’s still my favorite. It shows Dilbert delivering a presentation and saying, “As you can clearly see on slide 397.” The last slide shows someone in the audience dropping dead of ‘PowerPoint poisoning.’
I asked Adams why people know better than to create long, wordy PowerPoint slides with fonts so small that nobody can read, and yet, they do it anyway. According to Adams, “People don’t change that much. When people have an idea they want to express, they want to give you every bit of it, even when they know that less is more. It’s just too hard for them to leave out that extra slide…the good news is that it provides plenty of fodder for Dilbert comics!”
People don’t change and that’s good news for Dilbert. It’s good news for you, too. By creating simple, visually engaging presentations, learning to tell a story, and practicing the heck out of it, you’ll stand out in a hyper-competitive global economy. Your voice and your ideas will be heard.
The other day a research analyst contacted me to talk about a presentation she’s been asked to deliver at a major conference for professionals in her field. “I've been going to this conference for four years and the presentations are really dry. I’m into this stuff and I still fall asleep.” We talked about how she could take advantage of this opportunity to craft and deliver a presentation that will get her noticed among her peers, the media, and her company’s executives. I know this sounds as though the bar is low, but she will shine simply by not putting people to sleep! If she can deliver a presentation that is interesting and engaging, she’ll be considered a rock star.
Elevating the quality of your presentations will help your career. I recently wrote a column about a reader who told me that since he began improving his presentation skills, he is now considered an “evangelist” in his company of 80,000 employees. Area managers will fly him around the world so he can deliver a presentation to large, potential clients. Instead of giving the presentation themselves, they ask him to do it because he can tell the product story more effectively. Two years ago his PowerPoint presentations looked like everyone else’s. That’s not the case today. He stands out because he shows humility. Yes, humility.
In The Art of Doing, authors Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield examined the habits of “super achievers” in a variety of fields. They found that super achievers are “humble;” they are open to learning new things, improving their skills, and reinventing themselves. Super achievers are, by definition, superior. They are above-average. The vast majority of presentations will always be average. You can gain a significant career advantage if your presentations are one step better.
This week we remembered the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, one of the most celebrated speeches in American history. Lincoln’s concise draft of 273 words took him all of two minutes to read aloud. Lost in history is the speech preceding Lincoln’s—a two-hour speech delivered by Edward Everett. The next day Everett acknowledged in a letter that Lincoln has captured the “central idea” of the occasion in two minutes. Everett had served as the president of Harvard University, Secretary of State, and the Governor of Massachusetts, yet he’s remembered as the guy who spoke for two hours before Lincoln’s two-minute speech.
Four score and seventy years ago Everett realized that a short speech can be more powerful than a longer one. But that hasn’t stopped people from talking way, way too long. Once, when I was invited to speak to a group of travel professionals for a global company, several people approached me after the event and expressed the same concern. “We have a 90-minute presentation and our boss wants us to go through every slide. We've had customers walk out of the room because our presentation is too long.” When I asked the boss why he refused to cut down the presentation, he said, “Because everything is important.” PowerPoint didn't change human nature. It simply gave people a tool by which to cram everything they know on a lot of slides.
Most people have an innate desire to impress people with everything they know. But it’s lead to “Death by PowerPoint,” a phrase so well entrenched in our corporate vocabulary it has a Wikipedia entry. It takes courage to check your ego and to simplify your message. It also requires more than a little humility to admit that your presentation is too long, your slides are too technical, or there are too many words on each one. Death by PowerPoint is alive and well, but just because you have to sit through dreadful presentations doesn't mean you have to deliver one.
Carmine Gallo is the communications coach for the world’s most admired brands. He is a popular keynote speaker and author of several books, including the international bestsellers The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. Carmine’s upcoming book, Talk Like TED, reveals the 9 public-speaking secrets of the world’s top minds. Sign up for Carmine’s newsletter and follow him on Facebook or Twitter.
