Episode 52:  THE Leadership Japan Series - How to Use PowerPoint, Etc. (Properly) When Presenting
Intro:  Greg:  Konnichiwa and welcome to Episode 52 of THE Leadership Japan series.  I’m your host in Tokyo, Dr. Greg Story, president of Dale Carnegie Training Japan, and much more importantly you are a student of leadership, highly motivated to be the best in your business field.   If you enjoy the program then you might consider subscribing on iTunes.  Also, if you would like your own access to 102 years of the accumulated wisdom of Dale Carnegie training through free white-papers, guidebooks, reports, training videos, blogs, course information plus much much more, then go to japan.dalecarnegie.com.  Today, we are going to discuss the proper use of PowerPoint when presenting.
Greg:  Welcome to Dale Carnegie Training Japan, High-Impact Presentations.  Today we are going to look at the proper use of visuals when we are presenting.  Many people ask us at Dale Carnegie, what should I do with preparing my PowerPoint or my key note presentation?  What about visuals?  What’s too much?  What’s too little?  What’s the best way to make this work for me?  Well there’s a couple of things we need to consider at the very beginning.  Firstly, to have impact when you are a presenter, you must have a good structure.  It must be something that people can follow.  It’s very clear as you transition from one section to another of where you are going with this conversation, where you are going with this skilled presentation.  Naturally the content must be high quality.  There must be clear points with evidence backing up what you are saying.  The third one though is really the make or break it.  If your delivery is not well-rehearsed, well-practiced and professional, it doesn’t matter how good your structure is, people leave the presentation with a very poor image of your company’s brand and your brand.  If the structure is good, but content not very good, not very high quality, again you are just killing your brand.  But even if your content is great and even if your structure is great but you deliver it in such a way that the audience is left bored or they’re not relating to it, they are not identifying with the message, then you have had zero impact on that audience.  So a big part of the delivery is how we interact with the screen or with handouts that we’ve got for the audience.  Today I am going to look at what we can do to really improve in that delivery aspect around using visuals.
Preparation is the key to everything.  Very key question, who is my audience?  You have to really understand who you are talking to.  What is their level of expertise?  What is their level of experience?  What’s the age range?  What’s the gender mix?  What’s their interest in this particular subject?  So before we get up in front of any audience, we need to investigate who will be there?  What things we think will be most appropriate for that particular audience?  I’ll talk about this in a little bit but why are you giving this presentation?  What’s the purpose?  What are you trying to achieve with this presentation?  Let me come back to that in a little bit more detail in the next slide.
Well, how will I open?  Critical question.  You are competing with what’s already inside their heads, of every single person inside that room.  They come to your presentation maxed out.  They’ve got everything that’s happening in their lives in their head.  What happened that morning, what they’ve got to do later in the day, things that are going on at work, things that are happening in their personal life.  You are really competing with a lot of other stuff.  Your opening has got to cut through all that distraction and it has to grab their attention so they’ll listen to what you have to say.  If you don’t get that right and you lose them, and you’ve only got a few seconds to grab them, you are going to have a very difficult job to have any impact with that audience. 
What are so