Extreme Presentation (tm) Blog

This blog is moving

2006-09-06T16:27:00.001-04:00

The Extreme Presentation blog is moving to a new home. You can find it at

http://extremepresentation.typepad.com/blog/

Wake Me Up When the Data is Over

2006-08-17T13:28:00.000-04:00

Lori Silverman, founder of Partners for Progress, has edited an excellent book about using storytelling to drive business results, called "Wake Me Up When the Data is Over."

The book has chapters on using storytelling in strategy, leadership, project management, and marketing and market research, among others, all based on 70 case studies from large and small organizations.

The chapter on using storytelling in Marketing and Market Research, by Steven Silverman, makes extensive reference to Microsoft and Kimberly Clark, two of my biggest clients. Jeff Drake of Kimberly Clark features prominently in the chapter, discussing the great impact they've had from day long training sessions (run by yours truly).

I highly recommend this book.

One more time - why I don't like Guy Kawaski's 10-20-30 presentation method

2006-08-04T10:53:00.000-04:00

I mentioned some time ago why I don't like Guy Kawasaki's 10-20-30 approach to presentation. To follow Guy's approach is to admit that your material is boring and unimpressive, so let's get through it with the minimum of pain. I suggested instead that you let your message dictate the number and sequence of slides - that you tell a story with it. Apparently Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital agrees with me, according to Jerry Weissman, in the post I link to above.

Choosing the right chart v. 1.1

2006-08-04T09:18:00.000-04:00

I redesigned the Chart Choosing page to make it more userfriendly. Rob Headrick, my trusty designer, did a great job executing both versions.

Chesterfield County workshop

2006-08-01T13:56:00.000-04:00

While I usually run the Extreme Presentation workshop with corporate clients, occasionally I also have the pleasure of serving other organizations. This was the case on July 25, when I ran the workshop for members of the administrative staff of Chesterfield County, Virginia. Situated on the shores of the James River, Chesterfield is one of the oldest counties in the United States. Present at the workshop were, among others, James Stegmaier, Deputy County Administrator, and former Fire Chief Robert Eanes, who returned from retirement to set up the new Office of Environmental & Security Management for the County. The workshop took place at the Eanes-Pittman Public Safety Training Center, a state-of-the art training facility primarily for Chesterfield County Police and Fire Department training (but also on that day for presentation design training also!). The Center was named in honor of Chief Eanes upon his (first) retirement, and Joseph Pittman, retired Police Chief for the county.

The picture shows Chief Eanes and I standing beside the plaque dedicating the building to him.

Contest - $500 Prize

2006-07-21T13:27:00.000-04:00

Announcing the Extreme Presentation(tm) 1-Page Presentation contest!

A $500 cash prize will be awarded to the best 1-page presentation. Winner and runners up will be featured on the cover of Dr. Abela's forthcoming book.

Anyone who has participated in an Extreme Presentation workshop is eligible to apply. Entries should be emailed to Dr. Abela at abela(at)cua(dot)edu, and will be judged on persuasiveness, originality, and how well they follow the Extreme Presentation principles. Entries may be accompanied by a (max) 500-word script (your "voiceover").

The deadline is October 1, 2006. Early entries - and multiple submissions - are encouraged.

Forward any questions to Dr. Abela at the above email address.

Choosing the right chart

2006-07-20T20:32:00.000-04:00

Here's a first draft of something I've been working on for a while. I've always wanted a (relatively) simple taxonomy of charts, organized by purpose. The way to read this page is to start in the center: what are you trying to show? If you want to show a comparison, then follow the tree in the upper left, if distribution of data, then upper right, and so on.

I used this for the first time this week, in two workshops, and it was well received. That said, it's only a first draft and I welcome any comments.

SCIP '06 (Society for Competitive Intelligence)

2006-05-01T09:48:00.000-04:00

The Society for Competitive Intelligence 2006 Conference offered a full day workshop on Extreme Presentation as part of the conference. We had some great interaction; participants came from companies as diverse as Intel, Wells Fargo, RIM/Blackberry and Bayer. The highlight of the day, for me, was a great discussion around the different presentation Idioms, which I have blogged about before. CI (Competitive Intelligence) Magazine have asked me to write an article for their next issue on the workshop, and I am planning to focus the article on this Idiom issue - when to use each idiom, and what the proper design features for each idiom are.

Stowe Boyd on Guy Kawasaki on PowerPoint

2006-01-05T14:02:00.000-05:00

Stowe Boyd comments mostly approvingly on Guy Kawasaki's recent post about his 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint (10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font minimum), which the whole world seems to have commented on. I don't agree with the 10 part or the 30 part; come to think of it, I'm not so sure about the 20 part either.

Stowe thinks that the order and content of the slides should vary, and I agree. If people follow Guy's advice, Venture Capitalists, who are sick of 40-slide decks' worth of bullet points, will soon be sick of seeing ten slides with the same ten topics every time. (OK, that was the Marketing and Sales slide. Next will come the Competition slide. Snore.) Much more interesting is to let the story you're telling dictate the sequence of the slides. And maybe you'll need 8 slides to do it, or maybe 3, or less. A client of mine recently took a 20 page presentation and knocked it down to 1 page. Yes, just 1. And it turned out to be much more effective.

Have you every had anyone say to you "That presentation was great, but I wish you had more slides"? I didn't think so. Until you get that feedback, keep shortening the length of your presentations. And don't stop at 10 slides.

There is a reasonably credible theory about presentations that says that when you show a complex but well designed graphic or diagram and help your audience understand it, the effort they expend engages them more, and makes them more likely to be persuaded by your message. That's why I have a problem with a 30-point font - you can't show a complex graphic with 30-point font, at least not if you intend to annotate it or label it in any way.

As for the 20 minute limit - I suspect Guy's point here is to keep it short, and who can really quarrel with that. So I'll just stop here.

Pictures you can use

2005-10-29T12:29:00.000-04:00

Creative Commons is an interesting alternative to copyright. The site contains links to photographs and other material that you can use on your website and in your presentations legally, without permission or royalty.

Relational Presentation

2005-09-29T09:00:00.000-04:00

I am intrigued by Bob Lane's Relational Presentation approach. But here's the dilemma (from Visual Being, talking about Bob's presentation at PowerPoint Live):

"Ironically, during the presentation, Bob revealed the potential and the pitfalls of nonlinear PowerPoint presentation. Although the audience was clearly impressed by his ground-breaking concepts and his freeform, interactive presentation style, his presentation ultimately suffered from information fragmentation. His presentation did not have a predetermined destination, and that is exactly where it arrived. Many of the attendees voices the opinion that the session lacked a clear takeaway."

Before the fact, you may want the flexibility of a relational presentation rather than a linear one. But time itself is linear - after the fact, every presentation that is given was de facto linear - one point was made, then another, and then another until the end. Questions might have been raised along the way to change the direction, but that is all now part of a linear sequence of communication.

The dilemma, then, is while having the option to change directions within your presentation is a benefit - it allows for more interactivity - you run the risk of following a path that is not as clearly thought through as one that was carefully planned in advance.

Iran Nuclear PowerPoint

2005-09-23T07:15:00.000-04:00

ABC News has a copy of the PowerPoint presentation that U.S. Energy Department officials have been using to argue that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

The Neglected Importance of Presentation Idiom

2005-09-06T15:14:00.000-04:00

Each presentation situation calls for a particular presentation idiom—a form of expression and a set of design principles. Contrary to the popular complaint, the problem with PowerPoint™ is not that it forces you to design a presentation in a particular way, but that it doesn’t: PowerPoint™ allows you to mix design elements from different idioms, which, I believe, accounts for much of the ugliness and ineffectiveness of the presentations we see.

There are two fundamental presentation idioms, which I call Ballroom style and Conference Room style. The Ballroom style presentation is what most typical PowerPoint™ presentations are trying to be: colorful, vibrant, attention-grabbing, and (some-times) noisy. They typically take place in a large, dark room such as a hotel ballroom.

The Conference Room style presentation is much more understated: less use of color, more details on each page, more likely to be printed than projected, and more suited to your average corporate meeting or conference room.

Ballroom style presentations should be used when the objective is to inform, impress and/or entertain the audience, and where the main risk you are trying to avoid is looking foolish or unprofessional. The information flow in a Ballroom style presentation is primarily one-way, from presenter to audience. This style is appropriate for audience sizes from a dozen people to several thousand, although it can be used for smaller audiences if the objective, risk and information flow characteristics of the style are what is desired.

The look that you are trying to achieve with Ballroom style is that of the evening news: visually rich and thoroughly professional. To do this, you will want to project your presentation rather than hand it out, so that you can make extensive (but always appropriate) use of color, animation, and sound. (Color, animation or sound is appropriate when it is used to convey or emphasize information; it is inappropriate and should be ruthlessly eliminated when it serves only to embellish or distract). The length of a Ballroom style presentation should be between 12 to 60 slides per hour of presentation, depending on the talk time required for each slide.

Conference Room presentations are more suited to meetings where the objective is to engage, persuade and change the audience’s behavior. Here the presenter is trying to maximize the upside, rather than minimize the downside, and the main risk being avoided is that the message will not be delivered effectively. Information flow in this idiom is expected to be two-way, and this style is therefore more suited to meetings with smaller numbers of people, say two to 20. They can be used with larger audiences, though: I have used this idiom to support an interactive conversation with as many as 80 people in an amphitheatre-style classroom, or 200 people on a teleconference.

A conference room presentation should look more like an architectural drawing than something you’d see on television, and it is best delivered on paper. Paper has the advantage of allowing much greater resolution and therefore more information on each page; you can use font sizes as small as 9 point without difficulty, whereas in Ballroom style 24-point is usually the minimum safe size. More information on each page also facilitates more productive conversations, because it helps avoid the “turn back 2 slides – no, 3, what was that point there?”-type of confusion since all the information for the discussion of the moment is right in front of everyone on a single page. Paper delivery also allows people to write on the presentation, so that they can engage with your content better and communicate back to you any suggested changes. Also—as Edward Tufte notes—it sends a message that you are confident in your content, because you are allowing your audience to walk away with it. Because Conference room style presentations contain so much more detail on each page, they tend to have significantly less pages – from about 12 to as few as 1 page per hour of meeting time.

Mixing idioms – like mixing metaphors – is a recipe for confusion and deficient communication. Understanding when to use Ballroom style and when to use Conference room style, recognizing which elements are proper to each idiom, and never confounding the two, will lead to clearer, more attractive, and more effective presentations.

©Andrew V. Abela, 2005

Marriott International

2005-08-16T08:58:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's workshop was at the headquarters of Marriott International. Smaller group, and the biggest takeaway was the idea of spending a second day working on a case study as a group, and then comparing the results with what others come up with.

I am now working on this option, and will include it as part of a follow-up workshop called Extreme Presentation(tm) Makeover.

Supreme Court Graphic

2005-07-05T08:09:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday's New York Times' coverage of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's resignation included this very effective graphic, showing the extent of (dis)agreement among Supreme Court Justices. The size of the circle shows the extent of agreement between two particular justices, and the distance between any two justices shows the extent of agreement between them.

This graphic can be used effectively to illustrate pair-wise agreement or correlation among any type of variable, such as interaction affects among different media. I recommend it.

Kimberly-Clark workshop

2005-06-20T22:17:00.000-04:00

Today I am in Appleton, Wisconsin, visiting Kimberly-Clark in the nearby town of Neenah. This morning I ran an Extreme Presentation workshop with about 20 market researchers from KC. Given the larger number of people, I had the help of an assistant instructor. Tomorrow we're running the same presentation for an additional 25 people.

Once again the feedback was excellent. The most notable innovation we tried today was one suggested at the Dell workshop, namely that we use index cards to write each element of the story, which allows us to juggle the elements around until we find a good flow to the story. This worked very well.

Neighborcare Inc. workshop

2005-06-07T10:55:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I ran an Extreme Presentation workshop for Neighborcare, a leading provider of Long Term Care. The workshop took place at their stunning offices in the renovated Baltimore Power Plant, a building that they share with ESPN Zone and Barnes and Noble.

The workshop was only 2 hours long, and although we were able to cover a large amount of material, there seemed to have been general agreement that it would have been better to have more time. There were a variety of roles represented: sales people, educators, as well as senior management. It was interesting to hear the discussion about how Extreme Presentation can be applied in their different settings. The group was fairly large group - about 36 - but the folk at Neighborcare are very dynamic so this didn't stop us from have a very interactive session.

(Please note that all client company names are mentioned on this site only with their explicit permission.)

Dell Inc. workshop

2005-05-27T09:34:00.000-04:00

On Wednesday I ran a full day workshop for the brand research team at Dell Inc., in Austin, Tx. It was a very high energy group, and we covered lots of ground. We refined the approach for sequencing evidence, so that, by asking "what is the strongest objection that the audience could come up with at this point?" you can identify the "complication." Then you look for evidence that resolves this complication, and then repeat until you've addressed all objections.

The ideal presentation length is...

2005-05-17T09:35:00.000-04:00

... 1 page long. It's not always possible to reach this ideal, but shorter is always better than longer. Nothing wrong with having a fat appendix, into which you can put all your backup analysis, and those charts you worked so long on but don't quite fit the storyline. But the actual presentation should be short - 1 page if possible.

Why? Some reasons that came up in yesterday's workshop:

If you're only preparing a few pages, you can spend the time to make sure that each one is perfect.
A short presentation reduces the probability that your audience will be reading ahead on page 17, while you're still presenting page 5.
No-one has ever complained that "gee, that presentation was too short - I wish it were longer."

JP Morgan Chase workshop

2005-05-17T09:27:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I ran a full day workshop with researchers at JP Morgan Chase. Very intensive day, and very productive. Strongly positive feedback for the systematic method for integrating the five dimensions. Some good discussion about the ideal length of a presentation (see next post).

The Ethics of Extreme Presentation

2005-05-02T21:15:00.000-04:00

Recently I was asked whether market researchers should focus on presenting the truth or on what is politically expedient. I made the point that the answer should always be both. Without the truth you will lose your credibility, but without a keen sense of political expedience your presentations will come across as naive and impractical. I made this point again earlier this afternoon as a panel member at the US Federal Government Interagency Resource Management Conference. That is why an Extreme Presentation contains Logic, Rhetoric and Politics, to integrate ethics and effectiveness, inseparably.

First Pilot - Microsoft Corp.

2005-03-18T21:39:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I ran the first Extreme Presentation(tm) pilot workshop, with Microsoft Corporation. The workshop was held in Paris, attended by 55 market research managers from Microsoft's European, Middle-Eastern, and Asian subsidiaries. The setting was the lovely Hotel Le Parc, in the 16th. arrondissement. The material was very well received, and I also gathered some useful feedback.

Coming up for air

2005-03-15T10:20:00.000-05:00

The prototype workshop is complete. Over the next several months I will be piloting it with several leading global firms. Again, during this period my 'blogging will be sporadic.

Moving into Intensive Development Mode

2005-02-01T09:56:00.000-05:00

For the next several weeks, I will take a hiatus from this 'blog while I move into intensive development mode on the prototype Extreme Presentation(tm) Workshop.

The Data Density Debate

2005-01-26T11:27:00.000-05:00

Edward Tufte argues that a good chart will have high "data density" - a large number of data points on the page. Neville Hunt shows a good example of this. The debate around Tufte's point - and more generally around his hostility to PowerPoint (for encouraging lower data density, among other things) is summarized nicely by Tad Simons, editor-in-chief of Presentations magazine, in his article "Does PowerPoint make you stupid?"
One of the things I'm trying to do in this blog is apply the principles of marketing to presentation design. The great advertising expert David Ogilvy, in his classic Ogilvy on Advertising, seems to favor data density. Scan through his book and you will note a tremendous amount of text and other detail in the many examples of his work.

On page 84, Ogilvy wrote: "Short copy or long? All my experience says that for a great many products, long copy sells more than short. ... I believe, without any research to support me [but we value Ogilvy's judgment so we don't mind this], that advertisements with long copy convey the impression that you have something important to say, whether people read the copy or not."

This is a good argument for data density in presentations also: whether people absorb all the detail or not, they are left with the impression that there is depth to your work.

Checklist for Making Persuasive Presentations

2005-01-25T06:40:00.000-05:00

Prof. Scott Armstrong at Wharton, one of my favorite people in the marketing academy, has developed a checklist for making oral presentations. It is based on all the latest empirical research, and in only three pages it lists 41 important points that you should include for an effective presentation. It is very practical and I recommend it highly. It can be found at Prof. Armstrong's homepage (scroll to the bottom of the page, click on Educational Materials, then on Management Reports, then on Checklist for Making Oral Presentations).

The P&G 1-page memo

2005-01-25T06:29:00.000-05:00

When I started my marketing career at Procter & Gamble almost 20 years ago, the 1-page memo discipline was in full force. Every communication had to fit on one page, and follow a fixed format. It was - and remains - a very powerful discipline. I have used it ever since then.

Here it is, with some of my own embellishments. Each 1-page memo contains five parts.
1. The Idea. What are you proposing? This is typically one sentence.
2. Background. What conditions have arisen that led you to this recommendation? Only include information that everyone agrees upon in the Background - this is the basis for discussion, so it needs to be non-debatable.
3. How it Works. The details. In addition to How, also What, Who, When, Where.
4. Key Benefits. This is the "Why?" There are usually three benefits: the recommended action is on strategy, already proven (e.g. in test market or in another business unit), and will be profitable. You can think of these three in terms of the old Total Quality mantra of "doing right things right." The first (on strategy) means you're doing the right thing. The second and third mean you're doing things the right way, because you're being effective (proven to work) and efficient (profitable).
5. Next Steps. Who has to do what and by when for this to happen?

The Procter and Gamble salesforce used to use something called the Persuasive Selling Format (PSF) in their sales pitches. PSF also had five steps. At some point it occurred to me that the two mapped to each other, which is why the P&G 1-page memo format is so effective for making recommendations: it is a document structure that is designed to sell.

Most famous PowerPoint presentations of all time

2005-01-24T14:18:00.000-05:00

I have started to compile a collection of famous Powerpoint presentations. Here are the first few. Peter Norvig's Gettysburg Address is my vote for the most famous. But Tom Farmer and Shane Atchison's hysterically funny Yours Is a Very Bad Hotel should at least be a runner up. More sobering is the tile assessment of the Shuttle Columbia (the presentation slide made famous by Tufte's analysis is page 6). Another famous presentation should be Karl Rove's The Strategic Landscape, about the then upcoming 2002 elections, from a CD-ROM that was supposedly found on a street corner near the White House (Rove's presentation starts on page 11).
What else should we add to this list?

Resources for the Five Dimensions

2005-01-24T09:48:00.000-05:00

In my previous post, I mentioned the hypothesis that an Extreme Presentation should address five dimensions: Logic, Rhetoric, Graphics, Politics and Metrics. Here are some useful resources.
For Logic, I like Linda Long's new book The Power of Logic in Problem Solving and Communication. Linda, also a McKinsey alum, has been teaching problem solving and communication for several years, and the book summarizes the content from her most popular program. Another excellent resource is Barbara Minto's classic The Minto Pyramid Principle, which McKinsey has been using for years.
For Rhetoric, there are a slew of books, but to my mind, Chris Booker's newly published, 728-page, The Seven Basic Plots, should be at the top of the list. Lori Silverman's new book, Stories Trainers Tell, is a useful resource.
For Graphics, the undisputed authority is of course Edward Tufte, who is a genius when it comes to the visual display of information. In addition, Malcolm Craig's Thinking Visually is a great resource on diagramming.
I'm still looking for good material on Politics. For Metrics, see the first 2-1/2 chapters of Gene Zelazny's excellent book Say It With Presentations.

Please feel free to suggest additional resources for any of these dimensions.

The Five Dimensions of Extreme Presentation

2005-01-24T09:31:00.000-05:00

A central hypothesis at the heart of this research is that the Extreme Presentation must address five dimensions. These are Logic, Rhetoric, Graphics, Politics and Metrics. The problem with most approaches to presentation design, as I see it, is that they tend to focus on only one or two of these dimensions. So the current focus on using storytelling to improve presentations, for example, while a welcome and powerful idea, is misleading unless it is thoroughly integrated into the other dimensions.

Logic is about making sure that the problem is correctly defined and rigorously solved. Absolutely necessary, but not sufficient;
Rhetoric is the storytelling dimension: your audience usually contains human beings, not machines, so they need to receive your information in ways that are appealing to humans;
Graphics is the visual dimension;
Politics is the recognition that "power and politics are part of life in organizations everywhere" (Charles Handy, Inside Organizations, p. 115) and therefore that the best recommendations in the world will go nowhere unless their implications for all relevant stakeholders are thought through and syndicated in advance as far as possible; and
Metrics is the objective of the presentation and how you will measure its success.

My Credentials

2005-01-24T09:12:00.000-05:00

Who am I, and why am I interested in Extreme Presentation?

I have been designing and giving presentations, and teaching and coaching others to do so, for almost 20 years now. My background is in marketing, and marketing is in large part about persuading others to think or do something. I find it useful to apply the theory and techniques of marketing to improve presentation design.

I started my career with Procter & Gamble, and the intensive, on-the-job training I received there on their famous 1-page memo approach to communications (and the 10 or 11 rewrites that typically involved), was my earliest education in effective business communication. Powerpoint had not been invented yet. (In a subsequent post I intend to summarize the key elements of the 1-page memo, which I believe are still very useful).

I later joined the firm of McKinsey and Company as a consultant. McKinsey's approach to problem-solving and presentation is held by many to be the "gold standard" in this area. I became a regular faculty member at McKinsey's Introductory Training Program, or ITP, that all new consultants attended after about one year in the Firm, where I taught McKinsey's problem-solving technique.

Subsequently I helped start up both the Marketing Leadership Council (as its first Managing Director) and the Market Research Executive Board (as an external consultant). These are for-profit "think tanks" focused on improving best practices for heads of marketing and market research respectively. Both have become very successful, with members from several hundred companies, mostly from the Fortune 500.

Along the way, I received a Ph.D. in marketing and ethics from the Darden business school, and ethical persuasion has become a great interest of mine. I am currently a professor of marketing at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.

As I mentioned in a previous post, it was listening to many heads of market research express serious and ongoing concerns about the challenges with improving presentation skills that gave me the idea to launch this initiative.

What this is - and isn't - about

2005-01-24T08:59:00.000-05:00

This site - Extreme Presentation - is focused on presentations that face some kind of persuasion challenge: to persuade an audience to change their minds about something, to do something, or to stop doing something else. It is not focused on presentations that are merely designed to inform. It is particularly oriented towards presentations that seek to persuade their audiences of recommendations that are complex and/or controversial. Persuasion of complex or controversial recommendations is the most difficult task for presentation that I know of, and therefore I intend to concentrate on this toughest challenge.

The site is focused on the design of such presentations. It is not focused on delivery of the presentation, i.e. actually presenting the material, because I believe that there are already many excellent resources for this.

The Purpose of this Blog

2005-01-24T08:44:00.000-05:00

I have set up this site to serve as a log of a research effort on presentation design that I am undertaking, and as a forum for discussing the issues and findings from this research. Over the past three years, I have been working with heads of market research from hundreds of leading firms around the world, members of the Market Research Executive Board. During this time, one of the more common complaints I have heard from them is how difficult it is to get their staff to learn how to improve their presentation skills. This blog, and the research effort that underlies it, are dedicated to helping overcome that challenge.