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How Steve Jobs beats presentation panic

macworld.com

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Re: How Steve Jobs beats presentation panic

#5
Humor is a great strategy. Once you have people laughing, you can get away with a few minor hiccups.

It reminds me of a rafting trip I took. The buses being used to transport us from the office to the rafting location were really old and almost falling apart. The guides had a brilliant story about how the buses went from high schools->some backwater in mexico->some other really random places and were finally bought by the rafting company. The funny story had people laughing all the way there than crib about how crappy the buses were.

Re: How Steve Jobs beats presentation panic

#6
This is all well and good -- and a similar post a few months ago relating how Malcolm Gladwell practices his lectures had much of the same information -- but to be completely honest, with the amount of multitasking most people do these days, almost none of the presentations we give are much more than information sharing via PowerPoint/Impress/Pages. The extra time spent rehearsing and preparing backup plans would be a complete waste.

It would be smarter for most people to practice their public speaking more generally so that when they're giving these innocuous, boring presentations they at least don't come off as buffoons (whether the demos work or not).

Re: How Steve Jobs beats presentation panic

#8
I saw Jobs give a presentation of NeXT's Enterprise Objects Framework (an early, even pioneering ORM) at a trade show in Chicago... during the presentation one of his NeXT machines crashed, and the audience got to see the system reboot on the big projection screen. I don't recall any real wisecracking... he just said "oops!" and maybe a little banter but did remain very calm and continued the presentation without really missing a beat.

Re: How Steve Jobs beats presentation panic

#9
post #6

This is all well and good -- and a similar post a few months ago relating how Malcolm Gladwell practices his lectures had much of the same information -- but to be completely honest, with the amount of multitasking most people do these days, almost none of the presentations we give are much more than information sharing via PowerPoint/Impress/Pages. The extra time spent rehearsing and preparing backup plans would be…

+1

I have realized that having an overview of what's on the agenda aka the bullet points is the most helpful thing. Just talking about those bullet points instead of reading from a script makes the presentation more of an engaging/interactive conversation with the audience rather than a prepared speech/lecture.

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