Presentation Zen [1]
Back in the States, a big thank you to those who contributed ideas and support including Debbie Thorn, CZ Robertson, David Roemer, and Gail Murphy. And to Mark and Liz Reynolds for their fantastic B&B at the beach.
I’d like to thank the thousands of subscribers to the Presentation Zen blog and to all the blog readers who have contacted me over the years to share their stories and examples, especially Les Posen in Australia.
Though I could not include all the slides in this book, I want to thank all the people who submitted sample slides including: Jeff Brenman, Chris Landry, Scott B. Schwertly, Jill Cadarette, Kelli Matthews, Luis Iturriaga, Dr. Aisyah Saad Abdul Rahim, Marty Neumeier, Markuz Wernli Saito, Sangeeta Kumar, Allysson Lucca, Pam Slim, Jed Schmidt, Merlin Mann, and many others.
And of course my biggest supporter in all of this was my wife, Ai, who was always understanding and a great source of inspiration and ideas (and occasionally, chocolate chip cookies).
Foreword by Guy Kawasaki
Since this is a book about presenting better with slides, I thought it would be appropriate to show the foreword as a slide presentation. As far as I know, this is the first foreword in history presented in a book as a series of PowerPoint slides. Now, good slides should enhance a live talk; slides are not meant to tell the whole story without you there. But from these slides on the next page I think you can get my point. If I were to give a live talk about why you should buy this book, the slides would look some-thing like this.
Guy Kawasaki
Managing Director, Garage Technology Ventures
Co-founder of Truemors
www.guykawasaki.com
Introduction
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Chapter 1
Presenting in Today’s World
With successful presentations in Tokyo behind me, I boarded the 5:03pm Super Express bound for Osaka complete with my ekiben (a special kind of Japanese lunch box or bento sold at train stations) and a can of Asahi beer in hand. The quintessential “Japan experience” for me is zipping through the Japanese countryside aboard cutting-edge rail technology while sampling traditional Japanese delicacies with my chopsticks, sipping Japanese beer, and catching glimpses of temples, shrines, and even Mount Fuji out the spacious side window. It’s a wonderful juxtaposition of the old and the new, and a pleasant way to end the day.
While in the midst of savoring the contents of my bento, I glanced to my right across the aisle to see a Japanese businessman with a pensive look on his face reviewing a printed deck of PowerPoint slides. Two slides per page, one page after another filled with boxes crammed with reams of Japanese text in several different colors. No empty space. No graphics except for the company logo at the top of each slide box. Just slide after slide of text, subject titles, bullet points, and logos.
Were these slides used for visual support in a live oral presentation? If so, I sympathize with the audience. Since when can an audience read and listen to someone talk at the same time (even if they could actually see the 12-point text on the screen well enough to read it)? Were the slides used merely as a kind of document printed in PowerPoint? If so, I pity both the author and the reader because PowerPoint is not a tool for document creation. Boxes of bullet points and logos do not make for a good handout or report. And judging by the way the man was flipping back and forth between the printed slides, perhaps frustrated by the ambiguity of the content, this was becoming apparent to him.
What a contrast in the presentation of content, I thought to myself: The beautifully efficient, well-designed Japanese bento before me containing nothing superfluous, compared with the poorly-designed, difficult-to-understand deck of printed PowerPoint slides