A presentation is just a document that has been printed in landscape mode
Presentation advice doesn't work with most talks you'll give. Also, links and weird stuff, per usual.
Presentations are just docs that were printed wrong
Most presentation advice focuses on actual event of a speaker giving the presentation. In conference setting, you’re informing, making a point, and, hopefully, entertaining. In a corporate setting, the actual delivery of the presentation is not the primary purpose of a presentation. Instead, a presentation is used to facilitate coming to a decision. Usually, you're laying out a case for a decision you want the company to support. Once that decision is made, the presentation is often used as the document of record, perhaps being updated to reflect the decision in question better.
If your corporate presentation doesn't argue for a specific, "actionable" decision, you're probably doing it wrong. For example, don't just "put it all on the table" without suggesting what to do about it.
Think of presentations as documents that have been accidentally printed in landscape and create them as such.
You will likely not be given the chance to go through your presentation from front to end like you would at a conference. You'll be interrupted, go back and forth, and most importantly, end up emailing the presentation around to people who will look at it without you presenting.
You should, therefore, make all slides consumable without you being there.
Here’s some tactics to use:
Executive Summary - you should include an executive summary slide as the first slide. It should more or less have the titles of the rest of the slides (see title format below). You might add more detail to each bullet point. The point of an executive summary in this style of presentation isn’t to actually be a table of contents: you should be able to do your whole presentation with just that slide. Usually you won’t be able to go over the whole presentation, and you’ll probably be asked questions throughout that require you to jump around. If your meetings are like this, the executive summary is your defense against this. It’s the slide that says everything and you can always return to it as you go back and forth. Also, as you read through the summary at the start, you’re given the chance to go through your presentation, just a very short version of it.
Titles & Text - This leads to the use of McKinsey/headline titles (titles that are one-liners explaining the point you're making). Your slides will be much denser and full of text than conference slides.
Story & Ask - The presentation should have a storyline, an opening summary of the points you want to make, and a concluding summary of what the decision should be (next steps, launching a new project, the amount needed for your budget, new markets to enter, "and therefore we should buy company X," etc.).
Backup Slides - The different nature of corporate presentations also gives rise to "backup" slides which are not part of the core storyline but provide additional, appendix-like information for reference both during the presentation meeting and when others look at the presentation on their own.
Backing up Claims - You should also put extensive citations in footnotes with links so that people consuming the presentation can fact-check you. Big claims and figures will be defeated easily, nullifying your whole argument to come to your desired decision. When it comes to supporting data, using third parties is generally better if possible. Otherwise, you want to make sure you’re using agreed on data. For example, there might be five - even ten - different views of sales. Use one that all of the decision makers - and blockers - will agree with…or be prepared to discuss that data and why you used it.
Presentations Live in Email - Also, remember that people will take your slides and use them in other presentations; this is fine. And, of course, if successful, your presentation will likely be used as the document of record for what was decided and what the new "plan" was. It will be emailed to people who ask what the "plan" is, and it must be able to communicate that accordingly.
Remember: in most corporate settings, a presentation is just a document that has been printed in landscape mode.
Wastebook
Be brief, be bright, be gone.
“You can quit when you get home, Captain.”
Also: “Is it safe?” “Almost every time.”
“Sometimes, Mr. Spock, things go so badly, you just have to laugh.”
“reality dial” here.
I think what’s happened is that my life is slowly, and then all of the sudden, shifted from optimizing and improving and creating into just trying to chill the fuck-out when I can.
Relevant to your interests
This episode, I have a new thing. I ask ChatGPT to summarize articles for me all the time. Below, you can see its contribution, the ones that start with the 🤖. It takes a lot of work to get it to summarize the content instead of telling you what the article covers. It does it mostly in the below, but there’s some slight misses. For example, it does pretty well with the iOS release, but you’d expect it to list the couples in the book about writers.
How The Labor Market’s “Double Disruption” Impacts Your Talent Strategy - “A primary reason for the interest rate hike is the Bureau of Labor Statistics' February labor numbers, which were stronger than the Federal Reserve expected. In February, the economy added 311,000 jobs – well over the DOW Jones estimate of 225,000. Unemployment remained low at 3.6%. Some industries reported February job losses, but several industries had major gains, including retail and hospitality…. technology is removing jobs as fast as it is creating them.” // This must make sense in whatever reality monetary policy operates in, but it points at how weird and not friendly that model is.
🤖 I’ve Heard of Information Overload, but What Is Enterprise Attention Management? - The concept of Enterprise Attention Management helps employees focus on their work effectively. // “Attention is a rare commodity, and those who learn to focus it can gain significant advantages. It is the critical differentiator between success and failure.”
🤖 iOS 16.4 Overview: Emoji, Notifications, Web Shortcuts - The new features in iOS 16.4 include new emojis, improved notifications, and web shortcuts. // “While this is a minor point release, there are a few notable new features worth mentioning.”
A technology survival guide for resilience | McKinsey - This is pretty basic, standard stuff for DR/HA from the post 9/11 IT world. As such, it’s a great executive-level overview of that topic.
🤖 Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages by Carmela Ciuraru – review: Literary couples, a breed apart - The book review argues that the lives of five literary wives should be seen beyond the label of “wife” and recognized for their complex lives. // “Ciuraru’s book is an invitation to revisit the complex and often turbulent lives of these women, to see them beyond the reductive label of ‘wife’.”
🤖 Conservatives Win All the Time - The author argues that Conservatives' focus on power and culture, in addition to ideology, is a key factor in their recent political victories. // “Conservatives, especially on the right, understand that ideology is not everything, and that culture and politics are also about power.”
🤖 The Dollar Store Invasion: A comprehensive analysis of the impact of dollar stores on cities, towns, and the retail landscape. - The report examines the negative consequences of dollar stores' saturation strategy on local retail markets and consumer choice, limiting competition and leaving communities with few options. // “Dollar stores' strategy is to saturate the market with stores, driving out competitors and leaving communities with few options.”
🤖 A Technology Survival Guide for Resilience - The five steps for building resilient technology systems and processes include being realistic about transformation timelines and budgets, investing in change management and training, and establishing clear governance and decision-making processes. // “By following the five-step guide outlined in the article, organizations can develop more resilient technology systems and processes and better prepare themselves for the challenges ahead.”
🤖 Experience-led growth: A new way to create value - The five principles of experience-led growth include creating a vision and value proposition, designing holistic customer experiences, building an ecosystem of partners, capturing value through pricing, and creating organizational capabilities. // “The principles of experience-led growth offer a new way for companies to create value by placing customers at the center of their growth strategies.”
Why Do Digital Transformations Fail? - The risks/failures are mostly those of any IT project, “transformed” or not. Also, as summarized by 🤖: the risk of having unrealistic expectations during a digital transformation, as many organizations believe they can deploy technology changes in a short amount of time, when in reality, it takes much longer. This is because most organizations have trouble changing and absorbing change within an organization, so when unrealistic expectations are set, organizations may end up cutting corners later on and making bad decisions because they’re boxed into a corner. The key is to be realistic, understand the transformation process, and how quickly your organization can change and deploy technology and process changes.
ChatGPT Learns Computing - The brain could simply be a prediction engine as well; the plug-ins architecture for ChatGPT could solve its accuracy problems and, of course, give it access to current information.
How I would use AI RIGHT NOW if I was a CMO - “Edit the following post for grammar and readability. At the end, summarize all the before and after changes made.”
Superhuman: What can AI do in 30 minutes? - Way of the future. This is a good example of using the AI stuff for marketing. Once you took a few people to polish up the results, you could have a pretty good campaign in a day or two. The point wouldn’t be to eliminate people, but to enable them to do even more.
Logoff
I’ve been working on a lot of content for the future, so not much to put here. See y’all next time!