Learning from ancient folk stories

I was just reading some stories from Nelson Mandela's Favorite African Folktales(affiliate link) to my kids and realized how much you can learn from them to create short anecdotes that fit inside your bigger presentation:

• Very short
• One to three simple (almost stereotypical) characters
• Something happens at turn 3. "On the 3rd day..."
• An unexpected twist at the end: "and this is why monkeys became so good at climbing trees"

These tales were designed to be remembered and passed on for generations. How long does your slide deck stick?

Where good ideas come from

I am joining in the viral marketing campaign of the new book Where good ideas come from by Steven Johnson (affiliate link)

Video of his TED talk published today:



Shorter video highlighting the idea in his book with a good use of cartoon-style drawing:

Christoph Niemann and LEGO presentations

Christoph Niemann (web site) is a highly talented artist whose illustrations have appeared on magazine covers ranging from the New Yorker to Wired. He posts on a regular basis on his blog in the New York Times, where this set of cartoons based on Google maps caught my attention.

He recently published a new (board) book with snap shots of New York modeled in Lego bricks: I LEGO N.Y. (affiliate link). A sample image below.

Now here is a presentation challenge: construct your entire presentation in tiny Lego scenes, photograph them and paste them into PowerPoint. Not as crazy as it might sound.

UPDATE. One of my readers, Daniel Cabrera, used LEGO images to construct a presentation for a university project. In this case, the images were sourced from the web.

391 city workforce

View more presentations from DACabrera.

Browsing for books about design

The Internet and the place I live (Israel) have cut me off of those great large book stores where you can browse endlessly for books you did not know you missed.

Presentation blogs (this one included) often talk about the same limited set of books about public speaking and presentation design. Here is a list of design books compiled by graphic designer Jason Santa Maria full of titles that look really interesting.

Found via SwissMiss. Image credit Google LIFE, an excellent source of images for non-commercial use.

Seth Godin's Linchpin: "the good guys can win"

This post will be slightly off-topic: Seth Godin published his latest book yesterday: Linchpin (affiliate link) and I think it is important that as many people as possible absorb the ideas that it contains.

Seth's books have evolved over the years. What started with insights about marketing (he is the one who opened up our eyes to the fact that anonymous spam email campaigns are not effective), is now moving into the area of leadership and in Linchpin even broader: what is the purpose of the time you spend day in, day out. 

If there is one unifying theme in all his books it would be: "the good guys can win" (came up with this while listening to Leonard Cohen's song "Everybody knows"). You can be successful by doing remarkable things, without a need to cheat, interrupt, or lie.

The book opens with a grim analysis of history. Over the past 100 years we have built a society (education, advertising) that trains people to be cogs: cheap, willing, replaceable, numb, insecure people that man the production lines and purchase the stuff that the factory churns out.

It is time to escape the trap and change. It's urgent. Not changing will get you fired, and/or bore you to death, and/or rob you of your dignity, and/or paralyze your abilities and talents as you live and work in constant fear. On top of that, all of us own so much stuff that we do not even know what to do with it anymore.

The linchpin is a small but critical part that holds the wheel in place. Seth wants us to become one. "Us", the target audience of the book seems to be today's army of middle managers filling cubicles in office towers around the world.

You can see that Seth is a blog writer, the book contains many smaller ideas that are bundled together in one book cover.

• Emotional labor creates art: work that touches people, changes them.You are not born with a talent for art, you do not have to be able to know how to draw to be an artist. If what you do changes people, it's art.
• Gifts are powerful and will pay back somehow. Be generous without running an ROI calculation in your head. If you want a copper plate with your name in return for your gift, you do not feel emotionally strong enough about it. It is probably better not to give at all in that case.
• The resistance is strong. Our "lizard" brain wants us to be safe, warm, and comfortable and tells us all the time to back away. One defense against the resistance is to "ship" at the time you set yourself, even if your product/idea/post is not 100% perfect.
• The Internet/social media can be powerful to connect with people and spread ideas, but when it teams up with the resistance it becomes a huge time waster. We feel connected Twittering away, but the clock is running as well: "what happened to your art when you were Tweeting?"
• Anger, anxiety, and a longing for revenge are destructive and time-wasting emotions deeply rooted in our lizard brain. Anxiety is very often used as a motivator in big corporates: do as I tell you or I will fire you. People under constant stress cannot perform. There is no art when you are running away from a tiger that's chasing you.
• There is no map, no manual about how to become a linchpin. And no, this is not about Seth being lazy and not giving us the solution, being a linchpin is the exact opposite of following a manual with standard procedures.
• It is hard to see clearly, especially when you are in the trenches doing routine cog work, spend time in useless meetings, busy reading 100s of Tweets or stressed out about the upcoming performance review
• Being a linchpin gives meaning to who you are and what you do, but will not necessarily turn you into a millionaire. But hey, we own already too much things anyway.

You can see that it took Seth a long time to write this book.

• It bundles different ideas. Some passages are clearly written at the height of the economic crisis last year (linchpins don't get fired, be a linchpin to hold on to your seat).
• The language is much more deep and abstract than in Seth's other books. Many sentences require re-reading. One explanation is that they come from a set of ideas collected in a note book over a longer period of time.

Now for some connections to presentation design and public speaking:

• Fear of public speaking is a prime example of the resistance and the lizard brain teaming up
• Presentation design is the ultimate act of making people see clearly
• Public speaking is a rewarding opportunity to touch and change people

A presentation about Steve Jobs' presentations

Following my recent review of the book The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, here is a nice presentation summarizing the content of the book.

The Presentation Secrets Of Steve Jobs

Thank you Nancy Duarte for pointing me to this. Disclosure: links on this blogs to Amazon are affiliate links, I earn a small commission when you purchase products through them.

Book review - "The presentation secrets of Steve Jobs"

Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, is a public speaking legend, and in The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, author Carmine Callo aims to give you everything you need in order to be "insanely great in front of any audience" (as he puts it).
When I started of reading the book I was not that enthusiastic. The book repeats a lot of the speaking basics that are covered by other authors on the same subject. A very good overview for someone who has not read many public speaking books.

But later on in the book it became more interesting for me, as Gallo goes into the detail of a number of keynote addresses by Steve. As it turns out, Gallo is a speaking coach who works a lot in the high tech sector, a field I recognize since my local clients often are in the Israeli technology industry.
Flicking back through the pages, here are some of the ideas I highlighted:

• The book made be reconsider my aversion towards video in presentations (because it causes so many technological problems). Maybe 10 years later, technology has moved on and it is time to think about incorporating (very short) fragments of video.
• "Your audience does not care about your product, people care about themselves". A good reminder when creating presentations that need to sell technology products loaded with features.
• The concept of "reality distortion field", being such a good speaker that the audience is basically ready to accept anything from you
• A reminder how important headlines are
• A reminder how important it is to practice (if there is one public speaking tip that is important, this one is it). And building on this: you actually need to practice in order to sound spontaneous and speak naturally. Winging a presentation with improvised language and "uhs" and "ohs" does not sound spontaneous and natural.
• That you need to be Steve Jobs in order to dress like Steve Jobs in a key note presentation.
• The important of "signalling" making it completely and utterly obvious what the point of your slide/image is. No brain puzzles for your audience.
• Great speakers remain calm and confident when something unexpected happened, see this video full of Apple bloopers:

All in all, I enjoyed reading this book. It is particularly useful if you belong to one of two categories: 1) people who have not read a lot of public speaking books before (this is a good overview), 2) people who have not read a lot of books about Steve Jobs before (I am part of this one).

Here is a 7 minute video by Carmine Gallo in which he talks about many of the topics that are discussed in the book as well.

Disclosure: links on this blog to Amazon are affiliate links, I earn a small commission when you buy products through them.

Book review - Confessions of a public speaker

There are many books on public speaking, which probably makes sense: people who are good at speaking on stage usually also enjoy spreading their ideas in print. Many of these follow the same pattern: the experienced speaker explains to us (inexperienced novices who "hum", read out bullets from the screen, and avoid eye contact with the audience) how we can improve our stage performance.

Confessions of a Public Speaker is different. Scott Berkun is a public speaker, he does it for a living. What makes this book so interesting is that he discusses his own mistakes, failures, and stage fright. He puts into practice one of his techniques to gain credibility with your audience: tell the truth and be honest.

Here are some of the examples of the interesting experience and advice that are discussed in the book. Yes, taken out of their context and in random order:

• Why it is not useful to imagine your audience naked
• Even if (you think) you fail miserably on stage, the audience probably won't notice
• You have the mike, you are in control, do something nice for the audience (ask to change the freezing temperature of the A/C)
• Don't talk endlessly about yourself and your resume
• I love the chapter about "eating the microphone". When you start a presentation you have all the attention, the audience really wants you to do well, If things go bad, you will hit a point that you lose the audience, nobody is paying attention anymore. You ate the microphone.
• It pays of to learn how to write better headlines/presentation titles
• Anticipate the obvious question that any intelligent audience member would ask.
• The concept of interference (taken from physics): the audience is still digesting one point when you bring on the next. As a result, both points are lost.

The most important thing we learn from the personal experiences and mistakes of Scott is to practice, practice, practice. Never try to wing a presentation.

Disclosure: O'Reilly mailed me a free copy of this book for review. I earn a small commission on products you buy on Amazon via links on this site.

Book review - 1001 paintings you must see before you die

Paintings are excellent inspiration for presentation design:

• Color schemes designed to provoke an emotion, often going against the rules of color theory
• Lessons in composition and page layout
• Ideas to give your presentation a distinct style or personality

The Dutch educational system plus graduate degrees in computer science and business administration have not contributed much to my knowledge of art history. I want to catch up quickly, but it turned out to be more difficult than I thought:

• There are many web sites devoted to a painter or a museum, I have yet to discover one that cuts across artists, locations, styles and periods in time
• The same issue is true for many art history books: one style, one painter, one museum.
• More-over art history books (surprisingly) have usually more text than images in them. Text full of elaborate interpretations by the author, that is clearly written with student education in mind.

How happy I was to find this book: 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die.

Thousand pages of one painting per page, designed as a guide for museums to visit before your time on the planet is up (but then, there is no clear museum index, and many paintings are taken from private collections).

Leaving this small criticism aside, I found this book truly useful to digest a vast amount of images of paintings in a short time. Color picture, a bit of background on the artist, a bit of background on the painter. It contains both the block busters such as the Mona Lisa as well as lesser known works of art. Great.

Disclosure: I earn a small commission if you buy products from Amazon via links in this post.

Book review - "Blink"

I finally managed to get to reading Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Malcom Gladwell makes an engaging case for why snap judgement often turn out to be right, providing a constant flow of interesting case examples:

• Firefighters deciding to leave a building seconds before it collapses
• Art critiques "knowing" that a sculpture is a fake
• Police agents making the wrong judgement call in a shooting
• Autistic people unable to follow a pointing finger

The brain is very powerful, it can "thin slice" all memories of let's say all the people we met in our entire life and stack these up against a new individual in front of us. These powers work best when we are well-rested and not under stress. The human brain is built that in case of stress (i.e., we are trying to shake off a tiger that is chasing us), all non-essential brain functions are shutting down to focus on the immediate task at hand.

This book is not directly related to the subject of presentations, but it is relevant for some issues:

• The first-second audience judgement that every speaker has to deal with
• "Thin slicing" of bullet point decks. "Uh oh, the guys starts reading his bullets"/[scan the slide]/[open email on the mobile phone]
• Count to 10, when a heckler manages to get you upset, wait a bit before answering. In "upset mode" your brain is less effective.

Disclosure: the links to Amazon in this post are affiliate links, I earn a small commission when you purchase items through them.

Book review - Yes! 50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive

The book Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive is the "sequel" to Influence (earlier review here). Building on the approach of Influence, the book discusses 50 techniques to influence people's behavior. A psychological science experiment is the basis for each technique: the results are discussed and general lessons are drawn out.

As both books are similar, so is my review. The research case examples are great, the generic lessons are sometimes a bit dry. It could have been left up to the reader how to use the findings. There is a lot of overlap with techniques presented in the first book, if you do not have tim to read both, I would recommend reading Influence, since it takes you through the process of thinking about psychology in a more fundamental way when trying to persuade others.

Reading this book once again confirms the potential for visual communication. A lot of these psychological experiments involve people allocated in groups (test group, control group) and various changes in the experiment. Putting the outcomes in simple tables or graphs would have made it much easier to understand the outcome. Now, the reader is left to plough through the text and construct the visual picture in his/her head. Some of the 50 techniques in the book are more powerful than others, some are more relevant to the field of presentations than others. A few here:

• Create a bond with a group. "The majority of people who stay in this hotel room re-use their towels"
• Create scarcity: "If operators are busy, try calling again"
• Very relevant for presentations: watch out for data that can backfire. "22 million single women did not vote". "Hmmm, that's a lot, maybe I shouldn't either?"
• Create 2 extreme options around the desired outcome: people usually buy the middle-priced wine bottles in a restaurant. (Useful when presenting strategic options to your Board)
• Big threats don't work, people block them out. "Smoking kills". You need to complement the threat and provide an easy, step-by-step action plan to solve the problem.
• Hand-written post-it notes as a message really work. Thing about adding that personal touch to your presentation slides (by using selective hand-writing fonts for example)
• Get people to write down a goal at the beginning or the end of the presentation, it dramatically increases the probability that they will act
• Ask people whether they would be willing to do something later on. If they respond, they are actually more likely to do it themselves in the future.

Just a few teasers to get a sense of the sort of things discussed. If you are interested in psychological techniques to influence people, but Influence and Yes! are recommended books.

The author Robert Cialdini has a site with some more information.

Disclosure: links to Amazon in this review are affiliate links and I earn a small commission on purchases made through them.

Book review - "Influence - the psychology of persuasion"

The book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini was added to my Squidoo lens with presentation resources (thank you anonymous reader!). I finally managed to read it. The book aims to teach anyone who needs to influence other people (that includes presentation designers like me) to leverage learnings from the field of psychology.

Like most business classics, the real-life case examples are really valuable; the attempts to draw generic conclusions and insights from them somehow make less interesting reading (although they still are valuable). Just a few examples:

• A jeweller selling all his slow-moving inventory by accidentally doubling its consumer price
• Charities harassing people in airports by offering them a flower as a gift, and "forcing" them to contribute a few dollars to the cause
• Cults and mass suicides
• Normal people willing to give 220V electrical shocks to other people in the name of science
• How you can make sure that a crowd of bystanders actually helps you when you need them (spoiler: ask a very specific person to do a very specific thing, crowds usually think that help is already on its way)

The six principles discussed in the book (where possible I added lessons specifically for presentation design)

1. Do a favor, cash in later.
2. Get people to commit early on. Presentation use: have people write an objective down on a piece of paper as a group exercise, construct an argument in stages, have them buy into something small early on before the big idea comes later
3. Social proof, we do what we think others do. Watch out in presentations to make cases like "100m Americans have not signed up to donate blood". It might just backfire.
4. We say yes to people we like, we like people who are similar to us. Find a connection with your audience early in the presentation, even if it is a very weak one ("my nephew went to high school in Springfield")
5. Use authority. Establish your credibility early in the presentation, as specific as possible. OK: "I am a VC with firm x". Better: "I personally invested $300m in 35 early stage tech deals". Quote sources for the analysis and data you are using in your presentations
6. Scarcity, we like things that are hard to get

The first edition of the book was written in 1984 and despite some updates it is still a book that does not mention the word "Internet" in any of its 320 pages. Online user behaviour must provide an ocean of interesting case examples for psychologist to analyse that can add to the content of this book.

Also, the marketing philosophies are before concepts such as permission marketing introduced by Seth Godin. It's all about extracting that extra bit of money on a car deal, pushing people to sign to buy that fridge now, organize tupperware parties at which your friends feel embarrased not to buy anything. Sad marketing techniques.

In short interesting reading if you put the book in the context of the time it was written.

Book review - "A whole new Mind"

Slowly, I am catching up on reading presentation-related classics. This holiday I read through Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind.

The subtitle of the book: "why right-brainers will rule the future" is an overly simplistic summary of the main idea. The book's content is more nuanced. In the "conceptual age" 2 skills are essential:

• Solving problems in a way that nobody has ever done before
• Persuading other people, spreading ideas [here is where the link to presentation design comes in]

Why? In current society, supply of goods and ideas is overwhelming. In order to stand out you need to develop a unique edge. The only way to get this edge is through developing "right-brain" skills such as desgn and story telling. "Left-brain" skills such as accounting, diagnosing a patient, applying legal rules are repitive and can increasingly be automated or outsourced to countries with much lower labor cost. A whole new mind is a mind that has a combination of left-brain and right-brain skills.

Some additional thoughts:

• I think that people will have to learn the boring, repetitive left-brain skills in order to reach the next level of creativity. You need to read and write in order to write a book. You need to understand financial accounting in order to solve a strategy problem. You need to understand how large corporate structures work in order to deliver a presentation that convinces the Board. For example in the field of presentation, I think it is actually the entry of left-brainers into the field that was traditionally dominated by "creatives" that is causing the changes that we see now.
• There will always be a large number of repetitive left-brain jobs that will not be automated/outsourced, and unfortunately a large group of people that have to do them.
• It is hard for people to cut themselves free of left-brain corporate environments econcomically. Academia pay is poor. There are only so many spots available at companies such as Google that give their employees free time to work on whatever they want. Not everyone can build up skills that can be marketed in a freelance model profitably.
• The most successful engineers, accountants, lawyers, surgeons had the combination of left and right brain skills that Daniel is talking about.

In summary, and purely from the point of presentation design, Daniel Pink's book is not a standard reference book like the ones listed in the column on the right of this web site. However, it will open your eyes for a very important idea. It is essential reading for parents though: the biggest issue it raises is the one of the education system.

Another reason to buy the book is the wealth of recommendations for further reading that are spread throughout the story.

You can add Daniel Pink's blog to your RSS reader here.

Book review - "Brain Rules" for presenters

I finally got around reading Brain Rules by John Medina and can confirm that it is indeed essential reading. Not only for people interested in visual communication (the likely reader of this blog). But it is also likely to change some of your fundamental perspectives on life if you are a knowledge worker, a manager, a student, a teacher, a parent, or any combination of these.

The book has been reviewed extensively elsewhere, and a good web site covers its basic ideas centered around 12 rules. I will not repeat this, but rather dive in to some of the details that I marked on the pages because I found them interesting. Most of them (but not all) are related to visual communication. Here we go.

• Contrary to popular belief that (brain-related) things only go down after the age of 28 (millions of brain cells dying each day), the brain can renew. Just exercise and stay curious.
• Everyone's brain is wired differently, wiring gets decided early on in a person's life. Surgeons about to operate on a patient need to keep the subject conscious with exposed brains, while touching part of it to figure out what's inside. "Someone just touched my hand". This allocation might impact performance. "Don't let the superior temporal gyrus host your critical language area. Your verbal performance will statistically be quite poor".
• We don't register boring things, after 10 minutes of a continuous flow of densely packed information, our attention is close to zero. A presentation should have a break, or something to wake us up every 10 minutes (or better still, presentations should last 10 minutes).
• The first few moments of exposure to new information are the most important. Presenters should not waste it on boring generic overviews of their presentation, long-winded introductions of themselves. Leverage the fact that all brains in the audience are still switched on.
• Recalling an emotion at the moment we are fed information the first time greatly improves our ability to remember it. Dare to use creative tools. "Apologies for the ugly drawing of this huge orange turtle, but it walks about as fast as the typical decision making processes in our company". People will be talking orange turtles for the rest of the day.
• Vision trumps all other senses is almost a cliche (the 1000 words etc.). We know that images in presentations are important. But here is interesting bit: reading text is difficult. Decode the funny shapes, construct the sentence, understand its meaning... Bullet points and text books create too many processing layers between information and memory. But this gives also food for thought to reconsider some of the "big font/powerful quote" slides. "20% of kids are obese" combined with a huge picture of a fat kid walking out of a fast food outlet. Sounds powerful, but I think visualizing the 20% will do an even better job of getting message across.
• Vision is more than just registering an image. There are different parts of the brain that deal with color, motion, patterns. The brain is especially good at the latter. Use patterns, repetitions, in charts. Especially to visualize data.
• The brain fills in missing gaps in a visual picture. When you imagine something should be there, you see it. Drawings don't need to be perfect. Rely a bit on the audience's imagination.
• Meaning before details. We need to internalize what things mean before we can remember them. Out with the buzz words, out with the cliches. "Our new holistic security concept delivers scalable ROI that helps you stay competitive in an ever changing world".
• People need to sleep to function well. Poor sleep kills 20% of your brain power, that's about 2 hours worth of work for an average working day. Brains are build to deal with short-term stress ("help a tiger!") but cannot handle prolonged pressure. Manage your deadlines. A last minute, late night presentation iterations will for sure not deliver a brilliant end product. Our brain continues to chew on an idea in our sleep, give it time. These findings put into question the whole system on which corporate work environments are managed.

Book review - The Power Presenter

I just finished reading the book "The Power Presenter" by Jerry Weissman, a public speaking coach.

My main interest is in graphical slide design, so it is a bit unusual for me to be reviewing a book that is solely about delivery of speeches and presentations. Initially I found it a bit hard to get into the story of the book, but as I finished more and more chapters the entire plot of the book became clearer and by the time I read the last page I found that I learnt some real valuable lessons that will affect every presentation I will give in the future. The central objective of the book is to get rid of a presenter's adrenaline rush when presenting: the instinctive debate of the body whether to fight or flight a stressful situation. Rather than prescribing a number of dogmatic "presentation rules", Jerry suggests way to create a natural way to becoming a more confident speaker.

Central in his book is a concept called "ERA":

• Eye connect: "only speak to eyes". Much more powerful than "don't turn your back to the audience", or "don't muffle your voice". It is a simple rule that everything you say, everything, should be said by looking a member of the audience straight in the eyes, waiting for eye contact, delivering the sentence, and then move on. No exception. Quite a challenge for a presenter, but it makes sense
• Reach out with your hands and your body language to simulate the appearance of a hand shake
• Animate, adding more drama and passion in the way you deliver your message

Especially the "eye connect" suggestion will change the way I deliver presentations in the future.

ERA is backed up by a lot of analysis of political speakers: Kennedy, Nixon, Gore, Reagon, Bush, and even Obama (however mostly focusing on his 2004 speech at the Democratic Convention). Sound bites are important for political speeches, and Jerry spends some time discussing cadence, rhythm, etc. to improve "slide-less" presentations.

When it comes to slides and graphics, Jerry bases his advice on a very conventional use of PowerPoint. The thing I like is how Jerry talks about "graphics synchronization", making sure that visuals are perfectly aligned with the speaker. Secondly he is an advocate of the "less is more" principle when it comes to slides.

I am less convinced on the slightly mechanical technique of "tell 'm what you're going to tell, tell 'm, tell'm what you just told" that he is suggesting for every slide. A bit mechanical. 

Jerry spends some time suggesting ways to deal with the uncertainty of "what slide's next" in a live presentation. Presenter view can solve this issue.

A great innovation is the access to online video clips of the speeches Jerry is discussing in the book (server bandwidth is a bit thin).

All in all a useful book about presentation delivery with many big (i.e, "ERA") and smaller pieces of advice of an experienced speaking coach.

"The Power Presenter" is part of a trilogy, other books are Presenting to Win and In the Line of Fire.

Great book "Tasteful Color Combinations" - not even available on Amazon

Found hidden away on a shelf in the book shop of the Tel Aviv Museum: "Tasteful Color Combinations" by Naomi Kuno. It is not even available on Amazon, that's why I have trouble finding a good web link to it.

The book contains 455 color schemes (with detailed RGB  and CMYK codes), organized in 14 chapters each with a different mood. ("Nostalgic and melanchology", "humanistic and natural" to name two). The first edition was published in Japan in 2004, and the English translation is not always perfect, adding to the charm of the book.

Some examples of colors schemes available (exact quotations from the book):

• 241, Formal Kimono: the color of a patterned formal kimono for a married woman
• 255, Homely: the cozy warm color of home where a cheerful laugh is always heard
• 359, Glory and fame: glory and fame never fades away when quality is accompanied. The blue is for glory and the red and gold are for fame.
• 370, Rococo -1: the elegant rococo period colors of Fragonard's paintings and dresses
• 111, Ryugu castle: the color of a town of Ryugu castle in a deep sea, where princess Otohime and beautiful fish are said to inhabit, in a legend story of Japanese fantasy.

The colors of 111 below as an example:

I have used this book a number of times as a source of inspiration for finding color schemes for seed-level technology startups that need help developing their very first fund raising presentation. (Other techinques to find a good color scheme can be found here).

Here are the full details of the book in case you would like to try to order it:

Tasteful Color Combinations by Naome Kuno and FORMS Inc. / Color Intelligence Institute Published by Page One Publishing Private Limited, Singapore ISBN 978-981-245-228-3

Book review - Made to Stick by Dan/Chip Heath

Made to stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (find it here, affiliate link) is recommended reading for everyone who delivers presentations: it analyzes why certain stories "stick" in people's mind, and why others disappear, almost independent of the content: it's they way that they are told that matters.

• Keep them simple without creating silly sound bites
• Add unexpected twists to keep people interested
• Be specific and avoid fluffy hollow statements (Dilbert mission generator style)
• Be credible to get people to believe your idea
• Add emotion to make people care
• Tell stories

The book is written as a set of stories that are analyzed following the above framework. Sometimes this categorization can feel a bit forced (since most stories combine multiple elements), but generally it works well. Framework or not, the stories inside the book are the real treasure. They are interesting and fun to read (many of them still stick in my head). Besides the big idea of the book there are countless interesting bits of knowledge hidden in the stories. Some examples:

• The brain stores stories in a "virtual 3D" space. Slightly absurd experiment: people read a sentence about a guy and a shirt slower when the shirt has just been taken off a few seconds ago. Your presentation structure and the structure used to absorb information is not the same
• Being analytical, logical, thinking of numbers switches off your emotional mood: the mood in which you are most receptive to store information. Think about that when ordering slides
• The curse of knowledge (actually this is a big idea in the book) prevents people from putting themselves in the shoes of an audience for which a concept that took you 3 years to understand might not sound as obvious as it seems to you
• Another example of the curse of knowledge: when someone taps a song with his fingers on a table, he/she hears the entire performance including vocals, instruments, etc. A bystander just hears an irregular beat of taps...
• 70% of learning can happen by just imagining, anticipating, thinking about the task ahead of you (scientifically proven): rehearse, rehearse, rehearse your presentation.
• Negative "don't", "avoid this", "don't fall in this trap"-type recommendations stick better than positive ones: people learn from mistakes. This goes a bit against my marketing theory in business school though.

This book shows again how important it is to decouple structures you use to solve/analyze a problem from the story you use to tell the solution. Scrap all your analysis, nuances, balanced insights you built up (sometimes over a long period of time) and start with a blank piece of paper to think about the best possible way to tell your message to your audience.

The strategy consultant's review of The back of the Napkin by Dan Roam

We talked about sketching chart ideas on paper before, but Dan Roam takes visual problem solving to the next level in his book The back of the Napkin. This book was an interesting read for me not only because of the presentation concepts discussed, but also because The back of the napkin aims to provide a complete framework to solve business problems. (The key frameworks can be downloaded here for free). I think the book did really well on the presentation front, the goal of a generic strategic problem solving kit is not really reached. Dan does a great job convincing us that we should use our drawing/visual thinking skills that most of us have been neglecting since we started formal education. On top of that he provides practical guidelines to get going

• Have the courage to use a more informal drawing style (away from the computer) to get to the essence of problems, focus not on form but on content
• Help us think about what type of drawings are best to be used in which situations (who, what, when, why, etc.) and to what audiences (the visionary CEO, the detailed operations manager)

As a problem solving tool kit, he provides useful tools but falls short of providing a generic solution framework for all business problems (which impossible anyway I think).

• Dan takes the "S-type"/"sensing" approach to problem solving, spread out all data, put in on the walls, digest it all to see the bigger picture. A way of data processing very similar to the human brain sizing up a new environment. This is actually a useful and fresh approach compared to for example strategy firms such as McKinsey, that apply a very targeted data gathering approach focussed on key questions/issues that have been identified earlier. 
• Another take away for me were diagrams that try to summarize all relationships in a problem. Plot a variable on the x axis, one on the y axis, start adding bubbles in different sizes and different colors to analyze 5-6 dimensions in one diagram. Useful for solving problems, less for communicating results to a "cold" audience that is confronted with the material for the first time.
• I do think however that the book does not provide a simple step-by-step guide to solve problems, you need guidance for this. Running problem solving brainstormings around a white board requires a strong moderator, and picking the right diagrams requires experience. Hiring Dan's firm would probably do the trick, but the novice will find it difficult to apply the techniques after having read the just the book.

As a presentation tool, Dan's ideas are highly valuable in a smaller group setting, where everyone can gather around a white board while the presentor draws the story "live" in front of the audience without any help of PowerPoint. For the big audience however, this approach is high risk.

Book review - Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds

I had a big shipment of books coming in recently, hence the stream in book reviews.

I finally had a chance to read Presentation Zenby Garr Reynolds. Garr is a leading authority on presentation design and delivery, advocating his minimalist (or "Zen") approach to presentations. His blog is one of the most visited web sites on the subject.

That's what 50% of this book is about, convincing the army of business managers writing thousands of PowerPoint presentations every day to drop their bullet point slides, take off big corporate logos from their slides and use more images supported by minimal text. It is an important message and I forgive Garr for repeating it many, amny times throughout his book.

The other 50% is focussed around taking the designer approach to presentations. I enjoyed reading backgrounds on Japanese and Zen culture and how they can be applied to good design. I did learn a few things about photo composition.

The book is nicely illustrated with example presentations, and many "before and after" slide transformations. There are a lot of references to iStockPhoto in the book. A great site (I use it a lot), but the suggestions could have been put in slightly more subtle

Having read slide:ology by Nancy Duarte just a few days a go, it is interesting to draw a parallel. Slide:ology contains more practical presentation advice: how to define color schemes, specific examples about slide build up. Presentation Zen adds more on the create design process, esthetics, and photo composition.

All in all, both books are a must read and complement each other

Book review - slide:ology by Nancy Duarte

A copy of slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentationsfinally made its way across the Atlantic. (Disclosure link via Amazon Associates program) Nancy Duarte is managing Duarte Design, a company that has created some high-profile presentations (Al Gore is one of the clients). They (her husband is the company's CFO) started out in the 80s when the Apple Macintosh brought desk top publishing and graphics design to the masses, and have now become one of the big brands in professional presentation design. This is the perfect book for those who have mastered the PowerPoint (or Apple Keynote) technical skills and need to make the final jump to master concepts usually taught in art schools (rather than software manuals):

• Picking pleasing color schemes
• Slide composition
• Typography
• Etc.

The trained eye can extract almost everything there is to know about presentation design. However, this is not the book that will teach you magic that will turn your beginner-level PowerPoint edits into a professional presentation. Many subjects discussed in this books are covered in other material as well (minimal bullet points, cut words, use professional images, etc. etc.) However, there are some very specific things that I picked up in this book that were new to me:

• Thinking about cinematic movement for animations or slide composition
• Creating one big map and using the PowerPoint push transition to navigate it: one presentation - one big slide
• A large library of chart concept sketches, there were many new ones I did not use before
• Stressing to adopt a "designer" mentality to presentations

Things that I found less useful/interesting (personal preference):

• (Many) direct references to the services Duarte Design can offer
• Case examples (many of which are the same as on Duarte's site) are not always useful
• The section on data charts was relatively weak

But overall, a warm recommendation to purchase this book. It is well written, nicely illustrated and brings all the presentation design essentials together in one place, including many references to further reading and almost all the big presentation "brands" in the industry.