I have not read Timothy Koegel’s The Exceptional Presenter yet, but Tom Peters posted about it on his weblog (He Has a Point: A Damn Good One). Tom extracts one simple, very obvious, but—often—very forgettable piece of advice from this book:

Those who practice improve. Those who don’t, don’t

What people often complain, however, is the lack of time to practice, and maybe this should be linked to the fact that the pay-off from practicing is not immediate—it is somewhat distant in most cases. What Tom points out about this book in his post, is that one should simply seize more opportunities to practice, such as in everyday tasks:

One of Koegel’s greatest contributions is suggesting-revealing the fact, the great news, that we have many, many mundane opportunities to practice! He offers numerous ideas. Using people’s names in conversations is very powerful. So practice it at a party this weekend. Smiling is a matchless “weapon” for winning over audiences … so be aware, in family communications, the degree to which you smile, or don’t. In my case, and my wife laughs at me over this one, I spend as much time spell-checking and working on grammar-word choice on emails to old friends as I do when writing something formal to a prospective Client: Every time I communicate with anybody is an opportunity to improve my communications effectiveness.

What a wonderful point. Every time we communicate, we have the chance to improve our communication and presentation skills. Seize the opportunity and Go Own the Room.

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.

You are following the China Exposé.

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)