It’s no secret that most slide presentations are boring, ineffective wastes of time. PowerPoint isn’t the problem - it’s how people (mis)use it.
In fact most business meetings would do well to avoid slides - and presentations - altogether. Meetings should be for discussion, connection, decisions… not for information-sharing. Using a wonderfully-crafted PowerPoint deck to share information is like using an iPad Pro as a frisbee: sure, it’s well-designed and better than most other tablets, but it’s still the wrong tool for the job.
As many of us are learning, it’s easy to arrange a virtual meeting, but not so easy to run one successfully. There is quite a steep learning curve.
One vital area to work on is speaking in virtual meetings. People often complain of video issues, microphone issues, poor vocal expression, monotonous speakers, and poor interactivity. Step 5 of our Virtual Meeting Revolution process is called Connection for a good reason: when speaking in an online meeting, you need to connect with the other participants, and you can’t connect if they are so bored they are not paying attention, or if they gave up trying to understand what you are saying.
What are you going to do today? For many typical office workers, the answer is: too many meetings, and not enough time to work. It’s rare that meetings and productivity coincide.
At the time of writing, many of us are required to work from home, so physical meetings have become virtual meetings, and they’re not always an improvement. Online meetings present their own set of challenges, principally because unless everyone has their camera switched on, one participant won’t know whether another is paying attention, or is checking Instagram, or has gone to walk his dog, aiming to return at the end of the meeting in time to say goodbye and pick up as few actions as possible.
We worked with a lot of TEDx events over the years, and some of the talks have accumulated hundreds of thousands views, some even getting above the 1 million mark. Here are the top 5 talks of events we participated to, in number of views.
In fifth place we have Jean-Gabriel Causse, speaking at TEDx Dunkerque, with nearly 600,000 views. Color me shocked, but his is talk about the power of colors is full of interesting details.
With the current health crisis looming, remote work may no longer be a choice, but a precautionary measure. How do we do it at Ideas on Stage?
From day one, Ideas on Stage was created as a digital company. In fact, for many years, we didn’t have a physical office. Even today, we strongly encourage our employees to work remotely and limit their travel to what’s necessary. We can deliver 90% of our services at distance to our clients, whether it’s the creation of a presentation, coaching or training.
A lot of people think that organizing an event is within everyone’s reach. But is it really true? If you want to organize one for your company, a lot is at stake, including brand reputation as well as the satisfaction of your customers or guests. If you don’t want to take any chances and make a positive impression, it’s important to set up a team dedicated to your project.
If you are the organizer in the hot seat, you are likely asking yourself many questions.
A few months ago I recorded an episode for our video channel “The Business Presentation Revolution.” Initially, my content was too long to fit in the 3 to 4 minutes running time that we had planned. Looking at my script, I realized that many sentences could be simplified, some details omitted, and the structure streamlined.
After several dry runs and rewrites, we finally managed to get the video down to 3 minutes.
Is there a perfect recipe for a successful presentation? No. Partly it depends on the audience and the context: a boardroom presentation shouldn’t look like a TED talk, even if the subject is the same. And different presentations at the same event – a conference, a demo day, an Executive Committee meeting – should also look different from each other, because otherwise none of them will stand out.
So if there is no magic formula, are there at least some key ingredients we should always include?
