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December 03, 2009
50 in 50. #18: Real Leaders Don’t Do PowerPoint
A colleague of mine just suffered for two solid weeks (including weekends) developing a PowerPoint presentation for a senior leader. The process was painful and slow: Members of the team working on the presentation kept going around and around, adding slides, taking them out, revising them, and then doing it all over again. I didn’t see the end product, but I can imagine what it was like: too many slides, too much information, a muddled message.
Christopher Witt describes the problem in his book, Real Leaders Don’t Do PowerPoint. People “often assemble as much information as possible and import it willy-nilly into PowerPoint. They don’t organize it into a cohesive, meaningful whole. Why bother? . . . You can create any number of slides—hundreds, if you like—without ever tying anything together into a coherent or compelling idea.”
Mr. Witt’s advice is to approach a presentation completely differently: He counsels “sifting through the pertinent information, picking out what’s valuable, and discarding the rest. Then tie it all together in a way that makes sense of it. Write out your one organizing principle or thought—your Big Idea. Then structure the information you’ve assemble to support your idea. Use only as much information as you need to prove or illustrate your main idea.”
This is just one of the great pieces of speaking advice in Real Leaders Don’t Do PowerPoint. Here are others:
- “As a leader, it’s up to you to communicate a vision, a direction, a purpose, and the impetus for acting. The more you focus on imparting facts and figures, the less you’ll be perceived as a leader.”
- “The easiest way to appeal to what your listeners want—in other words, to answer their WIIFM question—is to show how they can use your idea or proposal to: solve a problem of theirs . . .achieve a goal of theirs . . . (or) satisfy a need of theirs.”
- “A confused mind always says no . . . Being unclear is sure make people resist what you want. Confusing people shuts them down. It makes them, at least figuratively, cross their arms in front of their chests, lean away from you, and say no way. So one of the first rules of speaking is: Be clear.”
In short, Real Leaders Don’t Do PowerPoint is a valuable book. My only criticism is that Mr. Witt doesn’t deliver on the great title. He doesn’t provide a comprehensive approach to avoiding PowerPoint and only briefly gives advice on how to use Microsoft’s ubiquitous presentation tool.
However, if you’re a leader who gives speeches and presentations, or a communicator who supports leaders, Real Leaders Don’t Do PowerPoint is a must read.
Posted by Alison Davis at December 3, 2009 12:19 PM
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