Presentation Zen [34]
Simplicity is an important design principle, but simplicity itself is not a panacea. Though people usually err on the side of making presentation slides more complicated than they need to be, it is indeed possible to be “too simple.” Simplicity is the goal, but as Einstein said, “Make everything as simple as possible but no simpler.”
Steve Jobs and the Zen Aesthetic
Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs is one of the best presenters in the world of business today. Jobs is clear and to the point. His presentations generate a lot of positive buzz and always release yet another wave of viral communication about the presentation’s content. This happens in part because the content is easily grasped and remembered by both the media and regular customers. You can’t “spread the word” if you don’t get what the word is. With Jobs’s public presentations, there is both a verbal and visual clarity. This is what great leaders do. Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, authors of Creating Customer Evangelists (Kaplan Business) make a good observation about Jobs:
“Jobs does just what a leader is supposed to do: Provide a vision of where the company ship is headed and make sure everyone understands it.”
Part of Jobs’s great clarity can be seen even in the slides that accompany his talks. I am stretching things a bit here, but there is almost a “Zen aesthetic” to Steve Jobs’s presentation visuals. In Jobs’s slides you can see evidence of restraint, simplicity, and powerful yet subtle use of empty space.
Bill Gates, one of the most powerful and philanthropic businessmen of our time, provides a lesson in contrast. In a typical presentation with slides, Gates and his staff do what millions of other PowerPoint users do daily—they use PowerPoint in a way that does not help their cause. The problems with Gates’s slides are all too common: too many elements on one slide, over use of bullet points (including long lines of text), cheesy-looking images, too many colors, overused gradation (even the text has gradation), weak visual communication priority, and an overall impression of clutter on-screen.
Both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates use slides to complement their talks. The biggest difference, however, is that Jobs’s visuals are a big part of his talk. The visuals do not overpower him but they are a necessary component of the talk, not just ornamentation or notes to remind him what to say. Jobs uses the slides to help him tell a story and he interacts with them in a natural way, rarely turning his back on the audience. Jobs uses the huge backlit screen behind him in the same spirit at least that George Lucas uses the screen: to help tell a story. Lucas uses actors, visuals, and effects to convey his message, Jobs uses visuals and his own words and natural presence to tell his story. Jobs’s slides flow smoothly with his talk.
In Bill Gates’s case the slides are often not only of low aesthetic quality, they simply do not really help the Chairman’s narrative very much. Bill’s slides are often not really necessary; they are more of an ornament or a decoration off to the side. In many instances Bill Gates would be better off just pulling up a stool and sharing his ideas and then answering questions that audience members could have submitted before the talk so that he could select which he would answer. You don’t have to use slideware for every presentation, but if you do, the visuals should seem a part of the show, not something “over there” off to the side.
I like Bill Gates a lot and from what people at Microsoft tell me, he’s also a nice guy and a pleasure to speak with. One on one he’s engaging. But when it comes to his public keynote presentations—and the visuals that accompany those talks—there is much he could learn about “presenting differently” from Steve Jobs. Bill Gates’s keynotes are not terrible, they are just very average and unremarkable. His PowerPoint-driven style is “normal” and “typical” and his presentations are largely unmemorable as a result. Bill Gates is a remarkable man, his presentations should be remarkable too.