Communication is the transfer of emotion
Avoid at all costs
The other day I turned up at a local Chamber of Commerce event only to be met by an anxious organiser. One of their speakers had cancelled because of problems with an excessively runny nose or some other man-flu excuse. Would I mind stepping in and talking for ten minutes about New Media to an audience of about eighty local businesses in an hour? Well, I prefer some time to prepare entertaining and thought-provoking fare and this wasn’t going to be the evening for that.
I was sitting next to my friend Simon, who is one of the those people who can just casually stand and talk compellingly without notes, PowerPoint, flip charts, laptops, notebooks, projectors, televisions, blackboards or pointy sticks. Go on he said smiling, Just do it. I raced home, grabbed my laptop and crashed two old presentations together (It’s called a ‘cut and shut’ in the motor trade). The floor was littered with bits of old Arial and Helvetica. I dropped the presentation onto a USB and ran back into a full seminar room waiting for the next speaker (me). This was one of those times when you just want everything to work. And it did - thank God. I smiled, took a deep breath and and dived into a world involving a slowly rotting Cheddar Cheese, Morecambe and Wise, San Deigo Zoo and the Evolution of Dance. The more I use applications like PowerPoint or Keynote, the more abstract they become. The great Seth Godin may have written this excellent piece four years ago, but it is bang on the money. Forward it to anyone who still uses PowerPoint as a Teleprompter.
Tags: MACOC, Man-flu, PowerPoint, Seth Godin, Simon Gough