Steve Jobs on Failure

How to Create a Great PowerPoint Presentation

By Eric Markowitz
Source: http://www.inc.com/guides/201102/how-to-create-a-great-powerpoint-presentation.html

Are you guilty of information overload? Do you abuse Clip Art? Here, the experts weigh in on how to create a pitch-perfect PowerPoint presentation.

Getty: Steve Jobs speaking at a Press Conference On Apples iPhone 4

“There’s something in the air.” With these five words, Steve Jobs opened the 2008 Macworld conference.  Jobs is often cited as one of corporate America’s greatest presenters, and that’s simply because he understands one thing: how to tell a story. Like any great sales pitch, an effective PowerPoint offers a compelling narrative; it elicits an emotional response from the audience, even if the subject is, say, debt consolidation, or finance derivatives. The trick is to understand how to engage your listeners, keep them focused, and use the right visual imagery to convey your message. So whether you’re pitching an idea to investors, introducing a new product to your clients, or simply reviewing your company’s quarterly results, a great PowerPoint presentation will leave your audience feeling inspired.

Creating a great PowerPoint is simpler than you might think. More often than not, you don’t need to be a great designer, writer or orator to come up with an attention-grabbing presentation. What you do need, however, is an understanding of how to capture an audience’s focus—and perhaps a bit of their imagination.  Here are a few tips on how to create a PowerPoint that your audience won’t forget.

Dig Deeper: 10 Ways to Make a PowerPoint Presentations Powerful

Creating a Great PowerPoint: Create a narrative.

“One thing I like to do is make sure there’s a logical story,” says Janet Bornemann, the creative director of PowerPoint Studio, based in Acton, Massachusetts. Bornemann, who designs PowerPoint presentations for corporate clients, says that just like any piece of good writing, there needs to be a beginning, middle, and an end to your presentation. Traditionally, in the beginning of the presentation you tell the audience what you plan to cover, in the middle of the presentation you tell them, and in the end, you tell them what you’ve told them.  One clever tip Bornemann recommends is to use five words per line, and five lines per slide.

Guy Kawasaki, a venture capitalist and Inc. contributor, has his own technique for creating a storyline for an entrepreneur’s PowerPoint presentation to investors. His method, which he calls the 10/20/30 rule, is a great way to structure your presentation’s story. “It’s quite simple,” Kawasaki wrote on his blog, How to Change the World. “A PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.”

Kawasaki’s recommended structure for any entrepreneurial presentation is as follows:

1.    Problem
2.    Your solution
3.    Business model
4.    Underlying magic/technology
5.    Marketing and sales
6.    Competition
7.    Team
8.    Projections and milestones
9.    Status and timeline
10.   Summary and call to action

Regardless of a specific structure you choose for your presentation, your story needs to accomplish three goals: frame the issue, present the challenge, and explain how you will solve the problem.

Dig Deeper: Pump Up Your PowerPoint Presentations

Creating a Great PowerPoint: Less is more.

At some point or another, we’ve all sat through a PowerPoint presentation flooded with an endless stream of bullet points, sentences, or even full paragraphs. It may seem obvious, but according to Bornemann, this is one of the biggest—and most common—mistakes made by presenters. And when the presenter lists too much detail on the slides, few people will be able to retain any of it.

A great presentation “should really just give the highlights,” says Bornemann. Steve Jobs, for example, is famous for using virtually no text at all— an icon of a new product or two or three “big picture” words will suffice. “People are afraid to use a slide with one word, but it has merit, because we have to process information before we go on to the next idea,” Bornemann says. It’s also good to segment presentations in places where your audience’s mind can sum up—and process—the information, so that they’re actually able to think about what you’re telling them.

“It’s very important for the mind to be able to rest on an idea or a thought, so if it’s a constant flow of words, people will grow tired,” she adds.

Jim Confalone, the founder and creative director of ProPoint Graphics, a graphic design studio based in New York City, says that people simply stop paying attention to slides with too much text on them. “It becomes like wallpaper,” he says. In other words, it becomes easy to tune out.

Your audience needs to digest information. Don’t be afraid to linger on a slide or create a slide with just one picture and nothing else. Taking risks like these will help sell your presentation to your audience, and keep them from getting that “glazed over” look of boredom.

Dig Deeper: 4 Great PowerPoint Tools

Creating a Great PowerPoint: Branding is key.

Clip Art: the enemy of any great PowerPoint presentation. When assembling slides for a presentation, Clip Art, slide transitions, and other tacky animations are an easy way to pollute your brand’s message. While they’re easy to use, they make your brand seem generic and outdated. After all, anyone with Microsoft has access to the same catalogue of images, and more than likely has seen it all before.

“You don’t want to have a circus of effects,” says Bornemann. “Be consistent with colors and fonts. Focus on the message—everything has to have a reason.” And, she adds, “effects ‘on steroids’ don’t have a reason.”

It’s also easy to fall into the trap of overusing charts and graphs to illustrate a point. However, if the graphic doesn’t support the information or push the presentation forward, it’s not necessary to the ‘story.’ “As soon as it turns into an arbitrary thing, we throw it out,” says Confalone. “If the content is not there, nothing you do is going to work. “

Dig Deeper: Making Your (Power) Point

Creating a Great PowerPoint: Rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse once more.

The presentation on the screen is just as important as the speaker’s presentation off the screen. When giving the PowerPoint Presentation, it’s essential to add a little flavor to the speech.

“Most speakers get into presentation mode and feel as though they have to strip the talk of any fun,” Carmine Gallo, a communication coach, wrote in his Business Week column recently. “If you are not enthusiastic about your own products or services, how do you expect your audience to be?”

According to Confalone, there are two ways a speaker can fail in his or her presentation: a lack confidence, or a misconception about what the audience will retain from the speech.

The only real way to boost confidence is to practice. If you spend 15 hours putting together the presentation, spend another 15 practicing it. Don’t rely too much on notes, since the audience will be looking at you to engage with them—not your script.

Confalone also stresses to his clients that most viewers will walk away from a presentation with only the very key points. Therefore, it’s essential not to confuse your audience with the minutia or details that are best left for a handout.

All PowerPoint presentations are trying to sell you something, even if it’s just an idea, product, or the presenter himself. A “boring” topic is no excuse for a “boring” presentation. “Sexy or not, you need to distill the key points in the conversation,” Confalone says. “That element of persuasion is the key to it.”

Dig Deeper: Grist: More Power Than Point

Read more:

• The 60-Second Sales Pitch
• How to Maintain Brand Consistency Across Product Lines
• How to Manage Client Expectations After You Close a Sale
• Liven Up PowerPoint with Interactivity, Touchscreens, and an iPad
• A Great Tool for Making Presentations

Eric Markowitz reports on start-ups, entrepreneurs, and issues that affect small businesses. Previously, he worked at Vanity Fair. He lives in New York City. @EricMarkowitz

Spotting the Great but Imperfect Resume

George Anders
George Anders is the author of four business books, including The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else.

by George Anders

Recruiters and senior executives express frustration these days about corporate talent hunts at all levels. The gripe: “We’re pouring tremendous energy into finding the right resumes. But we’re losing the ability to find the right people.”

Directors of summer internship programs, for example, have soured on seemingly “perfect” students with 3.9 grade-point averages from elite schools, who have mastered multiple foreign languages. The reason: these recruits show surprisingly little initiative once they arrive at a big, busy company; they keep waiting to be told what to do. Ultra-rigorous screening of internship candidates has inadvertently eliminated the freewheeling mavericks of previous eras. Those earlier interns might have lacked great transcripts, but they didn’t need anyone’s permission to try something bold.

Small-company chief executive officers voice a similar lament. They are eager to hire lieutenants whose career zigzags have created a burning desire to succeed in a new job. In the boardroom, though, such plans elicit frowns. Directors keep nudging these CEOs to play it safe, filling the management team with steady performers whose work history closely matches the job at hand, even if there’s no sense of “wow!” in the job interviews.

Insist on a perfect resume each time, and it’s impossible to make the most of highly promising candidates with “jagged resumes.” The lost opportunities can be excruciating. Imagine the remorse of a venture capitalist unwilling to back Steve Jobs in 1977, because the personal-computer pioneer never finished college. For that matter, consider Apple’s fate in the 1990s, if the company hadn’t invited Jobs back for a second turn at leading the company, even though his first run ended in dismissal.

As such extreme examples show, it’s essential to get comfortable with a resume that features a puzzling mix of highs and lows. Bring such candidates into play, and suddenly tomorrow’s unexpected stars become visible.

In researching my book The Rare Find, I focused on a small group of world-class organizations that pull ahead of competitors by making the most of jagged-resume candidates. Standout examples can be found everywhere from military special-forces units to some of Silicon Valley’s top tech companies. This willingness to decouple from traditional strict scrutiny of paper credentials may look risky. But when it is pursued in a well-thought-out way, it’s possible to sidestep most of the apparent hazards.

Two insights are crucial. First, organizations that consider jagged resumes have clear ideas of what high points they must see. Teach for America looks for perseverance. The New England Patriots look for a deep-seated desire to play football, not just to be a famous athlete. Linear Technology looks for tinkerers, who have been experimenting with electrical circuits since childhood.

In all these cases, organizations seize on a few central character traits that are well known internally as future markers of likely success. Such enterprises think harder about which candidates might grow the most on the job, rather than which ones already possess all needed competencies for the task at hand. Traits such as resilience, efficiency, curiosity and self-reliance are among the most likely ones to be prized. This bolder hiring philosophy can be summed up by the maxim: “Compromise on experience. Don’t compromise on character.”

Second, connoisseurs of the jagged resume have well-thought-out ideas about which apparent shortcomings don’t matter (and which ones do.) Hopscotch work histories often are viewed leniently. Quirky personalities and inconsistent grades can be forgiven, too. There’s no forbearance, though for lapses in ethics, an inability to work with people, or a lack of motivation. Jagged-resume hiring can succeed only if the cultural fit between candidate and company is unusually good, so warning flags in that area are taken seriously.

One of the most striking examples of jagged-resume hiring took place 40 years ago, at the University of Utah. David Evans, a lifelong explorer himself, took charge of the university’s computer science department in 1965. Some people might have regarded Utah as a backwater. But in his first decade at the school, Evans spotted and attracted an extraordinary group of graduate students, including the later cofounders of Pixar, Netscape and Adobe Systems. For a time, just about every world-changing idea in computer graphics could be traced back to Evans’s students in Utah.

What was Evans’s secret? He looked for restless souls who were trying to get to the frontier. In some cases, they didn’t know yet what frontier they were seeking. They had bounced around in college, switching majors three or four times. They had joined the Navy, or worked for Boeing, or tried a flurry of other false starts. They wanted to be on the forefront of some technical field. Evans celebrated their energy — and then turned them loose on some of the biggest unsolved computing problems of the day.

As Evans’s son, Peter, recalled, “My dad looked at people very differently. He hired a lot of people that happened to fail history, or whatever else. Some of them you might even call scary. It didn’t matter to him that they weren’t polished in some areas that weren’t important to their job performance. What he really cared about was what they liked to do.”

The past three years of economic turmoil have created a lot more jagged resumes in the American labor force. For some employers, that’s distasteful. For the next generation of David Evanses, that’s a rare opportunity. As the U.S. economy starts to revive, the companies that end up hiring the best people will be the ones that evaluate jagged resumes most intelligently

Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/12/spotting_the_great_but_imperfe.html