If you are the slightest bit interested in presenting, then you’ve probably heard as much about Steve Jobs’ mastery of the craft as you have heard about the new iPad. Jobs’ ubiquity as a demi-god of public speaking makes a book like this indispensable but, at the same time, necessarily redundant and adulatory.
What’s Hot
If you want to engage in a frame-by-frame analysis of Jobs’ on the job, this is your book! Author Carmine Gallo dissects Jobs’ techniques like a football coach watching game film, and this book is a must for readers who are firmly in the grip of Jobs-mania.
What’s Not
The book becomes overly fawning at times and Jobs’ lack of actual input in the content compounds the hero-worship/fanboy feel of some of the text. That said, Gallo’s analysis takes us as far into Jobs’ techniques as we are likely to travel until the man himself takes the time to write a book of his own.
The Bottom Line
In The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs author Carmine Gallo has the unenviable job of trying to make something new and interesting out of something that has been over-exposed and over-analyzed. It is a testament to Steve Jobs’ charisma as a presenter that his on-stage abilities still draw such attention. Every presenter is in awe of the man and has logged in the hours on YouTube, watching his every move to prove it. Gallo is able to make the subject new again by diving deeper, digging further and engaging in a thoroughly in-depth analysis of the man and his techniques.
The book is broken down into 3 familiar categories: 1) Create the story. 2) Deliver an experience. 3) Refine and rehearse. Not exactly a groundbreaking format right? However, it is in coming to understand Jobs’ ideas regarding these presentation fundamentals – and Gallo’s interpretation and analysis of them – that this book really begins to cook with gas.
Admirably, Gallo’s book finds its center in the same points that make Jobs’ presentations so powerful. Over and over again, Jobs finds ways to reach out to his audience: to reconnect, to check in, to reassure. In demonstrating the effectiveness of the various techniques Jobs makes use of to these ends, Gallo finds his book doing the same: connecting and reconnecting with interested readers who thought they knew it all where Jobs and his revolutionary presentations are concerned.
If you are just becoming initiated into the cult of Jobs, this book is required reading. If you think you’ve got the man’s techniques down to a science I’ll bet you’ll find more than a few surprises in this ambitious book.
