PRESENTATIONS ARE USELESS

Maximum NUMBER of presentation ARE USELESS

Decoration
Well, your presentation may be wonderful, I like to think mine are, but maximum presentation are. The title of the article is an overstatement, it is to catch the attention – but there’s a serious point behind what I am trying to point out.

Quite a few of the persons are nervous because there presentation means something in its own right. They are fearful of the judgement of the quality of the presentation, the draft of the presentation. Your presentation doesn’t mean anything on its own. It’s a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Example
In your day to day activities you come through reports. Suppose there are two reports:
  1. One is written in fantastic font. The binding is great, there is a beautiful cover page, but there is no summery / conclusion, it is just an amalgamation of many points of what is happening without a logical flow.
  2. Whereas there is another report on the same project which is not that good looking, but the flow is logical, with a good summary / conclusion at the end. The conclusion has a logical recommendation with easy to follow steps.

Which one has the potential for success? 
The first one doesn’t have any chance of success because the beauty will be lost as it will be in some corner of the room, it has nothing to follow. But, the second one has a chance of success as there is a recommendation which may be followed and implemented. Right?

Not before you get upset, let me point out that this doesn’t mean that you can submit a crappy presentation. The beauty needs to be there to catch the audience interest, and then the substance takes over to sustain that interest. Remember stunning visuals are just eye-candy if they don’t take your audience somewhere. You need to get you technical stuff and delivery right, because if you don’t, your audience can’t get to the content and can’t act on your words of wisdom, but pretty technology and stunning graphics aren’t the point of your presentation. They aren’t what your presentation exists for.

And as soon as you take that on board, you realise a number of helpful things are true:
  • Before you start working on the presentation find what your presentation needs to do … it may be different from what the presentation is about
  • The technicals need to be right, so that it doesn’t hamper your flow of ideas
  • Presentation don’t need to be perfect, they need to get the ideas across. Remember there is always a balance. And each and every member of the audience has a different aspect and thinking procedure, you can’t be right to every one of them. So your presentation has to only get the job done.


These are the three aspects of presentation. If we can get these sorted out, the importance of the presentation gets sorted.

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