Ep 160 Stephen Curry and the Billion Dollar PowerPoint Blunder June 8, 2016

The billion dollar PowerPoint blunder involving Stephen Curry.

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

Folks, this is a fantastic, fascinating story about a PowerPoint blunder that has some pretty big bucks involved. Stephen Curry, for those of you who don't follow professional basketball, and certainly to many of you outside the US you might not follow it that carefully, but Stephen Curry is a huge, huge basketball success, huge star, MVP all over the place, one of the greatest three point shooters ever, and is really considered the best basketball player in the NBA at the moment. So he has been a longtime user of Nike basketball shoes. And any of these players who reach that level in the pros have endorsement deals. They make a lot of money, typically more money from their endorsement deals than what they get playing. So the Nike team was giving their presentation to him, his contract was up for renewal and apparently they were so lazy and slack and unprepared, they reused a PowerPoint slide that they had used for another basketball player named Kevin Durant. Now that in and of itself, it's not a problem to recycle slides, slides, as long as you change it, tailor it to the new person you are giving your presentation to. Here's the problem. They left Kevin Durant's name in the PowerPoint slide that they were giving to Stephen Curry. This is according to ESPN and has been documented by other sources. Comical when you think about it. Here's the thing. If you are paper salesman, saleswoman and you're going to give a new account pitch to someone and maybe you're going to get $100 worth of business from them a month, you make a little mistake, maybe they don't care, maybe it's not notice. At worst you lose $100 a month. But with basketball shoes, I mean this guy's shoes are selling more than a hundred million dollars worth of shoes a year. And you look at long term, some of these athletes get billion dollar deals. So they're clearly bringing in way in excess of a billion dollars to the shoe companies. And Nike was careless. How do you get around blunders like this? Well, the easiest way is to. And I'll tell you in just a moment.

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Okay folks, everybody makes mistakes. I've made mistakes. I've made mistakes in this podcast and I have been guilty of sending a contract to a client and accidentally the fine print leaving another client's name in the bottom. So I don't want to be holier than thou and say I'm perfect and isn't Nike awful? But you know what? The stakes were pretty high when you're going after the largest basketball celebrity in the world at the moment. I think it would warrant an actual rehearsal of the presentation you're doing. So what I would recommend, and I have to assume Nike did not do, is to have whoever is giving the presentation give the presentation in advance to five or 10 colleagues in the office. Maybe bring in the new interns who are seeing these slides for the first time. Give them the presentation and ask them to really look at everything carefully and not hold back feedback and to give a fresh set of eyes. Because the reason I think the Kevin Durant name stuck in is just when you've seen a document and you've given very, very similar presentations 50 times, 100 times, the mind just glazes over. You can't discipline yourself to read every word because it's too boring. You've seen it a thousand times. That's why you want to have a fresh set of eyes. So in Nike's case, they might have been saved if they had just brought in a 17 year old intern who just had never seen the slides before and asked this 17 year old, listen to this presentation and when we're done, tell us what you like, what you don't like, and did you see anything that stood out as maybe a problem? I'm pretty sure that 17 year old who's really excited to be there and excited to not be sleeping the floor gathering coffee would look at it and slide goes up. They would read it carefully and they might say, excuse me, but why do you have Kevin Durant's name in this? If it had happened, then it would have been very easy to correct. So that's the number one tip here. If you're giving up a PowerPoint presentation, especially if it is similar to a PowerPoint presentation you've given to other clients, other prospects, other customers, make darn sure a fresh set of eyes looks at it to catch this very blunder. Now, here's the other problem again. This is documented according to espn, which is a pretty reputable source when it comes to sporting news and things like this. The person from Nike who gave the presentation mispronounced the basketball player's name. They called him Stefan. Well, that's not how he pronounces his name. And you know, if you're already a huge star and people are, and I know nothing about Stephen Curry, he may be the most delightful, down to earth, easygoing fellow there is. But if you're used to everyone treating you like a huge, huge star, knowing everything about you, talking about you, and now here's someone who wants to do business with you and they're mispronouncing your name, it makes you feel like, do these people even know who I am? Do they really care about me? Or am I just a number? So again, how could this problem have been solved? Because it may very well be that the person in charge of these sorts of endorsements at Nike just isn't a big basketball fan, but is fantastic at everything else he or she. And I don't know if it's a man or woman, but is great at everything else he or she does, but just is not a huge basketball fan, that's okay, but the problem was easily solved. Again, you practice the presentation in front of five, 10 people at Nike because I guarantee you somebody at Nike knows how to pronounce Stephen Curry's name properly. And I may even be mispronouncing it because I'm not a huge basketball fan. But you know what I did before I created this podcast today? I went to Google and I typed in Pronounce Stephen Curry and I went to YouTube and I found a video that talked about how to pronounce it because I didn't want to embarrass myself. Have I ever mispronounced names a podcast? Sure. But the stakes are a lot lower because I'm not going after a business partner who's going to sell a billion dollars worth of my product. Not that it's ever good to willfully mispronounce. But again, this all could have been solved simply by practicing out loud in front of 15 people, perhaps 10. Fifteen people, maybe even fewer. Bring in the interns. There's a vendor coming in to deliver Cokes. Ask that person to say, hey, do you mind sitting down for a few minutes and hearing presentation? I'm pretty sure that vendor would be very happy to listen for 10 minutes and then ask people, what do you like? What do you remember? What stands out? And anything odd or off. A real basketball fan would have caught that and corrected the Nike executive and the whole embarrassing blunder could have been avoided. It could have been, to quote Barney Fife, nipped in the bud.

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That's our program for today. Our program is really very simple. I get questions from you on public speaking presentations, PowerPoint, speaking to the media, speaking during times of crisis, and I answer those questions giving you the same advice I would give if you were a client of mine and had hired me for a day or two or a week of intensive one on one presentation training. That is our show. So I am very serious. If you send me your questions, you can email them. Tjwalker.com is the easiest email to reach me. You can send a note on Twitter J. Walker, you can post on our Facebook page, LinkedIn, anywhere you find us. And I promise you I will address your question on this program and there's no charge. So why not take advantage of it. Thanks again for joining me. Hope to see you and spend some time with you tomorrow and the next day and the next. Because this show is seven days a week.

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