Real. Smart. Now.

Well, I’m just as shocked as you are.

I’m recommending a book on PowerPoint. Never did I think I’d see the day.

For those of you who haven’t worked with me yet, I have been running an anti-PowerPoint campaign for years. I see how much PowerPoint (and other slideware) robs people of both their power, and often their point. Slides are used either as a way of hiding from the audience or distracting them, as speaker notes, or as handouts. None of these (ab)uses does anything for your credibility.

And so I dedicated my professional career to enabling people to speak to groups without needing slides or scripts, so that any visual aid is chosen because your listeners need it, not from a personal need of the speaker.

Garr Reynolds came at it from the other side. He saw terrible PowerPoint presentations and thought, ‘How can I teach people to use slides so that they help the audience to learn what the speaker is looking to convey?’

The result is his book Presentation Zen, based on his blog of the same name.

I’m only part of the way through it, but I don’t think I’ve disagreed with a single word yet. Things I’ve been saying for years are mirrored in what Garr is writing about, illustrated beautifully, of course.

It’s so great to find someone who is doing the same job as me, but from an entirely unexpected angle. Another person being fully self-expressed in his chosen career…

In fact, it’s so well written, that I got quite dizzy in the bookstore, wondering if I’d been wrong all these years. It took me a while to realise that we were just coming at the same problem from different angles.

Same intention, different solution.

I’ll be posting more about Presentation Zen as I move through it. So far, I couldn’t recommend it highly enough, especially if you’re in an organisation that demands PowerPoint.

If you’d like to explore this one with me, here’s a link to the book on Amazon.com.

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices That Matter)

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