The following comes from TJ Walker’s upcoming book “The Wisdom of Your Audience”

How will I know what my audience will remember?

Your Marketing Officer: “Just give them as much information as possible. That way if they don’t remember anything in particular, they are at least likely to leave with the impression that you are smart and competent.”

Your College Speech Coach: “They will remember anything, as long as you tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.”

You: “It just depends on luck and the whims of the audience that day. This is completely beyond my control!”

Your Audience: “We audiences are pretty predictable. We remember interesting and relevant stories, examples and anecdotes. If you can make your points with an occasional surprise, unpredictability or humor, then we will be retelling your message to others for the next 5 years. The one thing we can absolutely guarantee you is that we will not remember a straightforward data dump.”

I feel for former President Bill Clinton. He is, by all accounts, an indefatigable campaigner, often getting by with less than four hours sleep. Well, apparently even Clinton gets tired. Below is a video clip of Clinton snoozing and attempting in vain to stay awake while on the stage behind a speaker. My cheap easy advice is for everyone to get at least 8 hours of sleep, not only on days when you are speaking, but also when you are going to be near any0one else who is speaking and might have a video camera pointed at him or her. If you need motivation to get a good night’s sleep, then you need to watch this.

http://www.nypost.com/video/?vxSiteId=0db7b365-a288-4708-857b-8bdb545cbd0f&vxChannel=NY%20Post&vxClipId=1458_227094&vxBitrate=700

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.