What’s Hot.
Step-by-step approach makes concepts and explanations easy to understand and implement.
What’s Not.
Focus on business world and pitches might leave educators and others struggling to apply lessons to their specific needs.
The bottom line.
More than a Presentations 101 book, Presenting to Win provides experienced presenters with useful approaches to honing their delivery skills and creating presentations that accomplish their goals.
The back cover of Presenting to Win reads, “30 million presentations will be given today. Millions will fail. Millions more will be received with yawns.” If that doesn’t incite presentation panic in you, then I don’t know what will. No wonder the economy is in the trash. Instead of studying sound business practices, we’ve all been preparing, delivering or attending presentations that, in the end, mean nothing to us. And with a yawn, the human race collapsed under the weight of time-consuming and uninspiring PowerPoint presentations . . . . I can see the sci-fi film credits now.
Enter Jerry Weissman, the #1 public speaking consultant in the world. A graduate of Stanford’s Speech and Drama Department, Weissman now coaches executives from Yahoo!, Microsoft and Cisco Systems on how to present effectively. In his book, Presenting to Win, Weissman defines the reasons why audiences respond poorly to most presentations and explains how to combat these issues in a step-by-step manner that uses practical examples and real case studies.
To begin, Weissman outlines the pit-falls of nearly all presentations. He asserts that most of us are preparing presentations that are too detailed and long and have no clear point, flow or audience benefit. Ouch! After giving us a dose of tough love, Weissman explains that presenters must focus first on uncovering the audience’s incentive. This “WIIFY” (What’s In It For You) theory seems fairly elementary, but I’ve left many a presentation thinking, “And why exactly was I supposed to care about that?”
The rest of the book focuses on how to capture your audience after you have discovered your common ground. It almost allows you to walk into a presentation thinking “You will be mine, audience. (Insert evil scientist laugh here). Oh, yes, you will be mine!” Weissman covers everything from securing your audience’s initial attention to using visuals and web conferencing wisely.
Regarding visual aids, Weissman successfully explains how to create useful slides and why some visuals work and others don’t. He cleverly describes the “Presentation-as-Document Syndrome” as our tendency to design presentations that merely serve the same function as Word documents. Using psychological explanations, Weissman then tells readers how to design PowerPoint slides that enhance presentations and help convey their desired message effectively.
Presenting to Win is fairly business-world focused and assumes that the reader has some significant public speaking experience already. It might cause you to lose some self-confidence as you reflect on your own presentation history, but we all have to go to dark places before we find the light.
