In nine days—on April 6—I’m going to China to study challenges and opportunities for Danish companies that are doing business in, well, China. In total, about 30 students have been selected to go on this trip, where we—in teams—will work on solving a business challenge facing a large Danish company’s Chinese operations. I haven’t met my team yet, but I am sure it will be fun, challenging, and fascinating to work with them.

I have been selected as the official photographer for the trip (our photos will be distributed to media/press)—and given my keen interest in photography, I am, of course, very happy about that.

What I really wanted to post to my blog is the preliminary programme which came out a couple of days ago, so here goes:

• April 6: Copenhagen – Frankfurt – Beijing.
• April 7: Arrival in the morning, introduction to everything in the afternoon.
• April 8: Day-long visit to Novozymes’s headquarters in China.
• April 9: Sightseeing: Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace.
• April 10: Day-long visit to Novozymes’s production facilities.
• April 11: Danfoss’s production facilities in the morning and PricewaterhouseCoopers in the afternoon.
• April 12: The Danish Embassy in the morning and F.L. Smidth in the afternoon.
• April 13: Renmin University of China in the morning and the Beijing Biotechnology and New Medical Developing Center in the afternoon.
• April 14: Bestseller in the morning and IFU (Danish International Investment Funds) in the afternoon.
• April 15-16: Free time—or—time to work on the case.
• April 17: Case discussions and presentations at Novozymes’s headquarters.
• April 18: Sightseeing: The Great Wall.
• April 19: Beijing – Frankfurt – Copenhagen.

I will post in more detail on each event as we move along in the programme, but I am not sure how often I will get internet access and how much time I will get for blog-posting.

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Dr. Jay H. Lehr in his memorandum on presentation technique:

Let there be an end to incredibly boring speakers! They are not sophisticated, erudite scientists, speaking above our intellectual capacity; they are arrogant, thoughtless individuals, who insult our very presence by their lack of concern for our desire to benefit from a meeting which we chose to attend.

To the point. Full paper here.

My friend Stefan has a bunch of good links to video resources, where you can watch great presenters owning the room. You should go check it out.

In addition, one of my favourites is Steve Jobs. He is so good, and he has it all: Enthusiasm, Connection, and Sincerity. And—his visual aids are wonderful. (Slides from a visual display workshop I held can be found here.)  You can find a lot of Steve’s presentations as web casts on Apple’s website.

This is the fourth and final post in a series on presentation technique discussing your mental state while presenting—whether you own the room or not. Prior posts are How to Get a Standing Ovation, Go Own the Room: Enthusiasm, and Go Own the Room: Connection.

Sincerity is where I think most people fall to the ground. It is hard to fake, and it is not easily broken down into components that you can manage and measure (as for instance with Connection). However, it remains important if you want to own the room when you present (it remains important throughout all of life).

What, then, is sincerity all about? How do you come across as a sincere person? The easy answer, albeit not necessarily easy to implement or live by, is to be sincere. Do not underestimate the difficulty in being sincere – day in and day out you are confronted with dilemmas and tough choices that can compromise your sincerity—selling a product you don’t believe in, telling a white lie, doing something you’re not passionate about. It is small things, often, but they are there—day in and day out. And, eventually, larger dilemmas will appear, and it will make it all that more difficult.

My short answer to all of this is: Don’t compromise. Never. All you have is your word, your values, and your will, and the only one who can take these away from you is yourself. Don’t.

While your values and will are more or less tools (to use a very inappropriate word) to keep you on the track you want to be on, your word is something you share with others. Values often change as you grow up, which is natural—and not even close to what I will call compromising. Your will is how passionate you are about these values. Your word is what you tell others. Always keep your word—it is your bond, be true and live by your values with every will possible.

If you do this, which is difficult—please don’t underestimate its difficulty—I promise you that it will shine through when you present, be it in terms of presentation technique or when you present yourself through out life. Go own the room.

This Sunday, the CBS Case Competition 2006 started. I am in the organising committee and have been writing the case for the past half year, so it was of course a great relief to finally get everything kicked off. This week is tough—as if the weeks up to this one had not been. Sleeping hours is down to 2-3 hours per night, but it is fun, and we’re very happy to host teams from the entire world in our competition. Read more about the competition at our website, where you can also get the latest news all the time.

Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday included a number of social and networking activities for the participants in the competition. We invited them to Kronborg, salsa dancing, welcome dinner at the Carlsberg museum—and much more. Wednesday morning, my co-writer Thor and I revealed the case and the case company—Danfoss, who we’ve been working together with in order to create a real life, real time case for the participants. You can watch a short video interview with us here.

Right now it is 2am Thursday, and I am standing by in case any questions arise, when the participants are solving the case. They have to hand in their final presentation Thursday evening. Friday, the participants will present their recommendations to a jury, including, among others, three members from the case company, the CEO of the Copenhagen Stock Exchange, and the Chairman of LEGO. The finals will be streamed live over webcast at live.casecompetition.com.

Friday evening, we host an award banquet at the National Museum in Copenhagen.

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.

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…)

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.

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.

Visual Display Workshop (February 2006)

Today, the theme for the CBS Case Competition 2006 was officially revealed. The programme was quite impressive with three guest speakers on hot topics in business.

As the case writer, I presented and revealed the theme (photo on the left). I uploaded some of the slides I used (Slides: FUHU Presentation), if you want to have a look at them. Unfortunately, they are not self-containing, and you really need me present to get most out of them–and I haven’t produced hand-outs, so I can’t upload them. The slides are in Danish, but you should be able to gather some of it, and–in any case–you will be able to look at how I design slides.

Photographs from the FUHU/CBS Case Competition Rethinking Business Seminar (by Morten Maegaard).

I have been elected to participate on a team representing Copenhagen Business School at the inaugural Helsinki School of Economics Corporate Credit International Case Competition. The theme is extremely interesting and is a very hot one in risk management, so I am very happy to have been elected to the team.

It takes place on April 27 and 28, which will be my first visit to Helsinki. The team is Thomas Joachim Hansen, Christoffer Husted Rasmussen, and Stefan Jung, a strong combo in my eyes, and I am happy to be on a team with such outstanding professionals and fine personalities. It is going to be great.

Photo: The Helsinki Cathedral, built 1830-1852. Often used as a symbol for the city.

I previously commented on Google’s China launch. Since then, Google has put a post up (Google in China) on their web site in response to all the negative press and blogging they have been subject to since the China launch:

Google users in China today struggle with a service that, to be blunt, isn’t very good. Google.com appears to be down around 10% of the time. Even when users can reach it, the website is slow, and sometimes produces results that when clicked on, stall out the user’s browser. Our Google News service is never available; Google Images is accessible only half the time. At Google we work hard to create a great experience for our users, and the level of service we’ve been able to provide in China is not something we’re proud of.

This problem could only be resolved by creating a local presence, and this week we did so, by launching Google.cn, our website for the People’s Republic of China. In order to do so, we have agreed to remove certain sensitive information from our search results. We know that many people are upset about this decision, and frankly, we understand their point of view. This wasn’t an easy choice, but in the end, we believe the course of action we’ve chosen will prove to be the right one.

Launching a Google domain that restricts information in any way isn’t a step we took lightly. For several years, we’ve debated whether entering the Chinese market at this point in history could be consistent with our mission and values. Our executives have spent a lot of time in recent months talking with many people, ranging from those who applaud the Chinese government for its embrace of a market economy and its lifting of 400 million people out of poverty to those who disagree with many of the Chinese government’s policies, but who wish the best for China and its people. We ultimately reached our decision by asking ourselves which course would most effectively further Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally useful and accessible. Or, put simply: how can we provide the greatest access to information to the greatest number of people?

Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world’s population, however, does so far more severely. Whether our critics agree with our decision or not, due to the severe quality problems faced by users trying to access Google.com from within China, this is precisely the choice we believe we faced. By launching Google.cn and making a major ongoing investment in people and infrastructure within China, we intend to change that.

I thought the decision made sense before I read this (read my post: Google Launches in China), and I still do.
Prominent Google observers still don’t see the positive in the decision. (John Battelle: The Real Irony Here).

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From the book Karaoke Capitalism (by the authors of Funky Business:

- In 1998, CBS, Fox and ABC paid $12.8 billion to broadcast National Football League (NFL) games until 2005. The very same year the Minnesota Vikings franchise was sold for $250 million. In fact, the three networks could have bought all 30 NFL teams and had free broadcast rights forever. They didn’t.

Unless there is more to this story than this, it a big Oops. Read more fun quotes at Stefan’s Karaoke Capitalism post.

Google has launched the localised Chinese version of their web site, Google China, albeit not fully equipped with all features found at Google.com. Google has for a long time postponed going into China, because of the censorship restrictions imposed by the Chinese government, which Google has found incompatible with their values. Although Google.com is also censored when accessed from China, this censorship is exercised by the government and not Google themselves. Now, however, Google has followed in the footsteps of competitors Yahoo! and MSN, and launched a localised Chinese version with voluntary censorship.

Critics believe this decision conflicts with Google’s Do No Evil mantra. From a business perspective, however, the decision makes perfect sense: (1) Competitors are already in the Chinese market and more importantly (2) via the Chinese version Google now gets an inside, controlled approach to the censorship as opposed to the external censorship applied to Google.com. The latter will enable a better understanding for search and internet patterns of Chinese web users, but, in the long term, also offers the possibility of increasing bargaining power towards the Chinese government with regard to censorship.

Examples of censored searches include queries for the Tiananmen Square massacre and the—in China forbidden—Falun Gong movement.

Read more: Here Comes Google China, Google Joins Chinese Censor, and Google Makes Right China Decision.

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I told you about Guy Kawasaki’s new blog before—and it keeps getting better. One of his latest posts is about how you get a standing ovation, i.e. how to present well. He has eleven good points (go to his post for full details):

1. Have something interesting to say
2. Cut the sales pitch
3. Focus on entertaining
4. Understand the audience
5. Overdress
6. Don’t denigrate the competition
7. Tell stories
8. Pre-circulate with the audience
9. Speak at the start of an event
10. Practice and speak all the time

I think they are all good points, however, I disagree with point 5. It can be as disastrous to overdress the audience as it can be to underdress it. Preferably you should match-dress it, which goes well in line with Guy’s point 4: Understand the audience.

Although I do not have all of Guy’s experience, I also have a couple of tips, which I go by. They all point to the fact that the good presenter should own the room—be omnipresent. How to get there is very difficult, but one step of the way is to realise that you have to speak to everyone (or as many as possible) in the audience—they have to feel you are speaking to them (and—almost—them only).

I try to achieve this by being enthusiastic about what I talk about. When people feel you are enthusiastic, it is much easier for them to be so as well. It is much nicer to hear from someone who loves what he does or speaks about, than a boring nuthead.

I try to connect to the audience, so they feel I am in the room. It is as simple as establishing eye contact while making key points, but also utilising other body language—smiling (!), using my arms, using the depth of the room (walking to and from the audience) (not just the width—walking from left to right on the stage).

Finally, I try to be sincere. If you’re faking it, there is a good chance the audience will spot you, so you might as well just lay it off to start out with.

In summary, my three points, for now, is:

1. Enthusiasm
2. Connection
3. Sincerity

Go own the room.

From Autoblog:

With more than 5.9M vehicles sold in China last year, the country has become the second-largest automobile market in the world, moving ahead of Japan (which saw 5.8M new vehicles sold in 2005). China’s sales represented 8.7% of the world market, or about double its share back in 2001.

Not surprisingly, 5.76M of those vehicles were domestically produced, as China’s market remains very difficult to crack for importers.

The market in China remains highly fragmented, with the largest producer - First Auto Works - grabbing less than 17% of the market.

One of my friends told me: “I don’t know much about China, but if you multiply anything by one billion, it’s fine with me.” This is true, but you cannot always multiply things by one billion in the case of China, whose domestic market remains very difficult to get into. Lack of regulation in some cases, over-regulation in others, and lack of a developed domestic demand (China’s growth is mainly export-driven, not driven by consumption) are real challenges, which need to be faced if one wants to even get a chance of getting close to the one billion multiplication. Given the export-driven growth, it is nice to see that consumption grows, in this case with cars. Still, domestic cars take the majority of car sales in 2005. Let’s see what 2006 brings.

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