Powerpoint H*E*Double Hockey Sticks

We have all been through it. We join a meeting in a darkened room..the projector is humming…the presenter is standing anxiously by the screen…slide 1 of 200 looms before us. Something stirs inside of us and we drop into an available seat giving in to fate.

Whether you are the perpetrator or the victim of this crime, now is the time to stop the madness!

The brothers who authored the book Made to Stick write monthly for Fast Company magazine. In a recent article titled “Presentation Pep Talk” they provide some tips for preventing bad Powerpoint that I’d like to share with y’all (and try to start doing more myself):

• “Show, don’t tell” doesn’t mean to seek out the best clip art to help make your point. Adding pictures to a slide is decoration, not communication. Bring reality into the room. Use physical props and stories to emphasize your point.
• If your slide has more text than a King James Bible then you need to focus more on your main points. The authors advise, “Think about yourself as the Director of a play, and you’re allocating speaking parts among your main points. You can create a great dialogue, but if you’ve got 22 characters speaking, you haven’t developed any of them properly.” Don’t sweat cutting out all the supporting content. Give more lines to your main characters.
• Before your audience will value the information you’re giving, they’ve got to want it. You need to create curiosity and pull from the audience. If you put 8 points up on a slide your audience will have read through all 8 prior to you have completed explaining the first one – then they’re bored. What if you put up 8 questions instead?

Interested in seeing some really talented presenters and interesting presentations? Visit Ted Talks at www.ted.com.

The Future of Work

How do you work? What tools do you use to collaborate with your global team members to effectively work together? Are they the best tools for the way you and your team works?

I recently read a field study article in Fortune magazine (would provide a link to the online article but it is not available.) It asks the following questions:

In the future, what will work look like? Will employees continue to convene daily in office buildings, or will we evolve into species of laptop-toting nomads, roaming desolate corporate campuses in search of the next big project – scrounging for an electric outlet to recharge our batteries?

The article discussed how a team of ethnographers (social scientists who study people in their natural habitats) from Xerox was studying workers as they go about their business in a virtual work environment. The goal was to understand how workers collaborate and communicate across virtual teams.

One thing I’ve noticed about my current employer is the hesitancy to take advantage of the wealth of collaboration tools available in the public domain. For example, it would be invaluable to me to have an externally accessible instant messaging tool or web-based email or document management. Please note I said “to me.” I have certain tool and collaboration preferences for my ways of working that might not match yours. I ask myself how has my company changed in the last 10 years in terms of global collaboration? What will will our ways of working look like in 2018?

I’d be interested to know about how you prefer to collaborate today?

Peace, Love and Obama-tunity

I hesitate to attribute my success in middle-class America strictly to my character or intellect. I have to attribute a significant portion of it to my being a white man in a white man’s society enjoying white privilege.

I grew up in a diverse, middle class neighborhood. Both my parents worked hard, have college educations and raised my brothers and me with strong values and emphasized the importance of our own education. Growing up I didn’t face any particular societal challenges and moved through primary and secondary school with average success. My parents were able to send my brothers and me to college and now we each enjoy a comfortable living in professional careers. The opportunities afforded to me from the beginning came not only from the hard work of my parents (although it was substantial.) It also came from being male and being white.

Being a white man in our society afforded me with a set of unspoken privileges that I only recently came to consciously acknowledge. Until recently they were taken for granted. Not anymore.

The election of Barack Obama is significant. I understand this is an understandment. President Obama represents a different kind of hope and future to me than it does to a black man. The pride I feel for America in electing a black president is still coursing through me. I literally still get chills when I see his beaming smile and intelligent eyes glossing the cover of a magazine.

For me, the hope for a better future was grounded in the belief that this man shares my values and will represent to the world my generation and the future generations of my children better than any other person.

What I can’t imagine is what this moment must feel like for a black man. A man for whom the road might not have been so smooth. A man who had to work harder and prove himself more just because of the color of his skin. My hope is that for this man’s children the road ahead is paved a bit smoother by the bravery of past generations and the symbol of hope and opportunity for which President Obama stands.