1. No boring slides. Not “no slides.” No boring slides. Presentation Zen should be mandatory for all trainers who use slides. As John Medina points out, people don’t pay attention to boring things.
2. Free will. Employees should be there because they want to be. Forced training means disengaged participants, right from the start.
3. Story. Your presentation should have a story. What’s the moral? What’s the plot? Don’t just present a random cluster of information – build a story. You should also integrate actual stories into the presentation. You know, things that have happened to you (or others) that reinforce your points.

If you visit a lot of blogs, you’ll notice that many of them have what’s called a blog-roll in their sidebar. This is basically a list of other blogs that the writer of another blog finds interesting.

Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen has turned me into a bit of a simplicity nut, so I don’t have a blog-roll on my site. I hate having too much crap cluttering up my sidebar.

That said, I thought you still might be interested in what’s in my RSS reader, so today, I wanted to share with you the list of blogs that make my short list.

Many of them are less about technical HR skills, and more about how to market and spread ideas. Since Renegade HR is about transforming our profession into something way awesomer, I think those are pretty important skills to have.

Keep reading…

Many trainers use PowerPoint (or whatever their presentation software is) as a crutch. They load it up with bullets, filling every conceivable bit of white-space with content.

Often, they read off the screen, but not always. Most of the time, they use the bullets as a guide and “fill in the blanks” between the bullets as they speak. But rarely do trainers and presenters use their presentation as a tool to engage the audience – more often than not, it comes between the trainer and his or her audience.

Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen ran a post called 10 rules for making good design that highlights some great ways you can start increasing the visual impact of your presentations.

Want to draw the audience in rather than putting up a wall between you and them? Check out Garr’s article. Here are a few teasers to lure you over there:

1. Communicate – don’t decorate.
4. Pick colors on purpose.
5. If you can do it with less, then do it.
6. Negative space is magical – create it, don’t just fill it up!

To read all ten, head over to Presentation Zen.

The other day, I wrote an article about how to have better meetings. One thing I didn’t mention in the article, and should have, was my love/hate relationship with MS PowerPoint.

PowerPoint is an incredibly powerful slideshow tool. The problem isn’t the software – it’s that people don’t know how to use it effectively. The typical slideshow is 57 slides of minuscule text with the occasional overly complicated graph or chart thrown in for good measure. Is this really your idea of a good presentation?

Today, I’m going to teach you what I’ve learned about how to give better presentations (and yes, I will explain the title of this article).

Keep reading…