I watched The Apprentice last night. The task involved presenting ideas for a greetings card to three different card shops. Both teams botched the presentations monumentally.  Why?

• Too formal.
• Hectoring.
• Talking but not listening.
• Too much machismo masking too little self-confidence.
• Standing up.
• Humourless.
• Dependent on the script.
• Too little preparation.
• (Probably) too long and verbose.
• Using jargon and clichés.
• Inappropriate use of rhetoric. In one case, the presented lapsed into the worst kind of green hectoring with rhetorical questions (”Did you know that…”). It just alienates people.

In short, they turned into monsters. Unrecognisable as human beings. Totally unfriendly, untrustworthy and boring. It’s a common problem.

Last week, I saw a presentation that worked really well. The future of the internet and how to stop it by Jonathan Zittrain at the RSA. (Download the MP3 version.) It was witty, relaxed, informal, engaging and while he did use PowerPoint, there was no text on the slides only pictures. As my old history tutor might have said, you can use PowerPoint like a drunk uses a lamp post - for illumination or support but not both at the same time. What worked for him:

• Good jokes
• A compelling story that builds an argument
• Responsiveness to the audience
• Friendliness
• Obvious mastery of the subject and willing to go into more detail on different points
• A quarter of the allotted time given over to questions
• Jargon- and cliché-free

My wife’s theatre company, C Company, is running a course today for a London PR firm. The actors in her company all train in the Meisner technique. Its central tenet is responsiveness which means putting your attention on the other person and adjusting your own acting in response to them. The catchphrase is “living truthfully under a given set of circumstances raised to the optics of the theatre.”  It’s an interesting sidelight on the whole question. 

Perhaps it’s applicability to presentations is summer up by the quote from Wikipedia: “Solid preparation supports the spontaneity, an idea articulated by Martha Graham when she wrote, ‘I work eight hours a day, every day, so that in the evenings I can improvise.’”

(As an aside, it was depressing to watch one team argue for three hours about whether ‘National Singles’ Day’ should have an apostrophe and if so, where?  They even rang the editor of the Daily Telegraph for advice. What do they teach in schools?)