More Book Reviews and Commentary

The two books I mentioned earlier have now been read: Presentation Zen and slide:ology.

Presentation Zen
A nice book that any and every person that has to do any kind of presentation or speech (be it a status report, or a full-fledged Jobs-can-kiss-my-ass-two-hour-keynote). This really teaches you how not to suck at giving an oral presentation. I can not emphasize this enough. This book doesn't mention much concrete stuff about doing public speaking, but rather talks about, as the author calls it, the zen of presentations (hence the name); the dos and don'ts of PowerPoint presentations. Hell, let me reveal the biggest and most important thing the book tries to get across: Avoid bullet points at all costs. If you absolutely-positively-my-life-depends-on-it must use bullet points, keep them at a minimum. Even then, use huge font sizes.

This book belongs almost to the practical psychology category of books, and actually makes you a more likable person around the workplace, or wherever you are going to do presentations. Can't argue with that, now can you?

slide:ology
You want to read this only after Presentation Zen. You do not want to read them the other way around, or you'll ruin Presentation Zen. These two books are tightly coupled. I'm not sure who copied which, but they share content. Let me rephrase that: A few chapters are more or less copy-pasted from one into the other. Both books quote each others' authors. Presentation Zen first, slide:ology second. Trust me.

While the first three chapters in this book made me want my money back, I was perhaps a bit hasty in that judgement. Slide:ology is more of a hands-on kind-of-book. While Presentation Zen was more about the philosophy and psychology of doing presentations, slide:ology tries to give you concrete examples for your slides. The first three chapters was Presentation Zen in a tight nutshell. Once you skip them, you start to get to the original material, which is pretty interesting, case studies and all. There is the occasional shared content scattered also later on in the book, but since you already have read Presentation Zen, you are safe to skip (i did say skip, not skim) those parts.

Slide:ology works best as a reference book. There's not much you need to ingest and understand, unlike with the other book. Read it through once, put it in the bookshelf and take it out again once you have PowerPoint (or, as in my case, Keynote) running in front of you. Slide:ology tells you how an ad agency does its slides, what elements they to convey which pieces of information, etc.

So, that's that. Mini reviews: Ingest and embrace Presentation Zen first, then use slide:ology as a reference to how to build your slides (if you use slides, that is).

Commentary

As with How to Win Friends..., the story doesn't quite end here. Once I had read these two books in three days, I was psyched. I was pumped. I was ready to Deliver A Presentation. I had the know-how, I understood the philosophy.

So, I first sat down in front of my computer, opened FreeMind and started plotting stuff about LightFrame. Three hours of in-the-zone mindmapping later, I had all features pinned down – in a nice hierarchical manner, no less. Time for slide-making, I thought and launched Keynote. I subsequently hit a brick wall.

I realized that all this knowledge of how to deliver nice speeches and design un-sucky slides was worthless, without interesting content. What I had written down were only features and facts, not content. I could of course talk endlessly about how LightFrame works, what technical decisions I've made with each part of the design, the history of it and such. But who's interested in that. The most common theme of all practical psychology books I've read thus far have touted one thing, over and over again, with little variation in wording: People are only interested in what they can benefit from you.

People aren't there because they want to listen to me (actually, half of my audience will show up only for the company's breakfast, and will be oblivious of my presentation intents) – people are there to listen to what I have to offer them. That's a tough question to answer. I probably will be unsuccessful in giving a good answer to that. So, I'll aim at getting a few laughs out of them. Wait, make that a few approving nods...

As some wise and famous guy once said (paraphrased): I can deliver a five hour speech with only five minutes' preparation, but for a five minutes' speech, I need at least five hours of preparation. I could almost swear it was Churchill, but I can't find anything to back it up. Anyhow; I know now what this guy's talking about.