Business Presentation Guide

The Ultimate Business Presentation Guide Alan Radding

The Ultimate Business Presentation Guide

—Deliver Your Message With Real Impact —

Alan Radding PO Box 590340 Newton, MA 02459 617-332-4369 alan@radding.net www.technologywriter.com copyright 2002 Alan Radding

Business Presentations: Corporate Haiku for the 21st Century

Business presentations aren't just for big, formal business meetings anymore. Today business presentations—a series of screens (or printouts of screens) containing headings, subheads, bullets, and graphics—are used for a wide range of corporate communications. They appear at the most mundane staff meetings, in lieu of reports, as part of business plans, as marketing collateral materials, sales props, and more. In short, business presentations have become the business communications medium of the 21st century— corporate haiku to express ideas, simple or complex, quickly and (we hope) effectively. The emergence of software like Microsoft's PowerPoint has made pretty painless the process of producing a business presentation with a slick, polished look. With myriad backgrounds and foregrounds, fonts and typefaces, bullet styles, graphics, clipart libraries, charts, screen effects, and more, it is easy to take to produce an attractive presentation. But just as easy-to-use word processing programs don't turn every user into an effective writer, so too presentation tools like PowerPoint don't automatically enable you to turn out effective, compelling presentations. To the contrary, often the capabilities of the presentation tools mask weak ideas and poorly conceived and delivered messages. The attractiveness of the resulting presentation actually is superficial and any impact is decidedly short-lived; as soon as anyone looks beyond the production and examines the content of the presentation, the weaknesses become apparent. The presentation may be banal or utterly predictable or downright confusing. Often it undercuts the very messages the...