Presentation skills

With my new job, I have had many opportunities to learn useful and simple presentation tips.  In the last 3 months, I attended two conferences and three Town Hall presentations led by senior leaders.   Each one was memorable in its own way.   In this article, I summarized four simple presentation tips I learned from watching how these leaders engaged my attention during their presentations. ...  read more

Now that you have a good storyline and invested significant time preparing a great presentation, it’s time where the rubber meets the road.  A lot can still happen during a presentation that can distract the audience.  Here are 4 tips to use during your presentation to make sure all your hard work pays off and you deliver a great presentation. ...  read more

You do NOT need to know Powerpoint well to give great presentations.   Many people spend too much time making good looking slides and miss out on the larger picture.  There are three things that would make a presentation great.

1. Your audience is listening intently to what you have to say
2. Your audience understands what you are communicating and are following your reasoning
3. Your audience plans to take action based on what you presented

Notice, I never mentioned that your audience is impressed by your slides.  The whole point of a great presentation is for the audience to listen and then take actions that you hope they would take.  I learned how to give great presentations at McKinsey.  When I first joined McKinsey out of college, I would see my manager spend a day or two writing a draft storyline for a client presentation.  The storyline is written in Microsoft Word and would only be 1 -2 pages long.  I thought how strange – how can something so short take so long.  The team would be working on individual slides for weeks, but the manager focuses mainly on this storyline.  I used to think my manager was just slacking off until I tried to write one myself on my 4th project.  I couldn’t do it well even after 3 days. ...  read more

The following is a step by step instruction on how to develop an effective, practical presentation.  This process keeps in mind your audience and builds informal buy-in prior to the presentation.

Effective presentations are the bread and butter of consultants as we are paid handsomely by major corporations sometimes just for recommendations delivered in a presentation format.  I wrote these step by step instructions for my own use while working in consulting and wanted to share them with you.  They are based on my experiences at McKinsey and Deloitte and were used by myself and other managers/senior managers at Deloitte to build effective presentations. ...  read more