Simply Amazing Presentation Skills

From time to time at my job I will need to present information to an audience of people with a range of skills and knowledge. Presentations are kind of like skiing. A person can get good at skiing, but it is always good for people to return to the basics from time to time. Returning to the basics will often help to remind a person of things that they may have forgotten or taken for granted as they got better at a skill, it may help them see things that they missed the first time as they were learning, presenting a different view on a technique, or there may be new techniques that have become available that weren’t around when the person originally was learning the skill. I look at presentation skills, and in some ways facilitation skills much the same way.

Steve Jobs – Presenter Extraordinaire

So the other day I ran across some comments about who people thought was one of the world’s best presenters, Steve Jobs. Some things I just assume. One thing that I assume is that once you get to the head of an organization you have skills, one of them being communication skills, and specifically those types of skills that are connected to presenting information to a group of people. But when I read comments such as “world’s best”, my curiosity was triggered, my assumptions fell away, and I thought “opportunity to learn.” So I checked out his Macworld San Francisco 2007 Keynote Address.

One word: Brilliant.

I had only planned to watch a few minutes of the presentation. I was not really interested in getting an IPhone, and only have had a slight interest in switching over to a Mac. I had never seen Steve Jobs speak, but I did figure somehow it would be better than those embarrassing Bill Gates fiasco presentations, where technical people kind of raise their shoulders in fear for the person or persons behind the scenes that was going to get fired because of the problems that day. I not only watched a few minutes of the presentation, I watched the whole thing and charged it to personal development at work. The keynote address will be on my favorites list to be reviewed once a year, like going back and hitting the bunny slopes with Sven the helpful ski instructor.

What was so brilliant?

“What was so brilliant?”, one might ask. Well, I’ll just start with the thoughtfulness and preparation that it must have taken. Steve is a pro. Well, let me describe some of the highlights, then you can watch and make your own judgement.

1. This presentation is two hours long, and he doesn’t have a card, and does not appear to be using a Teleprompter
2. He starts with the “bad” news, but he turns it around to something positive. We are going to Intel processors, and we rocked at it!
3. He constantly gives credit to his team, and he includes them in the presentation
4. He uses the products he is discussing in his presentation
5. He is funny. He makes a crank call in the middle of the presentation. Priceless!
6. He uses his hands, and controls the presentation himself
7. Very few powerpoint type lists, he presents each idea with either an image, pictures, video, or demonstration
8. When he uses lists, it is only to show direction in a section of the presentation, then he follows up with review of that section with the same list
9. He is positive, shows enthusiasm and talks about success
10. He is graceful. He slipped on one name, but you really have to watch him to see that he did. Even when he slipped his words covered the slippage gracefully. The lightning quick grimace he made gave away his perfectionism
11. He is so graceful that when there was a problem with the clicker to move the presentation forward, he joked, made time, made the audience laugh, and moved on. Terrific.
12. He presented his partners as part of the team and let them speak
13. He justified the original $499 price of the IPhone, by the end of the presentation he nearly had me sold

If I watched the video again I could go on about more things that I thought were just fabulous. One indicator of just how good his presentation was can be found toward the end of the keynote. At the end, when the CEO’s of Google, Singular, and Yahoo spoke on the stage, good speakers in their own right, his performance dwarfed theirs. What an act to follow.

Why I’m probably not going to get me an IPhone, even after that stellar performance

It seems that even with the sale of a complete operating system on the IPhone, Apple Inc has decided to limit what developers can do on them, or how they can distribute their software to the IPhone. This is a backwards step for the IPhone, alienating one part of the team not quite represented in the presentation, the independent developers. If you are interested here are a few articles:

iPhone Coders Muzzled, Miffed by Apple’s NDA

Apple Is Picky About Its iPhone Dev Program

F_cking_NDA_iPhone_Coders_Upset_With_Apple

It seems that Apple Inc wants to keep a strangle hold of some of the functionality on the IPhone. Each new version seems to lock down the hopes of the openness of the full OS X operating system on the phone.

Windows Mobile might be a limited operating system, but geeks want to be able to develop and distribute what they like. I guess we will have to wait and see if Google’s Android will fit this particular geeky itch.

The great user interface to the IPhone is compelling, but the quickly closing openness of the phone seems like a little bait and switch after the Keynote.

One Recommendation for the Great Presenter

Another of the great things about Job’s presentation was his focus on what they will deliver. The confidence of speech when he spoke the words “will”, and the certainty that I have no doubt he brought to the mind of his audience when he spoke the words, was great. A lesson when delivering such a memorable speech, with promises given or implied, is that when you take them back, like in the case of closing the IPhone for independent development, you are breaking a deal with those you gave so much promise to.

One last lesson Jobs may need to learn to make the perfect presentation, is to acknowledge their lasting effect and only imply or announce the certainty of things that are for certain.

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Jobs is an awesome presenter. I recommend giving the Keynote a look.

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