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The best presentation is the one never shown
- zbanks 16y agoAs much as I agree with his point, his America vs. Russia shtick is grating and distracting.
- chrisbroadfoot 16y agoActually, I enjoyed his unique perspective on American vs Russian business culture. Without it, this article is not hugely compelling and ends up being like many articles before it.
- 2arrs2ells 16y agoI just help couldn't turning every sentence into something like "In communist Russia, you do not make presentation, presentation make you" in my head.
- te_chris 16y agotbh i lold at this.
- sz 16y agoThe rest of the site is good too. "Time makes things worse" I liked particularly.
- elithrar 16y agoIt seems he hasn't read Jason Santa Maria's article on presentations: http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/make-yourself-presentable/ http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/make-yourself-presentabl...
- chrisbroadfoot 16y agoa) The author is Russian, and his article translated. He probably doesn't speak or read English. b) The linked article predates Jason Santa Maria's article. c) The linked article is still interesting, even if a and b weren't true.
- obiterdictum 16y agoA correction: as far as I recall the author studied in US at some point of time.
- chrisbroadfoot 16y agoInteresting. So why does he get someone else to translate his articles? Maybe he's not that confident with his English skills.
- Vivtek 16y agoBecause he knows that unless he's really talented at language, he's better off expressing his thoughts in his native language, then paying a professional to translate them? I've spoken German fluently for over twenty years and translate it professionally to the tune of a million words a year - thus I'm no slouch with the German language - yet if I were to build a site for my services in Germany, you can damn well bet I'd pay a translator to produce the German.
- obiterdictum 16y agoHe runs the biggest design studio in Russia, so I suppose he does not have that much time to translate his entire website into English.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- sliverstorm 16y agoHe seems to be describing mostly bad presentations. I've seen good ones that don't suffer these problems, though they can be rare.
- obiterdictum 16y agoI've noticed that for the most part quality of a presentation rests on the skill of the speaker, rather than the quality of slides.
- sliverstorm 16y agoThis is true, but it does take certain qualities in the slides, such as not re-stating what is being said word for word, and including relevant & enlightening graphics that show what the speaker cannot say. Of course, you could argue knowing how to make such a slideshow is part of being a good speaker, because it is all about creating a slideshow to support, augment, improve & fill the holes in your talk.
- ams6110 16y agoI fortunately have not been in a position to attend a large number of presentations. Of the ones I have attended, the best have been by well-prepared speakers who use a whiteboard and no slides. The diagrams tend to be crude but hand-drawing on a whiteboard hardly ever outraces the ability of the audience to follow along; with slides the opposite is often the case (for me anyway).
- chevas 16y agoA ton of TED conferences are great examples of good slide presentations. Most of the "slides" are images without text. His article itself had images. If I was listening to that article orally, I'd appreciate the two different PowerPoint icons on a slide, but nothing else.
- eitally 16y agoI take some umbrage at the ubiquitous slighting of PowerPoint, et al. The vast majority of "business" presentations are for an internal audience that is already partially pre-briefed and the presenter just uses the slides to jog his or her own memory of the important points to review in the meeting. It's essentially pre-written agenda+minutes, and it doesn't have to be anything more. This is easily contrasted to the kinds of professional presenters you see at TED, or someone like Steve Jobs, but those are public presentations of novel content. Not at all the same, and it's not fair to directly compare the work these folks do to prepare and rehearse their presentations to what 9-to-5ers do. Nearly zero internal business presentations need to be so polished, either in formatting or delivery.
- mechanical_fish 16y agoIt's essentially pre-written agenda+minutes. This is very insightful. Powerpoint is a prop for establishing the structure of a meeting. It is -- as pointed out by many -- a lousy tool for conveying actual content. (Of course, in a world with cheap printing, and now cheap email, cheap blogging, cheap e-text, cheap recorded audio, and cheap online video as well, live lectures in general are lousy tools for conveying content.) Meetings need agendas. Otherwise every meeting ends up being about whatever the best schmoozer at the meeting wants it to be about. Of course, as with many tools, the use of Powerpoint is most noticeable when it is being terribly abused. People use it to force incredibly boring agendas. People use it as an excuse to lecture.
- edw519 16y ago145. Pointless presentation More like "146. Pointless Blog Post". From the title, I was expecting to read what one should do ahead of time to make one's slide presentation unnecessary. Something like "How to build a tag line so compelling that people will get it immediately," "Show everything a first timer needs to know on your front page," or "How to hit the reptilian brain in the first 10 seconds". We already know that most presentations suck and want to learn what to do to avoid suckdom. That's advice I'd be interested in learning. Alas, it never came from this post.
- borism 16y agoSomething like "How to build a tag line so compelling that people will get it immediately," "Show everything a first timer needs to know on your front page," or "How to hit the reptilian brain in the first 10 seconds". See, that's exactly something ArtLebedev and we Europeans object to in American business culture - do you REALLY need to get your "point" out immediately, does "hitting reptilian brain in 10 seconds" is really all that important? Maybe if you didn't need to brainwash us into business relationship in the first place, it wouldn't matter whether it took "immediately", 10 seconds or 10 minutes.
- edw519 16y ago...we Europeans object to in American business culture... Be thankful for being able to insult us Americans in English, because if it wasn't for us, you'd probably be doing it in German. </stock response to any illogical European insult of the U.S.>
- borism 16y agoSee, taking objective criticism as an insult and reacting strongly with a false sense of pride ("if it weren't for us in the WWII!!!"). Dealing with american here, no doubt about that.
- Vivtek 16y agoAnd then there are Americans who agree with your point of substance - yet still don't think HNN is the right place to flame about nationalism.
- dgudkov 16y agoGood point about being forced to make visual presentation in the form of slides. It's too restrictive sometimes. Does anybody know good presentation tool that allows creating animated presentations not in the form of slides? UPD. Discovered prezi.com - it's amazing!