Finally, the illustration for the CBS Case Competition 2006 theme has been unveiled (the theme itself was unveiled at another event). I been waiting anxiously to share it with you–I think it is a genius visualisation of rethinking business. A big applause for our marketing group.
I’m running WordPress for my blog, and I’ve been pretty happy with the category system embedded (I used to run Blogger). However, I felt the need to tag my posts with Technorati, so I installed Jerome’s keyword plug-in. It works perfectly. Thanks Jerome.
Making a stellar presentation requires you to connect with the audience—this post is about connection and is the third in a series on presentation technique (prior posts: How to Get a Standing Ovation and Go Own the Room: Enthusiasm).
We know this all too familiar feeling that the speaker, presenter, or lecturer does not connect with his audience. He is distant, he does not seem to communicate with you, and his content is out of place. The sad effect is that his message comes across less powerful, which is not desirable for neither the presenter nor the audience.
What this presenter needs is a connection with the audience. To establish such—and to do it well requires great ability. It also requires that nervousness does not get on top of the situation and take control; however, in this post we will disregard nervousness and focus on ability. (I will treat nervousness in a later post.)
“Connection” can be broken down into three basic parts—Conduit, Content, and Context. All three have a positive, causal impact on connection, and—to some extent—they also correlate with each other. Let me take them one by one. (more…)
In January of this year, Copenhagen Business School (CBS) opened its new building Kilen (which is Danish for The Wedge). It is located very close (2 minutes of walking) to the main building, Solbjerg Plads, which was opened in 1998. Now, almost all of CBS’s activities are located in the Dalgas Have (late 1980s), Solbjerg Plads, Kilen and Porcelain Garden (2006) facilities and has replaced older buildings, which means that we have very nice and new facilities here at school.
It also meant that we (by we, I mean the CBS Case Competition) moved our offices to the new Kilen facility. We now have two very nice offices and a handful of extra meeting rooms at our disposal. The competition is only two weeks away, which means that the offices are in use almost around the clock (the first people pop in at 6-7am, the last leave at 5-6am). I love it.
Photos by Tao Lytzen: Kilen from the outside and the inside.
Interesting article in the Guardian (China’s powerhouse vision for 2050):
By 2050 China will have eradicated poverty, established itself as a world power in science and lifted the average lifespan of its billion-plus citizens to 80 years, according to two blueprints for the future published yesterday.
Even by the standards of a country that has a passion for long-term economic plans, the targets - which foresee the relocation of 500 million peasants to cities, huge investment in biotechnology and the addition of hundreds of millions more cars to the streets - are ambitious, but give an indication of how the nation would like to see itself in the middle of the century.
You are following the China Exposé.
Good presentation technique (and good conversation and good karma) requires enthusiasm—read my post on Enthusiasm, Connection, and Sincerity to get a heads up on what I’m talking about. This post will elaborate on enthusiasm.
It’s Not What You Say
It’s how you say it (communication break-down chart)—there is no doubt that enthusiasm about your topic enhances your message, and it increases the effect of the conveying of information. The tricky part, then, is how you get enthusiastic. Even if you are enthusiastic about a topic, you may be nervous (or have tonnes of other things to think of) when you present, thus not being able to convey your enthusiasm. This is clearly an obstacle to effective communication.
Let me break down enthusiasm into two basic components, namely (1) teaching and (2) learning.
Teaching
Truly enthusiastic individuals know peculiar things about their topic, and they have an innate desire to share knowledge about their passion. Conveying enthusiasm is about showing a willingness to teach others (or at least convey, communicate or talk about) the topic at hand, and especially anecdotes and other peculiarities. This willingness should be burden-free. The virtue of wanting to share, underlines your enthusiasm of the subject matter. If you were not enthusiastic, why would you know this stuff, let alone teach/talk about it?
Learning
Enthusiasm never ends. Enthusiastic people spare no opportunity to learn something new, and they do so with a wonderfully childish and unbiased approach. Their enthusiasm is not about confirming what they know (nor the opposite) but about learning. Enthusiastic presenters treat their audiences as equal peers, because they know that presenting is in fact communication and conversation, and that they can extract as much from the presentation as can their audiences.
Be Enthusiastic
Conveying your enthusiasm, then, can be achieved by expressing interest in and fascination of teaching and learning your subject matter, using some of the characteristics I described above.
All this, of course, assumes that you are, in fact, enthusiastic about your subject matter. If not, conveying enthusiasm can give you a hard time.
In addition to my feed (the red radar on the left), which you can use to syndicate my blog and stay updated on whatever happens here, I have introduced a mail subscription service (powered by the wonderful Feedblitz web service). If you’d rather get posts by mail, plug in your e-mail in the field in my sidebar, and you’re rolling.
Today, I held a workshop on how to create great visuals, i.e. slides to accompany/aid your presentation. Although they do not make much sense by themselves, check them out for key points. I will also, occasionally comment on the points made in my presentation–right here on my blog. For now, suffice it to say: Don’t follow the examples given carelessly–it was a workshop, so I used a lot of slides to tease the audience and show examples of poor visual display. But, of course, there are also points to follow.
Super Bowl XL–XL has to stand for extra large: What a blast and what a game! Congratulations to the Steelers. We could’ve had a better half-time show, though.
One of the very exciting things about the Super Bowl is also the commercials. However, in Denmark it is illegal to interrupt programmes with commercials (you can only send commercials in between the programmes). So when all the cool commercials take the screen in the US, we have to listen to our Danish commentators. Hoorah (or not).
In contrast to last year, Google Video is here this time around. And of course the Super Bowl XL Commercials are on Google Video.
