TJ’s Insights

I just spent two days helping a team of corporate executives rehearse major presentations. The company was in the process of trying to sell itself for a bundle of cash to a new group of private equity investors.

We were in the company’s conference room—complete with fancy overhead projector, big screen, nice conference table, and a wireless mouse and keyboard. Speaker after speaker clicked the wireless mouse to advance the PowerPoint slides. For the most part, this worked well. But every once in awhile, and executive would use the scroll button excessively and the slides would advance two at a time. Or the speaker would hit the mouse twice and advance the PowerPoint twice. Oops!

If you work for a big corporation, sooner or later, someone is going to ask you to deliver their PowerPoint Presentation. And he or she will demand that you don’t change a single element of the presentation (and they can get away with it because they are your boss).

Here’s the problem: the slide show you are given is horrible! Each slide is dense with row after row of numbers, bullet points are strewn about generously on each page and complex graphs are squeezed in four to a slide. In short, you are asked to deliver a PowerPoint slide from hell.

“Help TJ! Jim (the leader of our organization) never prepares for his speeches because he is always running a million miles a minute. So he just reads the bullet points right off of his PowerPoint slides. It is a boring disaster. But that’s not the real problem. Now everyone in our organization is doing the same thing. They think they are SUPPOSED to do it this way. We now have a culture where everyone has been infected with the disease of DEATH-BY-READING-POWERPOINT-SLIDES.”
Anonymous Media Training Worldwide Client