The PowerPoint Fallacy

By Matthias Poehm

If Obama can talk without PowerPoint then so can you!
95% of all presentations today are given using a projector and PowerPoint*.
Yet what some people consider to be professional often completely destroys the effect on the audience. PowerPoint does not make for entertainment but rather for boredom. That is due to the fundamental concept of PowerPoint, not to how it is used!
Discover how you can dispense with PowerPoint forever and moreover,
with which alternative you can achieve five times the effect. In addition, you can trigger fascination at the push of a button. That is not just a catchy advertising slogan; it really is possible!
I show you how.Why PowerPoint and projectors impede effectiveness:
the facts!Represent figures and diagrams five times more effectively without PowerPointThe 2% exception to the rule for PowerPoint. But how?How to make a thriller out of even the driest subjectsHow to portray your own achievements in such a way that the audience will be profoundly impressedHow to double your bid chances with well conceived
presentations

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matthias Poehm
• Release date: Feb 23, 2012
• ISBN: 9783952395004

Matthias Poehm

Matthias Poehm once had a key-experience as an elected staff representative. He failed miserably in front of the entire staff during a meeting with a bright red head and a trembling voice. After that he made his fear of public speaking disappear through years of permanent training with many defeats. Meanwhile he has made a name for himself as one of the most well-known trainers of public speaking and "ready wit". The press calls him "the best public speaking trainer in the German-speaking countries" (Nordwest Zeitung). He is the founder of the Anti PowerPoint Party. Poehm's methods are extraordinary and often go against the common doctrine. He is a rebel, who questions many things, and he says: "I am not interested in established rules, even not my own ones. I don't want to be right - I always want the best results". Due to his analytic gift, Matthias Poehm wrote relevant books on many topics: on ready wit, public speaking, price negotiations, and seduction. Due to a spiritual experience he found a new field that has nothing to do with the improvement of technical communicative skills. It is the topic of purpose, deep happiness, spirituality, enlightenment. Here as well he is a rebel. He says: "Wanting to improve your skills in any area is OK. But that won't render you a happy and fulfilled person. We only can overcome our phantom-life, if we acknowledge that it is there."

Book preview

Matthias Poehm

The PowerPoint Fallacy

Still Presenting or already Fascinating?

© 2011 Poehm Seminarfactory, Switzerland

www.poehm.com Publishing

All rights reserved, in particular the right of duplication and distribution as well as translation. No part of this work may be reproduced (by photocopy, microfilm or any other procedure) or stored, processed, duplicated or distributed using electronic systems, without the publisher’s written permission.

Translation: Steven Jefferson www.aardvark-translations.co.uk

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Table of Contents

The PowerPoint Fallacy

The Alternative to PowerPoint

Language and Persuasion

Softeners, Fad Speech and Waffle

When do we Listen?

Selling Results Well

Learn to Sell Yourself

Effect Explosion by Intonation and Pauses

Stylistic Devices of Highlight Public Speaking

Talk Directly to the Subconscious

Express Every Benefit in Monetary Terms

Get the Audience Active

The Courage to Change the Subject

P-P-F: The Quickest Way to Develop a Speech

Short Tips

And Finally

Contribute to a Better World with Better Presentations

The PowerPoint Fallacy

In this book I address in detail the subject presenting with the aid of presentation software.

Throughout the book I talk about PowerPoint, as this programme has a global market share of 95 per cent. Whenever I refer to PowerPoint however, I am always referring to all other presentation software in existence, which clearly suffers from the same problems of use. For the sake of completeness I shall mention some others:

Apple Keynote; Applixware; Adobe Ovation; Corel Presentations; FotoMagico; Google Text & Spreadsheets; OpenOffice.org Impress; KPresenter; LaTeX Beamer; Lotus Freelance Graphics; Lotus Symphony; OperaShow; PowerDash; Prezi; PulpMotion; StarOffice; S5 and many more.

The Leipzig Prize for Innovation

The client came from Leipzig. She was joint owner of a company that offers Internet solutions, which was nominating itself for the Leipzig Prize for Innovation with its SaferSurf innovation. 135 out of 147 applications were rejected; the remaining twelve, including her company, were short-listed. Each of the twelve applicants now had to present their innovations to a jury during the course of a formal evening event. Eminent VIPs from politics and business, including the Mayor of Leipzig, were to decide which company was the most innovative in the whole of Saxony.

Two weeks before that, I flew to Leipzig to give some coaching on public speaking. Coaching, as I understand it, can best be described with the term personalised speech preparation. My clients already knew me from the seminar and of course they wanted to win this prize. It was clear to them that, at a fundamental level, juries always reach decisions based on a gut feeling; that of course is no different for competitive pitches. There were two company owners present: he was the technical head of the whole enterprise; she was responsible for marketing and personnel management. The first thing to decide was, which of the two would give the presentation on the critical evening. I had them both present a short passage and it was immediately clear: she, and not the accomplished technician, was the better presenter. The next decision was: no PowerPoint!

The company’s invention was ingenious. Everyone running an anti virus programme on his computer knows that regular updates are essential. This company’s invention made these updates superfluous: it simply sits within the Internet service provider’s (ISP) router centre and purges all virus junk from the data stream in real time. No longer do end users have to bother with viruses or anti virus updates on their computers: that is done for them by the ISP, which is supplied, at half hourly intervals, with the most up to date programmes against currently circulating viruses: and all for 2 Euros. [Virus Protection for 2 Euros, http://www.nutzwerk.de]

We gave ourselves two days to prepare the presentation - until I could be certain that the invention would also get under the jury’s skin. On the evening of the big vote all twelve candidates took the stage one after another and presented their innovations. Eleven of them used PowerPoint, my company … a flashlight. The only other thing on the stage was a flip chart.

Then came the decisive passage in the speech:

"Did you know that from 100 computers worldwide only five currently have anti virus protection? Everyone has it in your companies, but looking at it globally and including private individuals it is a feeble five percent."

My client turned the page on the flip chart and the following diagram appeared.

"5 percent – that means: out of 20 computers that you can see here only one has virus protection"

(She pointed to the only shaded circle on the flip chart.)

"The anti virus protection is stored locally on the hard disk of every individual computer. You can compare anti virus protection with a protective light beam: An invisible hand illuminates a computer with this beam of light, protecting it from damaging influences."

She now took out a large flashlight, switched it on and directed it at the shaded PC bathing it in a pool of light.

"Our invention is as follows: we no longer protect the individual computer at a local level; instead we go back to the central router …"

(At this point she stepped back with the flashlight thereby generating the following spotlight on the flip chart:)

"And in this way we protect all Computers fed from this point. We do this within the Internet Service Provider, purging all viral junk right there in real time …"

There then followed a few explanations of the enormous market potential and the marketing strategy for this innovation. We had put some thought into a concluding sentence for the end of the presentation that would have the desired clout. And so, looking self-confidently straight into the audience, she said:

"You are going to be proud to have a company like ours in Leipzig! Thank you!"

My company was awarded the main prize and an additional 20,000 Euros. The PowerPoint presenters never got a look in.

David versus Goliath

I took the last flight of the evening from Zurich to Berlin. An appointment with an advertising agency in the middle of Berlin was scheduled for the next day. I had been engaged for a two-day coaching session but I didn’t even know what it was supposed to be about.

The next morning, in their stately agency rooms, the two owners filled me in on their situation. Up till now their agency had specialised in giving newspapers a new visage; along the way they had become the uncontested market leaders in this within the German speaking countries. Now they wanted to tap into a new line of business: customer magazines for large companies. What many fail to realise: large companies that sell consumer goods publish customer magazines sometimes by the million. Most of these magazines are supplied with text, designed and published by external agencies and my advertising agency wanted to break into this lucrative market. They had bid on two tenders and needed to present their designs within the next two weeks - as usual, in competition with a series of rivals. The subjects of the tenders were the customer magazines of the Mazda Car Company and Kraft Foods, the second largest food producer in the world. Right at the start of the first coaching session I was told: We are in the finals for the Mazda bid along with one other competitor; from a purely mathematical perspective we have a 50/50 chance. We’re one of five bidders for Kraft, the food producer. Our competitors in both cases are the market giants – the crème de la crème of agencies. We’re smaller than the others by a factor of three to ten; we’ve been in existence for just about four years whereas the others have been established for decades. We have hardly any references in this new business sector. We therefore consider there to be almost no chance of getting both contracts. But we like your approach. We would like to give it a try! Because a success would represent a breakthrough for our company.

So that was the starting situation. I thought to myself: An exciting task! As was to be expected they had come armed with a draft presentation in PowerPoint. I watched it patiently and asked after a while: How did you do it in the past, before there was such a thing as PowerPoint? - In those days we messed about with old fashioned card-boards, the proprietor laughed. These are large sturdy cartons upon which we glued the designs - we then arranged them in a kind of laterally reinforced roof shape.

I asked them: Would you fetch me one of those roofs? And as soon as I saw it my decision was clear: We’ll use the roof - let’s forget PowerPoint. What I was thinking was that, if we want to be dramatically different, dramatically better than the others then that has to be reflected in a dramatically different type of presentation. Thank God I could make one assumption: the other bidders would certainly turn up with PowerPoint and projector.

My client, already pre-warned by my first book on public speaking went along with my decision slightly hesitantly. And then we worked on ‘the show’ for two intensive days. What became clear to my client and me was that, it is not enough to be good; you also have to come across as being good! About 80 percent of it is about that alone! First I reduced the company overview to a minimum, to what was really exciting - without PowerPoint of course. Originally they had wanted to display every page of the prototype magazine they had created, but I reduced that to those pages that represented highlights - to just enough that the customer would want to see more. That is the art: if they want more, then they also want more of this company.

Clearly we could safely assume that our competitors would bore the customers with the details of every single one of about 80 page layouts. To still give an overview of the whole magazine we came up with a unique showstopper. I asked my clients to print out the entire magazine on a roll of paper 6 metres long and 70 centimetres wide, with two pages at a time one above the other.

Towards the end of the presentation the two proprietors suddenly unveiled this oversized banner, unrolling it from both ends, so that every page they had created was revealed to the customer in one complete, stunning panorama. Wow! They stuck the banner to the wall with magnets, invited the customers to stand up and led them along the entire magazine, drawing their attention to the most exciting highlights on each page in a focussed flyby.

Whilst skimming through the tender it had occurred to me that the food corporation Kraft intended to use the customer magazine to achieve a higher turnover. My two advertising executives however had not addressed this aspect with a single word. I therefore included a section in the presentation, based on a four-page special feature, in which we plausibly explained to the customer why and how we would achieve higher sales tangibly set out in terms of an admittedly hypothetical but concrete amount in Euros.

From my experience with thousands of seminar participants and coaching clients, I knew for certain that none of our competitors would even mention this point, let alone present a specific calculation. By nature, the thing that interests magazine designers is designing an attractive magazine. As banal and simple as that may be, most of them fail to mention what most interests the customer: how does the attractive magazine affect my financial situation? It was good to know that we were likely to be the only bidders at the presentation, who had thought about the customer’s increased turnover in concrete terms.

In terms of the car manufacturer there was one distinctive feature. Through contacts my two agency owners had found out roughly what their competitors’ concepts looked like. The car manufacturer’s brief was: to merge two existing magazines, aimed at different consumer groups, into a single magazine. Now we knew that the other bidder wanted to create a, visually clearly distinct, magazine within a magazine. But we had something else planned; a unified magazine with no visible differentiation.

The question for me now was how we could best use this valuable background information to our advantage within the bounds of common decency. Then I had an idea … the presenter should go up the flip chart and say:

"Initially we wondered what would be the best way to integrate the two magazines. One idea was: we could make a magazine within a magazine."

(As he said this he sketched the following image on the flip chart with a few deft strokes.)

"But then it dawned on us: Mercedes for example maintains its image unambiguously with all vehicles within a single magazine. They do not differentiate between younger and older Mercedes customers.

So what we thought was: you as the client want to present a unified front, one single, non-divided identity; otherwise you would have no wish to merge the two magazines."

(At this point he took up a thick red marker pen:)

"And that’s why this version gets …

(and he energetically crossed out the sketch)

"… BINNED!"

We knew of course that this was the very proposal the competitor would be presenting the following day! Well, life is a game … and it’s great fun!

Suddenly I had another idea how we could finish the presentation with another emotional highlight: with a couple of V-shaped strokes one of the two agency owners silently sketched the wings of a stylised bird at the end of the show and turned to the audience:

„We want to fly with you to new shores. Then he turned around again and augmented the birds to a square with rounded off corners - and what should appear but … the logo of the Mazda car company! „Thank you!

Back in Zurich. Five days later I got a call. My colleague put it through to me. It was Berlin. I spoke with the client for about 15 minutes. I remained unshakeably calm. At last I said: „Okay, well then we‘ll wait