“Admit it! Sitting through most corporate slide presentations is the bane of our professional existence.”
That is the opening salvo of the chapter on PowerPoints in a fun and informative new book by the storied communications guru, Bill McGowan. Speak Memorably: The Art of Captivating an Audience, written with co-author Juliana Silva, is a slim volume packed with friendly and useful advice.
Take the chapter on that “bane of our professional existence.” Everybody has been subjected to “death by PowerPoint,” as it’s been called at the Pentagon: A speaker reading a lengthy text on the slide, too much text to absorb (in tiny font sizes), bewildering data, questions raised by the slide but not answered. Here is some advice from the experts:
- Don’t plaster your deck with massive text and then start reading from the text, what McGowan and Silva call “slide karaoke.” Keep the slide simple so the audience listens to you.
- Use images. If you want to compare two things, like how revenues grew from last year to this, employ a picture overlay (e.g., a pitcher’s mound vs a mountain) that will amuse and be remembered.
- Trim your deck down to 12 or 15 slides and take less than a minute of talking per slide. Vary their content, design, and images to keep people interested.
- Consider sending your slide deck to your audience in advance of your talk. That way they’ll listen to you rather than tune you out.
A lot of incompetent slide presentations occur because presenters, especially young people, simply get nervous and would rather read from the slide than use the slide to amplify what they have to say.
That is easy to understand in this age of short attention spans and social media whiplash. But it pays to do the homework on slide decks, because your audience will judge your professionalism by what you present.
Some CEOs and self-important executives leave the slide decks to subordinates. Big mistake. The authors’ advice really makes sense. If you are presenting slides, create and oversee them yourself. Your audiences will be so grateful!