Franklin D. Roosevelt: Public Speaking and Presentations

'You've got to have appeal as well as power in your voice. You must convince your audience that you have something to offer them'

This was the adage that Franklin D. Roosvelt lived by when presenting in public, on the radio and latterly on TV. Very few people realise that he gained this incredible insight from the Winner of the Hog-Calling Contest, held in his hometown in Texas.

Errant Children misbehave
I always tell my students that when presenting, they must consider there audience as a group of errant children who will run around and misbehave as soon as your back is turned. Therefore, they must face their audience at all times and not turn away, for any reason. Certainly not to read their own presentation, because as soon as they do they will direct the audiences attention away from you, the presenter and onto the screen. You want to hold them enthralled by your presence, your sincerity, your enthusiasm and your gaze, like a professional actor.

Make eye contact
Another important thing to remember, is to make eye contact with each and every one of them. Direct your presentation to all areas of the room and include all your audience. Believe that, as soon as you miss someone's eye contact, they will fall fast asleep, check their emails or just run off.

Use an even hypnotic pace when making eye contact. Move or flow gently around the audience. Do not attempt to flash a quick glance at everyone, like a startled animal, this will simply confuse your audience or worst, trigger a chase or flee response from the crowd.

Orchestrate your public performances and presentations, as if you were conducting a concert.

The structure of your presentation and the concert, depends very much on what the subject matter is and your audience. Once you have decided what you want to achieve then you can select the style. Here are a few I made earlier;

The Wave: Have an introduction, build up to a climax, plateau and then subside. It ends with the wave crashing spectacularly onto the shore, in a cascade of sound and images.

The Surfboard: Sometimes you will want to end the presentation on a high level of energy so that the audience will run out the door ready for action, riding the wave of energy you have developed. Very popular with charismatic figure-heads, dictators and revolutionaries.

The Mole: This is appropriate for mid-Project Rescue & Recovery, Trouble-shooting and Brain-storming sessions. In this situation you begin at ground level and start to dig your way through the problems and issues, listing and defining them as you go.

Once you have collected and considered these, you should be at the lowest point for the audience. Keep the doors locked and don't allow anyone to leave at this point, for their own good.

Now start to look at options and examine potential solutions, matching them to the issues. In this way you start to dig your way back to the surface and your audience will, hopefully, see some light at the end of the tunnel. Try and gather pace as you near the 'surface'.

Creativity and Innovation

The the creative art of any deal can be enhanced by the art of creativity and innovation.

In truth, "art" is overstating it. "Visualization" is more accurate: if you can draw basic geometric shapes, lines, arrows, and stick figures, you have all the creativity skills you need to put your ideas into practice and produce a vast array of concepts and network models, diagrams, schematics, flow charts, tables, and other visual representations. Welcome to the world of Pictorial analysis.

In 1969, Rudolf Arnheim's Visual Thinking made a compelling case that while perception and reasoning may seem like two distinct mental activities, neither one can occur without the other. More recently, in the business world, the concept of "strategy maps" has been advanced by Robert Kaplan and David Norton (creators of the balanced scorecard) as providing a "visual epiphany" that helps business leaders connect processes to desired outcomes.

Executives should reach for the pencil not only when addressing a discrete task such as drawing a strategy map, but in myriad situations in which "the problem [or the solution] is hard to see." That may be a challenge for finance people, who are accustomed to believing that, 'all answers can be found in the numbers if one simply drills down far enough'.

Those in finance are often "red-pen" people, who question the entire idea of visualization, right up to the point where they grab a red pen and redraw everything. You will need to work harder to convince finance executives, than any other group but, once won over, they will become the most ardent backers of the concept.

The other two classes of people are "black-pen" people, those who are instantly drawn to visualization and "yellow-pen" people, who are happy to build upon someone else's initial stab at visualization.

It may help to know that the finance department at Microsoft, where, not surprisingly, employees can "make spreadsheets do pirouettes in ways mere mortals can't," nonetheless, they "understand that insights often depend on looking at the data from different angles and in a more visual form."

Drawing Conclusions
Most business problems can be framed as a variant of the five W's, or, more accurately, four W's and an H: who, what, when, where, and how.

Use your given creativity to show innovation in your ideas and concepts and engage your audience by involving them in, what should be an organic process.

So for your next meeting, leave the laptop behind and instead bring a few whiteboard markers. You may find that even a lousy picture is worth a thousand rows and columns.

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

For the benefit of all of us, I am writing here to propose the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple:

• a PowerPoint presentation should have 10 (ten) slides,
  
• last no more than 20 (twenty) minutes, and
  
• contain no font smaller than 30 (thirty) points.

This rule is applicable for any presentation, in any business and can be used to reach amicable agreement: raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.

10 (ten) - This is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting. If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business. The ten topics that should be considered are as follows; (because these are the ones that most people care)

1. Define the Problem
2. Outline Your solution
3. Establish the Business model
4. Disclose Underlying magic/technology
5. Remember the Marketing and sales
6. There is always Competition
7. You need a good Team
8. Forecast Projections and milestones
9. Reporting Status and following a timeline
10. Finish on a Summary and call to action

20 (twenty) - You should present your ten slides in twenty minutes. Given you have an hour time slot, but if you’re using a Windows laptop, it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector. Once you are setup, people will arrive late and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes and you have forty minutes left for Q&A, discussion and networking.

30 (thirty) - The majority of the presentations that I see have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter stands and reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, they read ahead of you because they can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch with you and you lose the impact of your message delivery.

The reason people use a small font is twofold:

1) they don’t know their material well enough

2) they think that more text is more convincing.

This is the totally wrong approach. Be disciplined, force yourself to use a large font, no smaller than thirty points. It will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the real essence of your presentation. Use the most salient points and know how to explain and expand upon them.

Another possible algorithm; find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. Make that your optimal font size.