Presentation

16-Dec-2005

Alan points to an excellent piece of software for people like me who complain about PowerPoint, but never do anything about it. Piro Sakura has produced a “Takahashi-Method-based Presentation Tool in XUL/Returns” which allows you to edit and present

A friend attended a talk by Lawrence Lessig on his recent visit to Australia. She claims that what he said was interesting, but not life altering. However, how he presented it had changed her life.

“Mesmerising.” she said “A number would fade onto the screen as he was talking and he would pause and then measure out only enough words to tell you why that number was important. Then an image would appear, then another word. It was all perfectly synchronised with his speaking.” My friend said next time he visits she would pay money from her own pocket to attend his talks even if the subject matter wasn’t interesting to her.

Steve Jobs presents similarly and his style helps with generating his reality distortion field. Perhaps this has something to do with his association with another presenter with a legendary style, Guy Kawasaki.

“Lessig Style” has been compared with “Takahashi Method” and “Kawasaki Method” in a post at Presentation Zen.

It’s not the size of your deck that counts
I guarantee you there is no presentation book on the market that would recommend you use a few hundred slides, some visible for 1-2 seconds, for a 15-minute presentation. That’s crazy talk, right? Yet, it works in this particular case for this particular audience and for the particular allotted time, a short 15-minutes. This is why I never recommend a specific number of slides, or even that a presenter must use slideware at all. It depends.

As we like to say in Japan, it all depends on TPO (Time, Place, Occasion). Who’s to say what an appropriate number of slides should be? [...]

There are some good examples of different presentation styles available for comparison.

I think I will attempt a presentation based on “Lessig Style” soon, I must see for myself:

  1. Whether I can talk in a straight enough line to use this technique, and
  2. if an audience responds to the content better when more attention is paid to choreography.
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2 Responses to “Presentation”

  1. Alastair says:
    16-Dec-2005 at 10:22 am

    I found this presentation on Identity 2.0 (yeah yeah) to be equally compelling on style grounds. The content is interesting too, but it’s a good example of Lessig style (which AFAICT is rarely published in video form online).

    I think I’m more leaning towards a Jobs style presentation for my next talk, I just don’t think I could pull off the Lessig style without a serious amount of preparation and rehearsal.

    Presentation Zen is an excellent blog.

  2. Alan Green says:
    19-Dec-2005 at 9:35 am

    Another thing that was great about OSDC was the number of speakers that went beyond bullet points in some way. In addition to Takahashi and Lessig style, pictures were plentiful and some sessions consisted largely or entirely of live demoes. The contrast with those sessions that used traditional slide-ware was marked.

    There were a few presentations about giving presentations, and one of those papers (pdf) is online.

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