The following comes from TJ Walker’s upcoming book “The Wisdom of Your Audience”. Consistently, the worst advice speakers and presenters get, comes from everyone who is NOT your audience. The following gives examples of some of the WORST advice people are often given. It is followed by the advice of your audience. Listen to them. They are your true judge and jury.

Is it OK to read from my PowerPoint slides?

Your Marketing Director: “Try to read 20% or less of the time.”

Your Speech coach: “Try to read 10% or less of the time.”

You: “In an ideal world, I won’t read at all, but I don’t have time to rehearse and I want to get each word just right, so I will read 50% of the time.”

***

Your audience: “How insulting that you would read to us! What? You think we are too stupid to read on our own? You must think we are illiterate! For the love of Pete, just talk to us and tell us what you know. If we want to read stuff later, we will.”

The following comes from TJ Walker’s upcoming book “The Wisdom of Your Audience”. Consistently, the worst advice speakers and presenters get, comes from everyone who is NOT your audience. The following gives examples of some of the WORST advice people are often given. It is followed by the advice of your audience. Listen to them. They are your true judge and jury.

How many bullet points should I use on each page of my Power Point Presentation?

Your Marketing Director: “I’d like to limit the number, but we have to be realistic. We are going to need to put at least 20 bullet points per slide.”

Your PowerPoint slide producer: “We should limit the slides to three bullet points per page.”

You: “I’d like to limit the bullet points, but what if I forget something important. I’d better play it safe by putting 15-20 points per slide. That way I’ll never run out of intelligent things to say.”

********

Your audience: “Why do you think we want to stare at bullet points? Is that really the most creative thing you can do with a giant screen? We can read text on our own time. We don’t need you to read to us. Why don’t you actually do something that isn’t incredibly lazy and boring, i.e., show us pictures, images, or graphs that convey information visually.” 

An interesting take on the use of 3-d over at PowerPoint without Bullet Points blog today.

3-d is definitely over-rated when it comes to presentations. Most presenters woudl be better off showing the relationship between just 2 variables in any one slide; hence no need for 3-d. Check out the full article.

Let’s face it; you are an enabler—and so am I. When you and I sit through someone’s awful, boring, bullet-point filled PowerPoint Presentation and pretend to pay attention and listen, we are enabling another lousy speaker—and we are encouraging him or her to do the same thing again and again.

This has got to stop!

It’s time to take the 120-90-60 PowerPoint Pledge. Here it is:

If in the first 120 second (2 minutes) of a speech
A presenter shows slides that are 90% text based or more
And looks at his/her slides 60% of the time or more,
Then I walk out the door.

By my own accounting, this would put more than half of the business speakers in the world in front of an empty room—every time. The message would start to sink in.

For the record, I am pro-PowerPoint. I use PowerPoint 3-5 times a week in my presentations and trainings. But the way to use PowerPoint effectively is for the speaker to focus exclusively on audience members, use the slides to show visuals and not text, and to focus on one idea at a time in each slide.

Of course it’s not practical to walk out on your boss’s presentation, your weekly staff meeting, or a presentation from an important partner or client. But let’s face it; we all have opportunities to walk out on certain presentations. For example:

1. Large conferences where there are numerous presenters speaking in different rooms at the same time. Walk out on the ones who break the 120-90-60 PowerPoint Rule.
2. Vendors who are taking up your valuable time. If a vendor breaks the 120-90-60 PowerPoint rule in front of me, I simply stand up and say “thanks, I have an emergency. I would be happy to read any written materials you can leave behind.” And in fact there is an emergency; I want to stop my impulse to strangle the vendor for wasting my time with a boring PowerPoint presentation.

All of us, as frequent audience members, have the power to shape the greater business culture’s ways of speaking. If you don’t take a stand (and walk out the door) you will have nobody to blame but yourself when you become bored out of your mind when listening to future PowerPoint speeches.

If you are ready to sign the 120-90-60 PowerPoint Pledge, then please leave just your name in the comment button below.

In Montreal, a new PowerPoint concept know as Pecha Kucha (originally from Japan) is gaining ground. Here is the basic thrust according to a story in Today’s CanWest News Service:

“First, a slideshow must consist of 20 slides that last 20 seconds each, for a total presentation time of six minutes and 40 seconds. No more, no less.”

I have to say, this is one of the worst ideas I have ever heard of. It brings instant image of Lucy and Ethel trying to work the conveyer belt at a factory and making a huge mess of things. I love technology, but technology should never run the show. Your ideas, your messages, your stories, followed by your images—that should be the speaker’s focus.