Presentations in Action - Jerry Weissman [54]
Jon Stewart seized on this strategy in his coverage of the hearings on The Daily Show, first by setting it up:
Perhaps this year will be Elena Kagan’s chance to demonstrate the proper manner in which to answer committee questions in a forthright, nonevasive, honest, judicially transparent way, so that we may, as a nation, finally have the Supreme Court confirmation conversation that we deserve.
Mr. Stewart then followed his lead-in with quick cuts of about half a dozen video sound bites from the hearing in which Ms. Kagan refused to comment or said that a comment would not be appropriate. The juxtaposition told the tale.F73.1
Linda Greenhouse also seized on the refusals in the New York Times. Ms. Greenhouse, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for her coverage of the Supreme Court and teaches at Yale Law School, wrote, “A hearing like this represents a lost opportunity for the public to actually learn something about how judges think about what the Constitution means.”F73.2
Because of the highly polarized political aspects of such hearings and the extremely fine points of constitutional law, candidates for the Supreme Court can invoke caution or appropriateness in not answering; because of the public’s low expectations of integrity in the political world, politicians often get away with ducking tough questions.
You do not have that option. In business, you must answer every question asked of you.
No ifs, ands, or buts.
Section V. Integration: Putting It All Together
74. The Elephant: The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts
In 1873, John Godfrey Saxe, an American poet, published a poem based on an ancient Indian fable about six blind men who were asked to describe an elephant by touch. One man said it was a wall, another a spear, another a snake, another a tree, another a fan, and the last man a rope. The final stanza of the poem concludes:
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!F74.1
The point of both the poem and the fable is to demonstrate the importance of seeing objects—as well as objectives—from an overarching view instead of just as component parts; to see the forest, not just the trees.
Contextual perception also applies to presentations. Conventionally, people in business view a presentation as the individual parts of an elephant. One person describes it as the story, another as the slides, another as the delivery, and yet another as the handling of tough questions.
However, a well-told story can be ruined by a slide show that resembles a doctoral dissertation on quantum physics, or by a presenter stricken by the fear of public speaking, or by a zinger question from the audience.
The presenter must manage every one of these elements. More important, the presenter must integrate every one of these elements with each of the other elements, or any one of them can backfire and ruin the entire presentation.
The presentation is the elephant.
75. Presentation Graphics Meet Linguistics: Symmetry in Graphics Design
Matt Vasey, the Director of the American Distribution Channel at Microsoft Corporation, was a participant in a Power Presentations program held at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus. During the session on graphics design, one of his colleagues showed a bullet slide arranged in the format shown in Figure 75.1. Matt gave his commentary about the content and then concluded, “I’m not crazy about that glottal stop.”
Figure 75.1. Unattractive spacing in bulleted lines
His words brought me up short.
A glottal stop is an esoteric phonetics term that refers to an action of the vocal cords snapping shut over the glottis, the space between the cords, during speech. The action produces a sharp, unattractive sound, and Matt was clearly referring to the unattractive spacing