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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
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Shakes my tired patterns!
This book, recommended to me by a student of mine, gave me wonderfully fresh ways to look at my old and tired ways. I have walked away with some good techniques and ways of thinking.
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A Valuable Approach to Presentation Design in a Digital and Information Rich Society
Garr Reynolds is a former Manager of WW User Group Relations at Apple Computer, and is a currently a Marketing and Multimedia Presentation Design at Kansai Gaidai University in Japan.
In this "How-to" book, Presentation Zen, Garr offers a fresh teaching approach to presentation design. Garr organizes his book into three sections Preparation, Design and Delivery. Within these sections Garr stresses Clarity, Simplicity and Naturalness.
He cautions not to begin writing your presentation in PowerPoint, and instead to get out a notepad or scratch paper and jump into the creative process feet first. Imagine Shakespeare writing Romeo & Juliet in PowerPoint slides, it would have proved creatively impossible. Before digitizing your presentation, write it down on paper, yellow post-its, or a whiteboard. Generate a lot of ideas and then cut away the unnecessary information, then prioritize and organize your main points.
Garr also stresses not to "Data Dump" or simply paste entire excel sheets full of figures into a PowerPoint slide. Instead Garr asks readers to crunch the numbers first, consider the implications and wider relations and sum up the conclusion on each slide. He points out that the slide is not the place for you to walk the audience through a detailed walk through a process, that is better left to an actual printed document with deep explanation. Rather every slide should state a conclusion, a key takeway that the presenter can expand upon during the presentation.
A worthwhile investment to enhance your presentation skills.
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Ignores fundamental realities of presentations
This book is a good source of inspiration and ideas for slides, however, it overlooks key realities of many presentations. That is, most people create presentations that must stand on their own without the speaker because:
1) They are included in conference proceedings. Most conferences have multiple tracks. Unless your slides have sufficient content, then those who missed your presentation are SOL.
2) They are circulated among business colleagues for collaboration or information sharing
3) They are sales or marketing presentations that are typically left behind
These realities invalidate most of the principles of this book which recommends slides that are meaningless or content poor without the voice-over.
What's needed is a book steeped more in the realities of Powerpoint than in artistry.
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Replace Bullet Points with Dental Posters That Evoke Positive Feelings, Tell Stories, and Be Mentally Present
Long before there was PowerPoint, most presentations contained more columns of numbers and bullet points than pictures. PowerPoint seemed designed to capture the essence of those transparencies and make it faster to create them . . . while adding color. Compared to those ugly transparencies, PowerPoint seemed like an improvement.
By comparison, my dentist has always covered his walls with beautiful bleed images of gorgeous places combined with intriguing sayings about life. Those posters are the only uplifting thing about my trips to the dentist's office. He doesn't tell me any entertaining stories.
In presentationzen, Garr Reynolds shares with us that today's audiences like a standard PowerPoint presentation about as much as I like going to the dentist (I doubt if you are surprised by that). His prescription is to turn the typical presentation into a series of stories aided by exhibits that remind me of those dental posters while being very responsive (present . . . in his terminology) to the audience.
The book's main strength, and one that makes it well worth reading and following, is in describing a process that can be used to create a presentation that will be compelling. Even when I see a presentation that I like, I don't learn much from the example because the presenter doesn't share the process behind the result.
The examples almost all showed someone in a black turtle neck, black pants, and black shoes who looked like a Steve Jobs acolyte. As a result, there's an Apple versus Microsoft tone to the book that didn't match any environment where I ever see or give presentations (usually board rooms and senior corporate conference rooms).
Most presentations should be much shorter, should have a lot less material, and should be much easier to grasp. This book will help you if that's the way you want to go. Beware, however, that you don't go over the edge into becoming an "artiste" in your presentations. This book will probably push you a little too far in that direction.
For those who cannot imagine how an image might fit into a presentation, this book will be a great breath of fresh air. To those who want to copy the advice closely, keep your audience in mind. You might try to take them places where they don't want to go.
In my 30-plus years of presentation experience, I find that the story is the key to success. One good story will more than carry the day. You can draw on a chalk board with your fingernails for graphics and a good story will still work just fine. To me, the weakness of this book is that it doesn't pay enough to the story telling aspect of successful presentations.
I recommend Stephen Denning's books on story telling to help you with that aspect of presentations.
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Inside presentations - what really matters
Garr Reynolds has succinctly grasped a pernicious nettle and dislodged a few hoary myths about effective communication in his new book presentationzen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery. Realising '... that something needed to be done to end the scourge of bad PowerPoint slides and the lifeless narration that accompanies them.' (p. 6), he sets out to illustrate a simpler and more effective approach to communication through presentations.
Keep in mind that the whole thing is about communication: what you need to do and, perhaps more importantly, not do, to make communication effective.
The ten chapters are logically grouped into five areas - introduction, preparation, design, delivery and the next step.
Depending on your philosophical leanings, don't get too caught up or distracted by the 'Zen' context in which he sets out his ideas - look instead at the key ideas themselves.
In the context of planning a presentation I liked his idea of what he called "going analog" (p. 45). Get away from your computer to think about the bigger context in which your presentation is to be made, to identify your key messages and generally tease out your ideas.
One of his key points with which I heartily agree is the need to avoid inadvertently becoming a slave to the software you are using (especially PowerPoint) with its own inherent structural and process constraints.
In discussing at length presentation design (comprising some 20% of the book), Reynolds provides an extensive set of before/after examples to illustrate the key points about the use of text, images, graphics, the interaction between text and images, use of white space, balance, grids and the rule of thirds. The latter will be familiar to readers who are photographers.
A particularly helpful feature comprising Chapter 7: Sample Slides, are examples used by real world presenters , including links to relevant websites. A couple at which I have had a quick look were very worthwhile.
The only downside I struck occurred in the delivery phase of the book where I thought the extensive Zen references and context tended to dominate the key messages he was trying to get across.
I strongly recommend this book to anyone who has to present something to an audience.
I can't do better than reiterate Reynolds' own advice - enjoy the journey!
(Readers interested in following Reynolds' ideas further should have a look at his website www.presentationzen.com)
Reviewed by Greg Davies
The Apple Users' Society of Melbourne (AUSOM)
www.ausom.net.au
