Good Idea !

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Giving a Lousy Presentation, or not

Carmine Gallo, a communications coach for Fortune 500 executives, believes there are 15 sure-fire way to screw up an otherwise good presentation, and prove yourself a total amateur. We’ve selected the 10 we think are the most important and have added our own thoughts to Gallo’s.

Here’s a summary of Carmine’s list, which first appeared in BusinessWeek on August 25, 2009. If you think just this list might help you, read his full column.

1. Misspell words. Remember, “spell check” doesn’t catch everything — especially Malapropisms!. “It’s the easiest way to look unprofessional.” Gallo says.

2. Bad colors Gallo says blue on green are especially hard to read; we say, you’ll never go wrong with black on white, with touches of color, images, charts to add life to your presentation. Don’t make a color wheel out of it.

3. A circus of fonts. “Professional PowerPoint designers will use no more than two, perhaps three, font styles in an entire presentation.” Personally, we think Helvetica is the ideal universal font: simple, crisp, easy to read. To create emphasis use italic and bold, but do so very sparingly.

4. Small fonts. If your audience can’t read it, you might as well not put it on the slide. Small presentation fonts are like trying to read classified ads with the paper held at arm’s length; it is tough.

5. Distorted or fuzzy images.  ”Images used in PowerPoint slides should be at least 900 pixels wide by 720 high,” Gallo says, and we agree.

6. The disinterested presenter. Take time to really prepare; the audience deserves that.

7. The disheveled presenter. Dress for business, not the gym or your home office. We think you need to determine what style — coat and tie, business casual, etc. — of dress your audience will likely wear and match it, or go half a step up. Jeans don’t get it in any situation.

8. Reading slides. Don’t do it. Talk about your slides; say what they say in different words. Indeed, you slides should really phrases, not full sentences, and you should make sentences or paragraphs in your presentation from the phrases on your slides.

10. Don’t practice. Just wing it; you’ll appear unprepared and the audience wont respect you or what you have to say. If you don’t care enough about your presentation and your audience to practice, the audience should care enough to listen to you and just get and leave.

Three slides to successful messaging

Effective communications is always about gaining understanding. Buy-in, strategy development, execution, those are all next-steps. But, creating understanding is always first; it is the foundation on which everything else is built.

That’s why we were delighted to read the comments of Zurich Financial Services CEO James J. Schiro. He get’s it!

Schiro believes that when your speaking, or making a presentation, “People should focus on you and focus on the message. They can’t walk away remembering a whole bunch of different things, so you have to have three or four really key messages that you take them through, and you remind them of what’s important.

When making your case using a PowerPoint presentation, “Three slides, three points,” Schiro demands. “If we only have 15 minutes and you come in here with 30 slides, we’re not going to get to the answer.”

“If you’re working in an area, and you are running a business, you ought to be able to stand up there and tell me about your business without referring to a big slide deck.”

[This approach is true with speech making, too — and it works even with very complicated issues. Read our earlier post about the perfect speech structure used by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke.]

Visual presentations