I’ve been blogging recently about the abuse and misuse of PowerPoint and other slide software.  Today I’m sharing an example of a great business speech that succeeds without using PowerPoint at all.  It’s Simon Sinek’s TED talk, and it’s worthy of study.   Simon’s talk is about “How great leaders inspire action,” and it succeeds in spite of some flaws in Simon’s delivery because:

1.  He keeps it very simple.   Simon starts with a deceptively simple question – why do some people and companies succeed, and change the world, while others do not?  Martin Luther King, Jr, the Wright Brothers, Apple Computer – everyone else had access to the same information, or insights, or materials, and yet there was only one MLK, Jr, and so on.  Why?  His answer is also simple – great leaders and companies answer the question of motivation, or purpose, first, communicating inspiration, not technique.  The rest of us worry about what and how; great leaders worry about why. 

2.  He uses a flip chart.   The effect of a flip chart is that we feel like we’re getting to hear something for the first time – as if Simon were making it up on the spot.  Of course he isn’t, but that doesn’t matter.  PowerPoint looks canned; a flip chart talk looks customized. 

3.  He offers lots of clear examples, and only a smattering of data, to back up his assertions.   The human mind is constructed to remember stories, not data, and Simon plays beautifully to this predisposition by giving us examples, anecdotes, and stories, and very little data.  We get just enough data, in fact, to believe that he knows what he’s talking about.  No more. 

To be sure, Simon has his flaws.  He comes across as arrogant, but he softens the appearance of arrogance by tipping his head to one side – a classic listening gesture.  But that gesture gives up authority, so it’s not the best way to connect with an audience.  He also frequently looks down and away from his audience – a thinking gesture – which gives him a professorial air.  Again, arrogance mitigated by introversion.  But not a great way to connect with an audience. 

Those flaws don’t matter in the end, though, because Simon’s presentation is clear, empowering, and actionable.  It’s a great model for how to do a business talk.  Study it and be inspired. 

I’ve blogged often about the abuse of Power Point and other slide software programs – using them as speaker notes, and making them more about words than images.  And of course, the over-use and over-dependence on software instead of just connecting with your audience, person to person.

But there’s a further problem with the software, one that’s even more insidious and destructive to good presentations.  Because slides are created one at a time, they encourage people to think in terms of vertical slices rather than horizontal storytelling.  As such, they promote an ADD approach to presentations – and thinking in general, since so much of organizational life and intellectual capital is captured in slide decks rather than in documents. 

It’s hard to tell a good story with a slide – or a series of slides.  And stories are what we remember – because stories naturally fit our brains.  We remember good, emotional stories especially easily.  Data is something that we forget just as easily. 

That storytelling power is undercut by Power Point deck building.  You create a slide by putting data (or words) on it.  Perhaps you find a slide from a co-worker that has a great chart on it.  You put the two together.  And then you repeat the process until you have enough slides to fill the time allotted.  What you now have is a data set, or a set of boxes with words in them -- both hard to deliver in a presentation in an interesting way, and harder still to remember.  Your Power Point slide creation technique is therefore ensuring that your presentation will be forgettable and boring. 

So don’t start with Power Point at all.  Tell your story first, so that you can be sure you have one.  Tell it in a word doc, or a storyboard, or scratch it with a quill pen on vellum, but whatever you do, create a story first.  Make sure it flows horizontally.  Then, add some illustrations with a slide program if your story calls for illustrations.  Don’t start with Power Point – it will only hurt your storytelling and therefore your presentation. 

The bad news:  there are thousands of presentations every day, everywhere around the world.  Most of them use Power Point, badly, as speaker notes, with more words or numbers on each slide than anyone can read. 

The results are predictably boring – no, excruciating  -- for their hapless audiences.  That’s human misery on a massive scale. 

The good news:  in an effort to make the world a better place, here are 10 things to do instead of Power Point.  Ways to make your points without the sleep-apnea-inducing effects of boring slides.  Ways to pep up your presentations without much additional effort.  Your audiences will thank me.

1.  Use props.  For most workers, in a cubicle world, it’s sensory deprivation from 9 – 5.  The whirr of computers and the A/C.  The hum of colleagues chattering away.  The beige walls of the cube farm.  The fluorescent lighting.  It’s amazing anyone stays awake.  Offer the audience, then, something physical.  Instead of describing that new product on a slide, show them a prototype.  Pass it around.  Let the audience get physical.

2.  Use music.  We have an emotional response to music which is much more powerful than we do to most words.  Especially words like “3rd Q results” and “product optimization.”  So add a soundtrack to your presentation.  It will bring it to life.  Do obey copyright and licensing laws, please. 

3.  Use video.  Video –good video -- has all the life in it that static slides lack.   A good clip can enchant, move, and thrill and audience in 60 seconds.  You can create the right emotional atmosphere to begin or end a speech – or to pick it up in the middle. 

4.  Use a flip chart.  Create any visuals you need right there in front of the audience.  No need for technology.  Just a magic marker and your arm.  The act of creation draws the audience in where a slide doesn’t. 

5.  Ask the audience.  Of course, the best way to draw the audience in is to draw them in.  Ask them to tell you their stories – as they relate to the topic at hand.  Ask the whole audience or just selected volunteers. 

6.  Ask the audience – 2.  Break the audience up into small groups and get them to respond to a challenge that you set, a question that you ask, or a problem that you pose.  Then have them to report back to the whole group. 

7.  Ask the audience – 3.  Play a game with the audience – relevant to the topic.  Award prizes.  Audiences love to compete.  Just don’t make the questions too difficult or the prizes too expensive – or too cheap.  Only Oprah gets to give away cars. 

8.  Ask the audience – 4.   Get the audience to design something – new products, plans, or ideas.  Give them plenty of paper, sticky notes, ipads, or whatever you have on hand that they can play with. 

9.  Ask the audience – 5.  Have the audience create video responses to what you’re talking about.  Hand out a dozen flip cams and get them in groups.  Give them a limited amount of time – 10 minutes, perhaps.  Then show some of the video to the whole group on the big IMEG screen. 

10.  Combine any 3 of these to create huge audience buzz.   Stop thinking of a presentation as a static activity where you show slides to a catatonic group of fellow humans.  You passive, them active.  Instead, treat them as co-conspirators in something exciting, educational, and fun. 

People often ask me some variant of the following question:  OK, so I get the idea that presentations should be interesting, and speakers should be passionate.  But I’m an accountant (or engineer, scientist, nuclear physicist, doctor, etc) and what I have to present is highly technical and data-heavy.  How can I possibly make that interesting?

My answer always begins with one of the best college lecturers I ever heard.  Yes, he was a professor of accounting.  He made profit and loss fascinating by talking about the early days of the Wells Fargo company, complete with cowboys, Indians, gunfights, and desperate men riding their horses past human and equine endurance to get to safety. 

There was plenty of passion, and interest, and I learned something about double entry bookkeeping. 

It can be done. 

But seriously, my questioner will continue, how do you make it interesting?

It’s not easy.  I’ll grant you that.  But it is possible.  What it takes is passion.  If you’re thinking to yourself that you have a whole bunch of dull stuff to get across to the audience, then you’re already thinking wrong, and you need to start differently.  Here’s how you do it. 

1.  First, realize giving a presentation is all about persuasion, not information.  The first step is to figure out what you’re really doing – what are you trying to persuade the audience of?  Once you know that, you’re ready to get started crafting a presentation.  Summarize that in one sentence – e.g., “I’m going to persuade the audience that double-entry bookkeeping is essential to making modern commerce work, because it allows us to measure, understand, and control what we’re doing.” 

2.  Ask yourself, what is the problem that the audience has for which my information is the solution?  Talk about that problem first, and I guarantee you the audience will be interested.  Then they’ll want to hear your solution.  That’s when it’s appropriate to give them said information. 

3.  Don’t give out information, give examples and case studies.  Case studies and examples bring dry information to life.  Data about a study of drug efficacy is boring – even that much sounds boring – but seen through the eyes of one potential patient, it has a completely different aspect. 

4.  Use vivid metaphors and analogies.  If your information is highly abstract and you can’t figure out a way to turn it into a case study or an example, give us a metaphor.  What is it like?  Is it like music, or medicine, or cowboys and Indians?  Use your imagination.  Great teachers understand this and give their students metaphors and analogies to help them begin to understand the field and the theories they must master. 

5.  If all else fails, turn the information into a contest for the audience.   In the 90s I taught public speaking at Princeton.  I had a certain amount of the history of rhetoric from the ancient Greeks to get across, because I thought it was important.  Imagine trying to teach pre-law students about anadiplosis, epanalepsis, and paronomasia!  The students were not interested and I despaired of getting 100 kinds of tropes and schemas into their heads.  Until I thought of Jeopardy.  I made the whole thing a Jeopardy contest (what is anadiplosis?) and the students woke right up.  Years later, the same students would shout “What is synecdoche!” across the campus at me when they saw me.  I gave out Princeton t-shirts I had designed for the occasion, and the students cheerfully put hours in committing the terms to memory.  Just about everyone gets cranked up when there’s a competition involved.  It makes your information more memorable.  Do remember to give out prizes.    

With a little creative thought, any topic – any topic – can be made riveting.  I guarantee it.  Failure to make a presentation interesting is a failure of imagination.  Send me your worst topics and let’s get going.  We have a whole world of boring presentations to spare audiences. 

Should you write an eBook?  Should you publish one?  What does that even mean?  I get asked these questions all the time by people understandably confused by the sudden explosions of options in publishing thanks to the Internet and the lack of a coherent response by the traditional publishing industry.  In this blog, I’ll describe some of the options that seem most promising right now, with a bit of background.  Because the publishing industry is changing so fast, I encourage you to weigh in with your experiences.  What has worked for you?  No one person can keep up with all the permutations of publishing, so let’s help each other. 

First, a brief bit of context.  Publishers used to do 5 things for authors.  They used to acquire, edit, print, distribute and market books.  Each of those activities is an important step along the way to fame and fortune for an author, and the bad news today is that traditional publishers now only consistently do one of those five activities:  acquire books.  They’ve outsourced the rest – for the most part. 

If you’re a celebrity author (think Bill Clinton or Shaquille O’Neal) then it’s still the case that a traditional publisher will pay you a huge advance based on your proposal for your book; that’s the ‘acquire’ step.  The publisher will assign you an editor that will help whip your prose into shape.  The publisher will print the book, distribute it to the 5 big wholesale distributors, and market it aggressively in the hope of earning that advance back.  The publisher, finally, will pay you royalties based on every book sold after you’ve paid back the advance.  That’s traditional publishing, and that’s the way it used to work for all authors. 

Today, after the more ordinary author receives an advance, no one edits the book, unless the author makes separate arrangements.  Someone called a line editor will proofread your copy and correct your most egregious grammatical errors, but that’s it.  Then, the publisher will ship the manuscript somewhere – perhaps China – to have the book printed.  The publisher will ship the printed books to those 5 distributors, and no one will market the book unless, again, the author makes separate arrangements.   Most of the traditional jobs of the publisher have been outsourced, and left up to the author.  

It’s this lack of activity on the publisher’s part that has driven people like Seth Godin to start self-publishing and experimenting with a variety of online options.  Since the publisher isn't doing much, why not keep more of the profits yourself?  But the difference between Seth and most authors – or wannbe authors – is that Seth has an enormous megaphone, and most authors don’t.  When Seth writes a book and tells the world, the world pays attention.  When another author adds her book to the 1,000,000 or so published in the US alone every year, the world only rarely and quixotically pays attention.  Yes, that is one million, not a typo.  

So what should the rest of us do?  Here are some of the current e-options that have sprung up around traditional publishing and self-publishing. 

1.  Write an e-book and put it on your own website or blog.  There are a variety of possible formats – pdfs, slides, and even Word.  You can charge for the book, or give it away free.  The issue here is that you need to find some way to distribute and market your book, since the web is vast and growing faster every day.  How are people going to find you?  Perhaps it’s enough to use the book as a marketing tool itself, and perhaps your network is big enough that you’ll get all the distribution you need.  And of course, sometimes these things do go viral . . . .

2.  Write a book and self-publish it with a print-on-demand site.   Amazon and others now offer a print-on-demand option, which is a step forward from traditional ‘vanity’ publishing.  With the old model, you had to contract for a certain number of copies, like going to Kinko’s – 5,000 or 10,000, say.  Then you had to store them while you tried to sell all those copies you’d bought.  Now, Amazon and its competitors will publish them one at a time, as people order them.  No issues of storage, and the system appeals to the environmentally-minded, since presumably there are fewer wasted books.   You still have all the challenges of marketing, so this option makes sense if you have a way of getting the word out, and you don’t need the implicit endorsement of quality that traditional publishing brings. 

3.  Write an e-book and sell it through Amazon or one of its competitors.  You can make a deal with Amazon only to sell the book (or mp3, or video, or whatever) electronically, to Kindle or Kindle-like devices.   The same questions arise as with the print-on-demand options.  How are you going to market the book?  What’s your plan for getting the world’s attention? 

4.  Write an e-book and give it away through an online group like 800-CEO-READ.   800-CEO-READ began as a traditional bookstore that offered a service to busy executives – telling them the best business books to read.  Over the years, the company has earned a reputation as a smart purveyor of the best business books.  A few years back, it began its Change This manifesto series, which are short e-books, in pdf form, distributed for free through its strong marketing channel.  The author gets editing, marketing and distribution, but of course no money. 

5.  Write an e-book and publish it through a non-traditional online publisher.  A relatively new option is growing up amidst the wreckage of the traditional publishing world.  Companies like New Word City are acquiring ebooks, editing them, marketing them and distributing them – all online via Amazon and iTunes.   If the book does well, you and the publishing will share the profits, much like a traditional publisher in the old print world.  

Which of these options will dominate in the future?  Will all most content become free, as some argue?  Will that reduce most authors to penury?   Will paying models endure? 

And finally, what should you do?  The key questions to ask yourself are, how can I distribute and market the book?  Do I want the implicit endorsement of a third-party publisher?  And what do I hope for the book?  Do I want to make money, or simply share something with the world?  As in most things, it’s up to you to define success, and then pick the option that will make your success possible.  

What have you tried?  What has worked – or not?  Where do you think the publishing world is headed? 
 

Are you worth $40,000 an hour?  How can you be worth $40K per hour?  That’s the question people often ask of the top public speakers, the keynoters, the ones who have written bestsellers and whose names you probably know. 

In fact, celebrity speakers, like former presidents and prime ministers, make considerably more -- $100, 000 - $250,000 per speech.  Malcolm Gladwell, with bestsellers like Blink and The Tipping Point to his credit, asks $86,000 per speech.   President Reagan was famously paid $2 million for a speech he made shortly after leaving office.

But still, $40K per speech?  How can that be justified when the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour? 

Three points about that apparently obscene compensation.  First of all, the hour you see is not the whole story.  To get to that stage, a speaker at the $40K level has to have written one or more books.  That speaker has to have achieved success in her field, enough so that the public wants to hear about it.  And that speaker has to create the speech, rehearse it, and travel for days to hard-to-reach places in uncomfortable airplane seats to get to the venue, where she has to try to please a roomful of strangers so that the whole process can begin again.  In fact, there’s a lifetime of hard work leading up to that golden hour in the spotlight. 

Second, $40K is the cost of a coffee break at a moderately funded conference for 500 people or so.  Most of the money – a million or two – for that conference has gone to the venue, for room and board.  The entertainment is a relatively small part of a typical meeting budget.   

Finally, if you’ve ever been inspired by a speaker to change your thinking – or your life – you know that a speech can indeed get people thinking and doing in new ways.  Speeches can topple governments, launch careers, and inspire movements. 

Speeches can change the world.

And that’s worth $40K an hour.  That’s why the market pays it.  Every time.