The other day my buddy Ben Eubanks from Upstart HR asked me if I had any tips for giving great presentations. Here’s what I told him.

1. You are the presentation, not the slides.

Your slides should compliment your presentation, not be your presentation. If people can understand the presentation without you there, why give a presentation at all?

2. Practice, practice, practice.

You want to be at a place where you know what the next slide is going to be before you click to it.

That doesn’t mean memorizing your presentation verbatim. It means know the core message and being able to speak to it clearly.

I never give the same presentation twice, but my core message is always the same.

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This is part of a multi-article series on the book Made to Stick.

Photo by Paul L. Nettles

Last week, we talked about how you can use surprise to get people’s attention. But how do you keep their attention once you get it?

Today, we’re going to talk about another emotion: curiosity.

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This is part of a multi-article series on the book Made to Stick.

Photo by caribb

If you’ve ever been on a plane, you’re familiar with the safety announcement that flight attendants are required to make before the plane takes off. And if you’re like most people, you probably tune the flight attendant out. The information is pretty important, but no one cares.

What if you were asked to make the safety announcement? And what if you actually needed people to listen to you? What would you do?

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This is part of a multi-article series on the book Made to Stick.

Herb Kelleher, the longest-serving CEO of Southwest, once told someone, “I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds. This is it: We are THE low-fare airline. Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can.”¹

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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.

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Yesterday I came across this brilliant presentation on Slideshare about the power of social media (many thanks to Michael Black for the hat tip).

The presentation is awesome. Watch the whole thing. Then ask yourself, “Is my company really engaged in social media?” If the answer is no, make sure you follow it up with, “Why the hell not?!?” and “How do we start?”

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.