Presentation Panic: How to Deliver a Successful Business Presentation

By Theodore May

Presentation Panic is a collection of short essays that describe an original and engaging way to prepare and deliver successful business presentations. When you know what you're doing and how to do it, you will discover that there's no need to panic. Find out what needs to happen in a successful presentation and how to make that happen.

Based on the principles of live performance, Presentation Panic is the perfect blend of business strategy and performance art. Learn to reach audiences and move them to action. Discover the power of ideas and narratives to transform the thinking of your audience. Make the most effective use of your voice, movement and media to develop presence and cultivate charisma.

Create and deliver compelling presentations that enable you to distinguish yourself in the workplace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098304942

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 Theodore May

ISBN: 978-1-09830-493-5

eBook ISBN: 978-1-09830-494-2

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part 1

Presentation Panic

Chapter 1

Do You Feel the Pain?

Chapter 2

What Are We Afraid Of?

Chapter 3

A New Model for Business Presentations

Part 2

Content

Chapter 4

Stop Giving Speeches

Chapter 5

Your First 60 Seconds

Chapter 6

Three Reasons for 3 Bullets

Chapter 7

Picture Books for Grown-ups

Chapter 8

Behold the Technology Monster!

Chapter 9

The 4 Slides You Need

Part 3

Performance

Chapter 10

The Principles of Live Performance

Chapter 11

Your Real Workspace

Chapter 12

Reaching an Audience

Chapter 13

Engagement or Entertainment?

Chapter 14

What an Audience Knows

Chapter 15

How Would You Describe Yourself?

Chapter 16

Presenting Yourself

Chapter 17

Overcoming Presentation Nerves

Chapter 18

Breathe!

Chapter 19

Do You Speak Body Language?

Chapter 20

Does Your Audience Trust You and Your Body Language?

Chapter 21

7 Things You Should Never, Ever Say When Giving a Presentation

Chapter 22

Leaving Ah... Um... and Uh... Behind

Chapter 23

Don’t Be Afraid to Stop Talking

Chapter 24

Accents!

Chapter 25

Resisting the Casual

Chapter 26

Passionately Unemotional

Chapter 27

Read Your PowerPoint Slides!

Chapter 28

Questions After Your Presentation Signal Success

Chapter 29

How to Handle a Tough Crowd

Part 4

Special Topics

Chapter 30

The Media We Choose

Chapter 31

The Technology We Use

Chapter 32

What About Toastmasters?

Chapter 33

What About TED Talks?

Chapter 34

What About Shark Tank?

Chapter 35

Everything is Improv!

Chapter 36

What’s So Funny About a Business Presentation?

Chapter 37

Embrace Public Speaking Early

Afterword

Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Preface

Presentation Panic will change the way you think about, prepare and deliver successful business presentations. When you know what you’re doing, and know what needs to be done in order to deliver a compelling presentation, you will find there’s no need to panic.

The theory and techniques described by the author in this series of short essays combine professional training and experience in the performing arts with over 30 years of experience as a corporate executive in Fortune 500 companies and tech start-ups. The method based on this theory has been validated in two ways: by first-hand experience and the close observation of other executives preparing and delivering hundreds of business presentations at the most senior levels in public companies, and the success of seminars, masterclasses and coaching sessions which the author currently offers to corporate clients, individual executives and students in graduate business school.

The ability to prepare and deliver a successful presentation is one of the most important skills you can have in business.

Introduction

The ability to present yourself; to present your work, your analysis, your ideas and your recommendations is one of the most important skills you can have in business.

Whether you’re presenting to staff, peers, senior management, a Board of Directors, or the investment community and beyond, the ability to deliver a successful business presentation is important not only to your own personal success but to the success of your project, your team and your company.

Reach an audience, transform their thinking, and move them to action. That’s what we’re called to do as executives.

Effective managers recognize this. Presentations have been an integral part of conducting business for as long as we’ve been doing business. Delivering and attending presentations is something we continue to do on a regular basis and will likely continue to do for a long time to come. And yet, so many of us continue to struggle when it comes to preparing and delivering a successful presentation. Many of us see the presentation as a nuisance, if not a cause for all-out panic.

Effective executives understand the importance of presentations and are willing to look for help to improve their own skills and the communications culture of their company.

Classic presentations

When most of us think of a business presentation, we typically think of a live event. In a classic business presentation, the presenter stands in front of a live audience, in a designated space, at an appointed time, in order to inform, advocate, or announce a decision to the audience. Their presentation may include a series of prepared slides projected onto a screen. We’ve all been there.

With a nearly overwhelming choice of content creation and networking technology solutions available today, you might wonder why we still have or need classic presentations to build and reach audiences. Just send a group text. Post it on the Wiki or company Blog. And yet, there are more classic presentations than ever. It’s estimated that literally millions of PowerPoint presentations are given each day in corporate America.

While some technologies allow us to reach remote and asynchronous audiences with a better-than-nothing virtual substitute for the classic presentation, none as yet have been able to entirely replace the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the classic presentation.

Why classic presentations work

Human beings are social. We’ve evolved to communicate with each other, not only one-to-one but one-to-many, using our voices and gestures. A live in-person presentation binds the presenter and audience together. It does this in real-time via an immediate, shared experience.

The informal research I’ve done suggests that 85% of managers surveyed would rather attend a presentation in person than simply receive a copy of the deck to read on their own. These results were based on a survey of over 80 managers across multiple industries and organizations. (And the respondents were not all drawn from a self-selecting group that was already predisposed to see the value in presentation skills development.) What’s even more amazing is that the 85% becomes 100% when the presenter has a reputation for being good at delivering presentations.

When asked if they would rather see their company make a greater investment in communications technology or in live presentation skills development, over 60% of the managers surveyed said they would prefer to see more investment in improving the quality of live presentations in their organizations.

Over 68% of these managers responded that they would prefer to learn new and important information about their team, department, or organization and its strategy, products and services in person, via a presentation, rather than from other sources.

So, we still want classic presentations and we want our presentations to be good. In fact, they need to be good. The live presentation is the best way to ensure consistency of message and immediately confirm receipt of that message. It’s the most immediate and effective way to collect feedback. And good presentations are important in an organization because people learn by watching each other.

Allowing bad presentations to be the norm in our organizations will have a detrimental effect on employees, who will:

Consider bad presentations acceptable.

Measure themselves against the lowest bar set by others (at least I am better than [Insert name of hapless presenter here].

Copy things they see that they like, as opposed to things that are effective.

Concentrate more on how to improve their own comfort level as presenters rather than how to improve the effectiveness of their presentation.

Moving audiences to action

The live presentation is the most efficient and effective way to communicate a mission or new initiative broadly, deeply, and repeatedly throughout an organization. Compelling presentations are the best way to get everyone on the same page. The narratives that can be developed in a live presentation offer presenters and audiences extraordinary opportunities to experience:

Greater insight that comes from 1st person narratives and the ability to demonstrate rather than simply describe key concepts.

Mimesis: the impulse of an audience to mimic modeled behaviors.

Deeper empathy.

Greater cooperation on the part of audiences.

The discipline that comes from creating and delivering a well-executed presentation can also be as clarifying for the presenter as it is for the audience. It can not only energize an audience and describe clear roles for next steps, it can better define the presenter’s own objective, role, priorities and commitment. This empowers them to act with more purpose and confidence not only in the presentation but in their day-to-day engagement, to the benefit of their team and the entire organization.

Why we’re not better at presentations

If we were honest with ourselves, most of us would have to admit that we don’t really know what we’re doing when we give a presentation. We’re not entirely sure what needs to happen during our presentation or how to make it happen. We lack a common and unifying set of principles to guide us.

What I call the principles of live performance can provide us with a way to think about what it is we’re actually called to do in a presentation and how we can in fact do what we are called to do in front of a listening audience.

We begin by recognizing that a presentation is a live performance. It’s not like a live performance. It is a live performance. A live presentation requires space, an audience, a presenter/performer and content.

Certain principles govern the dynamics of all live performances. They define what needs to happen in a live performance in order for it to be successful. We know this to be true from thousands of years of experimentation and experience in the performing arts. And we can apply these same core principles of live performance from the arts to the business presentation.

And from the certain knowledge of these principles comes confidence. We begin to understand why we need to do the things we need to do and can better appreciate how to go about doing them. And from this newfound clarity and confidence comes a reduction in the levels of mild-to-total panic that most of us still experience when we’re called upon to deliver a business presentation.

But unfortunately, most executives don’t know what these principles are. They’re not just a list of Top 10 Tips.

The short essays collected in Presentation Panic are designed to give you an introduction to these principles and a sense of how you can begin to put some of them to work. They will change the way you think about what you’re doing, and provide you with some helpful tools you can use to improve your own presentation skills.

You will begin to feel more confident and your audience will thank