Presentations in Action - Jerry Weissman [14]
Just as I was about to leave for that event, an important business matter arose and I had to spend most of the drive time on my mobile phone dealing with the matter instead of Verbalizing my presentation. Having transgressed, I paid the price. When I got to the hotel and stepped up to the dais to speak, my delivery was choppy. Imagine that: My delivery was choppy with familiar content, and I am an experienced presentations coach who presents almost every business day of his life.
Do as I say, not as I did on the way to Spanish Bay: Verbalize for every one of your presentations.
14. Getting to “Aha!”: The Magic Moment
Dr. John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, defined the “Aha!” Moment in a Wall Street Journal article as “any sudden comprehension that allows you to see something in a different light .... It could be the solution to a problem; it could be getting a joke; or suddenly recognizing a face.”F14.1
The “Aha!” Moment
According to William Safire, the master etymologist of the New York Times, the first person to express the moment was Chaucer in a fox hunt in his Canterbury Tales.F14.2 Archimedes undoubtedly experienced it when he noticed the displacement of water in his bath, as did Sir Isaac Newton when he saw an apple fall from a tree, and Alexander Graham Bell when he called to his assistant, “Watson, come here; I want you.”
The “Aha!” Moment
Oprah Winfrey and Mutual of Omaha engaged in a protracted legal battle over the advertising use of the phrase until they finally settled out of court.
The “Aha!” Moment
History is filled with quests for the defining moment—that magic instant of Eureka or epiphany, that sudden turning or tipping point.
You can achieve the presentation equivalent of the “Aha!” Moment with your audiences if you learn one very simple technique—but be forewarned that the technique breaks rank with common practice in business today. Standard Operating Procedure is to load up the PowerPoint deck with all the information that the presenter thinks an audience needs to evaluate a proposal and make a decision. In other words, the slide show is meant to stand alone. You will read about the folly of this approach in the next section on graphics, but it will be from the design point of view.
For now, let’s look at the presenter’s point of view. If the slide show is correctly viewed solely as support for the presenter—as it should—then the presenter’s narrative can go beyond the information on the slides to provide substance and even add value. The presenter can go even further to lead the audience to a conclusion about the slide with information that does not appear on the slide.
For example: The CEO of a start-up company seeking financing makes a pitch to a venture capital company. During the presentation, the CEO puts up the simple slide in Figure 14.1:
Figure 14.1. Presentation slide
The CEO discusses each of the benefits briefly and then summarizes, “So you can see that our product provides a rich set of benefits to our customers.”
All very well and good, but imagine if the presenter were to add the following statement in the narrative only: “These benefits bring our company repeat business, repeat business brings us recurring revenues, and recurring revenues grow shareholder value.”
The “Aha!” Moment.
15. This Is Your Pilot Speaking: A Lesson in Flow from the Airlines
Picture this: You’ve settled into your airline seat, buckled your seat belt, and turned off your laptop computer, your mobile device, and your iPod. With nothing else to do, you start to read today’s newspaper. The airliner pulls away from the gate, taxis onto the runway, and rolls into a long line behind other jets waiting to take off. And it waits. And it inches forward. And waits ....
As it waits, the jet’s giant motors keep running at idle, their vibrations gently rocking the cabin with a constant low hum. And you continue reading. And the motors continue to idle in their repetitious drone. And you drift