![\"Powerpoint](\"http:\/\/www.templates.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/powerpoint-template-4.jpg\")
template powerpoint<\/p><\/div>\n
Let me get this off my chest right at the start – templates of any kind are the bane of my life<\/strong>. As I said here<\/a>\u00a0and here<\/a>, I\u2019m sure there are good ones, I\u2019ve just pretty much never seen any that work as well as a little bit of imagination and effort.<\/p>\n But corporate templates seem to have a hydra-like evil life of their own. I chop off one head and two more take their place.<\/p>\n Common comments seem to be things like \u201cBut the PR department says we\u2019ve got to stick to the corporate line\u201d. That\u2019s not too bad, I suppose, except that the PR department usually doesn\u2019t know what it\u2019s doing. What looks good on a traditional brochure doesn\u2019t work on the screen. How hard is that to grab, as a concept?<\/p>\n What am I talking about? Things like insisting on a font that reads well on paper but can\u2019t be read easily on the screen. I know of one organisation who insist our workbooks are written in a font which saves ink (for good, environmental reasons) but who also insist that we use it for all their presentations without checking to see if that font projects well.<\/p>\n Is it just me who sees the dumbness of this?\u00a0 Given that it takes no more electricity to project a good slide than a bad one, why\u00a0are you tie-ing our hands like this, guys?!<\/p>\n Really? Do you have the same car as your boss, too? The same handwriting?\u00a0 Do you make sure you have the same tie on that he does?<\/p>\n Okay, if your boss uses the corporate template for good reasons, by all means use it – but use it for those same good reasons, not just because he (or she) does. After all, if your boss jumped in front of a passing train you\u2019d not do the same! (Would you?) And yet you\u2019re happy to create a presentation that\u2019s a bit of a (corporate) train wreck. fine.<\/p>\n Excuse me?<\/p>\n Seriously, costs.<\/p>\n Well, costs and (mainly) effort. In fact overwhelmingly \u2018effort\u2019. How about this conversation:<\/p>\n Me<\/strong>: Did you like the mock up of the presentation – we did the first four slides Does anyone have any advice for this?! That\u2019s deliberately deciding to be bad!<\/p>\n Good grief!\u00a0I felt like I\u2019d \u00a0wandered into a Dilbert cartoon.<\/p>\n Actually, I do have a tiny bit of sympathy with this one.<\/p>\n It goes something like this… \u201cWe can\u2019t use a different type of presentation, though I agree your way is better. Everyone at the conference is going to be expecting the boring slides – the kind they use – and if we stand out people won\u2019t like it\u201d.<\/p>\n The bit that worries me here is that all too often these people know that they\u2019re doing something boring but they\u2019re too frightened to try something new. It seems to be a case of avoiding being bad rather than trying to be good.<\/p>\n The reason I can understand it is that all too often conferences cost and arm and a leg. Taking risks is potentially expensive: there\u2019s a corporate aversion to risk of the \u201cif it ain\u2019t broke, don\u2019t fix it\u201d style.<\/p>\n Thing is, though, it is ‘broke’! When clients do the sums they often find that the number of sales these conferences generate doesn\u2019t realllllly cover the costs, once they\u2019ve taken all the internal, hidden costs into account.<\/p>\n So what have they got to lose?<\/p>\n Just their inertia<\/p>\n The reason I\u2019ve got only a little bit of sympathy here (as opposed to lots) is that this is just the corporate equivalent of just doing things because everyone else does. Isn\u2019t it time a few corporations got out of this rut and decided that \u201cWhen everyone else zigs, zag\u201d? :)<\/p>\n Okay, gentle reader – the sound you can here is me, climbing down off my soapbox. Over to you – what are your thoughts on poor corporate presentations, and the reasons for them…?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Our client base ranges from one-man-band start-ups to multi-national corporations. I\u2019m not saying that the one-man-bands are better at making presentations than the corporates – they\u2019re just bad in different ways! Here\u2019s our experience of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2454,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5,8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-key-posts","category-powerpoint-and-other-packages","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2453"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3097,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2453\/revisions\/3097"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Or how about this \u201cThe boss uses this template!\u201d<\/h2>\n
Costs<\/h2>\n
\nClient<\/strong>: Yeah, they looked fantastic – really got the message over
\nMe<\/strong>: Glad you liked \u2018em – it\u2019s what we do
\nClient<\/strong>: But we can\u2019t use them.
\nMe<\/strong>: Eh?
\nClient<\/strong>: No. The boss says we\u2019ve got to go back to the old way of doing things \u2018cos these slides make our other presentations look bad.
\nMe<\/strong>: Errrrr…… Can I talk to your boss….?<\/p>\nExpectations<\/h2>\n
Sigh!<\/h2>\n