Rishad: excellent comments and thanks for sharing. It's a valuable and practical reminder that we need to keep the train of thought on the "What -> So What -> Now What" flow - driving to some action or decision. One build on what you wrote -- I encourage students and the emerging professionals we train, to make sure each slide has a "headline," a simple direct takeaway. Too often the top of the slide is just a placeholder e.g., 'Revenues', 'Markets', 'Competition', etc, and the audience is left to figure on their own how to summarize all the data and details presented on the slide. My sense is that your sparse/efficient model might net to the same place, if the body of the slides communicates the summaries succinctly. Thanks for your crisp framework - I will test it out!
I love this perspective but I have to say, if your presentation is a great story, and you are a skilled storyteller—the number of slides nor a deck matters. I think this really comes down to can you tell a compelling story or not. Same goes for a word doc. It’s not the medium, it’s the story (or lack thereof)
Spoiler alert. Most people are terrible storytellers
Love it! Definetely going to challenge my team and colleagues to apply this straight-forward, door-openning, discussion-insiring approach. Thanks a lot!
Valuable point of view Rishad. Love the idea of more pre-reads and prep and shorter meetings with valuable discussion rather than someone voicing over a beautiful deck that actually can’t outlive it’s presenter and hence has no purpose. Pushing to have synthesized insights and solutions is so important to the process itself as it forces one to have an ingoing point of view rather than just a ton of data that can be interpreted in more than one way - a lot of management consulting firms are guilty of this where they’re essentially crowdsourcing strategy and ideas rather than sharing a thought provoking perspective. Thanks for sharing!
This is so true. Love the idea of banning the slide and having people pre read the word doc which takes so much less time to prepare. Focus on them facilitation of a meaningful conversation. Love it!
Thanks for writing this. I was dealing with "death by Powerpoint" and info overkill years ago when I was doing executive speech writing and presentations training, and I barely made a dent in it in my big tech career... Some great suggestions here. One trick I did was after several slides, where we get to a key point, just turn off the computer, and with the screen blank, turn to the audience and say, "now let's have a real conversation about this.." People were relieved and the real engagement began.
"63% of all statistics are made up." I enjoyed the opening image and the article.
The practice of Lean Coffee has helped to reduce or eliminate meetings. We spend too much time in bad meetings and not enough time in deep thought. Cheers...
A few years old -- and certainly just as relevant today in a world of return to office where the value of our (collective) time has become more crystalized. Thanks Rishad -- keep 'em coming; and thank you + see you soon.
Rishad: excellent comments and thanks for sharing. It's a valuable and practical reminder that we need to keep the train of thought on the "What -> So What -> Now What" flow - driving to some action or decision. One build on what you wrote -- I encourage students and the emerging professionals we train, to make sure each slide has a "headline," a simple direct takeaway. Too often the top of the slide is just a placeholder e.g., 'Revenues', 'Markets', 'Competition', etc, and the audience is left to figure on their own how to summarize all the data and details presented on the slide. My sense is that your sparse/efficient model might net to the same place, if the body of the slides communicates the summaries succinctly. Thanks for your crisp framework - I will test it out!
Michael thank you . Given your expertise this feedback makes me feel great!
I love this perspective but I have to say, if your presentation is a great story, and you are a skilled storyteller—the number of slides nor a deck matters. I think this really comes down to can you tell a compelling story or not. Same goes for a word doc. It’s not the medium, it’s the story (or lack thereof)
Spoiler alert. Most people are terrible storytellers
Love it! Definetely going to challenge my team and colleagues to apply this straight-forward, door-openning, discussion-insiring approach. Thanks a lot!
Love this and plan to integrate this itnto every presentation we do moving forward....
Valuable point of view Rishad. Love the idea of more pre-reads and prep and shorter meetings with valuable discussion rather than someone voicing over a beautiful deck that actually can’t outlive it’s presenter and hence has no purpose. Pushing to have synthesized insights and solutions is so important to the process itself as it forces one to have an ingoing point of view rather than just a ton of data that can be interpreted in more than one way - a lot of management consulting firms are guilty of this where they’re essentially crowdsourcing strategy and ideas rather than sharing a thought provoking perspective. Thanks for sharing!
First class Rishad, bang on the money.
This is so true. Love the idea of banning the slide and having people pre read the word doc which takes so much less time to prepare. Focus on them facilitation of a meaningful conversation. Love it!
Thanks for writing this. I was dealing with "death by Powerpoint" and info overkill years ago when I was doing executive speech writing and presentations training, and I barely made a dent in it in my big tech career... Some great suggestions here. One trick I did was after several slides, where we get to a key point, just turn off the computer, and with the screen blank, turn to the audience and say, "now let's have a real conversation about this.." People were relieved and the real engagement began.
"63% of all statistics are made up." I enjoyed the opening image and the article.
The practice of Lean Coffee has helped to reduce or eliminate meetings. We spend too much time in bad meetings and not enough time in deep thought. Cheers...
A few years old -- and certainly just as relevant today in a world of return to office where the value of our (collective) time has become more crystalized. Thanks Rishad -- keep 'em coming; and thank you + see you soon.
It is a new insight for me how to present in just 9 slides for the desired outcome
It takes practice but works