DDD compact discs

Back in the 1990s, compact disks would show a so called SPARS code. A series of 3 letters that could either be “D” for digital, or “A” for analogue. “DDD” indicates digital recording, digital mixing, and digital mastering.

My late mother in law had a huge classical music CD collection and I would browse it to find a CD to play, when given a choice “DDD” would be my preference since it was clearly a recording of the highest quality.

My mother in law would answer that this was actually totally irrelevant. What matters is the conductor and/or solo artist that delivered the performance. A poor quality AAA recording from the 1950s might have been the best rendering of a particular piece of music ever.

There is an interesting parallel here with presentations: the actual performance and the supporting slides.

Image By Attosaur - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, source.

Demo story lines

A live demo of your product is risky in a short standup presentation. Lots of stuff can go wrong (internet connections, etc.) and you might end up spending valuable time on banal things like logging in and out. For short pitches, I would suggest to use screenshots, with the exact messages you want to convey. Point at your lap top with a running demo as evidence that there is indeed a product.

A proper demo of a product can be done in a follow up call. People have understood the basic idea, are interested, and now is the time to dive into the product. And strangely enough, in the era of Zoom product demos are a bit easier since everyone sits very close to a monitor.

Like presentations, it is not recommended to “wing” a product demo. You might end up forgetting to show critical features, hitting bugs, and presenting a rambling user flow. You want to impersonate consistent demo accounts that perform a sequence of actions in a logical way, instead of clicking around randomly to show features.

No slides does not mean no presentation

In smaller, informal settings, pulling out your laptop to run through your slide deck can zap the energy of a meeting. For these meetings without slides, it does not mean that this is a meeting with a presentation. In the absence of slides, it can be hard to stay focussed on the story line. You might get lost in tangents, you might miss the important punch line as the waiter asks if you need sugar or milk.

The way you “present” in a slide-less meeting is different from when you are in front of a big audience. But still, you need to rehearse that story, maybe even more.

Shorter or quicker?

If the time window if your presentation gets cut you have 2 choices: fewer words, or more words per second. Pick fewer words.

First/short or later/longer?

When speaking at a conference and you get offered two possible speaking slots: early in the day and very short, and later in the day and a lot longer. Which one to take? Easy, the early/short one.

• Attendance at conferences drops during the day, your audience is a lot bigger in the morning

• When people see you speak (early) they are more likely to approach you later, (feedback about) your presentation is an ice breaker

• In conferences, a really short speech is likely better than a long one. You are not here to close the deal, just to start more conversations. Your short speaker slot is a blessing.

Slides in negotiation

Lawyers love to negotiate (and bill hours) by changing words and lines in linear text. This works perfectly for deals that are standard and very well understood. The price of a product, the distribution commission, the number of shares.

When the business or the business model is a bit unusual, things go wrong. The 2 parties, and their lawyers (that’s 4 entities) can easily get confused. People think they understand, but they do not.

The solution: negotiate based on a sketch or a slide layout and use an imaginative case example with some made up, but realistic numbers. It is easy to refer to the year 3 sales redistribution commission as “those $42k”. Everyone knows what you are talking about.

After all this, the deal can be put in writing.

Write the deck from scratch

It can take months to get the results of your strategy project, or your business plan. And along with it, your pitch deck has evolved as well. You take it out for every meeting.

A refreshing approach: rewrite the pitch deck (not the business plan of course) from scratch for your next meeting. My guess is that it should only take you 3 hours, since you did all the work over the previous months. A fresh story line, and only charts to support your messages, rather than provide backup data. No risk, if it didn’t work you will always have your old one, but my predication is that that one will start to collect dust.

Huge audience speeches

The protests against the attempt to weaken the Israeli democracy are continuing. Every weekend there is a 100,000+ demonstration in central Tel Aviv (14 weeks and counting). As a result, I have heard my fair share of speeches made by politicians and activists.

The bar for a good speech gets higher. A politician who tries a very long sequence of cliche sound bites (we will win, it unfair, we won’t let them), is unlikely to excite the audience anymore. What can work?

• Crowd managment, some people have the charisma, voice, and ability to time sentences to sweep up a crowd.

• Personal stories. Some speakers, even with weaker voices and/or a smaller stage presence, manage to connect to 100,000 people who listen quietly

• Original plots. Coming at things from a different angle, drawing possible future scenarios, rather than cliche sound bites / one liners

• Keeping it short. Most speakers fall in the trap of repeating themselves, and taking too much time. Shorter, even very short, speeches are way more memorable.

The first take

On many famous music recordings, an artist’s first take often made it on the final record:

• A stress-free, we will just try something, approach

• Some happy mistakes that turned out great

• A clear mind, free of tangents

In presentations, something similar often happens. After weeks of work, you sit down and say “OK, this is what it actually boils down to”, and out comes the perfect story.

This only works after, you invested in the hard work and really understand what you are talking about. It is a first take of telling your story, not a first take of doing the project.

Speaking at mass rallies

Israel is going through a major political crisis now that has little to do with the traditional conflict here that usually makes headlines around the world. As a result, I have been attending a number of large rallies pretty much for the first time in my life, to try to prevent the current government from making the Supreme Court and legal system subordinate to the parliament with a simple 51% majority vote, effectively ending the separation of power that is crucial for a democracy to function properly.

Some lessons here when it comes to public speaking at these events with 100,000 attending:

• Your script is basically a list of sound bites, paragraphs of tension / release. Build up tension one way with a problem, then provide release with a punch line. There is very little room for sophisticated story lines.

• Don’t be afraid to put really, really long pauses in between, to get the crowd to calm down.

• Make sure your punch line is short and does not get washed out by the noise of the crowd.

• Balance your voice volume. If you are at the top of your voice all the time, you can no longer add extra drama to the punch line. (Yes, some people have a microphone voice with lots of lower frequencies, giving them an unfair advantage).

• Use the crowd creatively. “Raise your hand if you…” “Turn on the flashlight of your mobile phone if you…”

Most of the people in these rallies follow the speaker on giant screens. In between speakers, video clips are shown with a mix of regular footage and “slides”, usually big text messages that come in and out with animations.

There is an opportunity here for a carefully crafted, synchronized slide show and speaker performance. But I guess it will be pretty difficult to get all the technology to work: managing slide transitions, and switching between speaker and slide on the giant monitors. It should be possible though for events that are planned long in advance. The ones in Israel now are created at the very last minute, as things are moving very fast.

Zelensky's UK speech

Zelensky’s speeches will enter the history books as examples of powerful public speaking. Here is a link to the speech to the combined houses of Parliament in London on February 8, 2023. Zelensky starts speaking at around 10:33 (start the video at this time by clicking this link)

Some thoughts:

• He speaks in English with a very heavy accent. Instead of hurting his talk, it makes it a lot more powerful. It shows courage and effort. And the way he speaks (slowly, determined) makes it actually sound very good and easy to understand. When he (almost) gets stuck, he pauses, looks at his notes, and keeps going confidently

• Zelensky again drags the audience in. You fought your wars for values you believed in, you won, and now we are in the same position as you.

• In very news sources, a few sound bites of the speech are summarized, but they do not reflect the whole speech, you need to hear things in context. (Although he has a few powerful one liners, for example the one referring to the UK having a king who is a pilot, while in Ukraine there are pilots who are kings.

• Zelensky has a very clear agenda, he wants planes. It comes back in the one liners, it comes back in the examples, at the start, in the middle, at the end, all the time. It is very clear what he is asking for. Highlighting the bravery of the UK to be one of the first to support Ukraine, and implying that it should be ready to set the next step as a first as well.

• He switches skillfully from complimenting the host, creating empathy for his country, referring to very big concepts (the find between Good and Evil) and zapping the tension with humor.

• He uses props (the pilot helmet and the story with the meaning of the scribbles on it).

I think he will have changed the perspective of many MPs sitting in the audience.

Rehearsing the whiteboard

Adhoc brainstorm meetings are very hard to manage. If you have to discuss a complex issue, it might be worth to prepare and rehearse your white board sketch before entering the room.

On its own, a white board (or a black board at school) is not very meaningful. A bunch of words and drawings out of context. For the person who sat through the meeting, the board is very meaningful. Every scribble on a specific location on the board is a visual anchor for the entire rich discussion that was held about it.

So rather than prepare a big slide deck, maybe you should prepare your white board. Where do you put what. How do you connect elements. The whiteboard gives you the perfect excuse not to make perfect drawings. Try 3, 4, 5, or even more versions until you are left with one you like.

Convincing the decision maker

A big meeting is not the right setting to convince a single decision maker. A lot of her subordinates are around and showing doubt is showing weakness. So the interactions before that all-important presentation is where the real work gets done.

The wrong bucket

Last week’s conference is a gold mine for presentation pitch examples.

The receiver of a pitch of a new idea will almost always try to pigeon hole you in a product category they understand well, so it easy to compare the new thing you are offering to the familiar world they are living in.

We were pitching 9xchange that does not really fit very well in anything (yet). One of our audiences was someone in operations and IT. At the very basic level you can think of 9xchange as, well, an IT system. We have a web site, a server, etc. And this triggered all the red flags.

• We currently have already IT implementation projects running

• We already have a system that does […]

• What, we just switched all our employees to system x

• How do I get buy in from department x, y, and z for this, the previous project was a huge pain to get approved

• We are behind schedule in rolling out this system

We did not even get to pitch the core idea behind 9xchange and got stuck in the hassle of running major IT integration projects in very large companies.

This prospect was the wrong person to pitch to, we did not even try.

The last day of meetings

More reflections on last week’s conference. We stayed 6 days, with probably an average of 8 - 10 meetings a day, plus 3 - 5 cocktail receptions each evening. That boils down to hundreds of pitches to hundreds of people, in a time zone that is 10 hours before yours.

Everyone is in the same boat (people who pitch, people at the receiving end of pitches)), and the dynamic of the meetings changes over the course of the conference. Towards the end of the event, people get really tired, and have seen the dance many times. The result: meetings actually get better. The small talk is about the shared experience of the conference. The setting is more informal. People are more flexible to meet outside stuffy hotel rooms, just somewhere in the corner of a hotel lobby. The pitch is much more direct (“ok, what do you want”), feedback is more candid.

But I am not sure there is a way to get to these last days of meetings without having to go through the first ones.

Image by Jeffrey at https://www.flickr.com/photos/48889052497@N01/11342817773

What does this marketing agency do?

I find the world of marketing and branding agencies very confusing. You ask them what they do, and you get a description of a process that sounds and looks very similar to everyone else you ask the same question. But in practice, people are actually very specialized. Defining the personality of a brand, creating the competitive strategic positioning of a company, making the pitch deck, generating leads, designing ads, running online campaigns, designing logos, etc .etc.

The best strategy to find out what people do is to ask them to describe a project, and see where in this whole jungle they played a role, and most importantly, at what stage in this description see you light up the eyes of the person you are considering working with.

Using humor in a presentation

Using humor in a presentation can be a great way to engage your audience and make your message more memorable. When done correctly, humor can help to break the ice, lighten the mood, and make complex concepts easier to understand. However, using humor in a presentation can also be risky and, if not done well, it can easily backfire and make you appear unprofessional or insensitive. Here are a few tips for using humor in a presentation:

1. Know your audience: Before incorporating humor into your presentation, it's important to understand your audience and what they find funny. Different people have different senses of humor, so what may be funny to one group may not be funny to another. Consider the demographics, cultural backgrounds, and experiences of your audience when choosing your jokes.

2. Be appropriate: It's important to remember that humor is subjective and what one person finds funny may be offensive to another. Avoid using humor that is based on stereotypes, is sexually explicit, or is overly political. Stick to jokes that are clean and relatable to a wide audience.

3. Use humor sparingly: You don't want to overdo it with the jokes in your presentation. A few well-placed jokes can add some levity to your presentation, but too many can become overwhelming and take away from the overall message. Use humor sparingly and strategically, and save the majority of your presentation for the information and insights that you want to share.

4. Practice: Before delivering your presentation, make sure to practice your jokes and delivery. This will help you to feel more comfortable and confident when presenting, and will also allow you to gauge how your audience reacts to your humor. If a joke falls flat during your practice, consider leaving it out of your final presentation.

A small break

My daughter’s school concert was disrupted by a small toddler in the audience that ran out of patience and starting screaming. The chorus teacher decided to press on while the embarrassed parents tried to leave the audience with the kid (who got even more upset). The whole operation took 2 minutes out of a 4 minutes performance

I would have paused the concert for two minutes and continue with a relaxed audience. Presentation interruptions happen…

Memorizing things

This is an interesting video in which a bass player (Cici) explains how she copes with memorizing dozens of (cover) songs that she has not heard before in a short period of time. The lessons here can be applied to any performance, including a presentation.

The key is the memory shortcut: compressing lots of information into something short and “catchy” that is much more easy to remember than the individual bits and pieces. Examples:

• Grouping individual notes into shapes on the fretboard of a bass guitar

• Inventing an unusual description for the sound of a song (‘the carnival song’)

• Quick reminders of where songs are unusual, i.e., a break in a completely different musical style

• Reminders that are critical for the performance and hard to cover up: i.e., the whole bands needs to stop exactly at the same time on bar 64, or your instrument is actually starting the song solo, without the musical reference of the band to help you along.

The basics

Leaving political viewpoints aside, Obama did a great speech yesterday. This short clip starts about 30 minutes into a 1 hour speech.

Democrats are going giddy over this clip. Why? This is good campaigning, but no more. It's basic stuff: Clarifying what's at stake, appealing to personal experience, the rhetorical power of repetition.

Democrats' astonishment at basic rhetorical competence is what's astonishing. https://t.co/YSJMInEb2V

— Haviv Rettig Gur (@havivrettiggur) October 30, 2022