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By Root 2087 0

clarity of your presentation’s core message with the elevator test. This exercise forces you to “sell” your message in 30–45 seconds. Imagine this is the situation: You have been scheduled to pitch a new idea to the head of product marketing at your company, one of the leading technology manufactures in the world. Both schedules and budgets are tight; this is an extremely important opportunity for you if you are to succeed at getting the OK from the executive team. When you arrive at the admin desk outside the vice-president’s office, suddenly she comes out with her coat and briefcase in hand and says, “…sorry, something’s come up, give me your idea as we walk down to my car…” Imagine such a scenario. Could you sell your idea in the elevator ride and the walk to the parking lot? Sure, the scenario is unlikely, but possible. What is very possible, however, is for you to be asked without notice to shorten your talk down, from, say, 20 minutes, to five minutes (or from a scheduled one hour to 30 minutes). Could you do it? True, you may never have to, but practicing what you would do in such a case forces you to get your message down and make your overall content tighter and clearer.

Handouts Can Set You Free

If you create a proper handout as a leave-behind for your presentation during the preparation phase, then you will not feel compelled to say everything about your topic in your talk. Preparing a proper document—with as much detail as you think necessary—frees you to focus on what is most important for your particular audience on your particular day. If you write a proper document you will also not worry about the exclusion of charts or figures or related points to your topic. You can’t say everything in your talk. Many presenters include everything under the sun in their slides “just in case” or to show that they are “serious people.” It is common to create slides with lots of text and detailed charts, etc. because the slides will also serve as a leave-behind document. Big mistake (see sidebar on “slideumentation”). Instead, prepare a detailed document for a handout and keep the slides simple. And never distribute a printed version of your slides as a handout. Why? David Rose, expert presenter and one of New York City’s most successful technology entrepreneurs put it to me this way:

“Never, ever hand out copies of your slides, and certainly not before your presentation. That is the kiss of death. By definition, since slides are “speaker support” material, they are there in support of the speaker… YOU. As such, they should be completely incapable of standing by themselves, and are thus useless to give to your audience, where they will simply be guaranteed to be a distraction. The flip side of this is that if the slides can stand by themselves, why the heck are you up there in front of them?”

—David Rose

Three Parts of a Presentation

If you remember that there are three components to your presention—the slides, your notes, and the handout—then you will not feel the need to place so much information (text, data, etc.) in your slides. Instead, you can place that information in your notes (for the purpose of rehearsing or as a backup “just in case”) or in the handout. This point has been made by presentation experts such as Cliff Atkinson, yet most people still fill their slides with reams of text and hard-to-see data and simply print out their slides instead of creating a document. (I have used the four slides on this page while making this point during my live talks on presentation design.)

Create a Document Not a Slideument

Slides are slides. Documents are documents. They aren’t the same thing. Attempts to merge them result in what I call the “slideument.” The creation of the slideument stems from a desire to save time. People think they are being efficient and simplifying things. A kind of kill-two-birds-with-one-stone approach, or iiseki ni cho in Japanese. Unfortunately (unless you’re a bird), the only thing “killed” is effective communication. Intentions are good, but results are bad.