The results are in, and I am thrilled to announce my recent presentation, THIRST, was selected as the best presentation in the 2008 World’s Best Presentation Contest on SlideShare.net!

THIRST is an educational presentation designed to spark the conversation around the impending world freshwater shortage. I’m proud to report it’s working. Since it was first released just two months ago, THIRST has spread across the web and has been viewed over 60,000 times.

This year’s World’s Best Presentation Contest attracted 2,415 presentations from over 130 countries across 5 continents. The judges were four top gurus of the presentation world, Guy Kawasaki, Bert Decker, Garr Reynolds, and Nancy Duarte.

It’s truly an honor to have won the contest for a second year in a row. I extend a warm thank you to everyone who showed their support.

Jeff -

| View | Upload your own

Check out this presentation I created and entered into this year’s “World’s Best Presentation Contest” on SlideShare.net. The contest attracts entries from all across the world on a myriad of topics and is a great source for design inspiration. This year there are some very creative entries, so be sure to check them out and vote for the ones you like best. You can vote for THIRST by visiting this page.

THIRST is an educational presentation that explores humanity’s water use and the emerging worldwide water shortage—topics I deeply believe people need to be aware of. I designed it to function as a stand-alone presentation, which means the slides tell the full story (no need for person to deliver it). I’d love to hear what you think. Enjoy!

World’s Best Presentation Contest

Dazed and confused

I’m sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a dimly lit room. A projector screen is reflecting royal blue while a voice drones from up on stage. Bullet points. I know I should be paying closer attention to this presentation, but my brain just can’t focus.

I look around the room and see I’m not the only one drifting. The eyes of the woman seated two rows behind me are staring straight ahead, glazed. Her mind is somewhere far from here. The man on my right has totally jumped ship—he’s halfway through a game of Blackberry Solitaire.

The only one in the room who doesn’t seem to be drifting is the presenter on stage. In fact, he seems to be smiling. This poor guy is contently working through his slides, oblivious to the fact his audience has abandoned him.

How does this happen? How can this guy not realize his presentation is so boring? I know he can hear himself speaking, the problem is he’s just not listening.

“Hearing” happens in your ears. “Listening” happens in your brain. Listen to yourself from the mindset of your audience and you’ll notice a dramatic improvement in your presentation skills.

Listening is an active process that involves asking the right questions at the right times. In delivery, you want to focus your listening on two areas: “what you’re saying” and “how you’re saying it”.

1. What you’re saying

Question to ask yourself: Does this make sense?

If I start speaking in Spanish to an audience of non-Spanish speakers, I’m obviously going to lose their attention pretty fast. The same thing happens in a complicated presentation.

You’re the expert. You’ve taken the time to do your research—immersing yourself in your content for days, weeks, maybe even months. Steeping in your content and its associated lingo for so long makes it easy to fall into “expert-speak” mode.

Unless you’re presenting exclusively to other experts, expert-speak mode is something to avoid. Things that make sense to you will fall flat with your audience since they don’t necessarily know all the things you know.

It’s your job to simplify and explain your content in such a way that it makes sense to your audience.

2. How you’re saying it

Question to ask yourself: Is this interesting?

This one is a bit more subjective and a bit more difficult. “Interesting” is different for everyone.

Think back to a great teacher in your life, someone you learned a lot from. For me, one such person was my 9th grade English teacher. He was able get a bunch of high school kids revved up about Shakespeare and grammar because he knew how to relate the material in a meaningful way. He knew how to make it interesting.

Are you presenting to the company’s sales team or a group of programmers? The two groups tend to find different things interesting, so the lingo, metaphors, and examples you use will also need to be different.

Take some time to learn about your audience; frame your content so it’s interesting to them.

Lights, camera, you!

You may even want to take your listening one step further and record yourself practicing your presentation.

Listening to your recordings will bring to light things about yourself you had no idea existed. You’ll discover mannerisms you didn’t know you had, phrases you didn’t realize you used. It’s a humbling but valuable experience and something all the pros do.

At the end of the day, your goal is for your audience to understand and enjoy your presentation. If you want your audience to listen to you, begin by listening to yourself.

Do you really need those slides?

These days it seems the very act of giving a presentation comes with the expectation that at least a few PowerPoint slides will be involved. If you’ve ever tried telling your boss you don’t want to use slides in a presentation, chances are the response you got was a shocked, gasping, “why not?”

Well, because slides aren’t always necessary, that’s why. In fact, sometimes a presentation is better without them. It just depends on the content and context.

Too often people forget the purpose of slides. They are a useful tool to support your message, not take its place. When they’re used well, good slides can take an ordinary presentation from good to great, but it’s important to remember they are never as important as having a good story to tell in the first place.

I was reminded of this when I came across a talk recently given by Michael Pollan in the Authors@Google series. Michael is the author of five books, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, both New York Times bestsellers. He also happens to be an expert storyteller.

Even without a single visual, Michael’s presentation is vivid and engaging. He skillfully uses words and stories instead of slides to paint the pictures of his narrative. He even includes several statistics throughout his speech, not skipping a single beat as he recalls them from memory (an indicator of good preparation).

Michael’s presentation is a reminder that while slides can add a lot, having an interesting story to tell is what ultimately makes or breaks your presentation.

With no slides distracting our attention, we listen more closely to his words. It’s almost as though he’s telling us a few stories from across a dinner table, which is a style that works exceptionally well for his context and content.

Check out his Authors@Google presentation below, as well as his 2007 TED talk.

If you’re not familiar with Michael Pollan’s work, you’re in for a treat. I can guarantee you’ll find his perspectives on food and nature fascinating, potentially even life changing. Enjoy!

I’m sure you’ve heard it a thousand times, but it always helps to hear it again. Public speaking is all about preparation. It’s great to know how to think on your feet, but there’s no question the best presentations are the result of lots of practice.

So what’s the best way to prepare? Well, it depends. The chart above depicts the quality spectrum of speeches with varying styles of preparation.

At the boring end of the spectrum (the end you want to avoid) are the 10% of speeches that are prewritten word-for-word and read out loud from behind a podium. Think most graduation speeches. The people delivering these speeches don’t bother rehearsing the delivery since they assume there’s no need to—it’s all written out. But if you can think back to your high school days, you’ll recall that reading out loud to a room full of people is a lot harder than it seems. The rigid, stuttering delivery falls flat on the snoozing audience.

In the middle of the spectrum are the speeches delivered from an outline. For almost all of the presentations you will give, this is the best way to prepare. Speaking from an outline forces you to use conversational, natural language in your delivery, which makes the speech much more appealing to the audience.

The quality of your delivery will depend entirely on the amount of time you spend practicing. I don’t mean thinking about practicing while sitting at your computer writing your outline. I mean actually standing up in a room, facing a mirror or wall or lineup stuffed animals, whatever, and delivering the speech start to finish. The more times you can talk through your speech entirely, the more confident you’ll feel when the time comes to deliver it for real. Confidence is success.

Then, at the highest end of the spectrum are the greatest of great speeches. Like the worst speeches, these too are written out word-for-word beforehand, but unlike the worst speeches they are rehearsed so many times they practically become memorized. The process of delivering a speech like this has more in common with acting a scene than it does with reading words from a page or prompter. Think Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.

Writing a speech out in advance gives you the ability to choose every word, to predesign every metaphor for the strongest impact. It requires an enormous amount of preparation, weeks worth of it, so save this method for the speeches that really matter.

Being the opening act isn’t easy. The opening presenter at an event has two responsibilities:

1) Warm up the audience, and

2) Get through the logistical stuff that needs to be said before the person everyone is there to see takes the stage.

It can feel pretty grunt-level at times, but your role as an opening presenter is important and ought to be approached with the same passion you’d have if you were delivering the keynote address.

If there is one thing that is universal about presentations, it’s that a presentation without passion is a presentation without meaning. That’s why I am too often disappointed when I hear an opening presenter say something like this:

“Ok, so we’re about to get started! But first, I need to run through a list of thank you’s. It will only take a second.”

Run through a list of thank you’s? Tell me, what is the point of a thank-you when you run straight through it?

A thank you is meant to be something gracious. As much as people enjoy hearing their name read out loud, I don’t think hearing it quickly read from a list is going to give anyone the warm fuzzies inside.

A “running thank you” has no meaning and might as well be left out of your presentation.

The next time you’re an opening presenter and have people to thank on stage, take the time beforehand to understand why you are thanking each person. Slow your delivery down a notch and mean what you say. The audience will notice the difference, and I promise it will make your presentation better.

There is an old saying that says, “the reason we can see so far is because we stand upon the shoulders of giants.”

In other words, we owe so much of our knowledge and ideas to the countless teachers and gurus we learn from over the course of our lives.

It’d be impossible to write a blog about presentations without acknowledging one of the leading presentation experts in the world today, Garr Reynolds. If you are interested in presentation design theory and haven’t heard of Presentation Zen, it’s time you do.

Garr started writing the Presentation Zen blog back in 2005 as a way to regularly communicate his thoughts about presentations and design to the world. Today, it is one of the most popular and influential presentation resources out there.

Living in Osaka, Japan, Garr has an insightful take on presentation design and delivery that is strongly influenced by Japanese culture and the principles of zen philosophy. A few of my favorite Presentation Zen blog entries are: Gates, Jobs, and the Zen Aesthetic, Who says we need our logo on every slide?, Bill Gates and Visual Complexity, and Yoda vs Darth Vader.

Garr spent the past year consolidating several of the best ideas from his blog into the Presentation Zen book (available from Amazon or Barnes & Noble). Bearing no resemblance to your typical how-to manual for PowerPoint software, the Presentation Zen book is a much deeper exploration into the theory behind presentation design and delivery. As Garr describes it, it is “an approach”.

Garr really went the extra mile designing the book’s layout, so it as enjoyable to look at as it is to read. If you’re someone who ever gives presentations, you should definitely pick this one up.

These days the Presentation Zen blog is still going strong, with insightful new content being posted regularly. Check it out, I know you won’t be disappointed.

Below you can see a talk Garr recently gave at Google’s California headquarters. I think it’s an excellent presentation that gives a thorough overview of the Presentation Zen approach.

As you watch, pay particular attention to the way Garr keeps his audience involved throughout the entire presentation and utilizes his slides as backdrops to his conversational storytelling. Enjoy!