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The Presentations Japan Series

By: Dr. Greg Story
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  • Summary

  • Persuasion power is one of the kingpins of business success. We recognise immediately those who have the facility and those who don't. We certainly trust, gravitate toward and follow those with persuasion power. Those who don't have it lack presence and fundamentally disappear from view and become invisible. We have to face the reality, persuasion power is critical for building our careers and businesses. The good thing is we can all master this ability. We can learn how to become persuasive and all we need is the right information, insight and access to the rich experiences of others. If you want to lead or sell then you must have this capability. This is a fact from which there is no escape and there are no excuses.
    Copyright 2022
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Episodes
  • 388 Pacing Your Presentation In Japan

    388 Pacing Your Presentation In Japan
    Jun 3 2024
    We are usually asked to speak at events by some hosting organisation and these can be breakfast, lunches or evening occasions. Each has its challenges. Not that many people seem to be great in the early mornings and the energy level of the audience can be very low, as they are still sleepy. This sleepiness is definitely a problem for after lunch presentations too. Many are ready for a nap after hoeing down a big meal in the middle of the day. In the evenings, people can be tired after a hard day’s work and their concentration spans can be limited. As the speaker, we may suffer the same issues, but the adrenalin kicks in and we become sufficiently energised to complete the presentation. There are issues around how much information an audience can absorb when attending our talk. We, of course, are sold on the topic or subject because we have prepared a presentation on it. We have gone to a lot of trouble and have been highly motivated to give the talk. We may let that enthusiasm blind us to the reality of what it is like on the receiving end. This is where presentation technique become very important. I see so many speakers who ignore half their audience when they present, by simply not getting the feet placed at the correct angle – ninety degrees to the audience. These speakers get their feet angle at forty-five degrees and without releasing it, they are now only talking to one side of the room and are deleting the remainder from their view and attention. Don’t do that. Another issue is they lose sight of their audience. They are looking over the heads of everyone or looking at the screen or looking down and not making any eye contact with the attendees. This is a massive mistake. We have to make sure we are watching our people like a hawk. If we see they are losing interest or their energy is flagging, we can take remedial actions to fix the problem. By looking at members of our audience for six seconds each, we can make sure we not only engage the listeners, but we can always gauge their interest levels in what we are saying. If the energy goes down, we may need to get them physically involved by raising their hand to a question. This question should be designed so that basically everyone has to raise their hand. This way we get the maximum involvement and this helps to wake up those who are drifting off into slumber, with their eyes open. As we say “the lights are on, but nobody is home”. Another method is to pause and stop speaking for about ten seconds. Actually, ten seconds can feel quite long, as we are used to continuous palaver from speakers. This is called a “pattern interrupt” because we provide a consistent audio rhythm when we are speaking. When we turn it off, the sleepy attendees wake up because something has changed. They become alert again, springing from a deeply rooted and basic survival tactic. If we have been going hard with our delivery, we can wear some audience members out. We are hitting them with so much energy, it is thrashing them. This is something I have to be careful about, because I am a very high energy presenter. If I see I am wiping people out with my overpowering energy, I need to bring in more lows and reduce the crescendos. This is not that easy, because as the speaker, we get into a rhythm too with our pacing. We are up and away and it is hard to rein yourself in, especially when you are enjoying yourself. One of the unnecessary pressures we place on ourselves can be too much content for the time available and we rush. This gets very ugly, very fast. The audience realise immediately that the speaker has screwed up the time allocation for their delivery and now panic is setting in, as the presenter races through their slides. It looks very unprofessional, and as it comes at the end, it poisons our final key impression with the crowd. We may have been doing very well and everyone is enjoying the talk and getting a lot of value. We suddenly go crazy and start rushing. Effectively, we delete all that good will we have built up during the presentation and we replace it with a negative recollection of ourselves. Rehearsal is the cure for the time control problem. However, if you cannot do a rehearsal and you realise during the delivery that you have to stop, don’t rush through the slides. When you do that, the jig is up and everyone is on to you. Instead, just stop on the slide you are on, wrap it up and call for any questions they may have. Remember, only you know what is in the slide deck. When you race through and show them what they missed out on, the unhappiness is increased. It is better to not reveal the gap. When doing the Q&A, don’t forget to repeat the question, so that everyone can hear it, as long as it isn’t a hostile question. Never repeat or amplify an incoming unfriendly missile. With that situation, we always paraphrase to take the heat out of the question. Don...
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    11 mins
  • 387 Prepping For Your Presentation

    387 Prepping For Your Presentation
    May 27 2024
    I am terrible. I procrastinate about starting the assembly of my presentation. Invariably, by holding off starting, I create time tension, which forces me to elevate the priority of the presentation and lift its urgency above all the other competing demands on my time. I should start earlier and take some of that tension out of my life. So, everyone do what I say, don’t do what I do! Start early. The first point of departure must be working on the clarity needed around the key message. What is the point we want to get across? There are always a multitude of these and it is quite challenging sometimes to pick out the one we want to work on. Part of my problem is perfectionism immobilising me. So let’s all suspend perfectionism and just be happy to get started, knowing we can finesse what we are doing later. Once we have settled on the key message, we need to make sure that anyone would care about that message. It might be intoxicating for us, but it may not motivate anyone else to get excited. A reality check is in order before we move forward. Will there be enough traction with the audience we are going to be presenting to? We should have a fairly clear idea about who will be interested in our topic and what some of their expectations will be. After the reality check, we start to construct the talk. Counterintuitively, we start with the end. We settle on the actual words we need for our conclusion, because this is a succinct summary of what we will talk about. Getting that down to a few sentences is no easy feat. It is simple to waffle on, but it requires skill to be brief and totally on point. Next, we plan out the chapters of the talk to deliver the goods to prove what we are saying in our conclusion is true. In a forty-minute speech, we can usually get through five or six chapters. Here is a critical piece of the puzzle. We need to rehearse the talk and carefully watch the time. It is very difficult to predict accurately the required time until you run through the talk. We may find we are short on the content or too long and we need to make adjustments. We certainly don’t want to discover that on stage in front of an audience. We all feel cheated when the presenter start rushing at the end and the slides go up and come down in seconds. You simply can’t follow what they are showing to the audience and that leaves a very negative impression at the end of the talk. Now we plan our start. This is the first impression of our talk. Well, that is not quite true. The audience will be making critical judgements as to how we command the stage and how we get underway. Juggling slides on the deck is a bad look at the start. That should definitely be left to someone else, so we can get straight into our opening. Don’t thank the organisers at this point, we can do that in a moment. We don’t want to waste the opening with a bunch of generic bumf. We need to grab hold of our audience at this point and then never let go of them. The audience may be seated in front of us, but they are a thousand miles away with their collective consciousness floating above the clouds. They are focused on everything else but us and we have to induct them into our orbit and command their complete attention. So, we need to plan this first sentence extremely well, because it will set the tone for the rest of the event. Remember that fear of loss is greater than greed for gain, so we hit them with how they can avoid losses. We might say something along these lines, “it is shocking how much the change in the market is going to cost us all and we are talking about serious money here”. That start fits just about any talk subject and is a bit of a Swiss Army Knife of starters. The market is always changing and invariably some will gain and others will lose. Our job is to point the audience in the direction of how to avoid losing money. The cadence of the talk is we need to tell a story every five minutes to keep our audience with us. Storytelling is like superglue and will bind the listeners to us until the end of our presentation. That means we need at least five or six good stories which make the point we are selling. Including people they know or know of, is always good because that technique is a great equaliser and connector with the audience. We need to prepare two closes – one for our formal end to the talk and another for the final close after the Q&A has ended. We need to brief the organisers that after the Q&A we will wrap it up and then they can bring the proceedings to a formal end. If we don’t do that, they will just end the talk before we have a chance to drive in our key message for the last time. We will know if the talk has succeeded by the faces we see in the audience. If they are paying attention right through, that is a good sign. If they are nodding in agreement, that is an even better sign and if they are engaged through...
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    11 mins
  • 386 Thrashing AI When Presenting In Japan

    386 Thrashing AI When Presenting In Japan
    May 20 2024
    I was in a recent debate with the Dale Carnegie organisation about approving the publication of my new book “Japan Leadership Mastery”. There were concerns about copyright, because I was drawing on the Dale Carnegie curriculum for the book. A book is a powerful content marketing tool, so excluding the Dale Carnegie oeuvre defeats the purpose. One argument I made to them was I could rewrite the book and strip their content out and replace it with generic stuff summoned up from AI. This is the problem we all face. AI makes originality very difficult to sustain when it is so easy to coagulate all that is currently out there. I create these podcast episodes every Saturday morning and when you have composed over three hundred articles on presentations, it gets harder and harder to come up with something original. I try to find angles I haven’t explored before and to write them in a way which an AI prompt could not replicate. When we are creating our public presentations, we face the same problem. Any fool armed with AI can come up with a presentation which will assemble the best of what has been published already or at least what the machine could find from public sources. How do we make sure that what we are presenting is not getting pushed down into the sludge to battle with what AI can churn out in under a minute? How can we thrash our AI powered competitors within an inch of their lives? At this point in time, we are lucky that most of the AI production for presentations is generic and sounds generic. Originality for me means the choices of words like “thrash”, “oeuvre”, “coagulate”, “sludge”, and “churn”. These are unlikely candidates to emerge from an AI prompt to create a presentation on any subject. I have always tried to write like this anyway, to make myself stand out from the crowd. Today that AI assisted crowd is surging. In fact, it is accessing the entire global production of text on every topic. Don’t panic yet. Our experiences are sacrosanct turf, which protects us from AI mindlessness. No AI prompt can capture what has happened to us and our recollection of it. In our storytelling, we access those incidents and we use them in concert with our take on the lessons from what happened. This is a guaranteed way to remain one step ahead of AI generated content. Of course, AI can magically bring forth a slew of stories of other people’s experiences, but as a presenter relating to an audience what happened to us is unbeatable for making that human connection. I resisted sharing a lot of personal insights and experiences for a long time. I am a very private person, an introvert in fact, who has to operate as an extrovert. It is always tough. People who know me would never know that because I push myself in public to be outgoing. When I finally got over myself and started including more things about me and my family in my talks, I noticed that I connected more powerfully with the audience. AI won’t know that level of detail and so can never match us in a live situation. The other arena in which to slay the AI dragon is when we are on stage, standing there in front of a live audience. Our rival presenter may have been fed a steady diet of homogenised content from AI in prepping their talk, but can they rock the audience like we can? This is where knowledge and execution diverge. It is the same with technical presenters. They have all the data, statistics, details, etc., but they speak in a monotone and murder their listeners. They are dull dogs, with way too much micro data plastered all over their one slide, which in fact should have been spread over six slides. They are unable to create some buzz with the crowd. They have no clue how to penetrate that invisible barrier between speaker and those being spoken to. They don’t know how to bring gesture, voice tone, body language and eye contact together in an unstoppable vortex to completely capture the room and drive in their message. No amount of AI prep will help them. This is where the AI powered speaker runs out of gas. They can put up the bare bones of the AI generated presentation, but they don’t have the ability to flesh it out and make it a triumph. When you know what you are doing, you can dip into elements of AI for help, but for presentations, you have to be able to stand up and cut it. This is the Age of Distraction and Era of Fake News and we only have one shot. These days, with the micro patience of audiences we face, you don’t get any margin. If you sound boring, they will immediately lunge for their mobile and depart from you and your message. They will escape straight to the internet, to much more intriguing worlds like their email, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. AI is only a problem if you are a crap presenter. For the rest of us, let’s give AI powered presenters a sound public thrashing and blow them out of the ...
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    11 mins
Management Economics
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