How much is too much?

I'm working at the Gaylord Palms hotel in sunny Florida, just a stones throw from what's supposedly the happiest place on Earth. Yeah, I'm not totally down with that.

Anyway, we're producing a number of elements at this large conference, about 4000 attendees, and one of the featured speaker sessions really caught my eye. The first thing was the presenters title. Below is his actual title, taken directly from the program, named changed to protect his identity and my butt:

John K. Doe, MD, MPH, MACP, FHFMA

President and CEO

XYZ Corporation

Let me say this again...that's the actual listed title for this guy!!! How many designations does one man really need? So, from the very beginning, I'm think John Doe doesn't understand the idea of restraint. Little did I know.

I go to his session, probably 350 people in the room, and I sit in the absolute front row as it's empty even though 10-15 people are standing against the back wall, yep... it's not my first rodeo. Anyway, the good doctor puts up his first slide and I immediately laugh out loud! He gives me a look, I smile back at him, point at his slide, shake my head side to side and give him the 'whatever dude' gesture.

Here's what I counted on his very first slide:

• 181 individual words
• 5 bullet point indicators that were actually smiley faces
• 2 3D arrows in royal blue
• 2 pieces of ridiculous, generic 'office' clip art
• 2 3D boxes in fire engine red
• 1 horizontal line in lime green
• 1 logo

ARE YOU SERIOUS?

The lesson here is hopefully obvious... for the sake of all humanity...show some restraint people. As they say, less is more.

Immediately after counting up all the crap-tacular stuff on his slide, I got up and left. Even with all those fancy designations he forgot that his presentation really isn't about him; it's actually about the audience.

Love Hate

We love presentations. We hate presentations. We love smart clients. We hate adversarial clients. We love the creative process. We hate PowerPoint templates. We love finding new ways of looking at old things. We hate seeing old ideas that can't be let go in favor of something better. We love making creativity an integral component of great communication tools. We hate to see presentations ignored as superfluous tasks. We love companies with a clear vision. We hate companies brainwashed with the clichés of bad business habits. We love it when the written and spoke word extends a visual idea. We hate it when bad design obscures the clarity of a written or spoken word. We love blending development, design and delivery into one cohesive concept. We hate incomplete effort and ignoring any of the three Ds. We love new technology that can help anyone express an idea. We hate technology that makes people think they can do things they are not capable of doing. We love speakers who can engage an audience and inspire thought. We hate listening to someone reading off of their own slides. We love presentations. We hate presentations.

Video Tips & Tricks #1: Excuses

The first video of many to come, deals with making excuses in your presentations, and what you need to avoid.

I'm really glad to be with you tonight.

Last night I was in Kansas City working with a very large, very respected, very well known firm of accountants. One of the presenters in rehearsal confidently strode to the lectern, looked right into the belly of the beast (that would be the room full of 400 empty chairs) and dryly cracked, "I'm really excited to be with you tonight".

According to Dr. David Song, a plastic surgeon and Associate Professor at the University of Chicago Hospitals, who was interviewed for a Straight Dope article, it takes 12 muscles to smile. Clearly our presenter last night lacks all 12 of those facial muscles as her look didn't match her words.

It's real simple people...mean what you say. If you're actually pleased to be presenting, SHOW IT. If you're not really all that jazzed to be there, DON'T LIE, simply avoid opening with a line that places you in an awkward spot. Why? Because we can tell your full of shit and authenticity truly matters.

Oh, and by the way, Guy Kawasaki in his bestselling book "Enchantment" encourages all of us to throw a few four-letter words in every now and then. Guy says it keeps the audience on their toes as long as it's not mean spirited or used too frequently.

I guess by now you've figured out that he and I agree. THANKS

Pace matters. A lot.

Chicago has long been a great town for theatrical performances of all kinds. From improv to musicals to drama and the avant garde, the 2nd city ain't too shabby. With that in mind we were very excited to welcome the highly acclaimed, London-based, technical marvel that is "Peter Pan". This show uses the as-expected high-wire flying rigs, but it also features the first ever 360-degree, 3D video projection.

While we found most of this wizardry quite cool, the show itself was, well, just okay. At best! In fact, it was actually fairly awful. The acting was fine, the costumes cool, the staging remarkable. So, why was it just okay?

In a word—PACE.

We we bored to death. Some scenes were far too long to hold our interest, others simply too bogged down with details that we didn't get.

The pace may have been right for some people—I'm thinking of the dead in particular—but for those of us still very much alive, please, SPEED IT UP ALREADY!

This is a great lesson for anyone doing a presentation. Remember, it's not just what you say, it's how you say it. If your delivery pace is numbing, people will not receive the message. In fact, they'll be so preoccupied and focused on your pace (or lack thereof) they'll never hear a word.

So, take it from a kid who never grew up, PACE MATTERS. Thanks!

How many people to make a 'presentation'?

At SquarePlanet you'll hear us say things like, "whether it's one person, one hundred or one thousand, a presentation is a presentation—don't blow the opportunity!"

Now only do we believe it, we actually live it.

Today we did an important presentation to ONE person.
There were no microphones.

No rows of neatly organized chairs.

No name badges.

No, it was just us and him—person to person.

Does that mean the stakes were any less? Does that mean we needed to be 'less' prepared?

Obviously the answer to both of those questions is a resounding NO. The person happened to be the CEO and founder of a very large, very successful healthcare company and the projects and dollars discussed were substantial. The lesson is very simple, whether you're presenting to an audience of one or one thousand, you only have one shot to nail it.

Time will tell if our presentation today achieved the desired result—a signed contract. What we know already is that our attention in advance of the one-to-one presentation was necessary.

Additionally, throughout our meeting we strove for deep authenticity of who we are and what we believe. We shared examples of a highly personal nature. We told our message in a simple, easily understood way. And we left a lot for the next time—we showed real restraint.

You have got to walk the talk, folks! Not only is the right thing to do, it's the right technique to do. If your presentations aren't achieving the desired result, then Change Your Orbit. Thanks gang.

The State of Being Presented

One of the things we hear often is, "we don't do big keynote presentations—we don't need the kind of help you provide."

That couldn't be more wrong.

We ALL give presentations every day of our lives, whether we are conscious of it or not. Be it an introduction to a new business associate, a 15-minute sales call over coffee in a Starbucks, a designer showing (selling) their work to a client, or a 3,000 person audience at a corporate keynote event—we all present ourselves every day. You may be trying to communicate an idea to your marketing department in a conference room, or arguing one side of a topic in a symposium of your peers, you are most definitely giving a presentation.

Now, you may not be formally assembling a script, a deck of slides or practicing your message in a mirror, but each and every opportunity you have to meet someone new, convey a message, sell an idea or display a product, you are putting your ideas, your company, your product and your own self out there on display. And your audience is making subconscious and often conscious assumptions and decisions about you and your wares, be it good or bad.

Whether you know it or not, your posture, dress, gestures, appearance, eye contact, vocabulary, grammar, confidence, scent, handshake, and everything else that you take for granted is on display for people to judge you. A nervous tick might convey an unexpected message. An overly relaxed posture may exude arrogance or contempt. As a sales representative, a weak or overly strong handshake, or an overly strong cologne has just as much effect on your audience as the product you sell. What you DON'T say absolutely has an effect on your presentation to others.

All of these factors are components of corporate and business presentations, as well. How you stand in front of your audience or the eye contact you make (or don't make) are crucial components to connecting with an audience of 1 or 10,000.


presentation (prɛzənˈteɪʃən)
— n

1. the act of presenting or state of being presented
2. the manner of presenting, esp the organization of visual details to create an overall impression: the presentation of the project is excellent but the content poor
3. the method of presenting: his presentation of the facts was muddled
4. a verbal report presented with illustrative material, such as slides, graphs, etc: a presentation on the company results
   
5. a. an offering or bestowal, as of a gift b. ( as modifier ): a presentation copy of a book
6. a performance or representation, as of a play
7. the formal introduction of a person, as into society or at court; debut

By any definition, a presentation is presenting something or someone to someone else. In every case, what you say and do absolutely matters to your success or failure.

Are you preparing to succeed or fail?

Being Comfortable is Hard

It's easy to look unprepared. Just don't put any effort into your presentation. Looking casual, relaxed, confident and comfortable is REALLY hard—it takes a lot of practice. A LOT.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book, "Outliers" that to become a superstar at anything, it takes 10,000 hours of work or practice. It might not always be true or accurate (I don't think the Doors practiced much at all before they were rock superstars), but the concept is an important one to grasp.

Practice doesn't make perfect—it just makes you better than everyone else.

We were talking to a prospective client recently about an upcoming conference where he is to stand in front of a room full of 300 individuals who came out to hear about his company. When asked if he was getting ready and how he was preparing for the presentation, he quipped, "I donno, I'm just gonna wing it." He didn't even know the exact date and location of the keynote.

We believe he's preparing to fail. A swift kick in the 'nads would prepare him for the pain of failure that he should expect next month.

Three-hundred people, giving up their free or business time to drive or fly to this event, and listen to this speaker—yet, he doesn't believe that it valuable enough for him to prepare and practice. Fail.


This week another client of ours gave his presentation to his corporation's constituents after weeks of writing, crafting, slide preparation, and most importantly PRACTICE. How did he do? He knocked it out of the park. He was relaxed, comfortable and the message flowed from his body. His audience was engaged and appreciative. He worked for these rewards. He worked hard. The first time we met with him to coach him through his speech, he was unprepared. But seeing how important it was that he should be prepared and know his material, he went back to work to make himself better, and he did it.

It would have been easy for this VP to brush it off and "wing it," but he would have crashed and burned in a fiery ball of goo. Very few of us have the ability to get up there and speak comfortably on any subject, let alone something we know. It just doesn't work that way. Steve Jobs looks casual and comfortable at new Apple product releases because he practices over and over and over again! Not because he's just a regular guy talking about a cool new product, but because he has rehearsed the material and he knows it inside and out. He works his ass off at it.

So remember that if we ask you how you are preparing for your upcoming presentation and you respond, "I'm just going to wing it," be prepared to be physically and emotionally abused—because we're just preparing you for how you feel after you are done failing.

Spending Good Money After Bad

In this industry, as many others, you come across jobs from time to time that are handed to you to repair or redo. It happens more often than you would imagine. A company seeks out a vendor to perform a service—in our case, creating a slide presentation—and the results fall fatally short of their goals or needs. They usually have spent a lot of money on this service—sometimes overpaid for the results, and it puts them in a bad position. They are then forced to make a very difficult decision. Do they leave it as-is and deal with the poor results or do they spend money again and have it re-done to a higher level?

When my wife and I bought our current house, we decided to have the entire house painted before we ever moved in. We figured it would be a one-shot job with no furniture in the house. What could go wrong?

The results were nauseatingly bad from a "professional" painting company, and to this day I still kick myself for making such a bad choice in picking the painters to hue our freshly-built home. The paint stains on the carpeting, railings, ceiling, doors and fixtures are constant reminders of dollars poorly spent.

Over the last few years, we have systematically re-finished most of the house properly, but it has been a long, slow, painful and costly process.

So as a company when a mistake is made with a high-profile project and the results are less than respectable, how should it be handled? Yes, costly mistakes can often be hard to recover from for any company. Diligent work from the beginning on who you are working with is always the best way to keep this from happening in the first place, but is it necessary to fix the mistake? In a word, yes.

Just because you spent $25k on a presentation or brochure, and it turned out poorly or actually makes your company look bad, that doesn't mean that you have to keep it. The reality is that something like that can do more damage to your brand and business than paying for the same thing twice, just to get it done the right way.

In a perfect world, you would never have to do anything a second time to get it done right, but none of us are perfect. Sometimes a bullet needs to be bit to get the proper results for your company.

And if you ever need your home painted, I can tell you who NOT to use.

What you DON'T say matters too

Last week I had the perverse pleasure of working in Scranton, PA. Sure, it's the home to the fiction Dunder Miflin Paper Company and the sometimes we wish-to-be fictional character "Lunch Bucket Joe" Joe Biden, but if you're stuck there like I was, it becomes all too real.

Please consider these facts; it was 11 degrees, they have something like 4 feet of snow on the ground, it's actually quite close to Appalachia (scary), two of our bags never arrived. Safe to safe, I'm not a big fan of Scranton.

But Brian, your blog post title teased me into thinking you were going to say something important...what gives? Well, while in Scranton, I witnessed a classic example of body language and it's power in presentations.

The dining options in Scranton featured all of the usual suspects...c'mon, you know which ones. We deduced the least painful option to be of a scarlet-colored variety, especially between Monday and Wednesday. WORK WITH ME PEOPLE!!! I can hear the Stones song in my head right now, got it??? Very good. Let's continue.

Okay, we walk in and we are NOT greeted by a friendly, happy face. Instead it's our waitress, they had obviously let the hostess leave, as the place was empty. So now waistress-turned-hostess-yet-still-waitress is large and in charge. She's in no mood for another table, but the place is scheduled to be open for another TWO hours!!!!

We did not feel special, cared about or even welcomed. We didn't get a simple smile and we certainly didn't feel like our soon to be delivered dinner would be good, no matter how tasty it actually turned out to be.

The point of all this is, when you say things in a presentation like "It's great to be here" you better damn well mean it!!!!!! Be truthful with your emotions because your audience can pick up the truth, even if you try to hide it.

Remember, emotions are the key to connecting with people during a presentation. Sure, you all like to think it's great information. WRONG ANSWER...try again. It's EMOTION. Do you really think people remember bullet points or data-dumps? NO!!!! They remember how you made them FEEL.

So, the next time you're looking for dinner in Scranton, be sure to remember the Rolling Stones, hum a few bars of that tune, and you'll know where NOT to go.

Teaching as an art form

Something I have wanted to do since I was a Senior in college was to teach design at the highest level of public or private education. Essentially, to be able to teach people who were solely in front of me to learn from my experience. It started for me when I was a design lab administrator in college, and I found I was easily and comfortably able to teach other students things I knew. Even if it was in small doses, it was tremendously gratifying to me.

A couple of years later, I found myself in my day-to-day job as a Junior Designer at a prestigious Chicago-area design firm (pounding out 65+ hour work weeks with 2.5 hours of total commute), and I realized two things—one, I really hadn't learned nearly what I needed to survive in my industry while I was fighting through the Northern Illinois University Visual Communications program, and even more frustratingly, two, is that what I had learned, I didn't really feel as though I knew why I had learned it. So, the top design school in the Midwest didn't teach me enough, and what they did teach was vague and oblique to the point where I had no idea what the real practical application was. Great.

At that point, I realized that I wanted to go back someday for a Masters in Fine Art, to allow myself to teach college-level design, with real-world applications.

Fast forward 20-odd years, and I still have not returned to acquire my Masters degree, and as time goes one, lifestyle congeals, family is built and a career plods forward, and making the drastic move to return to school for another degree fades further from my reach.

When we started talking about the ideas and philosophies behind SquarePlanet, one of the keystones of the business plan was to be able to develop workshops around teaching what our careers had given us both in experience, and changing the way people think, work and behave with presentations. When we realized how important presentations are to anyone—business, educational or social, we started to focus on the fact that NONE of us are truly taught how to create or develop a presentation, let alone design slides or stand in front of your peers with in idea to promote.

Wait a minute—everyone knows (or thinks they do) how to use PowerPoint, craft messages, and stand up in front of people to talk, but no one was EVER really shown the right way to do this? Really? I think we might be on to something here. This is not intuitive stuff here, yet how many times have you seen people take this task feebly into their own hands, and throw away a massive opportunity?


This past Thursday was the very first SqP Presentation Boot Camp workshop. Boot Camp. Really? Well, yeah. The idea is that we ALL need to have what we know to be the presentation status quo needs to be stripped down to nothing, erased from our collective memories, and started again from scratch. A clean wipe board, if you will.

Our first 1-day school was not without hiccups and rough spots, but for the two of us to be able to get in front of a group of people who really wanted to be there to learn, it was not only an awakening for our class, but it was honestly one of the most rewarding things I have done in my career, and I can't wait to do it again.

With very few nerves or jitters, I was very comfortable in freely giving my experience and knowledge—even in such a small dose—to an eager audience. It was immeasurable joy for me, and it really was something that I enjoy doing. I know Brian enjoyed the day, too, and I really believe that our first students got something valuable from the day.

I'm looking forward to the March 17th school already, and I can't wait to get up in front of our workshop again.

All the right reasons

No matter what you do well, someone will hate it. No matter what you do poorly, someone will love it. Please yourself and reach your own personal goals and you will be a success at whatever you do.

Sometimes.



It doesn't always work that way, but it should.

I have spent the last 18 years of my career trying to please clients, and for the most part, I have accomplished that task. The problem is, most clients aren't really comparing my work to anything other than the previous garbage they had before. Unfortunately, in most cases, the bar is set really low. My goal has always been to raise the level of professionalism for any client, and make them look and feel as polished as they can possibly be—even to their own ham-fisted undoing.

It's a frustrating high wire act of balancing what the client thinks they want and what the creative team knows to be the best solution. The old adage, "the client is always right," is almost always getting in the way, though. The problem with that is that if the client was right all the time, they wouldn't have needed my professional experience and they could have done their own work themselves. The reason they hired me in the first place is for my experience and ability to do something they could not. Thus, the client might know what they want, but the almost certainly do not know how to execute to a successful completion.

So you run the risk of clashing with a client over details that will make or break the project, or not even have any effect on the resultant product. And in the end, you must determine which battles to wage war over, to suit your own goals for any given project.

In the end, your goals should always be in the best interests of the client—to represent them in the best possible light, all while doing the best work you can given the time, budget and other constraints.

If you manage to make yourself proud of your own work in the process of making the client shine, then all the better.

Brevity

A university creative writing class was asked to write a concise essay containing these four elements:

• religion
• royalty
• sex
• mystery

The prize-winning essay read: "My God," said the Queen. "I'm pregnant. I wonder who did it?"


There is something to be said for not saying anything. Think about it.

Jobs

"My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each other's negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are not done by one person, they are done by a team of people."

-Steve Jobs

teh internets haz made u stupid.

My wife and I read a lot of books to our 2-year old daughter, as she brings us a constant supply of books asking us to, "reeeead." There is a growing stack of children's books in her room now that get my "stamp of stupidity," because of bad grammar, incorrect punctuation, slang speech and a general lack of discipline in something that is essentially teaching our kids how to read and speak.

I see it now a lot in the Chicago Tribune and other major newspapers that should employ more experienced copy editors—or even someone who has actually graduated college to do the job. Professional web blogs are littered with terrible English. Some of the industry books written by presentation specialists could use another once-over, as well.

The lack of proper grammar in the written word is bordering on epidemic. It's fine in a text or on Facebook (though it still makes you look stupid), but when you are presenting anything to an audience, it is always in your best interest to make sure your Ts are crossed and your Is are dotted. Literally, and not figuratively.

Internet conversational communication has made us all stupid. It made us lazy. We have forgotten how important the written word is, and how your use of the English language says a lot about you (and potentially your company).

It isn't that much to ask that when you are putting something together for a presentation or anything that puts you out in a spotlight, that you let someone else look over your words. At least proofread your own work. Worst case scenario, let the obligatory spell check have a glance at your efforts to make sure that you are on point, and not looking like a fool.