It’s not exactly hard, I must admit, and no one anyone except me even knew I was using – which, frankly, is the point. It’s a trick that allows customisation on the fly, using black […]
Posts By: Simon
Good question. I can’t be sure, but I’m reasonably certain it was Guy Kawasaki who suggested dressing one level of formality above your audience. The need for being more formal is to give yourself a […]
Such a simple one this…. If you’re teaching your child to tell the time, which type of watchface would you use? It’s not a hard choice, is it?! You’d start with the watch on the left […]
One of my favourite rules for presenting is (with apologies to the plenty of great places to work out there) simply to “Never trust the venue”. Here’s why… I arrived at 8:15 or a 9:30 […]
I’m often asked how long a presentation should be. The answer is, unhelpfully, as long as it needs to be and as short as it can be. Each presentation and each audience is different. Each […]
Presentations are often business affairs. And as such, it’s unusual to get an exit round. What’s an exit round? It’s an actors’ term for a round of applause that happens when the actor leaves the […]
Bit of a controversial headline, I know. :) And your presentations might not suck. I’d like to think that mine don’t. But now that I’ve got your attention, here goes… my top three reasons. I’ve […]
Yes. Presentations on Saturdays are different. There now, that was simple, wasn’t it! Essentially they’re different because they tend to have a more informal feel to them: people are giving up their down-time to see […]
A few posts ago, I used an analogy for how a presenter should treat his or her audience, which got some nice feedback. I suggested that a presentation is like a dance (I had a […]
Casting my mind back to my schooldays, I remember something called the ‘Vocative’. It’s a particular use of a word as an address (or something like that). So saying “The coat belongs to Simon” wouldn’t […]
There’s a lot of stuff around blaming PowerPoint for bad presentations and I recently found another example of what are – undoubtedly – spectacularly bad slides (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/powerpoint-slides-pentagon-ash-carter). But I’m not sure I agree with the […]
I can’t pretend there’s scientific research behind these little graphics – just a fair amount of observation over the years! ;) Let’s start off with a touch of cynicism about the topic of your presentations! […]
Amongst presenters and professional speakers there’s a jargon term for delivering without slides, props or other help: it’s called “doing it naked”. (Even good professionals get nervous and prefer some clothing.) And there’s some well-meaning […]