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.

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If you give trainings or presentations, one of the things you need to worry about is what to do if the computer you’re using bugs out.

Some presenters bring an extra laptop with them. Others bring a flash drive and hope there’s a spare laptop available.

Today, I want to show you how you can actually present directly from your iPod.

(Hat tip to Garr Reynolds over at Presentation Zen for showing this trick.)

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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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I just moved into a new role at EMC. I’m now the Community Manager for our internal Career Community for our services group.

In plain English, that means that I’m responsible for creating a community kind of like this one, but with a focus on career development for our service folks. It’s a place to find career and development resources, connect with other people, and share ideas.

Kind of cool, right? EMC has a fantastic internal social network, EMC|One, that we can use for everything from collaborative team projects to entire social communities built around work groups, locations or functions.

With this new role, I get to put the skills I’ve developed in creating and growing Renegade HR to use inside my organization. Exciting stuff!

So, how do you train and develop remote employees?

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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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