Structure Your Presentation Like a Story

by Nancy Duarte | 8:00 AM October 31, 2012 After studying hundreds of speeches, I've found that the most effective presenters use the same techniques as great storytellers: By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved. That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently to move from what is to what could be. And by following Aristotle's three-part story structure (beginning, middle, end), they create a message that's easy to digest, remember, and retell. Here's how it looks when you chart it out:

And here's how to do it in your own presentations. Craft the Beginning Start by describing life as the audience knows it. People should be nodding their heads in recognition because you're articulating what they already understand. This creates a bond between you and them, and opens them up to hear your ideas for change. After you set that baseline of what is, introduce your vision of what could be. The gap between the two will throw the audience a bit off balance, and that's a good thing it jars them out of complacency. For instance: What is: We fell short of our Q3 financial goals partly because we're understaffed and everyone's spread too thin.

What could be: But what if we could solve the worst of our problems by bringing in a couple of powerhouse clients? Well, we can. Once you establish that gap, use the rest of the presentation to bridge it Develop the Middle Now that people in your audience realize their world is off-kilter, keep playing up the contrast between what is and what could be. Let's go back to that Q3 update. Revenues are down, but you want to motivate employees to make up for it. Here's one way you could structure the middle of your presentation: What is: We missed our Q3 forecast by 15%. What could be: Q4 numbers must be strong for us to pay out bonuses. What is: We have six new clients on our roster. What could be: Two of them have the potential to bring in more revenue than our best clients do now. What is: The new clients will require extensive retooling in manufacturing. What could be: We'll be bringing in experts from Germany to help. As you move back and forth between what is and what could be, the audience will find the latter more and more alluring. Make the Ending Powerful You don't want to end with a burdensome list of to-dos. Definitely include a call to action but make it inspiring so people will want to act. Describe what I call the new bliss: how much better their world will be when they adopt your ideas. So if you're wrapping up that Q3 update from above, you might approach it this way: Call to action: It will take extra work from all departments to make Q4 numbers, but we can deliver products to our important new clients on time and with no errors. New bliss: I know everyone's running on fumes but hang in there. This is our chance to pull together like a championship team, and things will get easier if we make this work. The reward if we meet our Q4 targets? Bonuses, plus days off at the end of the year. By defining future rewards, you show people that getting on board will be worth their effort. It'll meet their needs, not just yours.

How to Present to Senior Executives

by Nancy Duarte | 11:00 AM October 4, 2012

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Senior executives are one of the toughest crowds you'll face as a presenter. They're incredibly impatient because their schedules are jam-packed and they have to make lots of high-stakes decisions, often with little time to weigh options. So they won't sit still for a long presentation with a big reveal at the end. They'll just interrupt you before you finish your shtick. It can be frustrating. You probably have a lot to say to them, and this might be your only shot to say it. But if you want them to hear you at all, get to what they care about right away so they can make their decisions more efficiently. Having presented to top executives in many fields from jet engines to search engines I've learned the hard way that if you ramble in front of them, you'll get a look that says, "Are you kidding me? You really think I have the time to care about that?" So quickly and clearly present information that's important to them, ask for questions, and then be done. If your spiel is short and insightful, you'll get their ear again. Here's how you can earn their attention and support: Summarize up front: Say you're given 30 minutes to present. When creating your intro, pretend your whole slot got cut to 5 minutes. This will force you to lead with all the information your audience really cares about high-level findings, conclusions, recommendations, a call to action. State those points clearly and succinctly right at the start, and then move on to supporting data, subtleties, and material that's peripherally relevant. Set expectations: Let the audience know you'll spend the first few minutes presenting your summary and the rest of the time on discussion. Even the most impatient executives will be more likely to let you get through your main points uninterrupted if they know they'll soon get to ask questions. Create summary slides: When making your slide deck, place a short overview of key points at the front; the rest of your slides should serve as an appendix. Follow the 10% rule: If your appendix is 50 slides, create 5 summary slides, and so on. After you present the summary, let the group drive the conversation, and refer to appendix slides as relevant questions and comments come up. Often, executives will want to go deeper into certain points that will aid in their decision making. If they do, quickly pull up the slides that speak to those points.

Give them what they asked for: If you were invited to give an update about the flooding of your company's manufacturing plant in Indonesia, do so before covering anything else. This time-pressed group of senior managers invited you to speak because they felt you could supply a missing piece of information. So answer that specific request directly and quickly. Rehearse: Before presenting, run your talk and your slides by a colleague who will serve as an honest coach. Try to find someone who's had success getting ideas adopted at the executive level. Ask for pointed feedback: Is your message coming through clearly and quickly? Do your summary slides boil everything down into skimmable key insights? Are you missing anything your audience is likely to expect? Sounds like a lot of work? It is, but presenting to an executive team is a great honor and can open tremendous doors. If you nail this, people with a lot of influence will become strong advocates for your ideas.

Create a Presentation Your Audience Will Care About

by Nancy Duarte | 9:00 AM October 10, 2012

Generating ideas is the easiest part of creating a presentation. The hard part is deciding what to keep. Many of your ideas may be fascinating or clever, but you can't squeeze them all in and no one wants to hear them all, anyway. The people in the audience are the stars of your show. If they don't buy what you're saying, it won't go anywhere. To keep them engaged and make your case, you'll need to focus on what matters to them. If you don't, they'll have to work hard to figure out why they should care about your presentation and what it'll help them accomplish, and they'll resent you for the extra effort they've had to put in. Spell out the big idea: Your primary filter should be what I call your big idea: the one key message you must communicate. Everything in your presentation should support that message. The big idea is what compels the people in the room to change their thinking or behavior and that's the whole reason you're presenting to them in the first place. It's shaped by your point of view and what's at stake (that is, why the audience should embrace your perspective). A generalization like "Q4 financials" doesn't cut it. If you don't have anything of substance to say about the financials, why present? Better to send around a spreadsheet and be done with it. Try expressing your big idea in a complete sentence to make sure it's fully baked. The subject will often be some version of "you," to highlight the audience's role, and the verb will convey action. Be specific. When asked, "What's your presentation about?" you wouldn't say, "Software updates." That's a topic, not a big idea. But you might say, "It's about why production will keep missing key deadlines unless we upgrade our workflow management software." Once you've spelled out your big idea, generate lots of supporting material to give yourself more to choose from when it's time to pick your best stuff. Go for quantity designers call this part of the brainstorming process divergent thinking. But then turn your attention to convergent thinking, the filtering and sorting that helps you find material that will rally your audience behind your big idea.

By the way, you don't have to start from scratch when generating content: Dig up other presentations, industry studies, news articles, reports, surveys anything that's relevant to your big idea. Push on the concepts. Challenge them, or consider them from a new angle, or draw new connections. Then brainstorm new content using stickies (they're easy to move and arrange), whiteboards, mind maps, and other tools. At this stage, more is more, because you may work your way through five, ten, or even twenty ideas until you find ones that are distinctive and memorable. Wield a sharp hatchet: Once you've gathered lots of material, start cutting mercilessly on your audience's behalf. Say you're presenting a business case for developing a new product, and you've created a mind map in the brainstorming phase to explore issues that could affect the product's success:

Since your priority is to persuade decision makers at your organization to invest in your idea, you'll want to talk about what they'll be interested in: its profit and revenue potential, for example, and how you envision managing market and technological risks. But you probably don't need to get into trends such as agility and serendipity. Though they're important principles in the world of product development, they'd be a distraction in this particular talk. Save them for another presentation.

Do Your Slides Pass the Glance Test?

by Nancy Duarte | 11:00 AM October 22, 2012

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An audience can't listen to your presentation and read detailed, text-heavy slides at the same time (not without missing key parts of your message, anyway). So make sure your slides pass what I call the glance test: People should be able to comprehend each one in about three seconds. Think of your slides as billboards. When people drive, they only briefly take their eyes off their main focus the road to process billboard information. Similarly, your audience should focus intently on what you're saying, looking only briefly at your slides when you display them. Keep It Simple Research shows that people learn more effectively from multimedia messages when they're stripped of extraneous words, graphics, animation, and sounds. Lots of extras actually take away meaning because they become a distraction. They overtax the audience's cognitive resources. So when adding elements to your slides, have a good reason: Does the audience need to see your logo on each slide to remember who you work for? Does that blue swoosh add meaning? If not, leave it off. The same goes for text. Keep it short and easy to skim. Scale the type as large as possible so the people in the back of the room can see it. It's also important to stick to a consistent visual style in your slide deck. Select one typeface two at most. Use the same color palette throughout (limit yourself to three complementary colors, plus a couple of neutral shades, like gray and pale blue). Photos should be taken by the same photographer or look as if they are. Illustrations should be done in the same style. Consider the "before" slide below. It fails the glance test because it's packed with text. It's functioning like a teleprompter which may help you remember what to cover but won't make it easier for the audience to digest it.

Instead, streamline the text and incorporate simple visual elements (and save teleprompter text for the "notes" field, which the audience can't see). You'll reinforce your message and make it easier for people to get what you're saying. Here's an "after" slide to illustrate:

Arrange Slide Elements with Care Another way to help people process your visuals more quickly: Think like a designer when you arrange slide elements. These five design principles will help you simplify your slides so they'll pass the glance test: Flow. You can direct people's eyes to certain areas of a slide to emphasize important points. Here, for example, your eye takes in the cluster of grapes, then moves to the message about quality, and then focuses on one beautiful grape from the "yield":

Contrast. Our eyes are drawn to things that stand out, so designers use contrast to focus attention. Create contrast through your elements' size, shape, color, and proximity. In this example, a presenter compared cross-sections of skin and soil to show that tending to both requires an understanding of the microbiological activity beneath the surface. The blurred backgrounds set off the stark white illustrations for quick visual processing:

White space. White space is the open space surrounding items of interest. Presenters are often tempted to fill it up with additional content that competes for attention. But including a healthy amount of white space sharpens viewers' focus by isolating elements. In this example, if we'd paired the text with a larger or more detailed image, your eye wouldn't know where to begin, and the quote would have lost its power:

Hierarchy. A clear visual hierarchy allows viewers to quickly ascertain a slide's most important elements:

Unity. Slides with visual unity look as though the same person created them and make your message feel cohesive. You can achieve this through consistent type styles, color, image treatment, and element placement throughout the slide deck. Here's a pair of slides to illustrate:

Presentation software gives us many shiny, seductive elements to work with. But there's beauty and clarity in restraint. Use simple visuals that support your message, and you'll free people up to really hear and adopt your ideas.

Why Trying To Manipulate Employee Motivation Always Backfires

By Ken Blanchard and Scott Blanchard | October 25, 2012 inShare

CEOs have two levers they pull on a regular basis to influence their organizations. The first lever adds to, or takes away from, strategic intentions. The second one controls the hiring of key talent to ensure that the right people are in the right seats. Levers work well for many of the factors that impact business success; but one area--employee engagement--resists leveraging. Even after a decade of trying, organizations as a whole have made little progress on improving employee engagement. Disengagement still stands at about 70 percent, the same as when Gallup first started publishing data on the topic in the late '90s. Why the struggle with improving this particular area? In short, its because you cant control motivation. While traditional carrot-and-stick levers can influence behavior in the short term, they do not create the intentions to apply discretionary effort and work collaboratively that are required in todays more sophisticated work environments. Its time for a change

The research is clear, and has been known in social science circles for decades: Carrot-and-stick thinking is, at its core, a control method--and people always resist being controlled. Even if they don't openly resist, people resent being coerced into certain behaviors. People have their own beliefs and attitudes about their work environment. They make decisions about what is in their best interests based on individual perceptions of what is adding to--or taking away from--their sense of well-being. Building on the pioneering work of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester, our recent research into motivation and employee work passion is finding that perceptions of autonomy, relatedness, and competence are the factors that lead to positive employee intentions to stay with organizations, apply discretionary effort, and be good corporate citizens. We are finding that giving people a chance to succeed in their job and setting them free to a certain degree is the key to motivation, as opposed to trying to direct and control people's energy. It's really about letting go and connecting people to their work--and each other--rather than channeling, organizing, orchestrating, and focusing behavior. The role of senior leaders Senior leaders have an important role to play in creating this type of environment. Top leadership sets the tone for this attitude in a company. But many organizations are still set up--explicitly or implicitly--in ways that work against these three motivators. For example, a woman recently told us her CEO believed that a little bit of fear was good and that moderate to high levels of competition between people and business units were beneficial and kept the company sharp. This attitude of friendly competition inside the company permeated the culture, flowing out from the boardroom and cascading throughout the organization. This approach had worked for this technology company in the past, but began to become a liability as customers asked for more cross-platform compatibility. Because customers were asking for everything to work well together, these internal divisions needed to cooperate more effectively. This required the different business units to think beyond self-interest to the whole customer experience. It proved difficult to change the mindset of this historically competitive culture. Without a shift in thinking at the top of an organization, it is almost impossible to change an organizations culture. A study conducted years ago shed some light on the role of senior leaders in changing organizational culture and behavior. The study concluded that the CEOs disposition and personality had everything to do with the company's service orientation and collaborative mindset. CEOs whose personalities and dispositions were more competitive had a direct influence on the degree of competitiveness and fear experienced by members of their senior leadership teams. This resulted in a greater degree of siloed behavior within the organization and less cooperation among sub-units. The net results were less integration across the business, less efficiency, poorer

service, and ultimately lower economic performance. On the other hand, CEOs who were more cooperative generated less competitivenessand less fear-based anxiety generated better results. Leaders as environmentalists It's important for today's leaders to be environmentalists. Whatever level of leadership you have, challenge yourself and others to use less directing and controlling behaviors and instead look to create a focused and inspired workplace. Customers are requiring that organizations move toward an environment of internal cooperation to create truly innovative new products and services. Today we realize that control doesn't work. Find a way to connect your people with the big picture. Create an environment free of fear and anxiety. Leaders dont need a new lever--they need a new approach to bringing out the best in people. Give a little bit. Youll be surprised at what can be accomplished when people are free of fear and find their motivation within, instead of being controlled by external carrots and sticks.

12 Surprising Signs You Could Be an Entrepreneur

BY Grant Cardone|October 29, 2012| 146 inShare2,284

image credit: Shutterstock Almost every article ever written about entrepreneurship suggests that it's not for everyone. And yet the articles go on to list attributes that many successful people possess as the traits commonly associated with great entrepreneurs, such as a strong work ethic, persistence, persuasiveness and discipline. For 25 years, I have studied entrepreneurs and discovered that what contributed to their incredible success was not what society typically considers assets. People like John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Oprah Winfrey didn't achieve greatness by possessing the traits and following the narrow path recommended by management gurus. So, don't believe everything others say about you or how they label you. Maybe your supposed liabilities are really your assets. Here are 12 signs many people might consider a liability, but which can actually be indications that you are meant to be an entrepreneur. 1. Hate the Status Quo It doesn't make sense to you that something has been done the timehonored way with no explanation why. You are not someone who wants to just go through the motions or sit by idly. Nor do you like following the pack.

2. Easily Bored - You find yourself easily bored, and others start viewing you as a problem. But nothing is wrong with you except that you are bored with activities that aren't up to your abilities and aren't challenging. That's why you hated most of the classes you ever attended. Think Bill Gates who dropped out of college to become one of the richest men in the world. Related: 6 Tips for Staying Supercharged 3. Fired from Jobs You're too creative for your own good when it comes to working for others, and you may have some history, as I do, of losing jobs. Being just a cog in wheel is very difficult for you because you want to create something others can be inspired by and contribute to. 4. Labeled a Rebel - You know that greatness resides outside the lines of conformity and don't think that policies, laws and regulations apply to you. You have been described as a rebel and rule breaker and would defy gravity if you could. 5. Resist Authority - You have a lifelong record of resisting authority from your parents, teachers and bosses. You don't go along with the agreed upon norms of the group or community you work and live in. 6. Ready to Improve Everything - You always see how you could do things better. In addition, you are opinionated and freely give your two-cents about your better way of doing things--even when you're not asked. Related: How to Stop Over Thinking and Get Things Done 7. Bad at Making Small Talk - You have difficulty making the kind of small talk that so many people get comfort from. This social pattern of relationship and rapport building seems like a waste of time to you and makes you uncomfortable. 8. Bullied in Your Youth - You may have been heavily criticized, picked on and even bullied as a child or teenager. This has caused you to be driven to excel and to prove to the world that you are indeed a force to be reckoned with. 9. Obsessive - You may have been labeled obsessive/compulsive because when you get started on something you have difficulty letting go. Don't let anyone convince you that this is a disease or deficiency. All of the great entrepreneurs become completely immersed in their vision. Howard Schultz stuck with Starbucks even when his family tried to persuade him not to. Related: How to Harness Your Brain's Secret Efficiency 10. Scared to Go Solo - The entrepreneur in you is scared of going out on your ownand also terrified of not doing so. This fear is so common in our society because we've been conditioned to think that entrepreneurship is much riskier than getting a "good job." The reality is there is instability in both.

11. Unable to Unwind - You can't go to sleep at night because you can't turn your thoughts off. An idea may even manifest itself in your dreams. The next morning you find yourself still consumed with that idea, distracting you from the job you're supposed to be doing. 12. Don't Fit the Norm - You have always been a bit uncomfortable in your own skin. Until you get used to the idea that you are in fact different from most people, it could prove to be a problem--or exactly the motivation you need to acknowledge the entrepreneur screaming to get out.

4 Dysfunctions That Will Eat Away at a Growing Business

Small problems can grow quickly as a company grows. Here a several that are known to plague even the best teams.

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We see four common pitfalls occur as businesses grow from small to medium and into large businesses. Left unchecked, they can do serious damage.
1. Unclear Vision

One of the most problematic dysfunctions is when the company's strategic vision and mission is unclear, or constantly changing. Oftentimes, due to high turnover and/or misaligned incentives at the executive level, organizations can become shortsighted. When executives are operating to meet short-term goals, the organization may suffer. Alternatively, the vision might be clear, but if management's actions do not line up with the stated objectives, employees are highly demotivated due to the mixed signals they are receiving.
2. Poor Leadership

Similar to having an unclear vision, a lack of strategic alignment amongst management can be highly damaging to an organization. If each executive has differing (and possibly conflicting) objectives, investments of time, money, and resources can be counterproductive. Complex strategies are not necessary to running a successful business, but efficient management is essential. Management teams need to organize, plan, align and motivate employees to lead the organization in an effective way.
3. Change-Averse Culture

Employees generally have a desire to feel as though their contributions make a difference and their opinions make a difference; however, many organizations can be viewed as change averse. This can be a result of management teams that view people who disagree with the strategy as a

nuisance or not a team player. To avoid this problem, management needs to put their trust in the people they've hired and empower them through true ownership.
4. Bureaucracy

Many companies are structured with too many organizational layers, which makes it difficult to get things done. Time is wasted navigating the organizational layers rather than creating results. This leads to attrition of highly motivated employees and decreases productivity. While we've seen these dysfunctions in large organizations, it is critical for growing businesses to recognize these operational warning signs as the company grows. Businesses become dysfunctional over time, so management needs to be proactive in resolving problems as they arise. Take some time to assess the health of your company and adjust accordingly. Don't let dysfunction creep into your team.