The Story About How Bad Presentations Have Become the Norm

Bad presentations are everywhere. In auditoriums, boardrooms, meetings rooms and offices across the world, bad presentations have become the norm, despite our best efforts…

What constitutes a bad presentation?
Generally, they are bullet point ridden messes.  With countless slides overloaded with content, they have a lack of structure, focus obsessively on the presenter and their company whilst completely disregarding the audience, and they often lack the most obvious element: a call to action.

Think I’m being harsh? Since offering our free Presentation Healthcheck service, we’ve seen a worryingly high number of presentations that suffer from either all or some of the problems mentioned above.

What’s the impact of bad presentations?
In general, missed opportunities. Every time a presenter stands up in front of an audience, a lot of time, money and energy has been spent to generate that opportunity. A presenter turning up with a ‘bad’ presentation usually means the audience won’t follow the call to action (if there is one).

Worse than that, reputation can be irreparably damaged, both for the company presenting to the audience and back at base for the presenter and their boss.

It’s bad news all round.

How do bad presentations happen?
We have a theory (and please excuse the use of Comic Sans font – it’s supposed to be ironic)…

Are people really staying up all hours, tinkering with their presentations at the last minute to try and make them better?

Sadly, yes.

It’s happening every day in the real world. It’s so widespread and well known that the world’s largest fast-food chain has hooked into it in their latest TV advertising campaign…

Stuart is not a hero – he’s a pillock for leaving his presentation to the last minute. Working on your presentation late at night when you’re tired leads to two things – an annoyed family and a bad presentation.

Someone should tell Stuart “there is another way” and advise him to bookmark this URL.

 

You see Microsoft, the people that brought you the world’s most popular presentation tool, have teamed up with Eyeful, the people who, quite literally, wrote the book on the formula behind powerful presentations, The Presentation Lab…

We’ve taken our years of experience and the expert thinking that underpins our modular presentation training and mixed them together.  The end result is a platform for a month-long series of videos, Sways and thought-provoking content to spur presenters on to Thinking, Acting and Delivering their presentations differently.

All to make sure that presenters like Stuart (and possibly you?) don’t fall into the trap of poor presentations impacting your next opportunity…or career…or family harmony.

Both you and your audience deserve better…

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Simon Morton – View the original post .