The Presentation Summit w Rick Altman

Speaking with TJ Walker, dissecting the communication skills and practices of world class leaders.

You've heard of the super bowl, the Olympics, the World Cup. Well, imagine all those put together, but for public speaking. That's right. The Presentation Summit is coming up. Rick Altman, the longtime founder, organizer and chief guru there is with us today. Rick, thanks for joining us.

My pleasure, T.J. thanks for having me.

Now, Rick, you've been in every aspect of the presentation world going back to the 80s, whether it was with Corel products. You're a big PowerPoint guru. You are very different from me and a lot of presentation experts. We like to think of ourselves as we're good working alone. We can write, we can give a speech. You're actually a good organizer. And somehow you bring together collectively over the years, thousands of people around the world to talk about and learn about presentation skills. Tell us, first of all, for those who don't know, what is the Presentation Summit?

The Presentation Summit is an annual conference. We've been doing it for, oh my goodness, yeah, 14 years. I feel old. And we bring together about 200 people each year from just about every avenue of corporate culture and small businesses and the like. We find that. But there isn't a single industry out there whose people couldn't benefit from communicating better in public. So, you know, people ask us often, well, you know, what, what vertical industries is this conference for? And I feel like it's hyperbole when I say it's for. It's for darn near every single one. Death by PowerPoint is everywhere, TJ. You know that as well as I do.

I certainly see bad PowerPoint presentations everywhere in my own work. So who are the speakers and who is this audience geared towards?

The presenters come from just about every corner. Also, I will say that none of them is actually an employee of mine. They are all independent contractors themselves. That includes the speakers and the support staff. And that has made for some incredible loyalty. You know, if these people work for me, they'd be going off and getting other jobs eventually. But they all have their own lives. And so once a year they all come together for this week. And there are some people that have been with me since the very, very beginning. That's loyalty that you just can't find elsewhere. So these are some of the most noted experts in the PowerPoint community. Microsoft actually has a measure for that. They're called the MVPs, the most valued professionals. And they're the ones that dedicate certain amount of time to helping others in the community better understand the product. So from a technical standpoint, this group, they come to the conference, they set up our help center, where from morning till night across all four days, you can go in and get any question answered. So it becomes a total geek heaven.

And we should point out the conference is October 23rd through the 26th, 2016 in Las Vegas. For more information, you can go to presentationsummit.com that's three.

Now.

I have to confess, I almost come a time or two, I've never actually been. I hope to remedy that at some point. What else goes on? To some people's ears, although not this audience, to some people's ears, a conference about how to give PowerPoint sounds almost bizarre. Tell us about what goes on at the conference.

I'd like to think there's a bizarre quotient to it. For a while we were called PowerPoint Live and we were just about the software. It was a gradual evolution through the mid 2000s until we finally did the name change in 2010 to reflect the fact that there's so much more than just the software. I mean, really, TJ PowerPoint is kind of a mediocre commodity. I mean, people can learn it in about an hour or so. They declare themselves proficient soon thereafter. And that's actually one of the problems in the industry, I believe, is that the, the software is too easy. Not that it's too hard, there's just a whole lot more to it. To summarize, I'd say that we cover what I consider to be the four tenets of good message crafting, presentation, design, software technique, and mostly that is PowerPoint. We're about 98% PowerPoint users and then delivery. So of those four, I don't know, PowerPoint proficiency might rank fourth. I'm not sure it's the low lying fruit because everybody wants to know the software better and we certainly cater to that. But in our seminar tracks, you'll find that the real juice takes place with our makeovers in the design track and the people that come to talk to us about how to really create a good narrative arc. And then in the delivery track, about all the myriad forms of delivery from in person through webinars and Skype calls like this one and everything else. So we, you know, for three days we really put a blanket on all of that from the learning standpoint. Then there's a whole other side of this, but. And that could come out as we talk about it.

So who is the conference for? Who are your attendees? Do they work for large corporations, governments? Are they the actual Speakers, Are they administrative staff? Who are they?

Yes, to all of that, I would say that the, that if I had to label and actually we do, we ask people when they register what hats do they wear. And increasingly they wear multiple hats. But the one that probably is the plurality is content creator. These are people that owe their livelihoods to creating good presentation content, whether it's for themselves or whether it's for others in their organization, their bosses or their colleagues. One way or the other. That's what puts bread on their table, is creating good content for presentations.

And if you want to know more about how to attend this conference, go to presentationsummit.com3ws.presentationsummit.com Rick Altman, thank you for being our guest here today.

Pleasure.

Okay, stop. Great time out. Now we go to the analysis part.

Okay.

You are a public speaker and certainly if you were going to speak somewhere for 90 minutes promoting the conference, you would have one set of ideas. You're also a media communicator because you go on podcast talk shows and some, like this one, are going to be an hour, but some might only be three or four minutes, as the segment we just did was under seven minutes. How do you determine what to focus on and how do you adapt your presentations? Whether you've got 90 minutes, an hour or seven or even three minutes. Let me just so, Rick, you're asked to speak like any speaker. You have varying lengths of time. You might have a 90 minute keynote to promote the presentation summit. You might have a ten minute talk show, a four minute talk show. How do you decide what's most important when you have a relatively short period like the segment we just did?

Well, I suppose if I told you that I rely on a set of fundamentals and mechanics and principles, that would actually be disingenuous because while those things all exist, I rarely do fall to them. I consider it to be all a matter of can you share your passion with your audience? Because if you don't care about what you're speaking about, and if you don't convey that to your audience, then really there's not a whole lot else that matters. Now, if you've got an hour and a half or if you've got three minutes, you know that is going to certainly impact the way you communicate all of that. But it has to start with what you feel in your heart. So sometimes notes and scripts actually can do a disservice.

And that really begs the question, how did you develop such a passion for presentation and specifically PowerPoint, how far back.

You want me to go? I have. That's the beauty of this show.

We have time. We have time.

We can go back to first grade if you want. I'm a dumb jock. I'm a sports writer. My first job out of school was as the editor of a tennis magazine, and I wasn't good enough to play professional tennis. Everything else was my join the club. Everything else was my second choice. But back at Inside Tennis magazine, in the middle of the 1980s, I sort of invented desktop publishing in my own little vacuum. I figured out how to use. Okay, and I'm really going to date myself here. TJ Wordstar running on an Osborne computer. This was before IBM PCs with a haze smart modem that cost $800 that ran at 300 baud across a telephone line. We figured out how to sen our articles to our typesetter so they wouldn't have to retype everything. Because back then that's what you had to do. You'd send, you know, printed manuscripts and it was the just the coolest thing in the whole world. And this is before John Warnock of Adobe, or actually Aldous said, let there be desktop publishing. There was no, there was no words that described any of this, but it was just the coolest thing in the world. So I quit my job at the tennis magazine and I started, you know, fumbling around with all of this. And you had mentioned the Corel World conference. This led me to a desktop publishing program that's a dinosaur today. Ventura Publisher, which went up against Aldus Pagemaker. I mean, only those that are in their 50s are going to remember any of this stuff. And that led to an association with Corel Corporation, the company out of Ottawa. They were the darlings of the Windows based graphics industry before Adobe came in and stomped all over. We were holding Corel world throughout the 90s and the early 2000s. And one of the guys on my team back there, a dear friend now, Steve Rinsberg, said, well, you should be doing this for PowerPoint. And I said, who cares about PowerPoint? And he says, no, really, there's a whole lot of people out there that use it and they use it badly. And he was one of the founding members of this group of Microsoft MVPs that I discussed earlier. And he just kept nagging me. And I said, okay, well, fine, I'll put, I'll put my money where your mouth is. Let's do this. And a bunch of us met up in Seattle in a hotel room one day and said, okay, we're gonna do this. And that was 2002, leading up to our first event in 2003. And 180 people showed up to the darn thing. Who would have thought? And, yeah, now we're on year number 14.

And how many people have come in recent years? What sort of crowd are you expecting?

We cap attendance at 200. And I'd like to say that, you know that every year they bang our doors down. And last year, we actually did have to turn people away. That's a very pleasant problem to have. But, you know, normally we're somewhere right around the 185 to 215 mark, right around there. On the one hand, we love doing small conferences, and we're really good at it, if I have to say. I mean, I'm not an event planner, I'm not a meeting planner, but we're really good at putting together this conference for 200 people. And while that's a small number in the conference industry, at the same time, when you bring 200 people together, all who share that passion, and like I said, they're owing their livelihoods to doing all this better, you create an environment that is just unmatchable. It is intoxicating. And there's no online community that can do that. When you bring them all together under one roof like that, you create a sense of community that is just incredible. And while we're going to make people's heads explode and we're going to teach them more than they ever thought possible, I would say that I'm most proud of the community that has spawned around this conference. But that didn't exist before. PowerPoint users and presentation content creators and designers had no place to turn before, and this conference kind of created that community. And if you look at all the online communities today, the MVP team I talked about, or presentation expert, or all the webinars, the blogs, the podcasts, most of them can point in some way to having met the people they are now involved in with from the conference.

Now, I hate to be selfish, but I have to ask, are you still a good tennis player? I'm in need of a tennis Coach.

The. The USTA has me rated at a 4.5. Yeah, that. That's pretty good. I'm. Yeah, I know how to play.

I think I'm a 3.0, but I. That may have been someone's charity. They may have given me one and a half points. I don't know.

But 3.0 means that you're just starting out, but that you're an enthusiastic player.

Oh, boy. I played Every day in the 70s and was pretty good.

Well, then you'd quickly become higher than a 3, 0 if you started playing in any of the USTA leagues and.

Then didn't play for about 20 years. Living in New York City, Moved out to the suburbs a couple years ago, Have a tennis court in my backyard, so I really have no excuse not to play.

And there on the east coast, you get to play on clay tennis courts.

Well, unfortunately, I don't have a clay court at my home. That's a little too extravagant.

Back to the conference.

Now you have an all star lineup of speakers. I mean, I'm seeing some of the names like Nancy Duarte, best selling speaker. I mean, if you were to go to a conference, these are speakers who charge 20, $30,000 a keynote speech. Who else are your headliners?

Who else have we browbeated into working for well below their speaking rate? Is that what you're asking me? Okay, okay. Clearly, Nancy headlines for us this year. She's the rock star of our industry. She honors us with her participation. She was there for the first few years before she became the celebrity in our industry that she is today. And we're just so grateful that when she can squeeze us in, she does. It doesn't happen very often. So we think it's a total privilege that she's with us this year. The other two keynote speakers are Sunny Brown and Carmen Simon. We have an all girl band this year. I'm very proud and tickled by that.

Confession, I have to say. I looked at the website that showed the speakers. I saw three women's faces and my first reaction is, wow, isn't that odd? All women speakers. My second reaction was, how many times have I been to a website and there's 27 speakers and they're all white men. And I never registered anything with me. So I'm guilty of that sexism too, I guess.

You know, I could tell you that I've been a feminist forever and that my first few beats at the Daily California was all women's sports. That might be true, but this is just sort of grown organically. And I should say that, that our conference is attended by usually 60 to 65% women each year. I don't think know why that is. I've never studied it, but I think it's kind of cool. And we have a lot of women on our presenting team. I mean, actually, let me just take a quick look at all the others. If I.

While you're doing that, some housekeeping. While you're doing that, Some Housekeeping matters. You're listening to Speaking with TJ Walker. If you like the program, please subscribe. Please leave a review and share it on Facebook with your friends. If you have questions or comments, feel free to leave them on the website, on the blog. If you are experiencing this on Facebook, LinkedIn, you can leave comments there. For more information about the Presentation Summit, go to presentationsummit.com that's 3W's presentationsummit.com we're happy to have with us today Rick Altman. Rick, More on the speakers. Who else? Some of the big names.

Well, you know, we just, we look for the crazy talented people. We look for the people that, from a technical side, do incredible things with the software that make your jaw drop. On the, on the artistic side, we look for the people who, you know, create these makeovers and you just go, wow. But we also look for people who are really pragmatic and take approach approaches to presentation design, where you say, you know what? That makes sense to me. I can do that. Let's take the subject of makeovers where Julie Terberg, who's been with us since almost the beginning, and we call her the makeover maven, and her makeover sessions are one of the most popular of all. And she's just a brilliant designer who has chosen presentation as her medium. And she'll make your jaw drop on the next day, do makeovers. And I am not anywhere near Julie's league, but part of what makes that effective is that I will create these common sense before and afters where people look at that and say, well, I could have done that. And that's exactly the reaction I want them to have. I want them to leave thinking, I own this. So we will run the gamut from, from the amazing to the down to earth and practical.

So, Rick, you've seen dozens, if not hundreds of PowerPoint presentations at the presentation summit the last 14 years.

Thousands.

Which ones really stood out the most for your audience? Which ones were remembered and talked about? And what specifically did they remember?

Oh, wow. Okay, you're going to put me on the spot here. I remember one that Nancy did in 2010 in San Diego where she sort of created the anatomy of a presentation and she charted it out where, like, literally on a graph, she showed the ups and downs of a presentation. She took Martin Luther King's I had a dream, I have a dream, Excuse me. And she said, you know, here's where he's talking about, you know, where we are today. And then the, you know, the needle goes way up and here's where he's talking about what could be. And then drop back down to the reality today and then back up to, you know, where my brothers and sisters live and, you know, a world where, you know, judged by the content of your character, all of that. And then she, you know, took some other speeches and showed that this arc is sort of exists across the, you know, the entire gamut of presentation. That was incredible. That was 2010. A few years later, Nigel Holmes, former art director for Time magazine, he showed about all the different ways that he can express numbers and concepts. And he took a tube of toothpaste and he spread it out, he squeezed it out across the entire floor in front of him and said, okay, well, this is one way that you might measure something. And then he went into the millions and billions of stars in the galaxy and all this stuff, and everybody just loved it. So, you know, we've had a little of everything. We had somebody come and give a key. I gotta ask you about.

I gotta ask you about the toothpaste. To me, what I had not heard that. That use of a prop before, but to me, that is fascinating because I find it that so often we're taught to think visual, visual, visual. And for so many people, they instantly think, oh, that's gotta be a PowerPoint slide. But something like a 98 cent tube of toothpaste. Here you are remembering it years later.

And he connected the two. That was the great thing is he connected them. Well, first of all, he asked, he held it in his hand and said, how far do you think I can spread this? And it ended up being like, you know, 40ft. And then in a visual that he did about the consumption of toothpaste, he did these. He showed these graphs where it was toothpaste being squeezed out. And that's what, you know, each coordinate on the graph was so. So it was just wonderfully creative.

And what was the point that you took away from him, squeezing the toothpaste down?

That numbers can be deceiving and that if you only think of a number in your head, it might not give you the sense of proportion.

And was that an effective tool? Obviously, yes, tremendous. You remember not only what he did in the image, but you remember the message. When I ask, in a moment, I'm going to ask you who you think is given some of the best PowerPoint presentations in history and seen worldwide. When I ask that question, quite often people tell me, well, Steve Jobs. And I understand that he didn't use what's called PowerPoint, but the Apple equivalent. They often talk about him as a best speaker. And with all of his technology and all of his resources behind the largest technology company in the world backing him, one of the things that stands out was when he was introducing the Air Mac, he didn't put up a slide that had facts and bullet points of 1.8of an inch point 2 ounces. He had someone walk out on stage with an envelope and he said, how thin is this computer? He pulled it out of a microphone.

I remember that.

Thin enough to fit in an envelope. It was an extraordinarily powerful image. It cost 50 cents for an envelope. And yet here we both remember it a decade or so later. My big question is, how can your, the people who come to a conference like yours and the people who are in organizations and given the responsibility of creating presentations, how can they inject the use of props? Because it's not as simple as just finishing that deck and emailing it for approval.

You know, just a quick aside that actually backfired on Apple because there were lots of people who put their Air Max in small things like those envelopes and then lost them. And Steve Jobs is certainly, you know, one of the gold standards for us. And people talk about his props and everything else, but you know, what I'll point to with Steve Jobs is his meticulous preparation. He was in that room at the Moscone center for those Mac worlds the night before, driving his staff Crazy till 2 or 3 o' clock in the morning with clicker in hand, just so carefully pacing out every little thing that when he took the stage the following morning, he was just so supremely confident. And one of the things I talk about is confidence, because confidence is a transferable commodity when you prepare like that and you become confident with your use of the software. In his case, it was keynote, not PowerPoint. But it doesn't matter. Then that confidence will transfer to the way that you actually present. And he's one of the. There's no better example of that than the late Steve Jobs.

Now, I had forgotten, but when you mentioned. I do remember now, there was a rash of people who threw away their laptops because it was so thin it would get on. Get in between newspapers.

Exactly, yeah.

I'm curious, was that seen as his speech backfiring or is that just a function of it being the thinnest laptop for a long time?

I don't think you'd say his speech backfired, because you're right, that was expert use of prop. No question about it. There was just an Unintended consequence to that, you know, and just to the fact that these, these machines become so thin. I mean today we're used to it. We're used to our devices being really small and thin and we know we have to be careful. But a laptop computer, you know, that wasn't something that you thought could get lost on your desk back then. And it actually happened a few times, got taken out with the trash.

Rick, you mentioned Martin Luther King. I have a Dream speech, certainly great speech. Many historians rank it the top speech of the 20th century. No PowerPoint used, obviously. And most political figures to this day rarely use PowerPoint. You could think of Ross Perot in 92, which is now 24 years ago.

Obama did it a little bit, but yeah, not much.

It's not used much. But people in the corporate world do. Who do you think is someone who really uses PowerPoint effectively and has a large spotlight on them? The CEO of a major corporation, certainly historically in the last 15 years, I think most people would say Steve Jobs. But I'd like to know who you like currently.

Oh boy, that's a good one. I mean I could certainly point to some of the people that speak at our conference. We mentioned Nancy Duarte. Gar Reynolds is another one who's phenomenally talented. He will appear remotely because he lives in Japan. So we will bring him in for our late night session which is 2 o' clock in the afternoon for him. I'm kind of dodging your question here because I'm trying to think about in the corporate world. In the corporate world, what you usually see is PowerPoint used when it didn't need to be. People force the issue. Often in corporate culture it's practically required that you show slides and often it's to the detriment of the presenter. It doesn't complement the narrative message all too often. So you know what, tj? I'm coming up empty when I'm thinking of in corporate America who I've seen give a talk. I mean, part of the problem is it's not really televised very often. Now I could point to some TED talks that I think were really, really good. Some of them that used visuals tremendously well, you know the one with J. Taylor who, who talked about suffering a stroke and how she's actually a neuro neuroscientist or a neuro neurologist or I mean something in the neurology field and, and she was aware of her actually experiencing a stroke and she, she spoke about that and then she had somebody bring out onto stage A human brain. And she put her gloves on and she opened it up and she. She talked about, about. About how a stroke happens. That was just amazing.

I can see her speech now, just from the words you're painting right now. Ted, of course, has the advantage that they basically require speakers not to use traditional PowerPoint slides with text. They, for the most part, require you to use images exclusively, typically one image per slide, so that no one is. There's certainly no death by PowerPoint at a TED conference, even if you don't love every speaker.

That's right.

Do you think you're immersed in this industry? I've often made this point, have not been very successful at trying to get this rule imposed. But I always tell my corporate clients, if you want to have effective PowerPoint presentations, you should have a rule. One image per slide, don't use text. And that's essentially the TED way. But I've been advocating that for years. At what level? Well, let me just step back. What rules do you think corporations should have? I mean, a lot of them have rules of, our logo has to be on this corner.

It has to be legal.

What do you think they should have?

Well, you know, as soon as you start coming up with rules, you can easily confound them or contradict them. And in fact, we did this one year at the conference as a spoof. We said, okay, you can only have, you know. And what did we say? We said six words on a slide. Well, so then somebody, just for fun, created a procession of slides. Each one, you know, built on the other one. So he got around it, you know, the other one was, was, you know, how many. How many words per click? And so some guy used animation to put like 5,000 words on their slide. You know, we were doing this for fun. But the point is that usually a hard and fast rule will find exceptions too often for me. But here's the one that I use. I use this one. One thought per click. You know, you may build a slide to ultimately have several ideas on it, even maybe to the point that if you show that all at once, it would be too much. You'd be making your audience drink from the fire hose, like I like to say. But if you build that slide properly with effective use of animation, then, you know, you might be able to create both the forest and the trees. And so that has worked well for me. One thought per click.

And that's certainly what I advocate and I think is a best practice. But the second you have a traditional slide with seven bullet points or even Three bullet points with three words, you've automatically violated that. Essentially.

That's, that's. So there you go. Just like I said, as soon as you make a rule, you can find a way to violate it. Now what? I will also be very quick to say that I don't believe text should be animated. I find very little reason to take standard bullet slides and animate them. Dense, chunky data like a chart that I get. But when you animate text, you actually could be doing your audience a disservice. We took a poll one year at the conference, actually. We said, you know, what do you think about slides where they bring their bullet points up one by one, one out of 15 people? TJ, they told us they were actually put off by that because what you're doing when you do that is you rob your audience of context. You know, you know what our four, all four points are? Why don't you let your audience know all those four points? I mean, are you really that concerned that they're going to read ahead? Who gives a crap? I mean, you know, there's four points on the screen. That's your job to keep your audience on, on point. So I find very little reason to ever animate text slides. And so if I, if I marry those two things, one point per click, and, and just get your text out there and speak to that together, you're going to end up, I think, with, with workable solutions.

I'm going to have you back for another show. We'll have a more in depth debate. I actually argue it's a complete waste of time to put text on a slide. When I test audiences all over the.

World, they never remember text. They remember they were.

You know, Steve Jobs, for example, when he unveiled the iPhone, he said, well, what are we doing here today? He said, you know what this is? He put up a picture of an ipod. He said, you know what this is? And he put up a picture of a cell phone.

It would be a chat.

What do we have today? And he blended it together to, and.

To an iPhone debate. Well, let me just quickly say it'd be a challenging debate because I don't really disagree with you, but I live in corporate America and I understand the requirements. There's no way you can go into a company and say, eliminate all the texts from your slides. I have to work with that as, as my canvas of reality here.

Understood. And this is where people have to work in corporations, large governments. What else is at your conference that is going to help the career, benefit the career of Someone who is, let's say they are in the communications department and they work for a Fortune 100 company. They are, let's say, 32 years old. They've been at the company five years. They're looking to not only do well in their current job, but plan for the future. What else are they going to get out of your conference?

Unparalleled networking. When you hold a conference of just 200 people and you have enough space, and when we vet our hotels, we make sure that we can create what we call conference central, which is a room of about 5,000 square feet, where when you are not in sessions, you then go into conference central. We have all of our breaks there. We do our keynotes there. The help center is there, we put couches in there and we have long breaks. We have half hour between seminars and we have an hour over an hour and a half for lunch. So we give people tremendous opportunity and we give them the means and the physical space to really meet one another and to network. We have social events, of course, and we don't play any of the dumb games like put a name on the back of your thing. And I mean, we find these people. All we need them to do is give them the opportunity and, you know, maybe a glass of wine doesn't hurt. And they're going to, they're going to get to know one another. We have seen some of the most incredible relationships form at this conference. We've seen permanent friendships formed, business partnerships forged, and we have had three couples meet at our conference and then marry. So we are indeed a full service.

Well, if I, if I come, I'll bring my wife.

And a lot of people use it as vacation also.

So all sorts of good things happen there.

That's right.

It sounds like a lot of fun. Now, I have to ask, if you're giving a presentation at a PowerPoint and a presentation conference, the standards have got to be higher, the scrutiny is higher. And I'm not asking you to name names, but certainly over the years you must have had some people where their presentations froze, stuck, projector didn't work. Are there any mishaps like that? And what's been the reaction from the crowd?

Oh, sure, yeah, that has happened. When you give presentations to presenters on the art of presenting, first of all, you're never really sure what they're paying attention to. And yes, you know, you have to walk the walk and talk the talk and everything else. But, you know, I mean, crap happens. You know, there's there, I suppose there's two Levels of crap. One is when you bring someone in who just isn't very good. If I'm bringing in a total drop dead PowerPoint expert, the audience is going to cut that person slack because that person might not necessarily be a professional presenter. That person, we're actually going to ask that person to sit down at the machine, put hand to mouse and actually drive the software, you know, and then, you know, they may go a little too fast. You know, they may do lots of ums and uhs, but that's okay. I mean, because they're just showing magic with the software. That's going to be different than a keynote presenter whose job is to inspire everybody. And they really need to, of course, know their stuff. One of the, One of the biggest.

One of the.

My favorite mishaps was way back at the beginning, I think it was 2005 in San Diego. A power outage took out the power for the entire three block radius around our hotel. I remember walking into the rooms and there was Nancy duarte with about 125 people in the room. She simply took her notebook computer, turned it around, and she didn't miss a beat. I thought that was incredible.

Well done, Clancy. Now that's happened to me before. I'll tell you how I handled it. But what is your. But first I want to know what's your general advice to people? If it's something that can't be turned back on, there's just the bulb burns out, your computer completely locks up. What's your advice?

Audiences don't want perfect presenters. Audiences don't need perfect presentations. Audiences want people who they feel are just like them. And so this stuff happens to them. If it happens to the person, you know, then they're gonna, they're gonna give sympathy. So I mean, first of all, you gotta know what you're, what you're talking about. You got to know what your narrative arc is, whether you take physical notes or whether you have it in your head. You need to know where you want to take your audience. And so, you know, a capable presenter should be able to tell that story with or without visuals. And so, you know, and it is a pretty good exercise which I have done, in which I've actually imposed upon my clients when I give workshops in corporations. You know that, okay, you're gonna, you're gonna give this five minute talk now. And I see that you have your slides here. Well, I'm, and I, to be dramatic, I actually do unplug the projector says, okay, go. You know, and they have to to be able to do that. And the first thing that they often sue is, oh, geez, I wish I'd had some notes. Okay, well, so now there. That's rule one. Have notes, you know, maybe you never look at them, but even just the act of writing this stuff down, point, you know, main, first point, second point, third point. That's going to help you, you know, be able to see it in your head. So, you know, one way or the other, you. You need to. You are a storyteller, and you want to be able to tell your story in any environment.

Key, key point. You just said you've got to be ready to get it with or without your slides. And that's always my recommendation to clients, is you are never ready to give a PowerPoint presentation unless you're ready to give it without any slides or decks or electricity.

There's one exception. If you are a PowerPoint trainer, if the projector goes out when you are showing how the software works, then you are hosed. Then it is really challenging to do that, you know, just by painting a picture in people's heads. And so that's where, you know, where a presenter really deserves sympathy because. Because, you know, if the projector blows up and you're showing PowerPoint, and that's what you were planning to do for this next 30 minutes. Yeah. Then we're gonna have to say, okay, rain check. We'll do that again at 230 when we put a new. Or. Or, you know, if it's just the projector screws up, we've got an AV team that will be in there in five minutes. But that's the one exception right there.

I was giving a speech to a bunch of executives 12 years ago in New York City on PowerPoint, telling them this very thing. You've got to be ready even if the power goes out. Go outside in the parking lot and speak. Because if it's the last day of a conference and everyone is headed to the airport in 40 minutes, it may be your only chance to ever communicate with them. Well, sure enough, later that day, I'm speaking, the power went out. Now it went out in New York City for 24 hours. And I figured, well, let's make this a learning moment. So the studio was in, had no windows. We sort of carefully felt our way around. I found the refrigerator, grabbed half a dozen beers, and we crawled down the steps, went out to Bryant park just a block away, and it was bright sunshine, and finished the speech, finished the workshop. And it was a good learning moment.

For all Good for you. Well done. Mazel tov.

Thanks. Now, settle a debate for me.

If ever there were going to be.

A guest for me to ask this question, and an esoteric question at that. For years I have said presentation. Presentation. I had someone write to me the other day and said, TJ, you are mispronouncing it. It's presentation. But I'm noticing that you're saying it either both ways or presentation as well. Have I been wrong these years or are both acceptable in that pronunciation?

I have no idea. I've never paid attention. Let's see. I do say present. I don't think I say present. I say present. The presentation.

Presentation or presentation.

But I think I do say presentation. The Presentation Summit. Presentation. Yeah, that's what. That's what I say, present. And for the noun a presentation, I use the long E. I have no idea what's right. Sorry I can't settle this debate for you.

Pretty embarrassing for me, given that that's what I do for a living. When I looked it up, all the standard definitions were presentation, not presentation. But I felt a little better hearing you say it the same way.

Now you've made me aware of this. Now I'm going to have paralysis of analysis. I won't even be able to pronounce my own conference name. Now, tj, I have to cancel the whole thing. Oh, no, don't do that.

You're listening to Rick Altman, who is the founder, chief organizer of the Presentation Summit, which is held yearly this year, it's October 23 through 26 in Las Vegas. You can find out more information about that at presentation or presentation summit.com Rick, look into our crystal ball for the future. The people who have been. You've seen some of these people come to your conference year after year. Some of them maybe were young. Now they are working their way up the career ladder long term. Is there a sense of those that you work with closely that to really be effective, you have to have the EAR and FaceTime for the CEO, for example, if you're creating a presentation. I mean, I feel sorry for anyone who has to just create a presentation from scratch without really talking to the person speaking about, what are you trying to accomplish here? What are doing you your 3, 4, 5 most important messages? What stories do you have for each one? The PR world faces this challenge all the time. How do we get a seat at the table with the CEO if we're going to have impact? Are there similar discussions in the presentation world?

Yeah, and we upped the ante on that actually, because the principles of presentation, not presentation design that we espouse practically require that type of working together. Because, you know, let's take a simple example. You know, okay, you should, you should use better animation for this chart because otherwise you're throwing it all up there at once and you're going to make your audience barf. Okay, so let's put a couple clicks into this. But now that's not the person who's actually giving the presentation. So now that person has to work with the CEO or, or whoever and say, okay, well, here's your clicker. Now you're going to click now and then you're going to say this part, then you're going to click there. So the simplest of examples really does put a premium on collaboration like that. So how do you get Buy in Rome wasn't built in a day? What we have found is that there's so much autopiloting going on in our corporate culture that, you know, grab a template, throw some stuff on there and speak to the points as they come up. You know, sometimes that's all the training that the C suite has. And they don't even know that they're creating death by PowerPoint. They have no idea. And what, what does work though, is when they see properly crafted slides being delivered by a colleague who creates an experience for the audience that is fundamentally different. They see that and they go, whoa. You know, they might not realize why it's different. You know, maybe they do. Hey, those are nice pictures, you know, but whatever it is, that's what will get them. When they see their colleagues performing and creating experiences that are coming completely unlike anything that the corporate America usually sees, that's when you'll get buy in.

Are you seeing more PR? Excuse me, PowerPoint professionals increase their status and their position within companies? I mean, I certainly remember 15, 20 years ago, the person who created PowerPoint slides was seen as sort of the low level assistant to an assistant to a secretary. And they were typically the lowest paid person in an organization. Now that has changed somewhat. But where are you seeing people advance in their careers and what's their actual job title? If they are in a big corporation and they are experts on PowerPoint, it has changed.

You see marketing and communication managers with this type of expertise now you see graphic artists and designers that cross over and use PowerPoint. But you also see a complete muddling of job titles and such. I mean, a whole lot of times the PowerPoint specialist is the admin and the admin is a total professional. Today's administrative professionals. They just do countless numbers of work and wear so many different hats. It is a bit frustrating for people like me when we try to reach them that there's no one job title that describes this. But the tide is rising. All of the boats. And Even if the PowerPoint specialist is still being hidden by a job title of admin, they are seeing more responsibility, more job security, and I hope, more pay.

As industries mature, they typically gain different metrics holding people accountable. The hedge fund industry, you've got a clear cut number of were you up 10%, 20%? What was the, what was your return for the year? Insurance industry, similar things. Is anything evolving in the PowerPoint industry? The test I always give my clients, but I think I'm sort of a lone wolf in this. The test I say to them is if you're giving a PowerPoint presentation on Thursday to 50 clients or customers or colleagues, get two colleagues. Tuesday at lunch, give them your PowerPoint presentation. When you're done, ask them every slide they remember and what the message was. Any slide they don't remember, you now have empirical evidence it's worthless. Throw it in the trash can. That's my standard. But I can tell you that that is not the standard in most corporations or governments. Is your industry working towards creating any sort of universally respected metrics or is it all just about, oh, the boss was happy and we got a pat on the head? Yeah.

Okay. Well, I'll give you two that we emphasize at the conference. One is very ethereal and one is very practical. We'll start with the practical one. A good presentation is made up of three things, tj what you say, what you show, and what you give to your audience. Now, standard autopilot PowerPoint is to put a bunch of crap on your slide, display it, then lose to the irresistible urge to recite every word that's on the slide. Because it's practically impossible, when confronted with fully formed thoughts, to not do that. And of course, then you're going to print out your slides and give them to your audience as the handout. So you know that is just. That's the ultimate death by PowerPoint right there. But when you separate out those three things, then you're going to be just at a fundamentally print level and you're going to find success in a completely different way. And in fact, you know what? Then you may have to go back to your litmus test. Do they remember this? Throw it in the trash. Because now that they're going to be, they're going to be Hearing one thing. Well, that's what the. What this presenter says. They're going to be seeing something that might be completely different, and then ultimately they're going to get a handout. That is also going to be a separate effort. When you separate those three things, you will distinguish yourself from 99% of the people giving presentations today. And I'd like to think that that's one thing that the conference has really advanced is separating those three critical parts of the presentation experience. So that's the practical thing.

Rick, we really appreciate your time today and sharing sort of the inside of what the conference is about here. We're not opposed to pitches. You know, everyone says, oh, don't pitch on a podcast or a talk show. We're all about pitches. So I want to give you an opportunity, just unfiltered, to give your best pitch to our audience as to why they should think about coming to your conference and how they might benefit.

I feel like I've already done it. I'll just say that we created an environment that is, I think, unique for a business conference. You're going to learn like crazy, but you're also going to really get to appreciate the environment that we create where you get to really get to know your peers. These are people that feel just as passionately as you do about all the principles of presentation. And you're going to get to network with them, to become friends with them, to party with them, to learn with them. You're going to develop an entire support system, not just the patrons, but the presenting team. Also, you know, we, we don't have stages at our conference. We don't separate the presenters from the. From the patrons. The presenters are going to be in attending sessions, they're going to be at the parties in the evenings, they're going to be just like you. And that really does reflect, if you ask me for the one most important piece of advice to any presenter, authenticity. And we value that over just about anything else at the conference, you're going to feel like you are really getting to know these people. They are authentic. They're not just these presentation gods that live in a different plane than the rest of us. And if our patrons leave with nothing more than that, wow, these are real people that I got to know them, then the investment is going to be worthwhile many times over.

Rick Altman, you are someone authentically passionate about PowerPoint and presentations. Thanks so much for being our guest. For more information, go to the website presentationsummit.com mark your calendars October 23rd through 26th in Las Vegas presentationsummit.com you've been listening to speaking with TJ Walker brought to you by Media Training Worldwide. If you would like a free, no obligation online course on public speaking, all you have to do is click in the notes below and we will send you an online course on how to be a better, more effective presenter. You can also check out our other courses, including our newest one on how to give a virtual keynote speech. I'm TJ Walker.

Thanks for listening to Speaking with TJ Walker where the communication skills and practices of world class leaders are dissected.