Presentation

How to Give a Killer Presentation

24/08/16, 16:48

How to Give a Killer Presentation

A little more than a year ago, on a trip to Nairobi, Kenya, some colleagues and I met a

12-year-old Masai boy named Richard Turere, who told us a fascinating story. His

family raises livestock on the edge of a vast national park, and one of the biggest

challenges is protecting the animals from lions—especially at night. Richard had

noticed that placing lamps in a field didn’t deter lion attacks, but when he walked the

field with a torch, the lions stayed away. From a young age, he’d been interested in

electronics, teaching himself by, for example, taking apart his parents’ radio. He used

that experience to devise a system of lights that would turn on and off in sequence—

using solar panels, a car battery, and a motorcycle indicator box—and thereby create a

sense of movement that he hoped would scare off the lions. He installed the lights, and

the lions stopped attacking. Soon villages elsewhere in Kenya began installing

Richard’s “lion lights.”

The story was inspiring and worthy of the broader audience that our TED conference

could offer, but on the surface, Richard seemed an unlikely candidate to give a TED

Talk. He was painfully shy. His English was halting. When he tried to describe his

invention, the sentences tumbled out incoherently. And frankly, it was hard to imagine

a preteenager standing on a stage in front of 1,400 people accustomed to hearing from

polished speakers such as Bill Gates, Sir Ken Robinson, and Jill Bolte Taylor.

But Richard’s story was so compelling that we invited him to speak. In the months

before the 2013 conference, we worked with him to frame his story—to find the right

place to begin, and to develop a succinct and logical arc of events. On the back of his

https://hbr.org/2013/06/how-to-give-a-killer-presentation

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How to Give a Killer Presentation

24/08/16, 16:48

invention Richard had won a...