6 ms·

How Steve Jobs beats presentation panic

59 points by fogus 16y ago

j23tom 16y ago
tasteless eulogy
jtbigwoo 16y ago
A friend of mine has a great line for whenever something unexpected happens in a demo: "I'm glad this happened and I'll tell you why..."
- bwana998 16y ago
  Good one! :)
- djcapelis 16y ago
  I actually hate this line. I've heard it a few times and it provides the impression that you weren't going to explore something important in your planned presentation which is a bit of a slap to the audience. I prefer "This gives us an opportunity to talk about..." Your presentation shouldn't be an accident, you shouldn't be glad you would have failed to tell us something important had things gone right, you should be glad to react to changing circumstances and explain something off the cuff.
smwhreyebelong 16y ago
Humor is a great strategy. Once you have people laughing, you can get away with a few minor hiccups. It reminds me of a rafting trip I took. The buses being used to transport us from the office to the rafting location were really old and almost falling apart. The guides had a brilliant story about how the buses went from high schools->some backwater in mexico->some other really random places and were finally bought by the rafting company. The funny story had people laughing all the way there than crib about how crappy the buses were.
eitally 16y ago
This is all well and good -- and a similar post a few months ago relating how Malcolm Gladwell practices his lectures had much of the same information -- but to be completely honest, with the amount of multitasking most people do these days, almost none of the presentations we give are much more than information sharing via PowerPoint/Impress/Pages. The extra time spent rehearsing and preparing backup plans would be a complete waste. It would be smarter for most people to practice their public speaking more generally so that when they're giving these innocuous, boring presentations they at least don't come off as buffoons (whether the demos work or not).
- smwhreyebelong 16y ago
  +1 I have realized that having an overview of what's on the agenda aka the bullet points is the most helpful thing. Just talking about those bullet points instead of reading from a script makes the presentation more of an engaging/interactive conversation with the audience rather than a prepared speech/lecture.
tjmaxal 16y ago
this reminds me of the old interview tip "turn weaknesses into strengths" Being able to flip a hiccup into a fluid teaching point is good for any kind of teaching not just power point presentations.
ams6110 16y ago
I saw Jobs give a presentation of NeXT's Enterprise Objects Framework (an early, even pioneering ORM) at a trade show in Chicago... during the presentation one of his NeXT machines crashed, and the audience got to see the system reboot on the big projection screen. I don't recall any real wisecracking... he just said "oops!" and maybe a little banter but did remain very calm and continued the presentation without really missing a beat.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
dkarl 16y ago
He wasn't ad-libbing. A network or remote service being unavailable is a common occurrence in presentations. I can't say I have a scripted response for every common contingency, but I'm not Steve Jobs. If he's a rehearsal freak, I'm sure he rehearsed the common problems and didn't just repeat the ideal case over and over again.
albemuth 16y ago
This made me remember how awkward the Froyo/google tv hiccups at google I/O felt in comparison, completely different story.
kmfrk 16y ago
I also believe that one of Steve's biggest advantages is that he loves the products and features he is presenting; the videogame demonstrations in particular seem to summon his inner child. There are many dubious claims such as the "factual" remarks about the superlative qualities of the products (thinnest, cheapest, greenest), but I am sure he believes it when he starts the talk by saying that "we have some great things to show you".
- ergo98 16y ago
  >I also believe that one of Steve's biggest advantages is that he loves the products and features he is presenting He's a very good salesman. He clearly sold you on his pitch. I'm a little more cynical, and hardly expect the head salesman of the company to be anything but over the moon with the revolutionary new watchamacallit that changes the rules and introduces a whole new aspect to living that no competitor could ever hope to achieve, setting new benchmarks of stuff that wasn't important when we didn't have it but have become a mandatory element that will change you world now that we do.
  - dkarl 16y ago
    Spot on. He's clearly too smart and too critical to love all his products as much as he pretends. He can probably tell you thirty things he would fix about the 4G iPhone. (Or you can just wait until he releases the next version.) The mark of an innovator is perpetual dissatisfaction.
    - CamperBob 16y ago
      He's clearly too smart and too critical to love all his products as much as he pretends. He answers his own email in a hurt tone of voice when you criticize them. If you don't think he begins each day with a tall, chilled glass of his own Kool-Aid... well, I'd have to disagree.
    - kmfrk 16y ago
      I don't know about that. If he worked for AMD/ATI or nVidia, he might have gone bonkers, as the innovations over the previous ones seem so intangible, since the platform is basically an incrementalist arms race: benchmark scores, umpteenillion transistors, superthreading. The mobile market could have been the same, but Steve Jobs stepped up the PR game. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that the people in the graphics industry could apply the same communication strategy, but I won't go into that. A lot of people on this site often tout the Android phones' hardware specifications' superiority over the iPhone, since X has Y GHz or MB more. What a lot of these people do not understand is that this is not at all what the beauty of the iOS PR is about: it is about features and achievements. These represent tangible milestone that do not come across as uninterest incremental updates: "why would I want a 2GHz processor over a 1GHz" the average consumer asks himself. "It is Xer", the other bloke says. Faster, bigger, better, but to what end; to use the same logic of comparative adjectives as arguments, it's also more expensive. This is why buying a complete desktop Windows computer is incarnate nightmare of an average user. I mentioned features and achievements and how the constitute tangible milestone and selling points; nobody gives a damn about three-hundred-something DPI (what is DPI?!). The current iPhone has a number of DPI, and this new number is obviously higher, big deal. But there is an achievement; the pixel density surpass the resolution of average human vision, so the screen will be like a physical object---not a digital one. You could go on about a "post-pixel era" or something like that, but the point is that we have a feature and not a number anymore. This is a milestone to prospective users as well as the employees at Apple who have now breached a frontier and defeated a barrier in digital computing. You are feel to chalk up his views on the larger products as "dissatisfaction", but if his focus is in the features and achievements, there is much to be ecstatic about. ... if you do not lapse into the world of nonsensical numbers and incrementalism. (Sorry if any of it is incoherent, but my allergy is killing me today.)

59 points by fogus 16y ago

tasteless eulogy

A friend of mine has a great line for whenever something unexpected happens in a demo: "I'm glad this happened and I'll tell you why..."

bwana998 16y ago
Good one! :)
djcapelis 16y ago
I actually hate this line. I've heard it a few times and it provides the impression that you weren't going to explore something important in your planned presentation which is a bit of a slap to the audience. I prefer "This gives us an opportunity to talk about..." Your presentation shouldn't be an accident, you shouldn't be glad you would have failed to tell us something important had things gone right, you should be glad to react to changing circumstances and explain something off the cuff.

smwhreyebelong 16y ago

Humor is a great strategy. Once you have people laughing, you can get away with a few minor hiccups. It reminds me of a rafting trip I took. The buses being used to transport us from the office to the rafting location were really old and almost falling apart. The guides had a brilliant story about how the buses went from high schools->some backwater in mexico->some other really random places and were finally bought by the rafting company. The funny story had people laughing all the way there than crib about how crappy the buses were.

eitally 16y ago

This is all well and good -- and a similar post a few months ago relating how Malcolm Gladwell practices his lectures had much of the same information -- but to be completely honest, with the amount of multitasking most people do these days, almost none of the presentations we give are much more than information sharing via PowerPoint/Impress/Pages. The extra time spent rehearsing and preparing backup plans would be a complete waste. It would be smarter for most people to practice their public speaking more generally so that when they're giving these innocuous, boring presentations they at least don't come off as buffoons (whether the demos work or not).

smwhreyebelong 16y ago
+1 I have realized that having an overview of what's on the agenda aka the bullet points is the most helpful thing. Just talking about those bullet points instead of reading from a script makes the presentation more of an engaging/interactive conversation with the audience rather than a prepared speech/lecture.

tjmaxal 16y ago

this reminds me of the old interview tip "turn weaknesses into strengths" Being able to flip a hiccup into a fluid teaching point is good for any kind of teaching not just power point presentations.

ams6110 16y ago

I saw Jobs give a presentation of NeXT's Enterprise Objects Framework (an early, even pioneering ORM) at a trade show in Chicago... during the presentation one of his NeXT machines crashed, and the audience got to see the system reboot on the big projection screen. I don't recall any real wisecracking... he just said "oops!" and maybe a little banter but did remain very calm and continued the presentation without really missing a beat.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

dkarl 16y ago

He wasn't ad-libbing. A network or remote service being unavailable is a common occurrence in presentations. I can't say I have a scripted response for every common contingency, but I'm not Steve Jobs. If he's a rehearsal freak, I'm sure he rehearsed the common problems and didn't just repeat the ideal case over and over again.

albemuth 16y ago

This made me remember how awkward the Froyo/google tv hiccups at google I/O felt in comparison, completely different story.

kmfrk 16y ago

I also believe that one of Steve's biggest advantages is that he loves the products and features he is presenting; the videogame demonstrations in particular seem to summon his inner child. There are many dubious claims such as the "factual" remarks about the superlative qualities of the products (thinnest, cheapest, greenest), but I am sure he believes it when he starts the talk by saying that "we have some great things to show you".

ergo98 16y ago
>I also believe that one of Steve's biggest advantages is that he loves the products and features he is presenting He's a very good salesman. He clearly sold you on his pitch. I'm a little more cynical, and hardly expect the head salesman of the company to be anything but over the moon with the revolutionary new watchamacallit that changes the rules and introduces a whole new aspect to living that no competitor could ever hope to achieve, setting new benchmarks of stuff that wasn't important when we didn't have it but have become a mandatory element that will change you world now that we do.
- dkarl 16y ago
  Spot on. He's clearly too smart and too critical to love all his products as much as he pretends. He can probably tell you thirty things he would fix about the 4G iPhone. (Or you can just wait until he releases the next version.) The mark of an innovator is perpetual dissatisfaction.
  - CamperBob 16y ago
    He's clearly too smart and too critical to love all his products as much as he pretends. He answers his own email in a hurt tone of voice when you criticize them. If you don't think he begins each day with a tall, chilled glass of his own Kool-Aid... well, I'd have to disagree.
  - kmfrk 16y ago
    I don't know about that. If he worked for AMD/ATI or nVidia, he might have gone bonkers, as the innovations over the previous ones seem so intangible, since the platform is basically an incrementalist arms race: benchmark scores, umpteenillion transistors, superthreading. The mobile market could have been the same, but Steve Jobs stepped up the PR game. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that the people in the graphics industry could apply the same communication strategy, but I won't go into that. A lot of people on this site often tout the Android phones' hardware specifications' superiority over the iPhone, since X has Y GHz or MB more. What a lot of these people do not understand is that this is not at all what the beauty of the iOS PR is about: it is about features and achievements. These represent tangible milestone that do not come across as uninterest incremental updates: "why would I want a 2GHz processor over a 1GHz" the average consumer asks himself. "It is Xer", the other bloke says. Faster, bigger, better, but to what end; to use the same logic of comparative adjectives as arguments, it's also more expensive. This is why buying a complete desktop Windows computer is incarnate nightmare of an average user. I mentioned features and achievements and how the constitute tangible milestone and selling points; nobody gives a damn about three-hundred-something DPI (what is DPI?!). The current iPhone has a number of DPI, and this new number is obviously higher, big deal. But there is an achievement; the pixel density surpass the resolution of average human vision, so the screen will be like a physical object---not a digital one. You could go on about a "post-pixel era" or something like that, but the point is that we have a feature and not a number anymore. This is a milestone to prospective users as well as the employees at Apple who have now breached a frontier and defeated a barrier in digital computing. You are feel to chalk up his views on the larger products as "dissatisfaction", but if his focus is in the features and achievements, there is much to be ecstatic about. ... if you do not lapse into the world of nonsensical numbers and incrementalism. (Sorry if any of it is incoherent, but my allergy is killing me today.)