The power of presentations

(upbeat contemporary music) - There's an enormous amount of power in a presentation, especially when it's delivered really well. And, presentations are the only communication medium where it's in person, and we have the opportunity to connect in a very personal way because we're face to face. - Presentations have always been looked down as something that was, you know, any admin can do. But it takes a lot of thought and skill, because it's not about the tool, it's about the story. - It's a really simple question. I ask this of people all the time, "How many presentations have you sat through "in the last month?" People will say four, ten, thirty, right? And I'll say, "How many of them sucked?" And the look on their faces tells you that it was pretty much all of them. - It's been off-sited that there's somewhere between 30 and 50 million Powerpoint presentations given each day. Somewhere between 500 million and 750 million flash animations that are viewed on the web. So if you look at the ubiquity of what we're doing, it's absolutely immense. The challenge is to rise above the noise level and to really stand out. - I can't even be in the room anymore with a bad presentation, because it just drives me crazy. And I know about all the missed potential and the missed opportunity of how someone could really be engaging with their audience, or really make more of an impact with what they're saying. - We take it for granted at this point, you know, in business communications that we're going to go get hauled off to a room and non-voluntarily have to spend 45 minutes there listening to somebody else tell us what he thinks is important in his life. We really need to change that paradigm. It's about what's important in the audience's life. - We need just as strong as visual thinkers, conceptual thinkers, to be able to design these presentations. That they're just as impactful as a billboard is, or that a great package is. - Presentations are the most powerful way to rally a workforce or to close a big sale, whatever it is that you have as an objective. But right now, we build presentations so often that are so putrid and so poorly put together, that they don't resonate. And if you take that extra bit of time to really pull together your content, and your structure, and your story well, you can actually change your world. (upbeat contemporary music)